My recent consumption of Neal Stephenson literature has sent me down an old and familiar path, returning to a theme I was first exposed to by the works of Robert Pirsig. It is a theme as diverse as post-cyberpunk science fiction and Amish rumspringa, posing at once an explanation for the past and a seemingly intractable challenge for the future. It bears implications for religious and riotous living alike.

I will apologize only once that the following is more questions than answers. I will also apologize now for the occasional "citation"--this is a page number for my own reference. And as usual, I will apologize for the length. This one's a doozy.

Chapter 1: Stephenson's Neo-Victorianism

If you really want to read The Diamond Age spoiler-free, you may want to skip to Chapter 2. Consider yourself officially spoiler alerted. Mega spoiler-alerted. I'm not giving away the whole book, here, but I am exposing one plot thread almost in its entirety...

Central to the plot of Stephenson's post-cyberpunk nanotech-infused sci-fi is a question, posed by an elderly gentleman of great social standing. Lord Finkle-McGraw belongs to a society of social conservatives, "neo-Victorians" whose genesis came, another character explains, "out of the moral squalor of an earlier generation, just as the original Victorians were preceded by the Georgians and the Regency." But this means that the "old guard believe in [their moral code] because they came to it the hard way" while their children believe it "because they have been indoctrinated to believe it." (355-56)

Lord Finkle-McGraw perceives the advantages posed by such indoctrination--the neo-Victorians excel in commerce and science--but also perceives that the neo-Victorians produce few great leaders or artists. Thus in the early chapters of the book, Lord Finkle-McGraw seeks out an engineer, Hackworth by name. Hackworth was not born into the neo-Victorian society, but came to it "the hard way," after a life knowing "two kinds of discipline as a child: none at all, and too much." And so Lord Finkle-McGraw poses to Hackworth a question about neo-Victorian schooling:

Finkle-McGraw: You yourself said that [the best engineers] led interesting lives, rather than coming from the straight and narrow. Which implies a correlation, does it not?"

Hackworth: Clearly.

Finkle-McGraw: This implies, does it not, that in order to raise a generation of children who can reach their full potential, we must find a way to make their lives interesting. And the question I have for you, Mr. Hackworth, is this: Do you think that our schools accomplish that? Or are they like the schools that Wordsworth complained of?"

(Earlier in their conversation, Lord Finkle-McGraw quoted Wordsworth's The Prelude, which alludes to the dehumanizing effect of indoctrinating servitude)

Hackworth: My daughter is too young to attend school--but I should fear that the latter situation prevails.

Finkle-McGraw: I assure you that it does . . . . (23-24)

The greater part of The Diamond Age is concerned with Lord Finkle-McGraw's engineered response to the problem. He initially contemplates "a sort of young artistic bohemian theme park . . . where young [neo-Victorians] who were so inclined could congregate and be subversive when they were in the mood. [But the] whole idea was self-contradictory." (365) So instead he works with Hackworth to create another way to cultivate subversiveness; the result is a nanotech wonder known as the "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer."

The results of Lord Finkle-McGraw's experimentation are mixed. The Primer is given to three girls. One (Lord Finkle-McGraw's granddaughter, for whose benefit the experiment is first conceived) grows up "rebellious and high-spirited," another "bright but depressed, a classic manic-depressive artist." The last appears to have taken the lesson well: when asked whether she will conform or rebel, she responds, "Neither . . . . Both ways are simple-minded--they are only for people who cannot cope with contradiction and ambiguity." (356)

Several possible explanations are forwarded for this tripartite outcome, (appropriately enough) permitting Stephenson to advance diverse theories without necessarily endorsing any of them. In short, subversiveness is exposed as a necessary but apparently insufficient ingredient in producing truly great people.

Chapter 2: An Introduction to Pirsig

I must apologize in advance for what follows, limited as it is to a "quick and dirty" outline of Pirsigian thought. However, familiarity with Pirsig's work must precede a Pirsigian approach to Stephenson's work. It's a rough outline I'm hoping to polish into material suitable for publication on of these days...

