In Robert Clyde Allen's "Speaking of Soap Opera", he quotes one study of Golden Age radio soap operas that found over one half of all adult males in the shows were medical doctors.
In medical science's own Golden Age, roughly one long generation from the mid 1870s to the mid 1960s (the era of Progress and Modernity), soap operas loved doctors because that single profession was freighted with all the expectations humanity had for its highest civilizations.
This fraternity, and this one alone, was expected to do the impossible : to bridge over the many contradictions inherent in the Modern concept of Progressive civilization.
Showing posts with label post modernity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label post modernity. Show all posts
Sunday, September 20, 2015
Wednesday, April 8, 2015
"The Last May be First." Or Last. Or anything in between. It all depends.
Unparalleled horrific cruelties befell the world immediately before, during and after WWII .
That cruelty may best be explained as the result of educated, powerful humanity everywhere sincerely regretting all the small people being squashed by the big people, but also regarding it as the result of an inevitable "Law of Nature" --- just a regrettable part of Progress's ever upward march.
In other words, Scientism made them do it : 'it' being "being a bystander to schoolyard bullying and yet doing little or nothing".
Scientism can be best defined as science, at least as half remembered by middle aged, educated, powerful people ---- based on memories of their High School science education decades earlier.
High School science, unfortunately has always been and will always be a simplified, glorified, triumphantist, Whig account of Science with all of its real world complexities and unsolved issues swept under the carpet.
And the governing axiom of that pre-war scientism, and to some extent the entire science of Modernity, was "Hard Reductionism".
This was the faith - as yet unsupported by sufficient evidence - that all of reality can be explained, predicted and altered/improved by understanding the few simple universal and eternal laws that explained the physical motion of the smallest basic units of reality : atoms.
They (and their biological equivalent, the basic cell) occupied the lower left hand corner of the upward arrow of progress : being small, unchangingly simple and incredibly ancient.
By contrast, at the top right hand corner of that arrow of progress, everything was very new, very big and and incredibly and dynamically complex.
A complex bigness, but based simply upon being assembled from modules made up of multiple modules from the level of complexity just below them. And so on and so on back down to the original basic atoms.
So Life began when a few atoms attached around a single carbon atom becoming the small basic molecules of organic chemistry which then became, in turn, parts of much bigger biological molecules which became part of cells which became ever bigger multi-celled beings.
If re-defined as Soft Reductionism, the belief that much in reality can be explained this way, most of us still hold this view.
But in humanity's postwar view of science and in the scientists' Post-Modernity Science, we have decidedly rejected Hard Reductionism, explicitly or implicitly.
Scientists explicitly no longer see reality as a linear arrow ever upwards , but talk instead of non linear systems, non equilibrium physics, complexity science, chaos theory.
Basically they mean that after creating a modules of say 1000 atoms, it simply fails to display the known behavior of one atom multiplied 1000 times over - its actions are novel but unpredicted.
Further, even a handful of tiny different modules interact in extremely unpredictable fashion (unpredictable given the limited amount of world resources we can devote to computing) - let alone much bigger systems of interacting modules - such as the weather or the stock market.
Scientists say such things explicitly - we mere civilians tend to to more feel this sort of reasoning in our bones - believing less and less big things will turn out anything like the way experts, professionals and the powerful say they will.
So, back to WWII and its cruelties.
In a world believed to be totally predictable, things can be said to happen totally inevitably, with us unable to change them, even if we wanted to.
This belief is called Determinism, a higher level axiom in educated humanity's thought system, circa WWII.
It followed upon Reductionism, and it meant that while we might want to (our moral sentiment) save the Indian tribes in Canada, science had proven that the laws of nature had determined that these small ancient and simple societies would inevitably be replaced by the bigger and more modern structures of western civilization.
Regrettable to be sure, but one simply can't stand in the way of the bulldozers of progress : the 1940s Mosaic law of Robert Moses.
The arrow of progress is noticeably titled at a 45 degree angle - hard to square, at first glance, with another axiom of modernity : Darwin's claim of vertical only inheritance .
Darwin - wrongly - claimed we only inherit genes from our parents and they from their parents - vertically and linearly right on down to the tiny cells that first began life on Earth (this being the biological version of Reductionism).
Darwin claimed that we never get genes from our uncles or from total strangers - total strangers like viruses etc.
What he never claimed ,but that people assumed he claimed, was that each smaller module of life was, in the medium term, gradually replaced entirely by a slightly larger module and so on and so.
So horses started out small and then over time mutated slowly into ever bigger horses while the smaller older horse versions all died away.
This is the way that the world's best natural museums (I am not making thus up - God Help us !) illustrated the arrow of progress in the world of horses.
But it wasn't true and Darwin had never said it would be - success for any species, new or old, was in seeing its offspring survive because they were well suited to the niche they lived in.
So, in fact, in cold climates, horses are small, stout and well covered in fur - in deserts they are tall and thin.
Humanity's prewar arrow of 'evolutionary' progress, unwittingly I believed, was really based on a scale that measured only the progress of human type book learning and record keeping.
On this scale, yes, it seemed the first (the biggest, newest) were always first and the last (the smallest,oldest) were always last.
But evolution should really be measured by survival success, full stop.
Here the record is more clouded for big creatures like humans.
Microbes, thanks to the ability to exchange genes between themselves operate more as a single super organism, somewhat the way we humans are made up of trillions of co-operating cells.
Yet, on the surface, they seem so weak : a usually immobile tiny sac of mostly water : the smallest, oldest and weakest form of life.
But in terms of survival, they are the champions bar none.
The microbes as a collectivity have existed for 4 billion years when most single species, like humanity, survive for a million years at best.
They live everywhere imaginable on Earth - extremities of cold, heat, drought, acidity, starvation, radiation they toss off with ease.
In numbers of different individuals (because yes, like all forms of life and contrary to the tenets of reductionism, each individual of life ever born has always been uniquely different in subtle but important ways), they far outnumber all the rest of life put together.
They may represent the largest mass/weight of life in terms of biomass, though the term biomass is very hard to define (do dead tree trunks count ?)
These small and the last, may survive when the first and the big die, precisely because they are small - when niches get small and thin - only the small and thin get enough to eat to survive and reproduce.
And because, again contrary to Hard Reductionism, they are small but dynamically complex .
(Just as modernity's scientists soon discovered of the not-indivisible after all atoms. For each is made up instead of a complex seething soup of matters dark and anti, of spin and top and color. So much so that if anyone claims they truly understands the sub-atomic world, they're lying.)
Simply put, if mutations are needed if a species is to survive rapidly changing conditions, a small being that produces a new generation every twenty minutes instead of every twenty years that big beings need to reproduce, works its evolutionary magic more than 500,000 times faster.
Particularly when microbes are not biological racists like humanity circa 1940, instead being perfectly willing to take genes, horizontally, from anyone and anything.
The openness of commensality rather than the exclusivity of racism so that their gene pool gets ever deeper and they don't try to constantly drain it via eugenic murder.
In terms of reading a newspaper, yes the first (educated humans) are first and the last (bacteria) are last.
But in terms of making penicillin, WWII discovered - to its horror and surprise - the last ( the tiny slimy penicillium fungi) shall be first and the first (the world's best chemists) shall be last.
In terms of speed, neither the last (rare bacteria with limbs) nor the first ( obese urban university employed humans) are particularly fast in terms of body lengths travelled per second - that goes to the medium (cheetah and such).
Today instead of a single simple scale of worthiness with the new big and complex at the top inevitably, we accept that all forms of life excel at some things and do poorly in others.
We no longer believe that some life - inevitably, by laws of nature - must be life unworthy of life and so can be legitimately burned up in smoke at Auschwitz....
That cruelty may best be explained as the result of educated, powerful humanity everywhere sincerely regretting all the small people being squashed by the big people, but also regarding it as the result of an inevitable "Law of Nature" --- just a regrettable part of Progress's ever upward march.
In other words, Scientism made them do it : 'it' being "being a bystander to schoolyard bullying and yet doing little or nothing".
Scientism made them do it
Scientism can be best defined as science, at least as half remembered by middle aged, educated, powerful people ---- based on memories of their High School science education decades earlier.
High School science, unfortunately has always been and will always be a simplified, glorified, triumphantist, Whig account of Science with all of its real world complexities and unsolved issues swept under the carpet.
And the governing axiom of that pre-war scientism, and to some extent the entire science of Modernity, was "Hard Reductionism".
Hard Reductionism
This was the faith - as yet unsupported by sufficient evidence - that all of reality can be explained, predicted and altered/improved by understanding the few simple universal and eternal laws that explained the physical motion of the smallest basic units of reality : atoms.
They (and their biological equivalent, the basic cell) occupied the lower left hand corner of the upward arrow of progress : being small, unchangingly simple and incredibly ancient.
By contrast, at the top right hand corner of that arrow of progress, everything was very new, very big and and incredibly and dynamically complex.
A complex bigness, but based simply upon being assembled from modules made up of multiple modules from the level of complexity just below them. And so on and so on back down to the original basic atoms.
So Life began when a few atoms attached around a single carbon atom becoming the small basic molecules of organic chemistry which then became, in turn, parts of much bigger biological molecules which became part of cells which became ever bigger multi-celled beings.
