Scientific discoveries can happen anytime anywhere and be announced (be made public) anytime anywhere.
But scientific discoveries are only in turn "discovered" by the most powerful scientific, political, economic, media elites (ie made popular) when it suits the spirit of their particular place and time.
So we have Eugenics (controlling the gene pool) - universally popular in 1928 and universally denigrated in 1998 --- while the anti-eugentics of uncontrollable HGT (horizontal gene transfer) was universally ignored in 1928 and universally supported in 1998.
Eugenics did not emerge into the popular domain simply because Galton announced it, but only when the elites of his time and place took it up with enthusiasm instead of ignoring it - as they later did HGT.
Galton's scientific discovery soothed their deepest emotional fear about all the intermingling thrown up by the same Modernization processes they were leading (and cheering on).
But the later scientific discovery of HGT ( promoted most ardently by Martin Henry Dawson) only fuelled that deep fear and revulsion.
For Modernity/Eugenics ( the two basically mean the same thing) was the shiny public - daytime - face of their deepest darkest nighttime fears.
It was their way of trying to control the processes they had unwittingly unleashed --- their attempt to put the modernization genie back in the bottle while still enjoying all the fruits of its successes.
If I were as scared and revulsed by the loss of hegemonic control as these elites were, I'd ignore HGT too....
Showing posts with label modernization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label modernization. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 20, 2015
Sunday, May 3, 2015
Pushing & Pulling Modernity's Terrible Simplifiers
In the 1880s, the competing successes of both branches of science --- the real world oriented applied and natural history folks and the lab-bound experimental theory-oriented natural philosophy folks - gave Modernity a doubly fierce intensity of purpose.
Fear complemented Hubris inside their minds.
Applied science and technology had produced the better microscopes and telescopes that forced humanity to see the very small and the very big worlds co-existing with the long familiar medium sized human world.
The age of the beginnings of Life, of the Earth and of the Universe were pushed back into unbelievably distant times.
The scale of Universe was revealed to be as big as the scale of the world of microbes, atoms and molecules was revealed to be small.
Modern steamships and trains and electric telegraphs allowed explorers to more easily visit distant cultures ( distant in remote place or distant back in time) and spread that news worldwide instantly.
Now incredibly more cultures, languages, religions, ideas, foods were shown to exist than were imagined just a few years earlier.
That matched the new vast numbers of animal, plant and microbial species being added years to the relatively static total known a few decades earlier.
This plentitude of plentitudes overwhelmed everybody, none more than the elites who has secured their position at the top of each society's foodchain by creating a hegemony of thought.
Even new foods and new musics, let alone new immigrants or new scientific ideas, presented alternative to that hegemony.
Much worse, the mere idea that alternative visions existed, undercut decisively the claim that any one hegemony could be truly hegemonic.
Fortunately, at the very same time, lab scientists were convincing themselves that all the newly apparent surface variety of reality could be reduced to the simple motions of a few fundamental elemental atoms.
And that man could easily rearrange the abundant - boring - atoms of rock, air and water into anything man could imagine as well as thinks as yet undreamed up.
Reductionism would plenticide all the newly discovered plentitude and restore a simple static vertically oriented heirarchy to the elites' unsettled societies....
Fear complemented Hubris inside their minds.
Applied science and technology had produced the better microscopes and telescopes that forced humanity to see the very small and the very big worlds co-existing with the long familiar medium sized human world.
The age of the beginnings of Life, of the Earth and of the Universe were pushed back into unbelievably distant times.
The scale of Universe was revealed to be as big as the scale of the world of microbes, atoms and molecules was revealed to be small.
Modern steamships and trains and electric telegraphs allowed explorers to more easily visit distant cultures ( distant in remote place or distant back in time) and spread that news worldwide instantly.
Now incredibly more cultures, languages, religions, ideas, foods were shown to exist than were imagined just a few years earlier.
That matched the new vast numbers of animal, plant and microbial species being added years to the relatively static total known a few decades earlier.
This plentitude of plentitudes overwhelmed everybody, none more than the elites who has secured their position at the top of each society's foodchain by creating a hegemony of thought.
Even new foods and new musics, let alone new immigrants or new scientific ideas, presented alternative to that hegemony.
Much worse, the mere idea that alternative visions existed, undercut decisively the claim that any one hegemony could be truly hegemonic.
Fortunately, at the very same time, lab scientists were convincing themselves that all the newly apparent surface variety of reality could be reduced to the simple motions of a few fundamental elemental atoms.
And that man could easily rearrange the abundant - boring - atoms of rock, air and water into anything man could imagine as well as thinks as yet undreamed up.
Reductionism would plenticide all the newly discovered plentitude and restore a simple static vertically oriented heirarchy to the elites' unsettled societies....
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
Plenitude always thickest at transitional points
My age cohort of Canadians (those born between 1941 and 1956) have had to deal with its own sort of transitional plentitude.
We still tend to mentally translate temperature in Centigrade back into Fahrenheit, food prices in kilos back into pounds, struggle to remember to call Nova Scotian aboriginals Mi'kmaq not Micmacs, that Arctic natives are Inuits not Eskimos and on and on.
My young nieces and nephews, not ever knowing the older terms, do not have to struggle to un-learn them.
So it was in the early days of Modernity when this eternal and universal pain of knowing two or more conflicting terms or facts about something suddenly became an overwhelming flood.
