Monday, July 14, 2008

Another great Stephenson quote

I know this is getting increasingly ridiculous, but I'm still working on Cryptonomicon. I'm now on page 590 of 910, so I'm at least over the hump, and things are starting to come together. But once again I've found a quote on a random subject that I just have to share with you. To put it into some kind of context, Randy has been forced to go back to his old neighborhood because of an earthquake, and because of past problems he's getting the cold shoulder from all of his neighbors except one Christian couple.

"Randy hadn't the faintest idea what these people thought of him and what he had done, but he could sense right away that, essentially that was not the issue because even if they thought he had done something evil, they at least had a framework, a sort of procedural manual, for dealing with transgressions. To translate it into UNIX system administration terms (Randy's fundamental metaphor for just about everything), the post-modern, politically correct atheists were like people who had suddenly found themselves in charge of a big and unfathomably complex computer system (viz. society) with no documentation or instructions of any kind, and so whose only way to keep the thing running was to invent and enforce certain rules with a kind of neo-Puritanical rigor, because they were at a loss to deal with any deviations from what they saw as the norm. Whereas people who were wired into a church were the UNIX system administrators who, while they might not understand everything, at least had some documentation, some FAQs and How-tos and README files, providing some guidance on what to do when things got out of whack. They were, in other words, capable of displaying adaptability. (585-86)

I don't know what Neal Stephenson's personal beliefs are, and in a way it doesn't matter, because he's one of those authors who's able to perfectly rationally describe the viewpoints of multiple characters with contradictory ideas without necessarily choosing sides or stacking the deck. What I do know is that he's put into words here one of the feelings I've had for a while about the role of Christianity in our post-modern society: if nothing else, it at least gives you a place to start when thinking about issues.

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