Digital Barbarism

nearly all recorded human knowledge) with the contents of his battered spiral notebook. According to him, this would become the basis of a new and just order. Needless to say, he wouldn’t let me see what he had written, perhaps because I existed on too low a plane. He wouldn’t have burned down anything, for he was in fact a kindly intellectual, but many terrible notions were circulating among kindly intellectuals at the time.

The electric flow of hubris is such that in all eras it touches all classes and types. Now it is endemic, if only because the belief that man can be a god runs parallel, though illogically, with the decision that there is no God. In the absence of God, all nature is merely accident. Amidst all the accident there is only one purposefulness other than instinct, that of man. Standing thus above the randomness of the rest of the universe, he is no longer a piece of work (no will having worked upon him) but the ultimate and decisive power, alone above all else, the sole possessor of volition. It is hardly a new theme, though rationalism and the triumph of science have pushed it farther than in other ages. Previously, the conflict was between monotheism and idolatry. Now it is between any kind of theism and worship of the self. It is not a coincidence that in this era narcissism has inflated to the point of flattening many aspects of character. Hardly unique or surprising is the horribly cute pretension exemplified, for example, in a cookbook entitled How To Be A Domestic Goddess, dedicated to “John, Goddess-Maker.”¹¹⁴ This found sufficient resonance to be echoed. Seven years later you could read magazine articles such as, “The Easy Way To Be A Domestic Goddess,” with a picture of a woman aglow like Diana (courtesy of a bodice of electric lightbulbs), with the secret of how to become divine simply to “Wrap an odd-shaped gift.”¹¹⁵ Such things are not serious, but, like Freudian slips, they betray what is underneath. And in the bankrupt and bankrupting quest to escape history, mortality, and human nature, the necessary illusions are furthered with unprecedented power by the electronic culture and its informal system of belief. There, the world is made into a kind of shrunken head, a tame thing with neither wind nor storm; a playhouse where it is possible for those who share in the illusion to imagine that they are in charge; a closed system in which the word virtual is applied to that which is not virtual, and the masters are masters of nothing, not even a puff of real smoke.

Someone who is understandably if not forgivably centered in such a way upon himself can easily misinterpret any course of events as part of a planned or evolving harmony favorable to his destiny or opinions. Lack of humility comes from insufficient attention to how the world really works. The illustration of this has been one of the cornerstones of literature from its earliest beginnings, and in regard to it there is a lesson of history at every turn. Consider the dialectical placement of statements by three of what Churchill called “English worthies”—in this case Conservative politicians in the National Government of the late thirties. Mussolini said of them, “These, after all, are the tired sons of a long line of rich men, and they will lose their empire.” (He was right, of course, but it didn’t do him terribly much good.)

First, the thesis, from Sir Samuel Hoare, then home secretary, in March of 1939. He saw a “golden age” about to dawn, when “five men in Europe, the three dictators and the prime ministers of England and France,” would converge (not his word), and “in an incredibly short time transform the whole history of the world.”¹¹⁶ The antithesis came on the very same day, when (according to his memorandum) Lord Halifax told Ribbentrop that “Experience of all history went to show that the pressure of facts was sometimes more powerful than the will of men: and if once war should start in Central Europe, it was quite impossible to say where it might not end, or who might not become involved.”¹¹⁷ And, finally, the synthesis, in Neville Chamberlain’s speech to the Commons, of September 3, 1939: “Everything that I have hoped for, everything that I have believed in during my public life, has crashed into ruins.”¹¹⁸ So much for the golden age.

The optimism and confidence of the fin de siècle a hundred years ago became the First World War; the Second World War; the Holocaust; the Cold War and its attendant, costly, proxy wars; and a century as much, or more, of alienation, misery, and death, as of progress and the alleviation of suffering. Churchill was able to make an exception to the rule of blindness in the age of appeasement only because he had been an optimist prior to the Great War, and had bitterly learned the lesson he went on to teach—not that one policy or another is always right, but that throughout history grandiose expectations are almost always confounded and overturned in tragedy.

Thomas Hardy knew not only that fate deals severely with what he called “the Pride of Life,” but how. In “The Convergence of the Twain (Lines on the loss of the Titanic),” he wrote:

And as the smart ship grew

In stature, grace, and hue,

In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

Alien they seemed to be:

No mortal eye could see

The intimate welding of their later history,

Or sign that they were bent

By paths coincident

On being anon twin halves of one August event,

Till the Spinner of the Years

Said “Now!” And each one hears,

And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.¹¹⁹

Teilhard de Chardin’s recognizably Hermetic concept that salvation comes through the development and convergence of human capabilities with the divine is a doctrine with a dark side that he chose optimistically and faithfully to ignore, a side that Yeats (he of balancing this life with this death) expresses