Digital Barbarism, page 12
The polity was so intensely divided and cross-divided—not so much philosophically as by region, state, area, custom, dialect, law, and distance—that today we would consider its fastest reflexes glacial in speed. The citizenry was different then, educated differently in school, church, and by the landscape itself. It may not have been taught a mass of things, but the quality imparted in the study of classical languages, the Bible, and great works of literature (including the documents of the Founding) enlarged autonomy of thought. For, contrary to modern educational theories, discipline fosters not subservience but independence, as independence requires great strength to uphold. The differences in the quality and depth of political discourse between earlier and the most recent presidents is due to many factors, but not least that the earlier citizenry was primed to deliberate rather than merely to react. It came prepared to receive intelligently something of the nature of Lincoln’s First Inaugural, or Washington’s Farewell. It expected virtually nothing on the instant, it took time, and it looked hard. That is not to say that all Americans were models of dignity and concentration, but by and large they were quite different from what we are now. In the year of my father’s birth, the murder rate, absent any gun laws, was one-eighth of what the last few decades have taught us to accept as normal. Human nature was no different, but the forms of culture that channeled it and the means of understanding it were. Rather than a massive comparison, suffice it to say that although today not everyone is like Paris Hilton, and in the nineteenth century not everyone was like Emily Dickinson, each of these is far more characteristic of her age than would be the other, and that this is self-evident along with all that it implies.
Winslow Homer’s beautiful and moving painting, “The Veteran Returns to His Fields,” is emblematic of the difference. The veteran has left the long rank and file of blue, or possibly gray, and now stands in informal homespun, a scythe rather than a rifle in his hands. With his back to us, he confronts a field and the horizon above it. The wheat is golden and the sky a deepening blue. Though death is behind him, it is also ahead, and he will reconcile the two, alone, with much time in which to reflect. Having survived the convulsion of the mass, he is now protected on all sides by silence, color, and palisades of light. He will not parade his suffering or present what he has learned to an anonymous audience that would devour it in seconds and then skip forward to something else, and something else, and something else again, which would have left him more alone than had he remained alone in the first place. And he will not submit his conclusions to that impatient mass, but rather to those he loves and to the judgment of God expressed nowhere perhaps but in his heart, where it will be infinitely satisfying and indifferent to the passage of time.
The ethos then, and not that long ago, was of a life of one’s own, of privacy, constancy, and tranquility. Sins and virtues were the same, but the arena in which they contested was different and would differently direct the outcome of the battle. Henry Adams thought that at the beginning of the twentieth century the world had begun to move at an unsustainable pace. Little did he know, and perhaps in light of the future little do we, but now the rhythm of life is not that of the dynamo, with its gleaming copper windings, or the steam engine dripping water like a draft animal in the heat, but the silent, invisible, unapproachable electron, incomprehensibly fast and indifferent, to which, as we accommodate, we sacrifice much of what is in us by nature. All for fear of not following in the wake of its speed and power, for fear of missing out, of not having, and of being left behind. The character of the machine is that of speed, power, compression, instantaneousness, immense capacity, indifference, and automaticity.
These are what were apparent above all else in the mass of arguments that came like a flash in response to my simple and rather unambitious newspaper column. The substance was disturbing if only for its implicit comment on the state of contemporary education. The form, however, was most distressing, in that it was so thoughtless, imitative, lacking in custom and civility, and stimulated—as if in a feedback loop or feeding frenzy—by the power it brought to bear not by means of any quality but only as a variant of mass and speed.
In my mind’s eye I saw again and again the paintings of Brueghel and Bosch, both the more and less calamitous ones—those of torture and hell, and those depicting the relatively minor sins and difficulties of ordinary life. What did this have in common with a wave of reaction washing over the internet? In perhaps the most nightmarish of all paintings, Brueghel’s “The Triumph of Death,” one can see absolute horror, hopelessness, terror, and despair. The artist has depicted the kind of holocaust that in an instant can blast away the will and ability to resist. Death is a skeleton riding a horse that is red because it has been flayed and it lacks its skin. And yet the horse serves its rider energetically, carrying him and his immense scythe across a paralyzing landscape to harvest with boundless energy a crop of suffering mortals. Death himself is a human skeleton impressed into service and pressing others to follow. Though the horrors of the painting are many, the one most pertinent is that man has been enlisted into the cause of his own demise, and embraces it with lust. All the characters in the masterful paintings of Bosch and Brueghel, which document a time of dissolution and “paradigm shift” so faithfully that motion appears magically even in the illustration of sloth, are creatures of unconscious impulse and automaticity. They are driven to the quick and the reflexive, and behave as if they are entranced. Even those who may be relatively contemplative are pushed away from the habit of contemplation, in favor of action for its own sake and as the legitimizing principle of life. They cross the landscape in mobs, extending their paroxysms of self-destruction to everything in their path. Thoughtless and overquick, they move and strike like the living dead, their only sustenance being momentum.
