Digital Barbarism Mark Helprin (grave mercy .txt) 📖

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