Robert Pirsig's first book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, details his pursuit of "Quality," a transcendent value or "betterness" that he ultimately posits as the fundamental constituent of reality. In his second book, Lila, Pirsig divides Quality into two types: static and Dynamic. Then he subdivides static quality into four levels: inorganic, biological, social, and intellectual. Of these he writes:

This classification of patterns is not very original, but the Metaphysics of Quality allows an assertion about them that is unusual. They are discrete. . . . Although each higher level is built on a lower one it is not an extension of that lower level. . . . The higher level can often be seen to be in opposition to the lower level, dominating it, controlling it where possible for its own purposes. (149)

The four levels of static quality are "value" levels. The value that holds together a rock or a planet is an inorganic "value," which is clearly different from the value that holds a nation together. Biological patterns of value constitute life; social patterns of value constitute cultures and societies; intellectual patterns of value constitute ideas. Enabling interaction between these discrete levels is Dynamic Quality, a fundamentally indefinable force that can manifest as evolution to a higher level, degeneration to a lower level, or a lateral shift to maintain stasis. In some sense Dynamic Quality also rests atop the four levels of static quality in the evolutionary chain, which itself gives us an interesting reinterpretation of morality:

What the evolutionary structure of the Metaphysics of Quality shows is that there is not just one moral system. There are many. In the Metaphysics of Quality there's the morality called the "laws of nature," by which inorganic patterns triumph over chaos; there is a morality called the "law of the jungle" where biology triumphs over the inorganic forces of starvation and death; there's a morality where social patterns triumph over biology, "the law"; and there is an intellectual morality, which is still struggling in its attempts to control society. (158)

"Morality," then, is the subjugation or consumption of low-value patterns by higher patterns. The evolution between these patterns bears some resemblance to an evolutionary "survival of the fittest," but under the Metaphysics of Quality, the direction of the Dynamic is toward greater freedom and versatility, as well as toward Quality itself. This is not to suggest that the pursuit of Dynamic Quality is all wine and roses; speaking of biological patterns, Pirsig writes, "Without Dynamic Quality the organism cannot grow. Without static quality the organism cannot last. Both are needed." The same applies at every level, and at this point Pirsig's philosophy echoes age-old truisms regarding the balance between stasis and change. Stagnation is death; chaos is death. In order to preserve whatever change it has wrought, Dynamic Quality ("sexual choice, symbiosis, death and regeneration, communality, communication, speculative thought, curiosity and art") must result in "static latches" ("bones, shells, hide, fur, burrows, clothes, houses, villages, castles, rituals, symbols, laws [or] libraries"). (147)

While much of Lila is concerned with instantiations of the Metaphysics of Quality, two specific examples are especially interesting. The first is Pirsig's interpretation of a story shared by anthropologist Ruth Benedict. The story is about a nineteenth century Pueblo Indian brujo who was more or less proclaimed anathema by his people's most powerful and respected priest. When the brujo was hung by his thumbs to prompt a confession of his misdeeds, he sent for the U.S. government, who came and imprisoned the priest. After his release, the priest refused to return to service, proclaiming his power broken. The brujo, on the other hand, eventually governed his people:

It was the white man to whom he sent for help and who saved him. It was the white anthropologists, presumably, who took dictation of all his songs and stories and made him well known in books of which his tribesmen could not have been ignorant. [Pirsig] concluded that the real reason the [tribe] made the brujo governor had to be because of this. The brujo had shown he could deal successfully with the one tribe that could easily wipe them out any time it wanted to. . . . He had real political clout. . . . The tribal frame of values that condemned the brujo was . . . "static good." (114)

The second example actually concerns the historic aftermath of Pirsig's first book. Pirsig characterizes the Hippie movement, which adopted his first book as a sort of "culture-bearer," as a rejection of social and intellectual patterns. This "left just two directions to go: toward biological quality and toward Dynamic Quality." The problem was that no one seemed to see the difference between the two:

American writing on Zen during this period showed this confusion. Zen was often thought to be a sort of innocent "anything goes." If you did anything you pleased, without regard for social restraint, at the exact moment you pleased to do it, that would express your Buddha-nature. . . . [But] Japanese Zen is attached to social disciplines so meticulous they make the Puritans look almost degenerate. Back in the fifties and sixties [Pirsig] had shared this confusion of biological quality and Dynamic Quality . . . [but according to the Metaphysics of Quality when] biological quality and Dynamic Quality are confused the result isn't an increase in Dynamic Quality. It's an extremely destructive form of degeneracy. (303)

Chapter 3: Synthetic Climax

Lord Finkle-McGraw introduced Dynamic Quality into the lives of three young girls. All three ultimately rejected the static culture of their birth, but only one achieved that enlightened state of mind Lord Finkle-McGraw sought so eagerly to induce. We see hints of this pattern in Nietzsche, in the aforementioned Amish period of relaxed social pressure on adolescents, in glorious as well as ignominious revolutions against established governments throughout history across the entire world.

