Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing

by Neal Stephenson

  The F.B.I. was surprised by the fire because it apparently did not take David Koresh’s religion at face value. Now many commentators find fault with the Government, and in so doing misunderstand Branch Davidians even more miserably than the F.B.I. (The agency’s bombardment of the compound with amplified rock and Tibetan chants shows that it understood synthetic-culture shock at least well enough to use it as a weapon.) The pundits (and Congressional inquisitors) who find fault with the F.B.I.’s approach and who suggest that anyone other than the cultists themselves is to blame for the deaths are just as out of it as the Danes in 870.

  In weighing the morality of the Branch Davidians, it is not necessary to go any deeper than the fact that they were abusers, (allegedly) molesters and (finally) murderers of their own children. But has our society really secularized to the point where we are so bewildered by people with sincere religious faith? The F.B.I. can perhaps be forgiven for not having seen it in the Branch Davidians’ words—but how can the critics fail to recognize it in their deeds?

  In my adopted city, the sun is out for once, illuminating the flowery payoff of a long, rainy spring. No apocalypses seem imminent and the citizens, few of whom were actually born here, are pursuing the customs of their chosen cultures. Around here, this means a lot of young people in bright clothes, healthier than you or me, riding bikes, drinking espresso, and typing away on their PowerBooks—activities that would doubtless meet the approval of the journalists who patronize the Branch Davidians by scolding the F.B.I. The scene is as shiny and inviting as the spring snow on the glaciated slopes of the Cascades, which conceals jagged crevasses hundreds of feet deep. Still it is a better place to live and to raise children than older societies that held up people like St. Ebbe the Younger as role models.

  For many, the heavy eschatological issues that lie just below the surface of religion are simply too icky and troublesome to think about. But in a society where multiculturalism has become a new creed, it would not hurt for some of us to spend some time trying to see things from the standpoint of a sincerely religious person, just as we would for a differently abled sexual minority.

  Though I have recently started going back to church, I am as full of doubts and skepticism as many full-blown atheists. Even so it doesn’t take much of a stretch to understand that the Branch Davidians didn’t think death was such a bad thing. One does not have to believe David Koresh was the Messiah to understand that he wasn’t kidding. Next time the organs of secular society find themselves pointing their cameras and gun barrels into a compound full of Scripture-toting survivalists, a perusal of the lives of saints or the story of Masada might be illuminating.

  Time Magazine Article About Anathem (2012)

  —An army of Western citizen-soldiers marches into Mesopotamia. Their mission: to replace a cruel dictator with a friendly leader. The dictator’s conscript army scatters like chaff before the heavier armor and superb discipline of the Westerners. But the new leader turns out to be a slippery con man. A quick victory turns into a long stay. Soldiers and commanders fall victim to sneak attacks. The folks at home are dismayingly quick to forget about their faraway army. Their journey home turns into an ordeal, the soldiers harried by an elusive foe skilled at asymmetrical warfare. They finally come home to a country they hardly recognize, whose people are uneasy with hardened combat veterans in their midst, and whose political leadership is worried about how they will upset the balance of power.

  That’s Anabasis, written 2500 years ago by Xenophon.

  —The greatest military power in the world sends its army into a populous Middle Eastern country. The stated purpose: to overthrow its capricious, torture-prone dictator and return the land to its former state of peace and prosperity. The ulterior motive: to seize control of its resources, which will pay for the invasion once the people are given the modern Western-style government they yearn for. Sharp resistance from the dictator’s elite troops soon crumbles before the invaders’ overwhelming firepower and mobility. The dictator flees into hiding in the desert, where he long evades his pursuers. The invaders march into his capital and are astounded by the wealth and luxury of his palaces. But they don’t get the welcome they were expecting. Religious leaders exhort the common people to fight them. Faceless jihadists abduct stragglers and decapitate them or hold them for ransom. The foreigners build fortified zones in the major cities. The expected swag never materializes. Food and provisions must be imported from home at great cost. No expense is spared to bring the long-suffering troops the comforts of home. This lavish operation, however, is soon riddled with corruption. Faced with other demands on military resources, Napoleon Bonaparte decides to leave Egypt in August 1799.

