Forgotten by design : Victorians loved Sentimentality as much as Social Darwinism

Victorian Values ???

Thanks to libertarians like Thatcher, Reagan and their rich friends who own big media , most people today regard the Victorians as being obsessed with the values of social darwinism : law of the jungle, might is right, god-on-side-of-big-battalions, survival of the fit, red in tooth and claw , things they claim we have forgotten.

But there is no sign, in fact, that these values are not at least as popular today, as in the good Queen's day.

But what has been forgotten, in fact, is that Victorians (or at least many Victorian women) were opposed to social darwinism and took a "Sentimentalist" view of the value of life, human and non-human.

After all, it was the age of Uncle Tom's Cabin, of Little Nell and of Beautiful Joe ( to use an example particularly close to my home.)

Thomas Moore, the Sentimentalist, was at least as popular as Charles Darwin, the Utilitarian, in their day.

Victorian values ( both set of Victorian values) hung on in the late autumn of Victorianism : those years between the death of Victoria in 1901 and the early 1970s, when Victorian Modernity aka Scientism, still held full sway.

It is often forgotten that Victoria herself was raised as a pre-Victorian and that in fact , the truest Victorians were those who knew no other age (say those born between about 1840 and 1900).

People who were fully grown young people when Victoria died did not die with her as if in some immense funeral pyre, but instead lived on  as full-Victorians, until their own deaths in the 1960s.

Jazz Age kids fought & died in WWII ,yes, but Victorians ran it..

Henry Dawson (1896) and Howard Florey (1898) were both fully Victorian figures: the first representing pre-Great War sentimentality to its fullest, the latter a Social Darwinian from birth till death.

Their monumental clash between 1940 till 1945 was thus a clash of differing Victorian values ---- during the years of WWII --- a time that is incorrectly thought to be well past the Victorian Age.

Florey the Skygod ; Dawson the earthling.

I - on the other hand -will argue with my dying breath that the Victorian Age died with the death of the last Victorian , not at all with the death of the Queen herself....

Paulie-Ayn Rand : after Nov 6 , libertarian one heartbeat away from nuking the tired , poor, huddled , masses

Paulie loves poor me, he loves me not 

So one night two Micks, a Mormon And a Moslem walk into a TV studio and the Presidential Debates moderator says  " What the FRACK ever happened to an All-Protestant America !!!???"

Okay, okay,so maybe the President really was born in America and so maybe he is a church-attending member of the Trinity United Church of Christ denomination, but don't think that tongues aren't wagging in the back rooms of the Irreligious Right.

Their Chosen Party, the GOP (God's Only Party), has a Mormon and a Catholic as its ticket --- definitely a first.

But far more important is that the GOP Mick - Paulie-Ayn Rand - claims his number one influence isn't Christ but pro-atheist, pro-abortion, pro-greed, pro-selfishness AYN RAND.

Rand was about as "SkyGoddish" as one one could get.

Libertarians honor their own Trinity, just like Obama : but their Trinity consists of three American women.

Paul Ryan worships atheist pro-abortion home-wrecker Ayn Rand ,not Jesus, but GOP evangelicals don't care Diddley about Jesus : it is all about getting juicy tax breaks...

(Albeit two were foreign born - one in Russia (Ayn) and one in Canada (Isobel Patterson). The third woman, Rose Ingalls Wilder, ironically  got rich and selfish co-writing her mother's sentimental "Little House on the Prairie."

Mr Ryan, with his selfish Ayn-inspired philosophy, could be the closest a hard-core libertarian has ever got to world power.

Ryan is only a heartbeat away from the Red Button, only a heartbeat away from nuking America's tired, poor, huddled masses of wretched refuse with his harsh, selfish policies.

Like Mrs Thatcher , Ryan is death on the poor and a denier to the manor born on climate change : a wet is a warmist and a warmist is a wet , is his motto.

Earthlings are dirt, worms - not his fellow beings.

Past time then, to bring back 1964's  little Daisy Girl ad from out of the DDB vaults ....*

"Ten, nine, eight, seven......."

The real Daisy Girl was two year old Monique M Corzilius ---- and she was a redhead ---- only the effects of the very bright sunshine on the day of shooting and black and white film made her seem the iconic blond-headed kid !

The WICKED Rev Whewell and how the denier Skygods might just be doing us Earthlings a big favour

Breaking Up : for the Sake of the (human) Family...

"Boring" alert : I have been doing some heavy thinking. 

(The result of reading (via the ever-alert Mike at Watching the Deniers) of Graham Readfearn's account of how the deniers will soon be taking over Australia's government and education, from top to bottom.)

Yep,the deniers are breaking up Science: dividing it up into their science and our science.

And yet, in a strange sort of way, that is exactly as it should be - and as it as it should always have been.

The fact that it not, can be laid at the feet of that versatile, if wicked, polymath the Reverend William Whewell.

