1945: Janus Manhattan's legacy for Boomer kids - the paths of nuclear death or penicillin life.

Now which path they take to deal with (or not to deal with) climate change will decide the fate of all of us

1945 : discoveries perfected in ever janus-like Manhattan had helped end the war on a high note.

Now those discoveries (the Manhattan nuclear Project and the Manhattan penicillin Project) presented the children about to form the Boomer Generation two warring choices about how best to deal with physical reality.

The old way - as personified by the non-democratic way of the A-Bomb effort. The way of Modernity, The Enlightenment and The Plenticide : overpowering Nature to force it to do Man's will.

The new way - as presented by the tiny teams working to develop natural penicillin freely sharing information (and penicillium spores) amongst themselves. The way of postModernity, of global commensality and acceptance of plentitude. Working with, not against, Nature so there was a future for humanity on a shared vibrantly green planet.

2015 : now these boomer kids are in charge, the boss.

As world leaders, as voters, our major wealth holders, in senior positions everywhere.

Their decision now on climate change (choosing door one - the top down secretive violent ways of the a-bomb project) (or choosing door two - the open democratic ways of the natural penicillin project) will decide all our fates.....

Two centuries of direct family memories covers a number of EPOCHS

    If you are 84 in this Post-Modern year of 2012 , while your father, who born in 1896 (at the height of the Age of Modernity) lived with his elderly grandmother (born in 1811) until 1901, there is a potential there for two centuries of direct family memories.

  So you could find yourself telling your great-grandchildren, "I can remember my father telling me of hearing his grandmother recalling her early years growing up in a remote part of the Highlands in the 1810s, at the height of the Romantic Era."
  I am not saying that Shirley Dawson Kirkland, eldest daughter of Dr Martin Henry Dawson, has in fact ever recounted such an account - but technically - she could have.
   If Dawson's grandmother had gone further back and recounted to him what her parents or grandparents had told her of the effect upon their intellect world caused by the events of the French Revolution/end to the Age of Classicalism & Enlightenment/rise of the Age of Romanticism, we can span even more epochs and epoch changing events.
   His grandmother Janet's parents and grandparents had lived through the heady transition from the Ages of Classicalism/ Enlightenment into the Age of Romanticism.
   By contrast, Janet was fully a child and adult of the Age of Romanticism.
   Just as Henry Dawson himself was fully a child and adult of the Age of Scientism.
   But his parents, rather like his grandmother Janet's parents, were children of a time of dramatic transition - from Romanticism into Positivism.
 His daughter Shirley and son Keith were teenagers in the Age of Modernity, pre-1945, but have spent the vast bulk of their lives in this Post Modern Era.
  Since they were not even 15 and 17 when the Bomb dropped on Hiroshima, I would say they, also, were children of a transition period (Modernity to Post-Modernity).
   Through the eyes of just this one family, we can tell one hell of a story, of epochs succeeding epochs and being succeeded in turn.
  And I aim to tell just that story....

why global commensality is/isn't ROMANTICISM

   In a commensal world ,humanity dines with reality - not upon it.
   Hitler cherry-picked much from the Romantic Era - above all he saw that humanity could, be sheer force of will , create vast mental universes.

   But is was his great error was to imagine he - or anyone - could successfully impose these mental universes upon the physical universe (or universes).
   Romantics saw the physical universe, Nature, as endlessly dynamic , a constantly changing kaleidoscope of possibilities.
   They imagined the human individual was also a kaleidoscope of mental possibilities.
   The Modernists, such as Hitler and Einstein,  had a great weakness .
   It was to presume there was something they could drag into this Romantic Era from earlier (Plato to the Enlightenment) ages.
   They envisioned that one could fully know this natural kaleidoscope, fully know it to the point of freezing it and then re-molding it in your own mind-created kaleidoscope.
   They saw all of Nature's unceasing variety as a mere rococo surface, a showiness, because deep underneath, fundamentally, Nature was made up of a few knowable laws.
   Compared to the human mental universe, the physical universe they saw as much simpler.
   Now commensality agrees with the modernists that a single human mind might not just be able to convince itself, but all humanity, that cherry trees bloom year around on the top of Mount Everest.
   Virtual Reality behold yourself !
   But commensality argues that the physical reality remains equally successful in insisting that that no cherry tree ever blooms on the top of Mount Everest.
  Our mental universes are as free as the Romantics  and their foes, the Modernists,said they were, but they remain in, horizontal with, the physical universe, not superior to it.....

Professionalization is the ANTIDOTE to "Untutored Genius"

   Romanticism's finest rebuttal to the hubris of the Enlightenment Project was its counter-claim that 'there will always be dark mysterious unknowable regions, outside in Nature and inside the human brain'.

   This was best illustrated by The Age of Romanticism's most original idea: untutored, unfettered, un-peer-reviewed, genius. The genius, as it were, of  genius.

   Genius's biggest, darkest, deepest mystery, to a world raised for  centuries on the belief that one excelled only by learning the rules of one's elders and predecessors, was how exactly did they get all that caramel genius into that little chocolate-dark head, without 25 years of highly expensive schooling ?

   Genius's overwhelming superiority to both the ordinary and the highly educated individual posed the gravest threat yet to the ideology of Classical Enlightenment.
   Because beneath all of  Classical Enlightenment's brave talk of  'the democracy of thought' was its belief in a natural (aka Nature-authorized) aristocracy.
   Pre-Darwin social darwinism as it were.
   It was based ,ultimately,upon superior force and violence: might makes right, survival of the most violent and the biggest.

