Friday, September 11, 2009

Digital Barbarians

I haven’t read Mark Helprin’s Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto and I’m not sure if I will, but it sure looks interesting.  I may not read it because I’m already a convert to Mr. Helprin’s point of view.  His subject is something I’ve long been aware of and concerned about.  So what’s it about?  Let Joseph Epstein, whose marvelous review brought the book to my attention, explain:

Mark Helprin's Digital Barbarism is ostensibly a book about copyright: the need for preserving it and indeed extending its span, the distinctions between it and other forms and kinds of property, the political implications behind recent attempts to eliminate it. As a copyright holder myself, who has not thought lengthily on the subject, but only gratefully collects his peasantries (as I refer to my rather meager royalties) and moves on, Mr. Helprin's argument strikes me as sound, persuasive, even penetrating. But the book is about much more than copyright. Digital Barbarism is, in fact, a diatribe, harangue, lecture, attack, onslaught, denunciation, polemic, broadside, fulmination, condemnation, no-holds barred, kick-butt censure of the current, let us call it the digital, age.

And what are Mr. Helprin’s concerns about the digital age?  Epstein:

Without gainsaying the rich new possibilities that digital technology has made available, Helprin makes the case that this same technology inculcates a frenetic habit of mind, quick on the trigger yet slow to appreciate subtlety and dazzlingly blind to beauty. "The character of the machine is that of speed, power, compression, instantaneousness, immense capacity, indifference, and automaticity," he writes. The other side of this debased coin is that the machine does not understand tradition, appreciate stability, enjoy quality, but instead "[hungers] for denser floods of data" and fosters a mentality in which "images have gradually displaced words."

Early in Digital Barbarism, Helprin posits two characters, one a high-flying executive in 2028 of a company that "supplies algorithms for the detection of damage in and the restoration of molecular memories in organic computation," the other a British diplomat in 1908 on holiday at Lake Como. The first is living virtually the virtual life, so to speak, which means that he is hostage to the machinery of communication and information, flooded by e-mail, cell-phone calls, screen imagery, in a life lived very much from without. The second, reachable only by slow international post, lives his life with ample room for reflection, cultivation of the intellect, acquiring musical and literary culture directly and at leisure. Helprin naturally prefers the life of the latter, and if you don't grasp the reasons why, you are a digital barbarian in the making, if not already made.

Reading Mr. Epstein in full will certainly be more profitable than staying here with me.  But, in case you choose wrongly and stay here, let me make my own meager points. 

I’ve been long concerned that the digital age is producing a state of mind that can no longer recognize, never mind appreciate, beauty, depth, or greatness.  We are breeding a generation that is hooked up to all the latest technology but which appreciates only what can be gotten instantaneously and in small packages, via text messages, Twitter, Facebook, and goodness knows what else.  One of the marvels of the Internet revolution is that information can be shared in real time.  But it’s also has its drawbacks.  You can’t do any analysis on these tiny communication devices, all you can do is transfer raw data.  As a result young people today think in 140 characters, and often much less.  Subtlety, depth, analysis, thought, are impossible in these arenas.  An entire generation is swept up in this world, and it will have its consequences. 

I mentioned many months ago that I created a Twitter and Facebook account for myself.  I twittered three times, I believe, before I realized its uselessness.  What does anyone care, even those closest to me, what I’m watching on TV now, or if I’m off to work, or if I’m bored.  Isn’t that the bulk of what gets written on Twitter?  Now, I’m not totally anti-Twitter.  If you’re someone like James Lileks, who can make anything sound funny (“Picked up dog's arthritis meds. At this price I want him to get up on hind legs and riverdance.”) I’ll gladly browse through his Twitter feeds.  But few have that ability.  For most, the twitter above would end after the first sentence, and again I say, who cares?

The same thing with Facebook.  It is a complete waste of time, at least the way the vast majority of people use it.  I joined up hoping to get into conversations with people, debate issues, talk about movies or music, and the site has the potential for that.  But most users are simply not interested in debate, and don’t have the patience or knowledge to engage for any period of time longer than a few minutes.  From what I see, someone makes a statement, you get a lot of concurrences, and some smiley faces and exclamation points.  Who needs it?

As for text messaging, why not pick up the phone if you need to communicate?  I have long said that I will leave this earthly realm without ever having sent a text message or owned a personal cell phone.  I’ll never understand the need to constantly be in touch.  I’m perfectly comfortable alone by myself. When I’m out on my own that’s what I want to be, on my own.

