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It may seem odd to spend an entire post on a book that was published 25 years ago, but after re-reading The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson recently I just can’t help myself, the book is just that good. Or, at least the first 99% of it is, I’ve always felt that the ending was too abrupt, and ultimately unsatisfying. Of course any discussion of how something ends means that there’s definitely going to be spoilers, but that’s another reason for talking about something published 25 years ago, the time limit on spoilers has long since expired.
Diamond Age is set in a future where nanotechnology has revolutionized the world, nearly everyone has a matter compiler, and for those that don’t public matter compilers provide the necessities of life (food, blankets, etc.) for free to anyone who requests them.
In parallel with this development the world has been divided into globe spanning tribes, or phyles, as the book refers to them. Phyles are groups of people sharing a tighter cultural bond than individuals in a modern nation state (though perhaps not a historical nation state?) while being more geographically dispersed. (All cites contain multiple phyle enclaves.) Phyles include groups like Mormons, communists (the Senderos), secret cryptographically oriented phyles (this is Stephenson after all) and finally there are the three great phyles:
The Han (consisting of Han Chinese), the Neo-Victorian New Atlantis phyle (consisting largely of Anglo-Saxons, but also accepting Indians, Africans and other members of the Anglosphere who identify with the culture) and Nippon (consisting of the Japanese). The novel raises the question as to whether Hindustan is a fourth Great Phyle, or a “riotously diverse collection of microtribes sintered together according to some formula we don’t get.” (h/t: Wikipedia)
It should also be noted that not everyone belongs to a phyle, and those who don’t are second class citizens.
As you might imagine, given how phyles are constructed, culture plays a very large role in the world of Diamond Age, and discussing how Stephenson treats the various cultures, but particularly the Neo-Victorians (or Vickys as they’re often called) is how I’m going to be spending most of my time.
If you read my book review round up from a couple of weeks ago you’ll remember that I included a quote from Diamond Age on the subject of hypocrisy. The character who was offering his opinion on how hypocrisy had been elevated to “the mother of all vices” was Lord Finkle-Mcgraw, a member of the Neo-Victorian phyle, and in most respects the main driver of events in the novel (though not the main character). As I mentioned the Vickys were one of the “great phyles” and this phyle took the form of a weird corporate oligarchy that owed its allegiance to the British monarchy. Finkle-Mcgraw is an equity lord, meaning that he had a share in the profits of the phyle. This whole construct seems like the kind of thing that would be completely unworkable in reality, but in the book, the Vickys are portrayed as being the phyle you definitely want to be in.
Stephenson’s portrayal of the Neo-Victorians, is definitely what struck me the most on my first read through of Diamond Age, however many years ago. In particular this idea that the tribe holding to traditional values and historical norms would end up being clearly the best tribe. This was in stark contrast to most of the science fiction I had read before, or since in which traditional values either don’t make an appearance or are brought on the stage solely for the purpose of demonstrating how much better future values are, and if the author can throw in some mockery of traditional values, so much the better. But in Diamond Age these values were not only present, they provided a competitive advantage!
It’s tempting to take the next step and hold this up as a broader vindication of tradition, but I’m sure if I did people would hasten to point out that this is fiction, and there are no rules that because something happened in a novel that the chances of it happening in reality are thereby increased. Still, if they’re going to be engaging, the best novels have to reflect at least some reality, and I think that’s precisely what Stephenson has done.
Speaking of reality, and as something of a tangent, one question that occurs after reading Diamond Age, and other Stephenson novels, is where do his political sympathies lie? After his latest novel, Fall (which I reviewed here) featured a whole subplot about internet extremism among (very) fundamental Christians I saw several people asserting that he was obviously very liberal, and if not, then at least very disgusted with Trump. That may be so, but I find it hard to believe that someone could write so eloquently on the subject of traditional norms and customs without having some recognition of their power.
Also to tie it back into the discussion here’s what Finkle-McGraw thinks about culture.
