Lacking any moral code, they confuse inevitability with Right.
– Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
I don’t usually do novel reviews here, though I alternate between fiction and nonfiction in my reading. There are a couple of obvious reasons to change that: I write fiction, I hope to make money from it, and I have fiction-related goals on the blog.
The other reason might not be quite as obvious, and it ties so nicely with the particular book in question that I wish I could say I’d planned it.
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In The Diamond Age (or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer), Stephenson tells the story of a very young girl named Nell – a ‘thete’ (read: welfare-class. ‘thete’ refers to landless freemen in ancient Greece. Appropriate, but I digress). Nell is living a typical poor child’s life – an unreliable mother and her carousel of abusive boyfriends leave her to be looked after by her gangbanger older brother.
But before she can be completely subsumed by the destructive culture she was born into, Nell’s older brother steals the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer – a ‘book’ (actually a nanotech supercomputer) designed to instill upper-class values in a young girl through interactive fairy tales.
The Primer was commissioned by an Equity Lord – one of the planet’s most elite aristocrats, a self-made man concerned about his granddaughter’s future. The Equity Lord believes that his success was not due to luck, innate intelligence, or even his education – he believes that he was successful because of his personality and his values. In short, it was what he believed and how he felt – not what he knew – that propelled him to the heights of greatness.
He wanted the same outcome for his daughter, and he didn’t trust her parents or the school system to bring her up to be the right kind of person to succeed and conquer. He designed the Primer as a sort of moral mentor, meant to guide the young girl’s development and mold her psychology into that of a champion.
Much of the book recounts Nell’s experiences with/in the Primer – a kind of video-game storybook that leads her through traditional-style fairytales, often with grim morals. The book maps Nell’s psychological state and adjusts the stories to match her current life (her four companions, for example, are based on her four stuffed animals).
Over the course of the story the Primer guides Nell out of her abusive home environment and into further (real-life) adventures beyond it.
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The second half of the book veers into a dreamier, abstract kind of futurism that I didn’t find nearly as interesting, but Stephenson’s writing stays compelling throughout and there are dozens of moral lessons in the book.
So – like Nell herself learned who to be while reading about Faery Kings and Queens, we can learn a little about who to be while reading about Nell. And like the Primer revealed the character of its architect, we can learn something of Stephenson’s philosophy from The Diamond Age.
A handful of lessons:
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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.
– Neal Stephenson
The Primer’s architect correctly identified the root cause of all glory. It is on a foundation of moral qualities – virtue, courage, tenacity – that an individual, and thus a society, builds its house.
No number of college degrees, iPhone apps, tax reforms or subsidies can propel a person – or a nation – to greatness. It takes a higher virtue.
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[like] many universities at the time, ISU insisted that its students study a broad range of subjects, including arts and humanities. Finkle-McGraw chose instead to read books, listen to music, and attend plays in his spare time.
– Neal Stephenson
Study is fine, but study and leisure are different things – and in all subjects, practice is often preferable to study.
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Now, this was clearly unfair, and I protested that the birds were obviously trying to favor Pteranodon. This kind of argument might have worked with ants or even shrews; but the King of the Birds would hear none of it. For them, virtue consisted in being birdlike, and fairness didn’t enter into it.
– Neal Stephenson
Three lessons here:
- Reality doesn’t care about your idea of fairness. In this case, the Dinosaur (a T-rex, one of Nell’s fairytale companions) was being asked to cross a chasm of lava and retrieve a flower from a mountain. Apparently impossible for him, as he could not fly – but that was the challenge, and railing that it was impossible for him and easy for someone else got him nowhere.
- A King’s virtue is absolute. The King of the Birds valued grace and flight, and it didn’t matter to him that the T-rex was ‘unfairly’ unable to embody these virtues. When developing your morality, you don’t need to account for others.
- You don’t have to accept others’ opinions on your methods. The Dinosaur rerouted a river to ‘freeze’ the lava so he could cross on foot. The King of the Birds wasn’t pleased that the spirit of the challenge had been undermined, but he was forced to give Dinosaur his reward for completing the task.
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The seed of this idea had been germinating in his mind for some months now but had not bloomed, for the same reason that none of Hackworth’s ideas had ever developed into companies. He lacked an ingredient somewhere, and as he now realized, that ingredient was subversiveness.
– Neal Stephenson
It’s not enough to be brilliant or even driven. You have to be willing to break the system, to proceed without permission (and perhaps against orders), if you’re going to be truly great.
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If a well-written, brilliantly thought out sci-fi morality play sounds good to you, pick this one up.
And remember – who you are and what you believe do matter. They probably matter more than your degreee, your latest productivity hack, or your network. So if you want to change your life, start from the inside – and don’t ignore books like The Diamond Age. They may not teach you how to build your next website, but they might teach you why.
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Bonus quotes:
A honeybee cruising for nectar is pretty despite its implicit threat, but the same behavior in a hornet three times larger makes one glance about for some handy swatting material.
– Neal Stephenson
But Mom broke up with Brad; she didn’t like craftsmen, she said, because they were too much like actual Victorians, always spouting all kinds of crap about how one thing was better than another thing, which eventually led, she explained, to the belief that some people were better than others.
– Neal Stephenson
Die Gallantly 