In 1947, the critic Howard Daniel wrote that, “The schizoid nature of our modern civilization accents motion (no matter the direction), violence, and sensation. The opportunism of its commercialized culture points up the instability of its ideas and its ideologies; these are [as] subject to rapid change as fashions in dress.”54 (Compared to present change, however, fashions of dress move as slowly as redwoods grow.) This was the beginning of an intense acceleration far greater than the cumulative change and instabilities in the chaotic era of Bosch and Brueghel. Our era is potentially (though not yet) just as dangerous to the person, gentler and more insidious, faster almost beyond comprehension, and far more ruinous to the soul.
The apostles of the machine and what it has wrought have rushed to embrace it without critical regard. In perhaps unconscious service of instantaneity, automaticity, and collectivity, they have taken to the field to war against stability and tradition. And although they may not be aware enough to know, they are certainly keen enough to sense that in this war their chief enemy, irritant, and obstacle is the individual voice. For it is the individual voice that is most threatening to every form of tyranny, every attempted mechanization of the soul, every great challenge to civilization, and every assault upon human nature. Copyright is important because it is one of the guarantors of the rights of authorship, and the rights of authorship are important because without them the individual voice would be subsumed in an indistinguishable and instantly malleable mass. Those who have been taken irreparably into the roiling heart of this mass have a missionary zeal for pulling after them anyone and everyone. The red horse upon which they make their progress is immensely powerful, and it does not tire.
CHAPTER 3
NOTES ON VIRGINIA
Reclaiming Jefferson and Taking Care of Macaulay
The Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport is on a flat plain of the Virginia Piedmont, looking out at a long majestic line of the Blue Ridge. When I used to live in Brooklyn Heights, I would notice upon my return from Manhattan that, coming off the bridge or out of the subway onto quiet streets of nineteenth-century houses bedecked with flower boxes, my blood pressure would drop and pulse slow. Upon returning to Charlottesville from Manhattan, blood pressure and pulse seem to decline so precipitously as to suggest that one is dead. It is that beautiful, that tranquil, and it has an ineffable quality that promotes happiness. Perhaps this is a combination of climate, terrain, cultivation, and architecture. It may have been this way (minus architecture and cultivation) long before human settlement. Certainly if we are to believe Thomas Jefferson, it was like this in his time.
If a traveler, or a resident returning to Albemarle County, pauses when exiting the airport terminal and glances up into the rotunda, he will see a Jefferson testament inscribed around the lower rim. It conveys the same longing for tranquility of a Marlborough letter of 1703 (of which Jefferson could not have been aware) in which the English captain-general wrote, “I have no other thoughts of happiness but after all is over…to end my days quietly with my Lady Marlborough.”55 Later, Jefferson: “I am happy nowhere else, and in no other society, and all my wishes end, where I hope my days will end, at Monticello. Too many scenes of happiness mingle themselves with all the recollections of my native woods and fields to suffer them to be supplanted in my affection by any other.”
From my house I can see Monticello. That is no accident. More than half a century ago, my father and mother brought me there on a day late in winter. My school’s vacation schedule was misaligned with that of most others, and my father was anyway used to taking me from class at will if he thought it justified—something that I now realize has shaped my view of formal education. Monticello was not the vast enterprise it is today, with long lines, trolleys, shops, and places to eat. Before the interstates and the internet, it was sufficiently isolated so that in part of that morning, askew of school vacations, we were the only visitors.
We found ourselves more or less alone, wandering around the house and grounds. I was able, no doubt illicitly, to touch things that you cannot touch today. I remember my mother’s brown suede coat in the pale winter sunshine. Though she has been dead a long time, she was then not much more than half my age now. I felt that we were guests in this great man’s house, and it seemed as if at any moment he might appear. Just a child, I had not read the Declaration of Independence and I knew hardly anything about Jefferson, but his spirit was so strongly imprinted there—in inventions, views, decoration, the very layout of the rooms—that, later, upon reading what he wrote (or at least a small portion of it) I was not surprised.
When John F. Kennedy welcomed Nobel laureates with the remark that never had the White House seen such a concentration of genius except possibly when Thomas Jefferson dined alone, he was, pace Lincoln, quite right. But for many reasons it is important to note that Jefferson’s genius could not have existed in the absence of its tension with his imperfections. That is, it was a product, above all, of his humanity. His genius was not cold but rather reliably passionate. Who else could have written the first lines of the Declaration, the bedrock upon which this country rests, a document that in form and content is transcendent and unsurpassed?
Leaving out for a moment the issue of slavery, it can be said that he was so engaged with life itself and the world in many of its aspects that he had little time for the hierarchy among men, even if he had to live within it and at times near or at its summit. I believe that the virtue of putting such hierarchy in its place stems from a perspicacious understanding of mortality, which Jefferson surely had. Probably in light of this he did not value the regard of others in the way lesser men do, even those of great or supposedly great achievement. The substance of his life and work makes it clear that he would consider as worthless dross the worship that some people devote their lives to obtaining. He wanted to be seen in full, for it is only the man in full, with all his imperfections, who is truly remembered and who can truly be loved.
