The urban jungle that is Manhattan, with all its concrete skyscrapers, should be the very last place on earth where one might expect to see the start of a turning away from the Modern obsession with the artificial and the synthetic and a turn to the Postmodernity's renewed relationship with Nature.
But Manhattan is in fact the place where the wartime mass production of natural penicillin - with all that momentous decision's consequences for postmodernity - actually began .
Showing posts with label modernity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label modernity. Show all posts
Aug 25, 2014
Jul 12, 2014
Other than as victims, does a successful WWII book actually NEED women, blacks, Jews, the handicapped, the poor, gays, civilians ?
The Fox News-ization of WWII : history as re-written by talk radio ...
To answer my title's question : of course not.
The most prominent woman leader in WWII - almost the only one - was Eleanor Roosevelt - and her little bit of influence came mostly from her nation-wide newspaper column, not from being inside the corridors of actual decision making.
Ditto goes almost all of the small/weak/unfits/misfits I earlier mentioned.
Sure Jews and gays were plentiful in corridors of power in most Allied nations - but powerful acting as representatives of the Jews and of the gays --- no, no ,no , a thousand times not.
If you want to distort history, satisfy your aging male writer's ego and make lots and lots of money, you can happily focus on the WWII that was all about Modernity and the good old days when male middle class still dominated the lesser breeds and genders.
But 1945 did not just mark the Apogee of Modernity, Big Science and the hegemony of the big Western Powers - it also is taken - by general academic consensus - to be the year that marks the start of the Nadir of Modernity and the rise of our present Postmodern era.
Because, underneath the Boy's Own World of virtually all of today's most popular WWII books , there were an awfully lot of unfits taking FDR's Four Freedoms and the Allied Atlantic Charter very seriously indeed.
Which is to say, a lot more seriously than did the guys who originally wrote them ...
Penicillin-for-All : Postmodernity's "Manhattan Project"
We know far too well Modernity's "Manhattan Project" - Big Science's Atom Bomb - it sometimes seems that middle-aged male non-fiction writers write about nothing else than those heady - now long gone -days of Modernity and Male dominance.
(Yes it is almost always middle-aged men who write the books and articles about Manhattan's atomic bomb .
And perhaps it is also almost always middle-aged men who read them , despite the fact that ordinarily most readers are women of all ages.
This publishing fixation on the past glories of long gone Modernity may hurt publishing firms' bottom line but it is unlikely to change as long as most publishing bosses are also middle-aged males with a strong taste of nostalgia for when men like themselves ruled the roust unchallenged.)
Few middle-aged male writers , however , write about the simultaneous (in time and space) Post Modern Manhattan Project --- Penicillin-for-All.
P-F-A was an unexpected triumph -- because all-powerful wartime Big Government (and Big Pharma) definitely had other plans.
It was the unexpected triumph of a tiny band of unfits (with no government grants to aid them by the way) successfully defying both Allied and Axis eugenicism (and their own physical failings) to bring us Penicillin-for-All.
Call it a triumph of the unfit, weak, small - above all call it the triumph of DIY small science, since key to the unfits' success was their ability to create their own tiny life-saving penicillin factory , regardless of how Big Pharma and Big Government wanted to play out wartime penicillin.
So if WWII definitely began in 1939 at the height of the Era of Eugenic Modernity , equally it ended in 1945 at the beginnings of our present Era of Welcoming Diversity & Postmodernity and it is time male non-fiction writers accept this historical reality...
(Yes it is almost always middle-aged men who write the books and articles about Manhattan's atomic bomb .
And perhaps it is also almost always middle-aged men who read them , despite the fact that ordinarily most readers are women of all ages.
This publishing fixation on the past glories of long gone Modernity may hurt publishing firms' bottom line but it is unlikely to change as long as most publishing bosses are also middle-aged males with a strong taste of nostalgia for when men like themselves ruled the roust unchallenged.)
Few middle-aged male writers , however , write about the simultaneous (in time and space) Post Modern Manhattan Project --- Penicillin-for-All.
P-F-A was an unexpected triumph -- because all-powerful wartime Big Government (and Big Pharma) definitely had other plans.
It was the unexpected triumph of a tiny band of unfits (with no government grants to aid them by the way) successfully defying both Allied and Axis eugenicism (and their own physical failings) to bring us Penicillin-for-All.
Call it a triumph of the unfit, weak, small - above all call it the triumph of DIY small science, since key to the unfits' success was their ability to create their own tiny life-saving penicillin factory , regardless of how Big Pharma and Big Government wanted to play out wartime penicillin.
So if WWII definitely began in 1939 at the height of the Era of Eugenic Modernity , equally it ended in 1945 at the beginnings of our present Era of Welcoming Diversity & Postmodernity and it is time male non-fiction writers accept this historical reality...
Jul 3, 2014
Plentiphobia : fear of being overwhelmed by plenitude
"Too much information".
Humans are easily overwhelmed - temporarily - by too much.
Too much choice, too many people on a crowded street, too much choice of new clothes in a story - on and on.
They recover by retreating into places with much less choices and decisions - usually their own home.
But , starting in the 1870s , almost all of us in the educated urbanized middle class western world - all the time and everywhere - felt overwhelmed by too many new scientific discoveries , too many new immigrants, too many new imports, too much too much.
The un-coordinated activities of modernization/ globalization had produced the mother of all plenitudes and humanity reacted with a strong case of plentiphobia.
This phobia - given that humanity also supposedly welcomed modernization and wanted it to go faster and bigger - manifested itself in a complex way.
Western civilization now semi-consciously used the processes of modernization to reduce this plenitude - tidy and clean it up - perfect it and then freeze the result in place forever.
A few perfect chemical synthetics and plastics were to replace the vast variety of natural and imperfect materials we had traditionally used.
Against germs - a greatly hightened gospel of cleanliness.
Against plant and animal and insect pests - ditto.
Against immigrants - immigration controls and wholesale efforts to socialize those few that were admitted.
Against humans as imperfect as wood and wool and rock could be - culling out and purebreed breeding.
Plentiphobia in people who failed to graduate from university is called Fascism and Nazism.
While formal eugenics is just plentiphobia with a PhD ....
Humans are easily overwhelmed - temporarily - by too much.
Too much choice, too many people on a crowded street, too much choice of new clothes in a story - on and on.
They recover by retreating into places with much less choices and decisions - usually their own home.
But , starting in the 1870s , almost all of us in the educated urbanized middle class western world - all the time and everywhere - felt overwhelmed by too many new scientific discoveries , too many new immigrants, too many new imports, too much too much.
The un-coordinated activities of modernization/ globalization had produced the mother of all plenitudes and humanity reacted with a strong case of plentiphobia.
This phobia - given that humanity also supposedly welcomed modernization and wanted it to go faster and bigger - manifested itself in a complex way.
Western civilization now semi-consciously used the processes of modernization to reduce this plenitude - tidy and clean it up - perfect it and then freeze the result in place forever.
A few perfect chemical synthetics and plastics were to replace the vast variety of natural and imperfect materials we had traditionally used.
Against germs - a greatly hightened gospel of cleanliness.
Against plant and animal and insect pests - ditto.
