"Nature Bats Last" is hardly a catchphrase that originated with me.
But it is seems always to have been used in a non time-specific manner .
At least until I started this blog and website.
My unique take is this:
that World War Two marked both the high point
and the beginning of the end for Modernist Science :
that is to say 1939-1945 marked the apogee of Modernism.
But because History is written by losers with money and tenure, WWII has been played out, for the last 70 years, as an unalloyed triumph of Allied science and modernity with the nothing-if-not
-scientific German Nazi and Tojo-era Japanese elite recast as anti-modernists.
Adorno never bought that and neither do I.
But because Mother Nature can't speak, someone has to step forward tell her side (the winner's side) of the story .
Not seeing anyone else coming forward, I offer myself.....
On Oct 16th 1940, Gotham's concrete jungle rescued the NATURAL penicillin stone its (British) builders had rejected and gave the world's first antibiotic shot. Alexander Fleming's ARTIFICIAL penicillin (ironically from leafy green Oxford !) won a Nobel but failed morally and technically. Instead Manhattan Natural radiated hope to a world tired, huddled and wretched. On its 75th, let's remind terrorist Ramzi Yousef about a Manhattan project that saved far more lives than the A-Bomb ever killed.
No comments:
Post a Comment