Weber & Bureaucracy (was: MO's Vision...

[Terrance]

David Morris wrote:
> 
> >From: Terrance  At the most abstract level of analysis, modernization leads
> >to what Max Weber called "the disenchantment of the  world."
> >It eliminates all the superhuman and supernatural forces
> 
> Not to mention HUMAN ones...

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Specifically, modernization involves a process
of secularization; that is, it systematically displaces
religious  institutions, beliefs, and practices,
substituting for them those of reason and science. This
process was first  observable in Christian Europe toward the
end of the 17th century. (It is possible that there is
something  inherently secularizing about Christianity, for
no other religion seems to give rise spontaneously to
secular  beliefs.) At any rate, once invented in Europe,
especially
Protestant Europe, secularization was carried as part of 
the "package" of industrialism that was exported to the
non-European world. Wherever modern European cultures  have
impinged, they have diffused secularizing currents into
traditional religions and nonrational ideologies.

In that letter to Hirsch Pynchon says, 

"And German Christianity being perhaps the most perfect
expression of the whole Western/analytic"linear"/alienated
shtick. It is no accident that Leibnitz was co-inventor of
calculus..." 

Here in the novel V., just as in GR, it the German that will
be satirized most harshly. The Soul in the Stone, the
Catholic fecundity of Mary in the womb of rock will be
blasted away by Germany's belated modernization,
rationalization, secularization and technological Violence.