Elegy for Aaron Swartz

Elegy for Aaron Swartz

Information wants to be free and society wants to evolve. The dilemma of social evolution parallels the problem of building a bigger and better place to live when you live on a huge ship with billions of others and have no safe harbor to sail into to make repairs or modifications. Under such circumstances, the birth-pains of the future will always feel like disorder and disruption to those whose limited vision sees no other possibility vividly enough to care passionately about beyond a right here right now that is the only “real world” they can imagine. Only the here and now of this “real world” is real to them. It is the only place they see and the only place they can live and they never ask themselves why this “real world” should be the only possible world much less the best of all possible world.

Some of us are one-eyed Jacks or maybe Jills who can see the possible just clearly enough to say “why not”. The just Kings and true Prophets among us, the ones who see not just where we are but where we should go next and how to get there, are the only aristocracy worthy of the deference and honor of being followed faithfully and listened to carefully, the way we listen to a true and righteous teacher professing the whole truth of what is and what can be. The rest are tyrants and charlatans at war with the best we could do and be in a future perfect tense world which these true and prophetic souls make as founding fathers and true birth mothers for us the rest of us to live in. Many of them are martyred in the process.  

We live in the promised land their words and deeds made real for us as the substance of things wished for, the truth of things unseen; we never live in the “Promised Land” but are always exiles whose long, strange journey only looks like a pilgrimage looking back. To call the place we have arrived our final home and the promised land is the last and worst breaking of faith with those who lead us here by calling us onward and who still do. Their monument is the “progress” we see as we look back to our primitive ancestors as they burn witches and murder heretics, strip Hippolyta to the bare bone and nail up the Messiah, the Christ and the best of all good neighbors. We look back trying to forgive them because they did not know what they were doing. We one-eyed Jacks and Jills have only one true claim to nobility. We see just well enough to know our true betters. We see the sky darken and feel the air grow chill for a moment when one of them passes and we grieve.