Gravity again - whoa thar!

[Matthew Cissell]

Dear Monte (& Rev. 76),

Not all of us on the P-list hit on the "par" that Monte refers to, and that is certainly present here as well as so many other places. 

Somebody here mentioned the Sokal affair not long back and it wasn't picked up on, a glaring silence passing over an uncomfortable subject. By the way, out of that whole affair Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont wrote "Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science", might be of interest. Also check out "Theory and Reality" by Peter Godfrey-Smith. Good stuff.

ciao
mc otis



________________________________
 From: Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net>
To: 'Rev'd Seventy-Six' <revd.76 at gmail.com>; pynchon-l at waste.org 
Sent: Monday, April 15, 2013 5:34 PM
Subject: RE: Gravity again
 


> 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.