Dawson felt that God, Nature, Life, What have you, favoured the small as well as the big battalions ---- in fact, upon the evidence, favoured the small much more than the big.
It was only the hubris of civilized man that made him dispute the clear scientific evidence....
Showing posts with label civilization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label civilization. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 15, 2015
Tuesday, August 25, 2015
WWII Europe : Ethnic Cleansing was next to Godliness, for small and big nations alike
Not all the world violently reduced their ethnic minorities at the point of a gun during and at the end of WWII : only its most civilized portion : Europe !
The whole ideology of Progress, with its claims that the most civilized nations at the top were also the most moral, took another fatal body blow as a result.
Even before WWII formally began, small nations like Poland licked their lips and seized tiny portions of the equally small Czechoslovakia that they claimed - horrors - had a few of their "fellow" ethnics who they discovered had been mistreated by the Slovaks.
(One wonders how many hundreds of nations could invade Canada using the same feeble excuse, seeking to recover their "fellow" ethnics who emigrated to Canada beginning almost 500 years earlier.)
When Poland itself was soon invaded by Germany in turn, using the excuse that it was merely rescuing mistreated ethnic Germans in Poland, the general moral case for humanity helping Poland was neatly undercut.
Poland ended the war kicking out millions of its German residents from the lands to the west of the old Poland while receiving millions of Poles forcibly kicked out of the lands to the east of the old Poland.
Perhaps as many as a million Germans died in this process, mostly the weaker and relatively innocent children and elderly.
Then the Ukraine murderously killed and chased their Poles out of their new nation - a process the new Polish nation did to their Ukrainians in reverse.
This sort of squalid behavior happened all over middle and eastern Europe.
Western Europe and their colonial allies, together with all the neutral nations, refused to stop all this ethnic cleansing and ethnic cleansed themselves in a sense by not taking in many refugees or DPs themselves.
And by knowingly returning the fleeing citizens of the Iron Curtains countries to the non-tender care of their erstwhile Ally, the USSR.
Almost nobody in 1945 protested all this murderous cleansing, because pure nations of one ethnicity only was a widely accepted goal of all civilized peoples - a Godly good.
Seventy five years later, with almost the adults of the civilized world of 1945 dead and buried , it will soon be possible for their children and grandchildren in the former civilized world to stop pretending that only the Nazi Germans practised ethnic cleansing during the time around WWII....
The whole ideology of Progress, with its claims that the most civilized nations at the top were also the most moral, took another fatal body blow as a result.
Even before WWII formally began, small nations like Poland licked their lips and seized tiny portions of the equally small Czechoslovakia that they claimed - horrors - had a few of their "fellow" ethnics who they discovered had been mistreated by the Slovaks.
(One wonders how many hundreds of nations could invade Canada using the same feeble excuse, seeking to recover their "fellow" ethnics who emigrated to Canada beginning almost 500 years earlier.)
When Poland itself was soon invaded by Germany in turn, using the excuse that it was merely rescuing mistreated ethnic Germans in Poland, the general moral case for humanity helping Poland was neatly undercut.
Poland ended the war kicking out millions of its German residents from the lands to the west of the old Poland while receiving millions of Poles forcibly kicked out of the lands to the east of the old Poland.
Perhaps as many as a million Germans died in this process, mostly the weaker and relatively innocent children and elderly.
Then the Ukraine murderously killed and chased their Poles out of their new nation - a process the new Polish nation did to their Ukrainians in reverse.
This sort of squalid behavior happened all over middle and eastern Europe.
Western Europe and their colonial allies, together with all the neutral nations, refused to stop all this ethnic cleansing and ethnic cleansed themselves in a sense by not taking in many refugees or DPs themselves.
And by knowingly returning the fleeing citizens of the Iron Curtains countries to the non-tender care of their erstwhile Ally, the USSR.
Almost nobody in 1945 protested all this murderous cleansing, because pure nations of one ethnicity only was a widely accepted goal of all civilized peoples - a Godly good.
Seventy five years later, with almost the adults of the civilized world of 1945 dead and buried , it will soon be possible for their children and grandchildren in the former civilized world to stop pretending that only the Nazi Germans practised ethnic cleansing during the time around WWII....
