In 1940, Dr Martin Henry Dawson was a scientific heretic.
His heresy was in focusing upon (and endlessly talking up) various discomforting forms of microbial evolution.
In 1940, microbes weren't supposed to evolve - I mean not after Day One.
Today we encounter all these forms of microbial evolution in our very first lectures in Microbiology 101 - they are essential learning.
Let's begin with all the wonderful lifesaving beta lactam antibiotics, starting of course with Dawson's natural penicillin. And how these amazing medicines work their non-toxic magic by breaking up molecules essential to other life forms but not to us humans.
But then how these antibiotic molecules, in turn, are liable to be broken up by other chemicals from the microbes under attack. And so it goes, on and on and back and forth.
How the bacteria and other microbes survive and flourish against all the best defence systems that the human body and human doctors can throw up against them.
Their sophisticated abilities in areas like Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT), quorum sensing and molecular mimicry, as 'lie low persisters', their various goo capsules, the daringly wall-less L-Form bacteria, their communal biofilms, all helping the microbe to survive inside us.
Then their dangerously effective chemicals like the flesh eating 'spreading factor' (hyaluronidase) that so helps them to flourish against us.
All subjects of scientific papers - often pioneering papers - from Dawson between 1925 and 1945 --- and still cutting edge science even today.
In 1940, the scientific consensus was that the 'essence' of all the microbes at the lower left of the ever upward arrow of progress was to be eternally stupid and weak ---- and to remain eternally unchanging.
Except that the primitive microbes were permitted to mark the very primitive beginnings of the long slow process of evolution ever upwards that ended in the brilliant changeability that is Civilized Man, at the upper right of the arrow of progress.
Dawson never denied that there were some things we humans do very well and the microbes do very badly.
He said only that that the converse was equally true : abilities and defects (physical and moral) were well and truly mixed throughout all the lifeforms, not exclusively separated into stupid and bad at the bottom and good and smart at the top.
Now exalting the concepts of mixing and mixtures is perhaps the most distinctive feature of the intellectual life of our present post-1945 age.
Whether you call it the post modern age or the post progress age, its all the same.
It is interesting to ask, therefore, what part did the popular journalism of wartime penicillin play in ending "The Progress Project" so abruptly in 1945 ?
Because try as the 1945 scientific/government/commercial elite might, they could never get the ordinary uneducated public (as opposed to say educated historians) to buy into the explanation that penicillin came from highly expensive, highly complicated, highly sophisticated chemical "deep tank" factories.
The popular journalism penicillin stories always seem to be what journalists call 'brites'.
You know : cute stories of dogs walking on back legs, cats smoking cigars and ordinary bread mold grown in ordinary bottles on ordinary kitchen tables saving lives when the most expensive drugs of the sophisticated corporate chemists couldn't.
I am not denying Auschwitz and the Atomic Bomb's hearty roles in the demise of "Progress".
But I have also come to believe that all these mass media "Ripley's Believe it or Not" flavoured tales of clever primitive microbes and stupid civilized chemists were as devastating, in their slow cumulative way, to The Progress Project as anything the then obscure Adorno and Horkheimer ever wrote ...
Showing posts with label horkheimer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label horkheimer. Show all posts
Thursday, July 30, 2015
Monday, July 20, 2015
Why Adorno and Horkheimer got it partly wrong
I believe that Adorno and Horkheimer only got part of the correct explanation for why the Modernity Project so abruptly started dying in 1945, supposedly the moment of its greatest triumph.
Not because they were Central European Jews - it was right for them to intellectually fixate on the Nazis' industrial mass murdering of an entire people - because at the time no one else really was.
Their failure lay, I believe, in being old.
Old, at least relative to school age children.
For Adorno and Horkheimer was only in their forties when they were writing and revising their Dialectic of the Enlightenment, the first book to recognize the death of modernity.
In the 1950s (and for centuries earlier) early and middle adulthood was a relatively healthy time - violent deaths from accidents, wars and suicides aside.
It was actually in early childhood that lay the huge number of deaths from infectious disease that so skewed the entire life expectancy statistics downward.
