Who Was King of Bavaria During the Seven Years' War?

There are fools out there who will tell you that it is liberating to be without the Internet. They will say that it makes one more focused, more creative, more productive, more (fill in your own empty buzz word here). They will say this to you with a straight face, and they may even believe it. Ask any one of these people to show you the issue of a night of Internet-free productivity, however, and they will invariably come up with empty hands.

I find that time without the Internet is exhausting, and I am no practitioner of the great hoax on civil human society that is “web 2.0.” I check my e-mail once a day, steadfastly refuse to send messages (instant or otherwise), and am a proud non-participant in the dog-and-pony show of “social networking.”

No, what I miss about the Internet during those times when I suffer without is information. You may remember the promise of an “information age” that was made to us some few decades ago. The Internet, it was said, would be a vast library of not only formal, fixed scholarship, but also the raw, ugly matter of pure human experience. Then, some idiot figured out that you could use the Internet to meet people for sex.

The Internet is an adjunct to the brain. The human brain evolved to fit a very basic set of requirements: processing environmental stimuli, maintaining a store of information on past events, and the ability to extrapolate future events from a combination of the two below. These requirements are themselves mere sub-routines of a primary process: to avoid dying, at least until successful reproduction. Art, literature, dreams, writing, law, compassion, affection even love all owe themselves to the successful operation of our unique jelly.

The brain, however, does a few things rather poorly. One is recalling detailed information accurately. We evolved to process just enough information to save our lives, which is why we focus on the gun during a stick-up rather than the offender’s facial characteristics. Your brain doesn’t care a whit for accurate police testimony. It only cares about living. The other thing our brains do poorly is retain large amounts of information. Again, in nature it is simply not needed. You need only be aware of danger and safety, food and not food, predator and prey. The human today—compared to the human of even 1000 years ago—hold stores of information that are vast, and wholly unnecessary to survival.

Consider the question I asked at the beginning. No, the very beginning. Doubtless there are many people in the world who can answer a question like that from memory. There are even more who cannot. Before the Internet you had two options for discovering that kind of information:

1) Ask someone who is more knowledgeable than you.
2) Find the answer in a book.

The first option necessitated knowing someone who could answer the question, of course. The second would require either owning a book containing the answer or knowing where to find one. In the old days (of which I lived several) this meant a trip to the library.

(Now, a note to my fellow purists: I am neither suggesting that the Internet is a substitute for a good library, nor that words printed on a screen are superior to ones printed on paper. I am a firm believer in books, and am further convinced that no innovation will obsoletize ink on wood pulp technology for a very, very long time.)

However, the Internet can save you such a trip on matters of minutae. Say you’re writing a great novel about the life of Richard Wagner, and you need to know who ruled Bavaria when he wrote Lohengrin. You don’t need a complete run-down of his duties as monarch, or his foreign policy stance re: Prussia, you just need his name so that you won’t have to come back and fill in countless “KING SO-AND-SO” stand-ins the next day. The Internet fills small voids in knowledge in a timely manner, and does so magnificently.

(Though I should say to fellow victims of the humanities that a wealth of primary sources can be found on the Internet, if you’re game.)

Still, a grain of salt, as they say.

We are, sadly, conditioned to despise the technology that facilitates and enriches our lives. Again and again we are told that the witless savages of the stone age were in every way our moral and cultural superiors; That their ignorance of letters, science, and even the basic fundaments of law were not deficiencies against which they had to endure, but blessings! Intellect, many of us believe, is a curse, and its fruits diseased.

That is because we are creatures of our age, and like all creatures we think that our age is the worst one yet. Who hasn’t felt the dreadful gravity of the not-so-distant savage that still inhabits his mammal brain? It can be easy to imagine that life was better before soap, penicillin, and birth control. Part of us actually believes that. It tells us to shut off the Internet and the air conditioner, and labor in sweat and isolation. If it had its way it would relegate us to painting our thoughts in charcoal pictograms on the walls of our apartments. Even that wouldn’t be primitive enough in the end. Only when man is slumbering in a cold and damp cave, swathed in a cloud of his own bodily funk, with no more regard for the future than the source of his next meal and orgasm, will that deep, bestial part of us be satisfied.

Ignore him. Embrace technology. Love it. When it’s absent, miss it. If it ever leaves us, mourn it. It has been mankind’s truest, noblest friend.