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Hitler's Dilemma : If we liquidate all the "Primitive" how can we tell that we are the "Advanced" ?
Until the advent of fossil fuel based energy slaves, the rich and powerful needed the poor and powerless to do all the hard unpleasant jobs.
In the1860s, (interestingly parallel with the growing popular elite acclaim for Darwin's and Spencer's theories of the survival of the fittest), elites began seeing that fossil-fuel 'energy slaves' were far cheaper, far more tractable and far more moral than employing human slaves.
Perhaps, said these early utilitarian proponents of the much later Aktion T4, Eastern Hunger Plan and the Holocaust, the poor need no longer be "aways with us".
But if the Nazis and their earlier ilk all around the world had succeeded in liquidating all the weak and the poor, the defective and the asocial, how then would one be able to tell - for certain - that the healthy and the wealthy were truly so ?
For, to give but one example, the idea of 'the wealthy' can be easily shown to be a relative term, not an absolute term.
A working class European family of this the early 21st century is far far wealthier, in terms of access to (energy) slaves, money and sheer comfort, than any of the top nobility families of the 13th century.
They only seem poor, only feel poor, when they compare themselves to the families of today's top 1%.
Similarly, the most advanced human civilizations circa 1940 had so many visible shortfalls from what their members hoped and thought they were capable of, that people at this imagined top could only console themselves by saying "at least we are more civilized than X, Y, or Z" down at the bottom tiers of Life.
X, Y and Z being perhaps Australian aboriginals, slime molds and the anthrax bacteria.
Civilized and advanced are relational concepts and only make sense when matched in opposing symmetry with the uncivilized and primitive.
Destroy the bottom and where then is the top ?
But as it happens, the Nazis and other Social Darwinists never got that far.
Instead Progress's symmetry of an advanced top and a backward bottom simply collapsed when assailed from top and bottom.
In WWII, the top proved to have so many moral failings (mass bombing and gassing of the innocent) at a time when the bottom proved to have so many technical advantages (natural penicillin from the penicillium slime) that the delicate balance of the symmetry of opposites couldn't hold anymore.
So, today, it is a commonplace to say that this planet was made and sustained for the tens of thousands of ancient species of microbe and the relatively recent and single human species is but a short term parasite "just visiting" planet Earth ---- a commonplace unlike to be uttered or believed in 1940 .....
In the1860s, (interestingly parallel with the growing popular elite acclaim for Darwin's and Spencer's theories of the survival of the fittest), elites began seeing that fossil-fuel 'energy slaves' were far cheaper, far more tractable and far more moral than employing human slaves.
Perhaps, said these early utilitarian proponents of the much later Aktion T4, Eastern Hunger Plan and the Holocaust, the poor need no longer be "aways with us".
But if the Nazis and their earlier ilk all around the world had succeeded in liquidating all the weak and the poor, the defective and the asocial, how then would one be able to tell - for certain - that the healthy and the wealthy were truly so ?
For, to give but one example, the idea of 'the wealthy' can be easily shown to be a relative term, not an absolute term.
A working class European family of this the early 21st century is far far wealthier, in terms of access to (energy) slaves, money and sheer comfort, than any of the top nobility families of the 13th century.
They only seem poor, only feel poor, when they compare themselves to the families of today's top 1%.
Similarly, the most advanced human civilizations circa 1940 had so many visible shortfalls from what their members hoped and thought they were capable of, that people at this imagined top could only console themselves by saying "at least we are more civilized than X, Y, or Z" down at the bottom tiers of Life.
X, Y and Z being perhaps Australian aboriginals, slime molds and the anthrax bacteria.
Civilized and advanced are relational concepts and only make sense when matched in opposing symmetry with the uncivilized and primitive.
Destroy the bottom and where then is the top ?
But as it happens, the Nazis and other Social Darwinists never got that far.
Instead Progress's symmetry of an advanced top and a backward bottom simply collapsed when assailed from top and bottom.
In WWII, the top proved to have so many moral failings (mass bombing and gassing of the innocent) at a time when the bottom proved to have so many technical advantages (natural penicillin from the penicillium slime) that the delicate balance of the symmetry of opposites couldn't hold anymore.
