That is why, in my sleepy college town in the heat of a Southern summer, a former astronaut making a guest appearance at a science camp for children told them, “You are an infinite being with infinite possibilities with the ability to do anything.”112 No, my dear astronaut. As wonderful as life is, our beings are limited, as are our possibilities, and we do not have the ability to do anything. Perhaps he was exaggerating so as to make a point, but even if so, the exaggeration is both familiar and telling.
Quite familiar, in fact, most of this, the standard stuff of hubris and heresy, all of which would appear to be contradicted by the record of history and confounded by the constancy of human nature—that is, the human nature not of theory but of actuality. Nonetheless, these beliefs cannot be written off merely as impractical. They have run through the ages in an unbroken thread, flourishing remarkably in the Renaissance, in a trail that led through alchemy to modern scientific inquiry, to the Age of Reason, and to the magician John Dee of Mortlake, a Hermeticist whose navigational formulae are part of the reason I am writing this in English rather than Spanish.
And they run right down the center aisle of the electronic culture, for the quarrel runs deeper than copyright, deeper than what can be addressed in law, deeper than politics, deeper than a fight over property no matter how inextricably property is woven into the fabric of liberty. It is a dispute over the nature of things, and, therefore, what the world is to become. The argument is as old as man and perhaps a matter of inherited temperament, but it can be argued nonetheless. Of late we have seen its intensification fueled not as much by the vapid advances of technology but by a fervent embrace of these things that is far out of proportion to the rewards obsessive engagement can offer.
This surrender, in which people have become obsequious to machines, comes not merely from mistakes in judgment but from the absence of civilization’s counterweights, which otherwise might illuminate the dangers, stand in the stead of false promises, and provide alternate satisfactions. Weakened by war, neglect, cowardice, hostility, impatience, and time, these counterweights previously were the stabilizing and calming structures that checked all-consuming enthusiasms. In the decline of ethics, knowledge, and civility, and the wilting of restraint and deliberation, much has been carried too far.
It begins, as is often the case, with elites freed of the normally astringent necessities such as the struggle to make a living, surviving war and other forms of violence, and the need carefully to husband resources. Thus untethered in a world of gas, they propagate and accept peculiar doctrines without limit. At prestigious institutions, celebrated professors opine that newborns, being almost insensible, have a lesser right to life than, say, a celebrated professor at a prestigious institution, and that, therefore, their murder should be “understood” or even accepted as a right of the parent. Social theorists who have spent the last half century relentlessly attacking marriage have suddenly reversed course with the advent of legalized homosexual union. Formerly passionate defenders of free speech now propose and accept that the government, of which they are normally skeptical, regulate political speech, especially prior to elections. (They say they are regulating money, but as the size of the population precludes any but the most local candidates from going door-to-door, advocacy depends directly and as a matter of its life and death upon money. To say, I’m not controlling political expression, I’m just regulating money, is the same as saying, I’m not preventing you from speaking, I’m just forbidding you to open your mouth.)
I cite these few examples not from satisfaction in deploring them, for deploring, like heavy drinking, renders one powerless and sick not long after, but as an introduction to some of the notions that long ago arose in overprivileged asylums and are now joyfully inhaled from Santa Monica to Somerville. Serious and enthralled, some people liken the internet to the divine, and neither I nor they are making a metaphor. In the scientific equivalent of the medieval church’s indulgences, they promise the cheap, ill-thought-out, and unsubstantiated science-fiction chestnut of immortality via the transference of human memory into a mechanism. As I recall, we are now about three or four years past the point where this was to have been possible. They held, and perhaps some still do hold, the naïve and tragic belief that newly technology-intensive weaponry can win traditional wars in ancient and dusty places against people who are even crazier than are we.
Such things find quick adoption in the public mind given the general feeling that to keep pace with the machines and remain adequate in an era of inhuman speed, all decisions must be instantaneous. Those who rush forward to lap at the first trickles of what is new even have a name. They are called “early adapters,” a rather grandiose term for someone who buys a new cell phone and molds his life to all the petty and useless things it does—witness the coyly misspelled, ungrammatical messages that have neither the wit of telegram language nor the information content of a lichee nut.
Take the new way of making an appointment. Instead of, “Shall we have dinner on Monday?” “Okay, what about Sakura, one-thirty?” “Dinner at one-thirty? In the morning?” “I like to
