Science Against the Day Labor

[alice wellintown]

If God does not, as Milton sez in his famous sonnet, exact day labor light
denied, this hasn't prevented men from exacting day labor from men, light,
and even life, denied. Science was not much around to make safe the lives
of the working men and women we read about in AGTD. Empirical practice was
the method adopted, trial and selection, the railroad, the mines, the
textile mills, these had not science, and many lives were lost because
safety valves were not devised or employed to protect workers from
exploding steam machines. Sure, science would have made things safer,
better, if not for the workers, for the bosses  and their bosses, but for
safety it was the men who worked the mines the factories who improved the
work, the conditions, the safety. Even the laws of mechanical motion were
not trumped by these pragmatic and practical men who worked, for the most
part, without math or the scientific method. But once science began to
apply its method, like a man with a hammer who sees a nail in every grain
of sand, science applied its "scientific" method to every inch of man and
to every hair and every grain of sand. And so, science, systematically,
took over, from religion, from all other institutions of culture, and to
all inquires, to thought itself, to every mode of investigation, and it
claimed to have a better method for advancing all human persuits and
objectives, even the destruction of all human pursuits and objectives.
Moreover, not satisfied with using tools, extensions of human power, to
improve the human lot, to add human tools and science to the existing
patterns of life, as, say a farmer with a tool in his hand, science
fashioned organisms, including man, for machaniisms, for machines. So, the
huge farms, where science applied its method to plants and animals, and the
huge hospitals (white visitation) where science applied its methods to
human minds, and the huge, world wars where it applied its killing
machines, machines that a man might fly in, if he were fashioned to it and
not the other way round. This is Blicero's launch!
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20130415/e07279ef/attachment.html>