To give but one example, for decades now most of us know only one thing about the age of the present known universe : that it is about 13 billion years old.
We never have had to write on a high school science exam that it is hundreds of thousands of years old, only then re-learn as young adults that it is in fact hundreds of millions year old, then finally in middle age to learn that it is an ever-expanding number of billions years old.
All this over one normal lifetime.
So there were actually two plentitudes thrown up by early modernization.
One was an intellectual flood - starting in the 1870s - producing for the general public a sudden and vast increase in the size, number, and complexity of the known components of reality.
The other plentitude was for adults of that time struggling to separate the old facts of the known world from all the new conflicting facts about that now better known world.
Not just a plentitude then of one billion new facts - but a combined plentitude of two billion facts - half now true , half now false.
Eventually - by about the 1940s - this flood of new scientific evidence about the world slowed down, just as most people were also coming to accept that there would always be new evidence emerging to refute older beliefs.
Getting use to both sorts of plentitude wasn't the only reason why Modernity began dying in the 1940s, but it was one of the most important factors....
We still tend to mentally translate temperature in Centigrade back into Fahrenheit, food prices in kilos back into pounds, struggle to remember to call Nova Scotian aboriginals Mi'kmaq not Micmacs, that Arctic natives are Inuits not Eskimos and on and on.
My young nieces and nephews, not ever knowing the older terms, do not have to struggle to un-learn them.
So it was in the early days of Modernity when this eternal and universal pain of knowing two or more conflicting terms or facts about something suddenly became an overwhelming flood.
To give but one example, for decades now most of us know only one thing about the age of the present known universe : that it is about 13 billion years old.
We never have had to write on a high school science exam that it is hundreds of thousands of years old, only then re-learn as young adults that it is in fact hundreds of millions year old, then finally in middle age to learn that it is an ever-expanding number of billions years old.
All this over one normal lifetime.
the TWO plenitudes
So there were actually two plentitudes thrown up by early modernization.
One was an intellectual flood - starting in the 1870s - producing for the general public a sudden and vast increase in the size, number, and complexity of the known components of reality.
The other plentitude was for adults of that time struggling to separate the old facts of the known world from all the new conflicting facts about that now better known world.
Not just a plentitude then of one billion new facts - but a combined plentitude of two billion facts - half now true , half now false.
Eventually - by about the 1940s - this flood of new scientific evidence about the world slowed down, just as most people were also coming to accept that there would always be new evidence emerging to refute older beliefs.
Getting use to both sorts of plentitude wasn't the only reason why Modernity began dying in the 1940s, but it was one of the most important factors....
Medicalizing Modernity : a few vigilante superheroes against the many democratic un-superheroes
We have traditionally considered super heroes to be 'super' because their various strengths are clearly superior to those of ordinary beings, but this could be the wrong way to view their 'super-ness'.
We can instead think of super as simply meaning bigger and fewer.
This is because the basic laws of physics with regard to mass, energy and space suggest that fewer big things can occupy a given niche than can many small things.
Hold that thought as we turn to that time-honoured fictional small frontier town beset upon by outlaws.
The fictional residents have two basic choices.
In one, all the citizens can decide democratically what to do and then do it as a collectivity : the democratic and the legal way .
Now we know that few democratic decisions are ever unanimous and even fewer collectivities ever work together for long with one mind : this process is going to be slow, noisy and costly.
Or the fictional town can seek one individual to rid the town of the outlaws, by working outside the law.
Shane or Superman, in this fictional universe the vigilante one always solves the problem the democratic many could not, quickly taking out the bad guys --- and the problem never ever comes back.
Now in real frontier towns, such as Manitoba's The Pas, the actual problems before them are very complex and enduring.
To over-simplify ,they concern relations between a white protestant middle class in the heart of the town who hold all the positions of power and authority and a poorer population, usually catholic and aboriginal or immigrant, on the edge of town, literally Beyond the Pale.
Neither Superman, Batman or Spiderman or George W Bush's 'shock and awe' can solve those problems in the blink of a stun-gun on an outlaw's face.
They have instead emerged because the forces of modernization has brought big industries to places once solely occupied by non-industrial cultures.
The money thrown up by those industries draws in many different ethnicities to come together to live and work around it.
Think of it as one of the most common and contentious plenitudes thrown up by unconscious forces of modernization.
Modernity or Plenticide was the semi-conscious reaction by many to it : to reduce the new complexity of life by re-ordering it in a vertical hierarchy of worthiness, with the people with all the existing power coincidentally always at the top.
In their heart of hearts, all the peoples of The Pas know how their problems came about - and that that there is no tiny band of outlaws to lay blame upon.
But they all retreat instead to watch movies starring super heroes solving big social problems instantly and cost-free --- because it sure beats emerging from the Cineplex back out into the real world again.
There again to deal with the long and messy democratic process of reconciling various cultures who share a common humanity.
Perhaps then we should consider adding the cost of regular visits to Super Hero movies to Medicare, for those of us who can't handle too much change or variety.
Even when the change or variety is for the better...
We can instead think of super as simply meaning bigger and fewer.
This is because the basic laws of physics with regard to mass, energy and space suggest that fewer big things can occupy a given niche than can many small things.
Hold that thought as we turn to that time-honoured fictional small frontier town beset upon by outlaws.
