TRP and Science 2 (was: Science Plays God)

[Joseph Tracy]

On Jun 16, 2013, at 7:54 PM, Joseph Tracy wrote:

> The first time I had to write a research paper was in the 9th grade. It turned into kind of a weird experience that affected the course of my life along with All Quiet on the Western Front which I read the same year. I thought of ancient and medieval weapons as cool and intriguing artifacts of a completely different time and decided to look into how changes in weapons might change other things in history.  By the end I realized that this was a a theme many people had written about, and to be honest, weapons seemed a lot less cool. But it was clear to me that science, weapons,  social organization and  the technologies of war were highly linked in human history. Guns change everything; high speed transportation changes everything. And  those who do not have them  are like sitting Dodos.
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> There is clearly another dimension to science which is simply the curiosity to understand the physical world. 
> On Jun 15, 2013, at 6:18 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen wrote:
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>> On 13.06.2013 00:38, Monte Davis wrote:
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>>> Is it possible that at the same time he is suspicious and minatory and worried about science and technology (and he is, like so many other writers),  he is also (like very few others in literary fiction) really interested in it? Attracted to it? Even fascinated by it? Concerned to show us some real, important human values that come to us through, even because of, math and science and technology?
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>> How math, science and technology can bring us "real, important human values", I do not see. I'm not saying this polemically, and there are certainly good things - antibiotics have been mentioned - about scientific modernity. Or, as Jesse says when Walter shows him how to cook up the shit right: "WOW ... Science!"  But "values"? How? Ain't modern science - and I'm talking here about hard, or, as Paul Mackin puts it, "real science" - a self-referential functional system completely unreachable for something as old-fashioned as values of the "real, important human" kind? We do not have to come to a consent on this. But I really would like to hear - and please note that I'm not Alice - from you a detail or two on the criticism on science one can doubtlessly find in Pynchon. The thing is that he's not simply "worried about science and technology ... like so many other writers"; to Pynchon the pitfalls of science-based control are a key issue. I don't find this in, say, Philip Roth or Cormac McCarthy. It's plausible to say that Pynchon's attitude towards modern science's war against ambivalence became more relaxed in the second phase of his work, but in the first three novels the theme is central, imo. Pointsman makes his points, Schoenmaker finds his clients. And Dr. Hilarious can continue his concentration camp experiments under civil conditions in context of MK Ultra. These motives - all based in the real history of the 20th century - do unfold a fundamental criticism regarding modern science and its lack of values. I'm not discussing here - though we might come to this - whether the loss of human values is a necessary product of social differentiation, as Luhmann ("Modernity has more advantages and more disadvantages than any other society before") puts it, or whether this could be avoided by different forms of political organization. Just that much: "Keep cool and care!" won't do. That Pynchon is "attracted" to modern science is certainly right; even after the successful publication of V he wanted to complete his scientific education with a math grade from Berkeley. But, as already said, how to get from Pynchon's fascination by science to any kind of 'scientific value generation' to be found in the texts themselves, is not clear to me. What I find instead, especially in Gravity's Rainbow, is the tendency to connect the progress of science to deadly war technology. Not only in the case of rockets or nuclear weapons, yet regarding modern science as such. "There has been this strange connection between the German mind and the rapid flashing of successive stills to counterfeit movement for at least two centuries --- since Leibniz, in the process of inventing calculus, used the same approach to break up the trajectories of cannonballs through the air" (GR, p. 407). It's not really "the German mind", it's science ---
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