Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

in new and useful devices,” which if not wholly inaccurate at the time would soon prove so—England and America, in fact, leading the world precisely as he would have thought countries that adopted such restrictions could (and did) not—there is little to contradict. Certainly he is right, and the argument is not one of principle but expediency, as is the right of patent if it is anything at all. That which a machine or a process may share with a literary work—so aptly put in the United States Code: “idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form”—is specifically exempted from the privilege of copyright, while granted to the holders of patents, which have a more profound reach into the object. Jefferson was not writing about copyright. To the extent that his views on patents might now be applied to copyright, I believe that they would be wrong, and that given subsequent developments in the economy and in technology he never would have extended his view to copyright.

A literary work is not composed of pieces of previous works, as is a machine or perhaps a chemical or manufacturing process that might depend upon the use of what analogously in a literary work would be the assembly of quotations from others. That is simply not how things are written, with rare exceptions that are not so much writing as they are editing, and the all too frequent and dishonorable crime of plagiarism. Somewhere in between lies the internet term paper, which when not plagiarized from one source is plagiarized from many, and to be legitimate would require the abolition of both copyright and the expectation of honesty. That so many people seem to think of writing as a communal effort, an act of assemblage and additive progression as in adding storeys to a skyscraper or the laying down of railway track, points to a common misconception that though now championed by ideologues and careless dabblers has roots that stretch back several centuries and demand some explanation.

Let me begin this way. I have to confess that I have so rarely experienced triumph that I cannot claim to know it well enough to judge, but it seems to me at best a momentary joy followed instantly by sadness, and, then, of necessity, by wariness. In the few times I have been associated with a successful political tendency, I begin to part ways seconds after victory. When I was on a team, if we won I would be very quiet on the drive home. This had nothing to do with wisdom, which though I am old I still think I’m too young to claim (and certainly could not have at age fourteen), but with temperament, because, if you keep your eyes open, the light of triumph is always strong enough briefly to illuminate the darkness that lies ahead and at the end of which is death. More prosaically, victory is an imbalance of fortune that the nature of things soon begins to correct, but seldom is victory accompanied, as this would suggest it should be, by both constant vigilance and generous magnanimity.

Since the Enlightenment, we have been living in the ongoing triumph of science and reason. Their power is undeniable and their effect splendid and magnificent. The world, so much improved, could not have done without them. But like every triumph, that of science and reason, too, has been overextended. Not unexpectedly, it has wrought damage in those areas where its powers are nil, where it attempts to answer or deny questions it cannot answer, where it imposes its means and methods where they have neither effectiveness nor place.

I once served on a panel with an eminent scientist who was universally admired, and the kind of avuncular figure to whom one is eager to give every benefit of the doubt. He was eloquent and convincing until he claimed that human nature is a simple thing reducible to a few rules that he then began to recite. His audience then deserted him in embarrassment, because human nature is not reducible to a few rules, as he should have known. It is too much of a subject, too large in depth and expanse, to submit to the kind of physical laws and relationships that govern inanimate things.

Disparate colleagues of his have proposed, with similarly brutal reduction, that love is merely mechanical, the release of certain chemicals that bind to certain receptors. This is what happens when you cradle your child, behold your beloved, or mourn your lost parents, they say. The chemical is released, and then captured. QED. Love is not only explicable, but explained, and now we can move on to the next thing. But what they have not taken into account is why this does not happen (one would assume) when paying a toll on the Triborough Bridge, killing a hornet, or purchasing dish detergent. Because, they might reply, these are not significant acts that contribute to our survival or that of our line (proving that they have never driven across the Triborough Bridge at 5 p.m.). But what of the sacrifice and altruism, when moved by love, that do not contribute to survival or that of a line? They say then that such patterns are simply too deeply engraved to ignore. So that, therefore, the mechanism operates simultaneously both rationally and irrationally, for one end and for the other, both in contradiction of one’s interests and for their promotion. This unlikely paradox they attempt to sustain so as to keep faith with the view that love is the chemical manifestation of biological necessity. One wonders if anyone who can believe such a thing has ever known real love. I think not. Which is perhaps why they are content, forced by their own aridity, to offer such an impoverished definition.

The paradigm can be widely applied. The philosopher and aesthetician Benedetto Croce focused his great learning and extraordinary sensibilities upon an exploration of beauty, and after five hundred dense