When Emma Lazarus read Longfellow's otherwise moving poem about the old Jewish cemetery in Newport, Rhone Island, she hated the concluding line that - with Social Darwinistic finality - flatly stated that dead nations (ie Zion) never rise again.
Showing posts with label social darwinism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social darwinism. Show all posts
Thursday, October 1, 2015
Monday, September 28, 2015
"Survival of the Fit over the Unfit" flounders among Life's true survivors
Particularly after the whirlwind defeat of the effete French by the German Blitzkrieg in May-June 1940, it seemed obvious to most middle class people in the world that the fit 1As were bound to win , every time, over the unfit 4Fs.
Survival of the fit over the unfit : bigger is better/might is right : Q.E.D.
A Fact of Nature : the classic 'Appeal to Nature'.
But Dr Martin Henry Dawson strongly and fundamentally disagreed with this particular Appeal to Nature, or at the very least, he wished to make another and stronger scientific appeal to the Facts of Nature.
For he felt he had found another (and statistically much better) method for assuring long term survival, as revealed by his study of Nature.
Survival of the fit over the unfit : bigger is better/might is right : Q.E.D.
A Fact of Nature : the classic 'Appeal to Nature'.
But Dr Martin Henry Dawson strongly and fundamentally disagreed with this particular Appeal to Nature, or at the very least, he wished to make another and stronger scientific appeal to the Facts of Nature.
For he felt he had found another (and statistically much better) method for assuring long term survival, as revealed by his study of Nature.
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Hitler's Dilemma : If we liquidate all the "Primitive" how can we tell that we are the "Advanced" ?
Until the advent of fossil fuel based energy slaves, the rich and powerful needed the poor and powerless to do all the hard unpleasant jobs.
In the1860s, (interestingly parallel with the growing popular elite acclaim for Darwin's and Spencer's theories of the survival of the fittest), elites began seeing that fossil-fuel 'energy slaves' were far cheaper, far more tractable and far more moral than employing human slaves.
Perhaps, said these early utilitarian proponents of the much later Aktion T4, Eastern Hunger Plan and the Holocaust, the poor need no longer be "aways with us".
But if the Nazis and their earlier ilk all around the world had succeeded in liquidating all the weak and the poor, the defective and the asocial, how then would one be able to tell - for certain - that the healthy and the wealthy were truly so ?
For, to give but one example, the idea of 'the wealthy' can be easily shown to be a relative term, not an absolute term.
A working class European family of this the early 21st century is far far wealthier, in terms of access to (energy) slaves, money and sheer comfort, than any of the top nobility families of the 13th century.
They only seem poor, only feel poor, when they compare themselves to the families of today's top 1%.
Similarly, the most advanced human civilizations circa 1940 had so many visible shortfalls from what their members hoped and thought they were capable of, that people at this imagined top could only console themselves by saying "at least we are more civilized than X, Y, or Z" down at the bottom tiers of Life.
X, Y and Z being perhaps Australian aboriginals, slime molds and the anthrax bacteria.
Civilized and advanced are relational concepts and only make sense when matched in opposing symmetry with the uncivilized and primitive.
Destroy the bottom and where then is the top ?
But as it happens, the Nazis and other Social Darwinists never got that far.
Instead Progress's symmetry of an advanced top and a backward bottom simply collapsed when assailed from top and bottom.
In WWII, the top proved to have so many moral failings (mass bombing and gassing of the innocent) at a time when the bottom proved to have so many technical advantages (natural penicillin from the penicillium slime) that the delicate balance of the symmetry of opposites couldn't hold anymore.
So, today, it is a commonplace to say that this planet was made and sustained for the tens of thousands of ancient species of microbe and the relatively recent and single human species is but a short term parasite "just visiting" planet Earth ---- a commonplace unlike to be uttered or believed in 1940 .....
In the1860s, (interestingly parallel with the growing popular elite acclaim for Darwin's and Spencer's theories of the survival of the fittest), elites began seeing that fossil-fuel 'energy slaves' were far cheaper, far more tractable and far more moral than employing human slaves.
Perhaps, said these early utilitarian proponents of the much later Aktion T4, Eastern Hunger Plan and the Holocaust, the poor need no longer be "aways with us".
But if the Nazis and their earlier ilk all around the world had succeeded in liquidating all the weak and the poor, the defective and the asocial, how then would one be able to tell - for certain - that the healthy and the wealthy were truly so ?
