Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

apartment in Cambridge, pedaling ten miles home early in the morning after my night shift. Passing through the Brattle Street neighborhood, I saw a group of young men and women my age walking from a van, with surfboards on its roof rack, into one of the mansions there. They were sunburnt and relaxed, and everything about them said money—their brand-new vehicle, their fashionable beach clothes, their hair, their languid gait. Though I was working two jobs in Boston’s hottest summer ever, I had neither envy nor a quarrel, until I saw a bumper sticker on their van that said, “Eat the Rich.” These were the predecessors of the Creative Commons movement, which suffers the illusion that if ownership is abolished, everything will be free, when the opposite is true; and thinks that in opposition to copyright it is the ally of the little man, even as it fights the battle in behalf of the great combines and business powers of the imminent future.

Anyone who blithely recommends expropriation as a means of “economic justice” should first divest himself of most of what he has and give it to those who have less—and there are certain to be those who have less and are greatly afflicted for it. We tend to look up rather than at ourselves when surrendering to such passions of righteousness. The assault on copyright is a species of this, based on the infantile presumption that a feeling of justice and indignation gives one a right to the work, property, and time (those are very often significantly equivalent) of others, and that this, whether harbored at the ready or expressed in action, is noble and fair.

It is neither. It is, rather, a cowardly self-indulgence and a depredation of the public interest as much as it is destructive to the interest of the individual, for in truth these are in many respects one and the same: that is, the public interest is served when the rights of the individual come first rather than vice versa. When individual rights are pre-eminent, everyone is served. When they are not, the only thing that is served is an abstraction. Whereas community can be only an idea, concept, construct, or fiction, the individual actually exists in flesh and blood. One can claim to love the collective or the community, but it is the sterile, sick love of one who can love nothing, or, rather, no one. Love that is not echoed in a human heart is apt to petrify into tyranny, and so often in history a devotion to the abstraction of man has been a blind for hideous oppression.

Property is to be defended proudly rather than disavowed with shame. Even if for some it is only a matter of luck or birth, for the vast majority it is the store of sacrifice, time, effort, and even, sometimes, love. It is, despite the privileged inexperience of some who do not understand, an all-too-accurate index of liberty and life. To trifle with it is to trifle with someone’s existence, and as anyone who tries will find out, this is not so easy. Nor has it ever been. Nor should it ever be.

CHAPTER 6

CONVERGENCE

Wait As Long As You Want, It Will Not Come

A long time ago, and for a mercifully short while, I was a graduate student in England. Absolutely alone when I arrived and not knowing a single person in the British Isles, my circle of acquaintances soon became quite different from what it had been at home, and included eventually a famous English lord who began what appeared to have been the tentative process of introducing me to a secret rite. I despise secret rites. And because I left the country before I progressed very far in my introduction, and didn’t find out enough to betray it, I have no hesitation about discussing it.

The secret societies of which we know are by definition not entirely secret. Some tend to silliness, like the Secret Service, so many of whose members are enough taken with being secret agents that they carry themselves as conspicuously as orangutans in the Louvre. (Looking alert is not the same as being alert.) Some societies are secret but only mildly so, like the Masons, who put Masonic decals on their cars and wear Masonic jewelry. Of course, no one knows precisely what they are up to, perhaps even including them. The smaller an organization the better chance it has of achieving real secrecy, though Yale’s Skull and Bones is famous precisely because it is supposed to be secret. Harvard has two similarly elite groups, the Signet Society and the Porcellian, which, because they operate in the open, are virtually unknown. The secret is that in challenging everyone to find it out, secrecy transforms itself into publicity.

But not always. Some secrets are kept successfully. Within the notoriously open American intelligence apparatus, for example, are inner chambers entirely opaque to the public, and historians have unwittingly passed over at least some covert initiatives (of this I am sure) because the prime movers and their operators have been discreet unto death. Thus perhaps with the rite to which I was so briefly introduced that its secret remains safe.

Whatever it was, it centered, honest to Betsy, on the Egyptian god Thoth (as in “path the spthegetti thoth”), whose Hellenistic name was, obviously, Hermes Trismegistus. When the dentally challenged peer (teeth apart, he could give ex tempore orations in Latin) who introduced me to this first told me about it, I thought he was mocking me. But he wasn’t. Though it could have been, for all I know, nothing more than a kind of “I-hate-girls” club for barmy English aristocrats, Hermeticism does have a long, impressive, and secretive history, which, to my wonder, I was assigned to study. At first blush it seemed much like the standard run-of-the-mill Eastern mystical cults of antiquity, to which, as a Jew, I have a profound and inbred aversion. Just for