Primitive lifesaving penicillium and Advanced Auschwitz lifetaking put the Post into Progress

I suggest we replace the widely used term 'Post Modernity' with 'Post Progress' because it is both much more descriptive of what is actually going on and much more easily understood by the majority of the population who live outside academia.

I hope we all can at least agree on the second point : that far more people understand the term Era of Progress, 1875-1965 than do they the term Era of Modernity 1875-1965.

Now onto the first point.

All the many and varied postmodern -isms have at least one key element in common : they involve hitherto verboten mixing.

Be it of high and low (say in art) or normal and abnormal (say in sexual cum civil rights) or central/official/dominant or local/periphery/subculture (as in imperial/hegemony relationships).

I used high and low as my first example deliberately because the Era of Modernity was also the era of Social Darwin defined Progress.

Deductive Progress : absolute universals in an absolutely closed universe yielded absolutely correct results 

Everything and everyone was slotted in one universal and eternal vertical hierarchy.

In/out, normal/abnormal etc were really just variants of the all important high/low distinction in worth.

The elements of that ladder were never allowed to touch, let alone intermingle : for it was a heavily modified 'survival of the fittest' version of the old Great Chain of Being, only now leaning forward forty five degrees.

Supposedly 'Iron' Laws of Nature : absolute determinism and absolute reductionism

To the bottom left, were the oldest, smallest, weakest, stupidest beings destined - by 'the iron laws of nature', to quote a highly typical modernity cum progressive phrase - to be replaced by the newer, bigger, more complex and smarter beings at the top right - Civilized Man.

(Man as in, definitely not a woman.)

Any sort of mixing of any of the rungs of this vertical ladder or chain of 'worthiness to continued life' was definitely not allowed.

Instead, being half breeds, mixed breeds, sterile and defective hybrids, engaging in miscegenation, being of mixed bloods and 'passing' were Progress's most extreme crimes.

Now it is well known that most civilized people in the Era of Progress regarded the advanced civilization on Earth, when measuring both culture and technology, was Germany.

As is well known, the horrific postwar evidence coming out of Auschwitz immediately put paid to the exalted status of eighty million Germans as the most civilized and the most progressive nation on earth.

In a much slower fashion, it also put paid to the two billion of the rest of us in our easy lazy unexamined notions of exactly what was civilized and progressive behavior.

In 1945, we suddenly had the top of the Great Chain of Being being revealed as cold blooded mass murderers of humanity, something usually described as the behavior of life at the bottom.

Meanwhile, the bottom of the Great Chain had also become the mass lifesavers of humanity in the form of fungus made penicillin, something you would normally more expect from advanced German chemists at the top than from primitive penicillium slime at the very bottom.

1945 : Progress upended and mixed - the low high and the high low.

In a sense, it was a return to an earlier way of thinking, when it was assumed and accepted that good and bad intermingled in every being, in every society, in every time.

Added to this - a new feature - was a growing understanding that all lifeforms had to intermingle to keep the biosphere running smoothly - that global commensality was a fact, not a choice.

If Art today is a pastiche, so too is Life.

Life does not always imitate Art : sometimes Art, post 1945 Art as an clear example, rushes forth in catchup mode, trying to imitate Life ....

Four years difference really matter : when you're four and eight

On August 15th 1945, the two children (ages four and eight) of a young American serviceman in the Pacific preparing to invade Japan probably responded quite differently from the united way their two grandmothers (aged 59 and 63) reacted to the news that the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had caused the Japanese to sue for peace.

The two grandmothers were both united in giving comparatively little thought to all the grandmothers and grandchildren killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki , so glad were they that their son/son-in-law wasn't going to be killed during the Allied invasion effort.

The eight year old child agreed - very glad that Daddy wasn't going to die overseas and would be coming home soon unharmed.

But the four year old child probably hadn't even been told that Daddy was facing imminent death overseas or that two bombs that killed thousands of children would now bring Daddy home safe.

This child's reaction was no reaction.

Because when you are very young, even only being four years apart in age makes a huge difference - though four years difference means nothing when you are two grandparents nearing retirement.

Flash forward to the Spring of 1956 and the news that deadly nuclear fallout from an American Bravo Castle Test of an hydrogen bomb had gone around the world in the atmosphere strong enough to kill a Japanese fisherman thousands of miles from the test site.

The grandmothers are now in their seventies and the eight year old is now 19 and drafted into the Army.

Their fear over American nuclear fallout worries and their regret for the loss of a human life is undoubtedly tempered by the thought that the American A-Bombs had saved thousands of American lives and that the wartime Japanese had been particularly cruel to other ethnicities on many well documented occasions.

By contrast, the four year old is now 15 and this child is distinctly uncomfortable with possible death or genetic damage from fallout radiation - possibly because of her viewing of many youth-oriented movies on the subject.

The child knows - from schoolbooks - that the A-Bombs killed hundreds of thousands but also shortened the war , saving the lives of starving millions in Japan and in her overseas occupied territories, as well as tens of thousands of American servicemen.

