Threads of our Fathers
Amy Harmon called tonight doing early research for an article,
seeking a deeper insight into the Dean campaign. Amy's
beat at the New York
Times is technology
and
culture, and we laughed as it occurred to us that nothing integrates tech
and culture better than the Dean campaign.
Consider with me the deepest, most satisfying theme
that might help us define the Dean phenomenon. It would have to be the resilient
message of what American democracy means to its people. Like Robert Pirsig's discovery
about excellence, we all seem to understand the core of American
freedom without
needing a detailed definition.
In every age, we Americans suffer the current compromises
of our freedoms, in confidence that they are merely clouds obscuring
the
imminent sun we hold as our birthright. We are cynics and innocents, mistrusting
our politicians while assuming that they seek the same sunlight we do. What
is the core of the Founders' beliefs, and what core values do we hold
so dear that our leaders trespass upon them at their peril?
The Founders' breakthrough was their audacious assertion,
which they held to be self evident, that the people collectively are more
important
than
their rulers. This had never been stated before, and it was such a powerful
idea that it inspired the French to come to our aid with a zeal in excess
of their hatred of the English. (There's a fabriqué en France statue
on a little island four miles south of here, testifying to that belief and
the
support
the French
gave
us in the 1770's, without which we would not have won our freedom.)
This notion of popular sovereignty is a product of the Age
of Enlightenment, that flowering of humanist rationality and idealism
arising in the 17th-18th centuries. I've suggested before that this enlightenment
grew out of
two
catalysts.
One was the importation of tea and coffee, awakening
Europe from a centuries-long, alcohol-induced slumber. They weren't a
bunch of alkies on purpose. For centuries, the water hadn't been
safe in Europe unless it was boiled or distilled.
The arrival of caffeine caused a cultural buzz that Madison Avenue can
only dream of. Coffee houses sheltered radical thinking, as the interesting
ferment
moved from the distilleries to the conversations.
The second catalyst was the local newsletter. Printing had
finally evolved from Gutenberg's ponderous wood and leather-bound
church bibles,
one to each village church like the hand crafted and illuminated manuscripts
they replaced (bible being Latin for "book"). An intermediate
forebear of the newsletter had been the handy saddlebag-sized pocket
books produced
by
Gustavus
Aldus.
They
were
bibles
at first and then, slowly, became works of philosophy and fiction. Only
in the 17th and 18th centuries were inexpensive printing presses produced
that
an ordinary tradesman might
procure and with which he might produce a little broadsheet
saying
whatever
he felt like saying. It was a galvanizing and outrageous freedom, transforming
the printer as much as his readers.
Those cheap presses were the blog firmware of the eighteenth
century, freeing voices from the hollow cadence of church
and state, training the newly literate masses in clues never uttered before.
For the first time, historic rites of succession were questioned, wondering
what
was, exactly, the divine right of thugs.
All of this had been going on at the same time as the settling
of the New World, when a family might see a penniless son go off on a ship
and return a millionaire, beneficiary of slavery and plunder and
land seized from American aborigines (those marvelous British country mansions
were won the hard way). It was a precursor to the Internet boom, when anything
was possible and the old rules seemed less binding than they had been for
centuries.
And then, in the New World, came a bandwidth revolution. Each
of the colonies had started as settlements, divided from each other by an
impassable barrier of wilderness. Their communications architecture was hub
and spoke, a hierarchical command economy driven by old world masters who
were the only source of the manufactured goods they needed to hack out a
living from the forest. With time came expansion and roads and inter-colony
trade and local foundries and mills and a slow realization that a very nice
living could be had without reference to the masters now so far away. Physical
distance was a metaphor for the attenuation of hierarchical control, and
a clue that this newly flat society was giving more than it was getting.
The metaphors with our age are stunning and inspire us to
pick up that old thread the Founders started and Emerson continued and Thoreau
and
Whitman and Clemens and Steinbeck and Kerouac and all the rest. We've been
so busy lately that we've quit talking about ways while focused on means. But
that
hasn't
dimmed
our
collective sense of how we're meant to live. To paraphrase what the rustic
said about art, we may not know freedom, but we know what we like.
Somehow the Dean campaign dropped a little of this latent
genetic sensibility into the nutrient pool called the Internet. Contrasted
to an assault on freedom as we like it and a radical foray into preemptive
war, we seem to sense an unprecedented disturbance in our collective
force, as if a sister blue-green planet had been obliterated far, far away.
If there's a larger meaning to the Dean phenomenon, that is
it. Call me an idealist (please), but the character of people's response
counts as much as its quantity, at least in the early going. Consider the
code produced by a few hackers at the open source conference in Philadelphia
in 1776. Relative to the population of the colonies, there were fewer of
them than there are Deaniacs among us. They haggled over it, signed it with
a flourish, and let the power of their words carry the day.
If I had to pick a theme for the Dean phenomenon, that would
be it.
3:25:10 AM 
|
