Digital Barbarism, page 11
And I also shot Lincoln. Although I had never heard of the “copyright alliance” and have always been the natural adversary of the corporations to whom circumstances force me to license my copyrights at what, due to their superior weight and resources, are sometimes for me disadvantageous terms, after this I would be delighted to ally with them in defense of copyright in any legal, ethical, and transparent fashion. And people who make accusations of conspiracy must have a lot of rough bark on them to do so given that they themselves have longstanding organizations and programs with enormous numbers of fuzzy adherents, and I, whatever my failings, am entirely alone in this except that Joseph Tartakovsky of the Claremont Institute was kind enough to have the wikis printed out for me because my dial-up connection works at only 20 kbps, which is true but only an excuse, because I much prefer paper and ink. In fact, I love it, and when I have ink on my pants or shirt, people sometimes ask how I have stained my clothes and I, having in mind Johnson’s “ink-stained wretch,” reply that my clothes are not stained at all.
For these marks are the badges of the profession, over thousands of years, and, contrary to what a carelessly thinking advocate of the electronic culture might assume, my preference is well educated and of long standing. I have been using paper and ink for more than sixty years, and computers for almost thirty. In our household, we have seven, running on several operating systems. There is not so much in this new world—in fact, of substance there is virtually nothing—so that experience such as I have had would be insufficient to judge it, and I judge it to be wanting. There is a dignity and tranquility to the fixedness of the penned or printed page. It has the solidity of hand work. A marked-up manuscript, with interlinear and marginal notes in various colors and handwritings, lines, shapes, commands, cross-outs is as unique as a fingerprint and as surprising as an abstract painting. And when you’re working with it you know that it is there. You can feel it, and see it. It is not constrained to appear in only one page or less at a time. It does not need either fragile bearings, electronically vulnerable semiconductors, or a supply of electricity. It can be dropped, or soaked in water, and survive. It does not blink and flee. It lets you in. The difference is similar to that between holding a baby in your arms or looking at it from without, through the glass of an incubator. “Honest inkwell, sacred to the poet, / from whose ink a world emerges—.”53 Paper and ink. Stick with it.
These few examples represent a vast reservoir of hostile inanity. One could fill a “laptop” with them. This is, after all, the era in which students think we fought Germany in the Civil War, electricity was invented by John Travolta, and Frank Perdue was the seventy-sixth president of the United States. But what exactly is going on in a broader sense? The question transcends this particular dispute, in that it implicates underlying forces more general in effect.
As a college student in the sixties, well before what is inaccurately called the “gender” integration of dorms made the traditional difficulties college students have always had in showing up on time a matter of sex, race, and class, I was a student of the late William Alfred, professor of English at Harvard and author of the successful play, Hogan’s Goat, in which the female lead was played by the young Faye Dunaway. At that time, Harvard had a number of professors whose fame in the real world was greater than that of Professor Alfred, but his extraordinary abilities as a raconteur—and the fact that Faye Dunaway often stayed at his house—gave him status equal or superior to that of Henry Kissinger, Pat Moynihan, Timothy Leary, Arthur Schlesinger, Robert Lowell, and others. To enter his tutorial, one on one, was a prize for which an unreasonable number of students competed, many of them simply dunces who wanted to meet Faye Dunaway. Somehow, I was chosen, to the professor’s eventual regret, as I was simply a Faye Dunaway–seeking dunce who had talked my way in on a mixture of bravado, unjustified self-confidence, and pure passion.
I believe he quickly came to the conclusion that this was so, and yet he kept me on, not out of pity or inertia as one might expect, but because one day, upon seeing his glazed expression as I committed literary criticism, I stopped in midsentence and said, more or less, “Look, I don’t claim to be intelligent; it’s not my strength.”
Given that I was a Harvard student whom he was tutoring for an honor’s degree, he was quite taken with this confession (other than Richard Bissell, I may be the only person ever associated with Harvard to have made such an appraisal of himself, although there are many who could). Now completely awake, he asked, “What is your strength?”
“I’m loyal to what I love, at any cost,” I said. “And sometimes I can put together a decent sentence.”
Subsequently, there was less analysis of literary texts and more general discussion. I never encountered Faye Dunaway, and although I remember nothing from his lecture courses whatsoever, I remember our conversations, and two things above all. The first was that during the war the army sent him to the Rockies to learn Bulgarian, and that, desperately lonely and forlorn there, he made friends with a pig, with whom, perhaps echoing the circumstances in which he related this to me, he had long conversations. “Pigs,” he said, “are very intelligent,” and then he turned scarlet.
The second point was something deceptively simple. He told me that, in this time of great political upheaval, he was depressed and despondent. This was no surprise. Weren’t all intellectuals? No, he said. Politics can go one way or another and one is seldom satisfied even by one’s own party. He was saddened because of a fundamental change he had observed in recent years among his students. Unlike those who had passed through in previous decades, these were different, tragically and alarmingly so. What he went on to say was unquantifiable, or at least unquantified. It was probably unverifiable as well, and yet it was wise and true, and he said it in only five words, but with import that not even Laurence Olivier could have matched. “Now,” he said, “they run in packs.” He was a playwright, and he could speak in such a way that even something pedestrian and austere was rendered beautifully.