So, today, it is a commonplace to say that this planet was made and sustained for the tens of thousands of ancient species of microbe and the relatively recent and single human species is but a short term parasite "just visiting" planet Earth ---- a commonplace unlike to be uttered or believed in 1940 .....
Saturday, August 15, 2015
Modern Progress's symmetry of opposing binaries
The best way, it must have seemed at the time, to affirm that human civilization, circa 1940, was indeed 'civilized' as it claimed was to contrast it in every possible way with its polar opposite.
By setting up Progress itself as a sort of Janus-faced ladder.
For to the Modern mind, the very concept of a continuum was a dusty foreign country and the Moderns did so love their clearcut and opposing binaries & dualities.
So, at the top of the Ladder of Progress, human civilization was the newest, the biggest, the most complex, the swiftest, form of life.
And the kindest and the most civilized in behavior of all lifeforms.
Conversely, at the bottom, the germs were the oldest forms of life, the most simple, the smallest, the least mobile.
And they were all intent on killing all humans, all the time.
Pure evil.
The reason why the supposed archenemy of the Aryans, the Jews, were always described as 'bacillus'.
But not everyone back then agreed with this supposed dichotomy.
In particular, Dr Martin Henry Dawson set out to break this imaginary symmetry by attempting, late in that same year, to show that the germs and microbes were nowhere as simple or as evil as claimed.
And this being WWII, he hardly had to bolster his case by pointing to the current visible shortfalls of kindly complex Civilization....
By setting up Progress itself as a sort of Janus-faced ladder.
For to the Modern mind, the very concept of a continuum was a dusty foreign country and the Moderns did so love their clearcut and opposing binaries & dualities.
So, at the top of the Ladder of Progress, human civilization was the newest, the biggest, the most complex, the swiftest, form of life.
And the kindest and the most civilized in behavior of all lifeforms.
Conversely, at the bottom, the germs were the oldest forms of life, the most simple, the smallest, the least mobile.
And they were all intent on killing all humans, all the time.
Pure evil.
The reason why the supposed archenemy of the Aryans, the Jews, were always described as 'bacillus'.
But not everyone back then agreed with this supposed dichotomy.
In particular, Dr Martin Henry Dawson set out to break this imaginary symmetry by attempting, late in that same year, to show that the germs and microbes were nowhere as simple or as evil as claimed.
And this being WWII, he hardly had to bolster his case by pointing to the current visible shortfalls of kindly complex Civilization....
Wednesday, July 8, 2015
Dawsonian Revolution's twin triumphs : primitive penicillin and its 'primitive' distribution
The man at the top of the Anglo-American civilization (Winston Churchill) fully backed the Allied medical-scientific experts who insisted upon first civilizing and synthesizing (and patentizing) primitive penicillin before considering its civilized (hierarchical/restricted) distribution during WWII.
By contrast, Dr Martin Henry Dawson insisted from the start (October 1940) that primitive (fungus-made) penicillin was safe enough and efficiently enough produced to enable the world to start right now - today ! - saving those people dying of diseases penicillin could cure.
And he also demanded that his primitive made penicillin be distributed as a primitive society would distribute it - equally to all those in need, war or no war.
We really shouldn't be surprised by all this.
An essential characteristic of all 'civilizations', experts insist, is that it has a high measure of both social and geographic stratification - a hierarchy of inequality.
Those same experts say that 'primitive' and barbaric societies share a common egalitarian spirit of sharing equally.
True, in politicians' rhetoric, 'the civilized' show a great egalitarian spirit while 'the barbaric' have a hierarchy of cruel rulers and enslaved subjects.
Of course remember that $6 and politicians' rhetoric will get you a small cup of Starbucks, with any luck ....
By contrast, Dr Martin Henry Dawson insisted from the start (October 1940) that primitive (fungus-made) penicillin was safe enough and efficiently enough produced to enable the world to start right now - today ! - saving those people dying of diseases penicillin could cure.
And he also demanded that his primitive made penicillin be distributed as a primitive society would distribute it - equally to all those in need, war or no war.
We really shouldn't be surprised by all this.
An essential characteristic of all 'civilizations', experts insist, is that it has a high measure of both social and geographic stratification - a hierarchy of inequality.
Those same experts say that 'primitive' and barbaric societies share a common egalitarian spirit of sharing equally.
