Why I like Fromm's Behind better than P's Prick

[Terrance]

Pynchon wonders about two things but says little about them. 

1. Fundamentalism & the absence of Religious fanaticism in _1984_

2.  The absence of racial hostility, in particular anti-Semitism in BB's
regime. 


Orwell was an atheist.  

The rulers of Oceania detest the traditional God of established
religion. 

There is a new God. He is the God that has risen in the age of unbelief. 

The predictable antireligious views of the text are easy enough to
identify, but _1984_ is not an attack on religion, but on atheistic
totalitarian sadism.  No longer is God the enemy of man, religion the
foe of humanism. The enemy is man himself, the man who makes himself
God and high priest. 


O'Brien: "Winston, do you believe in God?"  

Why does Orwell show traditional religion replaced by an infinitely
worse creed with all the defects of traditional Christianity
monstrously magnified and none of the merits remaining? 

This book provides no solace, no comfort for those who assume that
atheism must embody a higher stage in civilization than Christianity or
that the waning of traditional belief should be celebrated. 

What Orwell new  was that in  20th century politics had increasingly
disguised itself as religion and that the crisis of Western civilization
had distinctly German
and fascist characteristics. 

This is what P calls the  German sickness in GR. 

The erasing of the past, of strong traditions, is the plan of BB.

Germany under Hitler, without strong institutional traditions, brought
together
economic materialism, racist biology, corrupt psychology, scientism, and
technological ruthlessness. 

Orwell rejects the compartmentalization of thought (a form of conceptual
nominalism) that equates religion with the institutionalized churches
and politics with the modern secular state. 

Reading Pynchon's fictions its fairly obvious that he too does not write
attacks on religion (institutionalized, organized, etc.), but shows how
the compartmentalization of thought makes it impossible that all
political order (even atheistic ones) is justified and legitimated
through symbolic narratives that connect the respective society or
movement with a larger order of things. The secularization of the
Western world, one of Modernity's  great achievements, has not silenced
nor ended the Quest for meaning but has produced the urge to find
alternative ways to satisfy this existential human need. This need, this
narrative and all its transcendental meaning manifests itself in the
social order. 

Like Slothrop in the Streets section , Winston comes upon buildings that
were once churches. 

What are they worshipping in those houses now?