Technology: making humanist arguments almost irrelevant

[Markekohut]

Very LIKE.......I haven't read Heelan( yet) nor even Eddins ( except thru you)

" a corrupted cult".....and " to serve human control".....yes 
With all of P's positive values about living on ythis world...

Sent from my iPad

On Jun 7, 2013, at 6:16 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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