True, in politicians' rhetoric, 'the civilized' show a great egalitarian spirit while 'the barbaric' have a hierarchy of cruel rulers and enslaved subjects.
Of course remember that $6 and politicians' rhetoric will get you a small cup of Starbucks, with any luck ....
Friday, July 3, 2015
Why the world couldn't believe the wartime photographs of the Holocaust
'Civilized people simply don't exploit and murder other civilized people' is what everyone thought at the time.
And, by and large, this was true - in a sort of 'honour among thieves', civilizations tended not to exploit other civilizations - preferring to exploit the vast majority of the world, all those other people they deemed 'uncivilized' - in fact doing so was the very hallmark of being civilized.
To be civilized was to hold dominion over lesser 'others'.
So during WWII, civilized people in the world were greatly horrified to learn that the civilized Germans were forcing the civilized French to provide involuntary labour, 'just as if the French were but mere darkies in some overseas French colony'.
But since the Eastern Europeans weren't really civilized, well documented reports of them being murdered in the millions by the Germans - made public before the half way mark of the war had even been reached - caused almost no outcry, beyond a few exiled or immigrant Poles and Jews....
And, by and large, this was true - in a sort of 'honour among thieves', civilizations tended not to exploit other civilizations - preferring to exploit the vast majority of the world, all those other people they deemed 'uncivilized' - in fact doing so was the very hallmark of being civilized.
To be civilized was to hold dominion over lesser 'others'.
So during WWII, civilized people in the world were greatly horrified to learn that the civilized Germans were forcing the civilized French to provide involuntary labour, 'just as if the French were but mere darkies in some overseas French colony'.
But since the Eastern Europeans weren't really civilized, well documented reports of them being murdered in the millions by the Germans - made public before the half way mark of the war had even been reached - caused almost no outcry, beyond a few exiled or immigrant Poles and Jews....
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
'A warm meal, a warm bed and a warm smile' : still the best medicine
"The hyssop and The Cedars" is a book about health during our past most recent man-made Apocalypse : occasionally it is about doctors and pharmaceuticals, but mostly it is not.
For the truth is that *food* was the only medicine in really desperate short supply during WWII.
Truth is that 'a warm meal, a warm bed and a warm smile' is all most of us ever need to reach our three score and ten.
After that, we generally do need the help of hospital beds and the pharmaceutical firms.
But let us also never forget the warm smile.
I believe that any civilization that truly claims to be a civilization must first see to it that all its citizens have that warm meal, warm bed and warm smile - everyone, from grandmother to granddaughter.
After that our civilizations are free to build all the Castles in Spain that they wish.
But that warm meal must come first.
Now we are about to be engulfed in another man-made Apocalypse , only unlike the last time , this is one in which no nations will be able to remain Neutral, aloof and above the fray.
We still have time to learn the lessons - both good and bad - from the last Apocalypse, because 1939-1945 gave us a very full dress rehearsal.
As a very active , very political , Green Party member I feel I must explain my own reasons for appearing to have gone AWOL the last half dozen years - for myself appearing to remain Neutral, aloof and above the environmental fray.
It is because I believe this book (and the lessons for us today that it contains within) is the best possible contribution I could ever make towards slowing our death march forward into overwhelming hubris-induced disaster....
For the truth is that *food* was the only medicine in really desperate short supply during WWII.
Truth is that 'a warm meal, a warm bed and a warm smile' is all most of us ever need to reach our three score and ten.
After that, we generally do need the help of hospital beds and the pharmaceutical firms.
But let us also never forget the warm smile.
I believe that any civilization that truly claims to be a civilization must first see to it that all its citizens have that warm meal, warm bed and warm smile - everyone, from grandmother to granddaughter.
After that our civilizations are free to build all the Castles in Spain that they wish.
But that warm meal must come first.
Now we are about to be engulfed in another man-made Apocalypse , only unlike the last time , this is one in which no nations will be able to remain Neutral, aloof and above the fray.
We still have time to learn the lessons - both good and bad - from the last Apocalypse, because 1939-1945 gave us a very full dress rehearsal.
As a very active , very political , Green Party member I feel I must explain my own reasons for appearing to have gone AWOL the last half dozen years - for myself appearing to remain Neutral, aloof and above the environmental fray.