If re-defined as Soft Reductionism, the belief that much in reality can be explained this way, most of us still hold this view.
But in humanity's postwar view of science and in the scientists' Post-Modernity Science, we have decidedly rejected Hard Reductionism, explicitly or implicitly.
Post-modernity Science
Scientists explicitly no longer see reality as a linear arrow ever upwards , but talk instead of non linear systems, non equilibrium physics, complexity science, chaos theory.
Basically they mean that after creating a modules of say 1000 atoms, it simply fails to display the known behavior of one atom multiplied 1000 times over - its actions are novel but unpredicted.
Further, even a handful of tiny different modules interact in extremely unpredictable fashion (unpredictable given the limited amount of world resources we can devote to computing) - let alone much bigger systems of interacting modules - such as the weather or the stock market.
Scientists say such things explicitly - we mere civilians tend to to more feel this sort of reasoning in our bones - believing less and less big things will turn out anything like the way experts, professionals and the powerful say they will.
So, back to WWII and its cruelties.
In a world believed to be totally predictable, things can be said to happen totally inevitably, with us unable to change them, even if we wanted to.
Determinism
This belief is called Determinism, a higher level axiom in educated humanity's thought system, circa WWII.
It followed upon Reductionism, and it meant that while we might want to (our moral sentiment) save the Indian tribes in Canada, science had proven that the laws of nature had determined that these small ancient and simple societies would inevitably be replaced by the bigger and more modern structures of western civilization.
Regrettable to be sure, but one simply can't stand in the way of the bulldozers of progress : the 1940s Mosaic law of Robert Moses.
The arrow of progress is noticeably titled at a 45 degree angle - hard to square, at first glance, with another axiom of modernity : Darwin's claim of vertical only inheritance .
Darwin - wrongly - claimed we only inherit genes from our parents and they from their parents - vertically and linearly right on down to the tiny cells that first began life on Earth (this being the biological version of Reductionism).
Darwin claimed that we never get genes from our uncles or from total strangers - total strangers like viruses etc.
What he never claimed ,but that people assumed he claimed, was that each smaller module of life was, in the medium term, gradually replaced entirely by a slightly larger module and so on and so.
So horses started out small and then over time mutated slowly into ever bigger horses while the smaller older horse versions all died away.
This is the way that the world's best natural museums (I am not making thus up - God Help us !) illustrated the arrow of progress in the world of horses.
But it wasn't true and Darwin had never said it would be - success for any species, new or old, was in seeing its offspring survive because they were well suited to the niche they lived in.
So, in fact, in cold climates, horses are small, stout and well covered in fur - in deserts they are tall and thin.
What the arrow of progress really measured
Humanity's prewar arrow of 'evolutionary' progress, unwittingly I believed, was really based on a scale that measured only the progress of human type book learning and record keeping.
On this scale, yes, it seemed the first (the biggest, newest) were always first and the last (the smallest,oldest) were always last.
But evolution should really be measured by survival success, full stop.
Here the record is more clouded for big creatures like humans.
Microbes, thanks to the ability to exchange genes between themselves operate more as a single super organism, somewhat the way we humans are made up of trillions of co-operating cells.
Yet, on the surface, they seem so weak : a usually immobile tiny sac of mostly water : the smallest, oldest and weakest form of life.
But in terms of survival, they are the champions bar none.
Post 1945 : we realize this world is really made for microbes, not humans
The microbes as a collectivity have existed for 4 billion years when most single species, like humanity, survive for a million years at best.
They live everywhere imaginable on Earth - extremities of cold, heat, drought, acidity, starvation, radiation they toss off with ease.
In numbers of different individuals (because yes, like all forms of life and contrary to the tenets of reductionism, each individual of life ever born has always been uniquely different in subtle but important ways), they far outnumber all the rest of life put together.
They may represent the largest mass/weight of life in terms of biomass, though the term biomass is very hard to define (do dead tree trunks count ?)
These small and the last, may survive when the first and the big die, precisely because they are small - when niches get small and thin - only the small and thin get enough to eat to survive and reproduce.
And because, again contrary to Hard Reductionism, they are small but dynamically complex .
(Just as modernity's scientists soon discovered of the not-indivisible after all atoms. For each is made up instead of a complex seething soup of matters dark and anti, of spin and top and color. So much so that if anyone claims they truly understands the sub-atomic world, they're lying.)
Simply put, if mutations are needed if a species is to survive rapidly changing conditions, a small being that produces a new generation every twenty minutes instead of every twenty years that big beings need to reproduce, works its evolutionary magic more than 500,000 times faster.
Particularly when microbes are not biological racists like humanity circa 1940, instead being perfectly willing to take genes, horizontally, from anyone and anything.
Open commensality versus closed racism
The openness of commensality rather than the exclusivity of racism so that their gene pool gets ever deeper and they don't try to constantly drain it via eugenic murder.
In terms of reading a newspaper, yes the first (educated humans) are first and the last (bacteria) are last.
But in terms of making penicillin, WWII discovered - to its horror and surprise - the last ( the tiny slimy penicillium fungi) shall be first and the first (the world's best chemists) shall be last.
In terms of speed, neither the last (rare bacteria with limbs) nor the first ( obese urban university employed humans) are particularly fast in terms of body lengths travelled per second - that goes to the medium (cheetah and such).
Today instead of a single simple scale of worthiness with the new big and complex at the top inevitably, we accept that all forms of life excel at some things and do poorly in others.
We no longer believe that some life - inevitably, by laws of nature - must be life unworthy of life and so can be legitimately burned up in smoke at Auschwitz....
Sunday, December 7, 2014
the "Transitional Cohort" : those born after the Fall of France but before the rise of Elvis ...
A cohort ("generation" in lay-speak) is forever defined by the significant external events happening during its key formative ('coming of age') years.
For my cohort - born roughly between 1940 and 1956 and usually defined simply as "first wave Baby Boomers" - its key characteristic is its 'neither nor' transitional aspect : neither fully and comfortably Modern nor fully and a comfortably post Modern.
Modernity's values were instilled into us by our teachers and elites but before those values had time to harden and to feel natural and inevitable they were assailed by post Modern doubters.
In turn, those doubts about Modernity never properly hardened into feelings that seemed as natural and inevitable to us as they did to our younger siblings.
We have eaten and enjoyed both white Wonder Bread and artisan whole grain loaves but are not now totally at ease with either.
More seriously, the Transitional Generation is quite uncomfortable with young people dismissing vaccines.
We too share their distrust of big drug company profit mantras but we also remember some of our parents and grandparents' fears before most life-threatening childhood infections had preventative vaccines.
But we are not a short, sharp, sharply defined cohort like the WWII cohort - we can't point to six years of war to forever define us.
Nothing really dramatic ever happened with us : modernity just went out with a long long slow gentle sigh and post modernity equally slowly seeped in , almost invisibly, day by day.
There was nothing Super-Hero-like about it : it wasn't a quick clean clear dramatic break between Eras , but rather more 'slow and messy' , contested and plodding : characteristically un-superhero-like in fact .....
For my cohort - born roughly between 1940 and 1956 and usually defined simply as "first wave Baby Boomers" - its key characteristic is its 'neither nor' transitional aspect : neither fully and comfortably Modern nor fully and a comfortably post Modern.
Modernity's values were instilled into us by our teachers and elites but before those values had time to harden and to feel natural and inevitable they were assailed by post Modern doubters.
In turn, those doubts about Modernity never properly hardened into feelings that seemed as natural and inevitable to us as they did to our younger siblings.
We have eaten and enjoyed both white Wonder Bread and artisan whole grain loaves but are not now totally at ease with either.
More seriously, the Transitional Generation is quite uncomfortable with young people dismissing vaccines.
We too share their distrust of big drug company profit mantras but we also remember some of our parents and grandparents' fears before most life-threatening childhood infections had preventative vaccines.
But we are not a short, sharp, sharply defined cohort like the WWII cohort - we can't point to six years of war to forever define us.
Nothing really dramatic ever happened with us : modernity just went out with a long long slow gentle sigh and post modernity equally slowly seeped in , almost invisibly, day by day.
There was nothing Super-Hero-like about it : it wasn't a quick clean clear dramatic break between Eras , but rather more 'slow and messy' , contested and plodding : characteristically un-superhero-like in fact .....
Saturday, December 6, 2014
Murray Howard Dawson ... and me
I never knew Murray Dawson and he never knew me.
He died July 24 2004, about 4 months before I began to get interested in his father's (Dr Martin Henry Dawson) amazing career.
But despite Murray being almost ten years older than me (he born September 23 1941, me on September 20 1951) I feel a kinship with him that I can never share with his surviving brother and sister , who I do know a little.
This is because Murray and I are of the post-Modernity generation, people who never knew a time before mass destruction nuclear bombs delivered by good-enough inaccuracy by jet bombers and continent spanning rockets, before Auschwitz, and before natural antibiotics like penicillin.
But the point I wish to make is that while we both might have been born in the first post-modernity generation, we also grew up at a time when all the powerful people - all the adults - had spent their formative years inside the peak years of Modernity and thus had never known it when it was on its way in or on its way out.
