«« :: 2009 Jan :: »»

Something must have changed since last time, because I've really gotten into it. One obvious thing is the economy. I'm seeing tons of articles and hearing lots of discussions of what went wrong and how to fix it and how it works. I've also learned a bit more about investing since the books came out, and about how businesses work. One of the main topics of the Baroque Cycle is how our current economic system came to be. Our ideas of what money is are only a couple hundred years old, and they're changing. Reading the books you get an idea of what it might have felt like to see it happen. I guess this is just more interesting to me now.

It's also interesting to see how our ideas of economic organizations -- companies -- got started. We see something of the workings of the Dutch East India Company and other Companies. Eliza is a sort of financier and later a proto-venture capitalist. The Royal Society is a weird quasi-governmental think-tank-meets-company-mash-up. I'm not done with the book but I'm thinking that the Clubb for the Taking and Prosecution of the Party or Parties responsible for the Manufacture and Placement of the Infernal Engines lately Exploded at Crane Court, Orney's Ship-yard, &c., of which Daniel is a member, might turn out to be the ancestor of something interesting.

Daniel Waterhouse's career path is also interesting to me. Daniel is always the guy who worked just out of the spotlight, next to the guy who got really famous (Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, Gottfried Liebniz, etc). Actually, there weren't really career paths as we know them today, because the idea of what a company is is being invented as the story progresses. Or maybe what I think of as a stable career path doesn't actually exist, and the nature of the company itself is changing. Daniel follows this crazy path through life, bumping around between doing science as part of the Royal Society, and other work for his patron, some of it overseas in the Colonies. The business/government boundaries (and the work/life ones) are really murky. Makes me think of how the internet blurs work and home life, at least for programmers and other people who do all their work on computers, which thanks to the Internet can be anywhere. Daniel helps me see my own development in a new light. We've always talked about people apprenticing themselves, or being journeymen, or having a patron, or lots of other metaphors. In the Baroque Cycle we get to see non-metaphorical examples of some of these told in story form, which makes them easier for me to absorb somehow.

Daniel is the son of Puritan in a country where there actually is an official state church that isn't too comfortable with the idea of sharing borders with Catholic Churches or the various Free Churches or Gathered Churches. He is a Nonconformist and a Dissenter (like a lot of other words in the book, these are capitalized and are more like titles) and has an uneasy relationship with royalty, which makes many around him uncomfortable. Some treat him as an amusing oddity but others are nervous or even threatened by him. This resonates with me: As a Christian I've never fit comfortably in the secular world. As a Mennonite I've never really fit in the evangelical world either. And now I'm finding that I don't quite fit into the Mennonite Church USA world either.

If I had to say what the take-away is from all this, I'd have to say first that I haven't finished it yet. But right now something what's meaningful to me is the idea that our current system (or what was our current system until recently) was not always as it was, that it came to be that way though a historical process. Right now, what we consider business-as-usual is having a sea change and it's nerve-wracking. Reading about how Daniel and Eliza and Isaac and the other characters deal with all the chaos and confusion and new-ness of things is an encouragement to me. As a civilization we went through some craziness to get to where we are, which helps me think about the future.