At my schools, I knew kids whose older siblings had died from polio and kids who went away and never came back , because of 'leukemia'.
And in my family alone, we had already had scarlet fever and rheumatic fever together with measles and chicken pox.
I could tell by the response of our elderly neighbours they were very frightening diseases -at least when they were young mothers.
My mother, a former medical lab tech, rushed to reassure me that, thanks to penicillium fungus and other microbes, these diseases were far less fearsome 'Since the War'.
From all the late night war movies I had watched with my parents since the age of six, I hadn't seen much evidence that the second world war had brought anything but tragic deaths and tears.
That the war had also brought us child's life saving antibiotics made a terrible big impression on this particular small child.
Perhaps if Adorno and Horkheimer had been young mothers (or even today's young fathers) while they were writing their masterwork, they might have seen that badness of Auschwitz alone couldn't kill the delusion of endlessly upward human Progress. in the minds of most humanity.
Because before we can dismiss a bad idea, we need a good idea to replace it.
Antibiotics, coming as they did from the despised fungus and microbes in the constantly overlooked soil right beneath our feet, was just that symbol of a hope-filled alternative way of looking at our fellow humans and the world.
Because the adults, like Adorno and Horkheimer, didn't really see this, everything had to wait until we 1950s kids got older.
When we did, in the mid and late 1960s, it was us postwar "Penicillium Kids" who started the postmodern recognition of rights for all types of people and beings that had been as traditionally overlooked as the soil microbes had once been ...
Not because they were Central European Jews - it was right for them to intellectually fixate on the Nazis' industrial mass murdering of an entire people - because at the time no one else really was.
Their failure lay, I believe, in being old.
Old, at least relative to school age children.
For Adorno and Horkheimer was only in their forties when they were writing and revising their Dialectic of the Enlightenment, the first book to recognize the death of modernity.
In the 1950s (and for centuries earlier) early and middle adulthood was a relatively healthy time - violent deaths from accidents, wars and suicides aside.
It was actually in early childhood that lay the huge number of deaths from infectious disease that so skewed the entire life expectancy statistics downward.
At my schools, I knew kids whose older siblings had died from polio and kids who went away and never came back , because of 'leukemia'.
And in my family alone, we had already had scarlet fever and rheumatic fever together with measles and chicken pox.
I could tell by the response of our elderly neighbours they were very frightening diseases -at least when they were young mothers.
My mother, a former medical lab tech, rushed to reassure me that, thanks to penicillium fungus and other microbes, these diseases were far less fearsome 'Since the War'.
From all the late night war movies I had watched with my parents since the age of six, I hadn't seen much evidence that the second world war had brought anything but tragic deaths and tears.
That the war had also brought us child's life saving antibiotics made a terrible big impression on this particular small child.
Perhaps if Adorno and Horkheimer had been young mothers (or even today's young fathers) while they were writing their masterwork, they might have seen that badness of Auschwitz alone couldn't kill the delusion of endlessly upward human Progress. in the minds of most humanity.
Because before we can dismiss a bad idea, we need a good idea to replace it.
Antibiotics, coming as they did from the despised fungus and microbes in the constantly overlooked soil right beneath our feet, was just that symbol of a hope-filled alternative way of looking at our fellow humans and the world.
Because the adults, like Adorno and Horkheimer, didn't really see this, everything had to wait until we 1950s kids got older.
The "Penicillium Kids"
When we did, in the mid and late 1960s, it was us postwar "Penicillium Kids" who started the postmodern recognition of rights for all types of people and beings that had been as traditionally overlooked as the soil microbes had once been ...
Saturday, January 31, 2015
Plentitude or Plenticide : Janus Manhattan 1945
Manhattan was long regarded as Modernity's 'special' city, home to most of the world's skyscrapers (and centres of eugenic research).
But a Manhattan university campus was also the first home of Adorno & Horkheimer's modest little mimeographed effort entitled "Dialectic of the Enlightenment".