Against immigrants - immigration controls and wholesale efforts to socialize those few that were admitted.
Against humans as imperfect as wood and wool and rock could be - culling out and purebreed breeding.
Plentiphobia in people who failed to graduate from university is called Fascism and Nazism.
While formal eugenics is just plentiphobia with a PhD ....
May 27, 2014
1870s Modernity -- fluid or rigid - or both ?
Modernity: Have we got it Wrong ? Rigid not Fluid ?
The usual claim that Modernity represents an extraordinary degree of change and dynamic uncertainty must butt its head against the co-current rise of hyper-rigid nationalism in the same time and space.
This newly reified term, nationalism, was generally based upon a single ethnicity, which was usually coded at the time, incorrectly, as "race".
No longer were all citizens of France or Germany regarded as French or German by simple reason of being legal citizens.
Instead a hopelessly il-defined and yet paradoxically rigid innate quality made you either part of The Glorious French Race or not.
Not, meant you belonged to another nationality slash ethnicity cum race.
You had no choice to say that you shared a number of different groupings varying upon your politics, religion, main language , place of birth and parentage.
Individuals effectively ceased to be individual and had to be members of , and hyper-loyal to , a particular block of humanity, the Italians or French, etc.
Contrast this to the Middle Ages's Christians who saw the Jews not as a solid group to be put to the sword, but as a group of individuals - some sinners and some saved - depending upon whether or not they individually accepted Christ and were baptized.
So WWI's vestiges of chivalry and empathy and altruism were not crowded out by old fashioned and immoral individual selfishness ( which was not any more common or any more popular than it has always been).
No, they were replaced by a new supposedly highly moral form of group selfishness.
People protested that concern for your kin had always been ruled morally legitimate - all that had changed, under Modernity, was that there were a lot more kin in your vastly enlarged German/British/Russian family.
By contrast, a pretty Russian or a handsome German was no longer a possible marriage mate for a French youth , as an attractive fellow human being who just happened to - currently - speak different and go to a different church.
Now different ethnicities might as well been different species and marriage with other ethnicities seem dangerously close to bestiality.
Not only were you rigidly placed in one ethnicity - from birth and fixed rigidly for all time - but your entire ethnic group was also rigidly and permanently set in a hierarchy of worthiness, from valued to useless.
So, regardless of the actions of individual Italians, individual combat units or individuals battles, Italians as a group were dismissed ,in advance, as permanently bad soldiers.
In this bizarre moral universe of Modernity,two billion human beings around the world saw the big nations beat up the little nations and did nothing, but each rushed loyally into fearsome combat the moment their own nation was itself attacked.
Each warrior felt he or she was on some moral high road but they were not.
For if Hitler hadn't attacked Russia and declared war on America, Europe would probably still be under his descendants' heel.
Altruism was at a very low ebb between 1931 and 1946 and so all the more reason to honour it where ever and when ever it was found...
Dec 23, 2013
Our monoculture of "BIG" is killing us and our only home - Earth
As was the case (on both sides) during WWII, we live in a (human) monoculture that worships the BIG and dismisses the small , despite the fact that Nature itself hardly reflects this scenario, in fact, much the reverse.
We do so because our powerful and elderly (the two conditions are often related) still support the values of their teenage to young adult formative years under the Late and not so Great era of Modernity.
Modernity's proponents felt it was inevitable that the "fit" ( ie the BIG and the ponderous) would inevitably have all the innings ,all the time, against the small and the nimble.
Today more and more of us younger folk are leaning into the values of post-Modernity, which shows an increased receptiveness to diversity , variety , the local and the small.
But will death take out the Modernists in our midst ( those deniers of any limits on the abilities of the BIG to laugh in the face of Nature's worst), before they take us all out ?
It is a grim race against time --- which is why I think it is worth re-examining the last time Modernity and the BIG really got sand kicked in their face : WWII ....
We do so because our powerful and elderly (the two conditions are often related) still support the values of their teenage to young adult formative years under the Late and not so Great era of Modernity.
Modernity's proponents felt it was inevitable that the "fit" ( ie the BIG and the ponderous) would inevitably have all the innings ,all the time, against the small and the nimble.
Today more and more of us younger folk are leaning into the values of post-Modernity, which shows an increased receptiveness to diversity , variety , the local and the small.
But will death take out the Modernists in our midst ( those deniers of any limits on the abilities of the BIG to laugh in the face of Nature's worst), before they take us all out ?
It is a grim race against time --- which is why I think it is worth re-examining the last time Modernity and the BIG really got sand kicked in their face : WWII ....
Dec 7, 2013
All life is family : science at War (1939-1945) with reality
During the era of modernity, 1870s- 1960s , politics was science and science was politics , both united around the idea that ultimately physical reality was really quite simple and so should human reality be.
Simple, pure, few/big,slow to change, predictable.
Modernity and its science had never had a war where it could show its stuff, earlier wars being run by the old men who grew up before scienticism replaced religion.
Now there were old men running this war who were teenagers when scienticism was in its fullest flower.
Let the games begin !
But their best laid plans were soon burnt out shells and nobody survived WWII with their predictions intact, as the actual complexity of reality confounded the mightiest and wisest over and over.
Supposedly 1945 marked the apogee of modernist science, winning the war for the Allies etc ( insert A bomb and penicillin here).
In fact it was its nadir , the birthdate of post-modernity , post-modern science ...
Simple, pure, few/big,slow to change, predictable.
Modernity and its science had never had a war where it could show its stuff, earlier wars being run by the old men who grew up before scienticism replaced religion.
Now there were old men running this war who were teenagers when scienticism was in its fullest flower.
Let the games begin !
But their best laid plans were soon burnt out shells and nobody survived WWII with their predictions intact, as the actual complexity of reality confounded the mightiest and wisest over and over.
Supposedly 1945 marked the apogee of modernist science, winning the war for the Allies etc ( insert A bomb and penicillin here).
In fact it was its nadir , the birthdate of post-modernity , post-modern science ...
Dec 5, 2013
WWII : Science at war against physical Reality...
Just because you come across the bodies of a lot of robbers over in the Sierra Madre part of town, this does not automatically mean it was the result of a fight between cops and robbers, good guys versus bad guys.
Sometimes it is nothing more than first a fight between robbers over spoils and then a fight between the surviving robbers and the physical reality of the Mexican desert, with reality biting last.
In terms of their approach to science, all the major combatant empires of WWII thought alike (reality was simpler than it appears)- but they differed wildly - militarily - on how best to divide up the global colonial pie.
However all their collective science efforts soon ran smack into the actual complexity of physical reality and ended up shattered upon it - though almost no one foresaw this ('this' being post-Modernity) at the time.
I think my thesis does a better job than the current historical consensus about WWII in explaining why, if the forces of modernity beat back the fascist forces of anti-modernity in 1945, does 1945 also mark the beginning of the end for the victorious modernity forces.
Sometimes it is nothing more than first a fight between robbers over spoils and then a fight between the surviving robbers and the physical reality of the Mexican desert, with reality biting last.
In terms of their approach to science, all the major combatant empires of WWII thought alike (reality was simpler than it appears)- but they differed wildly - militarily - on how best to divide up the global colonial pie.