I agreed. It was clear. But, being young, I was not as disturbed as he, though over the intervening forty years I’ve seen his meaning fleshed out relentlessly, and now share his view, including all that was unspoken—even if I cannot replicate the depth of his understanding. “Now they run in packs.” Now indeed they do, and they are either oblivious of the fact (along with much else) or, if not, proud of it in the manner of the possessed, like the invalid who professes love for the illness about to carry him off, or the alcoholic who praises the magnificence of drink.
Only an angel could write even a semi-memoir without imparting to it at least a whiff of confession. I don’t like the confessional form, which so often is only prurience masquerading as sincerity, but still I must admit that twenty-five or thirty years ago I was to some extent like the people I have been criticizing, in that I was borne along on an ineluctable current and enjoyed being the advocate of an irresistible change that I saw wreaking havoc among good people who were in the process of being put out to pasture, or, perhaps better, who were like old Eskimos set out on the ice. These good people of whom I speak would have a high position that they had held since F. Scott Fitzgerald was healthy, and then suddenly they would disappear, not because they would die but because of the changes coarsing [sic] through the publishing industry. People would lament their passing and the passing of what they believed, but I would justify and praise the powers that had cut them down.
In the seventies particularly, publishing was rationalized, consolidated, and transformed. Although I was hardly the cause of this and could not have stopped it, I was conspicuous in acceptance of it and have regretted it ever since. Much like my opponents today, I was on the side of the newly dominant power and insufficiently critical of it. What I did was comparable—if not in enormity and scale—to the French collaborating with the Germans after the fall of France. So many French intellectuals, their histories now scrubbed, obfuscated, and faked, made excuses for their conquerors, of which the worst was that because there was no stopping them (which, in fact, there was), one had to find a way to accommodate. Which is what I did with the corporatization of the industry.
To someone who had died in 1965, the industry would now be unrecognizable. The editors and publishers I knew then (some of them, anyway) had fireplaces in their offices. You rode in caged, open elevators from floor to floor, in stone buildings (sometimes). These people, many of whom had been born in the nineteenth century, were not that good at making money, but in the main they were devoted to literature. The financial apparatus was subsidiary to their standards and their calling. Once, I walked across Boston Common and went up to an office overlooking the Granary Burial Ground. I was so young that in the lobby they thought I was the child of someone who worked there, come to meet his parent after school. The editor I went to see was recovering from a very long and high-proof lunch. Her assistant brought a coffee service and cakes, on china. You could hear the clock ticking. “We won’t make any money on this,” she said of my first book, “but it’s so beautiful that I cannot see failing to publish it.”
The Nobel Prize could not have lifted anyone over the Common as buoyantly as I was floated back on my way home, and I had a wonderful week thereafter. But then I returned. It seemed as if she had just been exiled—as indeed she had been—and she told me that she was going to give me some bad news. But as she was not the cause of it, she would summon the cause of it, or, as I now know, merely the agent, to tell me himself. Down he came in the elevator cage, courtly and of the old school, a nuclear-grade preppy, her superior, responsible to the laws of economics and the welfare of his many employees. They would not publish the book, they were sorry, but times were changing, the model was different, the pressures overwhelming.
Nonetheless, in the following decades, in New York, as the companies were rationalized, I looked upon the people of the old school, as they were picked off like coyotes shot from a helicopter, with a rather cold eye. Their ideals had been unable to protect either them or the literature they loved. They knew nothing about economics, systems analysis and integration, marketing, or finance. They hadn’t a clue about the use of the newly emerging small computers. They were inefficient, uneducated in the hard things of the world. My point was that the machine and the machine-like routines, the iron laws, had conquered. To survive, we had to learn to live with them as our elders had not. We would look toward the benefits of rationalization and efficiency, because the hardness of these things could be turned to the good.
The first editor I ever visited, in the early sixties, had a fire going in the fireplace, and wrote with a fountain pen. She received me patiently and gave me an hour. I was sixteen. The last editor that I visited (not my own) received me hurriedly in a tiny cubicle with a window that did not open. I had the impression that she was forced to look for books that, above all, would be able to run the gauntlet and stay on the shelves long enough to keep her alive in her job. She was very irritated that her work had been disrupted that day as her computer was seized by hundreds of pop-up ads for penis enlargement. As she pointed out with justified irritation, “I don’t even have a penis.” Sic transit gloria mundi.
