Neal Stephenson and the Impossible Desire for the Secular
by Ajay Singh Chaudhary and Abby Kluchin
A response to a public talk with Neal Stephenson on December 1, 2011.
In his 1960 novel A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter Miller wrote of the “Albertian Order of Saint Leibowitz,” a monastic order whose members—quite literally—religiously copy the texts of the scientists of a pre-apocalyptic age. While maintaining the practices and beliefs of Catholic monks, they painstakingly recreate electronic schematics, hydraulic plans, and pages of fragmented statistical research findings and journal articles, each new version copied by hand, gilded, margins adorned with smiling cherubim and mythical creatures. They didn’t have the slightest idea what any of it meant. They did not know what this “science” was—just that it was practiced by “saints” of old and had allowed them to work great wonders. This point is driven home when Brother Francis, one of the heroes of the piece, is lucky enough to find and copy a sheath of notes of the Blessed Saint Leibowitz himself. In the sheath, alongside that most holy of discoveries, a blueprint, is a curious note from the Blessed Saint that reads: “Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels—bring home for Emma.” In complete ignorance of the meaning of this message, not to mention their Blessed Saint’s Yiddishkeit, this too is copied, illuminated and, preserved.
Miller’s novel may seem an odd excursus from Neal Stephenson’s public conversation with Alfred E. Guy Jr., but it was a reference point to which we continually returned in our discussion of Stephenson’s remarks, as we waited for the subway at 116th Street. For a recurring theme of the discussion was the attempt to sequester “religion” from “religious practices,” and to separate “religion,” “literature,” and “technology” into discrete categories. And yet this neatness, this orderliness, kept collapsing.
Although not his most recent work, the conversation quickly turned to Anathem, a book, as Stephenson characterized it, which represents an attempt to depict ‘a religious kind of life separated from religion.’ But even as Stephenson said this, he acknowledged certain tensions inherent in this concept. After all, as he pointed out, even the “purest” science is in some ways informed by that most perfect and enduring form of metaphysics: mathematics. In one of his answers, Stephenson framed this problem as a classic philosophical challenge: at the time of the Big Bang, did 1+2 = 3? To believe that it did, he said, is in essence to believe in Plato’s Forms, one version of the idea that there are irreducible facts that exist both outside and through human subjectivities. As Stephenson astutely observed, you find more of these sorts of Platonists in departments of physics than in, say, English literature.
Anathem directly addresses this challenge. In the book, in a vaguely post-apocalyptic era after the “Terrible Events,” science itself is sequestered into the cloister. Anyone who shows the unusual early childhood signs of proclivity for scientific, theoretical, or philosophical inquiry is shuffled away from the “Saecular” world into the “Mathic” one. This is not merely for the sake of preservation, as in A Canticle for Leibowitz, but also for the sake of a mutual protection. These thinking-types are cut off from a society that fears them and now feels safe from the danger they pose, and they in turn are free to pursue their odd, anti-social behavior in peace. Stephenson stressed that part of the inspiration for this idea comes from a place of anxiety: a reflection on the very real fear of science and technology.
But in his attempt to describe this as a scientific “religious life” without “religion,” Stephenson’s own work undoes his remarks. The “Fraas” (i.e. monks) in Anathem literally live in metaphysics, in “Maths.” In a memorable episode, Fraa Erasmus complains of the Mathic architects’ aversion to functional architecture: “Mathic architects were helpless when it came to walls. Pillars they could do. Arches they were fine with. Vaults, which were just three dimensional arches, they knew everything about. But ask them to construct a simple wall, and they would go to pieces. Where anyone else in the world would construct a wall, they’d fill in the space with a system of arches and tracery.” Why live between four walls when you can contemplate the splendor of the physical manifestation of mathematics? What’s a bit of rubbish, “wind, vermin, and other things,” in comparison with such power and glory? In the buildings they inhabit, the rituals they enact, and the vows they take, the Fraas re-create a religious life. Not only have they taken on a halakhah to guide them and preserve a fence around their mission of learning, but they revel in it, they revere it, they believe in its inherent, irreducible goodness. This is not a religious life without religion. It is a religious life that, despite its Catholic trappings, is in certain ways thoroughly un-Christian. It is a religious life devoid of a particular kind of faith, a faith that demands belief against the evidence of the senses.
