The New Victorians

Let me start with a little background.

• The page numbers are from a trade paperback that has 455 pages.
• I don't think Stephenson ever actually says “New Victorians”, that's just my preferred name. He does say “neo-Victorians” once or twice, but usually he just calls the people “Victorians”.
• When I saw the word “phyle” used to mean a group of people sharing the same culture, I figured it was supposed to be cool future shorthand for “phylum”, giving a hint of how cultures evolve and diverge over time. But no! For some reason I decided to check my dictionary, and it turns out it's a real word.

  A large citizens' organization, based on kinship, constituting the largest political subdivision of an ancient Greek city-state. [Gk. phulē, tribe.]

• Let me tell you a story about the word “thete”. Stephenson just uses it without explanation, so I had to guess what he wanted it to mean, and my guess was approximately “a vulgar person”. That made sense everywhere, but it gnawed at me that I couldn't figure out why he'd chosen that word. Was it short for something? What was I missing?

  Then, on p. 272, surprise, there was a definition: “someone who didn't have a tribe”. That made sense too, but it didn't give me any additional insight into why he'd chosen that word.

  But, then I had an idea, and the more I thought about it, the more sure I was that I'd found the right answer. When talking about phyles, Stephenson often mentions synthetic phyles, which I assume are phyles that were formed by a bunch of otherwise random people intentionally banding together, as opposed to all the other phyles that just emerged naturally out of the historical process. But, the prefix “syn-” means “together”, so the part that's left ought to mean “the random people, before they get together”. Thetes!

  Sadly, the story of “thete” doesn't end there. At some point I'd checked my dictionary for it and found nothing, but as I was writing this essay, it occurred to me that I should also check the internet, and yeah, apparently it too is a real word, meaning “a member of the lowest order of freeman in ancient Athens”. So, now I feel stupid. But, I do still think that the play on “synthetic” must have been intentional.

Now, on to the relevant parts. From p. 16:

He had some measure of the infuriating trait that causes a young man to be a nonconformist for its own sake and found that the surest way to shock most people, in those days, was to believe that some kinds of behavior were bad and others good, and that it was reasonable to live one's life accordingly.

From pp. 16–17:

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 judgment, merely an observation that some cultures thrived and expanded while others failed.

That sounds really good, but on second thought I think it's self-refuting. If Victorian culture is objectively better, and thrives and expands, why is it not here, now, all around us?

Actually, there's a lot of food for thought there. For example:

• Maybe it is here, now, all around us, it's just not newsworthy that, say, discipline and hard work lead to success.
• Or, maybe the memes in the Victorian meme bundle fit together in non-obvious ways, so that Victorian cultures tend to get derailed by mutations that at first seem to be harmless.
• Or, just as the success of a prisoner's dilemma strategy depends on the amounts of other strategies present (see for example A Thought on Stability and No Pure Strategy Is Stable), maybe the success of a culture depends on the amounts of other cultures present.

From pp. 19–20:

“ … You would have had decent prospects and been free from all this”—Finkle-McGraw jabbed his cane at the two big airships—“behavioural discipline that we impose upon ourselves. Why did you impose it on yourself, Mr. Hackworth?”

“Without straying into matters that are strictly personal in nature,” Hackworth said carefully, “I knew two kinds of discipline as a child: none at all, and too much. The former leads to degenerate behaviour. When I speak of degeneracy, I am not being priggish, sir—I am alluding to things well known to me, as they made my own childhood less than idyllic.”

Finkle-McGraw, perhaps realizing that he had stepped out of bounds, nodded vigorously. “This is a familiar argument, of course.”

“Of course, sir. I would not presume to imply that I was the only young person ill-used by what became of my native culture.”

“And I do not see such an implication. But many who feel as you do found their way into phyles wherein a much harsher regime prevails and which view us as degenerates.”

“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.”

From p. 31:

Now nanotechnology had made nearly anything possible, and so the cultural role in deciding what should be done with it had become far more important than imagining what could be done with it. One of the insights of the Victorian Revival was that it was not necessarily a good thing for everyone to read a completely different newspaper in the morning; …

That doesn't seem like a remarkable idea now, but I was very surprised to see it in a book from 1995!