However all their collective science efforts soon ran smack into the actual complexity of physical reality and ended up shattered upon it - though almost no one foresaw this ('this' being post-Modernity) at the time.
I think my thesis does a better job than the current historical consensus about WWII in explaining why, if the forces of modernity beat back the fascist forces of anti-modernity in 1945, does 1945 also mark the beginning of the end for the victorious modernity forces.
Pace Schnaiberg : simplifying science vs complicating science
Canadian-born sociologist of Science Allan Schnailberg , in a seminal article from more than 40 years ago, explained-in-advance today's Science Wars , with his proposed division of scientists into those oriented to production and those oriented to studying the impact of that production.
So some scientists are content to merely dig up millions of tons of tar sands to produce oil and never ask what for , while other scientists spend their lives exploring the impact on the world of all that additional air carbon and waste water.
I want to modify his suggestion when I look into 19th century science and technology's paradoxical effects upon modernization and its evil counterpart, modernity.
Because I want to suggest that the random working-out, in all directions, of the collective effect of individual science and technology efforts, was to do two wildly different things at the same time.
One was to greatly advance humanity's simple control over apparent reality.
The other was to greatly reduce humanity's simple control over actual (complex) reality.
Steam ships, lighthouses, radio, radar (works of technology basically : production science) all seemed to make our predictive control over ocean weather conditions far more assured.
But further weather research (basic science research, impact science) revealed just how complex ocean weather actually was and how unlikely it was that we could ever 100% predict the ocean weather , even three days ahead.
Nineteenth Century science claimed it was well on the way to finding the one 'Theory of Everything', and soon science would be able to show (reduce) all reality to the effects that a few basic forces have on a few basic particles.
But even if you don't give a tinker's damn about science, ask yourself if there has been a news headline that suggests that science has newly discovered less, rather than more ?
Never, never never : trust me.
The earth is older than thought, as is the universe - which is also much bigger than expected and rapidly expanding. More and more species are always being found, living in more and more extreme environs and Life's start is constantly is being pushed back.
More elements, more isotopes , more basic sub- atomic particles.
More interactions, more complexity, more chaos theory.
Very, very, rarely is ever revealed that only one faulty gene can cause a disease - it always seems to be the interacting of thirty genes that may or may not give us a statistical greater chance of having that disease.
Ever better instrumentation and more serious research projects focussed on highly particular questions has revealed ,again and again ,that the surface simplicity of reality is false.
So our incomplete knowledge of reality is indeed a dangerous thing ---- as it always seems to feed our ready tendency to technological hubris.
Let us get concrete for a minute : and think about what 19th century fingerprinting was really doing for us.
Yes, it offered us simple control over reality by determining which criminal was actually at the crime scene (hurrah !) but only by suggesting this unexpected complexity about reality : that every human that ever existed has unique fingerprints.
In fact, like snowflakes, fingerprints should have reminded us that universal random thermal noise ensures that everything in reality - from living clones to pure mineral crystals - is , and must be, subtly different ... if only we look close enough.
Linear and reality live on separate universes : because everything in our universe vibrates randomly and constantly and so zig-zags itself to every new chemical combination at its own unique pace.
Identical twins start off life with the exact same instructions of growth, but within seconds are subtly different as the carefully timed iterations when genes get turned off and on are subtly smeared by the random effects of thermal noise speeding or delaying each competing process.
May I suggest that the Enlightenment Project made a simple but fundamental error in thinking that knowing more about reality was the same as offering up more control over reality ?
Because what really had to be decided was this : was reality simpler than it looked or was it more complex than it looked?
A truly open mind, a mind agape - like that of Henry Dawson - would look to see what the evidence revealed before deciding.
But the utopian (unconsciously fearful of loss of control ?) minds of most Modernist scientists (I am thinking here particularly of the progressive scientist Einstein and fascist scientist Hitler) went into the question already convinced, in advance of any evidence, that reality was simpler than it looked.
Knowing that a person is utopian (ie, believes it is even possible to attempt to plan and micromanage social and economic reality) really tells us very little about their politics, but it tells us a great deal about their physics .
Because they must believe that physical (and above it social) reality is so fundamentally simple and predictable that it is possible to set forth an economic Five Year Plan for an entire nation without worrying that we might fail to foresee a possible earthquake, volcano, hurricane or meter crash .
Let alone considering that a possible war, drought, epidemic or social revolution might make their five year planning goals unobtainable.
Most utopians in fact seek a 'one world government' so confident are they that a few skilled technicians can successfully micro-manage an entire world for years in advance.
So 'simplifying science' is fundamentally utopian while 'complicating science' is fundamentally anti-utopian : hard to avoid a 'science war' with those opposing world-views facing off.
This is why I propose to 'prism' the WWII Florey-Dawson conflict over wartime penicillin development as an early example of a battle in a 'science war' between simplifying and complicating views on ultimate reality.
An enormous 'science war' happening beneath the better known but much smaller military war...
So some scientists are content to merely dig up millions of tons of tar sands to produce oil and never ask what for , while other scientists spend their lives exploring the impact on the world of all that additional air carbon and waste water.
I want to modify his suggestion when I look into 19th century science and technology's paradoxical effects upon modernization and its evil counterpart, modernity.
Because I want to suggest that the random working-out, in all directions, of the collective effect of individual science and technology efforts, was to do two wildly different things at the same time.
One was to greatly advance humanity's simple control over apparent reality.
The other was to greatly reduce humanity's simple control over actual (complex) reality.
Steam ships, lighthouses, radio, radar (works of technology basically : production science) all seemed to make our predictive control over ocean weather conditions far more assured.
But further weather research (basic science research, impact science) revealed just how complex ocean weather actually was and how unlikely it was that we could ever 100% predict the ocean weather , even three days ahead.
Nineteenth Century science claimed it was well on the way to finding the one 'Theory of Everything', and soon science would be able to show (reduce) all reality to the effects that a few basic forces have on a few basic particles.
But even if you don't give a tinker's damn about science, ask yourself if there has been a news headline that suggests that science has newly discovered less, rather than more ?
Never, never never : trust me.
The earth is older than thought, as is the universe - which is also much bigger than expected and rapidly expanding. More and more species are always being found, living in more and more extreme environs and Life's start is constantly is being pushed back.
More elements, more isotopes , more basic sub- atomic particles.
More interactions, more complexity, more chaos theory.
Very, very, rarely is ever revealed that only one faulty gene can cause a disease - it always seems to be the interacting of thirty genes that may or may not give us a statistical greater chance of having that disease.
Ever better instrumentation and more serious research projects focussed on highly particular questions has revealed ,again and again ,that the surface simplicity of reality is false.
So our incomplete knowledge of reality is indeed a dangerous thing ---- as it always seems to feed our ready tendency to technological hubris.
Let us get concrete for a minute : and think about what 19th century fingerprinting was really doing for us.
Yes, it offered us simple control over reality by determining which criminal was actually at the crime scene (hurrah !) but only by suggesting this unexpected complexity about reality : that every human that ever existed has unique fingerprints.
In fact, like snowflakes, fingerprints should have reminded us that universal random thermal noise ensures that everything in reality - from living clones to pure mineral crystals - is , and must be, subtly different ... if only we look close enough.
