The Calculus of History

The relevance to our present situation is obvious, but what Stephenson adds to this mix is a decidedly old-fashioned respect for the idea of human nature, a core of characteristics that divide people from the rest of creation. In short, Stephenson’s books suggest a belief in the soul, with all of its mysteries and perplexities. In Stephenson’s case, the reluctance to answer the Very Big Questions may not be the matter of cowardice or guile that it is for far too many of his contemporaries. It may be instead an acknowledgment that in the novel, as in life, we see truth through experience, not through abstract reasoning or the acceptance of others’ assertions.

This is a central theme of Stephenson’s current novel, “Quicksilver,” his most ambitious book–which is saying a lot. Unlike his previous work, “Quicksilver” is entirely a historical novel, set in the Baroque era of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Though more than nine-hundred-pages long, it is only the first installment of a trilogy, called “The Baroque Cycle,” the subsequent volumes of which will be released in six months and a year.

The present volume has three main characters, two of whom we know to be ancestors of characters in Stephenson’s previous book, “Cryptonomicon.” The protagonist is Daniel Waterhouse, a college roommate of Isaac Newton and son of a successful Puritan tradesman and political agitator, who is a talented scientist but no match for giants such as Newton, Robert Hooke, and Gottfried Leibniz. Daniel becomes the secretary of the Royal Society, the English organization devoted to the advancement of science (by which most of its members mean alchemy).

After more than three-hundred pages, the story shifts abruptly to follow the adventures of “Half-Cocked Jack” Shaftoe, King of the Vagabonds, a former London street urchin at loose ends in continental Europe. In the course of his bizarre adventures, Jack meets Eliza, a blonde harem girl from the imaginary island of Qwghlm, who is on a quest to wreak revenge on the man who kidnapped her and her mother years before and caused them to be sold into slavery. Later, Eliza meets Daniel, and the characters’ stories intertwine thoroughly.

Vividly drawn characters based on real people abound, notably Samuel Pepys, Robert Hooke, Charles II, Louis XIV, William of Orange, Newton, and Leibniz. Stephenson has described his book quite accurately as a “historical, swashbuckler, potboiler epic.” We witness a sea battle on a ship beset by numerous pirate craft in Cape Cod Bay, the depredations of the bubonic plague in England, the Great Fire of London, street riots, public hangings, the breaking of the Siege of Vienna, the Glorious Revolution, a gathering of witches on a German Walpurgisnacht, court intrigue in Versailles, numerous sword and gun battles, and much more.

As may be surmised, “Quicksilver” is something of a grab bag. Stephenson breaks things up with ample slapstick humor, discussions of philosophy and natural science, bawdy farce, letters, playlets dramatizing significant ideas and events, disquisitions on cryptography and economics, detailed descriptions of bodily functions, lots of sodomy, delusions of a syphilis sufferer, poems, quotations, lists, extensive biographical material on characters both fictional and historical, and much else. In fact, although the story is quite complex, the book’s length is really more a product of all the details, explanations, and digressions the author provides to impress upon the reader the mental and physical realities of the time.

Not all of this works or is even necessary, but overall it is the right way to portray an era in which impressive scientific and artistic advances were being made in a world of widespread poverty, misery, and slavery. Stephenson considers nearly every important trend and controversy of the time. (The one important gap is that he pays relatively little attention to the arts.) Prominent among the issues considered are the religious controversies between Catholics and Protestants, and in particular the wars between factions within both church and state.

Of equal importance is money. As trade within and among nations increased during this era, the nature of money began to change fundamentally, from a strictly physical commodity to more of a medium of communication, and Stephenson depicts this transition and its implications with great accuracy and insight. This material, fascinating in itself, is part of a much larger and quite sophisticated treatment of economic principles, especially seen in the playing out of incentives for investment and productive work. The contrast between Holland, which has free markets, and France, which is under the repressive, high-tax regime of Louis XIV (to finance international adventures against England and domestic wars against the Huguenots) displays this theme quite distinctly. In France, even many of the nobility are dirt-poor, whereas in Holland, the peasants work incessantly and can afford to fill their stables not with horses but with painters creating works for sale in Amsterdam.