It is because I believe this book (and the lessons for us today that it contains within) is the best possible contribution I could ever make towards slowing our death march forward into overwhelming hubris-induced disaster....
Saturday, May 4, 2013
Civilization, regarded as a "Cartwright Machine"
A "Cartwright Machine" is a powerful and unique way, created by famed philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright, of looking again at all of Humanity's machines , mental as well as physical.
Cartwright's central insight is to realize that the real beauty of a machine is literally 'only skin deep'.
This is in very sharp contrast to received opinion on machines up until now.
The surface of machines, like all 'black box' marvels was always dismissed as a mere banal matte black nothingness, while the divine spark and mystery of the machine was felt to be buried deep inside.
Not so, said Cartwright and her followers, among them myself.
For example:
The number and condition of a nation's "machine tools" ( big machines that make other machines) , in peace or in wartime, is universally taken as the best single guide to the economic health and medium term potential of that nation.
Naturally as a result , during WWII , both Axis and Allied regarded the destruction of the other side's machine tools by aerial bombs as perhaps the quickest and most certain way to win the war without a too big a loss in human lives.
The factory buildings that house these machine tools were big but lightly built boxes of thin steel and wood.
Acting like big sails, they easily fell over when hit by the 'wind forces' generated by even a near miss by a high explosive bomb.
But unless the bomb actually fell right beside the rows of squat, very heavy and extremely dense, steel-built machine tools, even a very heavy blast force only caused them to rock briefly on their base and then settle back unharmed.
Round One to Civilization.
But unless a building was very quickly assembled back around the machine tools, they quickly became useless, rendered inert by the most banal forces imaginable : gently falling rain.
Gentle rain on machine tools (and even damp air generally) quickly makes them rusty and useless, despite the fact that they could brush off the blast of a 500 pound high explosive bomb with casual aplomb.
Because machine tools are actually a bundle of diverse characteristics : mightly big (basically three metres cubed of steel) and yet also needing to operate within extremely small tolerances (measured in microns or millionths of one metre) to work as intended.
An apt metaphor for them might be a huge elephant rendered helpless by a tiny mouse !
The small tractor without an engine cover is a machine that seems to work well without appearing to be very shielded from the elements of Nature but that is because we forget it spends most of its life inside the sheltering roof and walls and floor of the farmer's barn.
A main battle tank is the war equivalent of the tractor, but it spends all of its combat time stuck in mud and dust and rain and snow and wind and mould ---- and as a result it tends to have a short service life, even if it doesn't first get hit by enemy fire.
More of WWII's tanks were 'put out of action' by mechanical
troubles than by their human foes.
(That is unless you choose, as I do, to regard Mother Nature as the general and admirals' real foes.)
But a Cartwright Machine was far more than an insight into just physical machines : it was also a way of looking at all of Mankind's much vaunted accomplishments.
Just as our tractors and machine tools (mechanical triumphs of Mankind's rational willpower) look far more fragile without their necessary shielding, so too do the intangible mental assets of Humanity's rationality.
A Great Power like Hitler's Germany seemed to be so truly mighty powerful in both industry and in science that it seemed obvious it could well make both guns and butter.
But in a real war, it quickly became apparent that peacetime Germany could only afford to survive off German-grown food (butter) because it didn't actually use all the guns it made.
(And even this just barely : reduced rations for Germans came into effect even before the formal declaration of war in September 1939.)
Actually using guns in war quickly revealed the need to replace all the shells the guns fired, along with the guns themselves when they were worn out from use or destroyed by enemy fire.
Ditto for the need to replace the former farm hands converted to gunners , when they also were worn out or killed.
The same for all the former farm horses diverted to pull these guns.
The former farm tractor factories have been converted to make gun carriages, while the farm fertilizer and pesticide plants are on short shifts, with most of their raw materials diverted to make gun powder and high explosives.
Soon, the women and old men left behind on German farms are doing a very poor job of feeding civilian Germany and all of its idle but high daily calorie consuming military, holidaying abroad in the occupied lands.
Without fertilizers, pesticides, tractors, horses and muscular young farm hands, who can blame these women and old men ?
Now the normal cycle of good and bad weather/good and bad harvests, a cycle that Germany has always experienced, kicks in on top.
