The current term 'Super Heroes', though not the age old concept , first fully emerged at the apogee of the super-modern era (the New York's World Fair ,circa 1939-1940) and have tagged along with us ever since.
Their continuing popularity - and not just among 15 year old boys - is a useful measure of the strength of belief in Super-Modern ideas , 70 years into this era of the post-Modern.
The other measure is, of course, support for the climate deniers.
Their chief funders and cheerleaders are old men (born on both sides of 1930) who were those same young 15 year old boys who first read of the original comic book super heroes.
Gosh Koch : comic books form the deep ideology of the climate denying network ?
Who would ever have thought that ?
Showing posts with label new york's world fair. Show all posts
Showing posts with label new york's world fair. Show all posts
Monday, December 8, 2014
Monday, May 6, 2013
WWII : began with "Bigger is Better - Inevitably" and ended up in "Global Commensality"
At the 1939 New York's World Fair , it seemed only common sense that life started out as tiny simple-minded microbes and inevitably ended up both bigger and smarter, with beings like us being the prime example.
After all, we all know that tiny embryos become babies then children before growing ever smarter and ever bigger as full grown adults.
True the big dinosaurs had disappeared while the tiny bacteria hadn't, but had not the dinosaurs been quickly replaced by mammals - not just as big as dinosaurs but also much smarter ?
Wasn't evolution, no matter how slowly and and how twistingly, inevitably progressing towards the reality that Bigger was not just Better (an idea that hardly needed proposing, it was so self evident to the 1930s mind) but Inevitable as well ?
These ideas were hardly the plot of conspiratory 1930s corporate elites, trying to hold down the working man , because everybody held these notions, even if they only accepted them resignedly.
Bigger was Better and inevitable because Science had shown it to be natural and so man's efforts inevitably had to be but a mere echo of what was happening and had always had happened, everywhere, in Nature.
So instead every different ideology of the 1930s was content, or resigned, to merely contesting different 'Bigger Betters' : Big Fascism, Big Communism, Big Capitalism, Big Christianity and on and on.
But a few biologists in the Thirties - mostly microbiologists - didn't find Bigger to be inevitably Better, at least in the natural interactions they were studying.
The brilliant if taciturn (Martin) Henry Dawson was in their forefront - certainly not as a verbal spokesman, but in his advanced concepts.
The 'little horse to big horse' dioramas beloved by every local museum wall made it seem that small beings were just wayposts on the path to ever bigger-ness.
But instead of being just something to be eaten up or stomped on during the charge to Bigness , true natural reality, these handful of microbiologists claimed, showed small continuing to co-exist with the big, now as in the distant past.
And not just co-existing in widely separated niches either .
For trillions upon trillions of bacteria co-exist in and upon every one of us, along with endless numbers of viruses, fungi, protozoa, worms and mites.
With all our medical science and with the best immune system in Life, it might see an easy task for us Biggies to dispose of such smallies but that hardly has proved the case .
As any infectious hospital ward in the Thirties would unhappily attest.
But Science, as always, had a ready answer whenever messy Reality clashed with the glib (Cartwright Machine) assumptions it shared with the non-scientific mind.
Science claimed that whenever a new small being invaded the human space, there was a tense period of ecological mismatch between the parasites' need for time to see to their continued survival versus their ability to make us (and thus them) instantly dead.
Dead human hosts meant dead microbe freeloaders.
So, gradually ,over time, the invading small beings reduced their virulency,the human host lived and reproduced and so did its parasites who also lived long enough reproduce their own kind.
Soon parasites became helpless and harmless commensals, merely tagging along with us for the ride.
Never again, once rendered a-virulent , would invading microbes bother the big and clever humans.
The 1930s Central Dogma of the Biology religion (one of many such Central Dogmas over the years) was that it was always a one way journey from high virulency to a-virtulency.
But Dawson , particularly in his studies between 1926 and 1940 ,
saw a much different picture.
To put it in modern day biological language, he was the first, or among the first, to explore Horizontal Gene Transfer, Quorum Sensing, Molecular Mimicry, L-forms, and Biofilms.
Just a few of the truly amazing and highly sophisticated ways bacteria survive in a hostile human body cum planet.
Because an individual bacteria is about the same size relationship to an adult human as a human individual is to the entire planet Earth.
Bacteria did not 'sense' they were invading and killing a fellow being when they land on and in us, (as they might regard a competing fungi cell).
Instead each human body seemed an entire rich lush dangerous planet to them - one well worth learning to survive in , despite the risks.
because our human immune systems and human medicine are indeed big, rich and sophisticatedly complex.
