Pynchon knows this, I say. Sorta always known.

[alice wellintown]

 As science strives to understand the world it risks a modernity without
restraint, it reaches for the moon and risks blowing up the Earth. Science
can't wash its hands of the bomb. It can't relinquish the awesome power and
responsibility it has. Science makes the little man seem larger than life.
His mantra is that nature exists to be bent by his will toward some human
use or purpose. The little man, the scientist, is easy putty in the hands
of a fascist state because the fascist state looks to nature and to man and
sees what it wishes they might be under control, under the extension
of  the little man's body and of the little man's ideas. His eye will see
into space and into the invisible atoms. He will put all things on a clock.
But science can not extend human ethics. It can not understand judgments or
the sense of what is right or good in a society. So why its limitless
influence on modern life? The little man of science launches his rocket.
Who can prevent it? He will show us fear in a handful of moon dust and we
will drink tang and listen for the drones that will surely fly over my back
door some day.




On Sun, Jun 2, 2013 at 7:30 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> The world changes as we invent, discover, promote, new ways of seeing it.
> How we see the world is determined by how we use it. Monte is right to
> remind us that this is not something that came along with twentieth century
> science or modernity. Humans have used nature and other humans in ways that
> have changed over time as the human view of nature and of humans (who is
> human?) has changed. When religion or politics or some other major force in
> human society held more sway than science, then these forces and the
> contexts in which they were excreted dominated.  Monte is also right to
> point out that Science, albeit, relatively primitive science, has been
> essential to human invention, discovery, and promotion of ideas for a very
> long time. In the twentieth century, however,  science has come to dominate
> our new ways of using and thus our new ways of seeing the world. Entropy
> does not dictate human development or progress, science does. And, Monte is
> right to point out that science, like the other arts he lists, like
> politics and religion, does not exist as an entity, an evil or good one,
> outside of human invention, discovery, promotion. It is human volition, not
> some machine that has, like HAL, taken over, or some gnostic spawn of
> darkness that works in mysterious ways, but human will that
> drives  science. Of course, Science never does exactly what humans want
> because exactly what humans want is modified by what a scientific view
> makes possible, desirable, so that science is never satisfied with limits
> but must press on, to boldly go where no carpenter would ever go.
>
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