Technology: making humanist arguments almost irrelevant

[alice wellintown]

Yes. It is the cornerstone.  Again, Eddins, in my opinion, wrote the most
important book on Pynchon to date, in Gnostic Pynchon, and, I alluded to
The Corrupted Pilgrim's Guide, and specifically to the essay by Coffman on
Bogomilism, Orphism, and Shamanism, and we can turn back to P's readings of
the Sacred and Profane, Eliade & Co. ... and other texts that inform GR,
and when we do we see a definite position on the environment and the Earth,
and that science is, in P's novels,  a corrupted cult that seeks to act as
a political force, a gnostic cult, as Eddins argues using Voegelin's
_Modernity Without Restraint_, that worships virtualization, that is
opposed to labor and to craft, to work with the hand and the tool, with
direct contact with the Earth, and that the culmination  of this modernity
without restraint will cause the intentional or accidental destruction of
the planet, and that powerful use of computers, to control the earth, to
replace it, to shape it in our own image, has made of most of the sacred
spaces on the surface, a wasteland, a motherboard from our scatterbrained
Mother Earth.

 More powerful technologies, more Science, Big Science and Big Data will
only serve the project to fashion the Earth to serve human control,
rebuilding, remapping the world to fit the rules, the laws of regularity
and efficiency, of speed and the other virtues of the machine. Modern
anti-Humanism loves the machine, as Winston Smith,  because they are driven
to solve, to force into logic, to map, but can't abide a mystery.
Anti-humanism can't locate value outside its technologies.  How can we
imagine something outside the order of our lives?

Have you read Patrick Heelan?

http://explore.georgetown.edu/people/heelanp/?Action=ViewPublications


On Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 5:28 PM, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Alice,
>
> This is a nice reminder-find again. As one who has made a bit of an
> argument about P p'raps
> Actually dissing technology and science more than some think, I think this
> excerpt can be more easily seen as one in which P expresses fear about "
> State" ( or THEY ) power....( keeping the truth that WE are also the THEY )
> more than disses technology, in my opinion today....
>
> BUT the line in this that strikes me today is...." Making humanist
> arguments almost irrelevant"
> Wow......that is some phrase from TRP......what do we think it means (
> deeply)?
>
> Is this line a cornerstone of your argument about TRP's beliefs?
>
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On Jun 6, 2013, at 4:48 PM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > What has steadily, insidiously improved since then, of course, making
> humanist arguments almost irrelevant, is the technology. We must not be too
> distracted by the clunkiness of the means of surveillance current in
> Winston Smith's era. In "our" 1984, after all, the integrated circuit chip
> was less than a decade old, and almost embarrassingly primitive next to the
> wonders of computer technology circa 2003, most notably the internet, a
> development that promises social control on a scale those quaint old
> 20th-century tyrants with their goofy moustaches could only dream about.
> > from the Foreword to 1984
>
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