  —On August 1st, 2007, the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis collapses during rush hour . . .

  “Hey, wait a sec!” you might be saying, “I thought this was another diatribe about the war in Iraq . . . how does a rusty bridge figure into it?”

  The answer: I’m interested in a larger topic: the attention span of our society. Bear with me.

  Literate people used to spend a lot of time reading books, but during the Internet years those have begun to seem more and more like a distinct minority: a large and relatively well-off minority, to be sure, but one that simply doesn’t register in the electronic media, as vampires are invisible in mirrors. They are out there somewhere, the book-readers in their millions, and they are talking to each other. Books, though, and the thoughts that go through the heads of their readers, are too long and complex to work on the screen—be it a talk show, a PowerPoint presentation, or a web page. Bookish people sense this. They don’t object to it. They don’t favor electronic media anyway. So why should they make a fuss if those media Photoshop them out of the national scene? They know how to find each other and to have the long conversations that nourish their bookish souls.

  A few years ago I began thinking that the bookish people of the world were becoming a little bit like medieval monks, living austere but intellectually complex lives in voluntary seclusion from a gaudy and action-packed secular world. I’ve written a novel, Anathem, based on that premise.

  It’s paradoxical, I suppose, to write a long book about how no one reads long books any more: an ambiguity I’ll have a hard time explaining on talk shows.

  If bookishness were just a niche pastime, like stamp collecting or waveboarding, none of this would really matter. But it’s more than that. It is the collective memory and the accumulated wisdom of our species.

  The rough-and-ready intellectual consensus of the mid–Twentieth Century is being pushed out by a New Superstition whose victims can find testimony on the Internet for anything they choose to believe. The only cure for it is reading books, and lots of them. When all things bookish are edited out of public discourse, strange things happen, or seem to. When our societal attention span becomes shorter than the lifetime of a steel bridge over a river, what appears to be a solid strip of highway can suddenly fall out from under us. Like a portent from the medieval world.

  Everything and More Foreword (2003)

  When I was a boy growing up in Ames, Iowa, I belonged to a Boy Scout troop whose adult supervision—consisting almost entirely of professors from the Iowa State University of Science and Technology—devised the following project for us to pursue when not occupied with dodgeball and clove hitches. One of the scouts’ dads—an eminent professor of agricultural engineering—obtained, from a lab in his department, a sack of genetically identical corn kernels, carried them across campus, and handed them off to one of the other scouts’ dads: a physicist employed by the Ames Laboratory. This was an offshoot of the Manhattan Project. The uranium enriched at Oak Ridge, and used in the first atomic bombs, had been refined from its ore by a process developed at Ames. Dad #2, who had been present at the startup of the world’s first atomic pile in a racquetball court at the University of Chicago, carried the seeds into a hot room buried a couple of stories beneath one of the Ames Lab’s buildings and handed it off to a mechan
ical arm that carried it behind a thick wall of yellowish lead-laced glass and set it down in the vicinity of something that was radioactive. After a certain amount of time had passed, he retrieved the irradiated seeds and brought them to the next meeting of our Scout troop and distributed them to the boys. I distinctly remember looking at the kernels in the palm of my hand and noting that they had been washed with paint or ink of two or three different colors, and, though the color code was not explained to us (not, at least, before the expiration of my attention span), I caught the spoor of the Scientific Method, and guessed that different batches had been exposed to greater or lesser amounts of radiation. In any case, we were directed to take these seeds home and plant them and water them. In a few weeks’ time, we would bring the results to a meeting where two prizes would be handed out: one for the tallest, healthiest corn plant, the other for the weirdest mutation. And indeed we ended up with both: proud stalks that would do any Iowa farmer proud, and plants, in many cases quite beautiful, that were scarcely recognizable as belonging to the relevant taxonomic phylum. If anyone had asked us “do you imagine that other scout troops in other towns are doing anything remotely like this” we would, after some higher-brain activity, have guessed no. No one asked, however, and so our lower brains assimilated the whole scenario as normal, like playing catch and making s’mores.