Linear and reality live on separate universes : because everything in our universe vibrates randomly and constantly and so zig-zags itself to every new chemical combination at its own unique pace.
Identical twins start off life with the exact same instructions of growth, but within seconds are subtly different as the carefully timed iterations when genes get turned off and on are subtly smeared by the random effects of thermal noise speeding or delaying each competing process.
May I suggest that the Enlightenment Project made a simple but fundamental error in thinking that knowing more about reality was the same as offering up more control over reality ?
Because what really had to be decided was this : was reality simpler than it looked or was it more complex than it looked?
A truly open mind, a mind agape - like that of Henry Dawson - would look to see what the evidence revealed before deciding.
But the utopian (unconsciously fearful of loss of control ?) minds of most Modernist scientists (I am thinking here particularly of the progressive scientist Einstein and fascist scientist Hitler) went into the question already convinced, in advance of any evidence, that reality was simpler than it looked.
Knowing that a person is utopian (ie, believes it is even possible to attempt to plan and micromanage social and economic reality) really tells us very little about their politics, but it tells us a great deal about their physics .
Because they must believe that physical (and above it social) reality is so fundamentally simple and predictable that it is possible to set forth an economic Five Year Plan for an entire nation without worrying that we might fail to foresee a possible earthquake, volcano, hurricane or meter crash .
Let alone considering that a possible war, drought, epidemic or social revolution might make their five year planning goals unobtainable.
Most utopians in fact seek a 'one world government' so confident are they that a few skilled technicians can successfully micro-manage an entire world for years in advance.
So 'simplifying science' is fundamentally utopian while 'complicating science' is fundamentally anti-utopian : hard to avoid a 'science war' with those opposing world-views facing off.
This is why I propose to 'prism' the WWII Florey-Dawson conflict over wartime penicillin development as an early example of a battle in a 'science war' between simplifying and complicating views on ultimate reality.
An enormous 'science war' happening beneath the better known but much smaller military war...
Nov 24, 2013
Modernization vs Modernity, made easy
Modernization (aka "Progress") was such things as fast safe comfortable steamships that made it easy for Englishman to migrate to becoming District Officers in northern India or for Indian students to travel to Oxford University.
Modernity was the counter-modernization ideology adopted by both Indians who objected to Englishmen becoming District officers in northern India and by Englishmen who objected to Indians students at Oxford University when they wanted to retain the parts of modernization that favoured them and attack the parts that did not...
So for example, Hitler that ultimate figure of Modernity, loved the fast armoured tanks that could let Germans travel quickly and safely from Berlin to Stalingrad, but objected strongly to the Russians used similar fast armoured tanks built at the Stalingrad tank factory to visit Hitler in his Berlin bunker.
Modernization is a highly inexact word to describe its effects : commensal globalization or global commensality is a much more accurate description because it adds emphasis to the willy-nilly-ness and two-way-street-ness of what was actually taking place....
Modernity was the counter-modernization ideology adopted by both Indians who objected to Englishmen becoming District officers in northern India and by Englishmen who objected to Indians students at Oxford University when they wanted to retain the parts of modernization that favoured them and attack the parts that did not...
So for example, Hitler that ultimate figure of Modernity, loved the fast armoured tanks that could let Germans travel quickly and safely from Berlin to Stalingrad, but objected strongly to the Russians used similar fast armoured tanks built at the Stalingrad tank factory to visit Hitler in his Berlin bunker.
Modernization is a highly inexact word to describe its effects : commensal globalization or global commensality is a much more accurate description because it adds emphasis to the willy-nilly-ness and two-way-street-ness of what was actually taking place....
Nov 4, 2013
Commensal Modernization vs Pure Modernity
The Second Industrial Revolution in steel, concrete, electricity, chemicals ,which lasted from about the 1870s to the 1960s ,led to a worldwide process called modernization.
Its key characteristic was a greatly increased intermingling of foreign human beings and their cultural objects (tangible and intangible) into every country on earth , with vast numbers of everything coming in and over supposedly sacrosanct national borders with greatly increased velocity.
Another word for the intimate co-mingling of small and big, willy nilly, is commensality (in the controversial sense in which biologists use this ancient concept).
Tourists, immigrants, ideas, ideologies, artists, manufactured goods - they poured in and out , at such a great speed and in such great numbers , that everyone felt at least a little overwhelmed.
More, faster and deeply intermingled : that was the impression the effects of modernization had on the first generations impacted by its initial stirrings.
Others felt a great deal overwhelmed indeed and not a little threatened : they were usually each nation's traditional elites, using to having their say pass unquestioned.
Now new competitors were threatening their hegemony and the national elites had both time, money and control of the key academic and media centres of influence to successfully fight back : fight back ideologically.
Today we call their counter attack on the commensality of modernization "Modernity", but they themselves never did.
They probably tended to regard their ideas as simply matter-of-fact ideas about Progress , Science and Modern times.
They certainly went to their graves not aware that their supposedly up-to-the-minute modern ideas were really a rearguard reaction against modern reality.
Because they claimed to be truly modern was to see stability, gradualism, simplicity, purity, the few and the big as what was found in Nature.
And moderns should seek and desire the same in Human culture to be truly happy and prosperous.
All this - and more in their ideological repertoire - could be reduced (itself a favourite modern term !) to the claim that reality is basically stable and simple.
A pure substance has fewer ingredients - it is simple.
For a given amount of anything - say the potential biomass on Earth - the bigger the portions it is made up of, the fewer there are of them - fewer is also simpler to keep an eye on.
And big things, by their size and complexity are less likely to move easily or move quickly.
If they move, they move gradually and slowly. Slow change is also simpler to keep an eye on.
And big things are hardly invisible and hardly capable of sneaking in below the radar are they ?
Reductionism, another core value of Modernity, is the claim that matter is all made up of a very few fixed building blocks and with them you can build up everything from a simple molecule to an entire Universe , just like Lego by simply adding more and more and more blocks.
Purity meant no co-mingling of human loins either : being called a half breed was about the worst epithet in the modernist lexicon.
They liked things big, clearly visible, few, simple, pure, slow moving , unchanging ; they hated things that were tiny (and thus "many") , fast moving, invisible, fast changing, flexible, mixed and complex, things mixing in other people's space without their permission or even them being aware of it.
What they disliked sounds like a textbook description of germs , particularly commensal germs, and Germ Theory.
No wonder then that everything human the Moderns tended to hate and fear and demonize they choose to call human germs or an equivalent words like human virus, bacilli or pathogen.
WWII, Modernity's own war , was all about the big picking upon and fearing, the small.
This war upon the small was not incidental to the main action of WWII --- it was the main action.
Now you know what Henry Dawson was up against in his wartime penicillin efforts to defend the small against the big......
Its key characteristic was a greatly increased intermingling of foreign human beings and their cultural objects (tangible and intangible) into every country on earth , with vast numbers of everything coming in and over supposedly sacrosanct national borders with greatly increased velocity.
Another word for the intimate co-mingling of small and big, willy nilly, is commensality (in the controversial sense in which biologists use this ancient concept).
Tourists, immigrants, ideas, ideologies, artists, manufactured goods - they poured in and out , at such a great speed and in such great numbers , that everyone felt at least a little overwhelmed.
