Digital Barbarism Mark Helprin (grave mercy .txt) 📖

eat late.” “Okay, see you then,” which takes place in nine seconds and one phone call, the text-messaging approach would take at least four messages, each typed in even more time than required by the entire voice transaction, over a period of hours or days, “from my BlackBerry.” Excuse me? From your BlackBerry? I don’t think the purpose of this declaration is to explain the brevity of your message, as you could probably type War and Peace with one thumb tied behind your BMW. I think its purpose is an ad from BlackBerry to let me know that you have a BlackBerry. May your BlackBerry rot in hell.

Why must something—perfectly handled by the telephone, an instrument invented among other reasons to replace the telegraph—be forced through a less efficient, hideously overcomplicated procedure, and with great fanfare? This is what is done by the “early adapters,” the long sheep-lines of vacuous fanatics who must have the latest device upon which to watch “The Sayings of Zsa Zsa Gabor” (a historical figure) as they keep in constant touch with forty friends whom they have never met, and do their homework during ten minutes of otherwise unendurable captivity in a bus or a ski gondola, when they might otherwise have had to look blankly out the window and, despite the spooling by of Manhattan, or a hundred-mile view, suffer the equivalent of sensory deprivation.

My mother, I suppose, was an early adapter when she began making toast in an electric toaster rather than in the oven, but I don’t think she waited in line all night to buy a toaster, or would have given herself or even accepted a title for doing so—Early toaster? Avante-tostée? And I wonder what my father, whose first automobile, at the beginning of the last century, was actually a horse, would think about the PDA-calendar entries that advertisements present as typical:

11:00 a.m.

Power Point Presentation for Putin and Brad Pitt.

12:00 p.m.

Sushi with Jason

2:00 p.m.

Help Jennifer Move Into Loft

4:00 p.m.

Drinks with Albert Einstein at Sphere

6:00 p.m.

Sushi with Kaitlin and One-Armed Jack

8:00 p.m.

Indonesian Film Festival, Bring Skateboard and Hitler Puppet

Not so long ago, it would have been impossible to find people with lives like this: that is, poseurs of fashion with brains the size of cocktail onions. Now, it isn’t. When the Apple iPhone™ was introduced in June of 2007, not a few stores that carried it in the Washington area hired police to control mobs in the hundreds as, giddy and ferocious from waiting twenty hours in the sun or rain, they surged toward the ecstasy of consummating their transactions. According to the Washington Post, “Some said they expected the phone to change their lives. Others said they just wanted bragging rights.” One “triumphantly held up his two iPhones to the cheers of the crowds behind him,” while another likened it “to a massive ‘paradigm shift’ or ‘gestalt effect’,” and “after 15 hours of waiting in 90 percent humidity and bouts of rain, iPhone hopefuls [italics supplied]…exchanged e-mail addresses to swap their iPhone experiences.”113

The faith of people in such things—a faith that will leave them empty and aching—is but one vulgarization of the longstanding fallacy that by his own powers man not only can improve his condition, which he certainly can, and must, but that he can bring it to perfection, lifting himself not merely up but to a divine state. The biblical story of Babel is about just that, although the builders of the tower were more modest than their descendants in that they did not fancy that they could equal God, but only wanted to make a name for themselves by visiting Him. And thus their punishment, to be separated by different tongues, was far less severe than the punishment of watching one’s own soul exsanguinate into the arid dust of modernity. For modernity, ceaselessly mercurial, is nothing more than obsolescence yet to occur. To put one’s faith in or devote one’s attentions to it is to chase after a vapor.

One of the latest manifestations of this universal hubris is the theory, recently revised by a pack of intellectuals intoxicated with their own powers and the money they and their associates were breathing-in during the internet boom, of convergence. This theory is not actually a theory but a kind of jelly donut of many manic expectations—of an all-explanatory unified field theory in physics; of the notion that the sexes will merge into one; of the quest for a single instrument embodying all convenience technologies (except, presumably, the shower); of the desire for a world government, beloved of the Left despite the fact that it would be the empire they as anti-imperialists have always detested, and detested by the Right despite the Right’s indelible soft spot for the nineteenth-century world in British red. The idea of convergence has done its job quietly and efficiently in re-aiming the common wisdom about a great many things, but it is all wrong.

I do not have the ancient and delicate volumes I consulted in the Bodleian Library after appearing in my robes and kneeling to an oath never to keep an open flame within its precincts, so I cannot attest to whether in the Hermetic oeuvre one actually finds the word convergence, but there is no question that the two go hand in hand. Despite its definite air of absurdity and even lunacy, Hermeticism includes expressions of elemental human tendencies, temptations, and truths. Though you may abandon it as I did even before taking it up, it comes back at you with a vengeance from various points of the philosophical compass.

To wit, Teilhard de Chardin. Ordained as a Jesuit priest in France in 1911, he was a heroic stretcher bearer in the trenches of the Great War, lived in inhospitable deserts, jungles, and stranded captivity in China during the Second World War, and contributed notably to the great enterprise of science. Science, which requires many hands, painstaking and time-consuming comparisons and eliminations, expensive machinery, and the blessings and money of government and