Digital Barbarism, page 4
Except as part of work (or in a crisis such as a battle, earthquake, or fire), in the presence of more than two people who are not members of my immediate family I slowly begin to disintegrate. I don’t like that, and what I like even less is when some people put me in such a position despite knowing from experience that I can’t tolerate it. Nonetheless, they do it repeatedly and enjoy and condemn my failure, while they are quite willing to make allowance for thieves, murderers, and publishers. They will with weepy compassion forgive someone who beats them silly or kills for cigarettes, but they will not forgive me when all I want is not to be in the room.
When, however, you are compelled by the laws of the state to attend school, enter the army, or do jury duty, you must be in the room. And as you age, stronger compulsions come into play. Unless you are an heir or heiress you have to make a living, and even in the solitary professions times will arise when you must depart from your isolation and deal with people in numbers. When you have children, you must support them. You cannot shrink from this, or from teacher conferences or birthday parties. If you are a writer, you more or less have to go on book tours. Even Margaret Atwood, a woman who when unharried knows no bounds in the ferocity of conviction, and yet is so shy that she has actually invented a robot through which she speaks at book events, must nonetheless be virtually present and answer questions—“Do you write with a pencil or a pen?” “Who are your favorite authors?” “Will you write my book about the affair between Golda Meir and Frank Sinatra if I give you twenty-five percent?” There is no escaping the world. This is not to be lamented, in that if you escape the world and its friction you escape education. And you can’t do that, or at least you shouldn’t, because, as much more than half the world is eager to tell you as soon as you manifest the signs of your discomfort, no man is an island. (To which you can reply, “But what about Arnold Taubman? He was Madagascar.”)
Why not soldier on as not-an-island for most of your life, and then, at some blessed point after your obligations have been met and duties fulfilled, finally allow the waters to rush in and dissolve the feeble causeways to the mainland that for decades you have maintained at the cost of a broken heart? I had thought that when I reached sixty (years, not miles per hour, although it did take about six seconds to get there) I might be able to make a partial retreat and exit the controversies in which I have been involved (and which, when the heat of battle maneuvered me into positions I would otherwise have rejected, have pulled me at times beyond where I wanted to go) to spend my last years as I had spent my first: alone except for family, and a few friends one or two at a time; writing descriptively and reflectively rather than combatively; with no thought to reception, position, or victory or defeat in struggles that soon will fade. Not retirement, but a shift in focus to that which is gentle, beautiful, and eternal.
Politicians, businessmen, and actresses there are who struggle mightily to hold back the thick curtains of age. They are so close to the falls of oblivion that they can hear the water’s white sound, and yet they are all-consumed in a fight for position in a boat that is soon to be launched into a world with neither gravity nor time. They will tell you that they work for a cause higher than themselves, but, depending upon who they are, you can quickly separate this chaff from the wheat and know that the cause they espouse is merely the disposable costume of their lust for power, or a distraction from the emptiness they dare not confront after a life in the absence of reflection.
I thought that by not being a politician or actor, and with a deep hunger for privacy, I would have a chance to steer my life into tranquility. This was fundamentally and particularly a mistake. Fundamentally, because neither nature nor human society is tranquil. They do have, however, improbable moments that give rise to villages in war zones that sow and reap as passing armies leave them untouched; centenarians who have had good lives, a minimum of pain, and children who love and will outlive them; healthy billionaires; statesmen who save the West; women who are beautiful into their nineties; skiers who never have had a fall; speedy tortoises; and people born without envy.
But these are rare. Naturally, most everything alive, and even almost everything that isn’t, is subject to change, shock, assault, and cycles of alternation. A rock formation deep within the earth may seem eternally solid, but it was once molten, once a gas, once cosmic dust, and once pure and inexplicable energy, as eventually it will be again. And as for us, the doorbell rings, the snowstorm comes, the package arrives, the crops dry up, children are born, affections arise or are alienated, marauders traipse across horizons more or less distant, and we grow old until no matter what tranquility we have managed to achieve eventually the prospect of lifting a glass to our lips becomes as threatening and difficult as climbing the north face of the Eiger.
There is no escaping into permanent tranquility similar to what pacifists mistakenly imagine to be permanent peace, but only managing the ebb and flow of continually active force. Still, though it is not possible to stop the waves, one can, in riding them masterfully, render them relatively motionless. This is the job of statesmen in ushering their countries through the high waters of history, of parents in bringing up children, and of people in living their lives. You can have tranquility only sometimes and only up to a point: beyond that is the grave. And of course if you are even slightly empathetic you can never be at rest. The pain and suffering of the world is so widespread and exquisite that it makes the peace for which we may long only an illusion.
Nonetheless, and knowing that I would not be able to do what I wanted to do, I wanted to do it, and I tried. It was not just one thing, but many: forgoing various opportunities; not reading from cover to cover every journal that arrives; now and then allowing the grass to grow too high; going to bed early; welcoming silence. In those efforts at management, not surprisingly, I met many forms of resistance.
