Digital Barbarism, page 7
They are often indistinguishable from the advocates of what both call the “Creative Commons,” a new movement with the fundamental premise that the work of the mind is for the most part the fruit of a vast, unchartable, often unconscious, collective progression. Commons is one of those words that, embraced by the commentariat, has spread too rapidly for its own good. During the 2006 Lebanon War, two expressions, “robust” and “disproportionate,” were repeated again and again as the press corps happily led itself by the nose. As for “commons,” a word popular in academia as part of a communal property philosophy given tremendous momentum by the music-sharing “crisis,” one can trace an example of its infectiousness by following the thread from, for example, Barry Posen’s essay, “Command of the Commons,” in the Harvard journal International Security,16 through various military publications, such as the Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute—“A recent term of some consequence is the ‘strategic commons’”17—and even to the secretary of defense, who spoke of space and cyberspace in particular as the “global commons.”18
Creative Commons is the self-congratulatory name of a self-congratulatory movement. Somewhat like a kibbutz on the internet, the idea is to write programs—“free ware”—and distribute them without charge. While presumably striking a blow at corporate giants like Microsoft, this demonstrates the generosity and selflessness of the programmer, musician, writer, or scholar who donates his work to the common weal. And it becomes in turn a premise that is promiscuously extended to those works the authors of which do not want to give them away, of whom the presumption becomes that they are not generous. Therefore, they are selfish. Therefore, they should be brought around, one way or another, to the ideal—for the public good and to save their souls.
What exactly is a commons? Webster’s defines it, inter alia, as “The legal right that arises either from a grant or a contract or from prescription or operation of a statute and that allows the taking of a profit in another’s land in common with the owner or in common with other persons.”19 Note “taking…another’s.” The “Creative Commons” is an invention of something that not only has not heretofore existed, but does not now exist and can never exist except as the manufactured justification of a hankering for appropriation. “Art is nothing if not a dream of the commons,”20 writes a publisher who makes money by publishing works in the public domain. (Not having to pay royalties means more profit either directly or from greater volume and market share as a result of being able to set a somewhat lower price.) But his role is irrelevant to his statement, which has no logically demonstrable meaning, as art is not created by collective dreaming. Not even D’Annunzio would have said such a thing, although Marinetti, a real piece of work, might very well have. Though the quotation is inchoate, it represents a now apparently widespread and deeply rooted notion.
It is an attempt to create a context for a wholly imagined new taking power. Unlike eminent domain, of which it is the crazed wildling, this imagined power is both arbitrary and capricious, and has no readily perceived limitation other than the appetite of whatever legislative regime is operative at the moment. Unlike eminent domain, its scope is disciplined neither by purpose, custom, nor probity. While ostentatiously referring to a public purpose, it would serve primarily private purposes—unless downloading the latest Kate Smith song (granted, this is a bit dated) without paying for it is now deemed a public purpose, like digging the Erie Canal. And a willing contribution to the “Creative Commons” does not bestow upon the contributor or observers the moral authority to compel others to do the same.
The “Creative Commons” has in addition to its shallower roots a much deeper one, a taproot of sorts, which, after a little excavation, can be exposed to view. It is well suspected, if ignored, that money at the margin (that is, over the comfortable minimum) is neither necessary nor sufficient for happiness. Beneath the margin, it is often sufficient, though not always and not necessarily, to promote unhappiness. A large part of politics is forging the public consensus in regard to where the margin lies, even if this would be better determined privately. Inscribed by centuries of economic growth, the default position of modern societies is that the margin is a continually receding horizon. Whereas this notion itself, in contrast to the nature of our absolutely limited life span, is a cause of unhappiness, limiting it is as irrelevant to happiness as is keeping it in play of expansion. A BMW,™ an iPhone,™ or a pantry stocked by Dean & DeLuca, and everything else of that nature, ad infinitum, are neither necessary nor sufficient to make you happy.
That people believe otherwise, however, is not surprising. Those who lack any but a materialist approach to life see both acquisition and de-acquisition, fine tuned, as the keys to a blessed state. As everyone knows, the structure of our civilization promotes this. As much as they want things, they also want to do without certain others, and to parade their renunciations. One set gives them succor, the other publicizes their virtue. Life becomes a carefully balanced grocery list. This is hardly enough to fill a human heart, and so they seek more of it, getting and renouncing furiously at the same time, as if to create an equilibrium of survival.
The lust for routinizing life, welding and wedding oneself to electronic machines, entertainment, fashions, and popularities, is balanced by a countervailing “idealistic” wish for freedom, renunciation, existence without property or possessions, and so forth. Open Source, “Creative Commons,” and other rejections of or attacks upon intellectual property (the battle over real property was, for these people, lost with the end of the Cold War) are the romanticized counters to a life poisoned by rigid and inescapable materialism. But as the mere flip side of the premise they are supposed to counter, they are ineffective antidotes. When freely given they are not a solution, and when compelled from others they are simply unjust.