We know many of these imperfections. Though we may never know for certain the nature—biological or otherwise—of his personal relations with Sally Hemings, and therefore, despite political wishes and temptations, cannot judge them, we do know that the man who wrote the most powerful and effective declaration of human equality that history has ever known owned slaves throughout his life, and, unlike George Washington, did not free them upon his death. We do know that he did not always control his appetites, curiosities, or lusts, that he lived beyond his means, and that he courted another man’s wife. We know that in his enthusiasm for equality he was blind to the nature and terrors of the French Revolution, the seeds of which proved more destructive than even he would have been capable of imagining.
Partly because of his knowledge of his own failings, partly due to his obvious convictions, and partly because of the nature of his character and the needs and demands of his agile mind, it seems clear that he would not have wanted to have been frozen into immobile certainty. He could not have wanted his descendants—that is, all Americans—to cite and run, using his opinions as an inflexible whip, as if he could think for those who followed him. To do so would be to betray his achievement and denigrate his spirit. And, like a good father, he would have wanted his descendants not to caste themselves beneath him but rather to engage him as equals as far as they could. Although there are fathers of contemptible character who do not want their children to equal or surpass them, most pray that at the very least their children will try.
I am a writer of fiction, and as such—in a field in which it used to be anyway that character, faith, truth, and beauty outrank intelligence—I value with special regard a man who could write both the Declaration of Independence and the lines inscribed on the interior rim of the airport rotunda, as quoted above. I was therefore bemused when the aforementioned crapulous professor, who is out of North Carolina (which is below Virginia), wrote to taunt me on the grounds that I thought myself smarter than Jefferson ( Jefferson was “smart?” What was Hitler, a “bad dude?”); that I had no understanding of him; and that I dared disagree with him.
In regard to the first accusation, what distinguished Thomas Jefferson was not that he was smart, and anyone who might imagine so is simply displaying his own limitations. But, were I somehow pitted against Jefferson in a contest measuring intelligence I do suspect that he would come out considerably ahead. For the record, Einstein, too.
As for the second point, my understanding of Jefferson, Jefferson was nothing if not straightforward. Not being self-consciously an intellectual, and certainly not an academic, he was almost always magnificently clear and in no need of decoding. Understanding Jefferson is really not an issue.
And as for disagreeing, and therefore violating some sort of authority postulated in support of an argument, I would assume that the professor referring so confidently to Jefferson’s views would nonetheless censure him in regard to the keeping of slaves. Perhaps even in regard to the expansion of the United States across the vast Indian lands acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. Perhaps even in regard to many other points upon which Jefferson wrote and acted in his eventful life (such as his opposition to federal roads, which have proved indispensable to the economic development of the nation, even as recently as the Interstate Highway System). And so, likely disagreeing on various points, how could he position a selected Jeffersonian opinion as infallible and its contradiction as placing whoever might disagree into a posture of supposed rebellion and inferiority? To love and respect Jefferson does not require that one agree with him uniformly, as Jefferson would no doubt forcefully assert.
But before reclaiming Jefferson from the anti-copyright partisans, we are forced, due to a frequent association made by opponents of copyright, to consider Macaulay. Though Macaulay came after Jefferson, because he was English he may seem to Americans to have come before (we do that), and although not as relevant to the American debate, he is often cited along with Jefferson as an unimpeachable authority. In his article, Professor Boyle attempts to use Macaulay to deliver a coup de grace. Almost everyone requires a fundamental text of some sort. Jews have the Bible and half a dozen others, Christians the New Testament, Muslims the Quran, conservatives the Declaration and the Constitution, Marxists Das Kapital, and environmentalists Silent Spring. If you look at the progression of these cardinal texts, authorship blurs the further back you go, and sharpens as they advance toward or into our era.
Every system of belief must have its seminal document even if, as in the case of Das Kapital, very few people may actually have read it. Priests and professors of all types take it upon themselves actually to read such things, and everyone else mainly discusses snippets, excerpts, digests, and reports. Courtesy of the book reviews, the Manhattan cocktail party or East Hampton (actually, the big money has forced even the rich intellectuals out to Springs) book discussion, particularly if it is heated, takes place usually among people who have not actually read the books they are discussing. I first observed this absurdity after the newspaper strike of 1963, when the New York Review of Books emerged from the darkness of Elizabeth Hardwick. Watching those debates—so often between largely bald men with very big beards—was like watching an intense tennis match played entirely without a ball.
For the anti-copyright set, raised on downloads and quarter-second video cuts, there are various professional interpreters to smooth over their followers’ many mental crevasses and provide summaries of that which would take more than five minutes to read before eliciting a blizzard of bad grammar. The fundamental text is Macaulay’s speech on copyright, to the House of Commons, in February of 1841, opposing a bill to extend the term of copyright to cover a period of sixty years after the author’s death. The bill was voted down, only to rise in more modest form not too long after. Macaulay spoke against it with faulted brilliance. He began with ostentatious support of copyright itself, declaring that he objected only to postmortem extension, and then went on at great length to attack copyright in general, making points that now form the heart of the anti-copyright case. Though modern intermediaries actually apologize for Macaulay’s style, it is this that chiefly recommends him. Despite his grievous faults, he writes as gracefully and fluidly as Cicero. Nonetheless, as rhetorically pretty as it is, his famous speech begs for evisceration by any semiconscious passerby.
