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"The Diamond Age" by Neal Stephenson
Posted by Tanos on Mon 16 Jul 07, 1:07 AM
Tags: books, household_ds
Neo-Victorianism is one attractive basis for Household D/s: the Victorian
/ Edwardian period was the last time middle-class families expected to have
servants and live in hierarchical, extended households. Neal Stephenson's
novel
"The
Diamond Age" doesn't deal with D/s or service, but it does present a
Neo-Victorian world which I'd like to explore in this review.
The book was published in 1995, just at the point when the Web entered the
awareness of people working for newspapers and broadcasters,
but Stephenson had already anticipated many of its features with the Metaverse system of his 1992 book, "Snow Crash".
Although "The Diamond Age" is
set in the middle of the 21st century a lot of its ideas are already with
us: it's a world full of wirelessly networked computers, which allow people
to connect in real-time, where entertainment and business services are
outsourced across the network to people in other timezones on other
continents, and where people read books and newspapers on screens, on sites
that are updated constantly.
The major technical advance over today's world is
the use of nanotechnology: robots smaller than human cells which can do
everything from carrying away dust to building artificial islands to order.
But rather than using this to create a visibly futuristic world like "Blade
Runner" or "Minority Report", the most successful group, the Neo-Victorians
of New Atlantis, have adopted the culture and manners of their English
speaking 19th century ancestors, whilst making use of subtle nanotechnology:
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Fiona Hackworth had been wandering through the Royal Ecological Conservatory
bracketed by her parents, who hoped that in this way they could keep mud and
vegetable debris off her skirts. The strategy had not been completely
successful, but with a quick brush, John and Gwendolyn were able to transfer
most of the dirt onto their white gloves. From there it went straight into
the air. Most gentlemen's and ladies' gloves nowadays were constructed of
infinitesimal fabricules that knew how to eject dirt; you could thrust your
gloved hand into mud, and it would be white a few seconds later.
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And it's not just clothing styles and cleanliness that have been
appropriated from the 19th century: the whole system of etiquette, a titled
aristocracy, and deference have been adopted, and learnt by new members of
the society:
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"Your friends are too kind," said Carl Hollywood. He was still a little
unsure of the etiquette. To accept the compliment at face value would have
been boastful; to imply that His Grace's friends were incompetent judges of
theatre was not much of an improvement; he settled for the less dangerous
accusation that these friends had a superfluity of goodness.
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One of the themes of the book is the competition between different cultures
rather than nations, as the state has withered away in the face of an
untaxable economy based on the internet. Several future cultures are
described, in particular Neo-Confucians on the east coast of China, which
I'm not going to deal with. All of them have adapted to the online world, in
which citizenship is largely optional rather than an accident of birth. As a
result, each of these groups, or phyles, exists in enclaves around the
world, as if Chinatown in New York and London were part of the same
distributed state.
The Neo-Victorians, who are mostly the descendents of English-speaking
peoples (the term "Anglosphere" was coined in this book), share the
cultural absolutism of their forebears, as argued by Duke Alexander
Chung-Sik Finkle McGraw (born in Korea but raised in the US) in his reaction
to the 20th century world of relativism and increasing mediocrity:
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Finkle McGraw
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.
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The 20th century gets another bashing from John Percival Hackworth, a
Neo-Victorian nanotechnology engineer:
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My life was not without periods of excessive, unreasoning discipline,
usually imposed capriciously by those responsible for 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.
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This isn't an attempt to return to the Victorian age itself - for example, they use nanotechnology as I've said and Hackworth points out that they have "removed many of the internal contradictions that characterised that era". Instead it is salvaging the best from the period and then using that as the starting point for their own society.
One of the charges often levelled at the real-life Victorians is hypocrisy,
and Lord Finkle-McGraw deals with this head on. First, by pointing
out that moral relativism removes the ability to criticise people on ethical
grounds: only inconsistency is left as a basis for criticism, and that leads
to unrealistic demands that ultimately deny the fallible humanity of
individuals:
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You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices.
It was all because of moral relativism. You see, in that sort of a
climate, you are not allowed to criticize others - after all, if there is no
absolute right and wrong, then what grounds are there for criticism?