But they proved to be, ironically, too big, too complex, too ponderous to beat back the microbes for very long.
Just too damned bureaucratical, just like every big organization you and I have ever worked for.
The microbes' vast numbers (trillions) and short period between new generations (minutes), combined with their controllable ability to encourage new mutations to emerge and even travel from species to species, ensured they could throw up a trillion new survival ideas in the time we got one new drug to stage three clinical trials.
Most of those new survival ideas would be harmful or useless, but with those numbers of ideas, it became like Monkeys typing Literature : something good was bound to come out eventually.
The small and nimble beat the big and ponderous often enough in our human corporate world to make Dawson's claim seem equally credible in the natural world.
Or so it might seem self evident , today, in our post-Modern world.
But that is getting well ahead of ourselves ---- because Dawson's 1930s notions of commensality are not just the object of our postwar post-modern gaze but one of the 1930s originating subject-creator of our postwar post-modernity.
Together with WWII itself.
Because until WWII came along and demonstrated over and over how often the very big fell before the very little , Dawson's notions gained no traction what so ever in the scientific or popular mind.
His scientific ideas did not change during WWII , but ours sure did .....
After all, we all know that tiny embryos become babies then children before growing ever smarter and ever bigger as full grown adults.
True the big dinosaurs had disappeared while the tiny bacteria hadn't, but had not the dinosaurs been quickly replaced by mammals - not just as big as dinosaurs but also much smarter ?
Wasn't evolution, no matter how slowly and and how twistingly, inevitably progressing towards the reality that Bigger was not just Better (an idea that hardly needed proposing, it was so self evident to the 1930s mind) but Inevitable as well ?
These ideas were hardly the plot of conspiratory 1930s corporate elites, trying to hold down the working man , because everybody held these notions, even if they only accepted them resignedly.
Bigger was Better and inevitable because Science had shown it to be natural and so man's efforts inevitably had to be but a mere echo of what was happening and had always had happened, everywhere, in Nature.
So instead every different ideology of the 1930s was content, or resigned, to merely contesting different 'Bigger Betters' : Big Fascism, Big Communism, Big Capitalism, Big Christianity and on and on.
But a few biologists in the Thirties - mostly microbiologists - didn't find Bigger to be inevitably Better, at least in the natural interactions they were studying.
The brilliant if taciturn (Martin) Henry Dawson was in their forefront - certainly not as a verbal spokesman, but in his advanced concepts.
The 'little horse to big horse' dioramas beloved by every local museum wall made it seem that small beings were just wayposts on the path to ever bigger-ness.
But instead of being just something to be eaten up or stomped on during the charge to Bigness , true natural reality, these handful of microbiologists claimed, showed small continuing to co-exist with the big, now as in the distant past.
And not just co-existing in widely separated niches either .
For trillions upon trillions of bacteria co-exist in and upon every one of us, along with endless numbers of viruses, fungi, protozoa, worms and mites.
With all our medical science and with the best immune system in Life, it might see an easy task for us Biggies to dispose of such smallies but that hardly has proved the case .
As any infectious hospital ward in the Thirties would unhappily attest.
But Science, as always, had a ready answer whenever messy Reality clashed with the glib (Cartwright Machine) assumptions it shared with the non-scientific mind.
Science claimed that whenever a new small being invaded the human space, there was a tense period of ecological mismatch between the parasites' need for time to see to their continued survival versus their ability to make us (and thus them) instantly dead.
Dead human hosts meant dead microbe freeloaders.
So, gradually ,over time, the invading small beings reduced their virulency,the human host lived and reproduced and so did its parasites who also lived long enough reproduce their own kind.
Soon parasites became helpless and harmless commensals, merely tagging along with us for the ride.
Never again, once rendered a-virulent , would invading microbes bother the big and clever humans.
The 1930s Central Dogma of the Biology religion (one of many such Central Dogmas over the years) was that it was always a one way journey from high virulency to a-virtulency.
But Dawson , particularly in his studies between 1926 and 1940 ,
saw a much different picture.
To put it in modern day biological language, he was the first, or among the first, to explore Horizontal Gene Transfer, Quorum Sensing, Molecular Mimicry, L-forms, and Biofilms.
Just a few of the truly amazing and highly sophisticated ways bacteria survive in a hostile human body cum planet.
Because an individual bacteria is about the same size relationship to an adult human as a human individual is to the entire planet Earth.