The fictional residents have two basic choices.
In one, all the citizens can decide democratically what to do and then do it as a collectivity : the democratic and the legal way .
Now we know that few democratic decisions are ever unanimous and even fewer collectivities ever work together for long with one mind : this process is going to be slow, noisy and costly.
Or the fictional town can seek one individual to rid the town of the outlaws, by working outside the law.
Shane or Superman, in this fictional universe the vigilante one always solves the problem the democratic many could not, quickly taking out the bad guys --- and the problem never ever comes back.
Now in real frontier towns, such as Manitoba's The Pas, the actual problems before them are very complex and enduring.
To over-simplify ,they concern relations between a white protestant middle class in the heart of the town who hold all the positions of power and authority and a poorer population, usually catholic and aboriginal or immigrant, on the edge of town, literally Beyond the Pale.
Neither Superman, Batman or Spiderman or George W Bush's 'shock and awe' can solve those problems in the blink of a stun-gun on an outlaw's face.
They have instead emerged because the forces of modernization has brought big industries to places once solely occupied by non-industrial cultures.
The money thrown up by those industries draws in many different ethnicities to come together to live and work around it.
Think of it as one of the most common and contentious plenitudes thrown up by unconscious forces of modernization.
Modernity or Plenticide was the semi-conscious reaction by many to it : to reduce the new complexity of life by re-ordering it in a vertical hierarchy of worthiness, with the people with all the existing power coincidentally always at the top.
Medicalizing Modernity (seeing modernity as a quasi-medical solution to a global mental health issue : modernization's overwhelming plenitude overwhelming our need for order)
In their heart of hearts, all the peoples of The Pas know how their problems came about - and that that there is no tiny band of outlaws to lay blame upon.
But they all retreat instead to watch movies starring super heroes solving big social problems instantly and cost-free --- because it sure beats emerging from the Cineplex back out into the real world again.
There again to deal with the long and messy democratic process of reconciling various cultures who share a common humanity.
Perhaps then we should consider adding the cost of regular visits to Super Hero movies to Medicare, for those of us who can't handle too much change or variety.
Even when the change or variety is for the better...
Monday, November 3, 2014
Mary Douglas : modernity VERSUS darwinism
One of the hallmarks of the Era of Modernity (1870s-1960s) was a sudden worldwide urge among the 'progressive' nations to begin to closely regulate and restrict immigration , a move I argue was directly contrary to the co-current move to embrace Darwin's theory of Natural Evolution as the best engine of Progress.
Now there is no solid proof that having an university education, or having lots of money or coming from prominent families actually makes one more logical or rational when fiercely defending a privileged existence , so we needn't be too surprised at this contradiction in actions among society's powerful.
In Evolutionary theory , a successful sub species (success being defined in evolutionary terms by the number of offspring who live to reproduce) will tend to flow outward , to completely fill all examples of its biological niche.
To a consistent Darwinist (do they even exist ?) reproductive success is the only form of success.
Mankind, according to progressive Darwinists , can't really stop this biological success and really shouldn't - not if Mankind , as an overall species, is to survive and flourish.
So - in evolutionary terms - what could be more natural than the more fecund Chinese and Indians flowing forth to occupy new biological niches in places like downtown New York and London that were once fully occupied by the now reproductively-failing Anglo Saxon race ?
A worldwide trend to increased emigration had began in the 1880s as ocean travel became safer, faster and cheaper ---- soon outbound Indians and Chinese were heading for the mother-cities of the Anglo-American empire.
But Modern Progressives, Mary Douglas fans before the poor lady was even born , said no to this unexpected consequence of Anglo-American modernization.
Just as Douglas said we humans regard dirt as useful matter that is simply 'out of place' or 'doesn't know its place' , so too with these would-be migrant Indians and Chinese.
Two very nice useful races - manufacturing things for us at dead-cheap wages in their native India and China - but once 'out of place', they were simply dirty Pakis and Chinks.
Now the older theory that Darwin's dynamic Evolution was supposed to replace was that of God's Great Chain of Being.
This theory held that there was a permanently static and unique place for every species and sub species in the great scheme of things -- and that all would remain well for everyone , as long as everyone 'knew their place' and kept to it.
That is to say, that the poor and powerless must accept their lowly position in life as God-given and not try any levelling-up social revolutions.
God and Nature had ordained that the poor were poor and the rich rich -----suck it up.
Just as , according The Great Chain of Being, God had also ordained that the Chinese should remain in China and the Indians in India.
(Returning momentarily to Darwin, his theory was simultaneously used to explain why the English were allowed to leave England to rule in places like India and China.)
If the harsh new immigration restrictions from the 1890s to the 1920s were simply the Great Chain of Being re-born, I contend that they were thus far less Social Darwinian than they have seemed to historians.
That is, that they weren't simply designed to keep out those judged 'unfit' because of mental , moral and physical disabilities.
They were really intent on keeping out the biologically successful fecund Indian and Chinese races along with the fecund poor from Eastern and Southern Europe, and thus they were more designed to keep out the biologically super-fit than the biologically unfit.
Claiming that these 'races' were morally unfit as reason to reject them was simply a Social Darwinist ploy to ignore their obvious Darwinian reproductive super-fitness.
All this as part of a series of defensive mechanisms put in place by Protestant middle class elites of Northern European origins desperate to maintain their high social and economic status.
