Digital Barbarism Mark Helprin (grave mercy .txt) 📖

school years learning various applications but those who will guide the future of computation at the molecular and atomic levels where they will find it when they are adults, having devoted hard study to physics, chemistry, and mathematics.

In the same vein, but with almost biblical implications, is the necessity of making certain distinctions. Most multimedia is appalling for several reasons. It endeavors to do the integrative work that used to be the province of the intellect, and that, if it is not in fact accomplished by the intellect, is of absolutely no value. It fails to distinguish between entertainment and education, image and fact. It integrates promiscuously, blurring in the addled minds that it has addled the differences between things that are different. It removes as far as it possibly can the element of labor from learning, which is comparable, in my view, to making a world without gravity, drinking a milk shake without milk, or living in an iron lung.

Whenever man opens a new window of power he imagines that he can do without the careful separations, distinctions, and determinations mandated by the facts of his existence and his mortal limitations. And whenever he worships at the feet of modernity he suffers a terrible degradation that casts him back even as he imagines himself hurtling forward.

Put simply, I want and will pay for the OED on my computer, I want everything in the Library of Congress (and will pay for copyrighted material), I want great search engines, fuzzy logic, and programs that do statistical analysis, but I do not want my contact with my fellow man to proceed mainly through his imagination—no matter how precise—in the fluorescence behind a glass plate. An example I might cite is that if you sail you really need wind and water: the idea and depiction of them are not sufficient. So with human presence: reality and actuality are necessities.

Whereas the Englishman had the exquisite memory of his wife emerging in wet cotton from the cold water of the lake into the Alpine sunshine, and whereas his relations with her must be based on subtlety and restraint, the man of 2028 on his way to the Alaskan beach will be able to graft by virtual reality any image he pleases onto the tactile base of his wife’s body. Variants of this have been in the dreams of men at least since Leda, and Pygmalion, and sex is undoubtedly responsible for much of the momentum of virtual reality, as is the apparent joy of pretending to kill large numbers of people in what are called games. In previous eras this would have been considered mental illness.

Many varieties of sensual manipulation will come to pass, and will be promoted as ways to refresh our existence, but they will, if they are embraced, go far in destroying it. The saving graces and the fragile institutions of humanity depend upon our humanity itself, which in turn depends absolutely upon the discipline or rejection of certain appetites. We have many a resolution that separates us from the other animals, many a custom, practice, tradition, and taboo, and if we do away with these in the pursuit of power, the worship of reason, or the imitation of time-and-space-flouting divinity, we will become a portion for foxes.

The revolution quietly about us is, if not good, yet wondrous, powerful, and great, and has hardly begun. But we have not brought to it the discipline, anticipation, or clarity it demands. We have been so enthusiastic in our welcome as to be obsequious—to machines. Some of us have become arrogant and careless, and many at the forefront of revolution lack any guiding principles whatsoever or even the urge to seek them. In this, of course, we are not alone. Nor are we the first. But there is no question that this revolution must be fitted to the needs and limitations of man, with his delicacy, dignity, and mortality always in mind. Tranquility, having been accelerated, must be slowed.

But rather than being slowed, it is rapidly being displaced by an opposite clothed in barbarism. The changes that have come in train with the digital revolution have not been modulated, buffered, and adapted as once they would have been. Instead, their partisans have entered the citadel of culture disruptively. They would change the language, purposefully degrading and mocking its forms. They would evince enormous hostility to books—to paper and ink, really, including even mail—setting them back further than did the burning of the library at Alexandria (if, indeed, that really happened). Anyone who in the last twenty years or so has had children in school must be aware of the incontrovertible desire to replace books with “media,” has heard or read of some children’s hostility to books and preference for things that jump around and make noise on a computer screen, and has seen the libraries empty of readers, most of whom now congregate around banks of computers and nearby espresso machines.

Barbarism in language consists of more than just the slighting of its forms and traditions with deliberate abandon. Technical computerese is so poorly defined and deliberately obscure (in the manner of secret words that get you admitted to the tree house) as to be infuriating to anyone used to actual syntax. It is as deliberately prolix as academic prose, and a not-so-distant cousin to the financial products that, built high upon nothing, guarantee inevitable collapse. Here the destruction is not financial but intellectual and spiritual. The abandonment of grammar, capitalization, punctuation, spelling, et cetera, and the substitution for these things of either nothing or of idiotic and inexpressive pictograms, jargon, and expletives, is often not a choice but an artifact of a decadent and dysfunctional educational system. The worst violations, however, come not from neglect but from attention—littering the language with revisions that almost always incline away from both the natural world and human nature: that is, a departure from what is real in favor of an artificial construct of some sort, an idea rather