[He] began to develop an opinion that was to shape his political views in later years, namely, that while people were not genetically different, they were culturally as different as they could possibly be, and that some cultures were simply better than others. This was not a subjective value judgement, merely an observation that some cultures thrived and expanded while others failed. It was a view implicitly shared by nearly everyone but, in those days, never voiced.
I’ll leave it to you to decide how much overlap Finkle-McGraw’s view of culture has with Stephenson’s. Also it should be noted that when he’s speaking of “those days” he’s basically talking about our own time (or at least the 1990’s when the book was written). It would be hard to read that section without immediately following it up with the question of what, exactly, makes one culture better than another? And by making the Vickys the most enviable phyle, Stephenson appears to answer that at least part of it is due to their embrace of traditional norms and customs.
In the novel (and in reality?) it’s because of the unity such an embrace provides. A unity that is greater because membership in a phyle is clearly something people have to work for. Not something which happens automatically as an accident of birth (though clearly that has some influence). This makes the phyles of Diamond Age much closer to religions than would be typical for a modern nation. Though as Samual Huntington argues in his work on civilizations you can’t have a civilization without a religion, and that historically the two have been tied together much more closely than they are now. Beyond the specific appeal of the Neo-Victorians, I also find the idea of nations with much tighter ideological bonds very appealing, particularly these days. (And it strongly resembles the proposal of an ideological archipelago proposed by Scott Alexander.)
As you might imagine unity is not the only thing the Vickys have going for them. They’ve combined this unity with immense scientific and engineering prowess as well. It should be obvious that this is a powerful combination, but Stephenson doesn’t handwave it into existence, rather he makes the difficulty of maintaining both of these qualities at the same time one of the central themes of the book, going so far as to have one character, the delightful Miss Matheson, point out that, “It is the hardest thing in the world to make educated Westerners pull together…” (A point I also made in a previous post.) If this is the case how is it done? I’ll allow Miss Matheson to once again provide the answer:
It is upon moral qualities that a society is ultimately founded. All the prosperity and technological sophistication in the world is of no use without that foundation—we learned this in the late twentieth century, when it became unfashionable to teach these things.
I can imagine many people disagreeing with this statement, particularly coming from the mouth of a fictional character, in a book written 25 years, ago, but if so perhaps you will find less to object to in another statement from Miss Matheson:
Some cultures are prosperous; some are not. Some value rational discourse and the scientific method; some do not. Some encourage freedom of expression, and some discourage it. The only thing they have in common is that if they do not propagate, they will be swallowed up by others. All they have built up will be torn down; all they have accomplished will be forgotten; all that they have learned and written will be scattered to the wind. In the old days it was easy to remember this because of the constant necessity of border defence. Nowadays, it is all too easily forgotten.
If you disagree with a foundation of morality I hope you can at least be persuaded that most people would like to preserve what they have built and the things that they have learned. Certainly binding together into a culture is one way of trying to ensure that, but how do you then go on to preserve the subsequent cultural repository? If you’re the Vicky’s how do you maintain unity and technological progress? And more broadly how do you maintain anything at all?
A large part of the problem comes from the fact that the people creating the culture are different from the people living within the culture. It’s made clear in the book that many of the most ardent Neo-Victorians embraced the phyle as a rescue or a correction (or a reaction?) to the licentiousness that surrounded them when they were growing up. But having rejected promiscuity, the last thing they’re going to do is expose their children to it, meaning that people born into the culture won’t have the opportunity to replicate the conditions which lead to the creation of the culture in the first place. The book is initially driven by Finkle-McGraw’s attempt to overcome that problem. Which he does by engaging a young engineer, named Hackworth. Despite its length their initial conversation is worth repeating:
Finkle-McGraw: Tell me, were your parents subjects, or did you take the Oath?
Hackworth: As soon as I turned twenty-one, sir. Her Majesty—at that time, actually, she was still Her Royal Highness—was touring North America, prior to her enrollment at Stanford, and I took the Oath at Trinity Church in Boston.