Elites deeply uncomfortable that they were even then were failing to reproduce themselves in their own lands , let alone 'go forth and multiply' in others ...
Now there is no solid proof that having an university education, or having lots of money or coming from prominent families actually makes one more logical or rational when fiercely defending a privileged existence , so we needn't be too surprised at this contradiction in actions among society's powerful.
In Evolutionary theory , a successful sub species (success being defined in evolutionary terms by the number of offspring who live to reproduce) will tend to flow outward , to completely fill all examples of its biological niche.
To a consistent Darwinist (do they even exist ?) reproductive success is the only form of success.
Mankind, according to progressive Darwinists , can't really stop this biological success and really shouldn't - not if Mankind , as an overall species, is to survive and flourish.
So - in evolutionary terms - what could be more natural than the more fecund Chinese and Indians flowing forth to occupy new biological niches in places like downtown New York and London that were once fully occupied by the now reproductively-failing Anglo Saxon race ?
A worldwide trend to increased emigration had began in the 1880s as ocean travel became safer, faster and cheaper ---- soon outbound Indians and Chinese were heading for the mother-cities of the Anglo-American empire.
But Modern Progressives, Mary Douglas fans before the poor lady was even born , said no to this unexpected consequence of Anglo-American modernization.
Just as Douglas said we humans regard dirt as useful matter that is simply 'out of place' or 'doesn't know its place' , so too with these would-be migrant Indians and Chinese.
Chinese and Indian migrants as useful human matter 'out of place'
Two very nice useful races - manufacturing things for us at dead-cheap wages in their native India and China - but once 'out of place', they were simply dirty Pakis and Chinks.
Now the older theory that Darwin's dynamic Evolution was supposed to replace was that of God's Great Chain of Being.
This theory held that there was a permanently static and unique place for every species and sub species in the great scheme of things -- and that all would remain well for everyone , as long as everyone 'knew their place' and kept to it.
That is to say, that the poor and powerless must accept their lowly position in life as God-given and not try any levelling-up social revolutions.
God and Nature had ordained that the poor were poor and the rich rich -----suck it up.
Just as , according The Great Chain of Being, God had also ordained that the Chinese should remain in China and the Indians in India.
(Returning momentarily to Darwin, his theory was simultaneously used to explain why the English were allowed to leave England to rule in places like India and China.)
If the harsh new immigration restrictions from the 1890s to the 1920s were simply the Great Chain of Being re-born, I contend that they were thus far less Social Darwinian than they have seemed to historians.
That is, that they weren't simply designed to keep out those judged 'unfit' because of mental , moral and physical disabilities.
They were really intent on keeping out the biologically successful fecund Indian and Chinese races along with the fecund poor from Eastern and Southern Europe, and thus they were more designed to keep out the biologically super-fit than the biologically unfit.
Claiming that these 'races' were morally unfit as reason to reject them was simply a Social Darwinist ploy to ignore their obvious Darwinian reproductive super-fitness.
All this as part of a series of defensive mechanisms put in place by Protestant middle class elites of Northern European origins desperate to maintain their high social and economic status.
Elites deeply uncomfortable that they were even then were failing to reproduce themselves in their own lands , let alone 'go forth and multiply' in others ...
Monday, September 8, 2014
WWII's paradigm shift - at least publicly , modern scientists forced to repress their Id fears about natural penicillin's slime monsters
We have long been taught that 1950s science fiction movies with all their red-colored Blob taking over and consuming little towns were really just a stand in for the dreaded red Russian commies taking over.
But this does those wonderfully slimy monsters a big disservice.
They do symbolize real fears but those fears are much deeper and far more profound than jus fearingt some opposing political party.
The values of the Modern Age (now called (big M) Modernity) were an unconscious (Id-induced) reaction to the events of late Victorian (small m) modernization (now more usually called globalization) that was both consciously welcomed and unconsciously feared.
Modernization brought not just an overwhelming plenitude of new physical goods and experiences but a plenitude of new and bewildering mental experiences as late Victorian era academics greatly and quickly expanded our sense of the vast size, age and complexity of our universe and this planet within it.
Things and ideas no longer seemed to remain in their traditional stable corners but intermingled in many destabilizing ways.
But Progress and Modernness was good , was it not ? - so how to release all those fears about all its unintended consequences without seeming as hopelessly old-fashioned as grandma ?
Slime creatures are the visually physical embodiment of these mental notions of instability - always living in the littoral regions between solid earth and fluid water, their very bodies were halfway between wet and dry, between solid and jelly-like.
When - much to almost everyone in science's total surprise - synthetic penicillin failed and natural penicillin triumphed, all scientists had to make the best of a scary situation - at least in public.
Deep tank penicillin with all its reassuring huge stainless steel tanks run by stern faced men in white coats behind mountains of dials and knobs was one way, the best way, to deny that the pee and poop of tiny slime molds was soon going to surge into the temple of the human body.
Once again, the iconography tells the tale the Id can't publicly speak about : no more shots of women (never ever men) tending their tiny poop and pee charges inside the transparently walled flasks of penicillium mold .
Poop and pee is still there but concealed behind the stainless steel wall so men (and it is always and only men now) can now safely stand close to the little unruly darlings.
You'd almost confuse it with a synthetic penicillin fctory - and that is the whole intent.....
