Helprin's simply wrong in a simple way.

The New York Times handed Mark Helprin, a writer whose fiction work I usually admire, centerpage on their op-ed Sunday, and Helprin used the opportunity to demand perpetual copyright from his legislators. Helprin writes,

Once the state has dipped its enormous beak into the stream of your wealth and possessions they are allowed to flow from one generation to the next. Though they may be divided and diminished by inflation, imperfect investment, a proliferation of descendants and the government taking its share, they are not simply expropriated.

Helprin then goes on to rail against bookstores for selling works in the public domain because the money given to the bookstore goes not to the families of the writers, but to the publishers who bothered to put their works into print again.

Helprin's idea seems rooted in a strange idea: material is eternal. He says that families can go on to create more wealth with the land and other properties left behind by the deceased. But this idea is fundamentally incorrect: families can't do that without upkeep and maintenance of the property or land. Fallow properties may be potentially useful, but without stewardship they are simply wasted.

A great idea requires no upkeep or maintenance; it survives forever because it has moved from non-existence to an active and shared residence in the minds of those who have encountered it. The estates of Dickens, Swift, Poe, and even Tolkien have done far less to preserve and proliferate their literary than their millions of fans, who have amplified, honored, and sometimes internally policed the fanbase to keep it true to the original intent.

Helprin seems to live in a universe where someday a novel of his will arise so compelling that six generations down the line it will still speak with such force that his descendants will be able to profit from it. Very few novels make it there. Most books descend into irrelevance, and a fitful few survive because small fanbases keep their candles alive. The creative tradition is not one passed from father to son: unlike the skills needed to manage a farm, a factory, or a funhouse, one cannot transmit creativity, one can only give the skills and encourage a love for the craft. The probability that some fifth-generation family member is the only appropriate intellectual advocate of a writer's work is vanishingly small.

Helprin's proposal would lock away even those ideas for eternity and punish our admiration for writers. It would make the rediscovery of great original thinkers like H.P. Lovecraft or Alexander Herzen impossible. It would drive the wedge between the truly admirable few and the pulp many even deeper. When Jefferson and the Founding Fathers laid the groundwork for the copyright and patent system in this country he was mindful of this difference between real property and the creations of the mind, of the ever-diminishing power of the former and the irrepressible force of the latter set free.

A Kinder, Gentler X

In keeping up with the discussion on Joss Whedon's recent blog entry and the commentary that has followed, the mostly negative point has been made that the there exist today cultures that have de jure subjugation of woman and there's just not much we can do about it: either we let them persist, or we engage in Might Makes Right to force them to change. Neither solution is palatable.

Jonathan Rowe has a fascinating view on this from his website, Positive Liberty, in which he writes that our own Christian tradition is not the one that came to America, but was deliberately shaped by the Founding Fathers:

Almost all of the most notable Christian thinkers from the pre-Founding era differed with our Founders on tolerance and the freedom to worship. John Calvin knew the Bible as well as anyone but thought it entirely proper to see see Servetus burned at the stake simply for publicly denying the Trinity. Likewise, Calvinist Samuel Rutherford, who purportedly influenced our revolution, too thought it just for Servetus to be executed in that manner.

To our Founders this was not authentic Christianity, or Christianity properly understood. Our Founders had a vested interest in convincing Christians that most notable past Christian thinkers from Augustine to Aquinas to Luther to Calvin to John Winthrop erred on tolerance and religious liberty. And though the government ultimately granted (and still grants) free exercise of religion to any religious thought, no matter how extreme, the Founders still endorsed, mainly through their supplications to God, a version of religion that was kinder and gentler than what came before.

...

These Founders were not simply "taking" the Christian religion as they found it; they were actively involved in a project to make such kinder, gentler, more sober and rational.

In some respects, Rowe, who's usually opposed to the David Barton "twist the truth to make this nation have a Christian heritage" revisionist line of "scholarship," here seems to be doing Barton's work for him. He seems to be saying that this would have been a "Christian nation" if not for those damn meddling kids and their dog free thinkers like Jefferson and Washington.