  I draw the reader’s attention, in other words, to the phenomenon of the Midwestern American College Town, which, in a completely self-aware tip of the stylistic hat to David Foster Wallace, I will denominate the MACT. For the final autobiographical note that I will make in this Foreword is to say that in 1960, when I was six months old, my parents and I moved to the archetypal, if somewhat larger-than-normal, MACT of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, so that my father could get to work on his Ph.D. Two years later, when David Foster Wallace was six months old, his family moved to the same town on the same errand (his dad is a philosopher, mine an electrical engineer). He and I lived in the same MACT only until 1966, when my family moved to the smaller, but no less quintessential, MACT of Ames. I never met him, unless we happened to share a slide or a swingset in some Champaign-Urbana park. Each of us went to Massachusetts for higher education and then landed for a while in a different MACT: Iowa City in my case, Bloomington-Normal, Illinois, for DFW.

  The irradiated-corn anecdote might have already said everything there’s to say about the culture of the MACT, but, since DFW and I seem to have been MACT products all the way, there are a few particulars that might be worth drawing out in a more discursive manner. So here goes.

  PEOPLE WHO OFTEN FLY BETWEEN THE EAST AND WEST COASTS OF THE UNITED STATES will be familiar with the region, stretching roughly from the Ohio to the Platte, that, except in anomalous non-flat areas, is spanned by a Cartesian grid of roads. They may not be aware that the spacing between roads is exactly one mile. Unless they have a serious interest in 19th-Century Midwestern cartography, they can’t possibly be expected to know that when those grids were laid out, a schoolhouse was platted at every other road intersection. In this way it was assured that no child in the Midwest would ever live more than √2 miles from a place where he or she could be educated. Secondary schools were presumably sited according to some less rigid scheme, and universities were generally doled out two to a state. According to a convention that obtains pretty consistently across all states west of Ohio, a given state, call it X, is allotted a “University of X” and an “X State University.” “University of X” has been a University, as opposed to a College, from its inception, and generally houses all of the prestigious Arts-and-Sciences departments, the law school, and the medical school. “X State University” frequently started out as “X State College” and only acquired the more august “University” designation within the second half of the Twentieth Century. It is, more often than not, a land-grant institution, practical-minded, skewed toward agricultural, veterinary, and engineering departments while showing a decent respect for the liberal arts.

  Normal Schools—the third tier—were post-secondary institutions whose purpose was to train the teachers who would staff those every-other-mile schoolrooms on the Cartesian road grid. The same inflationary pressure that turned X State College into X State University eventually caused these to get promoted to “University of [geographical modifier] X” or “[geographical modifier] X University,” which is how we got the University of Northern Iowa, Eastern Illinois University, and many others.

  The result is a network of public universities, typically situated in small cities (population, say, between twenty and two hundred thousand) and scattered about the upper Midwest at intervals of approximately one tank of gas. Precisely because of their proximity (spang in the middle of their catchment areas); their unprepossessing rank in the academic hierarchy; their practical, down-to-earth emphases; and their athletic teams, which entertain the surrounding areas, which are too sparsely populated to support professional squads, these institutions have escaped the censure/taint of elitism or ivory towerism that, deservedly or not, tends to get slapped onto private, coastal universities by those elements of society who, when depicted cinematically, are generally shown brandishing torches and pitchforks. This may have changed during the 21st Century because of the politicization of science, but none of that existed in the MACT of the mid- to late-20th Century, when most people’s attitudes toward science were shaped more by antibiotics, the polio vaccine, and moon rockets than current this-can’t-be-happening controversies over evolution and global warming.