A bad weather harvest now is truly a food disaster for civilization, as Adam Tooze has so brilliantly detailed.
Not a disaster for German civilization, except morally.
But a disaster for European civilization generally, because it means Germans ate well only by stealing food from their neighbours.
In the Western part of European Civilization, it means that the French and Dutch are at least left with just barely enough to get by.
But in the Eastern part of European Civilization , food was obtained by deliberately starving to death millions of Russians and Jews.
Ultimately, when starvation proved too slow a way to free up sufficient food, the Germans turned to mass killing of Jews and anyone else they considered 'useless eaters'.
Lack of food in Germany drove the Holocaust along, which was speeded up with every bad harvest year back home in Germany.
Lack of food in Germany led Germany to alienate its potential allies in New Order Europe by stealing the food off their plates.
This in term ensured that these hungry and embittered potential allies ended up resisting Germany, not fighting along side of it, dooming it for certain in June 1944.
And all too soon cannibalism - usually considered the very anti-matter to Civilization's matter - was being engaged in by desperate Russian civilians and POWs.
German Civilization's much vaunted ability to produce butter as well as guns was really a Cartwright Machine, its universal and eternal "law-like" appearance actually hedged by all sorts of restrictive "ceteris paribus" clauses.
This is always the way with Modern Science, its 'dirty little secret'.
None - none - of the famous science experiments we all have been taught to admire in High School and as undergrads actually works as described, at least not out in the real world.
They are really mind experiments , so for example in physics we mentally remove from consideration all the various real world forces working on an object , so we can focus on the main force influencing its motion.
The ceteris paribus clauses explain all that we must remove to get our supposedly universal and eternal laws of nature to work.
It is indeed true, just as our High School Science teacher claimed, that if the USA aims a truly ballastic missile at Tokyo to the west, it is very unlikely to hit Berlin in the east.
The main force at work, our rocket propellant, will accurately ensure it ends up somewhere west of Hawaii.
But lab-ignored factors like real world wind and air temperature and air density could very well work to move our ballistic missile slightly off course enough to hit Korea instead of Japan.
Diplomatically , even a High School Science teacher might realize that this could be very bad news indeed.
(The astute might notice that today's H-bombs are to be delivered by a very muddled, but also very real world, mixture of semi-ballistic and semi-guided techniques. But don't hold your breath waiting for any scientist to tell you that.)
The ceteris paribus clauses behind Nazi Germany's amazing ability to offer full employment, full food larders and full gun lockers was that it only worked if Germany didn't have too many guns and promised never to fire them .
In other words, it only really worked if Germany had a Cold War era military budget and not a Hot War era military budget.
WWII was a real disaster for Humanity and Civilization.
This is because, for the first time ever, the Civilization given us by Modern Science had all of its Cartwright Machines, minus their protective ceteris paribus shielding , left lying around in the wind and rain and mud and snow and heat and dust and mould of six long years of Total War .....
Cartwright's central insight is to realize that the real beauty of a machine is literally 'only skin deep'.
This is in very sharp contrast to received opinion on machines up until now.
The surface of machines, like all 'black box' marvels was always dismissed as a mere banal matte black nothingness, while the divine spark and mystery of the machine was felt to be buried deep inside.
Not so, said Cartwright and her followers, among them myself.
For example:
The number and condition of a nation's "machine tools" ( big machines that make other machines) , in peace or in wartime, is universally taken as the best single guide to the economic health and medium term potential of that nation.
Naturally as a result , during WWII , both Axis and Allied regarded the destruction of the other side's machine tools by aerial bombs as perhaps the quickest and most certain way to win the war without a too big a loss in human lives.
The factory buildings that house these machine tools were big but lightly built boxes of thin steel and wood.
Acting like big sails, they easily fell over when hit by the 'wind forces' generated by even a near miss by a high explosive bomb.
But unless the bomb actually fell right beside the rows of squat, very heavy and extremely dense, steel-built machine tools, even a very heavy blast force only caused them to rock briefly on their base and then settle back unharmed.
Round One to Civilization.
But unless a building was very quickly assembled back around the machine tools, they quickly became useless, rendered inert by the most banal forces imaginable : gently falling rain.
Gentle rain on machine tools (and even damp air generally) quickly makes them rusty and useless, despite the fact that they could brush off the blast of a 500 pound high explosive bomb with casual aplomb.