More, faster and deeply intermingled : that was the impression the effects of modernization had on the first generations impacted by its initial stirrings.
Others felt a great deal overwhelmed indeed and not a little threatened : they were usually each nation's traditional elites, using to having their say pass unquestioned.
Now new competitors were threatening their hegemony and the national elites had both time, money and control of the key academic and media centres of influence to successfully fight back : fight back ideologically.
Today we call their counter attack on the commensality of modernization "Modernity", but they themselves never did.
They probably tended to regard their ideas as simply matter-of-fact ideas about Progress , Science and Modern times.
They certainly went to their graves not aware that their supposedly up-to-the-minute modern ideas were really a rearguard reaction against modern reality.
Because they claimed to be truly modern was to see stability, gradualism, simplicity, purity, the few and the big as what was found in Nature.
And moderns should seek and desire the same in Human culture to be truly happy and prosperous.
All this - and more in their ideological repertoire - could be reduced (itself a favourite modern term !) to the claim that reality is basically stable and simple.
A pure substance has fewer ingredients - it is simple.
For a given amount of anything - say the potential biomass on Earth - the bigger the portions it is made up of, the fewer there are of them - fewer is also simpler to keep an eye on.
And big things, by their size and complexity are less likely to move easily or move quickly.
If they move, they move gradually and slowly. Slow change is also simpler to keep an eye on.
And big things are hardly invisible and hardly capable of sneaking in below the radar are they ?
Reductionism, another core value of Modernity, is the claim that matter is all made up of a very few fixed building blocks and with them you can build up everything from a simple molecule to an entire Universe , just like Lego by simply adding more and more and more blocks.
Purity meant no co-mingling of human loins either : being called a half breed was about the worst epithet in the modernist lexicon.
They liked things big, clearly visible, few, simple, pure, slow moving , unchanging ; they hated things that were tiny (and thus "many") , fast moving, invisible, fast changing, flexible, mixed and complex, things mixing in other people's space without their permission or even them being aware of it.
What they disliked sounds like a textbook description of germs , particularly commensal germs, and Germ Theory.
No wonder then that everything human the Moderns tended to hate and fear and demonize they choose to call human germs or an equivalent words like human virus, bacilli or pathogen.
WWII, Modernity's own war , was all about the big picking upon and fearing, the small.
This war upon the small was not incidental to the main action of WWII --- it was the main action.
Now you know what Henry Dawson was up against in his wartime penicillin efforts to defend the small against the big......
Oct 20, 2013
Birth of Modernity ?
Modernity was born the moment most of the educated West replaced a belief in the Theory of the Sublime with a belief in the Theory of the Germ , ie an event that occurred in the broadly defined '1880s'.
The Theory of the Sublime explains why humans fear - and should fear - only the awesomely big : God, the devil, earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, lions, tigers, et al.
But after the advent of Darwin, Lyell, steam power, high explosives and the Higher Criticism, who could fear any of these ?
Still, when things go wrong - as they often do - who then to blame ?
Can't blame ourselves, could we ?
Conveniently, a bizarre theory emerged from Pasteur in France about the same time, suggesting that an invisible Fifth Column of tiny, weak creatures, most even incapable of basic movement , could nevertheless fell the biggest and smartest of beings with ease.
Think of Germs being a sort of Anti-Sublimity and you're on the right track.
No longer were our enemies big, external and highly visible, (first declaring war forthrightly, then pouring over the border to line up en masse in their bright red uniforms on a sunny daytime battlefield).
Instead germs , like biological franc-tireurs, shot their toxin bullets, - in our backs - at night, out of uniform, from behind fences.
Bacteria are nothing but tiny, weak, poor beings you sentimentalists say ?
No, no, a thousand times no !
They are unsporting guerillas and biological bomb-throwing anarchist terrorists.
War without mercy then upon our minorities of the weak and the small - for they are humanity's one true remaining enemy .....
The Theory of the Sublime explains why humans fear - and should fear - only the awesomely big : God, the devil, earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, lions, tigers, et al.
But after the advent of Darwin, Lyell, steam power, high explosives and the Higher Criticism, who could fear any of these ?
Still, when things go wrong - as they often do - who then to blame ?
Can't blame ourselves, could we ?
Conveniently, a bizarre theory emerged from Pasteur in France about the same time, suggesting that an invisible Fifth Column of tiny, weak creatures, most even incapable of basic movement , could nevertheless fell the biggest and smartest of beings with ease.
Think of Germs being a sort of Anti-Sublimity and you're on the right track.
No longer were our enemies big, external and highly visible, (first declaring war forthrightly, then pouring over the border to line up en masse in their bright red uniforms on a sunny daytime battlefield).
Instead germs , like biological franc-tireurs, shot their toxin bullets, - in our backs - at night, out of uniform, from behind fences.
Bacteria are nothing but tiny, weak, poor beings you sentimentalists say ?
No, no, a thousand times no !
They are unsporting guerillas and biological bomb-throwing anarchist terrorists.
War without mercy then upon our minorities of the weak and the small - for they are humanity's one true remaining enemy .....
Modern Era/Modernity: Matter/Anti-Matter
You have to admire the sheer audacity of Modernity as it sought a full compass rollback of the effects of the Modern Era, under the sheep's skin guise of daring to lead this counter-revolution under the name of Modernity !
Albeit it was a subconscious counter-revolution ---- all of its varied proponents went to their graves convinced they were furthering the pace of the Modern Era and merely working to destroy some of its dangerous foes.
So some of the Modern Era's most dangerous foes (and also its biggest supporters) were socialism, liberalism, communism, capitalism, fascism, democracy, totalitarianism.
Like some hair-brained firing squad, the entire world armed itself with intellectual rifles and formed a circle, with each ideology convinced that its opponent directly across the way was Modernity's worse enemy and the erstwhile 'friends' on either side of themselves were only a little bit better.
The Modern Era was notable for many things but it is possible to see that above all else was was truly new about it was the extreme mobility it brought to so many hitherto local human activities.
The increased reach, speed and universality of the flow in and out of local areas (and of entire sovereign nations) of capital, materials, products, patents, intellectual ideas, fashions and tastes, immigrants and warfare was extremely upsetting to most everybody at some time or other.
Reality now seemed seemed so complex, so diverse, so unpredictable, so rapidly changing as beyond human comprehension, let alone human control.
Modernity can thus be best seen as an intellectual claim that - contrary to this current false human sense about reality - a scientific study of Nature actually revealed that real reality was essentially simple, predictable and static, in uniformitarian equilibrium, and any change in it was so gradual as to appear invisible over the average human lifetime.
The Modern Era and Modernity were not one and the same train or even two trains running on parallel tracks, but two trains heading for a head-on wreck on the same track : WWI and WWII ....
Albeit it was a subconscious counter-revolution ---- all of its varied proponents went to their graves convinced they were furthering the pace of the Modern Era and merely working to destroy some of its dangerous foes.
So some of the Modern Era's most dangerous foes (and also its biggest supporters) were socialism, liberalism, communism, capitalism, fascism, democracy, totalitarianism.