They were pure 100% undiluted Modernity and they were teaching us , directing us, controlling us.
Today the powerful (who I take as those in positions of authority and influence and roughly between the ages of 38 and 75), are themselves fully post-Modern, never knowing anything else.
So Murray and I were raised in a transitional era - Modernity very very slowly ebbing out , post-Modernity very very slowly seeping in.
I mean that if you believe (as I do and so do many others) that the culture around you when you are 15 & 16 is the most important influence on your entire life , then recall that I was 15 and 16 in 1966-68*, the years that most experts see as the moment when popular post-modernity first broke through and modernity first nosedived.
You can't get any more transitional than that ....
____________________
* My theory as to just why those particular years broke the back of Modernity is that these are the years that the last of the people who were 15/16 before all of WWI's disasters retired from positions of power.
I can remember the situation at my own high school as the new replacements for elderly teachers seemed almost to skip a generation - near-seventy year olds replaced by those in their early thirties.
People who were 16 before the Somme and 1916 replaced by people who were 16 at the time Elvis and the CND hit.
This was partly because changes to public pensions at that time, making them available at age 65 instead of 70 , made retiring at 65 near universal in that period.
He died July 24 2004, about 4 months before I began to get interested in his father's (Dr Martin Henry Dawson) amazing career.
But despite Murray being almost ten years older than me (he born September 23 1941, me on September 20 1951) I feel a kinship with him that I can never share with his surviving brother and sister , who I do know a little.
This is because Murray and I are of the post-Modernity generation, people who never knew a time before mass destruction nuclear bombs delivered by good-enough inaccuracy by jet bombers and continent spanning rockets, before Auschwitz, and before natural antibiotics like penicillin.
But the point I wish to make is that while we both might have been born in the first post-modernity generation, we also grew up at a time when all the powerful people - all the adults - had spent their formative years inside the peak years of Modernity and thus had never known it when it was on its way in or on its way out.
They were pure 100% undiluted Modernity and they were teaching us , directing us, controlling us.
Today the powerful (who I take as those in positions of authority and influence and roughly between the ages of 38 and 75), are themselves fully post-Modern, never knowing anything else.
So Murray and I were raised in a transitional era - Modernity very very slowly ebbing out , post-Modernity very very slowly seeping in.
I mean that if you believe (as I do and so do many others) that the culture around you when you are 15 & 16 is the most important influence on your entire life , then recall that I was 15 and 16 in 1966-68*, the years that most experts see as the moment when popular post-modernity first broke through and modernity first nosedived.
You can't get any more transitional than that ....
____________________
* My theory as to just why those particular years broke the back of Modernity is that these are the years that the last of the people who were 15/16 before all of WWI's disasters retired from positions of power.
I can remember the situation at my own high school as the new replacements for elderly teachers seemed almost to skip a generation - near-seventy year olds replaced by those in their early thirties.
People who were 16 before the Somme and 1916 replaced by people who were 16 at the time Elvis and the CND hit.
This was partly because changes to public pensions at that time, making them available at age 65 instead of 70 , made retiring at 65 near universal in that period.
Friday, November 28, 2014
During the Error of Modernity (1875-1965) : only life that was modern was life worthy of life
What 'passed' (successfully) for intellectual activity during the Era of Modernity was mostly about sharply separating, dividing and classifying : in/out , normal/deviant , worthy/unworthy , fit/unfit.
It presumed everything in the universe should be able to be put in distinct boxes ---- and that it could remain there.
One box was good stuff - the other stuff was junk , to be tossed and binned.
(Ultimately found in the rubbish bin of Modernity were such as the entire Jewish,Roma and Slavic 'races'. Along with rest of us who might be in anyway physically, mentally, emotionally or morally 'handicapped' and lacking in powerful friends).
Sometimes Modernity's supporters acted as if reality had once been sharply and separated - back in some earlier golden age.
Mostly they acted as if the current complexity of existence was but a temporary affair, only apparent on the mere surface level and not really indicative of a much simpler , more potentially order-able , reality at the basic levels of atomic structure (sic) .
(Ultimately this led to WWII : High School Science and a machine gun - always a terrifying combo.)
It presumed everything in the universe should be able to be put in distinct boxes ---- and that it could remain there.
One box was good stuff - the other stuff was junk , to be tossed and binned.
(Ultimately found in the rubbish bin of Modernity were such as the entire Jewish,Roma and Slavic 'races'. Along with rest of us who might be in anyway physically, mentally, emotionally or morally 'handicapped' and lacking in powerful friends).
Sometimes Modernity's supporters acted as if reality had once been sharply and separated - back in some earlier golden age.
Mostly they acted as if the current complexity of existence was but a temporary affair, only apparent on the mere surface level and not really indicative of a much simpler , more potentially order-able , reality at the basic levels of atomic structure (sic) .
(Ultimately this led to WWII : High School Science and a machine gun - always a terrifying combo.)
Commensal Plentitude
Our current era ,the post 1945 or post 1965 era , the Era of Commensality , accepts that there will always be a confusing and complex plentitude of objects and activities.
Further, it accepts that they all are capable of connecting and interacting : adding many more levels of complexity to what is already potentially hugely confusing by weight of sheer numbers alone.
If my portrait of life today rings unconvincing (climate deniers anyone ?) that is because , in fact, Modernity and Commensality currently co-exist.
And often in the same person....
Monday, November 10, 2014
The brief blip of Modernity (1875-1965) lost WWII - thank God !
Germany , Italy and Japan didn't lose WWII , not to judge by their present day prosperity and happiness that is far far higher now than even at the height of their world conquering triumphs.
Above all, they're still here - but Modernity (the philosophical glue that held Allied , Neutral and Axis together in 1939-1945) sure isn't.
Isn't really around , except in the minds of angry-old-Protestant-men-with-money, who still have plenty of power and money to deny any limits to Man's ability to control Nature.
(A big shout out to once socialist fellow traveller Rupert Murdoch, who is still denying we can't control the climate - perhaps by tapping its phone.)
But rabid global holocaust deniers aside, the bulk of today's humanity rejects the idea that Modernity gives us an accurate picture of how the real world works.
Many may do so reluctantly or grudgingly , others eagerly .
Still, seventy five years on, what is really changed from 1940 and today is just how differently almost all of us think about humanity's relationship to the world and about our ability to predict, control and successfully change that world.
Its almost as if the insights of Quantum Physics were discovered in 1915 at the height of Modernity, but not really believed , even by scientists, until 100 years later.
Physically, the military forces of one part of Modernity did indeed successfully defeat the military forces of another part of Modernity over the six year long duration of WWII.
But mentally and emotionally, over the course of doing so during those six years, the slow rot of uncertainty and doubt had entered the collective mind.
Modernity sputtered on, going through the motions, running on sheer inertia , but conviction was gone in the minds of many - particularly the minds of the youngest.
And no ideology, no matter how strong it appears at the time, can survive if it fails to indoctrinate the new young.
Because no human-created ideology is proof against the slow certainty of the physical deaths of human beings.
And so it is time we stop trying to soften the blow to the elderly who still embrace the Modernity of their youth.
For post-modernity, so-called, accepts the reality of relentless modernization (good and bad) while Modernity only into existence to praise it in rhetoric --- and oppose it in practise.
It is thus tempting to call today's post-modernity 'anti-modernity' but it goes far beyond that.
For today's world is a form of un-modernity, that in many startling ways is rather like life before the brief (reactive) interregnum of 1875-1965 Modernity ....
Above all, they're still here - but Modernity (the philosophical glue that held Allied , Neutral and Axis together in 1939-1945) sure isn't.
Isn't really around , except in the minds of angry-old-Protestant-men-with-money, who still have plenty of power and money to deny any limits to Man's ability to control Nature.
(A big shout out to once socialist fellow traveller Rupert Murdoch, who is still denying we can't control the climate - perhaps by tapping its phone.)
But rabid global holocaust deniers aside, the bulk of today's humanity rejects the idea that Modernity gives us an accurate picture of how the real world works.
Many may do so reluctantly or grudgingly , others eagerly .
Still, seventy five years on, what is really changed from 1940 and today is just how differently almost all of us think about humanity's relationship to the world and about our ability to predict, control and successfully change that world.
Its almost as if the insights of Quantum Physics were discovered in 1915 at the height of Modernity, but not really believed , even by scientists, until 100 years later.
Physically, the military forces of one part of Modernity did indeed successfully defeat the military forces of another part of Modernity over the six year long duration of WWII.
But mentally and emotionally, over the course of doing so during those six years, the slow rot of uncertainty and doubt had entered the collective mind.
Modernity sputtered on, going through the motions, running on sheer inertia , but conviction was gone in the minds of many - particularly the minds of the youngest.
And no ideology, no matter how strong it appears at the time, can survive if it fails to indoctrinate the new young.
Because no human-created ideology is proof against the slow certainty of the physical deaths of human beings.
And so it is time we stop trying to soften the blow to the elderly who still embrace the Modernity of their youth.
For post-modernity, so-called, accepts the reality of relentless modernization (good and bad) while Modernity only into existence to praise it in rhetoric --- and oppose it in practise.
