on Pynchon, maybe esp GR. Sounding a bottom--maybe--on the

[Mark Kohut]

vexed science and technology question in TRP's work.

One of the founders of the History of Science and Technology organizations
in the US, Lynn White
was intellectually famous from the late 60s onward. (He later went on the
succeed the even more famous Thomas Kuhn of scientific paradigms fame at
another organization of thinkers).

His fame largely stemmed from a seminal article in SCIENCE about the
Ecological Roots of the Environmental Crisis, pdf'd below. If you do not
have time to read it all, I suggest reading from
the break beginning *medieval etc. *This section only anthologized in the
Library of America book on Environmental writing.

The most interesting thing he does here, of course, is to link our attitude
to nature to the Western Christian tradition (which links to Adams' Virgin
and Dynamo obliquely--he went there first and earlier, see below---and the
Protestant Ethic/Calvinism stream that Weber fished.

But also very interesting is where he put technology in our agricultural
growth. With a super crossed blades plow--that needed eight oxen which no
individual farmer had--- was a leap way beyond a plow for single family
sustenance. In P's phrase, it was a kind of step-function of technology
growth that created needs and results way beyond natural self-supporting
farming. Way beyond simple human scale farming, one might say?

Reading thru this White stuff, one sees a focus on blades and windmills,
also TRP tropes in GR.
just sayin'.


https://www.uvm.edu/~gflomenh/ENV-NGO-PA395/articles/Lynn-White.pdf

White was an historian, but had also earned a master's degree at Union
Theological Seminary and was the son of a Calvinist professor of Christian
Ethics,[16]
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Townsend_White,_Jr.#cite_note-16> and
considered religion integral to the development of Western technology. From
his "Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages" of 1940,[17]
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Townsend_White,_Jr.#cite_note-17> through
his "Dynamo and Virgin Reconsidered" of 1958,[18]
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Townsend_White,_Jr.#cite_note-18> to
his *Medieval Technology and Social Change* (Oxford University Press,
1962), his work refuted the assumption that the Middle Ages were too
preoccupied with theology and/or chivalry to concern themselves with
technology, the assumption behind Henry Adams
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Adams>' antitheses of Virgin vs.
dynamo, but widespread elsewhere as well.[19]
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Townsend_White,_Jr.#cite_note-19>
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