Digital Barbarism, page 19
This kind of thing is hardly confined to Arabia. In a short article I read recently the following sentence jumped out at me like an electrocuted cat: “To grasp fully what he is up to, one must re-read Aristotle, Thucydides, Plato, and Xenophon [Isn’t that a type of headlight?] and then re-read them again alongside the related chapters.”102 What would you do in the afternoon? It was not, as far as I can tell without rereading Xenophon, a witticism, as it should have been. It does illustrate the world of intellectual tangle—the endless Möbius belt—in which every thread of the cloth is borrowed from another, every pick-up stick touched by twenty others, and no observation fresh from the mind of an observer left unencumbered lest it corrupt the spirit of complication. Those who operate this way both worship and detest those who don’t. The primary texts to which they are devoted are not derivative as are theirs, which should give them a hint, and perhaps does, which may account for a lot. Theirs is the prisoner’s envy for his fellow prisoners who charge electrified wire while he himself is afraid to run out an open and unguarded gate.
In the more sclerotic academic circles, where everything must be supported, even that which theoretically cannot be, a multiplicity of footnotes is godliness, and to be cited in them is bliss. The German tradition of scholarship suffers exquisitely from this, as does Jewish scholarship, always on the defensive, and (necessarily, with no alternative) English and American law. And of course a history without complete sourcing is valueless other than as a literary work, even if written by a participant (assuming it goes even an inch beyond his own story).
Students therefore are taught to support their assertions with crushing citations. Well and good, unless it is mainly the deadening hand of “authority” in both senses of the word, and unless it becomes a substitute for thinking, risk, labor, and originality. It often does, especially when, in a metaphysics reminiscent of Thomas Nast’s cartoon of Tammany characters standing in a circle directing blame at the person to the left, the blind cite the blind, the careless cite the careless, the ignorant cite the ignorant, the biased the biased, and so on.
At risk of straying too far, I must relate the story of how a long time ago a great friend and I, alighting from a freight train in northern Virginia, proceeded to Crystal City, where we insolently skated in our shoes across an empty ice rink while a Zamboni machine was grooming it, leading to our detention by a security guard with the physique of a whale. As we were led into the guard station, my friend (somehow a government attorney) appointed me his attorney, and I appointed him mine. During interrogation, I referred all inquiries to him, and he referred all inquiries to me, in the most polite, respectful, and legalistic way. This is exactly what too often passes for scholarship and authorship.
If authorship is simply an echo chamber, which for many it is, then copyright is of course a terrible hindrance and should be gutted for the good of all. But that it is an echo chamber is the choice and view of those who recoil from independent thought. As in the worst of medieval scholasticism, they dare not venture beyond the rim of received authority lest they fall off the edge of the earth. To help those who cannot face the terror of doing something independently, the electronic age has provided WEbook,™ which, according to the Washington Post, “by adopting the growing crowd-sourcing model [“Crowd-sourcing” was invented by sheep.]…hopes to help frustrated writers realize their potential…. Members can help one another overcome writer’s block” (if you have writer’s block you should heed it as you would heed a cobra), and the company has an employee who (Tolstoy would have appreciated this) “makes the final call in disagreements between writers or helps moderate brainstorming sessions.”103
Such stunning mental dependency was often evident in the voluminous reaction to my single editorial piece, and may have been inspired there from the top down, by the leader of the movement, Lawrence Lessig, who is also and not coincidentally a passionate advocate of “remix,” or, in my terminology, Legos.™ Taking a work that someone else has made, chopping it up, and rearranging it, perhaps adding or subtracting elements according to whim, is a favored “art” form of a generation weaned on push-button alternate endings and Microsoft’s “cut and paste.” Lessig writes, “Helprin barely cites anyone…. Helprin doesn’t bother with what others have written…. Now between…pure remix…and Helprin’s…pure Helprin…which is more respectful of authorship?”104 It’s one thing to learn from others, but another to copy them. In another context, he is what old-fashioned people might call careless about aesthetic standards and the integrity of a work, when he writes: “How better to revive a 30-year-old series than by enlisting armies of kids to make content interesting again?”105 That might be an interesting project for Star Wars, the thirty-year-old series to which he refers, but not for War and Peace, Dubliners, or A River Runs Through It. One is allowed to do it, in fact, with War and Peace but not with A River Runs Through It, because the latter is protected by copyright. When its copyright expires, A River Runs Through It could be “remixed” into a transvestite musical with dolphins. That might be a lot of fun, but perhaps it wouldn’t have been so much fun for Norman Maclean and those, strangers and otherwise, who hold him dear. Which is, of course, one of the many arguments for extending copyright.