Finkle-McGraw: Why?
…
Hackworth: I knew two kinds of discipline as a child: none at all, and too much. The former leads to degenerate behavior… My life was [also] not without periods of excessive, unreasoning discipline, usually imposed capriciously by those responsible for the laxity in the first place. That combined with my historical studies led me, as many others, to the conclusion that there was little in the previous century worthy of emulation, and that we must look to the nineteenth century instead for stable social models.”
Finkle-McGraw: Well done, Hackworth! But you must know that the model to which you allude did not long survive the first Victoria.
Hackworth: We have outgrown much of the ignorance and resolved many of the internal contradictions that characterised that era.
Finkle-McGraw: Have we then? How reassuring. And have we resolved them in a way that all of those children down there live interesting lives?
Finkle-McGraw somewhat euphemistically uses the term “interesting” as a catch-all for the many things which drove him and Hackworth to be Neo-Victorians, and which create success and character in general. But regardless of the culture or in the case of the book, the phyle, maintaining the culture that got you to where you are is a constant problem and nowhere more so than right now.
These days, there are many people who view progress as something of an unstoppable force, or at least an inevitability, and if that’s the case then nothing I say will matter in the slightest. And it would be nice if this were so, but I would hope that something like the coronavirus at least engenders some doubt that things will be quite so smooth. If lines at Costco and the price of gold are any indication it certainly appears that way. (If you’re interested in my take on things, I’m not sure I have much to add, but I’m sure it will form the subject for my personal life section when I do the next book review post.)
As I have repeatedly indicated I am not so sanguine about the future. I think that getting to where we are was a massive effort that built on centuries of trial and error, and yes also a significant amount of morality. That we seem to be abandoning many of the things which got us here without really considering whether they might have been important (i.e. Chesterton’s Fence). That not only are we not making life “interesting” for our kids but that many of us are declining to have kids at all.
Ultimately as Miss Matheson says, it’s a question of survival and propagation. We’ve reached a point where there are no barbarians at the gate and where the idea that there might ever be barbarians is scoffed at. And maybe there won’t be, maybe the barbarians are all gone, and no effort is required to keep civilization going or make the lives of children interesting. But even in the absence of barbarians, I feel positive that some effort is nevertheless required to maintain civilization. That in the end certain traditional standards, standards which got us to where we are will also end up being critical to keeping us where we are.
Somewhat unconnected to the topic, while I was writing this I experienced my first earthquake (magnitude 5.7). I try to neither overreact or underreact, but I’ll tell from an eschatological perspective having an earthquake in the middle of a plague is a bad omen. If you were thinking of donating, then this might be the time to do it, after all you never know when the world might end.
I don’t doubt that key components to a culture can make one culture more viable or better than another. Obviously you have to decide what you are selecting for. Are you selecting for sheer survival at any cost? Are you selecting for a balance between survival and quality of life? Is a slave empire that lasts 10,0000 years “better” than a democratic republic that lasts 1000? Are you selecting a culture for its ideals or for how well it implements those ideas or a mixture of both?
Western civilization claims to be based on some pretty radical idealism, but it is possible that there are two stories in culture? The fist is the self-told narrative about good-hearted men who fight evil and make the wheels of capitalism go in a democratic meritocracy driven by hard work, and the second, more objective narrative which includes those elements but also includes mass exploitation, slavery, genocide, mass murder, and boatloads of outright theft and territorial behavior over status and power.
I guess my challenge to you is, if you think a moral culture is better than an immoral one, why in the world would you be a traditionalist? Do you perceive previous generations of Europeans and Americans as being more “moral” than current ones, or just more ‘viable’ in terms of survival? And in what ways?
As you say reducing it to merely measuring years overlooks several things that many people find very important, but I don’t think that’s what Miss Matheson was talking about, because she mentions those other important things: what a culture has built, what they have accomplished, and most importantly what they have learned.
