I'm Shiloh Brooks. I'm a professor and CEO, and I believe reading good books makes us better men. Today I'm talking to Neal Stephenson. Neal is a legendary science fiction writer. Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published from 1776 to 1789, changed Neal's life. Today I'm asking him why. This is Old School.
Neal Stephenson, welcome to Old School.
So, you know, you're a writer who people say can predict the future, but for today's show, you've chosen a book about the past, which I want to get to in a minute. You've chosen Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. But I have been given to understand that you have coined terms like metaverse, that you have anticipated large language AI models, that you have coined the term or at least popularized the term avatar, you talked about cryptocurrency before it was a thing. I'm curious, when you're writing, do you feel like you're predicting the future?
I think that would be very counterproductive to be constantly aware of, you know, having that pressure. The last book that I wrote that sort of was set in a future kind of environment was Termination Shock, which is, you know, about geoengineering. And, you know, so in that case it was, you know, fairly near future, and everything in it is kind of based on reasonable extrapolations of science and engineering concepts that had already been worked out by other people. So I think once you kind of gain that reputation, it becomes a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way. And so sometimes people do some kind of pattern matching in their brain and think that some prediction has happened when maybe it's not actually there.
I know that there's a lot of folks who treat your novels almost as roadmaps, you know, and you're influential on a lot of technology figures, Bill Gates and Sergey Brin, Peter Thiel. Why do you think your books resonate with those folks?
Well, in order for a fantasy or science fiction story to hold up and engage the reader, it's got to be internally consistent. You know, it has to make sense. You've got to set out the rules of the world and then you've got to stick to those rules. You've got some leeway at the beginning to make stuff up. But then once you've set down some basic principles, you know, you have to stick with them or the readers, you know, suddenly just set the book down because it no longer makes sense to them. The technological world has to make sense. It has to be coherent. It has to add up. And so the technology needs to be based on actual science and technology as much as possible. But on top of that, it has to kind of make sense economically and socially. There has to be a kind of plausible, like, business plan, for lack of a better term, behind, you know, why these fictional technologies exist in the book and why they make sense. And once you've got that, that gives you the sort of basis that you need to keep following through with a plot that makes sense. And so that's what I've tried to do, and that's what a lot of science fiction writers try to do in making my books. And to the extent that succeeds, I think if you're a tech entrepreneur, you kind of see that, you pick up on those details and maybe get a sense that what you're reading, you know, actually is a kind of semi-plausible roadmap.
So it seems like what you're saying is you have to have not just intuition, creativity with respect to the science and technology side, but there has to be some social intuition, some wisdom about human affairs. The why of the technology is, in a way, what you're saying. The reason I ask you that question is because when I asked you to pick a novel or a book today for us to discuss, you picked a book not about science fiction, not about the future. You picked a book about the distant past, and you picked a book that was written in the 1770s all the way up to 1789 by Gibbon. And so I can sense from what you just said and by the book that you picked that you're certainly a kind of student of the human things and of human affairs and of human nature just as much as you might be of engineering and technology. When did you first find the six volumes that are the Decline and Fall of Rome? And how did they strike you when you found them?
Yes. So it's been a long time. Okay. It's been a while. I started reading him in my early twenties, fresh out of college. I was working on a novel, my first published novel. It's called The Big U. I felt the need for something to pattern the story on. And it's set in a fictional university, and there's a series of university presidents, you know, who are kind of tracing the arc of what happens in this university over time. Somehow I hit on the idea of basing them on a particular series of Roman emperors pretty early. I got this edition, which is put out by a historian named J. B. Burry, about in like 1909. So it's in seven volumes, and that's the one I've stuck with ever since.
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I think for people who have never heard of Gibbon, it might be helpful for us to just summarize. And this is hard because this is a six-volume book. It took Gibbon many years to write. I think he started writing it maybe in 1773, 1774. It comes out in 1776. So it's as old as America. It's about to reach the first volume. It's 250. I think he completes it in 1789. But I wonder if you might be willing to just tell people, what is this book about? Some basics about it.
