A Good Neal Stephenson Quip

Me and Neal Stephenson at a booksigning for Quicksilver.

I make it a point to check out the Teresa and Patrick Neilsen Hayden’s blog, Making Light, on a fairly regular basis. There’s always something interesting to read there, and my dendrites always feel a little bushier after a visit.

Making Light has an interesting set of quotes at the bottom of its left sidebar, and this one by Neal Stephenson — who probably rolls his eyes at the “dark prince of hacker fiction” that got pinned on him — caught my eye and tickled my brain (and will probably annoy some of my friends with hippie-ish tendencies):

For a Westerner to trash Western culture is like criticizing our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere on the grounds that it sometimes gets windy, and besides, Jupiter’s is much prettier. You may not realize its advantages until you’re trying to breathe liquid methane.

Joey deVilla

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Anonymous says:

June 27, 2005 at 10:33 am

With no context, I can't be sure exactly what Mr. Stephenson meant by this, but I'm afraid he is off the mark here. To use his own metaphor, for a Westerner to trash Western culture is like finding our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere increasingly difficult to breathe because of fossil-fuel pollution, and saying that that is bad, and that we must do something about it.
Anonymous says:

June 27, 2005 at 10:49 am

I think it's a matter of degree. What you're describing is constructive critique, while Stephenson is using the word "trash". I agree with you and will go farther by saying that many great leaps forward are the result of such critiquing. I also believe that Stephenson is responding to the "familiarity breeds contempt" automatic dismissal of anything "Western" that is fashionable in certain circles, such as academia.

The short and sassy summary: You say to-may-toe, he says gazpacho.