Religious Fundamentalism in Orwell and Pynchon

[Paul Mackin]

I think I remember writing the post, although many of these things I
said were fiction rather than philosophy or other higher disciplines and
therefore wouldn't submit to algebraic proof of the kind Stephen
demanded of himself in the demonstration that Hamlet was his own
granddad. 

Amusedly,

P.

On Tue, 2003-05-20 at 11:56, Terrance wrote:
> 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....