A world in transformation: Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, Part IV

 I am less than certain why it took three parts of prelude for me to get here.  OK, I know.  I am long-winded, and easily distracted.  However, when I started thinking again about Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, it was with the notion that the novels tell us something about a world in transition.  That is, after all, what Stephenson describes.  Throughout Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World, Stephenson lays out something like a literary-historical thesis that our world was set in place, for all practical purposes, during the Enlightenment, and that we can understand our world by understanding how those transformations took place from the late 1600's through the early 1700's.  Thus, we can learn about the process of transition through these novels, and as our world goes through dramatic upheavals of many kinds, perhaps we should study past upheavals.  Some of you may choose to read history texts themselves.  Go.  Do that.  I think it is as valuable to supplement such reading with great novelists, like Neal Stephenson.  So let's finally get around to this, and think through the concepts of transition in the Baroque Cycle.

I'll do so with a character that I don't think I have discussed yet in these posts.  Edouard de Gex.  de Gex is a Jesuit priest, and a member of the Inquisition, quite unexpectedly, who begins our story in the court of Louix XIV.  de Gex, though, is a true believer.  Plenty of players on this scene are just in it for the power, but not so, Edouard de Gex.  When there are black masses taking place in the French court, it is not merely the politics of the faction that trouble our Edouard.  No, it is the theology.  Yet as much as that, it is social structure.  Edouard de Gex does not merely see the Inquisition, even in its reduced capacity, as a vehicle for rooting out heretics for the sake of biblical purity.  He sees the church, like the nobility, as a vital bulwark.  The foundations upon which civilization is built.  Was built.  And here we come to the crux of the story.  So to speak.  The world is changing, and de Gex doesn't like it, not one bit.  Do you like change?  Would you stop change, with de Gex?

Changes were plentiful.  Stephenson does not merely write about multiple changes throughout the world, he connects them.  Specifically, he connects economic changes to scientific (natural philosophic) changes.  The Enlightenment sees the rise of empirical "natural philosophy," and the process by which it moves the world from a system in which claims take hold on the basis of bullshit ranging from a hodgepodge of folk tales and scholars working in isolation to alchemy, with the irony being that the greatest "natural philosopher" was guilty of multiple sins against the discipline, including both alchemy and hiding his own studies rather than just fucking publishing.  The inexorable march of natural philosophy, too, did not sit well with those like de Gex, who was squarely on the R side of the great science versus religion battle royale.  Sure, both Newton and Leibniz touted their religiosity, with Newton's alchemy taking on a distinctly religious flavor, and monads... um... yeah.  Yet that battle royale?  Eddie was cool with the alchemy thing, and we'll get to that, but this whole, natural philosophy thing, and the rest of what was going on?  Nope.

Edouard was disgusted by the other progress described throughout the novels, which would be the rise of proto-economics and nascent capitalism.  Money, and the concept of money as something that was both different from the strictly metal existence it held in the past, and something with which everyone suddenly needed to understand-- this, too, repulsed our Jesuit Inquisitor.  Why?

Edouard was living the good life, or something like it in his terms, at Versailles until Eliza came along.  I have explained her several times, so I shall dispense with another Eliza biography, but eventually she finds her way to the Court of Louis XIV, where de Gex holds a prominent position.  Eliza is ennobled by Louis because he and the other nobles find her useful.  Why?  She understands money, which is getting more complicated.  They need her to handle their money, their investments, and their trading arrangements, which becomes awkward until she, herself, has a title invented by the Sun King.

de Gex, though, hates her.  He sees Eliza as a threat to everything about France.  Worse than a spy (which, to be fair, she is), de Gex sees Eliza as a force to bring down the order of France itself.  The thing is, everybody in Versailles is spying on everybody, and Eliza is sleeping with the guy who would be the head of the NSA, were there such a thing.  She calls him Bon-Bon!  The guy who reads the important mail, and breaks the codes.  de Gex, though, is no slouch of a spy himself, and you wind up basically with spy versus spy versus spy as de Gex tries to piece together not only Eliza, but Jack and Jack's compatriots as they sail 'round the world in a hell of a lot longer than 80 days.  Hijinks ensue, de Gex links up with Jack, betrays him because of course, and eventually, he's Jack's minder when Louis sends Jack to England to fuck with the money supply.