IN SHORT, the Baroque Era drew the blueprint for Modernity. As Stephenson noted in an interview publicizing this novel, the work of the Royal Society and other natural philosophers of the time coincided with similar currents in politics and religion. Historians have commonly characterized the Enlightenment as the time when human knowledge and power over nature really began to increase, but it was actually in the Baroque era that the most important progress in these regards was made. (Secularists prefer the Enlightenment because of the increasingly explicit questioning and ultimate rejection of revealed religion on the part of some of its prominent figures.) Stephenson does not agree with this fondness for the more skeptical era: “The Enlightenment, though it sounds really good, is and should be a controversial event” because of the damages it did.

He is correct in that assessment, and in “Quicksilver” he shows that it may well be best to see the Enlightenment, and indeed modernity itself, as an unfortunate detour in history, rather than a peak period of intellectual achievement. The main story is set in motion when Enoch Root–the mysterious, preternaturally long-lived alchemist from “Cryptonomicon”–arrives in Boston in 1713 to send lapsed Puritan scientist Daniel Waterhouse back to his home country of England to effect a reconciliation between two increasingly fractious scientific factions. The followers of Leibniz in Germany and those of Newton in England are neglecting their productive work in favor of serving as “cat’s-paws and hired leg-breakers,” as Root puts it, in arguments over which of the two men was the first to invent mathematical calculus.

The real conflict behind this argument, however, is between those who support the continued pursuit of alchemy–Newton’s followers–and those devoted to the new science of empiricism (Leibniz’s faction, which also includes the brilliant jack-of-all-scientific-trades Robert Hooke). Newton is content simply to describe natural phenomena, to give only “a mathematical notion of these forces, without considering their physical causes and seats.” That is because he and his fellow alchemists follow Aristotle in believing that each thing in the natural world has an essential spirit behind it, the workings of which can never be fully explained. Leibniz, by contrast, thinks that science can fully explain how things work: “In order to be a Natural Philosopher I would have to put aside the old doctrine of substantial forms and instead rely upon Mechanism to explain the world.”

It is an interesting paradox that Leibniz’s ideas, though they seem more congenial to mechanistic explanations of nature–and hence possibly dangerous to received religion–are in fact rather more conducive to an informed belief in an omnicompetent God. As Leibniz notes in a letter to Daniel, although Newton’s science “encloses all the geometrickal truths [such as that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line], it excludes the other kind: truths that have their sources in fitness and in final causes.” That is, any phenomenon that cannot be explained by simple geometry must be a truth arbitrarily made by God, not one essential to the nature of the universe, and explanation of these matters belongs to theology, “a realm [Newton] thinks is best approached through the study of alchemy.”

Newton understands and accepts this limitation, admitting to Daniel that “Geometry can never explain gravity.” Daniel asks, “To whom should we appeal then? Metaphysicians? Theologians? Sorcerers?” Newton replies, “They are all the same to me, and I am one.” Leibniz finds this offensive because “it seems to cast God in the role of a capricious despot who desires to hide the truth from us.”

Rather than follow the alchemists in seeing “angels, demons, miracles, and divine essences everywhere,” Leibniz sees a universe that makes sense in all ways. “I like to believe,” Stephenson’s Leibniz writes, “that [God] would have chosen wisely and according to some coherent plan that our minds–insofar as they are in God’s image–are capable of understanding.” And thus, “God arranged things from the beginning so that Mind could understand Nature,” says the fictional Leibniz. “But He did not do this by continual meddling in the development of Mind, and the unfolding of the Universe. . . . Rather He fashioned the nature of both Mind and Nature to be harmonious from the beginning.”

STEPHENSON HIMSELF seems rather more sympathetic to Leibniz than to Newton, which makes one wonder what he thinks about today’s manifestation of the fundamental disagreement over the nature and limits of scientific knowledge. If Stephenson refrains from definitively answering the most profound questions brought up in his book, it is because these great questions are genuine puzzles of the human condition. That he has presented them so successfully in a sometimes trashy novel that affords so many pleasures great and small, is a sufficient accomplishment in itself.

S.T. Karnick is editor in chief of American Outlook magazine, published by the Hudson Institute.