Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

possible that in some war of the not-so-distant future a combatant will electronically seize control of enemy command structures and direct his opponent’s arsenal onto his opponent. Eventually, all battles will be entirely computational. The “arms competition” of this sort has already begun. To step out of it at this point would be to lose it, and, with it, everything else.

The attraction is strong, the need is real, the marvels truly marvelous, and there is no going back. The speed with which all is taking place is almost a self-organizing principle. Like many changes in history, it seems to have its own internal logic, pulling everything after it. Why then do we need an ethos, a set of principles, and an etiquette specifically fashioned for the rest of a revolution that will follow with stunning force the mere prologue through which we are now living?

One always needs such things, but more so now as we leave the age of brick and iron. The age of brick and iron, shock as it may have been to Wordsworth, was friendlier to mankind than is the digital age, more appropriate to the natural pace set by the beating of the human heart, more apprehensible in texture to the hand, better suited in color to the eye, and, in view of human frailty, more forgiving in its inertial stillness.

Put quite simply, the life of the British statesman was superior because he was allowed rest and reflection, his contemplation could seek its own level, and his tranquility was unaccelerated. While he was, in his time, a member of a privileged class unburdened by many practical necessities, today most Americans have similar resources and freedoms, and yet they, like their contemporaries in even the most exalted positions, have chosen a different standard, closer to that of the first paradigm.

The life of the exemplary statesman, then dependent upon a large staff of underpaid servants, and children working in mines and mills (if not in Lancashire, then certainly in India), is now available to almost anyone and without the attendant injustices. Even if in one’s working hours one does not sit in the Cabinet Room at No. 10 Downing Street, one can have a quiet refuge, dignified dress, paper, a fountain pen, books, postage, Mozart with astonishing fidelity and ease, an excellent diet, much time to oneself, the opportunity to travel, a few nice pieces of furniture and decoration, medical care far beyond what the British statesman might have dreamed of, and a single-malt scotch in a crystal glass, for less than the average middle-class income. If you think not, then add up the prices and see how it is that people with a strong sense of what they want, need, and do not require can live like kings of a sort if they exhibit the appropriate self-restraint.

Requisite, I believe, for correcting the first paradigm until it approximates the second, and bringing to the second (without jeopardizing it) the excitements and benefits of the first, are the discipline, values, and clarity of vision that tend to flourish as we grapple with necessity and austerity, and tend to disappear when by virtue of our ingenuity we float free of them.

The law itself can be mobilized to protect the privacy and dignity of the individual according to the original constitutional standard of the Founders and what they might expect. Even now, that standard has been violated enough to make inroads on enlightened democracy, which depends first and foremost upon the sanctity of individual rights. As if they could foresee the unforeseeable, the Founders laid down principles that have served to prevent the transformation of the individual to a mere manipulable quantity, of citizen to subject. It does not matter what convenience is sacrificed in pursuit of this. Convenience is, finally, nothing, even destructive. The standard must be restored, as it is slipping too fast. Bluntly, there are practices and procedures that, except judiciously and carefully maintained in war, legislation must end, and databases now extant that it must destroy, in a deliberate and protective step back. Revolutions and revolutionaries tear down walls. Though some walls are an affront to human dignity, others protect it. I do not want my life history in the hands of either J. Edgar Hoover or Walt Disney, thank you very much.

Quite apart from the reach of the law is the voluntary reformation of education. A substantial proportion of this country’s academic energies is swallowed up in the study of off-the-shelf software. Terrified lest their children be computer illiterate, lemming parents have pushed the schools into a computer frenzy in which students spend years learning to use tools that assemble pieces of what others have done, and relieve the students of the necessity of learning anything other than manipulation. You can’t teach someone how to cook by showing him how to put a frozen dinner in a microwave oven. The system is much like Sesame Street, which, instead of waiting until a child is five and teaching him to count in an afternoon, devotes thousands of hours drumming it into him during his undeveloped infancy. But while numbers will remain, fifth graders will, when they get to graduate school, have no contact with current computer programs and applications. The “teaching” of computer in the schools may be likened to a business academy in the twenties founded for the purpose of teaching the telephone: “When you hear the bell, pick up the receiver, place it thusly near your face, and say ‘Hello?’”

Basic computer literacy is a self-taught subject requiring no more than a few days. Ordinary literacy, however, requires twenty years or more, and that is only a beginning. And yet the schools are making of these two—unrelated—things a vast and embarrassing spoonerism. In the schools, computers should be tools for the limited study of other subjects, not (other than in electrical engineering and applied math) a subject in themselves. The masters of the digital world will be not today’s students who will have spent their high