However, de Gex has his own ideas.  Like Newton, de Gex is an alchemist, yet for very different reasons.  Newton is in it for the mumbo jumbo.  de Gex really just wants to convert lead to gold.  Why?  To devalue gold, and undermine all of economics.  If anybody can make gold, then gold will have no value.  Money becomes a meaningless concept.  We don't just stop progress, we backpedal.  What then, cowry shells?  If anything?

So here's the thing.  The Church is fading.  The Inquisition is losing power, and at one point in our story, Jack even risks execution at the hands of the local Inquisition in Mexico, in theory.  Except... that the Inquisition is losing power, and the story goes that the Inquisition specifically, and the Church more generally, are waning as the Enlightenment is waxing.  Weep for Edouard de Gex.  Weep, too, for the rise of this thing he cannot understand called "money."

Why does de Gex hate money so?  In de Gex's conception of the pre-Enlightenment order of France, money was a trifle.  Nobles paid no mind to it because a) they had their titles, and b) it was considered improper for nobles to attend to money.  (Um... Uh...)  The Church paid no mind to money, at least publicly, because they got tithes and all that.  (Yeah, he sort of glossed over a lot there, didn't he?)  And the serfs had no money.  So nobody talked about money!

Money?  What is this thing of which you speak?!

Douche.

Of course, this didn't mean money wasn't a thing, it just meant that it wasn't a topic of discussion in the same way, so de Gex could go on his oblivious way, but that's part of the point.  Yet there is another point here, or rather, many.  Edouard de Gex saw the coming of a world built on proto-capitalism, to which he was ideologically opposed.  We see this play out in different ways in the political struggle as Stephenson portrays it between the Whigs and Tories, but de Gex has a sort of antimaterialistic ideology associated with his Jesuit background.

Money is the root of all evil!

Or... something like that.

Not really.  After all, child molestation is among the greatest evils, and it is unrelated to money.  I could go on, and the great innovation of Adam Smith was to realize that two people may engage in individually selfish acts, to their mutual benefit.  Hence, good results from individually selfish behavior.  That's not to say that greed cannot motivate evil, and that means a certain type of reader may find an uncomfortable ideological compatibility with de Gex.  As a full-fledged capitalist, I can reject him wholly, but de Gex was disgusted by the rise of an ideology as much as anything else.

That ideology, that logic of an idea, was to become the dominant force in the world.  de Gex wanted to stop it.  He tried, through his mustache-twirling conspiring, and his alchemy, and such, but for our world, t'was not to be.  Money was changing as trade was rising, the study of money, and those who could understand it using the same tools as the Enlightenment were to become dominant powers, and that was to become our new world, metaphorically.

It is worth noting the following observation.  A metaphor, for all the dangers of such things.  One of our characters notes that as one system is replaced by a new system, the old system does not go away, so much as become subsumed.  It's still there, somewhere.

Who are you?  I suppose I am Kosh today.  (We are all Kosh...)

Do you flatter yourself Eliza?  Or perhaps you'll admit to a bit of the old de Gex in you?  Do you possess, not merely some aversion to that icky thing called, "money," but perhaps some attachment to an old system that you see falling by the wayside amid a transforming world?

I suppose that might depend on the transformation.  It should.  There are things about the world that I would transform, were I to have the power.  Emperor for a day, and all that.

Take your fucking shots, morons!  And I'm not talking about Lagavulin.

That'd be an easy one.  I'd issue that ruling before I take my second sip of coffee.  We'd go from there to some executive orders to manage climate change, water sanitation, netting for malaria...

Anyway.  Since I am nothing more than a schlub, shouting into the void, none of this matters.  There are many changes I don't like.  Some of them are petty and irrelevant.  Music today obviously sucks.  Autotune and associated software should be banned.  If I could turn back the clock on that, I would.  In fact, if I could go back to the pre-eMpTyV days, that'd just be awesome.  There was a time musicians were, you know, musicians instead of models, 'n dancers, 'n whatever else.  Yeah, pop was never great, but...

OK, off track.

