Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing

by Neal Stephenson

  Here, in a conjectural version of this Foreword that was more dignified and old-school, those two myths would be recounted and glossed. Matters being what they are, I will encourage anyone unfamiliar with them to consult Google before proceeding. These are meant to be scary, cautionary tales to keep Bronze Age peons from asking difficult questions of their betters. To say that they have outlived their usefulness is wrong, since they were never useful to begin with. At some level, though, we’ve all imbibed them and they can be invoked in rhetoric to elicit certain predictable responses. By and large, these enure to the benefit of those who have acquired lots of knowledge. You might not think so, for the Promethean myth is ostensibly a knock on academics. Not so ostensibly, though, it gives scientists a reason to put on priestly airs and, by hinting at the perhaps not-so-priestly stances of their counterparts in other countries, haul down defense grants. And it gives non-scientists an implicit pitchfork to brandish in the scientists’ faces. Accordingly, a kind of deal has been struck in which both scientists and non-scientists have ended up accepting the Promethean myth as being a passable model of reality. Call this the Promethean consensus. The Promethean consensus is something that no one would ever admit to believing in, if you pinned them down and tried to get them to engage in that level of introspection, but is universally hammered home by every movie and TV show about science and a good many books as well, and obviously underlies the public postures that scientists are expected to adopt.

  Once you’ve bought into it, the only two stances you can really take toward the Promethean consensus are to respect its rules or to wilfully break them. You are either a priest or a bad boy. Priest because, if you are one of the keepers of the academic flame and are willing to allow that some of your knowledge is dangerous, you can get a lot of mileage out of intoning the right solemn and portentous sound bites. Bad boy because the downside of the Promethean myth has largely gone away. No one is getting expelled from the Garden of Eden or being chained to a rock to have his liver torn by vultures any more. It’s true that modern-day scientists have to take their share of flak, but, with the exception of people who run girls’ schools in Afghanistan, or the occasional biomed researcher who’s run afoul of animal-rights activists, they no longer have to dodge pitchforks. And so if you’re one of the people who actually has access to Promethean-grade knowledge, there’s no longer much personal risk, and so, to the extent that the knowledge is perceived as dangerous, it can just feel kind of cool, in a naughty way, like you’re a teenager who just figured out where Dad hides the keys to his gun cabinet.

  Neither of these seemed to be going on with the irradiated corn seeds. Clearly, giving that kind of stuff to kids is non-priestly behavior. But when they were handed out at the scout meeting, or when we were exposed to sacred knowledge in countless other ways in the MACT, it was never done with an attitude of “we’re getting away with something—aren’t we being naughty” but rather “here’s some interesting and perhaps useful knowledge that any well-brought-up young person will want to have.”

  So the Promethean consensus is not much in evidence in the MACT. After I went Coastal, I committed a string of social gaffes in which I failed to address or introduce some Ph.D.-endowed person with the correct title. We simply never did this where I grew up because it would have given us the faintly comical affect of characters in The Crucible addressing one another as “Goodman this” and “Goodwife that” (in our town there was one man, not employed in academia, who had a Ph.D., and who insisted on being addressed by his title. The view taken of him by everyone else might most politely be described as bemused).

  In the preceding paragraph I am using a somewhat tawdry rhetorical shortcut by making fun of people who are pompous about academic titles, and readers from academic, but non-MACT, environments are probably getting hot under the collar and feeling as though they’ve been ill used by a thoroughly odious hit-and-run straw-man argument, so let me make clear right away that it’s way more complicated than I’m making it sound, and that professors at Harvard and Cambridge and Bologna and Berkeley address one another by their first names all the time.