That collection of essays rather went against the grain of 1945's informed opinion, by dissing the Nazi plenticidal killing machine for being, of all things, 'Modernity on Speed'.
Thereby A&H helped birthed our present day era, without quite realizing it, simply by killing off Modernity stone cold.
But it was the Manhattan-led process that enabled natural penicillin to unexpectedly win out over modernity's efforts to create synthetic penicillin that supplied the new kid in town : plentitude, aka post-modernity...
But a Manhattan university campus was also the first home of Adorno & Horkheimer's modest little mimeographed effort entitled "Dialectic of the Enlightenment".
That collection of essays rather went against the grain of 1945's informed opinion, by dissing the Nazi plenticidal killing machine for being, of all things, 'Modernity on Speed'.
Thereby A&H helped birthed our present day era, without quite realizing it, simply by killing off Modernity stone cold.
But it was the Manhattan-led process that enabled natural penicillin to unexpectedly win out over modernity's efforts to create synthetic penicillin that supplied the new kid in town : plentitude, aka post-modernity...
Thursday, May 2, 2013
Modernity dies in an Adorno Moment : 1939-1945
Between April 30th 1939 (when the New York's World Fair opened) and the November 20th 1945 (when the Nuremberg Trials opened) a lot of water (together with a lot of blood and brains) flowed under one of Modern civilization's few remaining un-bombed bridges : call it WWII.
If to the bemused Theodor Adorno, New York's fair was Modernity's bizarre apogee , he also saw Nuremberg's trials as Modernity's appalling nadir.
But I doubt that even Adorno and his co-conspirator Max Horkheimer had really expected Modernity to soar , burn and crash just that quickly.
Yet it clearly happened. Few people doubt that our new Age of post-Modernity can not be precisely dated to very late in the year of 1945.
Just as very few people deny that the opening of New York's World Fair of 1939 captured the absolute peak of Modernist optimism and hubris.
Now WWI also resulted in dramatic change all around the world.
But I would argue that while the surface of Modernity in 1919 was readily and intensely cracked all over, the deep superstructure actually held stronger than ever.
People often see WWI's dramatic results as the results of long standing tensions, buried below the surface, suddenly precipitating in a crisis situation.
Perhaps : tensions buried under the surface, but not that deeply buried.
By contrast, the surface of immediately post WWII Modernity didn't crack at all but actually burnished all the brighter ("Better Science won the War"), but deep down inside , the moral core of Modernity had lost its appeal to the young.
Modernist elders simply didn't seen their own self-inflicted wounds and so did nothing to reduce its shock upon their young.
As a result, the assault on their children's and grandchildren's moral certitudes was all the more stunning due to their elders' failure to genuinely reflect upon the meaning of the events of 1945.
But demographically, the rot had truly set in and it was now only a matter of time ------ and of baby booms ---- and of funerals....
If to the bemused Theodor Adorno, New York's fair was Modernity's bizarre apogee , he also saw Nuremberg's trials as Modernity's appalling nadir.
But I doubt that even Adorno and his co-conspirator Max Horkheimer had really expected Modernity to soar , burn and crash just that quickly.
Yet it clearly happened. Few people doubt that our new Age of post-Modernity can not be precisely dated to very late in the year of 1945.
Just as very few people deny that the opening of New York's World Fair of 1939 captured the absolute peak of Modernist optimism and hubris.
Now WWI also resulted in dramatic change all around the world.
But I would argue that while the surface of Modernity in 1919 was readily and intensely cracked all over, the deep superstructure actually held stronger than ever.
People often see WWI's dramatic results as the results of long standing tensions, buried below the surface, suddenly precipitating in a crisis situation.
Perhaps : tensions buried under the surface, but not that deeply buried.
By contrast, the surface of immediately post WWII Modernity didn't crack at all but actually burnished all the brighter ("Better Science won the War"), but deep down inside , the moral core of Modernity had lost its appeal to the young.
Modernist elders simply didn't seen their own self-inflicted wounds and so did nothing to reduce its shock upon their young.