If I am to understand it correctly, part of the view of, and common to, the movement I oppose is the idea that one can respect and/or actually achieve authorship by rearranging the works of others. And how do the others achieve authorship? By melding and rearranging the works of other others. But authorship is something entirely different. It is an adventure of sorts, a dangerous and risky thing that in its essence must depart from authority and is based not upon a compilation of previous works but on observation and what follows ineffably in the mind and heart of the observer. Since the beginnings of civilization this has distinguished almost everything worthwhile that has ever been written. It is not following the “remixing” mole into his suffocating tunnel, but, rather, standing on the cliff ’s edge above the sea, in the sun and the open air, on your own. There is no machine that can change this.
CHAPTER 5
PROPERTY AS A COEFFICIENT OF LIBERTY
Property Is Not Antithetical to Virtue
At age fourteen, on a cheap three-speed Robin Hood bicycle that my father inexplicably (to me) provided as a replacement for a magnificent English touring cycle, the color of a Weimaraner, that I had left to rust in the rain, I set out on a trip across most of the country. A great deal happened in those months: I was not many miles away from Ernest Hemingway on a sunny July morning in Idaho at the instant of his death; in the lobby of an office building in Arizona, Barry Goldwater informed me that I was not permitted to carry the hunting knife that hung from my belt; and with what now seems like a remarkably small number of other visitors to Zion National Park, I listened to a park ranger’s radio as the Berlin Wall crisis unfolded. In regard to copyright, property, and decency, the pertinent incident occurred in a field in Iowa.
As a child roaming sparsely inhabited land along the Hudson in a paradise that is now carpeted with condominia and conference centers, I had gotten into the habit of eating the fruit, berries, or other crops that in various seasons would easily come to hand, whether in the wild or at the edge of fields or gardens. Never did it occur to me that these apples, peaches, pears, corn, tomatoes, berries, watercress, and grapes were anything but a gift of nature and the common property of mankind.
No longer exactly a child, I halted my bike by the side of a cornfield on a hot day in Iowa to drink from my canteen. I was at the edge of thousands of acres. You couldn’t see the end of it, and the stalks, as dense as a Vietnamese bamboo forest, were heavy with young corn, probably animal corn. I helped myself to an ear, and, after shucking it, began to eat. Then appeared the farmer, as if from nowhere, as irate as Al Sharpton. Still eating, I wondered why he was agitated. Forty-eight years ago, it went roughly like this:
“Where’d you get that corn?” he asked, throat tight.
I didn’t lie, and say that I had bought it at Gristedes on Lexington Avenue, but instead made a kind of hitchhiker’s gesture, pointing backward with my thumb at the thick green front of corn stalks. I wasn’t able to say anything anyway, as my mouth was full.
“That’s my corn. You have no right to take it. You stole it from me.”
“What?” I said. “One ear of corn?” After all, he knew and I knew that there were thousands of acres of corn, and probably tens or scores or hundreds of millions of ears of corn, and that neither he nor anyone else could possibly have missed just one. Had he not seen me, he would not have known of my expropriation or been affected by it. All this was said by the simple phrase I had uttered, with the unspoken addendum, which I felt, that he was greedy and a little crazy to care about just one ear of corn, and that, although I knew he would never give it, in my view he owed me an apology.