Bacteria did not 'sense' they were invading and killing a fellow being when they land on and in us, (as they might regard a competing fungi cell).
Instead each human body seemed an entire rich lush dangerous planet to them - one well worth learning to survive in , despite the risks.
because our human immune systems and human medicine are indeed big, rich and sophisticatedly complex.
But they proved to be, ironically, too big, too complex, too ponderous to beat back the microbes for very long.
Just too damned bureaucratical, just like every big organization you and I have ever worked for.
The microbes' vast numbers (trillions) and short period between new generations (minutes), combined with their controllable ability to encourage new mutations to emerge and even travel from species to species, ensured they could throw up a trillion new survival ideas in the time we got one new drug to stage three clinical trials.
Most of those new survival ideas would be harmful or useless, but with those numbers of ideas, it became like Monkeys typing Literature : something good was bound to come out eventually.
The small and nimble beat the big and ponderous often enough in our human corporate world to make Dawson's claim seem equally credible in the natural world.
Or so it might seem self evident , today, in our post-Modern world.
But that is getting well ahead of ourselves ---- because Dawson's 1930s notions of commensality are not just the object of our postwar post-modern gaze but one of the 1930s originating subject-creator of our postwar post-modernity.
Together with WWII itself.
Because until WWII came along and demonstrated over and over how often the very big fell before the very little , Dawson's notions gained no traction what so ever in the scientific or popular mind.
His scientific ideas did not change during WWII , but ours sure did .....
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....
Saturday, April 16, 2011
WWII was supposed to be the triumph of the PROFESSIONAL will-to-power
WWII was supposed to be "THE GOOD WAR" for modern science; its beginnings coinciding with the beginnings of that love-in for Utopian modern science that was the New York World's Fair of 1939-1940.
Ironically and appropriately, it was in a New York City university and hospital itself that these hopes were dashed six years later.
Until quite recently, most universities and hospitals (including these particular institutions) were founded by a particular church denomination and there was a documented religious
impulse behind the creation of these quasi-temples of God.
As is well known, modern science claims its beginnings from when it threw out the preachers (and their God and God's animate Nature) from these buildings and made them temples of science instead.
God's World and God's Nature ceased to be seen as full of animate biology (unpredictable tigers) and quasi-animate matter (unpredictable earthquakes or monsoons) --- it all became inert matter that is never consumable, but merely, and eternally, transformable and utterly predictable.
This new temple was clearly for a new religion : "The-People-Of-The-First-Law" , ie the human-flattering First Law of Thermodynamics.
But in fact, these new - professional - scientists (amateur scientists had been around for millenniums) only fully succeeded when they threw the parishioners out of the temple as well.
Sir Charles Lyell, the Godfather of modern science, overthrew the preachers by convincing enough of the upwardly mobile professional middle class that there was no further need to hire preachers to make supplication to God for mercy when overwhelmingly immense catastrophes suddenly hit.
Under this uniformitarianist and gradualist view of the Universe, disasters still happened - but they happened only locally and only briefly and came with lots of warning ---- professional,full time, well funded, scientists thus had lots of time to mitigate the damage
----and to earn a full pension while doing so.
This was science at its most leisurely and at its most dignified - scientists who never sweated.
We can date this event with confidence - by no coincidence , it happened in the aftermath of the First British Reform Act when the urban upper middle class came to share power with the rural land-based aristocracy.
Exactly when non-renewable ,dead, coal began to replace renewable life-and-land based biological energy as the engine of the modern economy.
Science became the (new) sinecure and a well paid, high prestige, job-for-life --- sort of like being a Canadian senator, a British member of the House of Lords or a member of the American NAS : a new professional degree-based aristocracy to replace the old land-based aristocracy.
But if disasters hit only infrequently, why hire a whole bunch of well paid professional scientists to deal with something that only happens briefly, infrequently, and probably only in a small section of somebody else's country ?
Professional scientists took heed of this view and answered that all those pioneers who had cleared the land, built their own homes and raised their kids unaided were revealed as dangerous amateurs: actually these were only jobs that only trained professionals could be relied upon to do right.
DIY and self-reliance (aka subsistence farming) were bad,bad,bad --- old fashioned and out-moded.
So today, you can actually get a PhD in grief-counselling because ordinary people, the parishioners of years ago, can not be trusted to cry over the death of their own child properly --- and none of us stand up and complain about this insult upon the average human being !
No global catastrophe was too big for the scientific professional
(because asteroids simply didn't drop out of the sky) just as no personal catastrophe was so small that an ordinary person could be trusted to deal successfully with it on their own.