My relations with the New York Times, once excellent and warm, have of late—that is, in the last twenty-five years—been inexcellent and cold, both from differences of opinion and imperfections in conduct, my own included. But as one of the most wonderful things in this life is the lion lying down with the lamb (or, as some small children believe, the lamp), I was pleased when in the spring of 2007 the Times, after a long hiatus but in the most friendly manner, asked me to write an op-ed piece. Having resolved to live less combatively in my remaining years, I thought, Why raise fur when it has been rubbed up against me so kindly? At least to begin with, I would ease in without controversy, even if it meant abandoning longstanding habits. The next time, perhaps, I would formulate something that would generate hundreds of bilious letters, but not now.
I searched my memory and notes for something innocuous. I would choose a topic close to my heart but distant from the fire of partisanship, of which I remain thoroughly sick. Copyright! Except for Hollywood lawyers, who are not even human, who thinks about copyrights other than the few who hold them? Who really cares, or knows even the most elemental facts? I worried only about putting my audience to sleep, and thought of my potential readers as stones skipping unconsciously over a lake, my copyright piece being the lake. Still, this was perfectly consonant with my new life, and a step on the inevitable road to oblivion: gradual, tranquil, gentle, and somnolent. Though I regretted that only one or two people might notice, at least I was sure that I could not possibly anger anyone.
And yet it was a subject I could not dismiss if only because it had engaged a passion fueled by the existence of an inequity. Years before, in making my will, I had to accept that the bulk of what I would leave to my children, the product of a lifetime’s work, would after not too long a time simply expire and flow from their hands into the hands of others. Had I built a business, a farm, or a law firm instead of a series of copyrights, this would not be so. It seemed, as simply as I can put it, unfair.
“What if,” asked the piece, which, in the form that follows, would run also in the Claremont Review of Books, “after you had paid the taxes on earnings with which you built a house, sales taxes on the materials, real estate taxes during its life, and inheritance taxes at your death, the state would eventually commandeer it entirely? This does not happen in our society…to houses. Or to businesses. Were you to have ushered through the many gates of taxation a flour mill, travel agency, or newspaper, they would not suffer total confiscation.”
Here, I was inexact. Nothing is confiscated, but after it is, in fact, commandeered by the government, which moves it from the state of being protected to the state of being without protection, it is thrown open to the use of all. This is not the case with “many classes of assets abstract or concrete, from land to Treasury bills to stocks, paintings, and much else; once the state has dipped its enormous beak into the stream of your wealth and possessions they are allowed to flow from one generation to the next. Though they may be divided and diminished by inflation, imperfect investment, a proliferation of descendants, and the government taking its share, they are not simply expropriated.
“That is, unless you own a copyright. Were I to write the great American novel tomorrow (again?), seventy years from my death the rights to it, though taxed at inheritance, would be stripped from my children and grandchildren. To the objection that this provision strikes malefactors of great wealth, one might ask, first, where the inheritors of Sylvia Plath berth their 200-foot yachts. And, second, why, when such a stiff penalty is not applied to the owners of Rockefeller Center or Wal-Mart, it is brought to bear against legions of harmless drudges who other than a handful of literary plutocrats (manufacturers, really) are destined by the nature of things to be no more financially secure than a seal in the Central Park Zoo.”
This was not, however, merely a rhetorical question: “The answer is that the Constitution states unambiguously that Congress shall have the power ‘To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.’ The italics are mine, the capitalization James Madison’s.
“It is, then, for the public good. But it might also be for the public good were Congress to allow the enslavement of foreign captives and their descendants (this was tried), the seizure of Bill Gates’s bankbook, or the ruthless suppression of Alec Baldwin. You can always make a case for the public interest if you are willing to exclude from common equity those whose rights you seek to abridge. But we don’t operate that way, mostly.”
I then went on to point out, in some detail, how freeing a work into the public domain offers only a fractional economic advantage to the purchaser and the publisher, while depriving of any interest in it whatsoever both its author and his heirs; and next dealt with the argument that, as the copyright holder is dependent entirely upon the government for his exclusivity of right, does not then the government’s giveth support its taketh?
“By that logic, should the classes of property not subject to total confiscation therefore be denied the protection of regulatory agencies, courts, police, and the law itself lest they be subject to expropriation as payment for the considerable and necessary protections they too enjoy? Should automobile manufacturers be nationalized after 70 years because they depend on publicly financed roads? Should Goldman Sachs be impounded because of the existence of the SEC?”
Why would the Framers, whose political genius has never been exceeded, have countenanced such an unfair exception? After all, “Jefferson objected that ideas are, ‘like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and, like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.’ But ideas are immaterial to the question of copyright. Mozart and Neil Diamond may have begun with the same idea, but that a work of art is more than an idea is confirmed by the difference between the “Soave sia il vento” and “Kentucky Woman.” We have different words for art and idea because they are two different things. The flow and proportion of the elements of a work of art, its subtle engineering, even its surface glosses, combine substance and style indistinguishably in a creation for which the right of property is natural and becoming.”
