Fid for a day

This review assumes you know things about Neal Stephenson’s science fiction novel Anathem that have already been widely discussed in announcements and reviews:  the monastic “maths” peopled by monkish “avout,” the separation between the mathic and “extramuros” worlds, the discussions of familiar philosophical issues, the plot-significance of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory, the parallels between the planet Arbre and earth and between the Arbreans and earthlings, and so on.  What many reviews only mention in passing is that the Arbreans’ humanoid physiology is, not coincidentally, like ours; indeed, we (or our descendants) make an appearance late in the book.  Since the role of humans as polycosmic counterparts of Arbreans and other humanoid races is only a provocative sidelight, not a Planet of the Apes-style revelation (when Chuck Heston murmurs, “Oh, my God!” as he espies the Statue of Liberty poking up through the sand) that defines the work, I don’t feel I’ve spoiled too much.

Let me get down to brass tacks:  Anathem does some things very well as a sci-fi entertainment, even though I can’t hail it as the paragon of literary sci-fi art I was hoping to discover as I began my 10-book reading project.

Foremost among Stephenson’s gifts as a writer is his ability to construct a big plot (Anathem is about a thousand pages long—a “thousander,” to misappropriate one of the book’s myriad terms) with an even more massive backstory, and to keep the behemoth moving along at a steady pace.  He uses the first-person perspective of Erasmas, a young avout, as a channel through which to trickle background information about the novel’s world, from the architecture of the concents (monasteries) to the habits and beliefs of the avout to the ways of the outside world to the political and intellectual history of Arbre.  Stephenson’s writing applies an engineer’s precision and economy, page count notwithstanding, to the crafting of a novel.  Nothing wrong with this, although to some tastes it produces a monster less loose and baggy than is called for in a novel.

The Erasmas character is a kind of perfect-fool-everyman who excels at reporting facts and drawing just as many clever conclusions as Stephenson wants to let us in on.  One of my few difficulties in reading this book was the age group of its narrator and how his milieu is handled.  Erasmas is perhaps the equivalent of a college sophomore.  Owing to his contemplative mathic upbringing, he’s probably a few years ahead of a 19-year-old earth lad when it comes to book-learning, but emotionally he’s right on track, maybe even a little behind the curve from lack of hang time at the mall.  He spends time with other dweebs, such as Jesry, the alpha nerd.  The young “suurs” in Erasmas’s peer group are of course the developmental superiors of the “fraas.”  Erasmas learns this when he falls like a ton of bricks for one of his lady-friends, who has been planning their union for months.

Although developments like this are amusing and simply wrought, the level of social interaction is about that of an after-school special.  And this is my main reservation about Anathem:  It doesn’t give adult humanoids much to dwell on and learn from, so it’s not literature that rewards the reader, except as light, entertaining spec-fi (“speculative fiction,” Stephenson’s and others’ preferred expansion of “sf”).

The plot goes all over the Arbrean map, and then some.  Erasmas is drawn out of his concent (“evoked”) and into a sprawling quest across Arbre and into outer space, where he meets aliens from nearby possible worlds who are like himself and us (some of them is us).  Along the way, philosophical conversations (“dialogues”) and musings in Erasmas’s head reveal that the history of ideas and physical theory on Arbre essentially tracks our own.  The book has an extensive glossary, much of which is devoted to mathic equivalents of familiar philosophical and scientific concepts—”Gardan’s Steelyard” for “Occam’s razor,” “Protas” for “Plato,” “Adrakhonian” for “Pythagorean.”  I can’t deny the considerable delight for the nerdish reader in discovering these equivalences, and another of Stephenson’s talents is an ear for le mot juste when it comes to alien-spoofing neologisms.  In fact none of the Arbrean terms is supposed to be a verbatim re-creation of their language; in the introduction to the book, Stephenson spells out that the special words used in the narrative are meant to capture the flavor of Arbrean thought in terms resonant to the terrestrial reader.

It might seem as though the philosophical themes bandied about in Anathem would be of special interest to a philosophy student.  But since controversies such as nominalism vs. Platonism and the catastrophe that is postmodernism are introduced without being plumbed, much less advanced, I can’t say I experienced more than a feeling of solidarity with these aliens from our shared intellectual predicament.