As a result, the assault on their children's and grandchildren's moral certitudes was all the more stunning due to their elders' failure to genuinely reflect upon the meaning of the events of 1945.
But demographically, the rot had truly set in and it was now only a matter of time ------ and of baby booms ---- and of funerals....
Monday, January 21, 2013
Dawson's DIY penicillin a postmodernist "shot across the bow" of Modernist Big Pharma
Two hundred years from now, only the first of the Dawson team's many articles on wartime penicillin will still be cited and still considered seminal.
This, despite the fact that Nova Scotia-born Henry Dawson's last penicillin article told a surprised world that invariable fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis (the much dreaded SBE) had finally been cured - by his penicillin method that he had pioneered 5 years earlier.
But instead it is Dawson's first penicillin first article, the "impure but non toxic" article of May 5th 1941, that had (and continues to have) ramifications beyond any one disease, ramifications indeed beyond even medicine and science itself.
In that article, delivered before a large group of international medical researchers in Atlantic City and widely reported by the popular and scientific media from The New York Times to the South Africa Medical Journal, Dawson deliberately paired and then contrasted two oxymoronic phrases.
But first, recall that Dawson chose to appear in front of all his peers to praise his new drug to the heavens AND announce that it had no therapeutic effect on a series of four SBE cases in a row.
Trust me on this one : normally scientists do not rush to the biggest conference in town to proudly announce repeated failure.
But it wasn't the lack of therapeutic success from his impure natural penicillin that Dawson was really so eager to announce.
Rather it was the lack of toxic effects from his crude homemade mixture of natural penicillin and its natural impurities that he was so proud (and perhaps amazed) to announce.
(In a sort of 'reverse Ivory Soap', his starting penicillin brew was far less than 99 and 44 100th percent impure : pure penicillin made up only one part per million of his mixture !)
It could have had - perhaps even should have had - a highly deadly mycotoxin poison buried somewhere in that fungus mix, but God took pity on Humanity and it did not.
We do not have a complete version of Dawson's report and ad lib comments , only various precis. But assembled together, I believe we can garner Dawson's actual words and phrases used to prescribe his main intent behind this article.
He described how his tiny team made their hospital-grown crude (impure) and natural penicillin, calling it both more potent and much less toxic than the factory-made chemically pure synthetic sulfa drugs, less potent and more toxic, made by Big Pharma .
His takeaway line, as the CBC's Don Connolly likes to say, is that "despite being impure, homemade natural penicillin was actually less toxic and much more potent than factory-made pure synthetic sulfa drugs."
Today, in this postmodern age, this statement might hardly seem controversial ; but in 1940, at the apogee of Modernity, to diss the Du Pont slogan of "living better chemically" was to indulge in sheer heresy.
At the same university as Dawson (Columbia) and at the exact same time, famed German-scholars-in-exile Adorno and Horkheimer were busy dismantling 500 years of Modernity, brick by brick, and patiently reassembling them as Postmodernity.
Perhaps posthumously, their fellow university colleague Henry Dawson can lay claim to being among Postmodernity's first scientific converts.....
This, despite the fact that Nova Scotia-born Henry Dawson's last penicillin article told a surprised world that invariable fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis (the much dreaded SBE) had finally been cured - by his penicillin method that he had pioneered 5 years earlier.
But instead it is Dawson's first penicillin first article, the "impure but non toxic" article of May 5th 1941, that had (and continues to have) ramifications beyond any one disease, ramifications indeed beyond even medicine and science itself.
In that article, delivered before a large group of international medical researchers in Atlantic City and widely reported by the popular and scientific media from The New York Times to the South Africa Medical Journal, Dawson deliberately paired and then contrasted two oxymoronic phrases.
But first, recall that Dawson chose to appear in front of all his peers to praise his new drug to the heavens AND announce that it had no therapeutic effect on a series of four SBE cases in a row.
Trust me on this one : normally scientists do not rush to the biggest conference in town to proudly announce repeated failure.
But it wasn't the lack of therapeutic success from his impure natural penicillin that Dawson was really so eager to announce.
