While looking through the “stuff to get to” file, I rediscovered this interview with Neal Stephenson. If you’re not familiar with his riotously inventive fiction, start with Snow Crash and, once your brain has returned to normal operating temperature, move on to almost anything else he’s written (I’m about to start the last volume of his massive Baroque Cycle trilogy).

Excerpts from the interview:

“… terrorism is a much more formidable opponent of political liberty than government. Government acts almost as a recruiting station for libertarians. Anyone who pays taxes or has to fill out government paperwork develops libertarian impulses almost as a knee-jerk reaction. But terrorism acts as a recruiting station for statists.”

“We are in a position akin to that of early physicians who could see that people were getting sick but … didn’t understand the underlying causes. … (as a result) people tend to fall under the sway of this or that pet theory. And so you’ll get perfectly intelligent people saying, “All of our problems would be solved if only the workers controlled the means of production,” or what have you. Once they’ve settled on a totalizing political theory, they see everything through that lens and are hostile to other notions.”

“It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn’t care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war. Of course the broad mass of people don’t belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture. Since our prosperity and our military security for the last three or four generations have been rooted in science and technology, it would therefore seem that we’re coming to the end of one era and about to move into another.”
All very interesting stuff.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2005 at 11:45 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Brilliant, but uncategorizable, Big Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.