My favorite Stephenson's novel is Anathem with superb world building (as usual) but also a pretty good story and ending.
But it's also a book whose world (specifically the avout society) attracts me. I've grown up in a Catholic setting, but "converted" to atheism/agnosticism pretty early. But even with its many failings, there are certain aspects of religions which seem worth preserving - the focus on community, the rituals, a particular rule framework, meditation (prayers) and introspection.
The book presents a (on a certain level) pretty attractive model of society which combines the practical religious patterns with a full rationalism.
I kind of understand why such "atheist religion" is unlikely to get off in the real world, but it's still something I would wish for.
Interesting how different Judaism and Catholicism are in this way. My family lost forty people in the concentration camps, and there was simply no way we could reconcile a belief in god with that. But I also grew up with a strong Jewish identity, and still practice many of the rituals.
I was probably in college before I really understood that other religious practices truly BELIEVED the stuff they were talking about, in a way that most Jews I knew didn't. It was like being really into Harry Potter, and one day finding out that everyone who was really into LOTR truly believed that Frodo was a real person who had gone on a journey with a magical ring. And that THEY were confused how you could talk so much about these fan theories and what is/isn't Harry Potter canon if you didn't deeply believe that there was a magical wizarding school hidden somewhere around Manchester.
When my Catholic friends would lose their faith, they pretty much stopped calling themselves Catholic. At most they might call themselves "lapsed," but they always made it very clear that they no longer considered it part of their identity and they didn't go to church. My friends with more fundamentalist upbringings became aggressively anti-religious, like the militant vegans of the religious world.
I think some of the reason Judaism sticks is that an individual relationship with God isn't a central tenet. The individual's primary relationship is with the community, it's the community that has a relationship/covenant with God. A lot of the practice and ethics are about how a person best contributes to a harmonious group. It also certainly helps that we keep changing languages - first Hebrew which I don't speak, then Aramaic which I also don't speak, then Yiddish which I also don't speak - so it's easy to go through the rituals without being smacked in the face with direct appeals to an almighty power. And Judaism is a "religion" somewhat more in the way that belief in Greek gods was a "religion," a part of life and culture that blends with more secular life and culture.
It wasn’t until the late Roman Empire that what you believed in your mind really became important in religion. Before that, performing the rituals correctly was far more important.
Do you have any good resources in mind on this topic? I've been reading Boyarin's Border Lines, which hypothesizes that the concept of religion was created around that time to describe what kind of thing Christianity was, and to explicitly separate it from Judaism (which was cast as another thing of the same type by both sets of leaders). Really interesting perspective.
A lot of the conversation these days is dominated by fundamentalists, so it always seems like people from other cultures are far more likely to have faith. I can tell you growing up, I was the wierd one for insisting that because I lacked faith, is not call myself a Christian.
> ... My family lost forty people in the concentration camps, and there was simply no way we could reconcile a belief in god with that. ... I was probably in college before I really understood that other religious practices truly BELIEVED the stuff they were talking about
Interesting to contrast this attitude with that of the Biblical authors who so clearly foretold even those horrifying events: "... If we have forgotten the name of our God, or stretched out our hands to a strange god; Shall not God search this out? for he knoweth the secrets of the heart. Yea, for thy sake are we killed all the day long; we are counted as sheep for the slaughter. Awake, why sleepest thou, O Lord? arise, cast us not off for ever. Wherefore hidest thou thy face, and forgettest our affliction and our oppression? For our soul is bowed down to the dust: our belly cleaveth unto the earth. Arise for our help, and redeem us for thy mercies' sake."
Interesting to contrast the contents of the Bible with rational thought summed up perfectly by Epicurious:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
God creates ALL things including free will and evil, then punishes us for making certain choices he already knows we will make, lets bad things happen to good people because of some "plan". Sounds like a juvenile sadist with poor planning skills.
We don't need to look outside the Bible for this, we can find the gist of these very arguments in the text. They nicely illustrate the inherent limits of ordinary rational understanding compared with divine inspiration, even though the latter is only granted as a very rare gift to the truly worthy.
This spreads waaaay too much in otherwise rational circles.
Check your "if" statements, and ask for help from someone if you don't see where these Epicurian suppositions are poor rhetoric, patently misaligned with well-known scripture, and thus only serve as mental fodder for your own choir.
