Insulation

Milgrim had at least one more speech in him, before the end of the novel. And this one he even managed to speak aloud...

"A nation consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual's morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation's laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn't a nation.
"Are you really so scared of terrorists that you'll dismantle the structures that made America what it is?
"If you are, you let the terrorist win. Because that is exactly, specifically, his goal, his only goal: to frighten you into surrendering the rule of law. That's why they call him 'terrorist.' He uses terrifying threats to induce you to degrade your own society.
"It's based on the same glitch in human psychology that allows people to believe they can win the lottery. Statistically, almost nobody ever wins the lottery. Statistically, terrorist attacks almost never happen."

I thought of this particular exchange today during my class on education and child development, though I can't say I'm absolutely sure why. A classmate was commenting on previous courses she had taken, and a peculiar confluence she had experienced when three different classes were all covering the same certain revolutionary political philosopher. I don't know enough about what she had learned to have commented in any interesting way, so I didn't, but then she remarked that "he ignored entire aspects of humanity." Suddenly, I heard myself saying, "Well sure. Propounding your ideology is often so much easier when you flat out ignore certain parts of humanity. It's the kind of thinking that seems to get people elected to high offices of government."

Spook Country

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

Thus Gibson began his first novel, twenty-three years ago. About 2,173 pages later, he gives us the following...

Milgrim had never been one for metaphysics, but. . . .this text was starting to reveal the pleasure to be had from metaphysical contemplation. Particularly if you were contemplating these Free Spirit guys, who seemed to have been a combination of Charlie Manson and Hannibal Lecter.
And insofar as everything was equally of God, they taught, those who were most in touch with the Godness in every last thing would make it a point to do anything at all, particularly anything still forbidden by those who hadn't yet gotten the Free Spirit message. To which end they went around having sex with anybody they could get to hold still for it, or not, as the case might be—rape being viewed as particularly righteous, and murder equally so. It was like a secret religion of mutually empowered sociopaths, and Milgrim thought it was probably the gnarliest single example of human behavior he'd ever heard of. Someone like Manson, for instance, simply wouldn't have been able to get any traction, had he landed among the brothers and sisters of the Free Spirit. Probably, Milgrim guessed, Manson would've hated it. What good would it be to be Charlie Manson in a whole society of serial killers and rapists, each one convinced that he or she was directly manifesting the Holy Spirit?
But the other aspect of the Free Spirit that fascinated him, and this applied to the whole text, was how these heresies would get started, often spontaneously generating around some single medieval equivalent of your more outspoken homeless mumbler. Organized religion, he saw, back in the day, had been purely a signal-to-noise proposition, at once the medium and the message, a one-channel universe. For Europe, that channel was Christian, and broadcasting from Rome, but nothing could be broadcast faster than a man could travel on horseback. There was a hierarchy in place, and a highly organized methodology of top-down signal dissemination, but the time lag enforced by tech-lack imposed a near-disastrous ratio, the noise of heresy constantly threatening to overwhelm the signal.

It surprised me, as I progressed through the novel, that Milgrim ended up being one of the main vehicles of step-by-step commentary on interesting subjects not intrinsically tied to the plot of the book. I didn't guess him for that type of character, early on in the story.

The Recognition of Patterns

Cayce thought: "However odd things seem, mustn't it be to exactly that extent of oddness that a life is one's own, and no one else's?"


I just finished re-reading Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson. One of the side-plots revolves around one character's missing father, Wingrove. Though absent, his presence pops up throughout the book in memories of his actions or thoughts.

"That had always been Win's first line of defense, within himself: to recognize that he was only a part of something larger. Paranoia, he said, was fundamentally egocentric, and every conspiracy theory served in some way to aggrandize the believer."

Another one of Win's ideas had been that a person must allow room for coincidence. Look too closely for meaning in unrelated things, and you end up in the realm of apophenia.

Responding to the cliché "I know in my heart," another character, named Hubertus Bigend, corrects by way of the following paragraph.

"The heart is a muscle. You 'know' in your limbic brain. The seat of instinct. The mammalian brain. Deeper, wider, beyond logic. That is where advertising works, not in the upstart cortex. What we think of as 'mind' is only a sort of jumped-up gland, piggybacking on the reptilian brainstem and the older, mammalian mind, but our culture tricks us into recognizing it as all of consciousness. The mammalian spreads continent-wide beneath it, mute and muscular, attending its ancient agenda. And makes us buy things."

Gibson's gift of effortless description is poetic in a way rarely found in sci-fi, and his method of creating characters of depth and insight is remarkable. Sometimes he shows us a distant future, and recently he paints us a picture of the future that is tomorrow. Twenty-three years after winning the triple-crown of literature awards for science fiction, it is abundantly clear that he deserved it.