The Globe and Mail has a more nuanced review of The Confusion by Neal Stephenson than my earlier rumble. “Money makes Stephenson’s world go ’round” (May 1, 2004, D8), as the review is titled, points out how Stephenson is weaving a history of currency and science. He is setting up a battle between Whig and Tory, Science and Alchemy, England and France, or the Royal Society and the Inquisition. It also draws a comparison to The Lord of the Rings – The Confusion is “slow and lyrical” like The Two Towers – alternating between two plot lines that will be brought together (I hope) in the last movement. John Burns is too kind when it comes to the slow lecturing tour of the world we get in the middle of The Confusions. Burns isn’t really reviewing the book – that will have to wait for the last of the trilogy – he is summarizing the ideas for those, like myself, who lose sight of them in the wandering plot.
So what are some of the ideas?
1. The shift from an economy based on land (or currency backed by land – the Tory approach) to an economy/currency based on “the ability of the government to raise money from taxes, lotteries, annuities, and whatever other schemes the big brains of the Juncto (Whigs) can think up.” (p. 635)
2. The science of Newton woven through with alchemical mysticism evolving into the science of Leibniz built on logic (symbol manipulation) and monads which sound a lot like simple computers networked into a universe.
Don’t think of books. Think of a mirrored ball, which holds a complete image of the universe, yet is very simple. The ‘brain’ of the monad, then, is a mechanism whereby some rule of action is carried out, based upon the stored state of the rest of the universe. … consists essentially of a rule – a complicated one … when these simple rules are set to working … the results are vastly more complex and unpredictable than one would ever expect. From which I (Leibniz) venture to say that monads and their internal rules need not be all that complicated in order to produce the stupendous variety, and the diverse mysteries and wonders of Creation, that we see all around us. (p. 656-7)
Sounds like emergent properties to me and it is no surprise that Waterhouse – the closest we have to an authorial presence – goes to the colonies to set up the Massachusetts Institute for Technologikal Arts (MIT?) where he will collaborate with Leibnize on a project to make an arithmetickal and logical engine.
3. The struggle around slavery which maps onto the Tory/Whig economies. Landed economies need slaves while tax and credit economies need knowledge workers.
In the meantime I am reading Niall Ferguson’s Empire which covers much of the same ground without the fiction. More when I’ve finished it.