But this does those wonderfully slimy monsters a big disservice.
They do symbolize real fears but those fears are much deeper and far more profound than jus fearingt some opposing political party.
The values of the Modern Age (now called (big M) Modernity) were an unconscious (Id-induced) reaction to the events of late Victorian (small m) modernization (now more usually called globalization) that was both consciously welcomed and unconsciously feared.
Modernization brought not just an overwhelming plenitude of new physical goods and experiences but a plenitude of new and bewildering mental experiences as late Victorian era academics greatly and quickly expanded our sense of the vast size, age and complexity of our universe and this planet within it.
Things and ideas no longer seemed to remain in their traditional stable corners but intermingled in many destabilizing ways.
But Progress and Modernness was good , was it not ? - so how to release all those fears about all its unintended consequences without seeming as hopelessly old-fashioned as grandma ?
Slime creatures are the visually physical embodiment of these mental notions of instability - always living in the littoral regions between solid earth and fluid water, their very bodies were halfway between wet and dry, between solid and jelly-like.
When - much to almost everyone in science's total surprise - synthetic penicillin failed and natural penicillin triumphed, all scientists had to make the best of a scary situation - at least in public.
Deep tank penicillin with all its reassuring huge stainless steel tanks run by stern faced men in white coats behind mountains of dials and knobs was one way, the best way, to deny that the pee and poop of tiny slime molds was soon going to surge into the temple of the human body.
Once again, the iconography tells the tale the Id can't publicly speak about : no more shots of women (never ever men) tending their tiny poop and pee charges inside the transparently walled flasks of penicillium mold .
Poop and pee is still there but concealed behind the stainless steel wall so men (and it is always and only men now) can now safely stand close to the little unruly darlings.
You'd almost confuse it with a synthetic penicillin fctory - and that is the whole intent.....
Thursday, July 3, 2014
Plentiphobia : fear of being overwhelmed by plenitude
"Too much information".
Humans are easily overwhelmed - temporarily - by too much.
Too much choice, too many people on a crowded street, too much choice of new clothes in a story - on and on.
They recover by retreating into places with much less choices and decisions - usually their own home.
But , starting in the 1870s , almost all of us in the educated urbanized middle class western world - all the time and everywhere - felt overwhelmed by too many new scientific discoveries , too many new immigrants, too many new imports, too much too much.
The un-coordinated activities of modernization/ globalization had produced the mother of all plenitudes and humanity reacted with a strong case of plentiphobia.
This phobia - given that humanity also supposedly welcomed modernization and wanted it to go faster and bigger - manifested itself in a complex way.
Western civilization now semi-consciously used the processes of modernization to reduce this plenitude - tidy and clean it up - perfect it and then freeze the result in place forever.
A few perfect chemical synthetics and plastics were to replace the vast variety of natural and imperfect materials we had traditionally used.
Against germs - a greatly hightened gospel of cleanliness.
Against plant and animal and insect pests - ditto.
Against immigrants - immigration controls and wholesale efforts to socialize those few that were admitted.
Against humans as imperfect as wood and wool and rock could be - culling out and purebreed breeding.
Plentiphobia in people who failed to graduate from university is called Fascism and Nazism.
While formal eugenics is just plentiphobia with a PhD ....
Humans are easily overwhelmed - temporarily - by too much.
Too much choice, too many people on a crowded street, too much choice of new clothes in a story - on and on.
They recover by retreating into places with much less choices and decisions - usually their own home.
But , starting in the 1870s , almost all of us in the educated urbanized middle class western world - all the time and everywhere - felt overwhelmed by too many new scientific discoveries , too many new immigrants, too many new imports, too much too much.
The un-coordinated activities of modernization/ globalization had produced the mother of all plenitudes and humanity reacted with a strong case of plentiphobia.
This phobia - given that humanity also supposedly welcomed modernization and wanted it to go faster and bigger - manifested itself in a complex way.
Western civilization now semi-consciously used the processes of modernization to reduce this plenitude - tidy and clean it up - perfect it and then freeze the result in place forever.
A few perfect chemical synthetics and plastics were to replace the vast variety of natural and imperfect materials we had traditionally used.
Against germs - a greatly hightened gospel of cleanliness.
Against plant and animal and insect pests - ditto.
Against immigrants - immigration controls and wholesale efforts to socialize those few that were admitted.
Against humans as imperfect as wood and wool and rock could be - culling out and purebreed breeding.
Plentiphobia in people who failed to graduate from university is called Fascism and Nazism.
While formal eugenics is just plentiphobia with a PhD ....
Thursday, December 5, 2013
Pace Schnaiberg : simplifying science vs complicating science
Canadian-born sociologist of Science Allan Schnailberg , in a seminal article from more than 40 years ago, explained-in-advance today's Science Wars , with his proposed division of scientists into those oriented to production and those oriented to studying the impact of that production.
So some scientists are content to merely dig up millions of tons of tar sands to produce oil and never ask what for , while other scientists spend their lives exploring the impact on the world of all that additional air carbon and waste water.
I want to modify his suggestion when I look into 19th century science and technology's paradoxical effects upon modernization and its evil counterpart, modernity.
Because I want to suggest that the random working-out, in all directions, of the collective effect of individual science and technology efforts, was to do two wildly different things at the same time.