It doesn't get rolling until about 180 AD, which is the moment when Marcus Aurelius, who's one of the best emperors, hands it off to his son Commodus, who's one of the worst. So it's as good a moment as any to sort of mark the beginning of the decline. And it happens to be the exact same moment that we see in a very fictionalized form in Ridley Scott's movie Gladiator. You know, it's that handoff from Marcus Aurelius to Commodus. And so a key thing to say right up front is that if you've got sort of a passing familiarity with Rome, okay, from video games or YouTube videos or whatever, you probably know about certain stories. You know about Hannibal crossing the Alps and Vesuvius wiping out Pompeii and Spartacus rebelling and Caesar crossing the Rubicon and all of that stuff. All of that is far in the past at the beginning of Gibbon. Okay, there's no one alive who still remembers any of that stuff at this point. And so it starts in about 180. The empire falls in about 470-ish, 476, I think. So it only really—that's only a span of 300 years. But the Eastern Roman Empire continues for another thousand years. Okay, it doesn't fall until 1453. Along the way, you know, Gibbon covers not just the 300 years to the fall of the West, but he covers, you know, what we refer to as the Dark Ages. He covers the rise of Islam, the spread of the Islamic power across North Africa and into Spain, the Battle of Tours in 732 where Charles Martel turns the forces of Islam back in central France. He covers the Crusades, starting in around 1000 and going up through at least the Fourth Crusade. There's a lot about the history of the Persian Empire and the Holy Roman Empire, talks about Charlemagne. So it's really an entire history of kind of Western civ, if you will, up to about the year 1500.
So this is a complicated book. It's a big book. There's a lot that goes on. My understanding about this book is that there are two kind of central theses about what caused the decline and fall of Rome. The first is that what caused the decline and fall of Rome is that a hungry, scrappy, cunning young people become lazy and fat over time with their success, such that the old Roman virtue starts to soften. Barbarians begin to encroach on these people whose empire spans too far for them to defend and whose souls have somehow over time become softened. So that's kind of one view of what's going on in this book. The other view is that Christianity has something to do with the decline and fall of Rome. Now, it may be that Christianity causes that softening. We can talk about what it is about Christianity, but that the decline and fall of Rome is really about the history of Christianity. Gibbon says when he decided to write the book that he had this idea almost like it was a moment of revelation. And you're a writer, and you mentioned that he had inspired you, and without him maybe your first novel, The Big U, wouldn't be what it was. He says, 'I had the idea. It was at Rome on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the Decline and Fall of the City first came to my mind.' So I'm curious if you have any reflection on that image, that moment of inspiration, and how it might color the thesis of the Decline and Fall.
Yeah. Well, it's an incredibly powerful image. Gibbon sort of got this reputation pretty early on as being a skeptic or even outright hostile to Christianity. And so pinning the fall of the Roman Empire on Christianity, I don't see that so much. You know, when I read this, he'll hit the pause button every so often and drop in a chapter about the development of the church, you know, and, you know, the Council of Nicaea or whatever, you know, various important developments in the theology of the church and the development of both the Eastern and the Roman traditions. There's plenty of explanatory material for why the empire gradually decayed over time. And I just think that the idea that he's pegging it all on the rise of Christianity is a little bit overstated. And maybe it might be a holdover of like some early reactions to the book at the time it came out when people were expecting a more kind of pious, you know, and less skeptical attitude towards religion. But I don't see it that much in the actual reading of it.
What do you think about the part of the thesis that says the virtue of a great people can become softened with luxury? That there was a kind of discipline, a kind of singularity of purpose and focus, a toughness of the early Romans that gives way as a city becomes an empire. Do you think that that is a kind of crucial part of this? Do you think that's a true account of the nature of how great people evolve?
I mean, that is the overall kind of overarching theme of the book. As the story goes on, you read about emperor after emperor and all of these developments over the course of 1,200 years. There are many opportunities during all of that for Gibbon to sort of step in. And Gibbon does this very well. He's very opinionated and he loves to kind of drop in these witticisms and sly remarks. So sprinkled throughout the whole book, you know, there are these bangers, these great quotes that, you know, where he'll provide some insight. And he's not like leading you by the nose to try to tell you what to think or trying to impose a simple-minded explanation on this, but you can kind of draw it out over time by following the story, and you can kind of figure out, you know, what his attitude is.
We're talking about two kind of separate threads here, and I want to ask you whether they're connected. One is that a great people over time become softened by either luxury or by success, such that the hunger, the edge fades. The other part, of course, that we're talking about is that Rome, oddly, this pagan nation, becomes the storehouse of and springboard for Christianity. Now there are thinkers, there are great philosophers, Gibbon, I think, I suspect, had at least part of this in mind, who would say that Christianity is a cause of softness. In other words, that the pagan toughness of the Greeks and the Romans, there's a moral transformation with Christianity, a kind of inversion of values, such that the Christian virtues—charity, love, neighbor love, the veneration of suffering by the suffering god on the cross—versus, say, the great, you know, the pagan gods who are running around muscular and throwing lightning bolts, that this is, there's a whole, it's not just a decline of a civilization, it's the decline of an entire moral worldview and in a way an inversion of that. And I wonder if you think Gibbon is going that far, or really what you make of that moment in the history of the West.