  But I am, however crudely, trying to direct the reader’s attention to the fact that, even among academics who ride bicycles to work and wear T-shirts and blue jeans and eschew use of formal titles, there are certain strictures and rules and bright lines and hierarchies that Must Be Respected and that people who violate them can find themselves the object of crazily vehement retribution. And here I feel I am on firmer rhetorical ground since anyone who has spent time on any rung of that ladder will probably have at least one face-burning anecdote about how he or she ran afoul of these strictures and got crucified in a faculty meeting or a letter to the editor or rampant email thread. I put it to you that, improbable as it might seem, MACT natives can grow up not being keenly aware of those rules, somewhat as the Eloi never twigged to the fact that they were Morlock chow. As I have tried to demonstrate with the irradiated-corn anecdote, the MACT breeds an anti-Promethean nonchalance that really rubs some people the wrong way. Every paragraph of Everything and More is imbued with it.

  IT IS AN EXPECTATION, AND A REASONABLE ENOUGH ONE, THAT ANYONE who ventures to write about mathematics must make some kind of positive advance or else shut up. Exceptions are made for occasional review articles, which summarize other results without presenting new material per se, but even a review needs to be written to sufficiently exacting standards that a serious, let us say Ph.D.-level, student of the field in question can take every statement in the thing at face value and never be exposed to the risk that some part of it, in retrospect, might be found to have been glossed over, rearranged, or out-and-out screwed up. So if one is playing by the rules of academic publishing, writing an intellectually serious book about math that engages in some rearrangement and glossing over, as DFW explicitly does in Everything and More, is not looked on favorably.

  Another practice that seems to make tenured academics practically hop up and down in rage is the crossing of boundaries between sub-sub-disciplines (or, in the case of history, geographical regions or chronological epochs) to write articles that pull together a number of threads and point out common themes among them. The exact reasons for this taboo are probably best left to anthropologists or psychologists, but I infer that this sort of thing is viewed as a privilege gained only with age and emeritus-level distinction and that to write any such material before the age of 60 gets one designated as a whippersnapper, which, in the academic world, is the setup for retributive measures of a severity normally seen only in Greek myths.

  So the rules of the academic publishing road are both strict and cruelly enforced. This imposes some narrow and hard limits on what smart people can get away with writing about, which are sufficiently restrictive that some effort goes into finding loopholes. The biggest of these appears to be science fiction. SF novelists arrogate to themselves and, by convention, are readily afforded, a kind of court jester’s immunity. And indeed there have been any number of hard science professors who have donned the motley, taken up the pen, and written more or less successful works of hard science fiction as a way of dodging those two terrible strictures against popularization/simplification, and synoptic pulling-together-of-diverse-strands.

  It is also permissible for serious academics to write books that are explicitly targeted at general readers, though again this tends to be viewed as whippersnapperish behavior if indulged in too early in one’s career.

  To this point, then, we have two categories of books-about-real-science-for-non-specialist-readers: the hard SF novel and the popularizing book written by an actual scientist. There is a third category, in which a writer, well-educated, but without formal credentials in the field in question, immerses himself in the subject matter and then does his level best to explain it. There is a tendency, which is by no means a bad thing, for such books to become somewhat self-referential and autobiographical as the author tells the tale of his own self-education. While the premise,
explained this way, sounds dodgy, these books can be really good, since the writer knows what it’s like to not understand the material, and can tell the story of learning it as a narrative.

  A fourth category, seemingly quite different from #3 but in some ways similar, is the History of Science book, which generally takes the form of a narrative about the efforts of one or more scientists to figure something out. Here the questing author of the Type 3 book is replaced, as protagonist, by the actual scientist who figured it all out in the first place.

  Again, this Foreword might be a more respectable—certainly it would be longer—document if it now listed specific examples of each of the above-mentioned four types of books and engaged in some actual literary criticism. But anyone who is bothering to read an introduction by an SF novelist to a book about infinity by DFW probably has examples of all four types on her bookshelf and so this will be left, as the saying goes, as an exercise for the reader. Just to be clear, though, I will list some examples:

  Type 1: Any fiction by Gregory Benford

  Type 2: A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

  Type 3: 1491 by Charles Mann

  Type 4: Einstein in Berlin by Tom Levenson

  What is clearly true about all of these types of books is that they are safe to write, in the sense that critically-minded readers from the academic world will fairly quickly say to themselves, “ah, this is one of those” and then, if they wish to criticize them, will do so according to the rules of that type.