One of the many privileges of being a minister in the Established Church of England was to the ability to yoke two together, forever.

Between 1833 and 1840, the beastly Whewell did just that : forcing the unholy marriage between Natural Philosophy and Natural History and calling the spawn of this un-natural union by one word : Scientist.

Natural Philosophy goes under many names today, because all these names ( and sciences) contain bits of the core values of natural philosophy.

Theory-oriented science, lab/experimental science, production science, K-selected science , two-bodied science, Newtonian classical science, science of the First Law ( of Thermodynamics), linear (machine) science.

Natural History actually lives on, weakly, but many sciences also contains bits of its original values in their core.

Observation-oriented science, real world science, impact science, r-selected science, three (or multi) bodied science, Quantum science, science of the Second Law (of Thermodynamics), chaotic (garden) science.

Using Leo Marx's extremely useful metaphor of "The Machine in the Garden", we can see how these two original sciences should have worked against each other, for our and Nature's greater good.

Theory science is very good at creating new "machines"  in the laboratory for the betterment of humanity.

They do so at great ultimate cost, though.

By strictly, narrowly, focusing on only the new machine's invention and excluding all thought of the unexpected consequences when it is introduced into a chaotic, dynamic, resource-restrained real world, they merely postpone the inevitable.

Call them eternally cock-eyed optimists..... or deniers*.

(Albeit, only as deniers of material limits to human invention.)

Other kinds of personalities - call them worriers, doubters and yes, even, sceptics and cynics - are needed to discover and warn us about what happens when the shiny new machine leaves the Lily-white walled laboratory and heads out into the great big dirty, noisy, untidy, unpredictable, real world, aka the garden.

Skygod science and Earthling science are meant to clash - we only get their full benefit when they do clash.

Now, I will argue and you are free to disagree, that we earthlings do accept the right of production science to exist (pardon me while I check to see if my latest i-pod touch 4 is fully charged !)

But as well , we fully support the right of impact scientists to fully interrogate production science's impact upon the real world, for good or bad.

Reality ate my homework....

(Think of it this way : we earthlings think every teenage student should have the right to spout off whatever they want on the exam paper. But we also fully support the right of their teachers and parents to fact-check their work afterwards.)

Skygods do not : intellectually they are still the same 16 year old boys at the very back of the classroom who already know everything, and are bored beyond reason with futher schooling --- they see themselves as doers, not thinkers.

Despite this, they paradoxically take their old (pre-1970s) high school science teachers at their word (!).

  That word being there is only one kind of science and it's job is to produce and produce and produce an ever growing cornucopia of stuff : from biological food stuff to nuclear radioactivity stuff.

Deniers tell us that production scientists and their kindly employers can be fully trusted, by us the voter and consumer, to make sure nothing bad ever happens ; we promise -- this is why we are firing all those unnecessary interfering (impact) scientists that work for the government.

Deniers, very much against their own ultimate wishes (be very careful of what you ask for !), are busy taking us back to a pre-Whewell era when two sciences duked it out, with two opposing, alternative, visions of this single planet : skygod vs earthling.

Consider it my life's work to help the deniers tear Science apart : for the betterment of the world......

CATO vs CASSE : skygod vs earthling , battling thinktanks

Duelling think tanks, on a flatlining planet....

The CATO Institute, spawner of the denier movement and of all mean things Koch-able, is a powerhouse in the think tank business worldwide.

(And man oh man is it ever a business.

 In most think tanks it provides steady, pensionable, profitable employment for wannabe academics who can't get tenure or peer-reviewed publication. A first rate sort of home for the second rate sort of thinker....)

And I can't think of an organization more worthy of being called the skygod of all skygods - the denier of deniers on all the biological and material limits that humanity must face up to and deal with.

By contrast,Brian Czech's  CASSE ,  the Centre for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy ,is virtually unknown outside a relatively small circle of friends and supporters ( albeit friends like David Suzuki and Herman Daly !)

I couldn't even seem to find it on Wikipedia, normally a fount of information on all things obscure.

(I might try seeing it I can edit a token bit about CASSE for Wikipedia and rely on the good will and bad bile of regular wikipedia editors to do it up right.)

But CASSE would seem the natural choice for becoming the planet's leading green think tank.

This is because the advocating a steady state economy is the ONLY thing that truly divides real Green parties from the pro-environment 'greenish' wings of the other parties who remain stubbornly and foolheartedly pro-bloat.

Any party or individual that advocates perpetual growth is really preparing mentally to abandon the Earth, once it is raped to resource-exhaustion, for other worlds.

But CASSE really seems to deserve the title of Earthling of the Earthlings.

Please support it - sign its petition and live and think and talk up a steady state economy.

Be 100% green - not 1% green.

Because 1% of anything might make you rich, but it won't make you happy....