It is thus tempting to call today's post-modernity 'anti-modernity' but it goes far beyond that.
For today's world is a form of un-modernity, that in many startling ways is rather like life before the brief (reactive) interregnum of 1875-1965 Modernity ....
Monday, December 23, 2013
Our monoculture of "BIG" is killing us and our only home - Earth
As was the case (on both sides) during WWII, we live in a (human) monoculture that worships the BIG and dismisses the small , despite the fact that Nature itself hardly reflects this scenario, in fact, much the reverse.
We do so because our powerful and elderly (the two conditions are often related) still support the values of their teenage to young adult formative years under the Late and not so Great era of Modernity.
Modernity's proponents felt it was inevitable that the "fit" ( ie the BIG and the ponderous) would inevitably have all the innings ,all the time, against the small and the nimble.
Today more and more of us younger folk are leaning into the values of post-Modernity, which shows an increased receptiveness to diversity , variety , the local and the small.
But will death take out the Modernists in our midst ( those deniers of any limits on the abilities of the BIG to laugh in the face of Nature's worst), before they take us all out ?
It is a grim race against time --- which is why I think it is worth re-examining the last time Modernity and the BIG really got sand kicked in their face : WWII ....
We do so because our powerful and elderly (the two conditions are often related) still support the values of their teenage to young adult formative years under the Late and not so Great era of Modernity.
Modernity's proponents felt it was inevitable that the "fit" ( ie the BIG and the ponderous) would inevitably have all the innings ,all the time, against the small and the nimble.
Today more and more of us younger folk are leaning into the values of post-Modernity, which shows an increased receptiveness to diversity , variety , the local and the small.
But will death take out the Modernists in our midst ( those deniers of any limits on the abilities of the BIG to laugh in the face of Nature's worst), before they take us all out ?
It is a grim race against time --- which is why I think it is worth re-examining the last time Modernity and the BIG really got sand kicked in their face : WWII ....
Thursday, December 5, 2013
WWII : Science at war against physical Reality...
Just because you come across the bodies of a lot of robbers over in the Sierra Madre part of town, this does not automatically mean it was the result of a fight between cops and robbers, good guys versus bad guys.
Sometimes it is nothing more than first a fight between robbers over spoils and then a fight between the surviving robbers and the physical reality of the Mexican desert, with reality biting last.
In terms of their approach to science, all the major combatant empires of WWII thought alike (reality was simpler than it appears)- but they differed wildly - militarily - on how best to divide up the global colonial pie.
However all their collective science efforts soon ran smack into the actual complexity of physical reality and ended up shattered upon it - though almost no one foresaw this ('this' being post-Modernity) at the time.
I think my thesis does a better job than the current historical consensus about WWII in explaining why, if the forces of modernity beat back the fascist forces of anti-modernity in 1945, does 1945 also mark the beginning of the end for the victorious modernity forces.
Sometimes it is nothing more than first a fight between robbers over spoils and then a fight between the surviving robbers and the physical reality of the Mexican desert, with reality biting last.
In terms of their approach to science, all the major combatant empires of WWII thought alike (reality was simpler than it appears)- but they differed wildly - militarily - on how best to divide up the global colonial pie.
However all their collective science efforts soon ran smack into the actual complexity of physical reality and ended up shattered upon it - though almost no one foresaw this ('this' being post-Modernity) at the time.
I think my thesis does a better job than the current historical consensus about WWII in explaining why, if the forces of modernity beat back the fascist forces of anti-modernity in 1945, does 1945 also mark the beginning of the end for the victorious modernity forces.
Monday, September 23, 2013
1945's choices : the Modern exclusionary values that gave us Auschwitz or the post Modern values that gave us 'Public Domain' penicillin ?
In early 1945, two Manhattan doctors had dueling visions of the possible world ahead.
The prominent one, Foster Kennedy , wanted to kill all babies with developmental issues.
The unknown other, Henry Dawson, wanted all babies in the world to have access to cheap, abundant (Public Domain) penicillin.
By the end of 1945, the unknown Dawson was dead but - perhaps surprisingly - his idea lived on after him.
Because, with the beginnings of public revulsion over the revelations of Auschwitz doctors and children coming out of the Nuremberg trials, it was clear that Dawson had won most of the educated public over to his vision.
And this only a few years after public polls indicated that the majority of the educated public favoured Foster Kennedy's murderous proposals instead.
Dawson's unstinting efforts to make wartime penicillin truly inclusive had greatly shortened his life, but clearly they hadn't been totally in vain ....
The prominent one, Foster Kennedy , wanted to kill all babies with developmental issues.
The unknown other, Henry Dawson, wanted all babies in the world to have access to cheap, abundant (Public Domain) penicillin.
By the end of 1945, the unknown Dawson was dead but - perhaps surprisingly - his idea lived on after him.
Because, with the beginnings of public revulsion over the revelations of Auschwitz doctors and children coming out of the Nuremberg trials, it was clear that Dawson had won most of the educated public over to his vision.
And this only a few years after public polls indicated that the majority of the educated public favoured Foster Kennedy's murderous proposals instead.
Dawson's unstinting efforts to make wartime penicillin truly inclusive had greatly shortened his life, but clearly they hadn't been totally in vain ....
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
WWII:began optimistically as Science, ended tragically as Engineering..
WWII, in other words, began in Modernism and ended in post-Modernism.
It should be understood at the onset that Science's task is strictly pedagogical and that it doesn't have to provide answers that are true, in any realistic sense, merely ones that are correct.
In other words, an excellent science experiment also is an excellent exam question.
I am speaking here of course only of the physical sciences, those sciences that form a subset of human psychology.
Their main function in life is to boost the students' self esteem and make them willing and - God Bless 'Em ! - even eager to take on the world outside the High School or University as a non-physical science grad.
These science experiments are meant to give non-scientists and non-engineers, and probably a lot of engineers and scientists as well , the confidence-building illusion that the world outside the lab is as controlled and predictable as it is inside the university's "sheltered workshop".
As I have said before, philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright's key insight (aka the "Cartwright machine") is that the crucial component that Science, along with its machines, experiments and laboratories, requires to be a successful human activity is a metaphorical ROOF , to shelter those activities from messy Reality's wind, rain and dust.
And Frederick Christiansen argues that successful engineering often means adding yet more roofs to the designs-with-roofs coming out of the science labs, to make them robust enough to endure daily Reality.
So, for example, Newtonian ballistic equation solving (classical science at its purest) can take on a very different cast in actual battles of war.
Now our young university physics graduate is behind a gunnery rangefinder, high up on a heaving battleship in the dark of night, himself just barely awake.
His battleship is making a desperate turn, in high wind and waves, and at top speed, to dodge a possible incoming torpedo.
Meanwhile our young officer is trying his absolute best to get his 12 inch gun turret to score at least on hit on an heavily armoured (and armed) enemy battleship.
The enemy is also is bobbing up and down and turning left and right at high speed in equally heavy seas a dozen or so miles away in the dark.
The enemy ship is trying just as hard to land one or two shots on the superstructure of his own battleship - which if it happens, will likely kill him and render moot any success at getting his battleship's guns to hit the enemy.
This, despite the fact that both his battleship's hull and its gun turrets, both heavily armoured, remain totally undamaged.
He has been taught to use Newtonian ballastics to hit and destroy 60,000 ton ships, only to discover that what he is really aiming for with his massive one ton armouring piercing shell is the 150 fragile pounds of his counterpart gunnery officer.
Neither officer will ever hit what they were aiming for, but both are likely to end up dead --- when their ships make the wrong turn and run into an enemy shell equally off target.
Ballastics has descended in to a good old fashioned low tech infantry fire fight: fire as many shots as quickly as you can in the general direction of the enemy and hope some by mischance actually hit him.
Forget even that it is nighttime and in heavy seas, with two ships very far apart, moving at top speed in irregular weaving patterns while bobbing up and down in the water irregularly.
And that the eye on the rangefinder is hindered by all the bright flashes and dense smoke of real battles.
Or that in the minute or two it takes to set range and elevation, the gun to be fired and for the shell to travels to its target, the other ship will have irregularly altered what ever semi-predictable course,speed and elevation it was following at the time of 'set'.
Think about the intermittent winds across the path of that dozen or so miles - winds with different temperatures and density of air - all which affect how a shell deviates from its Newtonian path.
The gun barrel, its wearing-out with repeated shooting and even its changing temperature from shot to shot, all effect the accuracy of our departing shell.
Each new shell is never been machined as true to its designed shape as one would like - just as the bags of propellant each display a random slightly difference in the amount of force they provide.
Many of these factors, but not all, can be accounted on the naval battleship range and after a number of shots, gunnery officers do hit a target and retire to the wardroom.
But even the most lifelike gunnery range practise, far more real-world than the university lab, does not prepare the gunnery crews for a real-world battle.
In a real battle, it is far more likely that three battleships and heavy cruisers on each side are all trying to hit each other at the same time : what fans of Newton like to call "many-bodied problems" , the kind they'd rather not talk about in the physics classroom.
Yet battleship gunnery crews in WWII were the best trained, best equipped, most scientifically up to date gunners of all the war effort : none of the six nations that had modern battleships spared any expense or scientific effort to make their gunners topnotch.
