NP? modernity, terrorism, truth and relevance? CORRECTED

[alice wellintown]

This is the topic P writes about, beginning with V., then into TSI, and GR.
He continues to dive deeper into it in his best essays, on Luddites and
Sloth, and in his great and major historical romances. It makes sense that
the process of modernity would be more painful for some, including, of
course, those whose labor is both essential to modernity even as it becomes
disposable, a threat, to those who have the most to gain from it. These, in
Pynchon's great works, are not only wall street's greedy banksters, but the
high priests of science.
--------------------------------------------
selected excerpt from the Armstrong book I linked

By the eighteenth century, however, the people of Europe and America had
achieved such astonishing success in science and technology that they began
to think that logos was the only means to truth and began to discount
mythos as false and superstitious. It is also true that the new world they
were creating contradicted the dynamic of the old mythical spirituality.
Our religious experience in the modern world has changed, and because an
increasing number of people regard scientific rationalism alone as true,
they have often tried to turn the mythos of their faith into logos.
Fundamentalists have also made this attempt. This confusion has led to more
problems.

We need to understand how our world has changed. The first part of this
book will, therefore, go back to the late fifteenth and early sixteenth
centuries, when the people of Western Europe had begun to develop their new
science. We will also examine the mythical piety of the premodern agrarian
civilization, so that we can see how the old forms of faith worked. It is
becoming very difficult to be conventionally religious in the brave new
world. Modernization has always been a painful process. People feel
alienated and lost when fundamental changes in their society make the world
strange and unrecognizable.


On Sat, Apr 20, 2013 at 4:23 PM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com
> wrote:

>
> http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/a/armstrong-battle.html
>
> On Saturday, April 20, 2013, Mark Kohut wrote:
>
>> " But all of our experience suggests that it is not “fundamentalism”
>> alone but an aching tension between modernity and a false picture of a
>> purer fundamentalist past that makes terrorists."
>>
>> This is Adam Gopnick in The New Yorker today about the marathon bombers.
>> Does this apply to any of P's characters in AtD?
>> Does this apply to P's vision? Is Hume's condemning what she sees as P's
>> moral failure in Against the Day, refuted, or attempted
>> to be seen (refuted) by P's vision of the cohesion of life in the Olde
>> Europe scenes---the communities of the villages?
>>
>>
>> Or, a few have remarked that DeLillo best captured the meanings and
>> understandings of the characters in our recent acts of local terror. True,
>> where?
>> You can answer this question instead.
>>
>> Extra credit for both.
>>
>>
>>
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