As far as your criticism of Western Civ, they probably committed all the crimes you mentioned, but as usual what is are control civ? Is there some other civ that didn’t engage in “mass exploitation, slavery, genocide, mass murder, and boatloads of outright theft and territorial behavior over status and power”?
In answer to your question, there are certainly ways in which modern society is more moral (though I think it has less to do with ideology and more to do with material progress). But there are many ways in which they are far, far less moral, particularly in the ways that matter for civilization. Or at least that’s what Unwin is arguing in Sex and Culture. Stay tuned for my review of that. And yes, I would also argue that morality is less orthogonal to survival than most people think.
I agree that there are no large peaceful control civilizations to point to. But that’s not a point in favor of prudishness–it just demonstrates that moral action towards other cultures is not a winning move. Extreme immorality and aggression is probably also not a winning strategy. The winning strategy seems to be a mostly peaceful society with opportunistic exploitation and genocide, which I don’t think is moral. It’s certainly traditional, though. The point we clearly agree on is that morality is less orthogonal to survival than people want to believe.
I’m saying that by Christian standards, or generally most sets of moral standards I can think of, it doesn’t appear the US is significantly less moral than it used to be. The rubric here, or the “control civilization” is Western civ 200 years ago, not a different civilization.
I’m summarizing, but basically Unwin seems to argue that smarter civilizations spend less time rutting and more time producing, and thus have better weapons. Unwin advocates for women’s rights and women in the workforce. And all this is just what the US and Japan have been doing for a few decades now. From 1991 to 2017, the Centers for Disease Control finds the percentage of high-school students who’d had intercourse dropped from 54 to 40 percent. (Also generally people over 40 in the US and Asia are having less sex, too). It seems to me like consumer debt and fiscal anxiety is doing a good job of lowering sex drives and increasing productivity. Does that have the same outcome?
What I’m trying to understand is in what really specific ways you think modern Western culture is less moral than Western culture 200 or 400 years ago. Citing an entire book as a description of morality is pretty broad, especially one that seems to make claims about fitness. The explicit claim you make is:
“certain traditional standards, standards which got us to where we are will also end up being critical to keeping us where we are.”
… and I’m asking WHICH ones you mean, explicitly. Since we agree that morality and survival are not the same thing, then what’s so special about this narrow but nebulous morality you are referring to, and why is it a special kind of morality that IS orthogonal to survival? I’m trying not to make a straw-man by guessing what your definition is, or pick or bad one for you, I want to understand what you are saying.
Obviously this is a huge topic, and I prefer to let my posts do the heavy lifting, but in an effort to not just blow you off I’ll see what I can briefly do.
1- As far as Sex and Culture I would prefer to wait to discuss that until I do a post on it. For one thing I think his sexual energy getting redirected to cultural progress idea is overly simplistic. (Though Stephenson himself mentions it in DA).
2- You seem to be picking times 200-400 years ago which allows you to lump in slavery, which then ends up being a trump card to any discussion of which society was more moral, but Stephenson and I are pointing to the original Victorian era, which was less than 200 years ago and happened after the abolition of slavery in England.
3- That period and the early 20th century was less culturally fragile on nearly every front. Now I pulled a fast one and substituted culture fragility for morality, but that was kind of the point of this post. I think Stephenson is arguing that morality reduces cultural fragility which subsequently promotes survival.
4- Evidence for cultural fragility includes the entire culture war, well below replacement birth rates, rampant low grade selfishness (normally termed self-actualization), and general decadence (see my upcoming review of Age of Decadence by Ross Douthat, but by decadence I mean stagnation after a peak, not rampant orgies).
5- Making all of these connections requires first assuming that culture is important then assuming it’s fragile and then assuming that certain forms of morality (two parent households, belonging to a unified and energetic culture, prohibitions against extramarital sex) offer long-term protection against that fragility.
I’m not sure if I’m losing you at the first two assumptions or if you agree with those and just disagree about final assumption connecting it all to morality. But if you do agree about the fragility of culture I’d be interested in hearing your solution, or at least your theory as to the cause.
