Just as the famous Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt had earlier predicted, the Age of Modernity (1865-1965) was a time when 'terrible simplifiers' made that century the most violent and horrific on record.
A time of Grand - simple - Narratives, of soaring rhetoric , when all of life's problems and solutions seemed 'clearcut' , to use a word greatly overused by Sir Howard Florey, a much honored doyen of Modernity.
To his great penicillin rival, Martin Henry Dawson, nothing was ever simple or clearcut - a viewpoint that naturally won him no honours at all during the Era of Modernity.
And Dawson died in 1945, years away from being honoured under the very different value system of our current post-modern Era of Global Commensality....
Showing posts with label grand narratives. Show all posts
Showing posts with label grand narratives. Show all posts
Monday, April 27, 2015
Monday, December 8, 2014
How to be intellectually invisible : criticize the modern era's grand narratives --- without offering up one of your own
The Modern Era (1875-1965) was very tolerant of criticisms of its rules - as long as your criticism played by those same rules.
So individual Modern intellectuals might disagree profoundly with the content of your particular grand narrative but they still greatly admired the fact that you had one.
Dozens of major ideologies - isms of all sorts and shapes - poured forth in that age - each vigorously disagreeing with all others, except for the Modern Era's one overarching grand narrative : that to make a credible critique of Modern grand narrative, one must have one as well.
It was not the time for guardedly measured criticisms : it was an age of Alpha Male ideologies and their Alpha Male critics : dream (and critique) big and bold --- or stay home.
Martin Henry Dawson differed profoundly with this world : perhaps most defiantly in denying the need for grand critiques against grand narratives.
As a result, he simply doesn't figure as an intellectual (by word and pen) critic of his era.
He was, instead, a critic by deed .
He carried on his efforts to secure life-saving penicillin for those young patients deemed by the Allied scientific cum medical establishment as lives unworthy of life-granting penicillin even at the cost of his own life.
But he succeeded in the end and his vision of penicillin-for-all, particularly during a total war in an era that denied the universality of all humanity, was to be profoundly influential in the post-Modern era.
Dawson did not destroy the Modern era - it did that mostly on its own.
But his Manhattan project (the wartime mass production and mass distribution of natural penicillin) sure helped speed it along ...
So individual Modern intellectuals might disagree profoundly with the content of your particular grand narrative but they still greatly admired the fact that you had one.
Dozens of major ideologies - isms of all sorts and shapes - poured forth in that age - each vigorously disagreeing with all others, except for the Modern Era's one overarching grand narrative : that to make a credible critique of Modern grand narrative, one must have one as well.
It was not the time for guardedly measured criticisms : it was an age of Alpha Male ideologies and their Alpha Male critics : dream (and critique) big and bold --- or stay home.
Martin Henry Dawson differed profoundly with this world : perhaps most defiantly in denying the need for grand critiques against grand narratives.
As a result, he simply doesn't figure as an intellectual (by word and pen) critic of his era.
He was, instead, a critic by deed .
He carried on his efforts to secure life-saving penicillin for those young patients deemed by the Allied scientific cum medical establishment as lives unworthy of life-granting penicillin even at the cost of his own life.
But he succeeded in the end and his vision of penicillin-for-all, particularly during a total war in an era that denied the universality of all humanity, was to be profoundly influential in the post-Modern era.
Dawson did not destroy the Modern era - it did that mostly on its own.
But his Manhattan project (the wartime mass production and mass distribution of natural penicillin) sure helped speed it along ...
Most famous GREY LITERATURE ever : Lyotard's "The Postmodern Condition" ?
In true post-modern (anti-grand narrative) fashion the opening manifesto of our post-modern era was not dramatically nailed up on a tree or read aloud before the revolutionary crowd about to storm the presidential palace.
Instead it was merely tamely submitted to a provincial government, as a very small part of a routine 'backstopping' exercise by faceless government bureaucrats.
Despite this, La Condition Postmoderne , a 1979 piece of un-grey literature from a then obscure professor named Jean-Francois Lyotard , may in the end become the most globe-shaking artifact that the PQ party will have ever produced...
Instead it was merely tamely submitted to a provincial government, as a very small part of a routine 'backstopping' exercise by faceless government bureaucrats.
Despite this, La Condition Postmoderne , a 1979 piece of un-grey literature from a then obscure professor named Jean-Francois Lyotard , may in the end become the most globe-shaking artifact that the PQ party will have ever produced...
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