Stephenson’s desire to sequester the religious takes even more vivid shape in his now-classic novel Snow Crash. As Stephenson implied during the event, Snow Crash reflects a more direct critique of contemporary American religious movements, specifically evangelical Christianity. In the novel, evangelicalism is figured primarily through the practice of glossolalia, speaking in tongues. Its ‘gospel’ is spread in the physical world through a drug mixed with cocaine and the blood of infected hackers, and in the virtual world (the “Metaverse”) through exposing hackers to a bitmap. It is religion as viral in the starkest and most terrifying sense. What’s more, the effect of this ‘good news’ is to render the infected literally programmable, stripped of their own agency. The metaphor is most effective because it opposes the religious (the infected, the programmable) to those who are able to think for themselves, those who program, the “technological priesthood” of the not-quite-post-apocalyptic world of Snow Crash. Yet it is precisely these hackers who are most susceptible to being programmed.
But it is worth mentioning that Juanita, the figure (MILD SPOILER ALERT) who gets everyone out of this mess is not only a hacker but also the only self-professed believer in the novel. While the other hackers are confined to their beds with Snow Crash or else starting swordfights and staging Ukrainian nuclear fuzz-grunge concerts, looking pretty bad-ass but still essentially wandering around haplessly, Juanita figures out how to “hack the brainstem” and restore free will to those infected with the evangelical virus. In the talk, Stephenson contrasted mainline Protestantism with evangelical Christianity, much to the detriment of the latter. And he associates the character of Juanita with two even older traditions. Juanita is a Catholic, but she refers to her ability to reverse-engineer the virus as becoming a “Ba’al Shem,” a Master of the Name. Most famously, of course, this was the title given to the founder of Hasidic Judaism, the Ba’al Shem Tov. The uniquely capable figure of Juanita, juxtaposed with the helplessness of the unwillingly evangelized, suggests that for Stephenson there are distinctly good and bad ways to mingle religion and technology—those that inoculate us against the loss of agency and the disintegration of the social order, and those that work to propel us, individually and collectively, into that hideous future.
Stephenson’s seeming desire to distance himself from religion by distinguishing belief from forms, imagery, and practices seems even more peculiar if we turn to his essay “In the Beginning was the Command Line.” For it is one of the great strengths of Stephenson’s work that he is exquisitely attentive to the underlying metaphors that structure our experiences and to insist on the way that those metaphors call our reality into being. In “In the Beginning,” the metaphors he explores are those of the graphical user interfaces of personal computers, in which the user relates to the machine at a great remove, through many layers of mediation (think Windows, MacOs) as opposed to the command line interface, in which the user must specify at a much lower level and with a great deal of precision what she wants the machine to do (think Unix). And the metaphors that Stephenson himself brings to bear on this subject, as he picks apart those that Microsoft, Apple, et al impose upon us, are saturated with both Jewish and Christian language. In order to underscore the point it is only necessary to cite, perhaps, in addition to the title, a few of the subheadings in the section on Unix, such as “The Oral Tradition” and (a personal favorite) “Fallibility, Atonement, Redemption, Trust, And Other Arcane Technical Concepts.”
Here again, as in Snow Crash, the hacker—used not as a pejorative term but as a positive epithet for a programmer, someone able to manipulate technology at the level of the command line interface rather than through a graphical user interface—emerges as the pre-eminent figure. And the root metaphor at work for the hacker is that of the performative word. For some readers, this image might evoke the image of Jesus Christ in the Gospel of John, the Word made flesh. But in fact it reaches back much further to the first lines of Genesis, when God creates the heavens and the earth through speech. As God pronounces “Let there be…” so whatever he pronounces comes into being. In Hebrew, the book of Genesis is known simply as Bereishit, in reference to its first words, “In the beginning” or “At the beginning.” In the beginning was the command line, Stephenson tells us. This does not simply mean that the programmer has godlike powers; the implications of Stephenson’s image are both more subtle and vastly more far-reaching. The effect, rather, is a radical revaluation of the power of the word. It forces us to consider nominally secular and even utterly mundane language—be it English or C++—as radically creative, active, dynamic.
Stephenson would no doubt dislike our choice of words, but this is essentially an act of consecration: a re-constitution of a sacralized universe. But this does not make Stephenson an unqualified technological optimist. He emphasized that a naïve liberal technological utopianism (epitomized, in his example, by1960s era Star Trek) is no longer satisfactory for a variety of political and ecological reasons. And yet, Stephenson still wants to hold on to a belief in the possibilities of technology, in the power of the command line; he wants to hold on to the belief in the kind of human organization and re-organization that takes place in Snow Crash and Anathem. In many ways this is akin to the position of the Mathic Fraas in Anathem. And like the “Albertian Order of Saint Leibowitz,” with their illuminated circuit diagrams and shopping lists, they too know not what they do.
Ajay Singh Chaudhary is a doctoral candidate in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies and comparative literature at Columbia University, where he is also a fellow at the Middle East Institute. Abby Kluchin is a doctoral candidate in philosophy of religion and teaches at the Cooper Union.
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