From pp. 171–174:

“Mr. Hackworth,” Finkle-McGraw said after the pleasantries had petered out, speaking in a new tone of voice, a the-meeting-will-come-to-order sort of voice, “please favour me with your opinion of hypocrisy.”

“Excuse me. Hypocrisy, Your Grace?”

“Yes. You know.”

“It's a vice, I suppose.”

“A little one or a big one? Think carefully—much hinges upon the answer.”

:

“You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices,” Finkle-McGraw said. “It was all because of moral relativism. You see, in that sort of a climate, you are not allowed to criticise others—after all, if there is no absolute right and wrong, then what grounds is there for criticism?”

:

“Now, this led to a good deal of general frustration, for people are naturally censorious and love nothing better than to criticise others' 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.

“You wouldn't believe the things they said about the original Victorians. Calling someone a Victorian in those days was almost like calling them a fascist or a Nazi.”

Both Hackworth and Major Napier were dumbfounded. “Your Grace!” Napier exclaimed. “I was naturally aware that their moral stance was radically different from ours—but I am astonished to be informed that they actually condemned the first Victorians.”

“Of course they did,” Finkle-McGraw said.

“Because the first Victorians were hypocrites,” Hackword said, getting it.

:

“Because they were hypocrites,” Finkle-McGraw said, after igniting his calabash and shooting a few tremendous fountains of smoke into the air, “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.”

“So they were morally superior to the Victorians—” Major Napier said, still a bit snowed under.

“—even though—in fact, because—they had no morals at all.”

There was a moment of silent, bewildered head-shaking around the copper table.

“We take a somewhat different view of hypocrisy,” Finkle-McGraw continued. “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.”

“That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code,” Major Napier said, working it through, “does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.”

“Of course not,” Finkle-McGraw said. “It's perfectly obvious, really. No one ever said that 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.”

Don't worry, the rest of the book isn't so didactic. What interests me is the connection to relativism and nihilism.

From pp. 290–291:

“It's a wonderful thing to be clever, and you should never think otherwise, and you should never stop being that way. But what you learn, as you get older, is that there are a few billion other people in the world all trying to be clever at the same time, and whatever you do with your life will certainly be lost—swallowed up in the ocean—unless you are doing it along with like-minded people who will remember your contributions and carry them forward. That is why the world is divided into tribes. … ”

:

“Some cultures are prosperous; some are not. Some value rational discourse and the scientific method; some do not. Some encourage freedom of expression, and some discourage it. The only thing they have in common is that if they do not propagate, they will be swallowed up by others. All they have built up will be torn down; all they have accomplished will be forgotten; all they have learned and written will be scattered to the wind. In the old days it was easy to remember this because of the constant necessity of border defence. Nowadays, it is all too easily forgotten.

If you're young, that may seem kind of abstract, but if you're old like me, it's very tangible. All you have to do to see great books and authors being forgotten is walk into a book store.

The idea of cultures that value the scientific method seems like it must have been one of the many things that led to The Baroque Cycle. Also, maybe it's just me, but I definitely feel a bit of Atlas Shrugged coming through. To go back to what I said earlier, maybe there are cultures that can only succeed when some amount of a scientific culture is also present.

However, I shouldn't fixate on the scientific method. From p. 291–292:

“ … Now, what was the point of that?”

“To teach you humility and self-discipline,” Nell said. She had learned this from Dojo long ago.

“Precisely. Which are moral qualities. It is upon moral qualities that a society is ultimately founded. All the prosperity and technological sophistication in the world is of no use without that foundation—we learned this in the late twentieth century, when it became unfashionable to teach these things.”

There's a phrase in here that I like. From p. 301:

In the early years it had contained nothing more than a two-story mission for thetes who had followed their lifestyle to its logical conclusion and found themselves homeless, addicted, hounded by debtors, or on the run from the law or abusive members of their own families.

From p. 365:

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.

If you want to know more about the New Victorians, I'm sorry, because there isn't really that much more to know. It's a fascinating idea, though!