Digital Barbarism Mark Helprin (grave mercy .txt) 📖

say what they want is ease of access, the revivification of dormant works, and a reduction in costs, the opponents of copyright view these mainly as useful auxiliaries to their argument, the heart of which is that they want to abolish all forms of intellectual property. What they really want is evident not only in the occasional direct admission (“Seems we need to lay off on copyright laws as it [sic] is starting to slow growth in the U.S.”100; “I am at the point that I simply see no justification for copyright anymore.”101 ) but in both the underlying justifications and general direction of their movement.

Given that things like the Espresso Book Machine will go far in providing the benefits that supposedly would ensue with an absence or further restriction of copyright, what then is the driving force behind such a passionate movement? Of course, greed helps to make ideologues, but it does not make them entirely. There is to be sure a diffuse, watered-down echo of Marxist and other utopian objections to the idea of property, which thrives among the privileged in their various and comfortable la-la lands and then for some enlarges fearsomely when they are graduated and meet the shock of an entry-level job, but this is not sufficient by itself to explain an obsession with copyright rather than a general reaction and a general assault. Nor can envy or nihilism completely explain the impulse. Many things are involved, among which, very importantly, is academic orthodoxy: not politics of any sort as they now thoroughly intrude upon a university both unwilling and unable to resist their commanding influence, but the academic modus operandi, which is in itself valuable, necessary, and good, assuming it does not, like the scientific method, overreach like Germans seeking Lebensraum and force itself into places where for various reasons it does not belong.

Whence the collaborative impulse and worship of collective effort that has so completely saturated American education? Marxism and the like simply do not have the power to sustain it. Rather, it may come from a perversion of legitimate academic practices. One encounters in Arabic education something called the Isnad, or chain, in this case a chain of authorities. It is the formulaic recitation of a line of citations so long that whatever you say will contradict at least some of what you present as your authority for saying it.

This kind of thing is hardly confined to Arabia. In a short article I read recently the following sentence jumped out at me like an electrocuted cat: “To grasp fully what he is up to, one must re-read Aristotle, Thucydides, Plato, and Xenophon [Isn’t that a type of headlight?] and then re-read them again alongside the related chapters.”102 What would you do in the afternoon? It was not, as far as I can tell without rereading Xenophon, a witticism, as it should have been. It does illustrate the world of intellectual tangle—the endless Möbius belt—in which every thread of the cloth is borrowed from another, every pick-up stick touched by twenty others, and no observation fresh from the mind of an observer left unencumbered lest it corrupt the spirit of complication. Those who operate this way both worship and detest those who don’t. The primary texts to which they are devoted are not derivative as are theirs, which should give them a hint, and perhaps does, which may account for a lot. Theirs is the prisoner’s envy for his fellow prisoners who charge electrified wire while he himself is afraid to run out an open and unguarded gate.

In the more sclerotic academic circles, where everything must be supported, even that which theoretically cannot be, a multiplicity of footnotes is godliness, and to be cited in them is bliss. The German tradition of scholarship suffers exquisitely from this, as does Jewish scholarship, always on the defensive, and (necessarily, with no alternative) English and American law. And of course a history without complete sourcing is valueless other than as a literary work, even if written by a participant (assuming it goes even an inch beyond his own story).

Students therefore are taught to support their assertions with crushing citations. Well and good, unless it is mainly the deadening hand of “authority” in both senses of the word, and unless it becomes a substitute for thinking, risk, labor, and originality. It often does, especially when, in a metaphysics reminiscent of Thomas Nast’s cartoon of Tammany characters standing in a circle directing blame at the person to the left, the blind cite the blind, the careless cite the careless, the ignorant cite the ignorant, the biased the biased, and so on.

At risk of straying too far, I must relate the story of how a long time ago a great friend and I, alighting from a freight train in northern Virginia, proceeded to Crystal City, where we insolently skated in our shoes across an empty ice rink while a Zamboni machine was grooming it, leading to our detention by a security guard with the physique of a whale. As we were led into the guard station, my friend (somehow a government attorney) appointed me his attorney, and I appointed him mine. During interrogation, I referred all inquiries to him, and he referred all inquiries to me, in the most polite, respectful, and legalistic way. This is exactly what too often passes for scholarship and authorship.

If authorship is simply an echo chamber, which for many it is, then copyright is of course a terrible hindrance and should be gutted for the good of all. But that it is an echo chamber is the choice and view of those who recoil from independent thought. As in the worst of medieval scholasticism, they dare not venture beyond the rim of received authority lest they fall off the edge of the earth. To help those who cannot face the terror of doing something independently, the electronic age has provided WEbook,™ which, according to the Washington Post, “by adopting the growing crowd-sourcing model [“Crowd-sourcing”