Well, Pynchon seems to have

[alice wellintown]

Grace is amazement and wonder, not at our transformation of the world, but
at what we can't explain, understand, or "transform" to our purposes. We
want to transform the world, to make it ours, to give it names, to make it
an extension of us. This appeals especially to the little man because
science makes him physically more powerful; he can build with it; he can
see with sharper focus, he can think and calculate faster. But it can't
help him make better moral decisions. This is the lesson that Grover Snodd,
Pynchon's boy genius who applies mathematics to integration of the races,
struggles to learn.  A harsher lesson is taught to Kurt Mondaugan who is,
at the end of his story, listening to a language, a native language, he
can't comprehend. Mason leans this too when he dreams in native languages
he neither speaks not has, perhaps, ever heard, if they exist. Science
improves human life. We believe this. We want to. We need to believe this
because science is an extension of our purposes and we want our purposes to
be great. But science can't help us love the earth and our fellow creature,
our brothers and sisters. Or can it? If it can focus the eye, make it
sharper, slow things down so that we can get a better view, perhaps we can
solve or prevent a crime or make a decision based on improved data, a
decision that is more just, better. Film can be manipulated. The data
skewed. More data, more film, more science only shakes our confidence in
common sense and judgment. But what about the liver transplant? Yeah , I
want one. Who gets one? Who decides?  New science, new moral and ethical
problems to solve. And science is not much help with this. It often
compounds, confuses, undermines our instincts, our confidence.


On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 9:11 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> What the novels argue is that humans are scientific beings, technological
> beings, engineers by nature. Our scientific nature, like our spiritual
> nature, like our aesthetic nature .... is part of everything we do.
> Science  flows from us in all we do, defining the world, transforming it.
> Pynchon was born into what has been called the golden age of engineer, a
> dynamic period that advanced a dynamic view of nature. Nature knows
> transformation, not extinction, and nature is our experience, science, our
> application. We can not, to quote one of those big men of letters,
> distinguish the science from our application of it. A tool, such as a
> hammer, to quote another big man of letters, has our human purpose in it.
> A dynamic world, not a fixed world, is malleable, is not absolute, is our
> experience of it, thus all mystery retreats. Unless we experience what we
> can't explain, cannot analyze. Unless we experience Grace.
>
> On Monday, June 3, 2013, Markekohut wrote:
>
>> We don't disagree, I think.....complex he is fer sure....one reason I do
>> read and reread...
>>
>> But I did write " some anti-technology and anti-science stuff".......key
>> qualifier for me here
>> Is " some"......part of that complexity.
>>
>> Once again, few of his contemporary writers of fiction, near peers,
>> alluded to Ludditism
>> Favorably in a non-fiction piece, his own opinion,and I have pointed to
>> some perspectives
>> On math and science in Against the Day this last still-unfinished
>> read.....
>>
>> You're one of the best defenders of science on this list and really
>> illumine Parts where P
>> Shows his aware-love......
>>
>> But the other side exists too, I aver.
>>
>>
>>
>> Sent from my iPad
>>
>> On Jun 3, 2013, at 5:54 PM, "Monte Davis" <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:
>>
>> He writes better than anyone else about the intersections of science and
>> technology with our lowest **and** highest inclinations. If you missed
>> the inspiration and glimpses of transcendence that astronomy and geo-metry
>> hold for Chas & Jeremiah, or photochemistry for Merle – or even
>> aerodynamics for Pokler before the Reich took over rocketry – you really
>> should read the books again. ****
>>
>> ** **
>>
>> Lazy, trite anti-science and anti-technology attitudes are widely
>> absorbed by default over coffee at the student center and in the faculty
>> lounge. They’re as thoroughly woven into the liberal (and liberal-arts)
>> intellectual sensibility of my lifetime as an eager faith in Newtonian
>> enlightenment was in one earlier epoch, or an embrace of social/technical
>> progress in harness with liberal reform in another. And they’re typically
>> founded in all the rich knowledge and understanding of science displayed by
>> the editors of Social Text in 1996.****
>>
>> ** **
>>
>> But there’s so much *more* complexity, nuance and contradiction in
>> Pynchon’s treatment of science and technology than the lazy view takes in.
>> It’s patent that he has read and thought about them, wrestled with his own
>> feelings about them, far more deeply than someone simply gathering sticks
>> to beat them with. To me, saying “Pynchon is anti-science and
>> anti-technology” [because hey, all thoughtful and sensitive souls engaged
>> with literary fiction inevitably are, amirite?] is like saying “Vineland is
>> about how groovy the sixties were and how sad it is that the Man crushed
>> all our bright hopes.”   ****
>>
>> ** **
>>
>> *From:* owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] *On
>> Behalf Of *Mark Kohut
>> *Sent:* Monday, June 03, 2013 4:32 PM
>> *To:* pynchon -l
>> *Subject:* Well, Pynchon seems to have****
>>
>> ** **
>>
>> some anti-technology and/or anti-science stuff of some kind going on in
>> his mind****
>>
>> which I dangle as a pendant to the recent thread.****
>>
>>  ****
>>
>> I offer the Luddite N-F piece...and some stuff in AtD as circumstantial
>> evidence. ****
>>
>>  ****
>>
>>
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