Because machine tools are actually a bundle of diverse characteristics : mightly big (basically three metres cubed of steel) and yet also needing to operate within extremely small tolerances (measured in microns or millionths of one metre) to work as intended.
An apt metaphor for them might be a huge elephant rendered helpless by a tiny mouse !
The small tractor without an engine cover is a machine that seems to work well without appearing to be very shielded from the elements of Nature but that is because we forget it spends most of its life inside the sheltering roof and walls and floor of the farmer's barn.
A main battle tank is the war equivalent of the tractor, but it spends all of its combat time stuck in mud and dust and rain and snow and wind and mould ---- and as a result it tends to have a short service life, even if it doesn't first get hit by enemy fire.
More of WWII's tanks were 'put out of action' by mechanical
troubles than by their human foes.
(That is unless you choose, as I do, to regard Mother Nature as the general and admirals' real foes.)
But a Cartwright Machine was far more than an insight into just physical machines : it was also a way of looking at all of Mankind's much vaunted accomplishments.
Just as our tractors and machine tools (mechanical triumphs of Mankind's rational willpower) look far more fragile without their necessary shielding, so too do the intangible mental assets of Humanity's rationality.
A Great Power like Hitler's Germany seemed to be so truly mighty powerful in both industry and in science that it seemed obvious it could well make both guns and butter.
But in a real war, it quickly became apparent that peacetime Germany could only afford to survive off German-grown food (butter) because it didn't actually use all the guns it made.
(And even this just barely : reduced rations for Germans came into effect even before the formal declaration of war in September 1939.)
Actually using guns in war quickly revealed the need to replace all the shells the guns fired, along with the guns themselves when they were worn out from use or destroyed by enemy fire.
Ditto for the need to replace the former farm hands converted to gunners , when they also were worn out or killed.
The same for all the former farm horses diverted to pull these guns.
The former farm tractor factories have been converted to make gun carriages, while the farm fertilizer and pesticide plants are on short shifts, with most of their raw materials diverted to make gun powder and high explosives.
Soon, the women and old men left behind on German farms are doing a very poor job of feeding civilian Germany and all of its idle but high daily calorie consuming military, holidaying abroad in the occupied lands.
Without fertilizers, pesticides, tractors, horses and muscular young farm hands, who can blame these women and old men ?
Now the normal cycle of good and bad weather/good and bad harvests, a cycle that Germany has always experienced, kicks in on top.
A bad weather harvest now is truly a food disaster for civilization, as Adam Tooze has so brilliantly detailed.
Not a disaster for German civilization, except morally.
But a disaster for European civilization generally, because it means Germans ate well only by stealing food from their neighbours.
In the Western part of European Civilization, it means that the French and Dutch are at least left with just barely enough to get by.
But in the Eastern part of European Civilization , food was obtained by deliberately starving to death millions of Russians and Jews.
Ultimately, when starvation proved too slow a way to free up sufficient food, the Germans turned to mass killing of Jews and anyone else they considered 'useless eaters'.
Lack of food in Germany drove the Holocaust along, which was speeded up with every bad harvest year back home in Germany.
Lack of food in Germany led Germany to alienate its potential allies in New Order Europe by stealing the food off their plates.
This in term ensured that these hungry and embittered potential allies ended up resisting Germany, not fighting along side of it, dooming it for certain in June 1944.
And all too soon cannibalism - usually considered the very anti-matter to Civilization's matter - was being engaged in by desperate Russian civilians and POWs.
German Civilization's much vaunted ability to produce butter as well as guns was really a Cartwright Machine, its universal and eternal "law-like" appearance actually hedged by all sorts of restrictive "ceteris paribus" clauses.
This is always the way with Modern Science, its 'dirty little secret'.
None - none - of the famous science experiments we all have been taught to admire in High School and as undergrads actually works as described, at least not out in the real world.
They are really mind experiments , so for example in physics we mentally remove from consideration all the various real world forces working on an object , so we can focus on the main force influencing its motion.
The ceteris paribus clauses explain all that we must remove to get our supposedly universal and eternal laws of nature to work.
It is indeed true, just as our High School Science teacher claimed, that if the USA aims a truly ballastic missile at Tokyo to the west, it is very unlikely to hit Berlin in the east.
