Gravity again

[alice wellintown]

Religion, while it still guides the poor, powerless masses, is dead. The
new priests are scientists. On this one, Pynchon had it right in GR, so his
scientists are priests, bureaucrats, and the actual priests who work with
them at the White Visitation are cranks as well. So the marriage of science
and religion, as the novel V. argued, and as P argued in his Luddite essay,
is the new cult, the holy grail is the bomb, control by divesting nature of
life and investing a pornography, an imitation of life in the machines, in
the bombs. So Blicero wears a plastic cunt and dreams of liveless kingdom
of death.

But later on P seems to have shifted his view, and lost something, the edge
of his satire. In his Forewaird to 1984 he does note that control of
desire, the abolition of the orgasm or the harnessing of sexual drive, and
the investing of desire in machines is key, but he argues that
Orwell failed to see that Religion would still drive the wars. But they
haven't and they don't. Science does. So P is simply wrong. Religion is
dead, thank God, as god is dead. That scientists continue to kid
themselves, fool themselves with these old superstitions is a fraud and a
danger. But the greater risk is science itself because it knows no limits.
It cannot sin, there are no transgressions, the sacred is not a mystery but
a profane puzzle to be solved and then exploited.


On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 1:28 AM, Rev'd Seventy-Six <revd.76 at gmail.com>wrote:

> "...traditions are useless now. The scientists took over and they don't
> believe in anything except hubris and machines."
>
> I disagree.  I'm an agnostic, personally, but I've read a great many
> interviews with scientists who consider themselves moral & ethical
> Christians, Coptics, Muslims, Jainists, u.s.w.  Their faiths-- even those
> noted for being exceptionally exacting & stringent in their practices --do
> not Conflict with their chosen fields because religious dogma *doesn't
> have a place in what they're doing,* except in the usual academic / peer
> worship sense.  I might be making your point for you here, who knows.  They
> are individuals, first & foremost, and make the same crap decisions as
> anyone else; popular opinion seems to be against them because their actions
> have a greater probability of having greater consequences than that of the
> average schlemiel.  Witness the regular whipping science has received by
> the (extremely monied, fundamentalist-supported) anti-climate change
> crowd.  I do not sense P making any judgment against science or scientists
> in his novels.  As an engineer he admires them and sympathizes with their
> peculiar place in critical events.
>
> The men who made rocketry possible were engaged in an entirely different
> kind of worship than you or I might be able to conceive of, but certainly
> not a satanic one.  Witness Franz Pökler.*  *For all the horror that made
> the space program possible...  I wince when I think about it because my
> father was granted a scholarship by NASA  --yet,* it made the space
> program possible.*  Any evolution is always a tortured dark crawl out of
> the ignorant muck.  That's the history of our species and its spiritual
> evolution as a whole.  Hubris or not, we might be a little wiser, a little
> nearer the light than the last batch.  Who's to say the greater evolution
> of science isn't to become a worldwide religion that's *cool, but cares*?*
>
> *
> You're obviously making a generalization, I just can't quite parse your
> tone.  You make it sound like the game's over and humanity lost.  In my
> hopelessly biased view scientists may be among the most qualified to
> extricate us from the many, many messes capitalism-driven industry and
> religion have wrought before it's too late.  My longtime girlfriend is an
> animist and a cancer specialist & naturally I think the world of her so she
> may've influenced my thinking in this, but:  I've been rereading GR
> slooowly over the past month and it seems to me while P can be cynical he's
> irreducibly an optimist.  I don't believe he's going to write our species
> off with BE.  P don't judge.
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20130415/c63b94c7/attachment.html>