  Everything and More occupies a hard-to-pin-down space in the Venn diagram that has been taking shape in preceding paragraphs (and before going into detail on that, I’ll just supply the premonitory information that books without a clear coordinate on the Venn diagram tend to make people crazy, since this makes it unclear which set of interpretive and critical ground rules is to be applied).

  To begin with, DFW was arguably a science fiction writer (Infinite Jest), although he probably would not have classified himself as such. Of course Everything and More is not SF, or even F, at all, pace some of its detractors, but the mere fact of DFW’s having been an SF kind of guy muddies the taxonomic waters before we have even gotten started. Novelists—who almost by definition hold motley and informal credentials, when they are credentialed at all—make for an uneasy fit with the academic world, where credentials are everything. And writers who produce books on technical subjects aimed at non-technical readers are doomed to get cranky reviews from both sides: anything short of a fully peer-reviewed monograph is simply wrong and subject to censure from people whose job it is to get it right, and any material that requires unusual effort to read undercuts the work’s claim to be accessible to a general audience. So in writing a book such as Everything and More, DFW reminds us of the soldier who earns a medal by calling in an artillery strike on his own position; with the possible elaboration that in this case he’s out in the middle of no-man’s land calling in strikes from both directions.

  DFW’s degree was in modal logic, which, if you haven’t seen it, is indistinguishable, by almost all laymen, from pure math, though even more punishingly abstract than mathematics could ever be. Though he did not pursue that career to a Ph.D. and an academic post, the fact that he was able to study such a recondite field at all clearly marks him out as having had what it took to be a hard science/math/logic professional, and, therefore, in the eyes of hard-math critics, as fair game. We must therefore ask whether Everything and More is to be taken as a serious technical book by an actual scientist, or a popularization. Its editors clearly asked for the latter and eventually took delivery of something closer to the former. Which is not to say that DFW makes actual technical advances in mathematics—he doesn’t, and doesn’t try or claim to—but that he immersed himself in the material in a way that the editors of this series could not reasonably have asked or expected any writer to do, and pitched many parts of the text at a higher technical level than is generally considered a good move in books whose mission it is to popularize science. Which, if all DFW cared about was getting a uniformly rapturous critical reception, might not have been the best tactical approach. But he doesn’t appear to have been this kind of guy at all.

  In immune-system lingo, the equation-laden sections of Everything and More cause it to express certain antigens that arouse the retributive ardor of hard-science and math reviewers. The analogy being apposite here because the immune system, when aroused, can elicit a range of reactions from a mild sense that something isn’t right, to irritation, to hives, to full-on T-cell counterattack and organ rejection.

  Finally, Everything and More, in many sections, alternates between being a Type 3 and a Type 4 (see above taxonomic breakdown) in that, part of the time, we are getting autobiographical material about how DFW learned mathematics, mostly under one Dr. Goris, and part of the time it becomes a History of Science book in which we learn about the lives and careers of Dedekind, Weierstrass, Cantor, et al.

  Having as it were set all of those pieces out on the board, the weakest possible claim that I can now assert is that I really like this book and that, as I was reading it, it never even occurred to me to be troubled, confused, annoyed, or nonplussed by any of the features alluded to: the fact that it was written by a fiction writer, the excursions into highly technical discourse, the caveats—clearly and repeatedly stated by DFW—that the technical bits simplified and glossed over material in a way that wouldn’t be satisfactory to mathematicians, and the use of both autobiographical, and just plain biographical, material. My advice, therefore, dear reader, is that you simply read it, and that if you happen to be a math major you then peruse some of the trenchant criticisms of the book that have appeared in the mathematical literature, and improve your understanding of the pure-math content by studying peer-reviewed documents on the same topics, and, in general, make sure that this is not the last thing you read on the topic before your orals.

