Is it OK to be a Luddite?

[Courtney Givens]

>From: MalignD at aol.com
>
>I don't intend to debate this endlessly, but a few comments to a few
>responses.
>
>To Courtney Givens:
>
>I think it is you who are misreading Pynchon's opening paragraphs, re
>specialization (although, I find them largely incoherent, so who knows,
>finally).  He does write "suspect" and "'may still try' to hide behind" the
>jargon of a specialty, but I think that specialized jargon is rewarded less
>often with suspicion than with tenured positions at prestigious 
>universities
>and spots on MacNeil/Lehrer.
>
><<Clearly P means [by cranky] querulous, ill-tempered, factious.>>
>
>Fine.

(sp mss R) S/B fractious N factious

Always timely with his prose and fiction, in 1984 (VL & 1984, that's
what Clerc says too Doug, but he doesn't provide any textual support, just 
says it's obvious and nothing more, but on the
influence/comparative hermeneutic see Thomas Moore's Intro. to
*The Style of Connectedness*) 25th anniversary of C.P. Snow's famous Rede 
Lecture, Thomas Pynchon published his essay, "Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?"

Pynchon rejects Snow's "polarized" (literary versus
scientific) view of intellectual life in the West.  He says,
"Today nobody could get away with such a distinction."

But Neil Postman tries to get away with it by shifting the dispute
from "art versus science" to "Technology versus everybody
else."  In Technopoly (1993), Neil Postman also rejects
Snow's  "implacable hostility between literary intellectuals
(sometimes called humanists) and physical scientists," but
Postman simply shifts the polarized view, so that the
opposition for Postman, is no longer simply between art and
science, but rather "between technology and everybody else."
Pynchon notes that what Snow sought to identify were "not
only two kinds of education but also two kinds of
personality." He dismisses Snow's polarized personalities
and he dismisses Snow's use of the term  "luddite." For Snow
and Company, "luddite" was merely  "a way to call those with
whom they (Snow and those like him) disagreed, both
politically reactionary and anti-capitalist at the same
time." Contrasting Pynchon's use of  Snow's opposition with
Postman's, we can clearly recognize a difference in method.
Postman's method rejects one conflict and replaces it with
another, while Pynchon views the problem as one of multiple
perspectives,  cultures, specialization and education.  So
with "demystification" being "the order of our day,"  "there
are now so many more than two cultures that the problem has
really become how to find the time to read anything outside
one's own specialty."

Postman is much better writer of cultural criticism than Pynchon, but
then Postman hasn't written the great americn homowhatever novel.
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