Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

There all the barrel-hoops are knit,

There all the serpent-tails are bit,

There all the gyres converge in one,

There all the planets drop in the Sun.120

That something is very wrong with the notion of convergence in even its most elevated formulation is supported by its most eloquent critique. In “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” a simple and profound short story by Flannery O’Connor, a mother and son travel on a city bus in the newly integrated South. The mother clings to the old ways and is clearly wrong in doing so, but, in practice, she is kind and good. The son is the apostle of progress and justice, but in practice he is smug and cruel. He represents pride in achievement, faith in emerging perfection, reason, justice, the linear concept of history. She—humility, tradition, conservation, circularity, continuity, mercy, and forgiveness.

It is no coincidence that in the interplay between the two in the context of their individual struggles he finds that his actions have assured “his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow.” And it isn’t a coincidence that the title of the story, which Flannery O’Connor wrote to address the great French philosopher, is from Teilhard, for it is a velvet demolition of his belief that mankind can evolve to perfection.

If salvation is a function of perfectibility, what does this imply about the lame, the weak, the befuddled, and the oppressed? Are they by implication less beloved of God? In one spare short story, mortally ill Flannery O’Connor, with the Southern and the Celtic knowledge of hubris and defeat running naturally in her blood, checkmated Teilhard’s great erudition, multiple volumes, and splendid dreams. This she did with the same kind of totally unexpected, breathtaking power of the Maid of Orleans, or Anne Frank. She, who would never know temporal glory, or be rewarded in this world, who died without husband or children, who suffered and had no sway, she knew the simple truth that salvation is ultimately a matter of grace. That is, when all is said and done, man is simply unable to construct the higher parts of his destiny, and must know this to survive even the simpler challenges that he is expected to meet.

At least since the Enlightenment, man has modeled himself and his society upon the machine. Slowly shorn of his knowledge of and feel for nature and human nature, he has been brought over to the principles (and, often, the mere effects) of speed, efficiency, economy, and emotional detachment: doing the most with least; just-in-time inventory; lack of feeling; absence of commitment; neutrality of conscience; all the techniques common to a business, an organization, a mechanical contrivance, or a modernist novel. But neither nature nor man are machines, and, treated as machines, they sicken.

Convergence is not a fact on the horizon but a contrivance of human vanity. It will not come from a hand-held toy, an electronic network no matter how powerful, or a machine that sits on a desk. It will not come by virtue of universal or near-universal agreement or by virtue of the new. Wait as long as you wish, it will not come.

CHAPTER 7

PARTHIAN SHOT

Calling Barbarism for What It Is

If it is to be honorable, a military objective must be not merely to check or destroy an enemy’s forces, but to do so while sparing innocents and noncombatants as much as is practicable. Unfortunately, most of the time this is not possible on a scale sufficient to redeem the terrible necessities of war. And when it is impossible, no victory can be unalloyed. Even in the heart of the Nazi war machine (that is, Germany) were children as innocent as angels, who when caught in the immense crossfire deprived an otherwise clear-cut and morally urgent victory of any pretense to perfection.

Intellectual argument, unsaddled with the finality of death, is unsaddled with the laws of tragedy. Once an opponent’s attack is gutted, one may look upon his formations in disarray and pull from them perfectly alive everything worthy of preservation. Doing so, however, is no more magnanimous than carrying off the Sabine women, but rather another blow, in that what was once dear to the enemy may then cleave to the other camp.

What is useful and good in the arguments and justifications that the previous pages have opposed? Though they are confusedly coy about it, the critics of copyright and legionnaires of the machine would severely cripple or scuttle the system for the sake of universal access, which they term open. Their presumption is that copyright is a bar, and much of their motivation stems from indignation that it is therefore an impediment—even a fatal impediment—to an obvious public good.

But why must widespread or even universal access, which is unquestionably good, be “open”? That is, what makes the licensing of and payment for works not in the public domain, and apart from fair use, a bar to universality of access sufficient to change the quality of universality? Nothing, of course. Universal access needs no more to be free of licensing and payment than a transportation system, to be comprehensive and excellent, or a communications system, to be all pervasive, must be free of charge. One pays for access to the internet. One pays for hardware and (presumably) for software. One pays for telephones and PDAs. One pays for advertising on the internet—with money if one is an advertiser and with time and distraction if one is an internet user. None of these things is free. To facilitate fluidity of information, why must “content” be free? Why must one seek not to pay for music or television shows that come over one’s iPhone, with no such effort in regard to the instrument itself or the substantial and continuing user fees? If paying for the means and instrumentation of universal access is not a barrier to universal access, paying for the substance cannot therefore be more of a barrier,