… for each of you shall have your moment. And if you don’t know what I mean, let me explain that I’m sick in bed again. I’m suffering from a terribly heavy head so I’m allowing My Man to have his moment. Until the room stops reeling, please humour him as best you can…
My Master has asked me to write something for today’s entry in his blog. He’s confined to bed with what gentlemen call a ‘heavy head’, though if the truth were told, I fancy he overdid it on the red wine last night. If I might paraphrase one of those poets he’s always too keen to quote: ‘he wrote that reeling, / Having got drunk exceedingly to-day, / So that he seems to stand upon the ceiling’…The Hon. J.P.M. here, on the way to the bathroom for some more aspirin. Hope MM lived up to billing, though if you ask me, it all sounds like a yard and a half of pretentious twaddle, fit only for the undergrad study room at a third rate cosmopolitan uni.
It does give me an opportunity to let me talk about a piece of commentary and its comments I read yesterday, which caused me to consider the nature of individual freedom and the internet. It may well have been the Honourable Master’s mention of what he called ‘rustic rebellion beyond the fog bank’, but I did start thinking about Iran and America, and the why people live the way they do.
The piece mentioned that that the Iranian leadership is trying to stifle use of the internet in the fear that it breeds unrest amongst their citizens. At the same time, American senators want to stifle the internet because it breeds a different kind of unrest: radicalization.
The simple understanding I have is that the web empowers those it enthrals. With this unusual freedom comes a means to action. Some people use it to act wisely, many use it to act foolishly, and a few use it to act maliciously. Of course, some might say that the actions we define by each of these terms – ‘wisely’, ‘foolishly’, ‘maliciously’ – depends on your point of view. Light may rid us of darkness but we have a preference depending on whether we’re a bat or a bird. I make no bones about it. I choose to be secular. To enter into any kind of religious debate would be to admit (albeit unconsciously) to the possibility that another competing set of (unproven) values may take precedent over your own.
Ignoring Christianity or Islam, this question of faith versus reason has relevance to a different kind of religion that is spreading rapidly through the world. The internet breeds a type of faith not founded upon any idea of Heaven, but rather a very clear notion of ‘Hell’. It is a religion in which its devotees proselytise paranoia and a common, generally unquestioned hatred of America. For these people, fear is wonderfully seductive. This new religion manifests itself in the belief that the world is somehow larger than we are ever capable of knowing it. As science has cracked the problem of geographic distance and peering into the dark corners of the world, then we must look elsewhere for the ‘unknown’. We need a new sense of what remains hidden from us. The heart of darkness has moved from Africa to the corporate boardrooms of America.
I might lack the education of a Murgatroid, but I have travelled the world. I know there are no nations where all individuals are condemned to be fools; just fools who condemn whole nations of individuals. The world feels stage managed, not by secret oligarchs and their secret plans and rituals, but by the very activity of civilization itself. Great art binds people together, not by some rich media baron wishing to control our minds, but minds that find common delights in the structure of the universe.
Paranoids see patterns in apparently random events. Scientist see patterns because there are deep-lying patterns in our very nature. The internet need not be an unlimited descent into anarchy, but a chance to open ourselves to the eternal shared experience of what it is to be human.
I believe the Honourable Jacob will me well enough to resume his log tomorrow. I must get to bed in order to have the Bentley clean before he wakes up.
Returning to radio silence.
‘My Man’
Toodling until the morn.
1 comment:
Your man is deep. Keep drinking the red wine. Who ARE you?
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