Digital Barbarism Mark Helprin (grave mercy .txt) 📖

and, unlike George Washington, did not free them upon his death. We do know that he did not always control his appetites, curiosities, or lusts, that he lived beyond his means, and that he courted another man’s wife. We know that in his enthusiasm for equality he was blind to the nature and terrors of the French Revolution, the seeds of which proved more destructive than even he would have been capable of imagining.

Partly because of his knowledge of his own failings, partly due to his obvious convictions, and partly because of the nature of his character and the needs and demands of his agile mind, it seems clear that he would not have wanted to have been frozen into immobile certainty. He could not have wanted his descendants—that is, all Americans—to cite and run, using his opinions as an inflexible whip, as if he could think for those who followed him. To do so would be to betray his achievement and denigrate his spirit. And, like a good father, he would have wanted his descendants not to caste themselves beneath him but rather to engage him as equals as far as they could. Although there are fathers of contemptible character who do not want their children to equal or surpass them, most pray that at the very least their children will try.

I am a writer of fiction, and as such—in a field in which it used to be anyway that character, faith, truth, and beauty outrank intelligence—I value with special regard a man who could write both the Declaration of Independence and the lines inscribed on the interior rim of the airport rotunda, as quoted above. I was therefore bemused when the aforementioned crapulous professor, who is out of North Carolina (which is below Virginia), wrote to taunt me on the grounds that I thought myself smarter than Jefferson ( Jefferson was “smart?” What was Hitler, a “bad dude?”); that I had no understanding of him; and that I dared disagree with him.

In regard to the first accusation, what distinguished Thomas Jefferson was not that he was smart, and anyone who might imagine so is simply displaying his own limitations. But, were I somehow pitted against Jefferson in a contest measuring intelligence I do suspect that he would come out considerably ahead. For the record, Einstein, too.

As for the second point, my understanding of Jefferson, Jefferson was nothing if not straightforward. Not being self-consciously an intellectual, and certainly not an academic, he was almost always magnificently clear and in no need of decoding. Understanding Jefferson is really not an issue.

And as for disagreeing, and therefore violating some sort of authority postulated in support of an argument, I would assume that the professor referring so confidently to Jefferson’s views would nonetheless censure him in regard to the keeping of slaves. Perhaps even in regard to the expansion of the United States across the vast Indian lands acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. Perhaps even in regard to many other points upon which Jefferson wrote and acted in his eventful life (such as his opposition to federal roads, which have proved indispensable to the economic development of the nation, even as recently as the Interstate Highway System). And so, likely disagreeing on various points, how could he position a selected Jeffersonian opinion as infallible and its contradiction as placing whoever might disagree into a posture of supposed rebellion and inferiority? To love and respect Jefferson does not require that one agree with him uniformly, as Jefferson would no doubt forcefully assert.

But before reclaiming Jefferson from the anti-copyright partisans, we are forced, due to a frequent association made by opponents of copyright, to consider Macaulay. Though Macaulay came after Jefferson, because he was English he may seem to Americans to have come before (we do that), and although not as relevant to the American debate, he is often cited along with Jefferson as an unimpeachable authority. In his article, Professor Boyle attempts to use Macaulay to deliver a coup de grace. Almost everyone requires a fundamental text of some sort. Jews have the Bible and half a dozen others, Christians the New Testament, Muslims the Quran, conservatives the Declaration and the Constitution, Marxists Das Kapital, and environmentalists Silent Spring. If you look at the progression of these cardinal texts, authorship blurs the further back you go, and sharpens as they advance toward or into our era.

Every system of belief must have its seminal document even if, as in the case of Das Kapital, very few people may actually have read it. Priests and professors of all types take it upon themselves actually to read such things, and everyone else mainly discusses snippets, excerpts, digests, and reports. Courtesy of the book reviews, the Manhattan cocktail party or East Hampton (actually, the big money has forced even the rich intellectuals out to Springs) book discussion, particularly if it is heated, takes place usually among people who have not actually read the books they are discussing. I first observed this absurdity after the newspaper strike of 1963, when the New York Review of Books emerged from the darkness of Elizabeth Hardwick. Watching those debates—so often between largely bald men with very big beards—was like watching an intense tennis match played entirely without a ball.

For the anti-copyright set, raised on downloads and quarter-second video cuts, there are various professional interpreters to smooth over their followers’ many mental crevasses and provide summaries of that which would take more than five minutes to read before eliciting a blizzard of bad grammar. The fundamental text is Macaulay’s speech on copyright, to the House of Commons, in February of 1841, opposing a bill to extend the term of copyright to cover a period of sixty years after the author’s death. The bill was voted down, only to rise in more modest form not too long after. Macaulay spoke against it with faulted brilliance. He began with ostentatious support of copyright itself, declaring that he objected only to postmortem extension, and then