VLVL Is it OK to be a misoneist?

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Friday, March 05, 2004 8:55 AM
Subject: Re: VLVL Is it OK to be a misoneist?


> And yet, there's Pynchon's own apparent defence of Luddism -- perhaps the
> most misoneistic and reactionary of all sensibilities -- in that 1984
> article:
>
> http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_luddite.html
>

"misoneistic" -- you use it as if it was a scientific term.

Is the essay really a defence of Luddism or isn't it more of a warning of
undamped progress? If it is a defence it is a defence of people who had lost
their jobs through the knitting frames introduced to the textile industry
without the slightest social security. If you call these beginnings of a
workers' movement reactionary, well, that's your thing, but Luddism isn't
generally misoneistic, only in the proto-fascist Lombroso-sense. Luddists
aren't generally neophob.

"The word ''Luddite'' continues to be applied with contempt to anyone with
doubts about technology, especially the nuclear kind. Luddites today are no
longer faced with human factory owners and vulnerable machines. (...) If our
world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come - you
heard it here first - when the curves of research and development in
artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy.
It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us
devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It is certainly something
for all good Luddites to look forward to if, God willing, we should live so
long."
Thomas Pynchon: Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite?

To be critical of nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence, bio-engineering
and cloning is neither reactionary nor misoneistic.

> I suspect there's somewhat more ambivalence evident in Pynchon's writings
> than some commentators are willing to acknowledge.
>
> Overall, Brock's social diagnoses are quite apt:

Overall, it's interesting what you regard as "quite apt" -- a social
diagnosis based upon a simple reactionary, social-darwinist & racist
19th-century theory:

"By Brock's time the theory had lapsed into a quaint, undeniably racist
spinoff from nineteenth-century phrenology, crude in method and long
superseded, although it seemed reasonable to Brock." (272.32-35)

> both this recognition of
> the inevitability of a government and popular backlash against the '60s
> "[r]adicals, militants, revolutionaries" (272-3), and, more pointedly, his
> "genius" in seeing "in the activities of the sixties left not threats to
> order but unacknowledged desires for it ... etc" (269.5-15: not so
> surprising, I'd say, that this passage has been avoided like the plague).

It is just Brock's private reasoning for breaking the constitution and
violating traditional American values, nothing more, nothing less. Nothing
to be taken too serious. Pynchon just shows on what kind of binary nonsense
those political and anti-drug campaigns were based upon. Why should any
reader especially attracted or impressed by the novel's main villain's
ideas?

The passage hasn't been avoided "like the plague," in any case not by me. I
quoted a few days ago from the Observer:

"He would probably still be cited if the 1930s had not also been his
nemesis. Like many of his contemporaries, Lombroso believed the stigmatised
should be sterilised so they couldn't produce more inferior specimens.
Hitler put eugenic theory into practice and Lombroso's name disappeared from
the conversation of polite psychological circles."
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,518531,00.html


> A
> more productive way of understanding the resilience of political
> conservatism in recent times might be to open one's eyes to the flaws and
> failings of the "revolutionists", as Pynchon invites his readers to do in
> _Vineland_.
>
> best
>

I see it more as a kind of pendulum (the kind of W.B. Yeats had developed in
_A Vision_) that the movement to the left encouraged the conservative,
proto-fascist government (as it is presented in the novel, there is not one
Fed or other agent who's *not* breaking the law) to apply the old strategy
of the "rollback" which had been applied to Vietnam now was
applied to America's youth. The young were treated like Vietnamese peasants,
put into "camps" for their own safety according to Brock's crude fascist
theory, which is the absolute opposition to the ideas of Enlightenment
expressed in the American constitution:

 "The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little
longer."
  --Henry Kissinger

>
> on 5/3/04 8:12 AM, Toby G Levy wrote:
>
> > I'm suprised there's been no discussion of the following passage from
> > pp272-3:
> >
> > [Brock Vond] "was a devotee of the thinking of pioneer criminologist
> > Cesare Lombroso(1836-1909)...What really got his attention was the
> > Lombrosian concept of 'misoneism.'  Radicals, militants,
> > revolutionaries,
> > however they styled themselves, all sinned against this deep organic
> > human principle, which Lombroso had named after the Greek for 'hatred of
> > anything new.' It operated as a feedback device to keep societies coming
> > along safely, coherently. Any sudden attempt to change would be answered
> > by an immediate misoneistic backlash, not only from the State but from
> > the people themselves -- Nixon's election in '68 seeming to Brock a
> > perfect example of this."
> >
> > It seems to me that this is important to understanding the forces of
> > reaction in this book.  and the forces of reaction in today's world as
> > well. Could there be any other way to understand the success (so far) of
> > the Bush cabal than misoneism?

The Neocon think tanks assert (and Rob is trying something similar in his
last sentence) that the bad shape America's been in after 1973 was the fault
of the 60's generation that had betrayed the government in its fight against
communism during the Vietnam-era. In this sense the violent
Chicago-demonstrations August 1968 could be see as contra-productive when it
came to the decision between Nixon and Humphrey. On the other hand there
were no signs coming from the Democrats that they would have ended the war
in Vietnam in a reasonable period of time or would have legalised marijuana
if H.H. Humphrey had been elected. So the counterculture had no reason at
all to elect Humphrey or to trust him. They had simply lost the trust in the
electoral system to be able to provide alternatives to the nuclear threat. A
historical error I admit, because the only alternative would be terrorism
with all its contradictions  -- and the possible instrumentalisation
right-winged governments can use terrorism for, as we see in a fictional
character like Rex and a real-life president.

Bush's success can only be explained through the special structure of this
US-electoral process. As we see now the only possible challenger of the
president has to be an extremely wealthy guy who did his tour of duty in
Nam.

Otto