But they elide nicely with the dominant pieties. One of the sources of and continual sustenance for their movement is that, by and large, modern education promotes collectivism versus what it perceives as destructive, self-promoting individualism. Collaboration, collective punishment, and group responsibility are now the watchwords of the classroom. As the chairman of the Oxford History Faculty Board, Christopher Haig, recently put it: “Historians used once to work alone, reading in archives and writing in college rooms. History is now a more collaborative exercise.”21 Undoubtedly he is correct. In primary and secondary schools, writing, a naturally individual act, is now taught as such a collaborative exercise. It is often assigned to teams. Students gather and “brainstorm” (a comic-book word) to decide topics and approaches. They submit their work to what are in essence factory-floor soviets, and are bound by every manner of political inhibition and prohibition as if they were composing essays in a luxurious Vietnamese reeducation camp.
Several generations of students have been subjected to this. The preeminence of the collective was drilled into them in their earliest and most impressionable years as surely as they were made to study the same things about Martin Luther King in one grade after another, as if the worst possible fate for a child would be to forget what he had learned about Martin Luther King the year before. Intense “communitarianism” is continued through elementary and secondary education, and then nailed firmly into the wood by experts, ideologues, and lunatics in the university.
As much as civilization depends upon individual rights and freedoms, it depends upon collective action as well. Imagine a farm in a cove on the coast of Normandy in the year 700. Without collective action and community it would have been static unto this day, without—to draw, for example, from some of the “m” words made possible by collaboration—manufactures, medicine, museums, monasteries, movies, machines, and Mont Saint-Michel. A prehistoric stasis would have certain wonderful and humane advantages—a closed world running on the clock of nature, gentle in pace and expectation—as well as uncomfortable and mortally dangerous drawbacks: seaborne raiders, infectious diseases, starvation. One would see the constellations and feel their mystery ever so deeply, but without the slightest understanding of what they really are. It is all a question of balance.
And in that regard, what we tend to forget is that, whatever the equation, collective action should be the servant of individual thought, persons, and needs, and not their master as is so often the case. Having helped to give birth to civilization, community is also capable of smothering it in regimenting the life of the individual rather than in submitting to the direction of its genius; in relieving (though falsely and ineffectively) the individual of responsibility to himself and those immediately around him by creating a demanding obligation to invisible others and the state; in encouraging conformity; in the dehumanization of customs and standards; in saddling mankind with various brutal and destructive abstractions; and in promoting action by decree rather than in voluntary association, as if the greater part of collective action is commanded by the state rather than private and voluntary in nature, made possible not by fiat but by, in fact, the abstraction and deployment of capital.
But in the schools and in polite society the balance between individual and community is ignored in favor of an ever-insistent bias, often on the most maudlin grounds, toward the collective, which is taught not as one element of a complex equilibrium but as an imperative to which even the slightest resistance is suspect as immorality. This is the ethos of the schools. And after college and perhaps graduate school, students go out into the world, where they become, among other things, editors, writers, and publishers.
The book publishing industry now resembles a river town in the Midwest over which the water has risen and then subsided. Houses with long traditions have been shuffled so many times from one conglomerate to another, now absorbed, now spit out, now split, now joined, that what is happening to them resembles the industry’s wild juggling of personnel. Everyone in publishing “used to be” somewhere else, or ten somewhere elses. When the MBAs collapse and reorder the structures of the large controlling corporations, people are thrown from them in Dantesque fashion. Some find another publishing boat into which to climb, some go into other fields, some retire, some drink, and some die. Many swell the ranks of freelancers, doing exactly what they did before—editing, copyediting, designing covers—but as piecework, without benefits, security, stability, or longevity. The more people are fired, the more freelancers there are to lower the price of services, allowing more firings, further deepening the pool of independent contractors.
Thus, everyone clings to an uncertain position, and is even less equipped than he might be for resisting the pressure to seek the lowest common denominator. With exceptions, of course, books are tribally marketed to niche groups (including idiots) with affinities of interests, outlooks, or opinions, or thrown upon the open and general sea, the level of which is now so low that fish are flopping on sand. No one has control of what is happening. It is the result of the hundred million decisions that taken together mark the decline of a culture—the teacher, lacking anything to say about his subject, who promotes an ideology instead; the publisher who cannot resist the payout from sensationalism and whips it into a dollar-frosted frenzy; the intellectually lazy reader who buys a prurient thriller, knowing that its effect is equivalent to a diet of gas-station junk food, “just for the plane ride”; the drug-addled Hollywood solons who have blurred the line between general films and pornography, and have created a new nonsexual pornography of hypnotic, purely sensational images, substituting stimulation and tropism for just about everything else (except popcorn); narrow intellectuals who mock the ethical precepts, religions, and long-held beliefs of civilizations that have evolved over thousands of years, in favor of theories of more or less everything that they have designed over an entire semester; writers who write according to neither their consciences nor their hearts, but to sell.