But equally, all the odds against the various gunners hitting their targets had been equally up-gunned.
Faster and more agile opposing ships, heavier armour, longer and bigger guns, extreme firing ranges, night fighting, heavy weather fighting, submarines and dive bombers coming at them as well as big shells : it just never stopped.
Most of the (hugely expensive, manned by thousands of highly trained men) aptly named "capital" ships that were sunk in WWII, did not fall before the big guns, but rather to much smaller,cheaper, simpler weapons : sea mines, torpedoes, dive bombers, kamikazes.
Ballastics and science hardly entered into most of those losses : instead very brave men got within pointblank range and then eyeballed their way to success.
Engineers can understand that 'can-do' attitude perfectly well....
It should be understood at the onset that Science's task is strictly pedagogical and that it doesn't have to provide answers that are true, in any realistic sense, merely ones that are correct.
In other words, an excellent science experiment also is an excellent exam question.
I am speaking here of course only of the physical sciences, those sciences that form a subset of human psychology.
Their main function in life is to boost the students' self esteem and make them willing and - God Bless 'Em ! - even eager to take on the world outside the High School or University as a non-physical science grad.
These science experiments are meant to give non-scientists and non-engineers, and probably a lot of engineers and scientists as well , the confidence-building illusion that the world outside the lab is as controlled and predictable as it is inside the university's "sheltered workshop".
As I have said before, philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright's key insight (aka the "Cartwright machine") is that the crucial component that Science, along with its machines, experiments and laboratories, requires to be a successful human activity is a metaphorical ROOF , to shelter those activities from messy Reality's wind, rain and dust.
And Frederick Christiansen argues that successful engineering often means adding yet more roofs to the designs-with-roofs coming out of the science labs, to make them robust enough to endure daily Reality.
So, for example, Newtonian ballistic equation solving (classical science at its purest) can take on a very different cast in actual battles of war.
Now our young university physics graduate is behind a gunnery rangefinder, high up on a heaving battleship in the dark of night, himself just barely awake.
His battleship is making a desperate turn, in high wind and waves, and at top speed, to dodge a possible incoming torpedo.
Meanwhile our young officer is trying his absolute best to get his 12 inch gun turret to score at least on hit on an heavily armoured (and armed) enemy battleship.
The enemy is also is bobbing up and down and turning left and right at high speed in equally heavy seas a dozen or so miles away in the dark.
The enemy ship is trying just as hard to land one or two shots on the superstructure of his own battleship - which if it happens, will likely kill him and render moot any success at getting his battleship's guns to hit the enemy.
This, despite the fact that both his battleship's hull and its gun turrets, both heavily armoured, remain totally undamaged.
He has been taught to use Newtonian ballastics to hit and destroy 60,000 ton ships, only to discover that what he is really aiming for with his massive one ton armouring piercing shell is the 150 fragile pounds of his counterpart gunnery officer.
Neither officer will ever hit what they were aiming for, but both are likely to end up dead --- when their ships make the wrong turn and run into an enemy shell equally off target.
Ballastics has descended in to a good old fashioned low tech infantry fire fight: fire as many shots as quickly as you can in the general direction of the enemy and hope some by mischance actually hit him.
Forget even that it is nighttime and in heavy seas, with two ships very far apart, moving at top speed in irregular weaving patterns while bobbing up and down in the water irregularly.
And that the eye on the rangefinder is hindered by all the bright flashes and dense smoke of real battles.
Or that in the minute or two it takes to set range and elevation, the gun to be fired and for the shell to travels to its target, the other ship will have irregularly altered what ever semi-predictable course,speed and elevation it was following at the time of 'set'.
Think about the intermittent winds across the path of that dozen or so miles - winds with different temperatures and density of air - all which affect how a shell deviates from its Newtonian path.
The gun barrel, its wearing-out with repeated shooting and even its changing temperature from shot to shot, all effect the accuracy of our departing shell.
Each new shell is never been machined as true to its designed shape as one would like - just as the bags of propellant each display a random slightly difference in the amount of force they provide.
Many of these factors, but not all, can be accounted on the naval battleship range and after a number of shots, gunnery officers do hit a target and retire to the wardroom.
But even the most lifelike gunnery range practise, far more real-world than the university lab, does not prepare the gunnery crews for a real-world battle.
In a real battle, it is far more likely that three battleships and heavy cruisers on each side are all trying to hit each other at the same time : what fans of Newton like to call "many-bodied problems" , the kind they'd rather not talk about in the physics classroom.
Yet battleship gunnery crews in WWII were the best trained, best equipped, most scientifically up to date gunners of all the war effort : none of the six nations that had modern battleships spared any expense or scientific effort to make their gunners topnotch.
But equally, all the odds against the various gunners hitting their targets had been equally up-gunned.
Faster and more agile opposing ships, heavier armour, longer and bigger guns, extreme firing ranges, night fighting, heavy weather fighting, submarines and dive bombers coming at them as well as big shells : it just never stopped.
Most of the (hugely expensive, manned by thousands of highly trained men) aptly named "capital" ships that were sunk in WWII, did not fall before the big guns, but rather to much smaller,cheaper, simpler weapons : sea mines, torpedoes, dive bombers, kamikazes.
Ballastics and science hardly entered into most of those losses : instead very brave men got within pointblank range and then eyeballed their way to success.
Engineers can understand that 'can-do' attitude perfectly well....
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Modernity: the 500 Year Reich
In retrospect, all of the promise of the New York's World Fair (1939-1940) turned out to be just the sad brief apogee of Late Modernity, indeed of all Modernity itself.
It hardly started out that way.
Five Hundred Years of Modernity was to be celebrated as part of the Fair's second year , marking the 500 years supposedly since Gutenberg invented the printing press --- and began the onset of cheap, mass produced, printed knowledge.
Talk of a 1000 Year Reich in places like Hitler's Germany, at this point, was just that : talk .
But Modernity's first 500 years was already safely in the record books and tangibly real, real for all to see and applaud.
In 1939, there seemed no reason why there shouldn't be at least another 500 years of triumph ahead for Modernity.
Yet it is now generally agreed that by the post-Auschwitz, post-Hiroshima, post-Katyn autumn of 1945 , Granddad's Modernity was well and truly broken.
And out of that wreckage gradually crawled a very different and very new era, our own Era of Post-Modernity.
What could have gone so terribly wrong, for Modernity to soar way to its apogee and then plunge way down to its nadir, in just six short years ?
Clearly it was World War Two (Modernity's own war, Modernity with its thrusters fully engaged) that was what had gone so badly wrong ....
It hardly started out that way.
Five Hundred Years of Modernity was to be celebrated as part of the Fair's second year , marking the 500 years supposedly since Gutenberg invented the printing press --- and began the onset of cheap, mass produced, printed knowledge.
Talk of a 1000 Year Reich in places like Hitler's Germany, at this point, was just that : talk .
But Modernity's first 500 years was already safely in the record books and tangibly real, real for all to see and applaud.
In 1939, there seemed no reason why there shouldn't be at least another 500 years of triumph ahead for Modernity.
Yet it is now generally agreed that by the post-Auschwitz, post-Hiroshima, post-Katyn autumn of 1945 , Granddad's Modernity was well and truly broken.
And out of that wreckage gradually crawled a very different and very new era, our own Era of Post-Modernity.
What could have gone so terribly wrong, for Modernity to soar way to its apogee and then plunge way down to its nadir, in just six short years ?
Clearly it was World War Two (Modernity's own war, Modernity with its thrusters fully engaged) that was what had gone so badly wrong ....
Thursday, March 14, 2013
MO goes po : K goes r : thermo-setable Reality becomes eternally thermo-softenable
Modernity optimistically and fervently believed that all of Reality , the entire chemical, biological and physical world, was plastic of a definite sort : thermo-set-able.
Everything - even human beings - was malleable but once set perfectly and 'cured' would remain thus - perfect - forever.
It was, in a sense, a view of reality as all K-selectable ; round rods for every round hole : every niche perfectly matched to an activity or being - forever.
Modernity feared, a fear never far away from this optimistic view of Reality, that Reality could also be plastic of the thermo-softening sort, if left in the wrong human hands : infinitely re-meltable in new shapes, most of them horrible mutations far far from beauty and utility.
Only a firm - tough - brutal - hand could keep the human forces of r-select from ruining Paradise.
Today we tend to more see Reality as r-selecting and thermo-softening : infinitely and eternally unpredictable.
But as post-Modernists, we tend to lay the credit or blame for this less at the feet of humans and more at the feet of Nature itself.
Humans can still create any chemical we can imagine, for example, but we no longer claim that we know, in advance , how it will interact with the world outside the lab.
This is because all of the hyperreal claims made by WWII authorities on both sides all fell flat on their face-----making us survivors eternally suspicious of extravagant claims about the human ability to precisely control Reality's plasticity.
Man manipulate the plasticity of Nature : yes.
But precisely manipulate that plasticity : no, no a thousand times no....
Everything - even human beings - was malleable but once set perfectly and 'cured' would remain thus - perfect - forever.