If I may make a handful of gross overgeneralizations, I think we see it playing out rapidly in the history of the United States of America. A good deal of conformity once encouraged by social pressure is now, devastatingly, made mandatory through legal coercion, strangling the Dynamic forces that once made us the most innovative nation on the planet. Like Stephenson's neo-Victorians, we excel at economics and science, and we are still free enough to be one of the most artistic nations in the world. But we're moving in a much more conservative, much more authoritarian direction. Whether we swing "conservative" or "liberal" in the forthcoming Presidential election, neither candidate will work to decrease the centralization of power in the federal government.

This is not a matter of malice or stupidity; the importance of static quality cannot be denied. Lord Finkle-McGraw was a paragon of neo-Victorian morality. But he recognized that stagnation eventually results in a messy revolt. Probably the most famous example of this in American history is the cultural revolution of the 1960's and 1970's, a violent reaction to the cultural suffocation and (often government-enforced) conformity of post-WWII authoritarianism. But for many participants in that revolution, permanent brain damage, sexually transmitted diseases, and even death were the result. The good ideas that sprang from that revolution were largely co-opted by various political factions and transformed into static agendas, soulless dogmatism with no further attachment to the nourishing roots of Dynamic Quality.

One of the quotes you'll occasionally see in the "Wisdom" sidebar of this site is from Lewis Perelman: "Dogma is the sacrifice of wisdom to consistency." Stephenson's suggestion that consistency (in either conformity or rebellion) is the paradigm of small-minded people is a very interesting one to me. In effect, the challenge is this: to have the wisdom to decide when one must or may conform, and when one must or may choose otherwise.

The last four paragraphs seem a bit scattered to me, so more apologies are in order. Hopefully, somewhere between Lord Finkle-McGraw, Robert Pirsig, and my own fractured observations, you've reached an understanding of the challenge. The challenge is that Robin Hood is a hero and a thief; that the Founding Fathers were right to overthrow their government but somehow (arguably) we are not similarly situated; that converts always seem to have more zeal. We do not want our children to be thieves, or revolutionaries, or converts to some other faith, yet we inevitably encourage them to emulate such figures.

Chapter 4: Practicum

Thus, as interesting as the problem is from a philosophical standpoint, I find myself in the shoes of Lord Finkle-McGraw, looking at my progeny and wondering how I can possibly impart to them the spirit of subversiveness without exposing them to permanent damage. It bears mentioning here my own relationship with the authoritarian and hopelessly conformist collective known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is the faith into which I was raised, but it is also the faith to which I adhere in adulthood, now by choice rather than by habit. All spiritual and doctrinal assertions momentarily aside, the static patterns of behavior taught by the Church yield significant benefit on an individual and familial level when practiced over the course of years.

The challenge is that a large contingent of Church members never realize those benefits. Some, stifled by the conformity and authoritarianism, depart. Others, indoctrinated into uncritical conformity, enjoy the benefits of the culture without contributing anything valuable in return; these people are content but unremarkable. They are also confused (or angry) when their children reject the Church, but it is not really the Church such children reject. Rather, it is the stagnant qualitative wasteland they have come to associate with the Church. Some of these children learn "the hard way" and ultimately return. Many do not.

It is entirely possible to walk the line between the extremes. I am comfortable wearing my black shirt (no tie) into a building filled with people who, to some degree or another, disapprove of this choice. I do not rebel for the sake of rebellion, nor do I conform for the sake of conformity. Somehow I managed to learn "the hard way" without the dangerous kinds of rebellion that often accompany such lessons. But I know many who explored similar paths and are, as yet, still lost. And I know others who found approximately what I found, but found it somewhere else entirely.

My personal challenge is thus: I would not keep my children away from the Church, for fear that they would miss the lessons that have framed my own personal happiness and built the relatively luxurious lives my children now enjoy. Yet I despair of the possibility that they will take the proffered indoctrination and find themselves, like their inevitable peers, growing into unquestioning, uncritical, unremarkable people. I would teach them the benefits of conformity and respecting authority, but I would also teach them the benefits of rebellion and questioning authority. To rephrase: I would protect my children from "the hard way," the degeneracy of unanchored Dynamic Quality, and yet I would also protect them from the apparent alternative.

Thus, at last, the titular metaphor. If people are built like houses, perhaps conformity is the scaffolding. Many people tear down the scaffolding before the house is complete, resulting in stunted growth. Others fear to remove the scaffolding, lest the building collapse, concealing forever the unique beauty that building could have offered the neighborhood. The most magnificent buildings are those constructed to their fullest height, then released from the concealing constraints of merely instrumental construction materials.

I will have to think on it further. It seems a clumsy metaphor, gangly and pock-marked, but (as with children) this may be a sign that it simply needs time to mature. I must determine how best to furnish my children with the strongest scaffolding, all the while reminding them that despite its strength, it is a means, not an end.