The main force at work, our rocket propellant, will accurately ensure it ends up somewhere west of Hawaii.
But lab-ignored factors like real world wind and air temperature and air density could very well work to move our ballistic missile slightly off course enough to hit Korea instead of Japan.
Diplomatically , even a High School Science teacher might realize that this could be very bad news indeed.
(The astute might notice that today's H-bombs are to be delivered by a very muddled, but also very real world, mixture of semi-ballistic and semi-guided techniques. But don't hold your breath waiting for any scientist to tell you that.)
The ceteris paribus clauses behind Nazi Germany's amazing ability to offer full employment, full food larders and full gun lockers was that it only worked if Germany didn't have too many guns and promised never to fire them .
In other words, it only really worked if Germany had a Cold War era military budget and not a Hot War era military budget.
WWII was a real disaster for Humanity and Civilization.
This is because, for the first time ever, the Civilization given us by Modern Science had all of its Cartwright Machines, minus their protective ceteris paribus shielding , left lying around in the wind and rain and mud and snow and heat and dust and mould of six long years of Total War .....
Thursday, May 2, 2013
Civilization can fire Guns OR eat Butter, but not both....
The Cold War is always pointed-to-with-pride as a time when Civilization had guns and butter.
Had guns, yes, but never fired them.
Its all quite different from actual war,( shout out to WWII) , when guns get fired and their shells destroy the butter factories and people are left too hungry to build another shell or churn more butter.
Civilizations like Germany, Japan and Russia then quickly end up with their citizens turning to cannibalism to survive : true they don't eat their guns, but they do definitely eat their leather gun straps before turning on each other as a food source.....
Had guns, yes, but never fired them.
Its all quite different from actual war,( shout out to WWII) , when guns get fired and their shells destroy the butter factories and people are left too hungry to build another shell or churn more butter.
Civilizations like Germany, Japan and Russia then quickly end up with their citizens turning to cannibalism to survive : true they don't eat their guns, but they do definitely eat their leather gun straps before turning on each other as a food source.....
WWII : Science finds, Man applies, Nature confounds ...
Yes indeed, the Universe is just like some giant man-made clockworks, albeit one taken out of its 'shielding' case and left out in Nature's harsh elements, exposed years in years out to blazing sun, wind, rain, snow, dust and mould.
How much our vaunted Civilization rests upon the thin security provided by the shielding roofs over our man-made "Cartwright Machines" is made particularly clear during war.
Then those carefully hand-washed machines, the ones we normally baby and only take for a spin in good weather on a summer's afternoon , are worked to death in all times of year and in all kinds of weather.
As a result, they, their human operators and the civilizations behind them usually crack up pretty quickly.
We have all seen those terribly despondent photos of the soldiers of some Great Power or other, desperately trying to get all their vehicles out of the mud of Russia's winter or Guadalcanal's summer ; Civilization spinning its wheels hard and going nowhere fast.
At least six modernist Utopias (White Man's Burden , Aryan Man's Burden , Proletarian Man's Burden , Norden Precision , Synthetic Autarky and Eugenic Breeding) all quickly fell apart when taken out of their protective boxes and were left exposed to Nature's harsh elements between 1939 and 1945.
Just like clockwork......
How much our vaunted Civilization rests upon the thin security provided by the shielding roofs over our man-made "Cartwright Machines" is made particularly clear during war.
Then those carefully hand-washed machines, the ones we normally baby and only take for a spin in good weather on a summer's afternoon , are worked to death in all times of year and in all kinds of weather.
As a result, they, their human operators and the civilizations behind them usually crack up pretty quickly.
We have all seen those terribly despondent photos of the soldiers of some Great Power or other, desperately trying to get all their vehicles out of the mud of Russia's winter or Guadalcanal's summer ; Civilization spinning its wheels hard and going nowhere fast.
The Aryan Man's Burden.... and others
At least six modernist Utopias (White Man's Burden , Aryan Man's Burden , Proletarian Man's Burden , Norden Precision , Synthetic Autarky and Eugenic Breeding) all quickly fell apart when taken out of their protective boxes and were left exposed to Nature's harsh elements between 1939 and 1945.
Just like clockwork......
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