It was, in a sense, a view of reality as all K-selectable ; round rods for every round hole : every niche perfectly matched to an activity or being - forever.
Modernity feared, a fear never far away from this optimistic view of Reality, that Reality could also be plastic of the thermo-softening sort, if left in the wrong human hands : infinitely re-meltable in new shapes, most of them horrible mutations far far from beauty and utility.
Only a firm - tough - brutal - hand could keep the human forces of r-select from ruining Paradise.
Today we tend to more see Reality as r-selecting and thermo-softening : infinitely and eternally unpredictable.
But as post-Modernists, we tend to lay the credit or blame for this less at the feet of humans and more at the feet of Nature itself.
Humans can still create any chemical we can imagine, for example, but we no longer claim that we know, in advance , how it will interact with the world outside the lab.
This is because all of the hyperreal claims made by WWII authorities on both sides all fell flat on their face-----making us survivors eternally suspicious of extravagant claims about the human ability to precisely control Reality's plasticity.
Man manipulate the plasticity of Nature : yes.
But precisely manipulate that plasticity : no, no a thousand times no....
Saturday, March 9, 2013
MODERNITY as just one vast marketing ploy
At its very base base, Modernity consists of convincing other people (call 'em customers or colonies, tis the same) that you are smart (progressive/a professional scientist) and they are stupid (backward/laypeople).
Modernity and Imperialism after all grew up together and declined together: post-modernity and de-colonization being pretty much one and the same thing.
The 1920s trend to replace mom's homemade bread with industrialized white bread and Britain's attempt to create imperialized/militarized penicillin during WWII are two shades of the same big lie.
In most rural Nova Scotia farmhouses until recently, the biggest and cosiest room in the house was the kitchen where the big wood stove was the entire house's only form of heat.
There the kids would gather after school - by necessity in winter - to keep warm and watch mom prepare and then cook biscuits ,made from flour and water, that the kids immediately consumed. Artificial chemical preservatives need hardly enter such an immediate process.
But starting in the 1920s, bread manufacturers and their clever Goebbels of Madison Avenue successfully convince a new generation of Moms - and kids - that mom's homemade bread was unsafe and unhygenic.
Scientists in white gowns in white factories could put the right sort of chemicals in bread to kill all germs - and not so incidentially - allow factory bread to be shipped a thousand miles across a nation, sit about for weeks and still not grow mold before being consumed.
Germs were destroyed - as were local bakeries.
All the moms in the Nova Scotia rural hinterland became an internal colony, as she no longer baked bread to compete with Ben's , the huge breadmaker in the imperial metropolitan centre of Halifax.
Instead she focused on cutting fish at the local fishplant and with her earnings now bought Ben's fluffy white stuff.
When I was a kid, the local children were embarrassed to have to bring delicious homemade bread and baked-beans sandwiches to school and would trade it for sandwiches of Ben's bread and Kraft sandwich spread.
Howard Florey was the son of an industrialist and knew all there was to know about how modernity cum industrialization cum imperialism worked.
He was always most reluctant to ever give anyone some of his penicillium spores (usually sending rubbishy mutant spores unlikely to produce penicillin, if he was pushed to respond conventionally as one scientist to another scientist's request for some of the material mentioned in his published article.)
By contrast, he was almost willing to be seen forcing some of his Oxford Standard dried penicillin powder upon you , so as to prove he had made dry penicillin first and had set down the standard for others to follow.
He was actually doing nothing that Britain's political and industrial elite hadn't already worked out for themselves long before.
Give a colonist a vial of British-made penicillin and he could save a life for a day but then he'd need to trade cheap Indian cotton for expensive British penicillin, forever, if he hoped to go on saving Indian lives.
"Give a man a fish" et al, in a new guise.
By contrast, Robert Pulvertaft and Nancy Atkinson had different plans.
Howard Florey visited both and publicly - reluctantly - praised both, but was really was privately furious at both.
Pulvertaft in Cairo, Egypt had used Florey-made and British industry-made dry penicillin powder but they often arrived in pretty bad shape - unlike a fungi spore they didn't really survive travel well.
But Pulvertaft had also secretly got a sample of Fleming's penicillium spores mailed to him from a pal at Wellcome Labs in London - and as spores do - they traveled perfectly well indeed and started into making penicillin right away.
He was, like a rural Nova Scotian mom, making homemade penicillin in front of the patients to be consumed on the spot - and so like mom, didn't really need a whole lot of fancy high tech chemistry to render his penicillin safe.
His patients were wounded soldiers in his large base hospital and the liquid penicillin was barely produced by the penicillium spores in the hospital lab than it was coursing through the veins of the grateful soldiers : drying and chemical preservatives hardly entered into this cosy setup.
And he freely began to teach the local natives and other military units how to make their own penicillin with spores of his.
His efforts made Florey and Whitehall very angry indeed --- Britain hoped, once it had synthesized penicillin , to see a huge trade in penicillin in exchange for Egyptian cotton etc.
Nancy Atkinson because she was located in Adelaide Australia, Florey's home town, had his number and knew of his peculiar - grasping - personality.
She avoided approaching Florey, got her penicillin from Fleming himself and soon got a local Adelaide firm to make local penicillin and gave some spores to Duhig in Brisbane so he too could goose up the tardy government approach to providing enough penicillin for civilian as well as soldier.
Florey was very angry that he - as the long time away "local boy" - hadn't been invited in to help in Australia. Maybe his selfish and secretive attitude had something to do with it ?
I have said that the biggest reason for the long delay in providing wartime penicillin to those dying for lack of it was Florey, Flemings and AN Richards' obsession with weaponizing it.
By this I meant they rejected Pulvertaft and Duhig's implicit argument that penicillin was best used systemically (injected into the entire body) for life-threatening blood poisoning because - technically, as a drug - that is where it worked best.
And that this being the case, life-threatening blood poisoning cases were almost always sent to the big hospitals with a big enough lab and staff to make the penicillin,on the spot, for the steady stream of blood poisoning cases coming in.
There was no need to waste time making penicillin a stable enough material to send from a central factory to store in regional warehouses until traveling detail salesmen had sold it in small amounts to individual GPs.
Disagreeing strenuously, Florey, Fleming, Richards et al felt the greatest war need was for a local antiseptic to be poured or sprinkled inside wounds on the battlefield , soon as a soldier was wounded.
Let me say that more careful research,after the war,( including some by Pulvertaft himself) concluded this was an artificial problem - and that into this square artificial hole both the round sulfa and round wartime penicillin were reluctantly pushed - both failing , but for different reasons.
But sulfa and penicillin did save many lives, but not on the battlefield, but rather back in the base hospital, doing what they did best - reach into every part of the body and killing bacteria out in the open.
Killing bacteria in hard to get to places remained (and remains) hard to do - but if these bacteria did not get into the blood stream, they were almost never fatal in and of themselves.
But let us now combine weaponized penicillin with imperialized penicillin : because a dry , stable, complicatedly mass produced penicillin also suited the post war aims of Britain : to profitably sell high tech medicine to nations less advanced than European ones.
Convincing the lesser breeds that homemade (really made by skilled microbiologists in big hospital labs) penicillin, like homemade bread, was so un-civilizied , was at least half the battle.....
Modernity and Imperialism after all grew up together and declined together: post-modernity and de-colonization being pretty much one and the same thing.
The 1920s trend to replace mom's homemade bread with industrialized white bread and Britain's attempt to create imperialized/militarized penicillin during WWII are two shades of the same big lie.
In most rural Nova Scotia farmhouses until recently, the biggest and cosiest room in the house was the kitchen where the big wood stove was the entire house's only form of heat.
There the kids would gather after school - by necessity in winter - to keep warm and watch mom prepare and then cook biscuits ,made from flour and water, that the kids immediately consumed. Artificial chemical preservatives need hardly enter such an immediate process.
But starting in the 1920s, bread manufacturers and their clever Goebbels of Madison Avenue successfully convince a new generation of Moms - and kids - that mom's homemade bread was unsafe and unhygenic.
Scientists in white gowns in white factories could put the right sort of chemicals in bread to kill all germs - and not so incidentially - allow factory bread to be shipped a thousand miles across a nation, sit about for weeks and still not grow mold before being consumed.
Germs were destroyed - as were local bakeries.
Re-casting Mom as a lesser breed
All the moms in the Nova Scotia rural hinterland became an internal colony, as she no longer baked bread to compete with Ben's , the huge breadmaker in the imperial metropolitan centre of Halifax.
Instead she focused on cutting fish at the local fishplant and with her earnings now bought Ben's fluffy white stuff.
When I was a kid, the local children were embarrassed to have to bring delicious homemade bread and baked-beans sandwiches to school and would trade it for sandwiches of Ben's bread and Kraft sandwich spread.
Howard Florey was the son of an industrialist and knew all there was to know about how modernity cum industrialization cum imperialism worked.
He was always most reluctant to ever give anyone some of his penicillium spores (usually sending rubbishy mutant spores unlikely to produce penicillin, if he was pushed to respond conventionally as one scientist to another scientist's request for some of the material mentioned in his published article.)
By contrast, he was almost willing to be seen forcing some of his Oxford Standard dried penicillin powder upon you , so as to prove he had made dry penicillin first and had set down the standard for others to follow.