Now, I’m not anti-technology.  I’m simply dismayed at how its used.  Hell, I’m blogging on the Internet as we speak.  But I do it not for you but for myself.  At the very start of this blog I wrote:

I'm thinking writing about my interests may deepen my understanding of them. Pauline Kael once wrote, in her introduction to Deeper Into Movies, that "I write because I love trying to figure out what I feel and what I think about what I feel, and why." I guess I'm thinking something similar for the blog, though I'd be more comfortable saying "I write because I want to figure out what I think, and why.

And that has proved true.  Writing forces me to think, it allows me to organize my thoughts, it gives me an outlet for self-expression.  I enjoy all those things about it.  I read a six or seven other blogs daily because I’ve found people on the internet who make me think, make me laugh, who expand my own horizons.  I love the Internet, when put to the uses of furthering understanding, knowledge, and open debate.  But the instant, cotton-candy uses the digital barbarians employ it for is corrupting.  It doesn’t expand horizons, it limits them.  Stuck in a world of Twitter, Facebook, and text messaging, the youth of today have no time or inclination to explore the worthy things of life. 

My buddy Mike and I have been in agreement for more twenty years that the cultural and social environment of the day have degraded to the point that we no longer have the capacity to produce another Beethoven, or Michelangelo.  The digital generation has furthered this decline.  Not only can’t the digital age produce a Beethoven or a Michelangelo, it can’t recognize their greatness, preferring instead Michael Jackson or Brittney Spears or the latest American Idol winner.  With the great cultural treasures of the western world at their fingertips, they can’t rise above childish modern pop, violent special-effects movies, and mind-numbing video games.  And tiny little hand-held devices. 

I become daily more concerned that we are leaving the treasure of western civilization behind, not simply the cultural aspects of art, music, and literature, but also the organizing political ideas upon which we’ve all previously agreed.  These youth do not understand nor respect republicanism, democracy, or capitalism.  Many openly disdain them.  It’s no secret that the public schools long ago stopped teaching western civilization (except to criticize it).  That loss of knowledge about, and confidence in, those ideas that have shaped our society may now be coming home to roost.  Enter the digital barbarians and their childish sense of entitlement to every whim or fancy, their lack of civility towards anyone who disagrees with them, and you have the potential for true cultural and political chaos. 

Plato asked (and I’m paraphrasing), “what if one generation of children could be perfectly taught?”, implying that it would lead to a perfect social order.  Well, consider the opposite.  What if one generation of children could be perfectly emptied of all the wisdom of their ancestors?  Now, both those scenarios are equally implausible in that they are asking for perfection, which doesn’t exist.  The concern is that we are producing too many citizens devoid of the cultural and political wisdom that once was a inheritance, a given.  Produce enough of them and you end up with a society that becomes unlivable - think modern day England, which many Brits now living in the U.S. consider to have entered into a state of semi-barbarism. 

I nearly didn’t post this.  If I have any readers at all it well might drive them away, or at least solidify their opinion of me as a hopeless old-fogy.  Be that as it may.  But before you laugh off my musings, please read Helprin’s account of the “holy war” he entered into when the Wall Street Journal published his article in defense of copyright, the article that became the basis for his book.  His account of the barbarians ignorant yet ferocious reaction to his column is not pretty.  

I’m self-taught for the most part, but well enough to know that their are things that make life worth living.  The pursuit of virtue, the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of wisdom, and the pursuit of beauty, all make up a large part of what I consider the good life, and all of these concepts depend upon one another.  My concern for years was that we were raising (or have raised) a generation which no longer recognizes this, that cannot see the sublime in Bach or Shakespeare, that can’t find beauty in Mozart or Raphael, that can’t perceive majesty in Beethoven or Michelangelo.  The digital barbarians heighten that concern, expand it into the political and social arena.  Their’s is, according to Epstein, “a mind propelled by a strong sense of entitlement, inane utopian visions, and less than no regard for those distinctions and discriminations that make a complex culture hum,” and according to Helprin, “"is against property, competition, and the free market," which "favor a world that is planned, controlled, decided, entirely cooperative, and conducive of predetermined outcomes." At minimum, a mindset like this will degrade public life.  At worst, one is reminded of Burke’s dismay as he watched the unfolding of the French Revolution (the italics are mine):

The unbought grace of life … is gone.… All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of her naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.

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