I mean, it's certainly about the overall decay of the kind of, for lack of a better word, morals of the people and of the state. I again don't see that much directly linking that to Christianity. It's more to do with the corruption of institutions in my mind. And, you know, if anything, you could argue that the Christians might have been a countervailing force against some of that sort of moral degradation. There's a lot in here, you know, Gibbon is famous for when he comes across some material that is too spicy to print in English, he'll drop it into a footnote. And so all of the kind of the Jeffrey Epstein-type material in the book tends to be in Greek or Latin at the bottom of the page, and he just assumes that if you're capable of reading that, that you're, you know, mature enough to be able to handle it, right? But he has a lot to say about kind of the degeneracy of morals and the way that sort of public offices went up for sale and the way that the military came to exercise, you know, too strong of a role in the selection of who the next emperor was going to be. There are plenty of ass-kicking Christians. I mean, you know, Constantine, you know, the emperor who founded Constantinople and formerly converted the empire to Christianity was an ass-kicker. And, you know, famously, he saw this vision in Hoc Signo Vinces, by adopting the cross, by this sign you will conquer. And later we get on to Charles Martel, Chuck the Hammer, who takes down the Muslims at the Battle of Tours, and we get to the Crusaders and all of that. So for me, and this may be me reading it through the lens of what's going on right now in our politics, it's more to do with what we expect of our leaders in the way of upright, disinterested behavior.
Do you think that Gibbon is writing a book that is meant to teach future generations about the decline and fall of their own empires?
There are places in Gibbon where I think he resists this on the one hand. So I believe there are places where he seems to indicate that civilization can't collapse the same way that it did in Rome because civilization now is spread across borders. Meaning it's not as though there's one civilized center of the world. The other part, of course, is that in the Romans' time there were spots on the map, peoples on the map that Rome was wholly ignorant of, that these people could come in, the barbarians from outside. It's not clear what they are, who they are, what their power is, what's going on.
Who the hell are these people?
Yeah. Exactly right. So that's why I say that he's right, that that's a peculiar, singular situation. Rome, the civilized capital, and the Huns who are unknown. We don't have that anymore. On the other hand, I do tend to agree with you that there's something in this book that resonates with, as you were just saying in your recent remark, contemporary conversations about the decline and fall of the West as a whole, the decline and fall of the United States in particular.
Can I read a couple bits? Would this be an opportune time for me to... I mean, the problem with this guy is that he's got a banger on almost every page that I want to read.
In fact, I came across this, it's a slight brief digression, but it put me in mind of the Russians in Ukraine.
In the part of Ukraine that they control. So the Goths were now in possession of the Ukraine, a country of considerable extent and uncommon fertility, intersected with navigable rivers which from either side discharged themselves into the Borysthenes, and interspersed with large and lofty forests of oaks, the plenty of game and fish, the innumerable beehives deposited in the hollow of old trees and in the cavities of rocks, and forming even in that rude age a valuable branch of commerce. The size of the cattle, the temperature of the air, the aptness of the soil for every species of grain, and the luxuriancy of the vegetation, all displayed the liberality of nature and tempted the industry of man. But the Goths withstood all these temptations and still adhered to a life of idleness, of poverty, and of rapine. Made me think of what's going on right now.
Say more about that. How did it, and what about it?
Well, just the idea that these people have invaded Ukraine, which is one of the most fertile and prosperous places on earth, but instead of sort of being peaceful and productive, all they want to do is live off the land in a parasitical way and engage in further acts of conquest. Rapine is the term that he uses, which sort of is a word we don't use very much anymore. It's not about sexual rape, but it's about sort of rapacious behavior. And so pillaging the landscape for short-term gain instead of trying to make improvements and, you know, live in an industrious and peaceful way.
So you offer that passage because you see in it one way in which Gibbon isolates something that is enduring about human beings as such. Because we had said, well, maybe Rome is a singular example, maybe something like this can't happen again, but you're saying something like, on the other hand, there are these examples of human behavior in the book which seem to recur.
Yeah, yeah.
And it changes when you read. So when I read that, you know, decades ago, I thought, okay, well, he really socked it to the Goths there. You know, the Goths really, you know, come off pretty poorly in that description, but I'm thinking of it as a thing that happened a thousand years ago. Whereas when I read it post the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it takes on an entirely different meaning and significance to me. So that's why in some ways this is a good book to keep rereading.