For, to give but one example, the idea of 'the wealthy' can be easily shown to be a relative term, not an absolute term.
A working class European family of this the early 21st century is far far wealthier, in terms of access to (energy) slaves, money and sheer comfort, than any of the top nobility families of the 13th century.
They only seem poor, only feel poor, when they compare themselves to the families of today's top 1%.
Similarly, the most advanced human civilizations circa 1940 had so many visible shortfalls from what their members hoped and thought they were capable of, that people at this imagined top could only console themselves by saying "at least we are more civilized than X, Y, or Z" down at the bottom tiers of Life.
X, Y and Z being perhaps Australian aboriginals, slime molds and the anthrax bacteria.
Civilized and advanced are relational concepts and only make sense when matched in opposing symmetry with the uncivilized and primitive.
Destroy the bottom and where then is the top ?
But as it happens, the Nazis and other Social Darwinists never got that far.
Instead Progress's symmetry of an advanced top and a backward bottom simply collapsed when assailed from top and bottom.
In WWII, the top proved to have so many moral failings (mass bombing and gassing of the innocent) at a time when the bottom proved to have so many technical advantages (natural penicillin from the penicillium slime) that the delicate balance of the symmetry of opposites couldn't hold anymore.
So, today, it is a commonplace to say that this planet was made and sustained for the tens of thousands of ancient species of microbe and the relatively recent and single human species is but a short term parasite "just visiting" planet Earth ---- a commonplace unlike to be uttered or believed in 1940 .....
Monday, August 3, 2015
October 16 1940 : upending the team's protocol
To put it bluntly, twice-wounded Lieutenant Dr Martin Henry Dawson (MC with citation for bravery) was very far from being given to routinely performing bold, brave and lonely gestures.
This despite the fact that he performed some very brave actions indeed on at least a half dozen times during his shortened life.
Beside his wartime actions, those brave acts include his June 1928 sacrificing of the start of a wonderful research career at the then citadel of medical research - the Rockefeller Institute.
All to stand up for what this very junior pro tem researcher believed in scientifically, against his all powerful and very senior lab chief (and fellow Nova Scotian) Oswald Avery on the matter of the importance of bacteria transformed with DNA.
Or consider his December 1940 decision to sacrifice his own life, if need be, (against the wishes of his wife and doctors) to try and save the lives of others (the world's patients with deadly SBE) with his pioneering penicillin.
And his well known November 1942 decision to 'steal' (according to his hostile opponents) scarce government penicillin - during wartime ! - all to further his success in finally saving SBEs with penicillin, set against deliberate government 'indifference' to their dire fate - success with penicillin or not.
But my vote for his bravest, his boldest, his most lonely gesture was that which occurred on October 16th 1940.
For his solo determination to inject 'dangerously primitive' penicillin - right now ! - into a young black man and a young Jewish man in an attempt to save them from an inevitable death from SBE (subacute bacterial endocarditis) was not like his usual conflicts with higher authorities.
The people opposing his sudden decision were his own friends, down at his own level, on his own tiny team of researchers.
The protocol he was suddenly abruptly 'upending' was one he himself had helped create and agreed to adhere to.
The plan was to allocate five months (September 11th 1940 - January 11th 1941) to 'safely' purifying primitive penicillin - if not to actually totally synthesis it - before it would be clinically tested with internal - systemic - injections.
Tested upon Dawson's SBEs, if he insisted - though SBE was universally seen as the very Mount Everest of infectious disease and thus hardly a first choice for a team intent on getting those vital convincing early successes out of an untried drug.
It was always clear that Dawson wanted very much to save the lives of SBE patients.
But if he felt a drug was more likely to kill than to save - as he had earlier worried about massive doses of some new sulfa drugs - he would have been characteristically cautious rather than uncharacteristically bold.
No doctor in the world (most much bolder than Dawson), in the twelve years since penicillin was discovered, had dared to risk injecting it into the human circulation system.
This despite the fact that there were very few drugs effective against any of the deadly infectious diseases back then.
And despite the fact that in repeated internal animal testing and in repeated external testing with human blood, the primitive penicillin was very effective against the worst of the deadly bacteria cells and yet didn't harm human or animal cells, even when given in far larger doses than needed to kill the bacteria.
And despite the fact that man-made drugs with far less effect against deadly bacteria and far far worse toxicity issues had been quickly injected into test patients and brought to market.
With hindsight, what was going on here was a worldwide, profession-wide and prolonged case of collective cognitive dissonance.