Like some hair-brained firing squad, the entire world armed itself with intellectual rifles and formed a circle, with each ideology convinced that its opponent directly across the way was Modernity's worse enemy and the erstwhile 'friends' on either side of themselves were only a little bit better.
The Modern Era was notable for many things but it is possible to see that above all else was was truly new about it was the extreme mobility it brought to so many hitherto local human activities.
The increased reach, speed and universality of the flow in and out of local areas (and of entire sovereign nations) of capital, materials, products, patents, intellectual ideas, fashions and tastes, immigrants and warfare was extremely upsetting to most everybody at some time or other.
Reality now seemed seemed so complex, so diverse, so unpredictable, so rapidly changing as beyond human comprehension, let alone human control.
Modernity can thus be best seen as an intellectual claim that - contrary to this current false human sense about reality - a scientific study of Nature actually revealed that real reality was essentially simple, predictable and static, in uniformitarian equilibrium, and any change in it was so gradual as to appear invisible over the average human lifetime.
The Modern Era and Modernity were not one and the same train or even two trains running on parallel tracks, but two trains heading for a head-on wreck on the same track : WWI and WWII ....
Sep 21, 2013
After all, sharing unexamined assumptions is what makes two scientists 'peers' in the first place
Logically, the only thing worth examining is the unexamined assumptions that we all hold in common
The only real test of a scientific hypothesis is to have it reviewed by non-peers , for they will probably not share the underlying 'unexamined assumptions' that form the outer limits of whatever space a potentially new scientific theory can inhabit in a particular discipline.
By its very definition, peer review always fails, must fail, any truly ground-breaking scientific effort.
But having new ideas torn apart by non-peers is difficult in practise because many non-peers will fail to fully understand the context of the subtle internal arguments being made in support of that particular hypothesis.
Perhaps pre-publishing a particularly bold and unorthodox hypothesis to the world wide web and inviting critiques from all and sundry might get an useful blend of non-peers and peers tearing it apart.
But for most academics, the hypothesis in their potential article or monograph is simply too limited in 'newness' to be viewed as controversial by more than their fellow specialists.
This is a long roundabout way of saying that if a hypothesis really deserves a Nobel prize, it better have been first rejected by peer reviewers in all of the most influential journals in that scientific field.
Unfortunately, most Nobels are for normal science, for works that only bites away at exciting new patches of grass , well inside the unexamined assumptions that form a scientific field's boundaries.
The Modern Age (and its Science) had a particularly strongly hegemonic set of unexamined assumptions to hold it together .
This was in fact the main reason for the strength and uniformity of the underlying beliefs that united Modernity's many warring ideologies.
As a result, when a few minor and extremely non-charismatic scientists fundamentally challenged those unexamined assumptions, they were not put on trial and burned at the stake, in a scientific sense.
Instead their views merely caused bemusement and puzzlement among the scientists and the science-following educated laity of the Modern Age.
These minor scientists might not even have been aware of how fundamental their critiques were.
Thus they saw no need to further nail their views dramatically, in a Luther-like fashion, upon the nearest lab wall as some sort of troop-raising manifesto.
One minor scientist however, did unite his intellectual opposition to the Modern Age's unexamined assumptions with his moral objections to the Modern Age's behavior and his impact, perhaps as a result, had world wide and prophetic impact.
His name was Henry Dawson (Martin Henry Dawson).
The conclusions he drew about the microbial small and the weak from his pioneering studies in HGT (and other such marvels) , put steel beneath the velvet of his moral objections as to how the human small and weak were being mis-treated by Modernity's Axis and Allied alike in WWII.
His heart was open, agape, to the sufferings of small but his mind was also open, agape, to the brilliance of the small as well.
And that made all the difference......
Sep 18, 2013
WWII: the battle for inclusive medicine over exclusive medicine
In 1940, Big Pharma only wants to sell its profitable-expensive (patented drugs) to those who could afford to pay for them directly : just as the AMA only wanted doctors to heal those who could afford to pay directly for its members profitably-expensive services.
Against this, some doctors like Henry Dawson believed that all life dined at a common table and that all life deserved a chance to live , all life deserved medical care, including penicillin.
He did not believe in dividing the world into "life worthy of wartime penicillin" and "life unworthy of wartime penicillin".
When the AMA and Big Pharma, working together at the OSRD and the NAS , thought and acted differently , he promoted among his fellow doctors the idea of hospital-made inclusive penicillin.
Inclusive Penicillin was that hospital made by individual doctors , without thought of patents or personal gain, to save the lives of all those regarded by the government's medical establishment as being "life unworthy of wartime penicillin".
The movement consisted of just Dawson's team at first, then people he directly convinced to follow his ideals.
It then spread all around the world as more and more doctors , encouraged by an awakened and angered laity, urged them on.
All the dramatic new stories, on young mothers and young children snatched from certain death at the last minute by minute amounts of penicillin flown around the world by seconded heavy bombers, seemed to have had an unexpected secondary affect.
Suddenly many of the modern era's population rediscovered feelings of compassion and empathy they thought they had successfully exorcised under the rationalism and utilitarianism
of modern culture.
Their hearts softened at the sight of all those saved babies, children of strangers, and they looked at all their neighbours and all strangers in a new, kindlier light .
An post-modern light ...
Against this, some doctors like Henry Dawson believed that all life dined at a common table and that all life deserved a chance to live , all life deserved medical care, including penicillin.
He did not believe in dividing the world into "life worthy of wartime penicillin" and "life unworthy of wartime penicillin".
When the AMA and Big Pharma, working together at the OSRD and the NAS , thought and acted differently , he promoted among his fellow doctors the idea of hospital-made inclusive penicillin.
Inclusive Penicillin was that hospital made by individual doctors , without thought of patents or personal gain, to save the lives of all those regarded by the government's medical establishment as being "life unworthy of wartime penicillin".
The movement consisted of just Dawson's team at first, then people he directly convinced to follow his ideals.
It then spread all around the world as more and more doctors , encouraged by an awakened and angered laity, urged them on.
All the dramatic new stories, on young mothers and young children snatched from certain death at the last minute by minute amounts of penicillin flown around the world by seconded heavy bombers, seemed to have had an unexpected secondary affect.
Suddenly many of the modern era's population rediscovered feelings of compassion and empathy they thought they had successfully exorcised under the rationalism and utilitarianism
of modern culture.
Their hearts softened at the sight of all those saved babies, children of strangers, and they looked at all their neighbours and all strangers in a new, kindlier light .
An post-modern light ...
Sep 6, 2013
" Crude is more than 'good enough' ...
... if it can save lives right now ! "
Lifesaving's perpetual understudy , Penicillin, unexpectedly made her long overdue debut in a medical theatre in uptown Manhattan on October 16th 1940 .
Albeit more than a dozen years after the best lifesaver ever known was first discovered.
It all happened when Dr Henry Dawson suddenly broke his understanding with biochemist Karl Meyer that penicillin would not be used systemically (given to save a life), until she had been synthesized or at least very highly refined.
It had been assumed that this happy event would probably occur sometime early in the new university term starting in January 1941.
But it had all changed now.
For Dawson was facing not just one but two young patients dying on his ward of the invariably fatal untreatable disease SBE that he was convinced penicillin could finally cure.
