Greetings, Neal Stephenson fans! Be informed that
Stephenson's new novel _Cyptonomicon_,
which I just finished reading, has its own web site,
www.cyptonomicon.com, and that the web
site has a very interesting long non-fiction essay by
Stephenson entitled "In the Beginning
was the Command Line" which is mainly about the
history of computer operating systems, but
does A LOT of interesting digressing into discussions
about culture and other things.
You may remember the thread a began months ago about
the apparent lack of AI in Stephenson's
_The Diamond Age_. I haven't written since then, so I
hope you'll forgive me if I discuss
what portions of the "In the Beginning..." essay
reveal about his beliefs in other matters
not related to AI, and how a better understanding of
the novels can be had by knowing where
he's coming from.
Among the things I find fascinating about
Stephenson's writing is that much of it (in
particular _The Diamond Age_, but also _Snow Crash_)
seemed to me to implicitly reveal the
author's opinions on certain matters, but I could
never be sure, because all I had to go on
was what his characters believed, which could always
be different that how the author felt.
For example, in the future history of _Snow Crash_ and _The Diamond Age_ (which is a common future history; there are strong hints that _Snow Crash_'s youthful "Y.T." is none other than _The Diamond Age_'s elderly "Mrs. Matheson"), one gets the impression that Stephenson has a low opinion of contempory American culture. I say this because, among other things, he seems to portray it as eventually causing a period of poverty and chaos (_Snow Crash_) followed by the rise of more conservative cultures which he presents in a much more positive light, such as phyles "New Atlantis" (a.k.a. the Neo-Victorians), the "Heartlanders", etc.
What makes the essay "In the Beginning was the
Command Line" different is that it is
NONfiction; it is actually the Neal Stephenson
talking, not John Hackworth. Therefore, I
found the digressions into issues of culture very
interesting, as they confirmed my
suspicions that Stephenson's writings were more than
just cool cyberpunk, but carried certain
messages such as:
(1) Some cultures are superior or inferior to others
in that they are more or less likely to
lead to the happiness and prosperity of their
adherents.
(2) Contemporary American secular culture is inferior
in the sense of (1).
Stephenson makes these memes such central themes to
some of his writing that I feel you
cannot understand the novels without knowing that
these themes are there.
The following are highly edited excerpts from Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Command Line":
"The problem is that once you have done away with the
ability to make judgments as to right
and wrong, true and false, etc., there's no real
culture left... The ability to make
judgments, to believe things, is the entire it point
of having a culture...
"The global anti-culture that has been conveyed into
every cranny of the world by television
is a culture unto itself, and by the standards of
great and ancient cultures like Islam and
France, it seems grossly inferior...
"The only real problem is that anyone who has no
culture, other than this global monoculture,
is completely screwed. Anyone who grows up watching
TV, never sees any religion or
philosophy, is raised in an atmosphere of moral
relativism, learns about civics from watching
bimbo eruptions on network TV news, and attends a
university where postmodernists vie to
outdo each other in demolishing traditional notions
of truth and quality, is going to come
out into the world as one pretty feckless human
being...
"On the other hand, if you are raised within some
specific culture, you end up with a basic
set of tools that you can use to think about and
understand the world. You might use those
tools to reject the culture you were raised in, but
at least you've got some tools...
"In this country, the people who run things--who
populate major law firms and corporate
boards--understand all of this at some level. They
pay lip service to multiculturalism and
diversity and non-judgmentalness, but they don't
raise their own children that way. I have
highly educated, technically sophisticated friends
who have moved to small towns in Iowa to
live and raise their children... Any suburban
community might be thought of as a place where
people who hold certain (mostly implicit) beliefs go
to live among others who think the same
way...
"And not only do these people feel some
responsibility to their own children, but to the
country as a whole. Some of the upper class are vile
and cynical, of course, but many spend
at least part of their time fretting about what
direction the country is going in, and what
responsibilities they have..."