Science Against the Day Labor

[alice wellintown]

The argument that science is divorced from experience and from history,
that it is an idea or a method, a field or discipline that lives
in laboratories, is rather naive.

In the modern state, in the USA, for example, we need constantly to resist
the merging of religion and state. This struggle is constant in a
democratic system where the people who are given the power to rule must  be
elected and re-elected by a constituancy that demands that the elected give
serious weight to religion. In fact, the weight of religion is so great,
and so much greater than the weight of science, that elected members of
government simply cannot ignore it, must never treat it as an idea or
method, as something that lives in churches and religious spaces. This,
despite the fact that the merging of religion and politics is fascist,
anti-democratic, and keeps the government from acting in the best interest
of the state.


The same is true of science. Science is a political-religion, a cult, in
the US.


On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 5:15 PM, <malignd at aol.com> wrote:

> It does not come with an ideology nor is it a culture.  Such things might
> grow around it, but that's something else entirely.
>
>  "The science cult"?
>
>  And to say science has "been in bed with ..." barely seems sane.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Thu, Apr 18, 2013 3:35 pm
> Subject: Re: Science Against the Day Labor
>
>  Science is not simply a method, like technology it comes with an
> ideology, and as we speak that ideology, driven by science, is, as several
> here have confirmed, beyond reproach. Science is a culture. While it is
> also a method, and in this sense it is like math, it is also a ideological
> force, as it has been in bed with industry and agri-industry, and now with
> business industry and tech-industry, and is the cult that capital has made,
> and this cult is in direct conflict with labor. So, it is OK to resist
> technology and the science cult? Absolutely.
>
>
> On Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 9:25 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> "Empirical Practice" starts when a child reaches into a hot flame.  Even
>> amoebae recoil when hurt.
>>
>>  Do you imply that Religious Practice isn't reality based?  Religion
>> knows how to control as a primary goal.
>>
>>  Science doesn't have a mind of its own.  It ain't the anti-sacred.
>>
>>  David Morris
>>
>> On Monday, April 15, 2013, alice wellintown wrote:
>>
>>> 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!
>>>
>>
>
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