SBE usually hit the poor, immigrants and minorities.
Naturally enough, on the very first day of the new draft, they were judged by the eugenically-minded medical elite as being the 4Fs of the 4Fs, life unworthy of wasting too much expensive and scarce medical attention upon in a time of war.
Dawson felt passionately different - he felt that saving the 4Fs of the 4Fs in a time of war was the best possible riposte to Hitler and his values : because not a military victory but a moral victory for the Allies was what was really needed to fire the world up to tackle the Nazis with serious energy.
'If crude penicillin can start saving lives now, it is more than refined enough' was Dawson's new mantra , as he introduced this neologism into the medical-chemical vernacular.
To a chemistry-besotted medical fraternity, wedded to ever greater purity and refinement , this deliberate use of the term crude tied together with their main job, lifesaving, was like a red flag.
Crude penicillin for crude patients was their unspoken sentiment.
It didn't make Dawson popular then or now with the medical and chemical communities..... or their historians.
Because it reminds us all, that as Hippocrates looked on in horror, for 15 wasted years the world medical community choose to put refinement before life-saving.
But what ordinary patients thought of Dawson's notions has hardly ever been asked.
I am a patient who has received cheap, abundant , natural , non-synthetic, non-patented, "inclusive" penicillin of the Henry Dawson variety and I am grateful to him : eternally grateful.
I don't think I am alone.
"Hyssop in a time of Cedar" then is a 'patient's eye view' of Henry Dawson's impact on the genesis of wartime penicillin : from exclusive, secret, patented and militarized to inclusive, public, public domain and de-militarized.
Because the knowledge that cheap, abundant penicillin was being made available - now - to dying people of all classes, colours and genders around the world was more than just WWII's equivalent of WWI's promise of a return to "a land fit for heroes" : it was the Word made visible.
It was not just the fact that penicillin , like the sulfa drugs before it, saved lives - that was not enough.
It more in the way news reports revealed that it was carried literally around the world, by bombers diverted from their normal killing work, during the Total War to end All Wars, to save the lives of dying babies.
This - the promise of returning home to a world 'healthy enough for heroes' - finally seemed an Allied cause worth dying for.
This sentiment was best expressed, not by a British Prime Minister in a barnburner of a open air speech, but by the phrase-makers of an new age : an anonymous copywriter slaving away for a booze baron from somewhere out in the American Mid West.
Over a painting of a severely wounded American GI getting penicillin in a vividly colourful jungle battlefield, were the evocative words , "Thanks to PENICILLIN - he will come home! "
And thanks too, to the bog-ordinary mold that created this miracle this ad reminded its viewers.
That something ordinarily so small and despised could wrought such miracles - that too put paid to Hitler and Tojo's claim that Might made right and Bigger was always better.
If inclusivity , rather than unitary exclusivity, is the hallmark of our post-modern era, then Henry Dawson's crude penicillin for crude patients was one of the physical first artifacts of postmodernity...
Lifesaving's perpetual understudy , Penicillin, unexpectedly made her long overdue debut in a medical theatre in uptown Manhattan on October 16th 1940 .
Albeit more than a dozen years after the best lifesaver ever known was first discovered.
It all happened when Dr Henry Dawson suddenly broke his understanding with biochemist Karl Meyer that penicillin would not be used systemically (given to save a life), until she had been synthesized or at least very highly refined.
It had been assumed that this happy event would probably occur sometime early in the new university term starting in January 1941.
But it had all changed now.
For Dawson was facing not just one but two young patients dying on his ward of the invariably fatal untreatable disease SBE that he was convinced penicillin could finally cure.
SBE usually hit the poor, immigrants and minorities.
Naturally enough, on the very first day of the new draft, they were judged by the eugenically-minded medical elite as being the 4Fs of the 4Fs, life unworthy of wasting too much expensive and scarce medical attention upon in a time of war.
Dawson felt passionately different - he felt that saving the 4Fs of the 4Fs in a time of war was the best possible riposte to Hitler and his values : because not a military victory but a moral victory for the Allies was what was really needed to fire the world up to tackle the Nazis with serious energy.
'If crude penicillin can start saving lives now, it is more than refined enough' was Dawson's new mantra , as he introduced this neologism into the medical-chemical vernacular.
To a chemistry-besotted medical fraternity, wedded to ever greater purity and refinement , this deliberate use of the term crude tied together with their main job, lifesaving, was like a red flag.
Crude penicillin for crude patients was their unspoken sentiment.
It didn't make Dawson popular then or now with the medical and chemical communities..... or their historians.
Because it reminds us all, that as Hippocrates looked on in horror, for 15 wasted years the world medical community choose to put refinement before life-saving.
But what ordinary patients thought of Dawson's notions has hardly ever been asked.
I am a patient who has received cheap, abundant , natural , non-synthetic, non-patented, "inclusive" penicillin of the Henry Dawson variety and I am grateful to him : eternally grateful.
I don't think I am alone.
"Hyssop in a time of Cedar" then is a 'patient's eye view' of Henry Dawson's impact on the genesis of wartime penicillin : from exclusive, secret, patented and militarized to inclusive, public, public domain and de-militarized.
Because the knowledge that cheap, abundant penicillin was being made available - now - to dying people of all classes, colours and genders around the world was more than just WWII's equivalent of WWI's promise of a return to "a land fit for heroes" : it was the Word made visible.
It was not just the fact that penicillin , like the sulfa drugs before it, saved lives - that was not enough.
It more in the way news reports revealed that it was carried literally around the world, by bombers diverted from their normal killing work, during the Total War to end All Wars, to save the lives of dying babies.
This - the promise of returning home to a world 'healthy enough for heroes' - finally seemed an Allied cause worth dying for.
This sentiment was best expressed, not by a British Prime Minister in a barnburner of a open air speech, but by the phrase-makers of an new age : an anonymous copywriter slaving away for a booze baron from somewhere out in the American Mid West.
Over a painting of a severely wounded American GI getting penicillin in a vividly colourful jungle battlefield, were the evocative words , "Thanks to PENICILLIN - he will come home! "
And thanks too, to the bog-ordinary mold that created this miracle this ad reminded its viewers.
That something ordinarily so small and despised could wrought such miracles - that too put paid to Hitler and Tojo's claim that Might made right and Bigger was always better.
If inclusivity , rather than unitary exclusivity, is the hallmark of our post-modern era, then Henry Dawson's crude penicillin for crude patients was one of the physical first artifacts of postmodernity...
Aug 27, 2013
The irony of 1945's twin triumphs ...
1945 was , on any account, an extraordinary year, not the least for its twin scientific triumphs.
At the time, it was almost universally held that the Man-made Bomb was the way of an atomic future so bright we'd have to wear shades .
By contrast, 1945's new Microbe-made medicine (natural penicillin) was viewed as but a temporary anomaly, a dusty throw back to the outdated caldron practises of medieval midwives.
But more than a half century later we are no longer so sure of all of this.
Atomic energy has not at all fulfilled its early promise.
Meanwhile, microbiology and biotechnology (descendants of 1945's natural-produced penicillin) have far outshot their 1945 rival, synthetic chemistry.
So today, with 20/20 hindsight, while 1945 can still feel like the apogee of the Modern age,it is also revealed as its very nadir.