Rather it was the lack of toxic effects from his crude homemade mixture of natural penicillin and its natural impurities that he was so proud (and perhaps amazed) to announce.
(In a sort of 'reverse Ivory Soap', his starting penicillin brew was far less than 99 and 44 100th percent impure : pure penicillin made up only one part per million of his mixture !)
It could have had - perhaps even should have had - a highly deadly mycotoxin poison buried somewhere in that fungus mix, but God took pity on Humanity and it did not.
We do not have a complete version of Dawson's report and ad lib comments , only various precis. But assembled together, I believe we can garner Dawson's actual words and phrases used to prescribe his main intent behind this article.
He described how his tiny team made their hospital-grown crude (impure) and natural penicillin, calling it both more potent and much less toxic than the factory-made chemically pure synthetic sulfa drugs, less potent and more toxic, made by Big Pharma .
His takeaway line, as the CBC's Don Connolly likes to say, is that "despite being impure, homemade natural penicillin was actually less toxic and much more potent than factory-made pure synthetic sulfa drugs."
"Living better chemically ?"
Today, in this postmodern age, this statement might hardly seem controversial ; but in 1940, at the apogee of Modernity, to diss the Du Pont slogan of "living better chemically" was to indulge in sheer heresy.
At the same university as Dawson (Columbia) and at the exact same time, famed German-scholars-in-exile Adorno and Horkheimer were busy dismantling 500 years of Modernity, brick by brick, and patiently reassembling them as Postmodernity.
Perhaps posthumously, their fellow university colleague Henry Dawson can lay claim to being among Postmodernity's first scientific converts.....
Friday, June 29, 2012
the fragments of a dialectic enlightenment :Adorno & Horkheimer as PUNK DIYers ...
If one of your dear, dear friends gave you as a christmas present, late in December, over 300 pages of turgid prose, written in fragmentary style, and mimeographed to ensure ultra low quality readability and then stuck it all between two dull brown covers, you might be forgiven if you waited until January before you began a token,polite, skim through it.
That would be January....... 1945.
1945 ! : post-hegemony's annus mirabilis.
And what a way to usher in the postmodern era but with a punk-DIY un-book, as principle author Adorno reminded his co-conspiractor, Horkheimer on the latter's 50th birthday.
Adorno felt that hardcover,professionally printed books brought in the Modernist era - so why not a humble mimeograph to do the honors for the new age ?
So 500 years of Modernity laid low in an instance by a ZINE, for crikes sake !
Well, that and a little help from Modernity itself, during that most modernist of wars : WWII ....
That would be January....... 1945.
1945 ! : post-hegemony's annus mirabilis.
And what a way to usher in the postmodern era but with a punk-DIY un-book, as principle author Adorno reminded his co-conspiractor, Horkheimer on the latter's 50th birthday.
Adorno felt that hardcover,professionally printed books brought in the Modernist era - so why not a humble mimeograph to do the honors for the new age ?
So 500 years of Modernity laid low in an instance by a ZINE, for crikes sake !
Well, that and a little help from Modernity itself, during that most modernist of wars : WWII ....
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
What a difference one little substitute word can make...
My partner Rebecca said some very nice things about this, my new blog.
But I am afraid I misled her a little in describing my take on Postmodernity.
I meant to say that Modernity was a particular and peculiar form of 'Aesthetics masquerading as Science' ---- and functioning as an entire worldview and ideology.
And that Postmodernity was more than 'just' the aesthetics of contemporary painting, pop music and architecture - it was another particular form of Aesthetics and also functioning as an entire worldview and ideology.
I think I have now found a succinct way to describe the difference between Modernity and Postmodernity and it is in the new subtitle of this blog .
My take is that between 1939 and 1945 (and in the immediate postwar period), many - but by no means all - of the middle class educated people in the most modern countries in the world changed their minds.
They decided, albeit in a subdued and inchoate fashion, that all life was in some sense
worthy of life and dignity and worth.
