Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (best reads of all time .txt) 📕

on as the many threatened engines and instruments that supply the things that people would loot began to die. But despite the fact that (as illustrated by price controls or planned economies) when everything is free there is soon precious little or nothing of it, the attack continues apace. In a world turned upside down, indignant violators of copyright, abetted by tax-exempt “public interest” groups, aggressively sue copyright holders. The tide of opinion, driven by the internet, is running now largely against the idea of intellectual property, if only because relentless winds of propaganda state that to defend it is selfish and retrograde. Even at the risk of appearing selfish and retrograde, I defend it here.

The first chapter, “The Acceleration of Tranquility,” views without rancor the deeper elements of contention, which at its heart is an argument over different visions of the world. In it, we travel both with a British statesman to Lake Como in 1908, and by the side of a master of the universe in 2028—to illustrate where we are now and where we might choose to be.

The second chapter, “Death on a Red Horse,” is trench warfare, blow for blow, involving the foot soldiers and some of the low-ranking officers of the armies drawn up against the rights of authorship and the individual voice. It begins with an incident of childhood and ends with the masterpieces of Brueghel and Bosch. The trench warfare could perhaps have been avoided. To cite Churchill, referring to Count Ciano, Mussolini’s foreign minister, why talk to the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room? The answer is that in this case the monkeys are more important than the organ grinders. They are the infantry in which the ideas of their leaders and academic priests are realized. In their numbers, they are beyond the control even of those who work hardest to rile them up. To worry oneself too much with the theories of the professors would be analogous to having fought the Cold War by debating Soviet theoretician Mikhail Suslov in regard to the embarrassing intricacies of Marxist-Leninist thought. Apart from unavoidable forays, it is best to stay out of such thickets. As the manifestation of the theories shows, and as befits the state of the academy at present, the philosophical basis of the war on copyright is crackpot and stillborn. The actual battle is wherever the gnats in their millions crudely make real the musings of the Mad Hatters. We did not win the Cold War by debating Suslov but by making clear our principles, standing by them, and keeping an eye on the Red Army. That is, in a way, what I try to do in this chapter.

In the third chapter, “Notes on Virginia,” the battle moves to higher ground and chases the generals of the anti-copyright movement, taking into consideration some of the historical figures they embrace as their own: some accurately, others not. In claiming Macaulay they are quite right—even as he and they are wrong. But they err when they claim Jefferson. I believe that were the third president somehow able to know of this unsolicited association, he would suffer a nausea so immense as to disturb him even in death. That this book was written in sight of Monticello makes honoring Jefferson by separating him from false claimants especially gratifying. The chapter also deals with some of the peculiar “microeconomic” arguments the opponents of copyright present, such as that copyright is a monopoly, a tax, and a gratuitous imposition upon a non-zero-sum game, all of which make it an inhibition to art.

A machine that can print books individually, on demand, quickly, and at little cost is actually at work now. “The Espresso Book Machine,” Chapter four, considers the evolution of the technology that has given rise to the movement against copyright, and how the forces and capabilities that ushered-in the battle can almost effortlessly usher it out and make it moot.

But that would not bring an end to the anti-copyright movement, because many of its foot soldiers, its generals, and Macaulay himself, their muse, are exercised less about copyright than about questions of political economy that bear upon their imagined rights and grievances. Not surprisingly, their arguments that are the most current and the least thoughtful rest upon the assumption that a disdain for the right of property confers a species of moral superiority. In the fifth chapter, “Property as a Coefficient of Liberty,” I argue that in its effects the right of property transcends the material and is in fact a pillar of ethics and morals. In this chapter, as in others, illustration is not subservient to theory.

Chapter six, “Convergence” (in visiting with my late Oxford tutor, and witnessing the mortally ill Flannery O’Connor besting in a single short story the many erudite volumes of Teilhard de Chardin) is an explanation and refutation of the deeper ideas that animate the electronic culture to its greatest vacancies, although for practical purposes all you really have to know about its philosophical basis is that its adherents believe somewhere deep down that there is such a thing as the free lunch.

The last chapter, “Parthian Shot,” is just that, a strike upon departing, a synthesis, reprise, and plea. Then, of course, there are notes, present for accountability in citation, which is as necessary to argument as honesty is to the law, but one needn’t dwell on these.

This book is about copyright and a great deal else, because copyright is far more consequential than may be apparent at first blush. But it is hardly the most important thing in life, and I hope my tone and perspective comport with that. Still, copyright is and has been a bulwark of civilization, and as such is a measure of its health, a version of the trite though true example of the canary taken into the coal mine. Arguments about copyright lead quickly to the larger arguments of culture, the habits and degeneration of the mind, property, individuality, rights and