Luddites and now in Sci. Am

[matthew cissell]

Howdy Folks,

Hope you're all well and keeping cool.
The article doesn't mention our favourite author (or even Byron's poem),
but it is well worth reading.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/what-the-luddites-can-teach-us-about-ai/

We read things like that article with Pynchon's essay in mind (and each
with her/ his special background), but I might suggest taking a look at
Isaiah Berlin's "Bent Twig" essay from 1972. Although it is generally about
Nationalism, it does so by way of terrain that Thomas Pynchon also seems to
have gone over in his own manner. Allow me to fill that out, as briefly as
possible. (Please forgive the editing.)

     In section V, Berlin writes, "What we are seeing, it seems to me, is a
world reaction against the central doctrines of nineteenth-century liberal
rationalism itself , a confused effort to return to abn older morality." He
goes on to note that there are the "supporters of tradition" on one side
with their "belief in, and obedience to, divine, or at any rate
transcendent, authority"; in contrast stand the "unswerving champions of
reason, who rejected faith in tradition". Those then are the sides - is
someone winning?
    Berlin proposes, "There is a sense in which (...) the rationalists
(...) have won." Rational calculation was the solution: "The application of
technological techniques in organizing human beings is the policy of
governments, of industrial enterprises, indeed of all large.scale economic
(and cultural) activities in capitalist and communist states alike."
     "Physicist and biologists, geographers and urban and rural planners,
psychologists and anthropologists, mathematicians and engineers (including
Stalin's 'engineers of human souls'), ... can be, and to a larger degree
have been, harnessed into the service of those who.... are determined to
make the best possible use of available resources, natural and artificial,
human and non-human. ...It is against this that a world-wide protest has
begun."
   Berlin suspects the "revolt" "springs from the the feeling that human
rights, rooted in the sense of human beings as specifically human, that is,
as individuated, as possessing wills, sentiments, beliefs, ideals, ways of
living their own, have been lost sight of in the 'global' calculations and
vast extrapolations which guide the plans of policy-planners and executives
inf the gigantic operations in which governments, corporations and
interlocking élites of various kinds are engaged."
   "There is a growing number among the young of our day who see
their future as a process of being fitted into some scientifically
well-constructed programme, after the data of their life-expectancy and
capacities and utilisability have been classified, computerised, and
analysed for conduciveness to .... greatest happiness of the greatest
number." And if Berlin thought that that was how young people felt then...
    "In industrial and post-industrial societies the protest is that of
individuals or groups whose members do not wish to be dragged along by the
chariot-wheels of scientific progress, interpreted as the accumulation of
material goods and services and of utilitarian arrangements to dispose of
them." In what today are referred to as 'developing' countries and former
colonies, Berlin claims, "The cry for individual and national independence
(...) springs from the same sense of outraged human dignity."
   At the end of section V, Berlin cautions, "But the original impulse, the
desire *fare da se*, appears to be the same in both cases; it is the *se* that
varies."  There is a self that cries out in unison with Joseph De Maistre,
and many more. Berlin ends the section with this description and warning:
"The self that seeks liberty of action, determination of its own life (...)
is the very triumph of scientific rationalism everywhere, the great
eighteenth-century movement for the liberation of men from superstition and
ignorance (...) [and this] by a curious paradox, has imposed a yoke that,
in it's turn, evoked an all-too-human cry for independence from its rule.
(...) No doubt to do entirely as one likes could destroy not only one's
neighbours but oneself. Freedom is only one value among others, and cannot
be realised without rules and limits. But in the hour of revolt this is
inevitably forgotten."

   Berlin also gives mention to the anabaptists, populist movements and
more that I could not shove into this mail. I might as well add that the
essay seems fairly prescient and holds up today despite the massive changes
in society and technology.

ciao
mc otis