Luddites and now in Sci. Am

[Mateus Domingos]

Hi mc otis,
Thanks for sharing that article and the thoughtful suggestion to read the
Berlin essay. I like the bits that you've commented on and will seek out
the full piece.

I've been looking forward to reading Brian Merchant's Blood in the Machine
(not out yet here in the UK). I'm working on some research on the Luddites
and always enjoy catching those references to Pynchon's *Is It OK to Be a
Luddite. *In particular I think Matt Tierney's Dismantlings draws on it
really nicely (and also spends time with my writers like Samuel R. Delany
and Ursula K. Le Guin).

best,
mateus

On Wed, 6 Sept 2023 at 17:22, matthew cissell <mccissell at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> --
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>