In any case, I’m primarily interested in defending the first two assumptions: culture is important and increasingly fragile, and only secondarily on trying to get at the reason why. But the expectations of meta-morality would say that if you’re going to point out fragility, it’s better to also try and point to solutions as well. Which is the biggest reasons to bring in morality. For example, I do think that Unwin’s point that civilizations seem to universally have standards restricting premarital sex is one that is far too easily dismissed by people currently. But when I bring it up that’s as much about trying to get as many theories about culture fragility out there as possible as it as the fact that this particular theory matches my own morality.
6- None of this is to say that the modern world isn’t superior to the Victorian one in many respects, the whole point of this blog is that there was a summer and there was a harvest from that summer, and that harvest didn’t end in 1901 when Victoria died. Parts of it are still going, though I think most if it is over. And what’s happening now is that we’re about to reach the extreme end of the pendulum. And the question is how do we slow things down, and start moving back to a happy medium where we preserve the “harvest” while not careening so far into narcissism that the whole thing disintegrates into warring micro tribes? And the ultimate point of this post was to say, “Hey, Neal Stephenson hints at an answer in DA. It might be worth looking into.”
Just a thought, not sure if it’s right but it might be:
There is no culture war. The ‘culture war’ was and is about as real as the good and bad teams in Professional Wrestling.
@Boonton Okay, I’ll bite, give me your best evidence/argument/incongruity that leads you to suspect that there is no culture war.
Let me see if I understand the argument between Jeremiah and Joshua correctly:
Jeremiah – Old culture points the way to prosperity. This is spearheaded by its built-in morality. New culture is abandoning that morality, to the detriment of future prosperity.
Joshua – What morality? Are you talking about slave-holders or women considered as chattel? How about prohibition against interracial marriage? Jailing homosexuals? How is old English culture ‘better’?
Here’s my sense of the subject: Nearly every culture has practiced slavery, and the evidence suggests that slavery was/is often brutal. Nearly every culture has been built on misogynistic principles, denigrated/punished homosexuality, etc.
There’s something about modern Western society (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/ beginning nearly 200 years ago) that allowed it to correct many of the in-built moral errors associated with nearly all global cultures from time immemorial. Sure, some cultures lacked slavery, but they still oppressed women. Some gave women more freedom, but they still captured and exploited slaves.
The critical feature isn’t where the society started off, but whether they were able to correct the errors of the past. This is where I suspect Jeremiah and Joshua part ways. Jeremiah sees past errors as having been corrected, but not so much in more modern times – even to the point of reversing errors previously corrected – and that this is culturally driven. Joshua sees modern adjustments as continuing to correct errors as they did in the past – and that this is culturally driven. Both appear to agree that it is possible for society to redefine problematic institutions.
When things like sufferage or ending Jim Crow were happening, people often saw the changes as an attack on their underlying cultural norms. Thus, it’s interesting that this mysterious program capable of rewriting fundamental cultural institutions is itself often considered cultural. It’s like a virus capable of CRISPRing out long-held parts of the culture, present in the cell of modern/near-modern society. But the culture fights back each time, arguing that this part of the cultural DNA is necessary for survival and if you cut it out you’ll condemn the organism to a slow death.
And of course there’s no way of knowing ahead of time whether that’s true for any specific experiment in cultural change. Certainly nobody knew that women in the workplace wouldn’t destroy society in all the ways people claimed until the experiment was tried. Nobody knew constitutional rule by the people wouldn’t devolve into anarchy, that homosexual marriage wouldn’t destroy traditional marriage, that prohibition wouldn’t work, that spreading democracy by toppling dictators and manufacturing democratic institutions would fail miserably, that all attempts at instituting socialism would devolve into autocracy, etc., etc.
This, to my mind, is what the term ‘culture war’ has always been used to refer to. It’s the tension between people who feel the current cultural CRISPR is a bad move (of which there have been many!) and people who feel this particular cultural CRISPRing is long overdue and reflexive attempts to stop it are nothing short of barbaric. Support is suicide – leaving our children in ashes. Opposition is evil – how can you even call yourself a ‘good person’ while refusing to do good? Nobody knows who is right, or how long it will take for them to be vindicated.
