It is very, very, very hard for us today in 2015 to put ourselves in the mental mindset of the old men running the world in 1939.
For they had grown up during the heady worldwide high tech industrial boom that began in the 1870s.
That boom was primarily led by the inventions of just two industrial giants, equal to each other in population and scientific knowledge : Germany and America.
For us today can only see that America is more than four times the population of Germany and still growing - while Germany is losing population fast.
But back then both were equal in population with forty million people each.
Those old - badly outdated - childhood memories of when Germany was still equal in population and technology to the USA continued to govern the emotions of the old men who ran the Allies WWII war effort.
They thus greatly overestimated Germany's demographic and industrial strength and gravely underestimated their own.
This led them to avoid an early conventional weapons-based ground assault on Germany using their overwhelmingly superior demographics in favour of a slower (big money but small manpower) air-led assault using supposedly superior and secret technology.
The war thus dragged on needlessly for six bloody years, 75 million died directly and indirectly as a result , Russia did the land assault (albeit badly) and so got most of Europe behind the Iron Curtain - leading to a further 50 years of the Cold War.
A tragedy on so many fronts ....
Showing posts with label second industrial revolution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label second industrial revolution. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
Monday, November 4, 2013
Commensal Modernization vs Pure Modernity
The Second Industrial Revolution in steel, concrete, electricity, chemicals ,which lasted from about the 1870s to the 1960s ,led to a worldwide process called modernization.
Its key characteristic was a greatly increased intermingling of foreign human beings and their cultural objects (tangible and intangible) into every country on earth , with vast numbers of everything coming in and over supposedly sacrosanct national borders with greatly increased velocity.
Another word for the intimate co-mingling of small and big, willy nilly, is commensality (in the controversial sense in which biologists use this ancient concept).
Tourists, immigrants, ideas, ideologies, artists, manufactured goods - they poured in and out , at such a great speed and in such great numbers , that everyone felt at least a little overwhelmed.
More, faster and deeply intermingled : that was the impression the effects of modernization had on the first generations impacted by its initial stirrings.
Others felt a great deal overwhelmed indeed and not a little threatened : they were usually each nation's traditional elites, using to having their say pass unquestioned.
Now new competitors were threatening their hegemony and the national elites had both time, money and control of the key academic and media centres of influence to successfully fight back : fight back ideologically.
Today we call their counter attack on the commensality of modernization "Modernity", but they themselves never did.
They probably tended to regard their ideas as simply matter-of-fact ideas about Progress , Science and Modern times.
They certainly went to their graves not aware that their supposedly up-to-the-minute modern ideas were really a rearguard reaction against modern reality.
Because they claimed to be truly modern was to see stability, gradualism, simplicity, purity, the few and the big as what was found in Nature.
And moderns should seek and desire the same in Human culture to be truly happy and prosperous.
All this - and more in their ideological repertoire - could be reduced (itself a favourite modern term !) to the claim that reality is basically stable and simple.
A pure substance has fewer ingredients - it is simple.
For a given amount of anything - say the potential biomass on Earth - the bigger the portions it is made up of, the fewer there are of them - fewer is also simpler to keep an eye on.
And big things, by their size and complexity are less likely to move easily or move quickly.
If they move, they move gradually and slowly. Slow change is also simpler to keep an eye on.
And big things are hardly invisible and hardly capable of sneaking in below the radar are they ?
Reductionism, another core value of Modernity, is the claim that matter is all made up of a very few fixed building blocks and with them you can build up everything from a simple molecule to an entire Universe , just like Lego by simply adding more and more and more blocks.
Purity meant no co-mingling of human loins either : being called a half breed was about the worst epithet in the modernist lexicon.
They liked things big, clearly visible, few, simple, pure, slow moving , unchanging ; they hated things that were tiny (and thus "many") , fast moving, invisible, fast changing, flexible, mixed and complex, things mixing in other people's space without their permission or even them being aware of it.
What they disliked sounds like a textbook description of germs , particularly commensal germs, and Germ Theory.
No wonder then that everything human the Moderns tended to hate and fear and demonize they choose to call human germs or an equivalent words like human virus, bacilli or pathogen.