My confession is not that I stood on the wrong—though winning—side back then, and not that I was unmoved by the destruction, and that I rationalized it away. Rather, my real sin was that as I formed, confirmed, and spoke my opinions I heard an inner voice that told me I was wrong. I knew all the time, as if I were watching myself in a dream, that even if I had to ride the wave that I was riding, and could not resist, I must not speak out for it, I must not embrace and enjoy its inevitability, I must not look away from those it had overwhelmed and those things for the sake of which they had sunk beneath the surface of the sea, for these were the things that I believed in, too. My confession is that I heard that voice, faintly but incessantly, and I was able to ignore it. I went along, as they do now, with an immoral pride in force.
Obviously, mob action, the surrender to collective suggestion or force, is not new to civilization, and, taking into account its raw and elemental nature, it surely predated civilization and may outlast it. Hominids stoning a mammoth will find each other’s enthusiasm a practical necessity of bloodlust (although, strangely, the lust increases as the mammoth succumbs and the task eases). Hard-wired or not, this impulse and ability has come down through the ages intact. I used to believe that it was stronger in the male than in the female, until my daughters got to seventh grade, and often would return home wounded by the invisible feminine swordsmanship of which I had been unaware—and occasionally a casualty—all my life. There are more ways than one to drop a mammoth.
And I used to believe that, as in lynchings or a crowd turning on a supposedly transgressive outsider, the impulse was isolated: suppressed by law and custom, and naturally limited in that it was hard to kindle. My first encounter with it was in second grade, where a friend and I were ostracized by the other boys because he was poor and I was strange. We did quite well under our sentence of rejection, until one day when we were making a city in the sand and were so taken up in the construction of bridges, houses, and palisades built with twigs, that we didn’t notice an army of our classmates forming on a hill nearby. They swept down en masse, trampled our city, and beat us with sticks. My friend was bloodied and almost lost his eye, because the little boys in this army were already running on a fuel that had bypassed their souls and taken charge of their bodies.
My next experience of such things was in the thousand athletic contests in which I played in school. Although in baseball the blood lust was well contained by the languid pace of the game and the spacing of the players, it arose quite frequently in hockey and lacrosse, and even in soccer. But all these sports worked in accordance with a system of constraint analogous to the grid baffling of an oil tanker. In the nineteenth century, when petroleum was first transported by sea, an inordinate number of tankers mysteriously disappeared in transit. Their hulls being caulked into a single vessel for the oil, the roll and pitch imparted by the waves would make of the shifting cargo the equivalent of what is known as a “water hammer,” and after some resonance in rough weather, this could burst the hull like a bomb, sinking the ship in seconds beneath waters that then ironically were calmed. The solution, quickly determined, was to cage the momentum of the fluid by building crosshatched walls within the hull. No longer could force build upon force unchecked until the breaking point. The effect of this kind of containment is visible both in the divisions of an ice tray and the structure of American government.
In sports, the dampening passion was accomplished by numerous such interlocking walls: the rules of the game, the traditions of sportsmanship, the consequences of the civil law outside this structure, referees, delineated spaces and zones, an audience of people (parents, teachers, girlfriends, trustees, their order of importance determined by the luck or delinquency of each player) to whom one was responsible in various ways and who were influential and able to chastise and withhold. The events themselves, in my experience, took place on fields surrounded by palisades of trees both in the wild and domesticated in orchards. Nature was ever present as an exemplar of stillness, symmetry, balance, and dignity. The structure of all this—spectators on the sidelines, tall trees backing them, teams facing off within a rectangle, the contest timed to the second—provided yet more direction and restraint. And there was no anonymity. We knew each other, and even had we not, we had numbers on our jerseys, like license plates, assuring constant accountability. The impulse was there, and the fire, descended from the stoning and piercing of mammoths, but it was shaped by the civilizing action of many thousands of years.
Other than on the political battlefield, where soldiering for those who, win or lose, usually went on to disappoint, the last time I felt the impulse of coordinated aggression was marching in a column of two thousand heavily armed infantrymen, or, on occasion, in small-unit operations when cohesion was high and everyone was uncharacteristically well rested. Even then, there were the general laws from without and military regulations from within, orders, designs, schedules, and the rigidity of technique imparted by training, most of which was devoted to teaching the preservation of habit and control under stress. Many forms of discipline, day by day, were required and enforced, from strict schedules through codes of dress, salutation, sanitation, equipment maintenance, fire discipline, and by-the-book procedure for everything from patrol to how to tuck your pant legs into your boots. And above all was the hierarchy of command, to which each soldier was bound on pain of prison and, in extreme cases, death. The entire military way of life, it seemed, was a proportional response to the great potential for unwanted destruction possessed by large groups of men primed and trained for war.
More important in vitiating and directing the power of mass actions even than civilizing controls from without, has been the individuality of the person; that is, his separation from others in a semi-autonomy created by fact, accident, and the demands of culture in its various and broad forms. Perhaps the deepest American political expectation is of independent judgment on the part of each citizen, neither rushed, nor coerced, nor coordinated. Ideally, action requires consent, consent requires deliberation, and deliberation requires independence of thought. From the earliest days of the republic this species of independence was sustained by the vast amounts of space and time in which one could come to one’s own conclusions and hold fast to them.
