(as related by Eneasz on LessWrong)
"Revenge?" said the peg-legged man. "On a whale? No, I decided I'd just get on with my life."
The above is the complete text of Moby Dick if the primary characters were rationalists. The link has excerpts from other literature similarly written as if the characters involved were, similarly, thinking about what they were doing, and about how they were thinking, and about what they know. Besides its brevity, this one sticks out because of the relationship between Nomads, Prophets, and rational thinking.
Herman Melville’s (b 1819, Prophet) most famous novel was released in 1851. That point in history is three years after the start of the California Gold Rush, ten years before the start of the Civil War, a few years before Bleeding Kansas, Dred Scott, and Harper’s Ferry - in the Third Turning, that is. There isn’t quite the same feeling of easy riches that one might remember from the dot-com era or The Great Gatsby. (Although it’s fun to note that the crew of the Pequod are paid with the shipboard equivalent of room, board, and stock options.) And while Ishmael notes that his recompense will barely replace the clothes that will wear out by the voyage’s end, it seems as if he values the less tangible benefits of adventure and excitement on the open seas, of traveling around the world. Ishmael, that is, seems like a Nomad. And Captain Ahab acts like a Prophet.
Doing the math on Ahab, who is 58 years old when the novel begins, we can estimate that he is probably also a Prophet, like Melville, of the same Transcendental generation that includes Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William Lloyd Garrison. This depends on when one wants to estimate the start of the novel, however: 58 years back from 1851 is 1793, near the start of the Transcendental cohort. Assuming Ishmael took some time to set down the events he survived, it could be in 1848 or earlier, which has Ahab born in 1790 - near the end of the Compromise (Artist) generation. While there is probably another post’s worth of comparisons to be made with Ahab as an Artist (or someone very close to the Artist/Prophet line) this post will work with the Captain as a Prophet.
Prophets, in the regular (non-archetypical) sense, aren’t rational. They speak on behalf of God, are unwilling to accept alternative explanations, and often aren’t bearers of glad tidings. In the Strauss & Howe sense, they reject the status quo, and are willing to take on entrenched institutions - even when those institutions are willing and likely to fight back. John Brown (b. 1800, Prophet) turned 51 the year Moby Dick was published, and one could certainly imagine Captain Ahab on the ground at Harper’s Ferry, as easily as Brown might be seen exhorting the crew of the Pequod to find and kill the white whale.
The short version of Moby Dick above, then, could be seen as not only what Captain Ahab would do if he was a rationalist, but if he was a Nomad. Eliezer Yudkowsky, the man behind HPMOR and Less Wrong, is Gen X (b. 1979) and one might predict that the rise of rationalism parallels the move of Generation X into Young Adulthood and Mid-Life. The idea of reacting to a whale as the equivalent of God, of taking on the whale to attempt to undo fate - well, it all boils down to the short summary above.
Playing around with this a bit more, Captain Ahab has been played by Boomer (William Hurt, Barry Bostwick), Silent (Patrick Stewart), G.I. (Gregory Peck) and Missionary (John Barrymore) actors. It’s not surprising that it skips Generation X (none of whom is quite Ahab’s age) but it is interesting that it skips the (also Nomad) Lost Generation. Khan Noonien Singh similarly goes for vengeance - and spits out Ahab’s last words for his own - well, he was in suspended animation for a while, so the math could fail us, but he similarly appears to be a Prophet: In his mid-40s during the Eugenic Wars, so he was born in the late 1940s or early 1950s.
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