But that child doesn't feel it - in her bones - as her older brother does.

She, being four, wasn't literally there, at the time on the dropping of the Bomb.

In body yes - but not in heart, mind and soul.

Four years difference among the young  really matter --- this is the starting thesis of this blog.

My postwar transitional generation, by definition a little too young to remember WWII first hand, only learned of WWII (and how supposedly Big Science won the war) second hand,  learned it in the mind but not experienced it in the heart.

During its key plastic formative years, my generation held both this second hand kernel of support for prewar modernity's Big Science and first hand support for the beginnings of post-modern/postwar human rights protests of the Sixties.

The key characteristic of this transitional generation was not Sixties street conflict but internal mental conflict - knowing both modernity and postmodernity but not being totally in either camp, unlike their parents or children...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Un-Super Heroes : a biography of NEW DEAL penicillin ...

The post-modern NEW DEAL extrusion onto the landscape of the Modern Age

British Conservative wartime penicillin or American Republican wartime penicillin , if they had succeeded, would have totally altered the generally favourable image we have today of penicillin.

It would have been regarded as needlessly expensive and originally available - by design -  to only the richest and whitest classes.

By contrast the wartime penicillin we actually got in the end  - NEW DEAL penicillin - is probably the world's best known medicine almost entirely because it is also the most beloved of lifesaver.

It remains non-patented ( in the public domain) and naturally made and hence both cheap and available to all nations to make.

During the war this non-patented natural penicillin was made available to all those in the world dying from lack of it only because the New Deal oriented super agency known as the WPB (War Production Board) willed it to be so.

In many accounts, the New Deal was definitely on its way out in Washington and America by 1945 and the gift of cheap natural penicillin for all was merely its final, departing, gift.

But in my view, the informally postmodern New Deal morphed seamlessly into formal post-Modernity in late 1945 and the gift of  cheap natural penicillin for all became merely postmodernity's opening gambit...

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....

To misquote the late Ian MacDonald : "revolution OUTSIDE the head"

Forget denying climate change - it is the mere tiniest iceberg tip of the denying classes' overall brief against the world.

What they are really denying is the existence of the real revolution that has happened, in the physical world, outside their heads.

To the extent that AWGs can be thought of as aging hippies (acid-droppers and pot-smokers from way back 40 years ago) then the real surprise is that Beatles-lover, Ian MacDonald, was so badly wrong: the real revolution did not, in fact, occur 'in our heads', but rather outside our heads.

Virtual worlds conjured up by dropping tabs just weigh virtually nothing set against the weight of real atmospheric warming and real rising sea levels.

Call it the actual, post-modern, world while we  - at least inside our addled heads - think it is still a modern world.

So we need ask ourselves : are the Deniers' claims against human-induced carbon pollution of the atmosphere really bad 'science' --- or merely 'bad acid' ............

SVE's "awkward" sub-title is no accident

Why does  SVE 's sub-title run so 'trippingly-not'  off the tongue?

Moderns versus Post-Modernity indeed - why not moderns versus post-moderns or Modernity versus Post-Modernity ?

I constructed it that way because I have come to believe that while our world has decisively and permanently changed (ie is clearly post-modern in its structure) --- we haven't.

Or at least 80% of us haven't - a clear majority in anybody's books.

Our world has changed - bringing forth real biological and material restraints for us to butt our heads against.

However, inside those heads, inside our still-Modern heads,  our wills have not changed or accepted those restraints as real.

We still expect "The Spirit of Scientism" to pull yet another rabbit out of the hat at the last minute to save our bacon.

(Quite a post-hegemonic mixing of metaphors there - no ?)

So what do we  - the 20% - do about this crisis ?

We must strive to reconcile humanity to the fact that the physical world, outside their minds, has changed for good and that they must re-calibrate their dreams, hopes, illusions, delusions, to match......

Are we living in a Post-Modern Age or have we got it all badly wrong?

    Until recently I accepted the general consensus unquestioningly that 1945 marked the shift from the Age of Modernity to the Age of Post-Modernity.
   But what, oh what, what if we all got it very badly wrong?

   After all, the very notion of a shift from one age to another, from Classicalism to Romanticism to Modernity in a smooth linear fashion is itself the very embodiment of Modernist thinking.
   Surely in a true Post-Modern Age ,won't we see Modernity and its hegemony simply shattering into slivers of many many little "local" hegemonies (if one can imagine the concept of hegemony itself surviving its public questioning, implicit in a "many-worlds" of  hegemony).
   Perhaps then we do not live in a Post-Modern World as much as we live in a Post-Hegemony World ?
   I won't have thought so, as I say, if I hadn't recently divided deep into the cancer-inducing Tar Ponds of online comments from those who call themselves "skeptics" but who are generally better - and more accurately - known as "deniers" .
   First one notes the sheer strength of their bile - hardly coming from the depressed remnant of an aged & dying life form. Then you note their numbers - usually well hidden, as most deniers only unburden their true feelings in safe company.
    Then if one moves on to examine the actual content of  all those comments and blogs and mainstream media headlines and one sees - can it really be ? - yes it can ! - the sturdy roots and stems of 1875-1965 Scientism & High Modernity, albeit clothed in modern up-to-date Libertarianism.
   Libertarianism, you may or may not choose to recall , first slouched into rough being around 1945 and so itself might be best seen as a Counter-Post-Modernist reaction rather than from the Age of Scientism itself.
   Seen through this prism, we might better understand our current Climate Wars in a new light and will be better placed to accept that it will display an extraordinary ferocity before it all ends (or the World itself all ends,  in the awesome hellfires of Global Warming) ....