But not all nations and not all doctors back then did any bold research into the unknown and untried --- only a few pacemaking nations and institutions led the way, for all the others to follow.
So it was actually the collective unwillingness of a small subset of the world's doctors that we must really lay blame.
Upon a few thousand upper middle class white, mostly Protestant, males from the largest medical research facilities of the most civilized nations on earth.
The Big Dogs, the Alpha Dogs, of the human medical food chain.
(Dawson's own institution, Columbia Presbyterian Medical Complex in NYC, was in the top twenty five of such institutions world wide.)
They semi-consciously simply refused to accept that possibly the world's best and safest antibacterial agent could ever come from the sort of smelly fungal slime that covered their basement walls and not from the civilized world's best clinicians and chemists.
Even when the evidence lay in the published test results before their very eyes : classic cognitive dissonance.
(Feel free to substitute negro or gypsy traveller or New Guinea 'savage' for fungal slime to better understand the popular (semi-digested) social darwinism that lay behind their attitudes.)
For fifteen years, his entire career as a medical researcher, Dawson had been proving up his point that the small, tiny, weak, simple, primitive microbes were far far smarter than we give them credit for - sometimes capable of doing things we humans are not able to do, even badly.
If penicillin was as old as the intermittent competition between soil fungus and soil bacteria over dwindling foodstuffs (at least hundreds of millions of years old) then perhaps the slime chemists had polished penicillin's abilities --- and their skill at making it --- into a fine art.
Why not 'give them a fair go' ?
So, seventy five years ago this October 16th 2015, the Age of Antibiotics finally began - and with it - our current Postmodern Age as well.
For what all the variants of postmodernity (the word 'variants' itself being a characteristic postmodern concept !) have in common is a commitment to welcoming the mixing of High and low.
Not just in Art and Architecture either --- almost all of our antibiotics today, seventy five years later, are still based upon the lowest of medicines - based upon primitive penicillin made by the slime, not synthesized by Man - the same sort that Dawson injected that day.
And when sold to doctors by the slick ad efforts of some of the world's largest and most technically advanced corporations - those antibiotics can seem to be very High medicine indeed.
But penicillin is really penicillium excrement - fungus turds.
And no matter how much High science polishes it, a turd is still a turd - even if here a lifesaving turd .
Two hundred years of a smug world of linear and hierarchical progress leading up to Civilized European Man at the very top ------ permanently upended in a New York Minute.
The lowest of the low, the slime of the slime, medical missionaries daily saving the precious children of the uncivilized world, because The Smartest Chemists In The Civilized Universe couldn't ...
This despite the fact that he performed some very brave actions indeed on at least a half dozen times during his shortened life.
Beside his wartime actions, those brave acts include his June 1928 sacrificing of the start of a wonderful research career at the then citadel of medical research - the Rockefeller Institute.
All to stand up for what this very junior pro tem researcher believed in scientifically, against his all powerful and very senior lab chief (and fellow Nova Scotian) Oswald Avery on the matter of the importance of bacteria transformed with DNA.
Or consider his December 1940 decision to sacrifice his own life, if need be, (against the wishes of his wife and doctors) to try and save the lives of others (the world's patients with deadly SBE) with his pioneering penicillin.
And his well known November 1942 decision to 'steal' (according to his hostile opponents) scarce government penicillin - during wartime ! - all to further his success in finally saving SBEs with penicillin, set against deliberate government 'indifference' to their dire fate - success with penicillin or not.
But my vote for his bravest, his boldest, his most lonely gesture was that which occurred on October 16th 1940.
For his solo determination to inject 'dangerously primitive' penicillin - right now ! - into a young black man and a young Jewish man in an attempt to save them from an inevitable death from SBE (subacute bacterial endocarditis) was not like his usual conflicts with higher authorities.
The people opposing his sudden decision were his own friends, down at his own level, on his own tiny team of researchers.
The protocol he was suddenly abruptly 'upending' was one he himself had helped create and agreed to adhere to.
The plan was to allocate five months (September 11th 1940 - January 11th 1941) to 'safely' purifying primitive penicillin - if not to actually totally synthesis it - before it would be clinically tested with internal - systemic - injections.
Tested upon Dawson's SBEs, if he insisted - though SBE was universally seen as the very Mount Everest of infectious disease and thus hardly a first choice for a team intent on getting those vital convincing early successes out of an untried drug.
It was always clear that Dawson wanted very much to save the lives of SBE patients.