He was actually doing nothing that Britain's political and industrial elite hadn't already worked out for themselves long before.
Give a colonist a vial of British-made penicillin and he could save a life for a day but then he'd need to trade cheap Indian cotton for expensive British penicillin, forever, if he hoped to go on saving Indian lives.
"Give a man a fish" et al, in a new guise.
Enter Pulvertaft, Atkinson and Duhig
Howard Florey visited both and publicly - reluctantly - praised both, but was really was privately furious at both.
Pulvertaft in Cairo, Egypt had used Florey-made and British industry-made dry penicillin powder but they often arrived in pretty bad shape - unlike a fungi spore they didn't really survive travel well.
But Pulvertaft had also secretly got a sample of Fleming's penicillium spores mailed to him from a pal at Wellcome Labs in London - and as spores do - they traveled perfectly well indeed and started into making penicillin right away.
He was, like a rural Nova Scotian mom, making homemade penicillin in front of the patients to be consumed on the spot - and so like mom, didn't really need a whole lot of fancy high tech chemistry to render his penicillin safe.
His patients were wounded soldiers in his large base hospital and the liquid penicillin was barely produced by the penicillium spores in the hospital lab than it was coursing through the veins of the grateful soldiers : drying and chemical preservatives hardly entered into this cosy setup.
And he freely began to teach the local natives and other military units how to make their own penicillin with spores of his.
His efforts made Florey and Whitehall very angry indeed --- Britain hoped, once it had synthesized penicillin , to see a huge trade in penicillin in exchange for Egyptian cotton etc.
Nancy Atkinson because she was located in Adelaide Australia, Florey's home town, had his number and knew of his peculiar - grasping - personality.
She avoided approaching Florey, got her penicillin from Fleming himself and soon got a local Adelaide firm to make local penicillin and gave some spores to Duhig in Brisbane so he too could goose up the tardy government approach to providing enough penicillin for civilian as well as soldier.
Florey was very angry that he - as the long time away "local boy" - hadn't been invited in to help in Australia. Maybe his selfish and secretive attitude had something to do with it ?
I have said that the biggest reason for the long delay in providing wartime penicillin to those dying for lack of it was Florey, Flemings and AN Richards' obsession with weaponizing it.
By this I meant they rejected Pulvertaft and Duhig's implicit argument that penicillin was best used systemically (injected into the entire body) for life-threatening blood poisoning because - technically, as a drug - that is where it worked best.
And that this being the case, life-threatening blood poisoning cases were almost always sent to the big hospitals with a big enough lab and staff to make the penicillin,on the spot, for the steady stream of blood poisoning cases coming in.
There was no need to waste time making penicillin a stable enough material to send from a central factory to store in regional warehouses until traveling detail salesmen had sold it in small amounts to individual GPs.
Disagreeing strenuously, Florey, Fleming, Richards et al felt the greatest war need was for a local antiseptic to be poured or sprinkled inside wounds on the battlefield , soon as a soldier was wounded.
Let me say that more careful research,after the war,( including some by Pulvertaft himself) concluded this was an artificial problem - and that into this square artificial hole both the round sulfa and round wartime penicillin were reluctantly pushed - both failing , but for different reasons.
But sulfa and penicillin did save many lives, but not on the battlefield, but rather back in the base hospital, doing what they did best - reach into every part of the body and killing bacteria out in the open.
Killing bacteria in hard to get to places remained (and remains) hard to do - but if these bacteria did not get into the blood stream, they were almost never fatal in and of themselves.
Weaponized penicillin was imperialized penicillin
But let us now combine weaponized penicillin with imperialized penicillin : because a dry , stable, complicatedly mass produced penicillin also suited the post war aims of Britain : to profitably sell high tech medicine to nations less advanced than European ones.
Convincing the lesser breeds that homemade (really made by skilled microbiologists in big hospital labs) penicillin, like homemade bread, was so un-civilizied , was at least half the battle.....
Sunday, March 3, 2013
Henry Dawson : The biography of dull dishwater or of the first modernist to leave the reservation and go PoMo ?
I don't doubt that Henry Dawson's colleagues felt he made a 'perfectly competent associate professor' ( in the most damming sense of that ominous phrase) ---- but that as an individual he was a man extremely unremarkable and totally non memorable.
Even those who knew him very well, and who choose to write their personal and scientific memoirs, still found virtually nothing to say about Dawson.
I have been attempting to write his non-authorized biography for almost nine years now and I still know very little about the inner Dr Dawson.
What keeps me happily to my post is my fascination with what Dr Dawson did , not what he said or felt - that, and the lure involved in searching for a reasonable explanation why this most ordinary of men did the things he did , and under the most trying conditions imaginable.
We have accounts of the Modern Age and of our own Post Modern Age, just as we have biographies of Modernists and of Post Modernists.
But in Henry Dawson we have the rarest of rare species : a Modernist caught is the process of becoming a Post Modernist and in the process, shaking the world around us completely.
So a dull as dishwater backwater modernist ? Or a world-class disturber of Modern decorum, a ravager of Modernity ? Or a bit of both, a sort of latter-day Henry Alline ?
I chose Answer three......
Even those who knew him very well, and who choose to write their personal and scientific memoirs, still found virtually nothing to say about Dawson.
I have been attempting to write his non-authorized biography for almost nine years now and I still know very little about the inner Dr Dawson.
What keeps me happily to my post is my fascination with what Dr Dawson did , not what he said or felt - that, and the lure involved in searching for a reasonable explanation why this most ordinary of men did the things he did , and under the most trying conditions imaginable.
We have accounts of the Modern Age and of our own Post Modern Age, just as we have biographies of Modernists and of Post Modernists.
But in Henry Dawson we have the rarest of rare species : a Modernist caught is the process of becoming a Post Modernist and in the process, shaking the world around us completely.
So a dull as dishwater backwater modernist ? Or a world-class disturber of Modern decorum, a ravager of Modernity ? Or a bit of both, a sort of latter-day Henry Alline ?
I chose Answer three......
Friday, March 1, 2013
"Triumph of the SCIENTIFIC Will" : WWII scientists as 'swimmers into technical sweetness leaping'..
Sure, sure: Hitler, Mussolini ,Tojo and Stalin and all that lot started the war, but it took the collective will of the world's best scientists and engineers to build their visions up into History's bloodiest, most heart-less war.
It was the scientists' war, the only truly Modernist war, the war of their big shiny machines . Scientism's big moment under the Klieg Lights.
It was Science's incautious pre-war claims that moved the politicians and the generals and the industrialists and - above all - the ordinary public of all nations to fund the killing machines --- in preference to returning to the foot soldier led wars of earlier times.
Of course in the end, we never saw the scientists in the box in Nuremberg in 1945 : because many many more of us, back then, saw 1945 as the apogee of Modernist science rather than its death knell and the birth of post-modernity.....
It was the scientists' war, the only truly Modernist war, the war of their big shiny machines . Scientism's big moment under the Klieg Lights.
It was Science's incautious pre-war claims that moved the politicians and the generals and the industrialists and - above all - the ordinary public of all nations to fund the killing machines --- in preference to returning to the foot soldier led wars of earlier times.
Of course in the end, we never saw the scientists in the box in Nuremberg in 1945 : because many many more of us, back then, saw 1945 as the apogee of Modernist science rather than its death knell and the birth of post-modernity.....
Thursday, November 15, 2012
Skygods vs Earthlings: a post-Modernist history of WWII
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Modernity finally gets its own WAR |
World War II was like all the certitudes of grade 11 High School Science, armed with machine guns and unleashed upon the physical reality outside the laboratory door : the most violent, evil, catastrophe that Humanity has ever inflicted upon itself.
Modernity's scientists - scientists of faith - lost the physical war but crucially won the postwar battle of words, won the war of books, myths and movies (or did they ?)
1945 : MO goes PO
Because today historians are starting to uncover the stories of WWII's evidence-based scientists ,who resisted the onslaught of science based on faith , as best they could.
Above all, younger historians are starting to tell Mother Nature's version of WWII, because she easily bested Modernity's science, time and again.
Now we can see post-war 1945 for what it really was : the time when MO goes PO, when Modernity began to fade and be gradually replaced by post-Modernity's new Global Commensality Era.........
Saturday, July 28, 2012
Erroneous common sense vs nonsensical Reality : Sciences, solid vs quantum
quantum-modernity
Modernists such as think tank climate deniers pride themselves on their side's "solid science" , their "common sense" science developed from that reliably Anglo Saxon trio of Newton, Dalton & Darwin .
They dismiss the other side's (quantum-based) science as "nonsensical".
On both counts they are correct but unfortunately, also in error.
(Rather like a quantum particle which can be shown by experiment to be in two places at once and also both a particle and a wave.)
Nineteen Century science - the only sort of science that 21st century university undergraduates and high school seniors are ever taught, is indeed solid and commonsensical.
Unfortunately, starting in the 1890s it was also shown to be fundamentally wrong (more accurately : wrong at fundamental scales) and only apparently semi-accurate over a limited (but very common) scale of activities.