Else, consider with an open mind that "God is love" and consider how loving it is for, e.g., a nanny state to care for all your needs and control you in pure utopian safety.
Given our gift of free will, what an act of love it is to be hands-off so the subjects can learn (love - of self, other, environment, etcetera) how to impose balance of one's self within all of creation. God being able, but not willing, therefore, is clearly more nuanced than the "malevolent" conjurings of such a narrowed mind.
That said, such God would be able, but unwilling, as the will is distinctly ours. Following along, still? Evil exists because we may choose it, giving good people the opportunity to do something other than nothing with it.
Does God really punish, or is that something we do to ourselves? I, for one, am neither deceived by Epicurious nor you nor a pastor - were I to treat all above as true, there would indeed be suffering - but who would be punished, though, and for what exactly, by whom?
The plan is apparently to give us free will and let us learn love in all its forms and functions - sounds like juvenile sadists can imagine all they want and tell us "this is true" and "this is illogical" and be believed for millenia, though they're just wrong and gaslighting a culture. As a reminder, an early creation, The Lightbringer angel, is known to be deceptive. Those who accept The Word for what it honestly is do not thusly suffer.
A more loving, honest act would be to seek how such scripture is right and see how the falsified interpretations from some hateful few oughtn't give such trouble - but it's still your choice what you seek, and ye shall find it.
The existence of kids with cancer (one example of the million miseries of this world) easily refutes your claim that "evil" is begotten by "free will".
Oh brother... if vague prophetic visions of doom to come is enough to impress you then maybe you consider the people who write the horoscope columns in magazines to be divinely inspired?
In the UK there are probably very few 'true believers' left in the Church of England, including within the priesthood. The church has been dying for decades, which personally I feel is a shame. There are many beautiful buildings, rituals and music that will die with it.
What I enjoyed about this book is it helped me "get" Platonism. Somehow, Neal Stephenson made Platonism seem cool and interesting.
People focusing on the mathematical monks are missing the point that Arbre is intended to exemplify a more Platonically idealized of our world. Not all in good ways, but also in bad ways.
When technology goes bad in Arbre, it goes worse than in our world. When there are divisions in Arbre society, those divisions are sharper than in our world. Mathematics is more powerful, but it is also more separated from Praxis. The maths aren't just monasteries for mathematicians; they instead represent the Platonic form of "The Institution", and as such incorporate elements of monasteries, prisons, universities, asylums, and barracks. Arbre's version of Platonism is itself divided into two camps that in our world are dimly reflected as "religion" and "abstraction"; in Arbre the division between these is larger-than-life. The Monad ever devolving into a Dyad.
I’m not surprised there are Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash, Diamond Age, or Baroque Cycle favorite-rs but I am when I come across someone that thought Seveneves or Dodge was his best.
I absolutely loved Seveneves; easily my second favorite. The first part was too long and the second too short, however, and it's obviously not as good as Anathem ;)
>The first part was too long and the second too short
....and no one ever mentions the third part because it was so long and poor that the book would be better without it.
Seveneves wasn't bad, but part 3 dropped it well down my list of favorites, maybe below Zodiac.
For context, an informal off-the-cuff ranking of his books for me:
Anathem (epic world building, I love the philosophy and the theory)
Cryptonomicon (I've always been interested in WWII, Cryptography, and Computers)
Baroque Cycle (taught me a lot of history I didn't know and somehow made finance interesting)
Diamond Age
Snow Crash
Reamde (not the most technical, but one of his best paced and a good thriller)
Zodiac (also a nicely paced thriller)
Fall (I don't hate this like some people do, but would love to see the real world from the beginning developed further)
Seveneves (I love the science and hate the pacing and all of the third act)
Rise and Fall of DODO (this felt like a slog to me and by the end I was forcing myself to read just to get through it).
The Big U (I don't think this is as bad as Stephenson himself does but it's nothing amazing)
Mongoliad (not my thing)
I pre-ordered a signed copy of Termination Shock, read the first few chapters, got distracted, and have never cared enough to go back. I suppose I should finish it but it didn't grab me fast like some of them have.
I’m always amazed at how polarizing part 3 of Seveneves is for people. I loved the whole book, but part 3 was among my favorite of any NS book. My only complaint is that it wasn’t longer.