But if he felt a drug was more likely to kill than to save - as he had earlier worried about massive doses of some new sulfa drugs - he would have been characteristically cautious rather than uncharacteristically bold.
No doctor in the world (most much bolder than Dawson), in the twelve years since penicillin was discovered, had dared to risk injecting it into the human circulation system.
This despite the fact that there were very few drugs effective against any of the deadly infectious diseases back then.
And despite the fact that in repeated internal animal testing and in repeated external testing with human blood, the primitive penicillin was very effective against the worst of the deadly bacteria cells and yet didn't harm human or animal cells, even when given in far larger doses than needed to kill the bacteria.
And despite the fact that man-made drugs with far less effect against deadly bacteria and far far worse toxicity issues had been quickly injected into test patients and brought to market.
Collective Cognitive Dissonance
With hindsight, what was going on here was a worldwide, profession-wide and prolonged case of collective cognitive dissonance.
But not all nations and not all doctors back then did any bold research into the unknown and untried --- only a few pacemaking nations and institutions led the way, for all the others to follow.
So it was actually the collective unwillingness of a small subset of the world's doctors that we must really lay blame.
Upon a few thousand upper middle class white, mostly Protestant, males from the largest medical research facilities of the most civilized nations on earth.
The Big Dogs, the Alpha Dogs, of the human medical food chain.
(Dawson's own institution, Columbia Presbyterian Medical Complex in NYC, was in the top twenty five of such institutions world wide.)
They semi-consciously simply refused to accept that possibly the world's best and safest antibacterial agent could ever come from the sort of smelly fungal slime that covered their basement walls and not from the civilized world's best clinicians and chemists.
Even when the evidence lay in the published test results before their very eyes : classic cognitive dissonance.
(Feel free to substitute negro or gypsy traveller or New Guinea 'savage' for fungal slime to better understand the popular (semi-digested) social darwinism that lay behind their attitudes.)
For fifteen years, his entire career as a medical researcher, Dawson had been proving up his point that the small, tiny, weak, simple, primitive microbes were far far smarter than we give them credit for - sometimes capable of doing things we humans are not able to do, even badly.
If penicillin was as old as the intermittent competition between soil fungus and soil bacteria over dwindling foodstuffs (at least hundreds of millions of years old) then perhaps the slime chemists had polished penicillin's abilities --- and their skill at making it --- into a fine art.
Why not 'give them a fair go' ?
The injecting only took a New York Minute - but it changed everything
So, seventy five years ago this October 16th 2015, the Age of Antibiotics finally began - and with it - our current Postmodern Age as well.
For what all the variants of postmodernity (the word 'variants' itself being a characteristic postmodern concept !) have in common is a commitment to welcoming the mixing of High and low.
Not just in Art and Architecture either --- almost all of our antibiotics today, seventy five years later, are still based upon the lowest of medicines - based upon primitive penicillin made by the slime, not synthesized by Man - the same sort that Dawson injected that day.
And when sold to doctors by the slick ad efforts of some of the world's largest and most technically advanced corporations - those antibiotics can seem to be very High medicine indeed.
But penicillin is really penicillium excrement - fungus turds.
And no matter how much High science polishes it, a turd is still a turd - even if here a lifesaving turd .
Two hundred years of a smug world of linear and hierarchical progress leading up to Civilized European Man at the very top ------ permanently upended in a New York Minute.
The lowest of the low, the slime of the slime, medical missionaries daily saving the precious children of the uncivilized world, because The Smartest Chemists In The Civilized Universe couldn't ...
Wednesday, July 29, 2015
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.
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.
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 ....
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 ....
Sunday, July 19, 2015
Lindbergh's "Wave of the Future" and Prell's "Underdogma" : plus ca change, plus c'est meme chose ...
As 'literature', there isn't much in common between Anne Morrow Lindbergh's airy if wooly personal essay style 1940 "Wave of the Future" and Michael Prell's 2013 dense cut-and-paste thesis "Underdogma".
But in terms of actual intent, there is surprisingly little difference between the pair.
Isolationist Republican Lindbergh implies, in part, that America's traditional enemy, Britain, is once again trying to exploit American' heartfelt empathy for the underdog - here being Europe's smaller nations falling before Hitler and Stalin's might - to once again to try and drag America into Britain's wars, for Britain's benefit.
Tea Party Republican Prell says that that America's newest enemies (the Moslems being the most prominent) are exploiting Americans' traditional empathy towards the underdog to undercut Americians' sense of their right (simply because they are so big and so powerful) to lead the free world by dictatorial fiat and the bloody sword.