  Having supplied that exhortation I will add one piece of advice about how to read this book, which is to relax and pay no attention—beyond, of course, reading and enjoying it—to one feature of this book that has engendered an absurd volume of critical boggling, namely, DFW’s habit of employing informal pop/slang expressions in close juxtaposition with high-end vocabulary and while talking about fancy stuff. This is nothing except good writing. The vernacular is often the most expressive wing of the language. DFW could write high-powered prose better than just about anyone but he well knew the value of mixing it with informal day-to-day English, and, though he was especially good at it, it’s worth keeping in mind that he was hardly the first great English writer to do so. For every Milton who kept it all on an elevated plane there was a Shakespeare who knew how to sock us in the chops with some well-timed plain talk (among reviewers with humanities degrees, it also seems compulsory to make some remark—or, just as well, to go on at some length—on “post-modernism,” a topic of zero interest to most actual readers).

  I infer that some whose academic reputations have been put into play by the assignment to write a review of this book have felt provoked or confused by DFW’s disinclination or outright refusal to don the mortarboard—the lofty academic style of expression—that’s expected of people who want to thrive within that system, but that can be swapped out, by novelists, in favor of the court jester’s cap ’n’ bells. A dead giveaway being the habit of following a quote from DFW’s prose by “(sic).” As long as you are not the sort of person who is in the habit of using “(sic)” after quoting others’ work in your own written communications, you should be okay with the style in which Everything and More has been written.

  THE FOREGOING HAS BEEN ALL NEGATIVE, NOT IN THE POP-PSYCH SENSE OF adopting a dispiriting tone, but in the purely technical sense that it has been about negating a number of predicates (DFW didn’t buy into the Promethean consensus, Everything and More doesn’t fit into such-and-such bubble on the Venn diagram, certain criticisms of the book aren’t that interesting or useful to most readers). I would lik
e to end with something positive (both in the pop-psych and the technical senses). DFW’s writing reflects an attitude that is lovely: a touching, and for the most part well-founded, belief that you can explain anything with words if you work hard enough and show your readers sufficient respect. While it has probably existed in other times and places, it is a Midwestern American College Town attitude all the way.

  As an explanation for milder allergic reactions—and, having proselytized DFW’s writing to many friends over the years, I’ve seen a few—some readers posit (often vaguely and fretfully) that there is some archness or smart-assery in DFW’s literary style. This, to me anyway, is an unsupportable conclusion, given the obvious love that DFW brings to what he’s writing about, and his explicitly stated opposition to irony-as-lifestyle in his essay E Unibus Pluram. Why do people see it when it’s not there? It’s something to do with the fact that his conspicuous verbal talent and wordplay create a nagging sense among some readers that there’s a joke here that they’re not getting or that they are somehow being made fools of by an agile knave. Which DFW was not.

  To me Everything and More reads, rather, as a discourse from a green, gridded prairie heaven, where irony-free people who’ve been educated to a turn in those prairie schoolhouses and great-but-unpretentious universities sit around their dinner tables buttering sweet corn, drinking iced tea, and patiently trying to explain even the most recondite mysteries of the universe, out of a conviction that the world must be amenable to human understanding, and that if you can understand something, you can explain it in words: fancy words if that helps, plain words if possible. But in any case you can reach out to other minds through that medium of words and make a connection. Handing out irradiated corn kernels to a troop of Boy Scouts, and writing books that explain difficult matters in disarmingly informal language, are the same act, a way of saying here is something cool that I want to share with you for no reason other than making the spark jump between minds. If that is how you have been raised, then to explain anything to anyone is a pleasure. To explain difficult things is a challenge. And to explain the infamously difficult ideas that were spawned in chiliastic profusion during the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries (Infinities, Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Hilbert’s problems, Gödel’s Proof) is Mount Everest.