Religious Fundamentalism in Orwell and Pynchon

[Terrance]

Paul Mackin wrote:

I know Im just a simple schoolteacher and all, but I knew (maybe it's
because like Rick Moody's father--Black Veil-- my father talked about
the Fed a lot) when I read Pynchon that the guy was no economist.
Nothing wrong with not being a historian, philosopher, economist,
prophet or whatever, but I also knew that P was a thief: like the war
that never ends is not exactly his idea and Weber's ideas are slid into
GR. 

Now, however, the Occident has developed capitalism both to a
quantitative extent, and (carrying this quantitative development) in
types, forms, and directions which have never existed elsewhere. 

All over the world there have been merchants, wholesale and retail,
local and engaged in foreign trade. Loans of all kinds have been made,
and there have been banks with the most various functions, at least
comparable to ours of, say, the sixteenth century. Sea loans, trade, and
transactions and associations similar to the limited cooperation have
all been widespread, even as continuous businesses. Whenever money
finances of public bodies have existed, money-lenders have appeared, as
in Babylon, Hellas, India, China, Rome. They have financed wars and
piracy, contracts and building operations of all sorts. In overseas
policy they have functioned as colonial entrepreneurs, as planters with
slaves, or directly or indirectly forced labor, and have farmed domains,
offices, and, above all, taxes. They have financed party leaders in
elections and mercenary soldiers in civil wars.


And, finally, they have been speculators in chances for pecuniary gain
of all kinds. This kind of entrepreneur, the capitalistic adventurer,
has existed everywhere. With the exception of trade and credit and
banking transactions, their activities were predominantly of an
irrational and speculative character, or directed to acquisition by
force, above all the acquisition of booty, whether directly in war or in
the form of continuous fiscal booty by exploitation of subjects. The
capitalism of promoters,
large-scale speculators, concession hunters, and much modern financial
capitalism even in peace time, but, above all, the capitalism especially
concerned with exploiting wars, bears this stamp even in modern Western
countries, and some, but only some, parts of large-scale international
trade are closely related to it, to-day as always. 

But in modern times the Occident has developed, in addition to this, a
very different form of capitalism which has appeared nowhere else: the
rational capitalistic organization of (formally) free labor.

Now the peculiar modern Western form of capitalism has been, at first
sight, strongly influenced by the development of technological
possibilities. Its rationality is to-day essentially dependent on the
calculability of the most important technological factors. But this
means fundamentally that it is dependent on the peculiarities of modern
science, especially the natural sciences based on mathematics and exact
and rational experiment. 

So on....