Both Lindbergh and Prell say that in terms of evolutionary success, Might is self evidently Right : current "big" successes speak for themselves.
But Darwin never said that.
Evolutionary success for him was limited to re-productive success, with the emphasis on the re-.
His theory was niche oriented and hence time based, not numbers based.
Darwin said, in effect, that a species that reproduced a trillion individual members over each of twenty generations and then went extinct was much less of an evolutionary success than a species that reproduced only a few thousand members over at least ten thousand generations and yet is still going strong.
This is because the smaller species lived in a much smaller niche so its small numbers were hardly a surprise - but its long term survival was a clear sign of its greater evolutionary success.
Misunderstanding Darwinism and abusing it, in the social arena, seems to never go out of style.
Ironically, Social Darwinism's ongoing ability to evolve and survive shows this inaccurate meme's amazing evolutionary success ....
But in terms of actual intent, there is surprisingly little difference between the pair.
Isolationist Republican Lindbergh implies, in part, that America's traditional enemy, Britain, is once again trying to exploit American' heartfelt empathy for the underdog - here being Europe's smaller nations falling before Hitler and Stalin's might - to once again to try and drag America into Britain's wars, for Britain's benefit.
Tea Party Republican Prell says that that America's newest enemies (the Moslems being the most prominent) are exploiting Americans' traditional empathy towards the underdog to undercut Americians' sense of their right (simply because they are so big and so powerful) to lead the free world by dictatorial fiat and the bloody sword.
The upper/inner dogs (because they control "big business") always condemn any actions by what they call "big government"; actions that actually are designed to protect the small under/outer dogs from the big upperdogs
Both Lindbergh and Prell say that in terms of evolutionary success, Might is self evidently Right : current "big" successes speak for themselves.
But Darwin never said that.
Evolutionary success for him was limited to re-productive success, with the emphasis on the re-.
His theory was niche oriented and hence time based, not numbers based.
Darwin said, in effect, that a species that reproduced a trillion individual members over each of twenty generations and then went extinct was much less of an evolutionary success than a species that reproduced only a few thousand members over at least ten thousand generations and yet is still going strong.
This is because the smaller species lived in a much smaller niche so its small numbers were hardly a surprise - but its long term survival was a clear sign of its greater evolutionary success.
Misunderstanding Darwinism and abusing it, in the social arena, seems to never go out of style.
Ironically, Social Darwinism's ongoing ability to evolve and survive shows this inaccurate meme's amazing evolutionary success ....
Monday, July 13, 2015
WWII : diverse Ideologies of "Ends" but a single Methodology of "Means"
Traditionally, immense philosophical differences between three "clusterings of ideologies" are said to be the reason for the intensity of violence that was WWII.
So one clustering group, for example, claimed to be benevolent-to-their-own-race racists.
The Germans claimed to be protecting the white race and the Japanese claiming to protect the yellow (or even all colored races).
Perhaps fortunately for the entire world, this was doubletalk.
The two were actually only nationalists cum imperialists : the Germans treated most other whites almost as badly as they hoped to mistreat the coloreds, just as the Japanese treated fellow yellow races at least as badly as they mistreated whites.
This narrow nationalism destroyed both nations' ability to unite the wide and strong coalitions needed to defeat their many opponents.
The various kinds of Marxists and Communists all started out claiming they intended to take everything from the world's middle class and give it all to the world's working class.
And after an initial violent overthrow of the existing system, they promised to end state executions.
And indeed they did start out by taking from the rich and giving to the poor - if the poor is defined as the upwardly mobile urban industrial working class.
But soon they all began to take from everybody and give it mostly to massive military buildups against imaginary enemies, so somewhat continuing to benefit the industrial worker, but also ensuring that the working class didn't get too much of the nation's new wealth and start feeling frisky.
In addition, a very generous share went to an entirely new middle class cum ruling-forever class made up from some of the smarter, more ambitious and more ruthless children of the working class.
Even more depressingly, the communists in all the various nations in which they seized power soon acted exactly the same way against their minorities and neighbouring nations as the previous aristocratic and capitalist rulers had done.
And to do so, they secretly murdered millions of all sorts of people over the decades, all the while publicly claiming to have ended capital punishment, except in cases of treason.
Once again deep rooted narrow nationalism cum imperialism seemed to have trumped the nominal world-wide official ideology.
