Digital Barbarism Mark Helprin (grave mercy .txt) 📖

greater and more consequential battle between those who favor a world that is planned, controlled, decided, entirely cooperative, and conducive of predetermined outcomes, and those who favor and tolerate market-based systems that admit and honor chance, competition, unexpected developments, peril, and reward. It is very easy to dispense with the structures and protections of the market economy, of which copyright is one, if you are willing to dispense with the market economy itself.

Rather than defending free markets—which would swell this short chapter into a large book that has already been written many times and well—I will try, with a discursiveness I cannot suppress, to address the favorite and particular arguments the opponents of copyright bring to the fore in making their case, and which draw, apparently without consideration, upon assumptions in regard to property, liberty, and time.

While teaching at the University of Iowa thirty years ago, I went to a summer barbecue at the farm of novelist Vance Bourjaily, and his wife, Tina. It was an eventful evening. The Carvers were there, minus Ray, who had just run off. Tina came up the hill riding one and leading another of two magnificent horses, as white as clouds, as if in a giant Rosa Bonheur painting, and invited one of the guests to accompany her in taking them bareback to a higher pasture. As he mounted, a few puppies new to the farm nipped at the horses’ pasterns, and quickly drove them into a frenzy. Though at first the horses went rampant they soon were sprawled in the dust like war horses felled in battle, their legs windmilling in a tangle, in the midst of which was the lady of the farm, who would have been killed had not her riding companion pulled the animals away by their halters. Nonetheless, she was severely injured, and lay for a while in a coma. Apart from that, and enough angst, loneliness, bitterness, and heartbreak to fill the pond across which, before the dinner that due to the accident was never consumed, there had been swimming races, the most notable thing and the reason (if not sufficient justification) for telling this story, was Vance Bourjaily’s extraordinary control of his sheep.

On the next hillside, they looked like a mobile lake of whipped cream. From the perch of his writing cabin across the valley, where we were, he could stand with a trumpet and direct them as precisely as if they were at the end of a mechanical arm. One blast, and they would go here, two and they would go there, some tootles and they would run up the hill, a high note and they would stop short (not being a sheep, I don’t remember the actual code, and am approximating). From the way they moved you would think they were Republicans or Democrats in a presidential election year. All of which is to say that, because taking refuge in words embraced by partisans who willingly glide over faults and contradictions is harmful both to one’s integrity and the public discourse in general, I am uncomfortable about using the word liberty.

It is one of those words that has been freighted so heavily that it has almost lost its meaning, although not as much as freedom, fairness, or diversity. Lest anyone jump like sheep to Vance Bourjaily’s horn, the scope of the word must be limited. It comes from the French liberté, a carrier of more freight perhaps than even the English word, and the Latin liber, meaning free: that is, unencumbered; without external controls or the internalization of external controls; not being subject to captivity or a will other than one’s own; and, untrammeled by binding requirements.

Nothing is entirely free, not even an electron (hardly an electron) or an atom floating in the inaccurately named vacuum of space. Everything that exists is subject to the pull or constraint of something else. Even God, in almost every theology, is bound by certain of His own consistencies. Freedom, and, therefore, liberty, cannot be absolute but only a matter of degree, and the liberty here endorsed is the condition in which one finds oneself when decisions of governance are made with a constant prejudice against compulsion and dirigisme rather than with persistent affection for them.

Even in the most nightmarish prisons, freedom exists in the interstices: not merely because of the impracticability of absolute control, but because it is not in the nature of man completely to ignore natural rights. (By the same token, though conversely, anarchists are marvelously organized thanks these days to their seduction by the internet, of which they are one of many classes of enthusiastic slave.)

The balance of liberty, and the nature of predilections for and against it, is legible in many forms, one of which is the level of taxation. While a small number of tax protestors believes that taxation completely lacks justification, another small number believes that, property being unjustifiable (or at least immoral), taxes should, in one manifestation or another, be all consuming and vacuum up every form of property or possession as soon as it comes into being, as in their view property is a kind of redistributive grant or loan from the collective. In between these rims of the bell curve lies most opinion. Liberals and conservatives alike recognize that taxes are necessary for the operations of government. What distinguishes one from the other is that conservatives are always wanting and willing to put a cap on the levels of taxation, whereas liberals, believing that we are very far from the appropriate level of state intervention, generally are not.

Whereas liberals find it cruel and inexplicable that someone would want to set limits before every mouth is fed and every cry comforted, conservatives find it deeply alarming that anyone can fail to recognize the danger of pressing ahead in the absence of limits. In my lifetime I have seen effective tax rates (the marginal rates were of course higher) of 88 percent.107 Although the argument that this extinguishes incentive is not