Science Plays God

[Markekohut]

so much to think on, talk bout here....thanks for the shout-out.....I' m back to thinking and rereading it.






Sent from my iPad

On Jun 9, 2013, at 10:41 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> In his comments on work and original sin, Mark reminds us that we need to add Weber, the **Spirit** of Capitalism into the mix:
>  "Only in the West, and in relatively recent times, has capitalistic activity become associated with the rational organization of formally free labor. By 'rational organization of labor' Weber means routinized, calculated administration within continuously functioning enterprises" Giddens Intro to PESC).
>  
> The accumulation of wealth and a this-worldly asceticism, which Weber connects to Puritanism, and to his notion of  "the Calling", stands in direct contrast to the Catholic idea of the monastic life, whose object is to transcend the demands of mundane existence.
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>  Moreover, the moral responsibility of the Protestant is cumulative: the cycle of sin, repentance and forgiveness, renewed throughout the life of the Catholic, is absent in Protestantism.
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> Predestination, Weber asserts, is an extreme inhumanity that causes inner loneliness, a torment that gives birth to the spirit of capital.
>  
>  In V., P's parodic abuses of Rand, the satire of the charismatic creator, The Fountainhead,  who claims, in the exercise of his free will to represent the creative powers of god(s), and, in the same novel, P's Mondaugan's Story, where we meet the "little man" (yes,  an allusion to Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism), so easily manipulated, and Blicero, of GR, is foreshadowed.
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> There is, of course, something in the West, a German Sickness, as P calls it.
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> In an existential world, God is no longer the creative will, but the charismatic, who is outside the routine, outside the profane--thus irrational and resistant to authority, to traditional authority, to the past, and is therefore revolutionary. The Rocket is now divine!
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> How anarchists and Luddites fit into this is key to P's view, which is not (as Cowart says), a call for balance, is not, an apology for science tempered with ethics.
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> The strategy here is to paint P, and readers who understand his position, as technophobes and Later-Day-Luddites. But we are all too familiar with the cant perpetuated by the anti-science and anti-intellectual and anti-technology crowd. The claim to take a position apart, for example, with masterly skill, no doubt, is an empty one, noise that squeaks and squawks  an affected tough-minded and analytical position but thinks like a mechanical duck. Such defenses support a continued improvement in the means to a carelessly examined end, and of course, a concentration of capital, which requires great control by the state. Only naïve people can possibly attribute this to  greed on Wall Street, or to the machinations of a few evil individuals. It is economics stripped of normative economics, where what is the world, not what it might be, is all that fits into the equation. The citizen buyers become content with what they must be content with, or turn to technical distractions, TV etc.
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> But there is no plan, no Machiavellian Master Plan, no one wills it, or plans it all out, its de-humanizing and wasteland making is merely a manifestation of the laws of science applied through technology.
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> Like Nature, it has laws but no plan. So how does a Christian Anarchist, someone like Ellul, deal with brothers who toss dynamite?