WWII, Modernity's own war , was all about the big picking upon and fearing, the small.
This war upon the small was not incidental to the main action of WWII --- it was the main action.
Now you know what Henry Dawson was up against in his wartime penicillin efforts to defend the small against the big......
Its key characteristic was a greatly increased intermingling of foreign human beings and their cultural objects (tangible and intangible) into every country on earth , with vast numbers of everything coming in and over supposedly sacrosanct national borders with greatly increased velocity.
Another word for the intimate co-mingling of small and big, willy nilly, is commensality (in the controversial sense in which biologists use this ancient concept).
Tourists, immigrants, ideas, ideologies, artists, manufactured goods - they poured in and out , at such a great speed and in such great numbers , that everyone felt at least a little overwhelmed.
More, faster and deeply intermingled : that was the impression the effects of modernization had on the first generations impacted by its initial stirrings.
Others felt a great deal overwhelmed indeed and not a little threatened : they were usually each nation's traditional elites, using to having their say pass unquestioned.
Now new competitors were threatening their hegemony and the national elites had both time, money and control of the key academic and media centres of influence to successfully fight back : fight back ideologically.
Today we call their counter attack on the commensality of modernization "Modernity", but they themselves never did.
They probably tended to regard their ideas as simply matter-of-fact ideas about Progress , Science and Modern times.
They certainly went to their graves not aware that their supposedly up-to-the-minute modern ideas were really a rearguard reaction against modern reality.
Because they claimed to be truly modern was to see stability, gradualism, simplicity, purity, the few and the big as what was found in Nature.
And moderns should seek and desire the same in Human culture to be truly happy and prosperous.
All this - and more in their ideological repertoire - could be reduced (itself a favourite modern term !) to the claim that reality is basically stable and simple.
A pure substance has fewer ingredients - it is simple.
For a given amount of anything - say the potential biomass on Earth - the bigger the portions it is made up of, the fewer there are of them - fewer is also simpler to keep an eye on.
And big things, by their size and complexity are less likely to move easily or move quickly.
If they move, they move gradually and slowly. Slow change is also simpler to keep an eye on.
And big things are hardly invisible and hardly capable of sneaking in below the radar are they ?
Reductionism, another core value of Modernity, is the claim that matter is all made up of a very few fixed building blocks and with them you can build up everything from a simple molecule to an entire Universe , just like Lego by simply adding more and more and more blocks.
Purity meant no co-mingling of human loins either : being called a half breed was about the worst epithet in the modernist lexicon.
They liked things big, clearly visible, few, simple, pure, slow moving , unchanging ; they hated things that were tiny (and thus "many") , fast moving, invisible, fast changing, flexible, mixed and complex, things mixing in other people's space without their permission or even them being aware of it.
What they disliked sounds like a textbook description of germs , particularly commensal germs, and Germ Theory.
No wonder then that everything human the Moderns tended to hate and fear and demonize they choose to call human germs or an equivalent words like human virus, bacilli or pathogen.
WWII, Modernity's own war , was all about the big picking upon and fearing, the small.
This war upon the small was not incidental to the main action of WWII --- it was the main action.
Now you know what Henry Dawson was up against in his wartime penicillin efforts to defend the small against the big......
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
1845-1945 : SECOND Industrial Revolution or the SECOND Fall of Man ?
Maybe a bit of both ?
The-People-Of-The-Second-Fall claim they have repudiated Original Sin and that as a result, anything that God can do, they can do too - only better.
As Rickey Santorum, the prelate of The Church of the Deniers , reminds us :
Sort of like what God Himself would have done, if only he was as smart as us....
The-People-Of-The-Second-Fall claim they have repudiated Original Sin and that as a result, anything that God can do, they can do too - only better.
As Rickey Santorum, the prelate of The Church of the Deniers , reminds us :
"We are the intelligent beings that know how to manage things and through that course of science and discovery if we can be better stewards of this environment, then we should not let the vagaries of nature destroy what we have helped create."When God's Natural World makes mistakes, its our job to save Nature from itself and fix things up.
Sort of like what God Himself would have done, if only he was as smart as us....
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