April 10, 2001
I rejected the culture of
“rock ’n’ roll” back in the 1950s, and I have had zero
interest in modern music since then. When I was a little boy, my parents
explained to me that Elvis Presley was decadent; I did not fully understand
what decadent meant, but I knew that my parents were not going to steer me
wrong. Thus, in the fall of 1956, I plugged my fingers into my ears when a fellow
kindergartner on a school bus turned up the volume on his radio as it blared
Presley’s “You Ain’t Nothin’ but a Hound
Dog.”
By the time the Beatles rolled around in
1964, I was 13 and had come to understand by myself that rock music was from
Hell and that it was produced by Satan. I knew the Beatles represented the
glorification of immorality (relating to so-called free love and the use of
hallucinogenic drugs, including marijuana) and a rejection of legitimate
authority. Indeed, I wore a crew cut for ten years — from 1964 to 1974
— as my own sign of protest against the long hair then in style among
teenage boys as a result of the Beatles. So I am not in the least bit conversant
with contemporary music. Don’t listen to it. Have no interest in it
whatsoever, except to comment on those things that make the news because of
their overt hostility to the true Faith.
One with no interest in contemporary
music does not seek it out, obviously. So I had never heard of Napster —
the service that until recently permitted its users to download music to their
computers for free — until it became the object of news reports and court
battles challenging its legal right to use the intellectual property of others
without compensating the performers and the creators of that property. As it
has been explained to me by several home-schooling students, Napster has
thousands of selections that can be downloaded into computers, and these
include classical-music selections. Therefore there are users of Napster who are
not necessarily part of the culture of death that has arisen in large part as a
result of contemporary music and its derivatives. Still and all, Napster was
founded on the false premise that consumers should be able to get something for
nothing. That is a fundamental violation of the Seventh Commandment:
“Thou Shalt Not Steal.” It is a sin to steal anything that does not
belong to us, including the intellectual property of others. This is something that
is of particular interest to those of us who create our own works, whether
writers or artists or musicians or inventors.
In September of 1987, Sen. Joseph Biden
(D-Delaware) was derailed in his bid for the 1988 Democratic presidential
nomination when John Sasso, an aide to Massachusetts Governor Michael
Dukakis, released an attack video demonstrating that Biden had stolen a speech
on foreign policy given only days before by Neil Kinnock, then the hapless head
of the British Labour Party (which party Kinnock led to defeats by Margaret
Thatcher and the Tories in 1982 and 1987). It turned out that Biden, who as
chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee was presiding over the Robert
Bork confirmation hearings, had committed plagiarism when he was at
Syracuse Law School in the mid 1960s. Although he is said to be contemplating
yet another run at the presidency in 2004, Biden’s credibility was forever
tarnished by his record of intellectual theft.
Sadly, such theft is more common than
one might imagine. A committee appointed by the president of Boston
University in the 1980s concluded decisively that Martin Luther King
plagiarized parts of his doctoral dissertation. (However, the university did not
posthumously take away his doctorate, something it would have done in any
other case.) Intellectual theft is something of an epidemic in the entertainment
world. Milton Berle was so notorious for stealing the jokes of other comedians
that he made fun of himself during the Dean Martin Roasts in the 1970s.
“Could you slow down, please? I can’t keep up with you,”
Berle once deadpanned as he feigned copying a young comic’s jokes.
Indeed, some of the more prominent comedians actually hire scouts to steal
fresh material from young comedians trying to establish themselves. It’s
a practice of long standing. (Naturally, almost all of the comedians today are
crude, vulgar, and pornographic in their content. It doesn’t take a lot of
imagination or wit to mimic their offensive material.) The same is true of
magicians. And there are professional
spies in the world of computer technology who do their level best to steal
programs and operating systems designed by others. Intellectual theft is
everywhere — yet another sign of the de-Catholicization of the world.
The Napster controversy, however, has
seen a lot of otherwise sensible people crying foul, claiming that they have a
“right” to download the material found on the Napster web site.