Up until about 1947, nothing we had ever built in the Age of Modernity (except perhaps natural penicillin antibiotics) reflected the new quantum sciences of physics,chemistry and biology.
Not even the A-Bomb.
But starting with transistors and other semi conductors, almost everything truly major invented since then has been only possible by understanding and accepting quantum science's take on reality.
We can still safely build huge bridges and dams using only old Newton's rules, but I won't want to land a plane using a GPS system built by Newtonian Science : crash ,boom, dead !
What we take to be solid actually isn't fundamentally solid - not from those little hard elastic balls we thought were atoms, right down to the smallest possible sub atomic building
And a great deal of quantum science is indeed non-intutitive and nonsensical but the measurements do not lie ; to parts per million they are real, they are reality.
Our sense impressions are at fault : not Reality.
By contrast much of Newton's & Maxwell's most fundamental laws fail embarrassingly at crucial points.
Nineteenth century science convinced engineers, at least, that feathers fell as fast as lead ball (in a vacuum) and that the sun's gravity "force" affected the earth via "spooky action at a distance" : neither ideas seem on the surface to be commonsensical.
But they were (and are) wildly popular notions among modernists and deniers despite all that.
Why ?
I would argue this is because Nineteenth Century Science promised us that while our macro (Man-sized) world of volcano and weather sized objects and events seemed complex, dynamic and uncertain, it reassured us that underneath - at the most fundamental level - Reality was actually solid, simple, certain, regular.
Fundamentally Reality was knowable, controllable and manipulatable by Man.
A libertarian capitalist or socialist's dream : in Isaiah Berlin's formulation : Liberty for Man and Slavery for Atoms.
What quantum science revealed was exactly the reverse: a man sized rock was solid - particularly if your car hit it - but neither its fundamental atoms or their tinier components were solid - really just flickering bits of energy : altogether the wrong sort of eternally shifting sand to set the foundations of an ideology of certitudes upon.
Quantum science and Solid science of modernity / libertarianism / climate denial are fundamentally opposed - only one can be true.
No science experiment - even at the high school level - shows that solid science beats quantum science ; always solid science is a subset of quantum science, a useful subset that sometimes works - and then embarrassingly - sometimes does not.
But quantum science's revealing of the reality at its most fundamental has split over into post-modernity ; in fact helped create it and sustain it.
Post-modernity is quantum-modernity ......
Monday, June 25, 2012
Sun-hegemony in a post-hegemonic world
It is a very very brave - and rare - reader of the TORONTO SUN who publicly dares to define the group hegemony among its readers.
But recently, 6% of those readers defied the SUN Hegemony that there is no change in the Climate.
No word as yet if other modern readers of this most modernist of Canadian newspapers headed out, cane & walker at hand, to torch the offending six percent's retirement homes and extended care villas.
The Toronto Sun planted a news story entitled "Green Drivel Exposed" ---- exposed by journalist Lorrie Goldstein as a suitable cue, in case readers were still unsure how to vote in the poll below the story that asked " Do you think global warming is a real threat ?"
Now in the good old days, back in Albania or Alberta, you could be sure that 99.87% would answer correctly , with the other .13% presently 'recovering from their injuries' in police custody.
But in this post-wildrose-spring, things are much freer now and while 6 % said "yes" --- mysteriously 91% answered "no" and only 3% gave the correct answer which was "it won't be my problem" .
I don't know if you have seen a recent photo of the moderns en masse --- the white hair , the knobby knees, the walkers , the canes, the oxygen assists - it is a sight to behold.
Most have lost a lot of weight from their heyday back in the 1950s, and are down to about ninety pounds of skin, bones and bile.
I really think bile must be the only biological substance that goes up in production as we age.
Now if the same question was asked at ,ehem, the greenbloggers website, I have a feel that 91% would have given the correct answer for its editors : "yes we believe in global warming" .
We're in a post-hegemonic world and the varying hegemonies will have to war it out for control of the collective political consensus, if it still can be re-consituted , while the skies above get ever hotter and the planet below watches its biodiversity flatline.
The effort to save the earth should be a race against aging as much as it is against Time.
However, with the aging moderns getting fresh new supporters among the millions of young "Spacers", as starry-eyed about Mars Colonies as they are about saving the rainbow-blowing LGBT-friendly whales, this battle will go on for a very long,long time - a longer time than the planet has to right itself......
But recently, 6% of those readers defied the SUN Hegemony that there is no change in the Climate.
No word as yet if other modern readers of this most modernist of Canadian newspapers headed out, cane & walker at hand, to torch the offending six percent's retirement homes and extended care villas.
The Toronto Sun planted a news story entitled "Green Drivel Exposed" ---- exposed by journalist Lorrie Goldstein as a suitable cue, in case readers were still unsure how to vote in the poll below the story that asked " Do you think global warming is a real threat ?"
Now in the good old days, back in Albania or Alberta, you could be sure that 99.87% would answer correctly , with the other .13% presently 'recovering from their injuries' in police custody.
But in this post-wildrose-spring, things are much freer now and while 6 % said "yes" --- mysteriously 91% answered "no" and only 3% gave the correct answer which was "it won't be my problem" .
I don't know if you have seen a recent photo of the moderns en masse --- the white hair , the knobby knees, the walkers , the canes, the oxygen assists - it is a sight to behold.
Most have lost a lot of weight from their heyday back in the 1950s, and are down to about ninety pounds of skin, bones and bile.
I really think bile must be the only biological substance that goes up in production as we age.
Now if the same question was asked at ,ehem, the greenbloggers website, I have a feel that 91% would have given the correct answer for its editors : "yes we believe in global warming" .
We're in a post-hegemonic world and the varying hegemonies will have to war it out for control of the collective political consensus, if it still can be re-consituted , while the skies above get ever hotter and the planet below watches its biodiversity flatline.
The effort to save the earth should be a race against aging as much as it is against Time.
However, with the aging moderns getting fresh new supporters among the millions of young "Spacers", as starry-eyed about Mars Colonies as they are about saving the rainbow-blowing LGBT-friendly whales, this battle will go on for a very long,long time - a longer time than the planet has to right itself......
Friday, June 22, 2012
1945 : the climatic Battle over MODERN synthetic penicillin vs POSTMODERN natural penicillin
If we see Postmodernity as organic and natural, versus High Modernity's love for the synthetic and the man-made (and I think we all do) why then do we focus on 1945's Auschwitz and Hiroshima as the climatic revelations that signal the switch from the Era of Modernity to the Era of post-Modernity ?
I have been doing a re-think in preparation for a talk I am giving about MH Dawson and his tiny team's approach to inventing "GP" penicillin and in fact their approach to all things weak and small, versus the thinking of his immense (and immense-oriented) opponents.
It seems to me that we can see in the battle that Dawson and natural penicillin finally won in late 1945 against the forces for synthetic penicillin, led by the OSRD and Vannevar Bush & Newton Richards, the real roots of the Fall of Modernity and the Rise of the Post Modern, Globally Commensal, Age....
I have been doing a re-think in preparation for a talk I am giving about MH Dawson and his tiny team's approach to inventing "GP" penicillin and in fact their approach to all things weak and small, versus the thinking of his immense (and immense-oriented) opponents.
It seems to me that we can see in the battle that Dawson and natural penicillin finally won in late 1945 against the forces for synthetic penicillin, led by the OSRD and Vannevar Bush & Newton Richards, the real roots of the Fall of Modernity and the Rise of the Post Modern, Globally Commensal, Age....
Saturday, May 19, 2012
This un-civil war of words is "The News Story of the Century" and it is 3000 years old ...
On one side : the SKY GODs , utopians clinging to outdated science, all to bolster their denial of any limits to humanity's potential in a limitless Universe.
On the other side: the EARTHLINGs, realists accepting the newest science, believing that the Earth is a rare, perhaps unique, human-friendly planet that nevertheless operates under biological and material restraints that must be obeyed.
On the question of whether humanity's carbon pollution of the atmosphere will change our climate in highly de-stabilizing ways, these two sides are better known as Deniers versus Doomers.
I believe the new science brings us much good news along with the bad.
The new post 1945, post-modern science's central metaphor of global commensality says that 'all life on Earth dines at one table, shares but one lifeboat' , that all life survives by taking in each other's laundry - recycling scarce biological resources over and over.
It reassures us that Life has endured some hard knocks on Earth over the last 4 billion years, but it has surmounted them and flourished - by not having its grasp exceed its reach, Robert Browning to the contrary.....
On the other side: the EARTHLINGs, realists accepting the newest science, believing that the Earth is a rare, perhaps unique, human-friendly planet that nevertheless operates under biological and material restraints that must be obeyed.
On the question of whether humanity's carbon pollution of the atmosphere will change our climate in highly de-stabilizing ways, these two sides are better known as Deniers versus Doomers.
I believe the new science brings us much good news along with the bad.
The new post 1945, post-modern science's central metaphor of global commensality says that 'all life on Earth dines at one table, shares but one lifeboat' , that all life survives by taking in each other's laundry - recycling scarce biological resources over and over.
It reassures us that Life has endured some hard knocks on Earth over the last 4 billion years, but it has surmounted them and flourished - by not having its grasp exceed its reach, Robert Browning to the contrary.....
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