My bottom line on this book is that I don’t regret reading it, yet I wonder whether reading another NS epic will be worth the time spent.  I’m also interested in computers, so I may at least begin Cryptonomicon, which I already own.

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When worldviews collide

Just watched the 2009 documentary “Collision,” in which pastor Doug Wilson and pundit Christopher Hitchens duke it out on the question of whether Christianity is good or bad for the world.  The question sets up a sort of public-policy debate, as if some government agency might mandate either Christianity or atheism for all.  Not that this sort of thing hasn’t been attempted, but the focus of religious debates is usually more ontological than pragmatic:  Does God exist?

The existence of God does figure in this debate, but it doesn’t take center stage, and with good reason.  The question of existence doesn’t touch on the most interesting consequences of our belief in the God described by scripture.  Even if God exists, what could this possibly tell us about His nature?  What moral authority, apart from the self-certifying imprimatur of scripture, would He command?  What should be our relation to an omnipotent being, anyway?  Assuming He exists, why does God hide himself?  Why should God care whether we worship or believe in Him?  These are all questions asked in the philosophy of religion, and for many religious people they never get asked.  I had never considered many of them until I took a course in the subject.

The debate within “Collision” struck me as a near miss or at best a grazing blow, not the flush whomp of two conflicting worldviews that have come to understand each other deeply.  The film is worth watching mainly for its illumination of the two combatants.  Wilson comes across as an autodidact country parson, humble in self-portrait but clearly pleased with his range of knowledge.  In a voice-over, he terms the mastery of theology, scripture, and philosophy needed to face the mighty Hitchens “copiousness.”  There is something Victorian about him.  No less smug is Hitchens, who wields a databaseful of lectern-ready prose on his pet topic of why “God is not Great.”  Hitchens is slicker, more academic, better rehearsed.  He, too, possesses the copiousness the battle demands.

I must confess to having a soft spot for Hitchens, despite his retrograde politics, his ironic self-description as a “contrarian,” and his distinctly non-ironic righteousness in the crusade against religion.  I have known and sympathized before with the schoolyard prodigy who could fight his way out of any scrape using words alone.  To be such a person requires unfathomable fortitude and energy due perhaps to equal parts vanity and fear.  But Hitchens at least searches and makes his search public.  His written and spoken record seems a kind of vanity project, but the same could be said of any engaging body of published work.  His bears his stamp.

Unfortunately for the dialectic conveyed in the film, being smarter, better-spoken, and even right do not guarantee Hitchens a slam-dunk.  Perhaps the filmmakers were trying to keep the contest “close” in order to maintain tension or to focus on the amity between Wilson and Hitchens, which appears to be held together by a shared love of Wodehouse.  Maybe the aim was merely to whet the viewer’s appetite for the meat of the debate itself, toward other dramatic ends.  In any event, Hitchens is portrayed as losing some of his decisive edge about two-thirds through the film.

That’s when Wilson seems to draw Hitchens onto his turf by pressing the issue of how one is supposed to ground one’s morality if not by God’s authority.  Wilson hammers away at the assertion that Hitchens has “helped himself” to the Judeo-Christian ethic in order to wage a (self-defeating) war against Christianity.  The Judeo-Christian ethic is not the only source of moral conviction, of course, and to reason from its primacy is both obtuse and circular.  Wilson seems comfortable with the position this leaves him in.  His strikingly postmodern defense is that participants in such a fundamental debate can only ground their arguments on certain axioms, to which they must return again and again.  If one must argue in the round, best to start and end one’s circle with God’s word.

My preferred response at this point would have been for Hitchens to “go Socratic” (not a bad motto generally) and press the Euthyphro question:  Is the good loved by the gods because it is good, or is it good because it is loved by the gods?  Hitchens eschews this line, perhaps because he himself holds that morality is innate, and, if morality is merely instinctive (or the equivalent for rational beings), it has no independent theoretical foundation that would render the Euthyphro question rhetorical in the desired way.  But by hewing to the Euthyphro line without foundationalism (as I imagine Socrates would have preferred), Hitchens could have held that God’s moral authority can be only as well-founded as morality itself—however well-founded that may be—and that the difficult course of questioning and refining and coming to grips with moral theory is preferable to checking one’s conscience at the chapel doors.  One finds oneself arguing in circles only when one stops trying to improve one’s position.

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