History, Fiction ,Luddites

[Joseph Tracy]

 TP's full essay Is it OK to be a Luddite? appears at following link. www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_luddite.html

The questions appearing in the History vs. Fiction thread are given an enjoyable form and focus in Is it OK to be a Luddite  ? what follows is the transition from P's reference to Snow's 2 cultures essay to his  brief but telling look at historical information about the Luddites.
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     ...Snow's immoderate, and thus celebrated, assertion, "If we forget the scientific culture, then the rest of intellectuals have never tried, wanted, or been able to understand the Industrial Revolution." Such "intellectuals," for the most part "literary," were supposed by Lord Snow, to be "natural Luddites."
Except maybe for Brainy Smurf, it's hard to imagine anybody these days wanting to be called a literary intellectual, though it doesn't sound so bad if you broaden the labeling to, say, "people who read and think." Being called a Luddite is another matter. It brings up questions such as, Is there something about reading and thinking that would cause or predispose a person to turn Luddite? Is It O.K. to be a Luddite? And come to think of it, what is a Luddite, anyway?
Historically, Luddites flourished In Britain from about 1811 to 1816. They were bands of men, organized, masked, anonymous, whose object was to destroy machinery used mostly in the textile industry. They swore allegiance not to any British king but to their own King Ludd. It Isn't clear whether they called themselves Luddites, although they were so termed by both friends and enemies. C.P. Snow's use of the word was clearly polemical, wishing to imply an irrational fear and hatred of science and technology. Luddites had, in this ...
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Are the Luddites irrational or are they simply following a different rationality. A rationality the larger culture ignores at its own peril?
The beauty of what P is doing is in it's apparent simplicity. By a series of simple questions he reveals the  power of ordinary English to examine the funadamental premises and hidden biases which may lay at the foundation of a powerful cultural myth. 
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"Nevertheless, the idea of a technosocial "revolution," in which the same people came out on top as in France and America, has proven of use to many over the years, not least to those who, like C. P. Snow, have thought that in "Luddite" they have discovered a way to call those with whom they disagree both politically reactionary and anti-capitalist at the same time."   TP
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In this argument we sense that History is as much about the future as it is about the past.

But P seems intent on more than justifying the humane rationality of the Luddites. He wants to talk about the role of imagination.He turns the conversation to the dark dreams of the literati. Through these we see how other (less rational?) forms   of consciousness  may   envision  the nature  of what is to come, and with remarkable prescience too. We have not yet created monsters but we have used machines to amplify our own monstrosity.  Still  despite P's prophecy about the covergence of sci-tec-bio it is interesting to me how fundamentally resistant evolution is to being hot wired.  How do you program desire?

If the workers did control the means of production what would we really do with them? 

Stay tuned a few thousand years  , for the answers to these and other ridiculous questions.
Joseph Tracy
brook7 at earthlink.net
Why Wait? Move to EarthLink.
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