Laplacian Skygods versus the penicillin groundlings

Pierre-Simon LaPlace won eternal fame - or is that infernal infamy ?- for his claim that if one could but climb up high enough to survey all the atoms in the Universe, then one could perfectly predict all the future as well as perfectly explain all of the past.

Keep that thought in mind as one reads how Adnan Morshed, in surveying the leading edge of the optimistic Thirties in his book "Impossible Heights : Skyscrapers, Flight and the Master Builder", sees everywhere the conjunction of the sleek  and oh so eugenically ideal airplane & skyscraper.

They are both symbols and enablers of Man's new ability to survey - and hence control and change - all of the world he sees below him : Man as the Master Builder of "The World of Tomorrow".

Even Carl Norden could be fitted into this system -- for his Norden bombsight operated from 5 miles up could also re-build the world below : first breaking many eggs before making some new omelettes.

Hum, didn't the 1930s also have some guys in tights and capes flying about high above us, also re-working the morals of the world for the better ?

So Morshed also throws into the epic brew the figure of the Super Hero as a sort of Super Builder.

One can well imagine that Pierre-Simon himself is back, among the undead - inhabiting all these dreams.

The Master building plan ultimately consisted of replacing the drag of having to co-exist with and beg off of imperfect Nature with the freedom of 100% perfect synthetic autarky.

And what better place than to perform this new alchemy than from the top floors of these sleek shining metal, glass and concrete skyscrapers?

Bit hard ,though, to fit that other wonder of that age into this schema - because penicillin was first scraped off the slimy below-ground basement walls of some big buildings in central London.

Far from Olympian Heights indeed - in fact nearer Hades than Heaven.

More groundlings than Skygods .

Janus is normal thought of looking both to the right and to the left.

But maybe it is better in the case of wartime Manhattan to think of Janus as looking both skywards and away with the atomic bomb's 'go it alone ' synthetic autarky and also downwards, to the soil, with penicillin's open commensality with Nature...

Noir's Children : the teenagers who MADE Mo go Po

Noir's Children (my particular birth cohort of 1940-1956) those of us born 'after the Fall of France but before the Rise of Elvis' - were virtually unique in being perfectly comfortable living inside TWO whales .

Those two whales being the Modernity (Mo) of our childhood and early teen years and the emerging Post Modernity (Po) of our late teen years and early adult years.

We still remain unique in this regard - we are old enough to remember believing in our elders' tattered Modernity but with minds not so rigidly formed we couldn't also take on the attributes of an emerging Post-Modernity - which was the only reality our younger siblings ever knew first hand.

My cohort did not just feel the transition from one era to another : we were that transition.

Modernity only died when it failed to reproduce itself in its young

For it was our failure to carry on the ideas of Modernity as we matured that condemned Modernity to a slow sad certain death as our  still-faithful elders died off, one by one.

Why our post WWII birth cohort - and not any earlier birth cohorts - came to reject the centuries-old Enlightenment Project is the subject of this blog and of my book projects .

And like many exciting things, it all begins in wartime Gotham  - where the reigning American Super Hero was not the comic books' Superman, Batman or Captain America but rather a squat balding middle aged Dutch-Swiss-American called Carl Norden.

His invention , a bombsight that was claimed to unerringly drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from three miles up - was going to end the war ( even end all wars) quickly, cheaply and with minimum loss of civilian lives.

As a result, the British and American governments of the day in 1940 saw no need for spending serious amounts of taxpayers' monies on either atomic bomb or penicillin development.

In their experts' eyes, the atomic bomb was serious overkill (literally) and life-saving penicillin, rather like old fashioned infantry riflemen, wasn't really going to be needed in a short modern war of minimum casualties.

The best laid plans .....