Now, this
led to a good deal of general frustration, for people are naturally
censorious and love nothing better than to criticize one another's
shortcomings. And so it was that they seized on hypocrisy and elevated it
from a ubiquitous peccadillo into the monarch of all vices. For, you see,
even if there is no right and wrong, you can find grounds to criticise
another person by contrasting what he has espoused with what he has actually
done. In this case, you are not making any judgment whatsoever as to the
correctness of his views or the morality of his behaviour - you are merely
pointing out that he has said one thing and done another. Virtually all
political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out
of hypocrisy.
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This is very much the political world we're in, where - for example -
openly racist organisations in other parts of the world are given a free pass
by the Left who claim
it's just part of that culture; but people on the Centre and Right who oppose
racism are accused of secretly harbouring it, as their words are inspected
for double meanings that can be twisted and touted as proof of hypocrisy.
I don't believe this situation is sustainable, and sooner or later there will
be a realignment back towards cultural absolutism, and then, for example,
racism will be seen as wrong however far away, dark skinned or religiously extreme the
racist is.
But how can Victorian hypocrisy be defended? Finkle-McGraw's second point
is to differentiate between intentional deceit and failures to meet one's own
exacting standards:
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Because they were hypocrites the Victorians were despised in the late
twentieth century. Many of the persons who held such opinions were, of
course, guilty of the most nefandous conduct themselves, and yet saw no
paradox in holding such views because they were not hypocrites themselves —
they took no moral stances and lived by none.
We take a somewhat different view of hypocrisy.
In the late twentieth century Weltanschauung, a hypocrite was someone who
espoused high moral views as part of a planned campaign of deception — he
never held these beliefs sincerely and routinely violated them in privacy.
Of course, most hypocrites are not like that. Most of the time it's a
spirit-is-willing, flesh-is-weak sort of thing.
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And this leads up to Finkle-McGraw's third point and the pay-off, where
"hypocrisy" of a type which is rightly seen as mere failure, is also seen as a part of
a virtuous endeavour to set high, absolute standards, and take the risk of
not always achieving them:
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No one ever said it was easy to hew to a strict code of conduct. Really, the
difficulties involved — the missteps we make along the way — are what make
it interesting. The internal, and eternal, struggle between our base
impulses and the rigorous demands of our own moral system is
quintessentially human. It is how we conduct ourselves in that struggle that
determines how we may in time be judged by a higher power.
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Another charge often levelled at Victorians and nineteenth century standards
of propriety and self control is that they were cold and repressed; that
schools produced emotionally stunted individuals, who were unable to relate
to other people. But this isn't a uniquely Victorian idea: Stoicism was a
virtue amongst Greeks and Romans, although that's been partly tainted due
its association with the classically educated Victorians. However, it's also
valued, even in Western popular culture, as part of some Eastern traditions:
for example, the endurance and dedication associated with martial arts.
The character Nell realises this, as she watches Colonel Napier of the Royal
Joint Forces Command fencing with a fanatic of the Neo-Confucian Fists of
Righteous Harmony from mainland China, and realises the similarity between
Victorian and Japanese temperaments:
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Still, there was something about this very contradiction that made him, and
by extension all Victorian men, fascinating to her. They lived a life of
nearly perfect emotional denial - a form of asceticism as extreme as that of
a medieval stylite. Yet they did have emotions, the same
as anyone else, and only vented them in carefully selected circumstances.
...
Watching Napier at work, watching the medals and braid swinging and glinting
on his jacket, Nell realized that it was precisely their emotional
repression that made the Victorians the richest and most powerful people in
the world. Their ability to submerge their feelings, far from pathological,
was rather a kind of mystical art that gave them nearly magical power over
Nature and over the more intuitive tribes. Such was also the strength of the
Nipponese.
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I've left a lot out of this review, especially the various Neo-Confucian
groups, the plot line of Nell, and the interactive "Young Lady's
Illustrated Primer" that educates her. The book also has one of
Stephenson's abrupt endings that leaves a lot for the reader to speculate
about, which some readers strongly dislike.
But I do find the Neo-Victorian combination of future technology and
Victorian culture, plus the rehabilitation of some Victorian virtues, to be
enthralling. Part of the reason Victorianism is one natural template for
Household D/s is the way it stresses these master virtues of standards,
responsibility, and dignity.
Edited Tue 26 Feb 08, 11:46 PM by Tanos
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