Martin Henry Dawson was a modern scientist who at the height of WWII - the war of science - successfully challenged these twin dogmas of science.
Ironically he was not religious - apparently far from it.
But perhaps unconsciously, he smuggled both God's animate Nature and a big role for the amateur laity back into a leading Temple of Science, New York's Columbia University.
Scientists in all the warring nations and all the neutral states of World War Two tried to work up a sweat about what would happen if the (stars and stripes) (hammer and sickle) (swastika) suddenly replace the normal flag flying over the scientific institution where they worked.
But they couldn't - as Operation Paper Clip and its ilk revealed, smart scientists (even evil smart scientists) will always land on their feet, under what ever regime takes over.
But Dawson's efforts threatened the jobs and prestige of all science and he has never been forgiven for his transgressions, no matter how much us laity might applaud his efforts....
Ironically and appropriately, it was in a New York City university and hospital itself that these hopes were dashed six years later.
Until quite recently, most universities and hospitals (including these particular institutions) were founded by a particular church denomination and there was a documented religious
impulse behind the creation of these quasi-temples of God.
As is well known, modern science claims its beginnings from when it threw out the preachers (and their God and God's animate Nature) from these buildings and made them temples of science instead.
God's World and God's Nature ceased to be seen as full of animate biology (unpredictable tigers) and quasi-animate matter (unpredictable earthquakes or monsoons) --- it all became inert matter that is never consumable, but merely, and eternally, transformable and utterly predictable.
This new temple was clearly for a new religion : "The-People-Of-The-First-Law" , ie the human-flattering First Law of Thermodynamics.
But in fact, these new - professional - scientists (amateur scientists had been around for millenniums) only fully succeeded when they threw the parishioners out of the temple as well.
Sir Charles Lyell, the Godfather of modern science, overthrew the preachers by convincing enough of the upwardly mobile professional middle class that there was no further need to hire preachers to make supplication to God for mercy when overwhelmingly immense catastrophes suddenly hit.
Under this uniformitarianist and gradualist view of the Universe, disasters still happened - but they happened only locally and only briefly and came with lots of warning ---- professional,full time, well funded, scientists thus had lots of time to mitigate the damage
----and to earn a full pension while doing so.
This was science at its most leisurely and at its most dignified - scientists who never sweated.
We can date this event with confidence - by no coincidence , it happened in the aftermath of the First British Reform Act when the urban upper middle class came to share power with the rural land-based aristocracy.
Exactly when non-renewable ,dead, coal began to replace renewable life-and-land based biological energy as the engine of the modern economy.
Science became the (new) sinecure and a well paid, high prestige, job-for-life --- sort of like being a Canadian senator, a British member of the House of Lords or a member of the American NAS : a new professional degree-based aristocracy to replace the old land-based aristocracy.
But if disasters hit only infrequently, why hire a whole bunch of well paid professional scientists to deal with something that only happens briefly, infrequently, and probably only in a small section of somebody else's country ?
Professional scientists took heed of this view and answered that all those pioneers who had cleared the land, built their own homes and raised their kids unaided were revealed as dangerous amateurs: actually these were only jobs that only trained professionals could be relied upon to do right.
DIY and self-reliance (aka subsistence farming) were bad,bad,bad --- old fashioned and out-moded.
So today, you can actually get a PhD in grief-counselling because ordinary people, the parishioners of years ago, can not be trusted to cry over the death of their own child properly --- and none of us stand up and complain about this insult upon the average human being !
No global catastrophe was too big for the scientific professional
(because asteroids simply didn't drop out of the sky) just as no personal catastrophe was so small that an ordinary person could be trusted to deal successfully with it on their own.
Martin Henry Dawson was a modern scientist who at the height of WWII - the war of science - successfully challenged these twin dogmas of science.
Ironically he was not religious - apparently far from it.
But perhaps unconsciously, he smuggled both God's animate Nature and a big role for the amateur laity back into a leading Temple of Science, New York's Columbia University.
Scientists in all the warring nations and all the neutral states of World War Two tried to work up a sweat about what would happen if the (stars and stripes) (hammer and sickle) (swastika) suddenly replace the normal flag flying over the scientific institution where they worked.
But they couldn't - as Operation Paper Clip and its ilk revealed, smart scientists (even evil smart scientists) will always land on their feet, under what ever regime takes over.
But Dawson's efforts threatened the jobs and prestige of all science and he has never been forgiven for his transgressions, no matter how much us laity might applaud his efforts....
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