Trying to avoid spoilers, I was disappointed given Stephenson's usually rigorous research that at least one entity appearing in the third act could not have possibly survived to that point for multiple glaringly obvious reasons. The image of Indiana Jones surviving a nuclear explosion in a refrigerator, except over the Act 2/3 scale, is a surprisingly good reference, and we all know how well that's held up.
And that was far from my only complaint in that section.
Stephenson ends a book like a crash ends a car trip. It's not that I wanted the trip to go on forever, it's that I wanted it to end with the car neatly parked in a driveway, rather than unrecognizeable pieces scattered in a ravine.
> Reamde (not the most technical, but one of his best paced and a good thriller)
Best paced? It could've easily been twice as short if Neal got rid of all the MMORPG stuff.
I know, I know, that's the part Neal wanted to write about and used the transcontinental thriller plot as a framing story, but that just didn't work out.
> Reamde (not the most technical, but one of his best paced and a good thriller)
Funny, as someone who loves Anathem, I couldn't stand the pacing in Reamde. I found the whole thing quite souring, coming off the tail of his other works. Whoever edited that book did a miserable job, as far as I'm concerned.
I've only read Seveneves to the end and was blown away (and simultaneously a bit disappointed if that makes sense?). I've started Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash but they didn't interest me as much.
I thought Fall Or Dodge In Hell was pretty good, probably just because I don't know anybody else who has tried to answer the question... what would it be like to be reincarnated in that way?
Same! I love Diamond Age and to a lesser extent Cryptonomicon, but for my money Seveneves found him leaning into his worst instincts.
At his best, Stephenson’s love of oddball, hyper-focused engineers leads him into in-depth explorations of niche fields & communities. In Seveneves though it manifested as boring Heinlein-esque heroic Mary Sue libertarian engineers who are never wrong, while every other character is somewhere on a spectrum of stupid to nefarious.
For anyone who enjoys future world-building that dives deep into religious and political systems, I recommend Ada Palmer's Terra Ignotta series. She's an Associate Professor of Early Modern European History and the College at Chicago University, and creates a future (set in 2425-ish) using rich historical cultural references that is also not terribly improbable.
A secular buddhism/meditation revolution is currently happening in the west, with many neuroscientists and other academics involved in the mix. It kind of matches what you are describing. I'd recommend starting with Michael Taft's "Deconstructing Yourself" podcast, in which he interviews many of the most prominent western representatives of meditative traditions and human potential movements, most secular. He also is the chair of a meditation center in San Francisco called The Alembic that opened recently.
Agreed. I think there is definitely a certain kind of person who attaches to the idea of academic monks (myself included). Especially the slower pace of life and limited pop culture influences. I remember a few years ago someone on the Anathem subreddit tried to live "cloistered" for a year- not totally isolated, but intentionally avoiding media throughout the year, then they listened to a few albums and watched the best regarded movies.
I definitely liked Anathem, but the structure of it seemed odd. Like half the book was world building then the plot happened really fast and it was over. The idea that scholars are extremely concerned about being intellectually corrupted by the outside world and having an intricate methodology to prevent it is definitely a novel concept though.
I think you missed the part about how the avout were put into maths because they were blamed for scary tech and generally considered weird. To saeculars, maths are as much prisons and mental asylums as they are universities and monasteries. That's why avout have all those rules about not being permitted any technology except the robe, the cord and the sphere, and they are subject to auditing.
i had no idea what i was going to read, but deeply enjoyed snowcrash and just picked another stephenson book to read. what a bizarre and interesting world, but at the same time.. not that bizarre given actual monastic life across various religions in our world.
I agree! There is something very beautiful about people having the time to just think and learn, without access to distracting technology or practical concerns. I wonder what would happen if this was a real pathway in society. I also wonder what were to happen if driven individuals would take sabbaticals in places like this - what kind of ideas would they come up with?
But it's also a book whose world (specifically the avout society) attracts me. I've grown up in a Catholic setting, but "converted" to atheism/agnosticism pretty early. But even with its many failings, there are certain aspects of religions which seem worth preserving - the focus on community, the rituals, a particular rule framework, meditation (prayers) and introspection.
The book presents a (on a certain level) pretty attractive model of society which combines the practical religious patterns with a full rationalism.
I kind of understand why such "atheist religion" is unlikely to get off in the real world, but it's still something I would wish for.