   The aristocracy, already in decline as its land-seized-through-violence-wealth dimmed in comparison to the new wealth obtainable through new ideas and new inventions, had to quickly reinvent itself, if its children and their children's children were to remain at the wealthy top of society.

   Hyper-professionalization, based on Scientism, would be the answer.

   Now to get to the top of the world of professionals - the tenured professor of basic research in a top-ranked university - would first require 25 years of the best formal and informal schooling that money could buy.

   Only the wealthiest and best connected of society could hope to  easily enter into such any expensive conversion of present day wealth and power into future wealth and power.

    So let the rare genius slip into popular prominence, virtually untutored - they could only do so as entrepreneurs.

 Because ultimate knowledge (public/aka formally peer-reviewed and published in a top-cited journal) would have been successfully re-defined as only something someone with a superior university position could present to the world.

   Academic genius failing to pass through this secular eye of the needle could and would be simply ignored.

   Hear them sing today : "If what he claims is true (Russia was at least as much as Germany to blame for WWI)  why isn't Sean McMeekin a tenured full professor at some university we have at least heard of like, Oxford or Columbia, eh ?"

   Steve Jobs can be a genius then - like Satchmo - as long as he agrees to go no nearer to a university than to write it an endowment cheque.

   Professionalization is an attempt to erect a filmy gauze of order and rules and proper procedures, over a Reality that knows of no such thing.

   Mental floss for those psychologies unable to handle uncertainty and loss of total control....

My target is highly respectable DENIALISM , not the cranks ...

Michael Marshall

My denialist target is the unconscious bias still lurking within mainstream science and mainstream scientists.

I am not after, in the main, the cranks who deny HIV-AIDS/9-11/the Holocaust/Evolution/Climate Change etc.

I have much bigger fish to fry.

My target is The Enlightenment Project and its offshoots : Modernity/Positivism/Scientism and their collective claim that there is nothing in the universe we can not and will not know - eventually.

Scientists who say this are DENIERS all right, deniers of the possibility of limits to Certainty.

They freely admit the space trip to Perfect Certainty will be very long, very expensive, filled with disappointments and errors - but that Science will ultimately arrive.

I ,on the other hand feel ,we can never know or control much of Reality --- in part, simply for lack of money.

To take an example we all talk about but no one ever does anything about, the weather will never be perfectly known.

 It is simply too expensive to fund all the observation posts and computing power needed to do even a reasonably close-to-perfect prediction job.

The Science is there, has been there - but the money has not and never will be.

Partly it is a size issue.

Humans are simply too Big for quarks and too small for Quasars to know much about either without spending an inordinate amount of money that we haven't got to spend, not when more pressing human-sized problems face us.

If this sort of scientific DENIALISM is sheer Blue Sky/ Castles in Spain/ Pie in the Sky wishful thinking , the COMMENSALIST science alternative is refreshingly down to earth.

It cheerfully accepts limits and strives instead to see just how far we can push them along,  for the betterment of life on Earth.

I am aware of many other scientist authors/bloggers out there working to refute crank denialism.

 But I currently know only of a few scientists (insider agitators as it were) who are tackling my definition of denialism from inside their institutional home of mainstream science and mathematics.

That takes a high level of intellectual bravery and I salute them.

In upcoming blog posts I will discuss some of these pioneers' work to explore whether it parallels my own efforts....

1895-1945: the new forms of En-LIGHT-enment

We often fail to take the scientists at their word.

They meant for their "En-LIGHT-enment" project to be taken literally.

 They had a determination to turn the full light of scientific curiosity upon that childhood darkness that lies at the top of all of Humanity's stairs, because they were certain to the point of certitude -They Had Faith - that it would turn out to be more simple, more regular and more benign than our dirty,cluttered day-to-day visible world.

Our fears of these dark unknown areas they dismissed as superstitions promoted by priests.

So between 1895-1945, we got ever more powerful searchlights that probed the skies above us or the seabed deep beneath submersibles.

In wartime, they served to coned Allied bombers high in the air or to Leigh-ted up U-boats lying low on the surface of the sea.

Bigger and bigger telescope lens or mirrors gathered up more light and concentrated it, letting us see further and further in Space and further and further back in Time.

With newer microscopes, we added ever sharper lights to ever more powerful lens, to clearly see Brownian motions and thus see the motion of molecules.

But ultimately there is a limit to the sharpness of visible light, so we expanded into X-Rays (circa 1895) to peer into bodies, metals and crystals and molecules and then Radar (circa 1945) to see into clouds and darkness and finally to bounce off of the Moon itself.

We developed flash photography, in ever shorter, sharper bursts so we could clearly photograph a speeding bullet stopped in mid-flight.

The electron microscope uses a sharper (a shorter wavelength) form of illumination to reveal a lot more of the hidden details of bacteria
and to show us viruses and even atoms for the first time.

If an atom buster ray can be thought of as a form of light, it too revealed much that was new - in particular the world of sub-atomic particles, indirectly visible as con tails in cloud chambers or revealed on exposed film.

New radio telescopes (circa 1931) listened to waves of information coming into us from the darkness of the universe - as did cosmic ray detectors.

All of this before 1945, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, et al.

The Enlightenment didn't die or fail - it succeeded only too well in revealing what lies in those areas of Reality beyond our normal ken - but it was totally wrong in assuming that they would be simple,regular and benign.

Perhaps Adorno and Horkheimer wrote their famous little mimeographed book a little too early.

 Because they failed  to understand that the deliberate 'return to darkness' of post 1945 Film NOIR might have been a reaction against all the bright enlightenment that the previous half century had produced...