The list is long. It embraces scores of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of people. No one is entirely free of responsibility except perhaps the dead. Not least among them are the libertines of novelty, who promiscuously embrace the new in whatever form just to be on top of the wave. Not only have they institutionalized much of what is harmful, they have cast aside much that is good. The sum of these, their two actions, is a gaping negative that threatens in a decade or two to dissolve the accomplishments of millennia, reordering the ways in which we think, write, and communicate. It would be one thing if such a revolution produced Mozarts, Einsteins, or Raphaels, but it doesn’t. It produces mouth-breathing morons in backwards baseball caps and pants that fall down; Slurpee-sucking geeks who seldom see daylight; pretentious and earnest hipsters who want you to wear bamboo socks so the world won’t end; women who have lizard tattoos winding from the navel to the nape of the neck; beer-drinking dufuses who pay to watch noisy cars driving around in a circle for eight hours at a stretch; and an entire race of females, now entering middle age, that speaks in North American Chipmunk and seldom makes a statement without, like, a question mark at the end? What hath God wrought, and why didn’t He stop with the telegraph? One thing is for sure. In all this dissolution, as the word dissolution would suggest, many distinctions have been abandoned, many differences subtle and otherwise have gone unperceived, and respect for the individual and recognition for the integrity of his voice have been left by the wayside.
When, in the sixties, I first started writing for The New Yorker, everything I turned in was set in a narrow column of type with immense margins as white as glaciers. Not a single comma, much less a word or phrase, was ever changed without my consent. Suggestions would appear in parentheses, or often as just a question mark, implying that something could be made better. Mr. Shawn and my editors, Rachel Mackenzie and Fran Kiernan, would probably have chosen death (for themselves, not me, although of this I was never completely confident) rather than make a change without my knowledge or against my will. I would have done the same. It is a sacred principle. Many times, I have turned down needed money rather than write according to direction or make even a single alteration that I didn’t feel was right. Twenty-two years ago, Time magazine wanted me to write the cover story for the centennial of the Statue of Liberty. They offered an extraordinary fee and the most liberal expense account in the world outside of Hollywood. Delighted, I began to work. The choreographer of the centennial was Lee Iacocca, who began to construct a cult of personality that would have given Stalin hives. Thus, to Time’s annoyance and disbelief, I titled my piece, “The Statue of Iacocca.”
“You can’t write this,” they said. But they had engaged the sacred principle, and my answer could only have been, as it was, “Yes, I can.”
No story, no money. I was quite fired. Later, when it became the fashion for Hollywood studios to acquire the copyright of a work and then grant back the publishing rights, my insistence upon retaining the copyright allowed me to watch lucrative film deals collapse. Whereas one cannot control the end product of thousands of people making a movie, one can control every word on the page, something that, beyond saving one’s soul, as it does, steadies civilization.
In the fact of copyright the power of law is enlisted in this most important principle that otherwise would be subject to violation at will. No corporation or combine, no matter how great, can breach this wall with impunity. Nor hostile individuals or organized groups. One can write parodies at will, and make fair use, but even the president of the United States cannot legitimately change so much as an apostrophe in a work under copyright. This is far more important and consequential than money, and the shield behind which it finds protection is the copyright that some might abolish for the sake of an ill-defined collectivist ideology that is not much more than a poorly wrought and self-indulgent excuse for downloading music and movies without charge.
Given that so many of these people are purposefully ignorant of any but a communal approach, and that they rank individual authorship below collaboration, it is not surprising that they view the rights of authorship, as these have been understood for most of our history, not as encouraging of civilization but as a discouragement, as in the case of a monopoly, a word they often use to describe copyright. My own experience with editors who have been educated to this point of view has taught me that they are at first uncomprehending, then surprised, then puzzled, and then repelled by the insistence of an author that, if something goes out under his name, he should have the final cut. I have been fighting over commas all my life. There are some people who cannot appreciate music in a minor key, who cannot fall in love, who cannot understand beauty, who cannot or dare not travel beyond the very limited realms of human reason. And there are some who cannot understand the almost insensible complexion of a phrase that is capable of transforming history. If we are in fact to sense those great and subtle signals, as individuals and as a people, we must remain always attentive to the particularities of language. Even in recipes. Even in signs scrawled on parking meters. And especially in literature and public discourse.
The use of one word as opposed to another; the truncation or elongation of a sentence; the placement of a comma; a sense of syllables, sound, and elision…these elements arranged ineffably are what make a text unique, inimitable, and great, and although they can be possessed by all the world, first privileges must go to the author as their creator and guardian.
In the Summer 2007 issue of the Claremont Review of Books, John C. Briggs, professor of English at the University of California, supplies for comparison Seward’s proposal for and then Lincoln’s own closing of his first inaugural address.
Seward:
I close. We are not [,] we must not be aliens or enemies but fellow countrymen and brethren. Although passion has strained our bonds of affection too hardly they must not, I am sure they will not be broken. The mystic chords which proceeding from so many battlefields and so many patriot graves pass through all our hearts and all the hearts in this broad continent of ours will yet again harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation.
