Pynchon's Pragamatism or VL is about American Work

[Terrance]

Occasions for choosing good present themselves in public and private for
us every day, and we pass them by. Acedia is the vernacular of everyday
moral life. Though it has never lost its deepest notes of mortal
anxiety, it never gets as painful as outright despair, or as real, for
it is despair bought at a discount price, a deliberate turning against
faith in anything because of the inconvenience faith presents to the
pursuit of quotidian lusts, angers and the rest. The compulsive
pessimist's last defense -- stay still enough and the blade of the
scythe, somehow, will pass by -- Sloth is our background radiation, our
easy-listening station -- it is everywhere, and no longer noticed.

The New York Times Book Review
6 June 1993

In 1993, the NYTBR ran a series in which various authors were asked to
write about one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Thomas Pynchon's subject was
"Sloth."

 Rorty contrasts the reigning sense of national self-mockery and
self-disgust with the national hope of early twentieth-century leftist
intellectuals, and likens the difference between the two to that between
agents and spectators. Unlike late twentieth-century intellectuals,
earlier writers such as William James thought that disgust with American
hypocrisy was pointless unless accompanied by active efforts to give the
country reason to be proud of itself in the future. By contrast, writers
today tend to retreat into resigned pessimism, while American colleges
and universities foster this "spirit of detached spectatorship, and the
inability to think of American citizenship as an opportunity for action"
(11). What is needed instead, Rorty maintains, is an active desire to
participate in political initiatives, a desire reflected in James
Baldwin’s call to "achieve our country, and to change the history of the
world."

The Left must foster this hope because the political Right, naturally
conservative, always contests the necessity of change. To the extent
that "a Left becomes spectatorial and introspective, it ceases to be a
Left," which is precisely what Rorty argues has happened: "Leftists in
the academy have permitted cultural politics to supplant real politics,
and have collaborated with the Right in making cultural issues central
to public debate" (14). The remainder of the first lecture details the
retreat from secularism and pragmatism to theory detached from real
political problems. It culminates in the claim that there is now, "among
many American students and teachers, a spectatorial, disgusted, mocking
Left rather than a Left which dreams of achieving our country... Members
of this Left find America unforgivable, as Baldwin did, and also
unachievable, as he did not" (35). Rorty ends the first lecture with a
plea for a return to the ideals of Dewey, who "wanted Americans to share
a civic religion that substituted utopian striving for claims to
theoretical knowledge" (38).