HOORAY FOR BILL GATES...I GUESS

By LANCE MORROW

It snowed almost 2 ft. in upstate New York--wet, gluey snow so weighty that it brought down trees across power lines and left our farmhouse in the dark and cold for three days and nights. We huddled under five blankets and a 40-lb. dog and read by the light of oil lamps.

The computer, of course, was dead. The Internet, an entire universe (bright leaping data, shooting stars, comets of information, evanescent meteor showers) shut down. We fumbled in the dark for match and wick; we watched our shadows on the wall.

That was weeks ago. Before the lights went out, I had been reading a colleague's article in TIME ("Can Thor Make a Comeback?" Dec. 16) that described how ancient religions have at last found their way to the Internet. There seemed something funny and very American about insisting that eternity must scramble to catch up with progress--God's obligation to gadgets. It is the Stout Cortez Syndrome, the New World habit of needing a procession of new worlds, transformative revelations following upon one another like new-model cars.

Dynamics of progress: the Pacific that John Keats' stout Cortez (actually, it was fat Balboa) beheld has become the Pacific Rim, and out over the horizon the Sandwich Islands have turned into an American state, Hawaii, where men may marry each other now. American fast food will gobble up China. The planet contracts to the size of a grape.

In The Wind in the Willows, Mr. Toad romances his gypsy cart until he is transformed by the sight of that splendid innovation, the motorcar. The gypsy cart is forgotten--is junk. We are all Toad. We need the sobering voice of Mr. Badger to talk us down from our manias.

Hooray for Bill Gates, I guess. Hooray (long ago) for Marconi's gypsy cart, the telegraph. The transcontinental railroad was a marvelous new cart (though you get an argument on that from remnant buffalo and Sioux). The interstate highway system, brightest cultural blossom of the Eisenhower years, was a wonder. So were the electric carving knife, the fax machine and the splendid neckties and haircuts of the 1970s.

Overstimulation, hypergreed and a kind of idiocy--those three stooges--have a way of tumbling into the room along with technological progress, which gives them respectability and theological cover. Mr. Badger, Toad's killjoy twin, makes these points: 1) each transformative moment will be superseded by another one, tomorrow or the next day--all marvels are disposable; 2) innovations are not always wonderful; 3) the world is round and time is circular; human nature is constant, but 4) may be damaged--or what is worse, humiliated--by novelties, which (like '70s neckties or television in any decade) may have about them an aura of imbecility, leading to 5) the Paradox of Retrograde Progress. Television is a Faustian bargain (a dazzling technology that induces dullness and even moronism), and the Internet has the same ominous tendencies. It is not a bad idea to mistrust the omnivorous vulgarity of innovation, even its (paradoxical) death instinct. Novelty, in its pointless ingenuity, keeps slaying itself.

Not that Mr. Badger is a Luddite. He merely points out that technology has a mixed record. CB radio was a Toad mania long ago. Technology is sometimes, in the end, a little stupid--as anything must be that was brilliant yesterday but was surpassed overnight--a monster that lives on a hungry, dynamic need for its own obsolescence. The universe of Gutenberg should no more be an abandoned graveyard than, say, the American city, which, a generation after World War II, seemed to be in decline and headed toward extinction. Why did we need the cities when we had the new paradise of the suburbs? Who could ask for anything more?

It is a sound rule of travel, and of intellectual delight, to go where the others are not. Therefore, plunge back into books--not texts read in pixels off the screen, but read, rather, with their sweet weight of thought held in the hand. Go where others are not--to wonderful unread writers like Seneca or Plutarch, for example, whom I read during our blackout. They understood certain essentials that we have misplaced.

After three days, my computer sprang back to life, chipper, as if nothing had happened. I found myself wishing that a hard snow would fall on Seattle. Bill Gates and his geek brigades, I thought, need to sit in the dark for a while, or to light oil lamps and catch up on their reading.

I thought it, and nature responded with such biblical overreaction (the heaviest weather in the Pacific Northwest in 70 years, days of snow, ice, thaw, rainstorms, flood, power failures) that I began to feel guilty.