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tsharris 's review for:
The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
by Neal Stephenson
Re-read for I believe the third time. I used to think this was one of my absolutely favorite sci-fi novels. May still be one of my top-five or top-ten, but my thoughts are considerably more mixed after this reading. I still love the world that Stephenson built here and have nothing but questions about how his world came to be, how some of the other phyles function, etc. I cannot complain about his world building. For that matter, I also love the bildungsroman that is the heart of the novel - Stephenson's attempt to answer the puzzle posed in the novel, namely how can a society propagate its values in a way that its children use their reason to see why its values are appropriate rather than just enforcing them by rote. Not that I'm satisfied that technological wizardry could truly provide the answer (Stephenson anticipated some US education reformers in this regard).
My problem is Stephenson's heralding culture as the answer, not least because I'm not convinced that he manages to disentangle culture from race and ethnicity. Despite some hand waving that suggests that the Neo-Victorians are open to anyone that accepts their values, I'm not convinced that it's anything more than a stand-in for white Anglo-Saxon culture. Meanwhile, his "Han" phyle refers to an ethnic category, not a cultural one. Not sure whether this link was deliberate, but it does seem as if Stephenson was taking Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" thesis to its logical conclusion. Except that like Huntington, Stephenson struggles to show how culture is independent from other categories. This entanglement is particularly challenging when discussing Chinese culture, since it has at times emphasized the universality of Chinese culture and at other times veered to Han chauvinism. Meanwhile, his dismissal of the long-term viability of the state leads him to miss the key point that the state - especially in China and Japan - has often played a central role as the upholder, articulator, and defender of culture, particularly through the education system.
Anyway, it's possible that Stephenson wasn't making definitive statements on any of these questions and believes that everything is up for grabs, but I doubt it.
Oh - and I had previously argued with econoblogger Noah Smith about the Boxer Rebellion ending. I've come around to his view: it's lame and unnecessary.
My problem is Stephenson's heralding culture as the answer, not least because I'm not convinced that he manages to disentangle culture from race and ethnicity. Despite some hand waving that suggests that the Neo-Victorians are open to anyone that accepts their values, I'm not convinced that it's anything more than a stand-in for white Anglo-Saxon culture. Meanwhile, his "Han" phyle refers to an ethnic category, not a cultural one. Not sure whether this link was deliberate, but it does seem as if Stephenson was taking Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" thesis to its logical conclusion. Except that like Huntington, Stephenson struggles to show how culture is independent from other categories. This entanglement is particularly challenging when discussing Chinese culture, since it has at times emphasized the universality of Chinese culture and at other times veered to Han chauvinism. Meanwhile, his dismissal of the long-term viability of the state leads him to miss the key point that the state - especially in China and Japan - has often played a central role as the upholder, articulator, and defender of culture, particularly through the education system.
Anyway, it's possible that Stephenson wasn't making definitive statements on any of these questions and believes that everything is up for grabs, but I doubt it.
Oh - and I had previously argued with econoblogger Noah Smith about the Boxer Rebellion ending. I've come around to his view: it's lame and unnecessary.