THE VICTORIAN FUTURE

Over the years, there has been * a gradual change in the way science fiction projects forward our present-day technological hopes and fears. In the 1950s and ’60s, authors imagined futures in which science and technology had evolved into new forms either horrifyingly destructive or unimaginably benign — from radioactive Godzillas and mutant swamp creatures to cities in the clouds where everyone has his own private jetpack. In most cases, however, there was an integrity to the society against which these changes occurred. Aliens always attacked some tidy American suburb or modern Japanese city, and if civilization descended into barbarism or reverted to an earlier set of feudal norms (as in Frank Herbert’s Dune), that alternative social world was clearly demarcated from our own.

In recent years, however, imagined futures have become what can only be described as dingy, populated by noxious cultural fragments from the world in which we actually live. The most astonishing technology coexists with a society that is violent, polluted, and crime-ridden; where garbage lies uncollected on broken-down spaceships; and in which the purity of the silicon chip stands in sharp contrast to the degradation of ethnic conflict, terrorism, and random violence perpetrated by punk-sadists. And, in these grungy futures, religion has made a roaring comeback.

The novelist Neal Stephenson has become a leading exemplar of the new science-fiction school. I have yet to meet a hacker or information-technology guru who does not see Stephenson’s writings as a point of reference for what the digital future will look like. Stephenson began his writing career with two relatively forgettable books, The Big U and Zodiac, the latter an “eco-thriller” that achieved some following among radical environmentalists. Stephenson’s reputation was made, however, with two novels, Snow Crash (1992) and The Diamond Age (1995). Snow Crash is about the Metaverse, an Internet of the near future in which people are represented in cyberspace by lifelike avatars that move, converse, and dismember one another in a fully realized virtual reality. The Diamond Age involves nanotechnology, the shrinking of machines to submicron scale so that invisible sensors can enter the bloodstream and report on the progress of their struggle with the host’s immune system.

What is utterly brilliant about both of these books is not their portrayal of technology (something that is quickly dated as technology itself advances at a remorseless pace), but the social reality they describe. The America of Snow Crash is a libertarian, multicultural utopia: The country has fractionated into a series of “burbclaves” or “franchulates” like “Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong,” in which residents are totally sovereign and free to set their own lifestyles. Blacks have their crime-ridden sovereignties; white racists can choose to live in New South Africa. (As in William Gibson’s now- classic Neuromancer, Stephenson’s future is heavily populated by Asians: The protagonist of Snow Crash is a half-black, half-Japanese hacker named Hiro Protagonist whose skill in writing software is matched only by his ability to wield a samurai sword.)

The jurisdiction of the federal government extends no further than the buildings that house its employees, who are mistrusted, demoralized, and subject to daily lie-detector tests to make sure they are not ripping off the few remaining taxpayers. The chief comparative advantage of the American economy, apart from software, is on-time pizza delivery, now controlled by the Mafia, which has franchised itself and punishes failure to deliver in 30 minutes with knee-capping or worse.

The Central Intelligence Agency has been privatized and merged with the Library of Congress to form the Central Intelligence Corporation, which buys and sells information to anyone who will pay, while the aircraft carrier Enterprise has been sold off to a religious huckster named L. Bob Rife and is being used to transport impoverished Asians and Russians to the coast of California.

The Diamond Age features even more intriguing ethical themes. The protagonist is again a programmer named John Percival Hackworth, who lives in a neo-Victorian colony called New Atlantis outside of Shanghai. The Vickies, as they are known, originated in the observation that culture was critical to economic success. As Western civilization disintegrated in the early 21st century, it was only those possessed of self-discipline, honesty, and hard work who were able to prosper. The Vickies, who practice sexual prudery and speak to one another in a stilted, anti-quarian English, so successfully remoralized themselves that they have become the richest and most technologically advanced of all the social fragments left by Western civilization.

The Diamond Age’s plot revolves around the theft of a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, an interactive book-computer programmed by Hackworth to educate New Victorian girls. It falls into the hands of a child named Nell, who lives in abject poverty at the mercy of her single mother’s abusive and violent boyfriends. Nell finds the primer so intriguing that she is educated, in spite of herself, to rise out of her circumstances and become, however improbably, leader of an army of Chinese orphans rescued from the female infanticide practiced in the Celestial Kingdom (once a hinterland of the People’s Republic of China).

There is one passage in The Diamond Age that deserves to be quoted at length. Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw, a Chinese “equity lord” of New Atlantis, asks Hackworth how serious a vice he considers hypocrisy to be. After receiving an equivocal answer, Finkle-McGraw says:

You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices. . . . It was all because of moral relativism. You see, in that sort of a climate, you are not allowed to criticize others — after all, if there is no absolute right and wrong, then what grounds is there for criticism?

You wouldn’t believe the things they said about the original Victorians. Calling someone a Victorian in those days was almost like calling them a fascist or Nazi. . . .

Because they were hypocrites . . . the Victorians were despised in the late twentieth century. Many of the persons who held such opinions were, of course, guilty of the most nefandous conduct themselves, yet saw no paradox in holding such views because they were not hypocrites themselves — they took no moral stances and lived by none.

The suggestion that our age has suffered grievously by elevating hypocrisy to the vice of vices has been made by a number of recent observers, including Alan Ehrenhalt in his book The Lost City (which evokes the vanished moral life of Chicago in the 1950s) and Gertrude Himmelfarb in The De- Moralization of Society. I do not know whether Neal Stephenson has ever read a word by either author, but he certainly writes as if he has. And he has stumbled onto a truth that may escape the cyberpunks who read his novels because they like nanotechnology and the Internet: that technological progress without moral progress is worse than useless, and that technological progress itself may depend upon a moral coherence that we are rapidly losing.

Francis Fukuyama is Hirst Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University and co-director of the New Sciences Project at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.