When they repudiated Eugenics (and again not everybody did) they repudiated the core tenets of Modernity --- just as Professors Adorno and Horkheimer had insisted they had to do in 1944, in their famous little mimeo-book ( Dialetic of the Enlightenment), circulating throughout the campus of Columbia University in New York City.
Currently, there is no record of what Professor Martin Henry Dawson, also at the same university at the same time, thought about Adorno and Horkheimer's claim - or in fact about virtually anything - we have no personal papers.
But in his public 'biography of deeds', he certainly acted in a postmodern fashion - giving up his life to save the life of someone (Charlie Aronson) who many American doctors considered a prime example of the fact that only 'some life is worthy of life'.
In one of those improbable coincidences that make up reality,Dr Foster Kennedy advocated that only some lives are worthy of life and that all others should be killed (at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association) on the same day as Dawson first announced (at the annual meeting of the American Clinical Society) that he was trying to save the lives of the unfit, with some penicillin he had brewed up himself.
In a sense, to Kennedy's statement, Dawson merely substituted the little word "all" for "some" and then forcibly acted upon that statement, against the greatest of obstacles.
Mo only truly goes Po when somebody actually does something concrete.
And it was Martin Henry Dawson putting PoMo thought into PoMo action that made all the difference - for Charlie and then ultimately, for all of us .....
@MichaelMarshallMogoesPo
But I am afraid I misled her a little in describing my take on Postmodernity.
I meant to say that Modernity was a particular and peculiar form of 'Aesthetics masquerading as Science' ---- and functioning as an entire worldview and ideology.
And that Postmodernity was more than 'just' the aesthetics of contemporary painting, pop music and architecture - it was another particular form of Aesthetics and also functioning as an entire worldview and ideology.
I think I have now found a succinct way to describe the difference between Modernity and Postmodernity and it is in the new subtitle of this blog .
Taking the widest view of the term Postmodernity : converting it - but only very slightly - from my emphasis on ethics and morality to one of aesthetics - it can be phrased as a difference in the sort of people we find aesthetically attractive.
Today we are far more willing to see attractiveness in many more body shapes, skin colors and lifestyles - or at least to let other people see beauty in people we don't find that particularly attractive.
It is typical of this Postmodernity era to learn of a recent poll saying that most of us find a person of mixed color ( the tawny or coffee colored flesh tone so common in places like Brazil) as the most attractive physical type.
(Just as it is a hangover from our grandparents' Modernity era to learn that most high fashion models continue to be the icy blue-eyed blonds of 1930s Aryan wet dreams.)
My take is that between 1939 and 1945 (and in the immediate postwar period), many - but by no means all - of the middle class educated people in the most modern countries in the world changed their minds.
They decided, albeit in a subdued and inchoate fashion, that all life was in some sense
worthy of life and dignity and worth.
When they repudiated Eugenics (and again not everybody did) they repudiated the core tenets of Modernity --- just as Professors Adorno and Horkheimer had insisted they had to do in 1944, in their famous little mimeo-book ( Dialetic of the Enlightenment), circulating throughout the campus of Columbia University in New York City.
Currently, there is no record of what Professor Martin Henry Dawson, also at the same university at the same time, thought about Adorno and Horkheimer's claim - or in fact about virtually anything - we have no personal papers.
But in his public 'biography of deeds', he certainly acted in a postmodern fashion - giving up his life to save the life of someone (Charlie Aronson) who many American doctors considered a prime example of the fact that only 'some life is worthy of life'.
In one of those improbable coincidences that make up reality,Dr Foster Kennedy advocated that only some lives are worthy of life and that all others should be killed (at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association) on the same day as Dawson first announced (at the annual meeting of the American Clinical Society) that he was trying to save the lives of the unfit, with some penicillin he had brewed up himself.
In a sense, to Kennedy's statement, Dawson merely substituted the little word "all" for "some" and then forcibly acted upon that statement, against the greatest of obstacles.
Mo only truly goes Po when somebody actually does something concrete.
And it was Martin Henry Dawson putting PoMo thought into PoMo action that made all the difference - for Charlie and then ultimately, for all of us .....
@MichaelMarshallMogoesPo
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