IVIV (12): 195-197

[Monte Davis]

John Carvill writes:

My opinion is that Pynchon has pondered the phenomenon whereby scientists
and engineering types tend to respond to a request for a technical solution
by asking themselves, "How could we do that?", without first asking, "Why
would we do that?", or "Should we do that?"

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Pretty much the way writer Winston Smith responded to the job opening for an
editor of historical documents; pretty much as a large majority of
non-scientists and non-engineering types responded to opportunities to make
a living as functionaries, facilitators, apologists and mostly just
non-boat-rocking get-alongers under Stalin, Hitler, Mao & co. Maybe even
(gasp) the way young Tom Pynchon took a Boeing tech writing job, as a very
small and tangential cog in the Cold War machine.

It's fairly rare for anyone -- preacher, teacher, bus driver, scientist, or
engineer -- to ask "should we do that?" when the paycheck, the behavior of
everyone around him, and the cultural context are conducive... let alone in
an authoritarian state and/or in wartime. (cf. another of the offstage but
clearly-hinted-at cruxes in AtD: the _trahison des clercs avant la lettre_
in August 1914, when nearly all of Europe's socialist-internationalists, the
ones who'd spent decades denouncing imperialist drum-beating, rallied to the
flags.)

I regret as much as you that more scientists and engineers haven't refused
to pursue some paths. But it's not at all clear to me that as a group they
are any more complaisant than their less technological peers, or that they
have a greater moral responsibility to resist. Perhaps a Few Brave Souls
Saying No! in Thunder would have led to a world without shrapnel, or Maxim
guns, or dynamite, or phosgene, or ballistic missiles or their warheads.
Wouldn't it be pretty to think so?

-Monte