Because 1945 is now seen as the birthday of our present post-Modern age.
In which case, Henry Dawson's twin follies of advocating on behalf of small individuals and on behalf of small microbes can be seen as promoting a distinguishing hallmark of postmodernity.
For few of us, under the age of eighty, devote much energy these days to replacing our current rainbow of many small cultures with a return to yesterday's dreary unitary monoculture of constipated WASP-dom.....
At the time, it was almost universally held that the Man-made Bomb was the way of an atomic future so bright we'd have to wear shades .
By contrast, 1945's new Microbe-made medicine (natural penicillin) was viewed as but a temporary anomaly, a dusty throw back to the outdated caldron practises of medieval midwives.
But more than a half century later we are no longer so sure of all of this.
Atomic energy has not at all fulfilled its early promise.
Meanwhile, microbiology and biotechnology (descendants of 1945's natural-produced penicillin) have far outshot their 1945 rival, synthetic chemistry.
So today, with 20/20 hindsight, while 1945 can still feel like the apogee of the Modern age,it is also revealed as its very nadir.
Because 1945 is now seen as the birthday of our present post-Modern age.
In which case, Henry Dawson's twin follies of advocating on behalf of small individuals and on behalf of small microbes can be seen as promoting a distinguishing hallmark of postmodernity.
For few of us, under the age of eighty, devote much energy these days to replacing our current rainbow of many small cultures with a return to yesterday's dreary unitary monoculture of constipated WASP-dom.....
Aug 25, 2013
Are the small just a tiny part of the Modern past or a vital part of the Postmodern future ?
Two hundred years from the event, historians will be telling classrooms that when it comes to exam time, they should remember that WWII boiled down to just one issue.
One - scientific - issue.
Were the small to be considered just a tiny part of Modernity's dusty past or were they to be a vital part of the (postmodern/multi-coloured) future ?
In early 1939 , on one side was virtually all of the world's educated.
On the other, was Henry Dawson : and that was his folly.
By late 1945 , Henry Dawson was dead and gone and so his current opinion was irrelevant.
But many of the world's younger educated had moved - under the course of many events - one begun by Henry himself - to doubt their parents' and grantparents' position on the matter.
For if the smartest pundits of the war's end were sure that 1945 represented the apogee of modern bigness , by about 1978 leading commentators are just as sure it actually represented Modernity's nadir and the birth of our present day Postmodernity.
But Dawson's all-out efforts to defend the small under the assault of WWII values caused his premature death, so he wasn't around in his mid-eighties to enjoy his vindication.
That to was his folly ; or his eternal glory ...
One - scientific - issue.
Were the small to be considered just a tiny part of Modernity's dusty past or were they to be a vital part of the (postmodern/multi-coloured) future ?
In early 1939 , on one side was virtually all of the world's educated.
On the other, was Henry Dawson : and that was his folly.
By late 1945 , Henry Dawson was dead and gone and so his current opinion was irrelevant.
But many of the world's younger educated had moved - under the course of many events - one begun by Henry himself - to doubt their parents' and grantparents' position on the matter.
For if the smartest pundits of the war's end were sure that 1945 represented the apogee of modern bigness , by about 1978 leading commentators are just as sure it actually represented Modernity's nadir and the birth of our present day Postmodernity.
But Dawson's all-out efforts to defend the small under the assault of WWII values caused his premature death, so he wasn't around in his mid-eighties to enjoy his vindication.
That to was his folly ; or his eternal glory ...
Aug 22, 2013
In moral terms, WWII boils down to one simple - scientific - question : are the small a part of the future, or just of the past ?
G F Hegel, the 19th century's most influential philosopher, was famous for claiming that history wasn't an endless cycles of birth, maturity and death laced with infinite variations , as people had always observed.
Instead, he ventured that history has a single purpose and a single goal - together with a linear unbreakable path upwards to that goal - linear, unidirectional "Progress" with a capital "P".
Herbert Spencer and a thousand others said that , scientifically, Progress of this sort actually existed, wasn't just an intellectual debating point, and that Darwin's Evolution showed not just why it happened but why it had to happen.
Species and cultures and societies and businesses and empires started out young as small ,weak and foolish and just mightier and mightier and wiser and wider as they got older and older.
The small were useful - yesterday - but now they were just speed bumps in the way of Progress.
Tomorrow had no place for them.
This was the general tenor of the Modern Age between the 1870s and the 1960s.
Many people made moral arguments against this claim - but morality carried far less weight in this age than did science.
Henry Dawson also made moral arguments against this scientific central dogma , but where he seemed downright foolish to his colleagues was that he also said that he had scientific evidence - proof - that this dogma wasn't actually confirmed out there, in the real world.
A man of deeds ,not words, his scientific articles cut little ice : that had to wait for someone like Stephen Jay Gould a half century later.
By then ,of course, Gould was writing to the half converted.
But what had made the world change its mind ?
Blame on the events of that momentous year 1945.
1945 was both the apogee and nadir of the Modern Age.
Apogee with one project from Manhattan that assembled a scientific team almost as big and strong as The Bomb's explosion itself.
Nadir with another project from Manhattan that had a scientific team almost as small and as weak as those that manufactured the cure and almost as small and as weak as the intended patients.
Robert Oppenheimer led one team ; Henry Dawson the other.
Time is starting to tell as to who ultimately had the greater impact.....
Jul 30, 2013
WWII as a baseball game between Modernity and Reality (and 'Reality Bats Last' )
WWII was (and it wasn't) a battle royal between the belief that reality is a lot more simple and predictable than it looks at first glance and the belief that reality is much more complex and much less predictable than it looks at first glance.
Everyone big and powerful lined up in support of the first position during the war and if there were many holding the second position they held their tongues and kept quiet about it .
Or simply groused about the foolish optimism of the bigwigs, back of the front lines , to the other enlisted men, much as Willy and Joe did.
So - in one sense - there was NO battle royal over this great divide.
But - in another sense - there was a tremendous battle royal with 70 million dead and much of the world's wealth destroyed.
This is because reality, with we can give it a human like capability for a wee moment , held fast to its own opinion.
Or so it would seem.
Because almost every prediction Modernity Man made during WWII did a big belly flop and batted zero .
In this baseball game, reality batted last.
And reality consistently revealed itself to be far more complex and far less predictable than all the politicians,CEOs,editors, scientists, generals (and armchair generals) had ever suspected.....
Everyone big and powerful lined up in support of the first position during the war and if there were many holding the second position they held their tongues and kept quiet about it .
Or simply groused about the foolish optimism of the bigwigs, back of the front lines , to the other enlisted men, much as Willy and Joe did.
So - in one sense - there was NO battle royal over this great divide.
But - in another sense - there was a tremendous battle royal with 70 million dead and much of the world's wealth destroyed.
This is because reality, with we can give it a human like capability for a wee moment , held fast to its own opinion.
Or so it would seem.
Because almost every prediction Modernity Man made during WWII did a big belly flop and batted zero .
In this baseball game, reality batted last.
And reality consistently revealed itself to be far more complex and far less predictable than all the politicians,CEOs,editors, scientists, generals (and armchair generals) had ever suspected.....
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