“No,” he said, taking in all arguments at once, “it doesn’t matter whether you took one ear or all the corn, you have no right to do so, you’ve stolen from me, and you’re a thief. I struggle to pay for this land, I plow it, I pay for the fertilizer and seed, and I work to cultivate and to harvest. I take the risk, I spend the time, the land is mine, the corn is mine. Who are you? What did you do?”
My presumption that because I was from New York I could out-debate an Iowa farmer was beginning to go the way of all flesh. “There’s no sign,” I said, stupidly, beginning to fear that he was right, but, at fourteen, making a stand anyway.
“Do you mean to say that without a sign you have no way of knowing that this is not your field and this is not your corn? Did you think, ‘Oh, this must be the corn I planted when I was passing through here last spring. Otherwise there’d be a sign telling me that it isn’t’?”
“It’s just one ear of corn,” I insisted.
“Are you starving?” he asked. “You look pretty well fed to me.”
“No.”
“If you were, then you might have to steal someone’s corn, but at least you’d know that you had no choice—having asked for some in the first place, having tried to plant your own, having looked for work, having suffered until you were pushed. None of these things applies to you.”
“I’ll pay you,” I said, in one of my lowest moments. By now, I was ashamed.
“No you won’t. It doesn’t work that way. When a thief is caught it doesn’t change things if he offers to pay. ‘Sorry I robbed your bank. Here’s the money. See you later.’ Think of what the world would be like if that were true.”
“You want me to throw it back?” I asked sheepishly, holding up the ear of corn as if it were a fish.
“And then get out of here.”
“Do you own the side of the road?” I asked, voice cracking in defeat.
“Yes, I do.”
The rest of the day, bicycling toward Nebraska and a night camping on grasslands beneath a sky miraculously heavy with stars, I thought of rejoinders. I would not—even after the fact—let him do that to me. The problem was that I had not a single argument better than his. My pride was shattered, I had no excuse, I had been totally in the wrong and had had neither the presence of mind nor the good grace to recognize and admit it. It didn’t matter that he had thousands of acres of corn, and, perhaps like Van Gogh, would not have missed a single ear. It didn’t matter that taking the corn was easy, and except by chance would have been undetectable. I stole from him. That’s what mattered. And if I had been not a single kid passing through, but one of hundreds of thousands who stayed put and habitually raided his fields—simply because they could—then not only would it have been wrong, it would have been hurtful and destructive.
The farmer was right to have shamed me. Once I had made sense of it, and by the time we got to Nebraska and were camped under the sky as I had never before seen it, I felt freedom and enjoyment far superior to the corrosive delight of getting something for nothing.
Having been initially instructed in why most takings of property are unjust, I passed into adulthood nonetheless with an almost unconscious residual bias against property. (That’s part of what you get from living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in the same way that a fish gets water when it opens its mouth). It took decades, actually, for me to understand the positive—and, for a democracy, indispensable—effects of property, and to grasp in full the theoretical proposition that property is the guarantor of liberty. Though hardly as elegant as the word guarantor, the word coefficient is perhaps more precise.
According to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary,106 the adjectival meaning of coefficient is “Co-operating to produce a result.” As a noun, it is “a multiplier that measures some property of a particular substance, for which it is constant.” In regard to the relation of property to liberty, coefficient is thus a good predicate. This requires further explanation.
To begin, where would copyright, patent, and trademark be obviously unnecessary? Only in an entirely centrally directed economy, whether “perfect” socialism, communism, “democratic centralism,” or whatever it might be called. There, for example, drug firms would not need to own the rights to their discoveries, because to raise capital they would not need to promise a return, having obtained their capitalization by decree. (How this would work in comparison to the predatory capitalist model may be illustrated by comparing the number and qualities of drugs developed in the Soviet Bloc and China with those originating in the West.) Writers and composers would draw equal salaries from their cooperatives, or, as in the USSR, “unions.” As inventions would be produced only in the factories directed to do so by the central planning authority, with no possibility of competition, patents and trademarks would be unnecessary.