But they do not have any such “right.” No matter how much money
a particular performer or record company may have made as a result of a
particular piece of music, it is nevertheless a matter of strict justice that each
performer or company must receive compensation for the acquisition of that
work by a consumer. There is absolutely no getting around it. It is immoral to
take something from another without compensation, no matter how much
enjoyment it brings the person who is engaging in the theft of another
person’s intellectual property.
Unless their just owner voluntarily gives
them away, goods and services must be exchanged for something of value,
whether that value is in the form of currency or bartered goods or services. One
of the many victories wrought by the forces of relativism, though, is the
popularization of the belief that a practice cannot be wrong if large numbers of
people are engaging in it, especially if people are deriving a great deal of
pleasure and convenience from the practice. If Napster is an exception to the
Seventh Commandment, where does one draw the line? Can one steal term
papers one has not composed and submit them to a professor for evaluation as
his own work? Can one rearrange the e-mail of another and then send it out to
his own friends, presenting it as his own original creative work and making
points he had not thought of himself? Can one bring notes into an examination
in order to surreptitiously “review” those notes as he faces
questions he is not prepared to answer on his own? (That is the derivation of
theft called fraud.) Where is the line to be drawn if there is not one simple
standard that is in accord with the Seventh Commandment’s absolute
prohibition against all forms of theft?
As alluded to above, some in favor of the
Napster service have made the Marxist argument that performers and
companies make “too much money,” justifying the theft of services
as a matter of personal right. Unfortunately, we live in a world of supply and
demand. If there is a demand for a particular product, those who produce the
product are going to make more and more money. True, a good many of the
“artists” who have become wealthy in today’s world would
be in the poorhouse if an authentically Catholic understanding of culture
prevailed. There would be no market for their illicit and profane wares, as
nobody would want to pollute his ears, which belong to Christ Himself, by
listening to their filth. (And the just state would have the right in the natural
law to censor those things injurious to the salvation of souls, as Pope Leo XIII
noted in his encyclical letter On Human Liberty in 1887.) In
today’s market, the purveyors of rot have become very wealthy in the
midst of our secularized world. But that is no justification for stealing their
“works of art” by downloading them free of charge. If people want
rot, they have to pay for it.
Part of the responsibility for producing a
culture conducive to the stealing of the intellectual property of others falls on
the doorstep of the modern state. As I have noted in many other commentaries
in recent years, leftists and collectivists and redistributionists actually believe
that there is no right to private property, that our income belongs to society as a
whole, and that the government is best able to use our property in order to
redistribute it as it sees fit. We are involuntary participants in that redistribution
as our private property is confiscated from us by means of taxation, the levels of
which are unjust — and the purposes for which are unjust and immoral.
Indeed, President Bush boasted in his radio address of March 24 that under his
administration the federal budget is actually increasing to the tune of $100
billion. Bush believes that is worthy of a boast! It is actually quite a sad thing, as
the so-called conservative participates in the expansion of the size and power
of the federal government while giving us a parsimonious reduction in taxes to
keep us happy. When the government steals from them all the time, it is little
wonder that people believe they have the right to steal from others.
The violations of the Ten
Commandments all proceed one from the other. If we make false gods out of
the idols of this world, it is easy to profane God’s Holy Name and all
sacred things, to profane the Lord’s Day, to dishonor our parents, to kill
innocent human beings, to engage in wanton acts in violation of the Sixth and
Ninth Commandments, to steal the property of others, to bear false witness,
and to envy the goods of others. We have the means to obey the
Commandments if we cooperate with the graces won for us by the shedding of
every single drop of our Lord’s Most Precious Blood on the wood of the
Holy Cross, administered to us as they are in the sacraments entrusted to Holy
Mother Church. It will not be until people recognize that simple truth that the
violations of the Commandments, including the Seventh Commandment, will
stop for love of God as befits redeemed creatures who are destined for an
unending Easter Sunday of glory in Paradise if they persist until the end in
states of sanctifying grace.
Our Lady, Mother of Life, pray for us.
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