There's real stuff that bugs me, and if you're honest, there's real stuff that bugs you.  What's the Venn diagram overlap?  For the purposes of today's digression, it does not matter.  Let's simply take a moment to think about things from the villain's perspective, which is useful to do, when presented with a compelling villain, like Edouard de Gex.

Looking back, change can appear inexorable, and results inevitable, but that's rarely if ever the case, and in the moment, making a long-term prediction can range from difficult to impossible.  Edouard de Gex could not actually have foreseen the rise of global capitalism.  He feared the rise of money as a popularizing force, and he was right, and from the perspective of a novel, it works because we look at the Enlightenment period with the benefit of hindsight.  Stephenson, after all, wrote history both selectively and, well, fictitiously to fit a thesis based on hindsight.  Yet de Gex had no hindsight.  He had foresight because the hindsighted author gave him appropriate foresight.  Rather circular, that.

Yet it allows an intentionally open-minded reader to ask, did de Gex have a point?  Any point?  He had several, depending on one's point of view.  I am obviously not inclined to agree with much about his ideology, being pretty much in the Eliza camp, but there is such a thing as materialism gone too far, and while de Gex's vision of social order is not one with which I am inclined to agree, not exactly being pro-Inquisition, myself, he has a point of view.

So what changes do you see, or think you see that you don't like?  They may not come to pass.  You don't have Neal Stephenson sticking future-hindsight into your head, but we can conceive of this, in some way, as Eliza versus de Gex, and change versus maintenance, even knowing that an old system may merely be subsumed rather than obliterated.

Do we look to a future of crumbling democracy?  The rise of illiberalism in the face of scare-quote "populism," be it of the left or right variety?  Those of us doomsaying about such things must feel an affinity for de Gex, not for his ideology, but for the doomsaying.  Long-term prediction may be a mug's game, and please don't get involved in any de Gex-like conspiracy.  "Conspiracy," after all, is a crime, as would be much of what de Gex does.  He's kind of a bad guy.  Yet for compelling villains, it is worth thinking about their perspectives.  As Princess Caroline gathers Newton and Leibniz to a salon to argue it out (yeah, that'll work), she claims that a new system built on an unsound philosophic foundation is doomed.  The system is/was being built.

Of course, to say that the Enlightenment won would be specious.  Science denialism is not new.  Science progressed, economics progressed, trade, money... but the old system, so to speak, was there, and there are multiple ironies in the Newton/Leibniz debate, as written by Stephenson.  First, both Newton and Leibniz were kinda blinkered in real life.  Newton was... an alchemist, and Leibniz had that crazy nonsense about monads.  Did you study monads in physics?  No?  That's 'cuz Leibniz was off his rocker.  To have them duke it out in a natural philosophic duel, when they were neither of them to be vindicated?  Kinda hilarious!  Monads versus alchemy, for the future!

Classic.

And are we seeing a crumbling?  The burning of Caroline's globe, as in her dream, and as she rolled a globe into a fireplace while Isaac and Gottfried bickered?  If so, why?  Probably not because we failed to pick between alchemy or monads, or anything else about that hilarious debate.  After all, no system lasts forever.  We even have a law about that.  Thermodynamics.  And in fact, at various points in the fictitious Newton-Leibniz debate, a reader might want to shout, "thermodynamics!" at the page, because it gets relevant to what they say, having no understanding, yet, of laws yet to be understood.

So what next?  Do we think about this from Caroline's perspective?  If an old system is falling by the wayside, do we simply accept that, and try to find a way to build what will be on sound principles?  That's a different answer, to be sure, and maybe healthier than de Gex's answer.

COVID is surging again, democracies face continuing challenges, and the world goes nuts with the proliferation of lies.  How will the world proceed?  Fuck if anyone knows.  Alchemists and monadologists probably can't help us, however brilliant they are at mathematics.  Eliza would be better, but Stephenson was even less constrained in the construction of her character, being entirely invented as opposed to "liberties taken."

World gone mad.  At least there are good books, right?

I have a few more scattered thoughts-- odds 'n ends, really.  They may go into another post, or I may have this be the wrap-up.

Anyway, music.  Richard Thompson.  "Time To Ring Some Changes."  Here's an old performance.