Is it significant that the only conditions in which such protections would not be required, or would be ill fitting at the least, and perhaps harmful, are those in the target end-states of Marxism? Of course it is, as this is the ethos from which the anti-copyright movement emerges. The theses they rely upon are sensible in their minds because they have already decided—even if not formally or consciously—against property, competition, and the free market. This is the foundation upon which their movement rests. Their arguments are mainly a subspecies of the greater and more consequential battle between those who favor a world that is planned, controlled, decided, entirely cooperative, and conducive of predetermined outcomes, and those who favor and tolerate market-based systems that admit and honor chance, competition, unexpected developments, peril, and reward. It is very easy to dispense with the structures and protections of the market economy, of which copyright is one, if you are willing to dispense with the market economy itself.
Rather than defending free markets—which would swell this short chapter into a large book that has already been written many times and well—I will try, with a discursiveness I cannot suppress, to address the favorite and particular arguments the opponents of copyright bring to the fore in making their case, and which draw, apparently without consideration, upon assumptions in regard to property, liberty, and time.
While teaching at the University of Iowa thirty years ago, I went to a summer barbecue at the farm of novelist Vance Bourjaily, and his wife, Tina. It was an eventful evening. The Carvers were there, minus Ray, who had just run off. Tina came up the hill riding one and leading another of two magnificent horses, as white as clouds, as if in a giant Rosa Bonheur painting, and invited one of the guests to accompany her in taking them bareback to a higher pasture. As he mounted, a few puppies new to the farm nipped at the horses’ pasterns, and quickly drove them into a frenzy. Though at first the horses went rampant they soon were sprawled in the dust like war horses felled in battle, their legs windmilling in a tangle, in the midst of which was the lady of the farm, who would have been killed had not her riding companion pulled the animals away by their halters. Nonetheless, she was severely injured, and lay for a while in a coma. Apart from that, and enough angst, loneliness, bitterness, and heartbreak to fill the pond across which, before the dinner that due to the accident was never consumed, there had been swimming races, the most notable thing and the reason (if not sufficient justification) for telling this story, was Vance Bourjaily’s extraordinary control of his sheep.
On the next hillside, they looked like a mobile lake of whipped cream. From the perch of his writing cabin across the valley, where we were, he could stand with a trumpet and direct them as precisely as if they were at the end of a mechanical arm. One blast, and they would go here, two and they would go there, some tootles and they would run up the hill, a high note and they would stop short (not being a sheep, I don’t remember the actual code, and am approximating). From the way they moved you would think they were Republicans or Democrats in a presidential election year. All of which is to say that, because taking refuge in words embraced by partisans who willingly glide over faults and contradictions is harmful both to one’s integrity and the public discourse in general, I am uncomfortable about using the word liberty.
It is one of those words that has been freighted so heavily that it has almost lost its meaning, although not as much as freedom, fairness, or diversity. Lest anyone jump like sheep to Vance Bourjaily’s horn, the scope of the word must be limited. It comes from the French liberté, a carrier of more freight perhaps than even the English word, and the Latin liber, meaning free: that is, unencumbered; without external controls or the internalization of external controls; not being subject to captivity or a will other than one’s own; and, untrammeled by binding requirements.
Nothing is entirely free, not even an electron (hardly an electron) or an atom floating in the inaccurately named vacuum of space. Everything that exists is subject to the pull or constraint of something else. Even God, in almost every theology, is bound by certain of His own consistencies. Freedom, and, therefore, liberty, cannot be absolute but only a matter of degree, and the liberty here endorsed is the condition in which one finds oneself when decisions of governance are made with a constant prejudice against compulsion and dirigisme rather than with persistent affection for them.