MODERNITY FALLS 1945

   There is no consensus on the name for the Era we are presently living - the era after the Era of Modernity. But all agree that it began in 1945.

   That means that every single one of us has has spent the majority of our lives living in this "Era-Without-A-Name".

  Rather embarrassing that : perhaps it will be left to our ancestors to name this era retrospectively.

   Then billions will perhaps know us as Commensalities, when we never heard the word while alive, let alone ever thought of ourselves that way.

   A child whose birthday everyone knows , but who no one is willing to christen, is an unusual child indeed.

  Why then the nigh-universal consensus that this post modernity era we are living in all began in 1945?

   It was not as if nothing else happened in 1945, so it had some plenty of time on its hands to dream up post-modernity.

  1945 was the year the world finally ending its worst conflict : WWII.

   With the occupation of enemy lands long hidden from the world, reports of horrible things were finally confirmed by the Allied armies : the concentration camps and death camps.

  Soon the upcoming Nuremberg Trials would reveal that death camps like Auschwitz also held plenty of evidence of unbelievably cruel medical experiments on innocent human children.

  Gas Chambers or Doctor Mengele, all worked together to advance the ultimate intentions of Galtonian Genetic Biology.

   All worked to create the perfect Master Race, even if that meant that those judged non-master races had to pay the ultimate penalty to make it all happen. 

  Meanwhile in August 1945, the Americans dropped single bombs, from single planes,  yet big enough to wiped out big cities - cities like Hiroshima.
   Hitherto, thousands of planes and hundreds of thousands of bombs ( and a perfect storm of weather) had been needed to wipe out a city.

  Since the Americans alone had thousands of these big planes ,B-29s, (planes able as well to fly half way around the world) that meant we suddenly faced a world where the next big war might mean all cities everywhere facing annihilation.

   Meanwhile the ineffectiveness of any defense against the German V-2 rockets reminded us that while we might be able to shoot down the B-29s before they reached our cities, soon even that option would be closed off.

   So Newtonian Physics was also in its final phase : no longer content on measuring the transit of planets, it had moved up to destroying planets instead.

   Hiroshima, Hamburg, Toyko, Dresden, London, Rotterdam, Warsaw - city after city shattered  with depressing ease.

   Equal depressing was the thought that Auschwitz was merely the culmination of six years of killing in the name of Genetics.

  But also in 1945, World War II was credited (wrongly) for bringing at least a bit of good news.
   In a race against time, tiny simple stupid Microbes had beaten the best of the world's chemists (The1940s Masters of the Universe) to produce natural penicillin when Mankind failed to make synthetic penicillin.
    What today is an enormous industry, bio or micro technology, never looked back.

 By contrast, Daltonian Chemistry, hitherto the Queen of Science particularly in Industry, started a long slow slide into invisibility.  

   The jewels of  the Era of Modernity were these three: Newtonian Physics, Daltonian Chemistry and Galtonian Genetic Biology.

   With all three in ruins by the end of 1945, Modernity 's Fall was all but available....

Earthlings versus the Sky Gods : 1945 and "THE FALL OF MODERNITY"

   Everyone agrees that Post-Modernity began after 1945 and that thus, in some muted --- pastel --- fashion, Modernity must also have began its slow decline in that same momentous year.
   Most writers just dial in some reference to Auschwitz and Hiroshima and leave the rest unsaid and assumed
- a few might add a bit more references to the bombing of Hamburg and Dresden and the revelations of the Nuremberg Trials, particularly the so-called Doctors' Trials.
   So 1945, Year of Revolution.
   Could any other "Year of Revolution" have happened in such an un-dramatic fashion?
  No leaders' fiery speeches, no burning Manifestos, no mass  protests or barricaded streets.
   For 1945 was a Revolution from within, a collapse, a revolution of failure,defeat, negation.
  Modernity defeated itself, Modernity simply self-destructed.
   In 1939 it set itself the highest possible goals - this would be history's first fully modern war, its first fully scientific war (or at least first fully scientism war).
  Of course, nothing in WWII worked out as its various protagonists planned.
  Its seers and futurists were equally naft in their predictions.
   At the cost of 60 million dead , billions emotionally scarred and trillions in waste and destruction, Modernity laid an egg.
   Or a mushroom - your taste......