As a political animal, I do tend to see Modernity as an ideology, not an Era

I freely admit, that as a longtime political animal (and as an Dal '80 political science graduate) I do tend to see the world through the glasses of 'political' ideologies.

That is, I see our internal/personal ways of viewing reality ultimately having sharp public/political (power/force/violence) consequences.

So, in many ways, JANUS MANHATTAN'S CHILDREN is as much a work of political science as it is of history.

This is because of its focus on WWII's shortfall between modernity's ideologies and physical reality.

This will encompass, just for example, examining the pre-WWII ideas about armies clashing vs WWII actual acted-out clash of physical armies vs post-WWII ideas about what did happen during those clashes.

War imagined (pre and post) versus War lived, to freely adapt Lucy Riall's definition of the new approach to biography in academic history.

History is particular good at going into German and Soviet archives and counting dead tanks to find out if Prokhorovka's reputed claim as the 'greatest tank battle in history' actually happened as publicly remembered.

While Political Science is excellent at determining what public/political capital that all the world's soldiers, politicians, deniers and video game designers made out of Prokhorovka's myth.

Similarly, conventional histories of WWII strategy are content to simply that the UK had less population and soldiers than Germany and so Britain was loath to invade Europe without American help.

But I intend to ask what private prejudices lay behind the Allied unwillingness to think of getting the 6 million strong volunteer dark-skinned Indian Army to invade occupied Europe --- instead of a waiting for a mere million white American conscripts instead ?

But I suspect that so strong is the hold of Modernity-cum-racism still upon the western mind that historians - even today - are loath to even think my suggestion can be taken seriously enough to be examined before being dismissed.

This is why I so adamantly reject the claim of Modernity 'merely' being a period in time (an Era), a period of time when the ideology of socialism/communism clashed with those of liberal/conservative capitalism and of fascism.

Instead I see these admittedly better known ideologies as being (during the Era of Modernity hegemony) absorbed into and completely affected by, the larger and newer supra-ideology of Modernity.

Similarly, in the hetro hegemony of today's Era of Postmodernity, these sub-ideologies along with that of the fading Modernity survive (all in altered postmodern forms) but all must compete against the fastest rising supra-ideology of Open Commensality....

I know nothing - I hope - about academic post-hegemony

I find reading academic works on post-hegemony feels like being fracked in the butt by a sociology thesis - the jargon will tear your insides out like nothing else can.

All I believe is that something very important happened in 1945, after 500 years of stability.

Modernity didn't die but it was wounded, its hegemony assailed - one could fancy you could even heard its last breaths.

Post-modernity didn't replace modernity, but it was birthed that year and one could almost hear its faint first yelps.

So, nope, no shiny brand new hegemony dominating the high ground, replacing the earlier hegemony.

That is a very modernist notion and feels almost quaint to say in 2012.

Instead we see competing hegemonies occupying different parts of that high ground - an concept that itself is typically post-modernist and 2012-up-to-dated.

So I am saying that pre-1945 Modernity survived almost unchanged,  but limited to areas such as politics, business, some applied sciences, among wealthy retirees - call them all 'the denier classes', from their position on climate change.

But they really deny any and all thought that there can ever be biological or material limits on man's will to do whatever he wants ---- and to correct quickly any mistakes he might very occasionally make.

They see themselves as Pierre-Simon LaPlace would - as skygods - high above Nature.

Post-1945 thinkers are usually but not always younger - they accept that there are limits to what Humanity can hope to do.

They accept we humans are deeply embedded in the web of life and that we must be global commensalists and share the Earth, because it is the only lifeboat in the Universe that Life has got.

Think of them as earthlings - particularly in relationship to their polar opposites - the skygods.

The earthlings dominate in areas like the life sciences, among greens and environmentalists - and among some of the young.

That is enough for you to know about post-hegemony as I see it.

I might attempt to describe hegemony of course - good luck !

It can be thought of  as when sincere opponents to a system of government or society nevertheless coach their opposition in terms that the government or society's elite have provided - the day in day out total emersion bath of schooling, media, political talk etc.

Successful hegemony isn't seen as an ideology - but as pure common sense and even as 'the way of nature' - unchangeable even if we wanted to change it.

We got the birth certificate , CATO : Denialism was birthed in America, more precisely in Wichita

    DENIERS are busy,busy,busy people, but among  all their other denials, they never hesitate to find time to deny that America could have possibly birthed the current president.
   They seem to feel that he is either the spawn of the Devil or the spawn of darkest Kenya ----and as part of the DENIERS' overall "Southern Strategy", either hallucination will work equally well at the ballot box.
   One thing they will never ever deny (or its bye-bye that life-sustaining greenback oxygen) is that the DENIER Movement was birthed in America - more precisely in Wichita Kansas's Koch-funded CATO INSTITUTE, back in 1974.
   Unfortunately for The-Fate-of -the-Planet, the rest of the world was too busy to notice.

   Too busy witnessing what they thought was the soon-to-be triumphant Environmental Movement, thrown up after the late 1973 spike in Oil Prices marked the end to Modernity and Scientism.
   "Wrong, wrong ,wrong", said the Koch bros.
    America might have temporally have left bucolic Kansas for the seductions of Big City Environmentalism, but they's be back - back to the land of the ruby red slippers.
    The Koch bros decided to devote a lot of their enormous wealth to 'Denying' their way back to "The Lost Hegemony of Scientism".
    Back to the the sort of science their dear old Dad had made his fortune in : HARD Science, Newtonian - Daltonian - Darwinian Science , not all this post-quantum gobbledygook.
    The pity was that the Kochs simply didn't get it : yes the old Scientism Hegemony of 1875-1965 was gone : that perfect harmony between political/economic and intellectual hegemonies.
    But it hadn't been replaced by a new green-looking hegemony.
    In the postmodern world of posthegemony, there was no overall Hegemony anymore.
    Scientism still held all the cards among the politically and economically powerful and among those middle-aged or older while the the new green vision had only captured most of the younger intellectuals and most of the younger scientists but only some of the younger voters.
    It was a sort of stand-off : Scientism was still in charge but its orders no longer went unquestioned.
   Now if there is ANYTHING a denier hates worse than being questioned, well I haven't yet discovered it.
    Spoiled as rotten as only upper middle class WASP male teens can be spoiled, their every whim has always been granted all their lives : from mom to wife to secretary to mistress.
    Their animus at having their thoughts questioned sharply, in public, by young whippersnappers, is - I believe - what fuels the DENIERS' energy and anger.
    And to think that all this global bile was birthed in that little ole sorta Mayberry town of Wichita, Kansas : truth is indeed crazier than fiction.....

The big "DISCONNECT" that drives the climate change debate

    When High Modernity (aka Scientism) lost the intellectual hegemony it held between 1875 and 1965, it did not also lose any political or economic power.
   So now we see a world that basically - publicly - says it worries about a steadily warming planet, but, in practise, does nothing to mitigate it.
   To exaggerate a lot, to make my point more vivid, it is as if the 99% agreed that that climate change was real and dangerous, but that the 1% did not.

    High Modernity, the Theology of greed, is the Theology of Southern Baptists and of CEOs of growth-oriented multinationals and of leaders of growth-oriented political parties (socialist and capitalist).
     Power and Age on one side, numbers and youth on the other.
     Gridlock.
     I hope this blog post survives the burning of the planet so any survivors in the future who can still read, as well as forage for scraps, will understand how the baby boomers came to blew up the earth....