Trump. Plus you’re asking me for evidence there is no culture war. In WWII would anyone ask for evidence there was no world war? Nope, they would be perplexed and say something like “dude, Pearl Harbor is burning”, maybe not ‘dude’ but you get the idea.
Give me evidence that the culture war is nothing more than a right wing media stunt to manufacture its own ‘news cycle’ for essentially endless fund raising, click bait and ratings among the gullible.
Okay let me try a different tack. From my perspective it feels like everyone is pointing to things and calling it a war. Perhaps on the right they call it a war against Christianity or against the unborn, but on the left you’ll frequently hear talk of a war on LGBTQ individuals and the idea of “conflict theory” (vs. mistake theory) is endemic on the left side of things.
From my perspective everyone is saying well of course there’s a cultural war just look at “our metaphor for Pearl Harbor” and you’re saying that there isn’t, can you point to someone else saying there isn’t a culture war? That it’s all being imagined by the right?
So you’re saying you don’t like the use of the term ‘war’ unless it’s about a defined conflict? For example, the War on Poverty, War on Women, War on the Unborn, War on Workers, Unions, Small Business, the Middle Class, Fathers, Speech, Religion, the Press, etc.
I’ll steelman your argument for a minute and agree that this term is immensely overused to the detriment of both the argument and common sense. Perhaps the best example is the one that approaches most closely to actual conflict: the War on Terror. It is instructive, because it follows the same template many of the other overextensions of the ‘war’ metaphor follow: it’s ill-defined, with no tangible objectives, no conditions for victory (or even for defeat), and no metrics for determining whether progress is being made – let alone how much. The belligerents are vaguely ‘us-vs-them’. We’ve even declared a formal ‘war’, with no end in sight and no way to get out of it. There has to be a better way to define the situation than calling it a war. Selling it as a war brings additional baggage that makes resolving the conflict more difficult. There is no possible way to negotiate a cessation of hostilities, or conditions for one side to surrender, so both sides must view themselves as locked in an eternal struggle to defend their way of life. Clearly that’s dumb.
Okay, now I’m done steelmanning you. You’ve made some great points! I don’t really even disagree with them. However, I’ve fought on the battlefield of semantics before and I always seem to lose when I’m fighting against the common usage side. That’s because language is whatever we define it to be, and the mass of the people have chosen to over-define war. It’s a metaphor that communicates how we feel toward another idea or group. The Culture War is a widely used metonymy at this point. It represents a group of ideas, and everyone on both sides knows what you’re talking about when you bring it up.
You might point out all the ways it fails as a legitimate ‘war’ as above, or you may point out how it’s bad to engage with half the population as though you’re at war with them and completely unwilling to compromise or listen to their grievances. “The Culture War is dumb, and we don’t have to do it. Can we please stop treating each other like enemies? We all lose this kind of fight. There’s a better way,” is a fine approach. But I don’t think you’ll get far by saying, “This set of ideas that has you all hot and bothered never existed in the first place.” All that does is start a new battle to define terms, at which point you both lose.
I rarely hear “war on LGBQT”. Then again I also haven’t heard ‘war on the unborn’ much either. Although I’m sure Google will yield you plenty of hits.
I think it’s pretty simple. Is it not a fact that the right is ridden with quite frankly a lot of hucksters who preen either for positions in the administration or media AND/OR fundraising operations either pulling donations out of people or selling them crap? Does that model not result in a race to the bottom where the loudest, most tabloid voice wins? Hence why wouldn’t claims of ‘war’ be about as serious as one should take the posturing of professional wresting? I think the onus would be to show me a real war while a fake one is much more likely.
Personally I think the culture war became an explicit sham when Sarah Palin’s daughter had a kid out of wedlock and then started getting $100K speaking gigs for abstinence.