One was to greatly advance humanity's simple control over apparent reality.
The other was to greatly reduce humanity's simple control over actual (complex) reality.
Steam ships, lighthouses, radio, radar (works of technology basically : production science) all seemed to make our predictive control over ocean weather conditions far more assured.
But further weather research (basic science research, impact science) revealed just how complex ocean weather actually was and how unlikely it was that we could ever 100% predict the ocean weather , even three days ahead.
Nineteenth Century science claimed it was well on the way to finding the one 'Theory of Everything', and soon science would be able to show (reduce) all reality to the effects that a few basic forces have on a few basic particles.
But even if you don't give a tinker's damn about science, ask yourself if there has been a news headline that suggests that science has newly discovered less, rather than more ?
Never, never never : trust me.
The earth is older than thought, as is the universe - which is also much bigger than expected and rapidly expanding. More and more species are always being found, living in more and more extreme environs and Life's start is constantly is being pushed back.
More elements, more isotopes , more basic sub- atomic particles.
More interactions, more complexity, more chaos theory.
Very, very, rarely is ever revealed that only one faulty gene can cause a disease - it always seems to be the interacting of thirty genes that may or may not give us a statistical greater chance of having that disease.
Ever better instrumentation and more serious research projects focussed on highly particular questions has revealed ,again and again ,that the surface simplicity of reality is false.
So our incomplete knowledge of reality is indeed a dangerous thing ---- as it always seems to feed our ready tendency to technological hubris.
Let us get concrete for a minute : and think about what 19th century fingerprinting was really doing for us.
Yes, it offered us simple control over reality by determining which criminal was actually at the crime scene (hurrah !) but only by suggesting this unexpected complexity about reality : that every human that ever existed has unique fingerprints.
In fact, like snowflakes, fingerprints should have reminded us that universal random thermal noise ensures that everything in reality - from living clones to pure mineral crystals - is , and must be, subtly different ... if only we look close enough.
Linear and reality live on separate universes : because everything in our universe vibrates randomly and constantly and so zig-zags itself to every new chemical combination at its own unique pace.
Identical twins start off life with the exact same instructions of growth, but within seconds are subtly different as the carefully timed iterations when genes get turned off and on are subtly smeared by the random effects of thermal noise speeding or delaying each competing process.
May I suggest that the Enlightenment Project made a simple but fundamental error in thinking that knowing more about reality was the same as offering up more control over reality ?
Because what really had to be decided was this : was reality simpler than it looked or was it more complex than it looked?
A truly open mind, a mind agape - like that of Henry Dawson - would look to see what the evidence revealed before deciding.
But the utopian (unconsciously fearful of loss of control ?) minds of most Modernist scientists (I am thinking here particularly of the progressive scientist Einstein and fascist scientist Hitler) went into the question already convinced, in advance of any evidence, that reality was simpler than it looked.
Knowing that a person is utopian (ie, believes it is even possible to attempt to plan and micromanage social and economic reality) really tells us very little about their politics, but it tells us a great deal about their physics .
Because they must believe that physical (and above it social) reality is so fundamentally simple and predictable that it is possible to set forth an economic Five Year Plan for an entire nation without worrying that we might fail to foresee a possible earthquake, volcano, hurricane or meter crash .
Let alone considering that a possible war, drought, epidemic or social revolution might make their five year planning goals unobtainable.
Most utopians in fact seek a 'one world government' so confident are they that a few skilled technicians can successfully micro-manage an entire world for years in advance.
So 'simplifying science' is fundamentally utopian while 'complicating science' is fundamentally anti-utopian : hard to avoid a 'science war' with those opposing world-views facing off.
This is why I propose to 'prism' the WWII Florey-Dawson conflict over wartime penicillin development as an early example of a battle in a 'science war' between simplifying and complicating views on ultimate reality.
An enormous 'science war' happening beneath the better known but much smaller military war...
So some scientists are content to merely dig up millions of tons of tar sands to produce oil and never ask what for , while other scientists spend their lives exploring the impact on the world of all that additional air carbon and waste water.
I want to modify his suggestion when I look into 19th century science and technology's paradoxical effects upon modernization and its evil counterpart, modernity.
Because I want to suggest that the random working-out, in all directions, of the collective effect of individual science and technology efforts, was to do two wildly different things at the same time.
One was to greatly advance humanity's simple control over apparent reality.
The other was to greatly reduce humanity's simple control over actual (complex) reality.
Steam ships, lighthouses, radio, radar (works of technology basically : production science) all seemed to make our predictive control over ocean weather conditions far more assured.
But further weather research (basic science research, impact science) revealed just how complex ocean weather actually was and how unlikely it was that we could ever 100% predict the ocean weather , even three days ahead.
Nineteenth Century science claimed it was well on the way to finding the one 'Theory of Everything', and soon science would be able to show (reduce) all reality to the effects that a few basic forces have on a few basic particles.
But even if you don't give a tinker's damn about science, ask yourself if there has been a news headline that suggests that science has newly discovered less, rather than more ?
Never, never never : trust me.
The earth is older than thought, as is the universe - which is also much bigger than expected and rapidly expanding. More and more species are always being found, living in more and more extreme environs and Life's start is constantly is being pushed back.
More elements, more isotopes , more basic sub- atomic particles.
More interactions, more complexity, more chaos theory.