In Jefferson’s era 95 percent of the population drew its living from the land. “Writers and inventors were largely those who obtained their sustenance from their patrimony or their mills; their writings or improvements to craft were secondary. No one except perhaps Hamilton or Franklin might have imagined that services and intellectual property would become primary fields of endeavor and the chief engines of the economy. Now these are, and it is no more rational to deny them equal status than it would have been to confiscate farms, ropewalks, and other forms of property in the eighteenth century.”
Nonetheless, one cannot ignore “the express order of the Constitution, long imprinted without catastrophe upon the fabric of our history. But given the grace of the Constitution it is not surprising to find the remedy within it, in the very words that prohibit the holding of patents or copyrights in perpetuity: for limited times.”
Here was the answer, brilliant, anticipatory, and judicious. “Congress is free to extend at will the term of copyright. It last did so in 1998, and should do so again, as far as it can throw. Would it not be just and fair for those who try to extract a living from the uncertain arts of writing and composing to be freed from a form of confiscation not visited upon anyone else? The answer is obvious, and transcends even justice. No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property, because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind.”3
This was a simple and unambitious argument for the extension of the term of copyright based upon a more equitable, though hardly absolute, reconciliation of diverging treatments of different forms of property. There is obviously a public interest in the expiration of copyright, but there is also a public interest in copyright itself, and thus potentially in its extension. The question is one of degree. Although I did not state it directly (not being in the habit of negotiating with myself), my hope was that Congress, having not long ago extended the term so that in most cases it might benefit the original copyright holder’s children throughout most of their lives, would consider grandchildren as well, and perhaps even great-grandchildren, inasmuch as most owners of other forms of property are allowed theoretically to extend their bequests into eternity. Were I to die next week, one of my own children’s children born ten years from now would see the inherited copyright pass into the public domain when she reached my age, whereas the hypothetical grandchild of my hypothetical neighbor, whose legacy was not a bunch of copyrights but, for example, a hotel, could be confident that it would remain in her possession. One may quarrel with the idea or effects of inheritance, but whatever the final disposition it is immaterial to the imbalance here addressed.
When the piece was published, it appeared to have been one of those ghostly columns that pass entirely without notice and in which no one even wraps fish. I filed it and went on to the next thing. But as the state of Virginia passed from a Martian-ice-cap spring to a boiling Venusian May, and as I worried about the first cutting of the hay, an electronic storm began to take shape. Because I look at a computer screen as little as possible, I was unaware of the tempest as it mounted. Within ten days or so, the copyright article had generated (as chronicled by Google) what Churchill called “million-tongued propaganda.”4 In this case, three-quarters of a million “hits,” not a single one of which, in my wide sampling, was favorable. And to say that they were unfavorable would be like saying that someone had a touch of Ebola fever. Their language was angry, inflammatory, imprecise, and, shall we say—“Screw you, Helprin!”5—sometimes immoderate, although to their credit not as violent, obscene, and vengeful as it often is on the internet in regard to purely political questions, in which they so often confirm the observation of the First Earl of Oxford that “hatred, the more groundless and unreasonable it is, the more durable and violent it most times proves.”6 When a million tongues suddenly wag in unison happy with indignation and the joy of attack, the very nature of this tends to impeach whatever cause they espouse. A mob may be right, but, even when it is, it discredits that right.
Unlike the troublesome and annoying classical nudniks of the past, the electronic nudnik is sheltered by anonymity, his acts amplified by an almost inconceivable multiplication and instantaneousness of transmission. This new nudnik is therefore tempted to exchange his previous protective innocence (think Alfred E. Neuman) for a certain sinister, angry, off-the-rails quality (think the Unabomber) which is perhaps to be expected from the kind of person who has spent forty thousand hours reflexively committing video-game mass murder and then encounters an argument with which he finds himself in disagreement.
It is not merely training that has unleashed this keypeck ferocity, but also changes in certain fundamental conditions. In the electronic media’s dissolution of barriers—time, space, isolation—and in the vast expansion of received (or, at least, receivable) information, we have become in proportion infinitely smaller. Were you to have lived next door to Ethan Frome in Starkfield, Massachusetts, at the turn of the last century you would have been one of only a few hundred. Every time a ferry sank in the Philippines or a bank was robbed in Kansas or Italy, you would not know, as you do today. Or if you did, the knowledge would come later, briefly, controllably, in a small printed dispatch with neither sound nor color. You would not have felt as if you were merely one in six-and-a-half or seven billion. Now, as mere atoms amidst this mass, the damage we can do is by comparison so much less that rage counts for nothing but a cry to be heard—even if from a protective and cowardly anonymity. Were anyone to have behaved in such a way (like a “Hockey Dad,” a “Shock Jock,” or a foul-mouthed blogger) on the real commons of a New England village even as it existed in my youth and young-manhood, he would have been immediately brought up short, if not committed or jailed. In the new “commons,” brutishness and barbarism are accepted, just as no one dares, as once they would have, to put a pack of high school students in their place as they half-terrorize a subway car or a bus.
