Gravity again

[Ian Livingston]

I have a friend who worked for Dow Laboratories, in GMO r&d. She went in
believing the mission was to feed the world, and left after a few years
jaded by the realization that the whole purpose of GMO development was
world domination, an evil she could not bear being a part of. She is quite
outspoken about it now. The scientist is only innocent until she discovers
that her work is being used for nefarious purposes.


On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 8:34 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:

> > Also rather unlike any practitioner of science I know of or respect.****
>
> ** **
>
> Get used to it: that’s par for the course in characterizations of science
> and technology (and mischaracterizations pof Pynchon’s stance w/r/t them)
> around here.****
>
> ** **
>
> Good post! ****
>
> ** **
>
> *From:* owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] *On
> Behalf Of *Rev'd Seventy-Six
> *Sent:* Monday, April 15, 2013 10:49 AM
> *To:* pynchon-l at waste.org
> *Subject:* Re: Gravity again****
>
> ** **
>
> "....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."****
>
> Solved, then exploited?  Jeepers, harsh.  Also rather unlike any
> practitioner of science I know of or respect.
>
> It's not science fueling the impending apocalypse we glimpse in our
> rearview these days, it's overweening greed.  *"I need my night's blood,
> my funding, funding, ahh more, more."*  Knowledge isn't dangerous, nor
> clarified insight into the workings of the spheres, it's damnfool hubris
> that's the hazard.****
>
> Science can't sin.  Its practitioners, I'll grant you, but not science.
> Like religion, science is all about limits; probing for them, determining
> them, comprehending them and, occasionally, establishing new ones.  Unlike
> religion, science is fairly self-aware in that respect.  There's no 'sin'
> in knowledge unless your fetish is eyeballing fruit in a nervous,
> god-fearing fashion.  Contrast this with the great many sins of ignorance:
> corporations who pay corrupt scientific 'authorities' to deny climate
> change, for example, or fundamentalists who spin specious rules of biology
> for women from whole, shoddy cloth to disguise a cromag interest in the
> mindless, incautious propagation of the species.  Science would see us as
> enlightened & able as angels--  and where's the sin in self-improvement, I
> ask you, long as it's not masturbatory   --no, it's *men* who would
> prefer to graze on all of Eden like locusts.  I see P. drawing this line
> again & again throughout GR and elsewhere.****
>
> ** **
>
> If his literary philosophy is in essence gnostic & predicated on the idea
> that we occupy a 'fallen' universe where the living are used for the
> purposes of the dead, and I view that as a grotesque oversimplication, P
> also recognizes that the deathwish dystopia we've engineered for ourselves
> is as driven by bloody money as fatuous reasoning.  The edge you allege
> he's lost is an erosion of the rapport you felt with earlier books & now no
> longer perceive.  While 'lighter' or at least less highfalutin', esoteric
> fare than GR, VL & IV are very much about would-be devils, dybbuks in human
> drapery, selling the ground from beneath unborn feet.  To accuse science of
> meddling in the affairs of god is a B-movie reaction.  Kekulé's dream of
> the benzene ring was a moment of sacred inspiration; 'tis the *abuses*his work has been put toward that're profane.
> ****
>
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