Very, very, rarely is ever revealed that only one faulty gene can cause a disease - it always seems to be the interacting of thirty genes that may or may not give us a statistical greater chance of having that disease.
Ever better instrumentation and more serious research projects focussed on highly particular questions has revealed ,again and again ,that the surface simplicity of reality is false.
So our incomplete knowledge of reality is indeed a dangerous thing ---- as it always seems to feed our ready tendency to technological hubris.
Let us get concrete for a minute : and think about what 19th century fingerprinting was really doing for us.
Yes, it offered us simple control over reality by determining which criminal was actually at the crime scene (hurrah !) but only by suggesting this unexpected complexity about reality : that every human that ever existed has unique fingerprints.
In fact, like snowflakes, fingerprints should have reminded us that universal random thermal noise ensures that everything in reality - from living clones to pure mineral crystals - is , and must be, subtly different ... if only we look close enough.
Linear and reality live on separate universes : because everything in our universe vibrates randomly and constantly and so zig-zags itself to every new chemical combination at its own unique pace.
Identical twins start off life with the exact same instructions of growth, but within seconds are subtly different as the carefully timed iterations when genes get turned off and on are subtly smeared by the random effects of thermal noise speeding or delaying each competing process.
May I suggest that the Enlightenment Project made a simple but fundamental error in thinking that knowing more about reality was the same as offering up more control over reality ?
Because what really had to be decided was this : was reality simpler than it looked or was it more complex than it looked?
A truly open mind, a mind agape - like that of Henry Dawson - would look to see what the evidence revealed before deciding.
But the utopian (unconsciously fearful of loss of control ?) minds of most Modernist scientists (I am thinking here particularly of the progressive scientist Einstein and fascist scientist Hitler) went into the question already convinced, in advance of any evidence, that reality was simpler than it looked.
Knowing that a person is utopian (ie, believes it is even possible to attempt to plan and micromanage social and economic reality) really tells us very little about their politics, but it tells us a great deal about their physics .
Because they must believe that physical (and above it social) reality is so fundamentally simple and predictable that it is possible to set forth an economic Five Year Plan for an entire nation without worrying that we might fail to foresee a possible earthquake, volcano, hurricane or meter crash .
Let alone considering that a possible war, drought, epidemic or social revolution might make their five year planning goals unobtainable.
Most utopians in fact seek a 'one world government' so confident are they that a few skilled technicians can successfully micro-manage an entire world for years in advance.
So 'simplifying science' is fundamentally utopian while 'complicating science' is fundamentally anti-utopian : hard to avoid a 'science war' with those opposing world-views facing off.
This is why I propose to 'prism' the WWII Florey-Dawson conflict over wartime penicillin development as an early example of a battle in a 'science war' between simplifying and complicating views on ultimate reality.
An enormous 'science war' happening beneath the better known but much smaller military war...
Sunday, November 24, 2013
Modernization vs Modernity, made easy
Modernization (aka "Progress") was such things as fast safe comfortable steamships that made it easy for Englishman to migrate to becoming District Officers in northern India or for Indian students to travel to Oxford University.
Modernity was the counter-modernization ideology adopted by both Indians who objected to Englishmen becoming District officers in northern India and by Englishmen who objected to Indians students at Oxford University when they wanted to retain the parts of modernization that favoured them and attack the parts that did not...
So for example, Hitler that ultimate figure of Modernity, loved the fast armoured tanks that could let Germans travel quickly and safely from Berlin to Stalingrad, but objected strongly to the Russians used similar fast armoured tanks built at the Stalingrad tank factory to visit Hitler in his Berlin bunker.
Modernization is a highly inexact word to describe its effects : commensal globalization or global commensality is a much more accurate description because it adds emphasis to the willy-nilly-ness and two-way-street-ness of what was actually taking place....
Modernity was the counter-modernization ideology adopted by both Indians who objected to Englishmen becoming District officers in northern India and by Englishmen who objected to Indians students at Oxford University when they wanted to retain the parts of modernization that favoured them and attack the parts that did not...
So for example, Hitler that ultimate figure of Modernity, loved the fast armoured tanks that could let Germans travel quickly and safely from Berlin to Stalingrad, but objected strongly to the Russians used similar fast armoured tanks built at the Stalingrad tank factory to visit Hitler in his Berlin bunker.
Modernization is a highly inexact word to describe its effects : commensal globalization or global commensality is a much more accurate description because it adds emphasis to the willy-nilly-ness and two-way-street-ness of what was actually taking place....
Monday, November 4, 2013
Commensal Modernization vs Pure Modernity
The Second Industrial Revolution in steel, concrete, electricity, chemicals ,which lasted from about the 1870s to the 1960s ,led to a worldwide process called modernization.
Its key characteristic was a greatly increased intermingling of foreign human beings and their cultural objects (tangible and intangible) into every country on earth , with vast numbers of everything coming in and over supposedly sacrosanct national borders with greatly increased velocity.
Another word for the intimate co-mingling of small and big, willy nilly, is commensality (in the controversial sense in which biologists use this ancient concept).
Tourists, immigrants, ideas, ideologies, artists, manufactured goods - they poured in and out , at such a great speed and in such great numbers , that everyone felt at least a little overwhelmed.
More, faster and deeply intermingled : that was the impression the effects of modernization had on the first generations impacted by its initial stirrings.
