While researching the Sixties

[Mark Kohut]

I wish I had seen this brand-new remark to attach to the post I just
sent....down all the days to the present for some:

https://twitter.com/clairlemon/status/1117015971120549888?s=20

On Sat, Apr 13, 2019 at 7:23 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> I've uncovered a few Cute Correspondences with
> some of Pynchon's themes and words and favorite things.
>
> C. P. Snow again, who, besides his famous *Two Cultures [*1959]
> delivered a lecture in January 1961 entitled *"On the Moral Unneutrality*
> *of Science." *in which he says he has observed a distinct shift in the
> culture about science/ scientists since the 30's and 40's. An unalloyed
> good thing
> in itself then, the view started to shift. "[For Rutherford] the world of
> science
> was a world that lived on a plane above the nation-state, and lived there
> with joy." *
> [And he was not alone]....
>
> Now [1961] is different. " [Although] I, to a large extent share the moral
> attitudes of
> those scientists who devoted themselves to making the bomb...the trouble
> is, when you get into any
> kind of moral escalator, to know whether you're ever going to get off.
> When scientists became
> soldiers, they gave up something"......"There is a moral difference."
>
> Snow's late volume in his long series of novels, his sixties novel, *The
> Sleep of Reason* is
> about this, the summaries say.  Lots of scientists and politicians talking
> and thinking about the bomb.
> Yet also a clear negative perspective on the sixties movements and
> actions. Reason sleeping there
> as well.
>
> And by the end of the decade, when Mumford's *Pentagon of Power, *all
> about this complicity,  gets a
> front-page NYT Book Review rave.....the decade has shifted strongly and
> shown itself.
>
> Snow also wrote a late book called *The State of Siege, *that admittedly
> unoriginal phrase which TRP uses powerfully
> in *Against the Day. *[ bonus fact: Camus wrote a play with this title I
> did not even know of nor remember--and I was
> half-immersed in him at one early point of my life--because it is
> described as a very minor work.]
>
> ** 'above the nation-state"*---the way the Chums start out in AtD,
> then.....what are they by the end? A huge nation-state
> combination?
>
>
>