  According to numerical metrics of selectivity, academic prestige, etc.—and believe me, these are exactly the kinds of yardsticks by which these people rule everything—these schools tend to be somewhere behind the prestigious and older private schools of the coasts (not because the people are any dumber but because it is part of their mission to pull in the whole spectrum of academic talent whereas coastal institutions are lodged in well-defined strata). That combined with the habitually dour and self-deprecating, not to say passive-aggressive, character of residents of the upper Midwest, has left them with chips on their shoulders and an embarrassing tendency to denote themselves as “The Harvard of the Midwest” or what-have you. Seen in a longer perspective and without the overlay of coast-vs.-Midwest politics, however, the achievements of the state universities are more remarkable, and certainly more unusual, in that one would not necessarily expect newish, publicly funded institutions to be able to make such respectable showings in competition with far older, privately funded schools that have nothing to do except pile up their endowments century after century and educate the cleverest, best-prepared scions of powerful families.

  I describe, here, a situation that existed during the second half of the Twentieth Century. It might be different now. But in those days, graduate students and faculty members U-Hauled from MACT to MACT somewhat in the manner of Arabs oasis-hopping across otherwise inhospitable terrain, and all of the MACTs, mutatis mutandis, were the same. Only the school colors and mascots really differed.

  Geographical isolation is key to MACT culture. If you have an academic position in, say, greater Boston, you are spending your working days in a culture similar to that of the MACT, but when you go back to your house in Saugus or your apartment in Allston-Brighton, you’re in a place where, even if you’re not making more money than the people around you, you do enjoy an at least theoretically exalted status by virtue of your advanced degree and your prestigious job. Some people will treat you with a degree of deference. Even those who don’t remind you of what an odd duck you are in the larger scheme. Whereas if you are in a MACT you are accorded no sense of specialness whatsoever.

  And, remember, these are the professors themselves I’m talking about. The professors’ kids, growing up in a community where all of the other kids had Ph.D. parents, never acquired in the first place, and so did not have to lose, their sense of belonging to a special, or even an unusual, class.

  There are certain other peculiarities of the MACT that mi
ght find their place in a longer treatment of the topic, such as the way that garbage collectors’ sons and farmers’ daughters ended up being treated the same as everyone else, as long as they were smart, and the way that grad students from what were in those days seen as extremely exotic and remote places (Thailand, Afghanistan, Nigeria) were surprised, not always happily, to see their children fully and unquestioningly integrated into small-town Midwestern society, going to keggers and t.p.-ing their friends’ houses as if their ancestors had come over on the Mayflower.

  The premise of this Foreword, which will be nailed to the mast very shortly, is that in Everything and More, David Foster Wallace is speaking in a language and employing a style of inquiry that might strike people who have not breathed the air of Ames, Bloomington-Normal, and Champaign-Urbana as unusual enough to demand some sort of an explanation. And that, lacking such background, many of DFW’s critics fall into a common pattern of error, which consists of attempting to explain his style and approach by imputing certain stances or motives to him, then becoming nonplussed, huffy, or downright offended by same. It’s a mistake that befuddles MACT natives who see this book as simply what it is: one of the other smart kids trying to explain some cool stuff.

  THE REGRETTABLE FACT THAT (BARRING POSSIBLE RANDOM PLAYGROUND ENCOUNTERS) I never actually met Mr. Wallace is not necessarily a disqualification from writing a Foreword. For that, all that is strictly required is some familiarity with the work being introduced. But since anyone can read Everything and More, that hardly makes for a unique, or even an unusual, qualification, and so my strategy here will be to predicate certain things of DFW and his work, based solely on our common MACT provenance, that are wild guesses, but that I’m pretty sure are right. This could be developed at heinous length, but since what you are reading is merely a foreword to the actual book (“booklet”—DFW) I am going to lay my core thesis directly on the line and put it to you that this is all about a quintessentially MACTish denial, or at least shrugging-off, of an attitude toward knowledge that in the Greek tradition is conveyed in the story of Prometheus and, in the Judeo-Christian, in that of Eve.