Others felt a great deal overwhelmed indeed and not a little threatened : they were usually each nation's traditional elites, using to having their say pass unquestioned.
Now new competitors were threatening their hegemony and the national elites had both time, money and control of the key academic and media centres of influence to successfully fight back : fight back ideologically.
Today we call their counter attack on the commensality of modernization "Modernity", but they themselves never did.
They probably tended to regard their ideas as simply matter-of-fact ideas about Progress , Science and Modern times.
They certainly went to their graves not aware that their supposedly up-to-the-minute modern ideas were really a rearguard reaction against modern reality.
Because they claimed to be truly modern was to see stability, gradualism, simplicity, purity, the few and the big as what was found in Nature.
And moderns should seek and desire the same in Human culture to be truly happy and prosperous.
All this - and more in their ideological repertoire - could be reduced (itself a favourite modern term !) to the claim that reality is basically stable and simple.
A pure substance has fewer ingredients - it is simple.
For a given amount of anything - say the potential biomass on Earth - the bigger the portions it is made up of, the fewer there are of them - fewer is also simpler to keep an eye on.
And big things, by their size and complexity are less likely to move easily or move quickly.
If they move, they move gradually and slowly. Slow change is also simpler to keep an eye on.
And big things are hardly invisible and hardly capable of sneaking in below the radar are they ?
Reductionism, another core value of Modernity, is the claim that matter is all made up of a very few fixed building blocks and with them you can build up everything from a simple molecule to an entire Universe , just like Lego by simply adding more and more and more blocks.
Purity meant no co-mingling of human loins either : being called a half breed was about the worst epithet in the modernist lexicon.
They liked things big, clearly visible, few, simple, pure, slow moving , unchanging ; they hated things that were tiny (and thus "many") , fast moving, invisible, fast changing, flexible, mixed and complex, things mixing in other people's space without their permission or even them being aware of it.
What they disliked sounds like a textbook description of germs , particularly commensal germs, and Germ Theory.
No wonder then that everything human the Moderns tended to hate and fear and demonize they choose to call human germs or an equivalent words like human virus, bacilli or pathogen.
WWII, Modernity's own war , was all about the big picking upon and fearing, the small.
This war upon the small was not incidental to the main action of WWII --- it was the main action.
Now you know what Henry Dawson was up against in his wartime penicillin efforts to defend the small against the big......
Its key characteristic was a greatly increased intermingling of foreign human beings and their cultural objects (tangible and intangible) into every country on earth , with vast numbers of everything coming in and over supposedly sacrosanct national borders with greatly increased velocity.
Another word for the intimate co-mingling of small and big, willy nilly, is commensality (in the controversial sense in which biologists use this ancient concept).
Tourists, immigrants, ideas, ideologies, artists, manufactured goods - they poured in and out , at such a great speed and in such great numbers , that everyone felt at least a little overwhelmed.
More, faster and deeply intermingled : that was the impression the effects of modernization had on the first generations impacted by its initial stirrings.
Others felt a great deal overwhelmed indeed and not a little threatened : they were usually each nation's traditional elites, using to having their say pass unquestioned.
Now new competitors were threatening their hegemony and the national elites had both time, money and control of the key academic and media centres of influence to successfully fight back : fight back ideologically.
Today we call their counter attack on the commensality of modernization "Modernity", but they themselves never did.
They probably tended to regard their ideas as simply matter-of-fact ideas about Progress , Science and Modern times.
They certainly went to their graves not aware that their supposedly up-to-the-minute modern ideas were really a rearguard reaction against modern reality.
Because they claimed to be truly modern was to see stability, gradualism, simplicity, purity, the few and the big as what was found in Nature.
And moderns should seek and desire the same in Human culture to be truly happy and prosperous.
All this - and more in their ideological repertoire - could be reduced (itself a favourite modern term !) to the claim that reality is basically stable and simple.
A pure substance has fewer ingredients - it is simple.
For a given amount of anything - say the potential biomass on Earth - the bigger the portions it is made up of, the fewer there are of them - fewer is also simpler to keep an eye on.
And big things, by their size and complexity are less likely to move easily or move quickly.
If they move, they move gradually and slowly. Slow change is also simpler to keep an eye on.
And big things are hardly invisible and hardly capable of sneaking in below the radar are they ?
Reductionism, another core value of Modernity, is the claim that matter is all made up of a very few fixed building blocks and with them you can build up everything from a simple molecule to an entire Universe , just like Lego by simply adding more and more and more blocks.
Purity meant no co-mingling of human loins either : being called a half breed was about the worst epithet in the modernist lexicon.
They liked things big, clearly visible, few, simple, pure, slow moving , unchanging ; they hated things that were tiny (and thus "many") , fast moving, invisible, fast changing, flexible, mixed and complex, things mixing in other people's space without their permission or even them being aware of it.
What they disliked sounds like a textbook description of germs , particularly commensal germs, and Germ Theory.
No wonder then that everything human the Moderns tended to hate and fear and demonize they choose to call human germs or an equivalent words like human virus, bacilli or pathogen.
WWII, Modernity's own war , was all about the big picking upon and fearing, the small.
This war upon the small was not incidental to the main action of WWII --- it was the main action.
Now you know what Henry Dawson was up against in his wartime penicillin efforts to defend the small against the big......
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