And yes, doubletalk once again - though in this case, there seemed a widespread and genuine surprise among marxist & communist intellectuals that it all ended up this way.
The third clustering gathered the rest of the world's nations, be they dictatorships, monarchies or liberal democracies , united only around just one thing : the all out defence of well-off people's private property (and the nominal defence of the 'individual').
Once again doubletalk.
The defence of ill-gotten capital accumulation was sincere enough, but in practise most of the rewards and the protection of the law that was supposed to go to all individuals, instead went to native-born, educated, upper middle class, straight males of the dominant religious and ethnic group.
These nations might never declare formal military war against each other but they were always secretly at war against each other over matters of money.
In the form of nationalist trade wars, together with nationalist wars over intellectual property rights and nationalist wars over the flow of capital, labour and goods.
So once again, behind the smokescreen doubletalk of universal brotherhood of individual rights, nationalism trumps all.
One can only point to the immense secret efforts by both America and Britain, at the very depths of their Allied war against Hitler and Tojo, to beggar the other in postwar trade matters, to show how much greed is the real underlying ideology of many of our rulers.
And all three clusterings were united in giving unearned wealth to members of their privileged subgroups by taking from the weak.
The weak might be an internal group - their own majority ethnicity's poorest . Or it might be the more traditional form of imperialism - taking the natural resources and labour from ethnic and religious minorities inside the borders of their empire cum nation or from overseas 'colonies'.
So imperialism and nationalism actually united all three supposedly different ideological clusters.
But they then had to morally justify why it was so very morally wrong to steal private property of the strong but quite alright to steal the private and public property of the weak.
The traditional way was to claim that their nation-empire-civilization was the sole, best, bearer of the one true religion and that they weren't stealing at all - merely extracting a university tuition sized fee from the heathens in exchange for teaching them of this priceless boon.
But there were quite a number of one true and universal religions in the nineteenth century and this led to wars among them ---- as long as people still believed in religions.
But when people stopped believing that there was any real difference between Catholics and Protestants, indeed between Christians, Moslems and heathens, a new moral justification was required.
Now the true civilizations, those worthy enough to enslave other lesser beings and feel morally good about it, were the most scientific ones.
A peculiar form of science. mind you - one much beloved by Conservatives and Republicans of the day - because it said that Evolutionary success inevitably went to the big and ruthless over the small and weak.
Better science meant both better guns to put down the scientifically backward darkies and in feeling a warm moral glow while doing so.
Because if the darkies had fought back successfully, that would mean that they too are scientifically advanced and hence a worthy civilization, in evolutionary terms.
A clear example of this was how the West responded when Japan beat the Russians in the 1905 war.
But science is truly universal, at least in the big picture, so how then to justify why it was right for scientifically advanced England to invade backward China but not for scientifically advanced Japan to do the same ?
I have often thought the sudden rise of many new ideologies at the same time as the sudden rise of Scientism was somehow intimately connected.
I don't mean the people who founded these various -isms were insincere.
I just mean the success of these many brand new ideologies can be laid to the fact that they allowed 'moral' wars against each other among the world's powerful and ruthless, elites who were otherwise united in all worshipping at one new and universal religion - scientism and its offshoots : the new nationalism, the new imperialism, the new racism and the new social darwinism...
So one clustering group, for example, claimed to be benevolent-to-their-own-race racists.
The Germans claimed to be protecting the white race and the Japanese claiming to protect the yellow (or even all colored races).
Perhaps fortunately for the entire world, this was doubletalk.
The two were actually only nationalists cum imperialists : the Germans treated most other whites almost as badly as they hoped to mistreat the coloreds, just as the Japanese treated fellow yellow races at least as badly as they mistreated whites.
This narrow nationalism destroyed both nations' ability to unite the wide and strong coalitions needed to defeat their many opponents.
The various kinds of Marxists and Communists all started out claiming they intended to take everything from the world's middle class and give it all to the world's working class.
And after an initial violent overthrow of the existing system, they promised to end state executions.
And indeed they did start out by taking from the rich and giving to the poor - if the poor is defined as the upwardly mobile urban industrial working class.
But soon they all began to take from everybody and give it mostly to massive military buildups against imaginary enemies, so somewhat continuing to benefit the industrial worker, but also ensuring that the working class didn't get too much of the nation's new wealth and start feeling frisky.
In addition, a very generous share went to an entirely new middle class cum ruling-forever class made up from some of the smarter, more ambitious and more ruthless children of the working class.
Even more depressingly, the communists in all the various nations in which they seized power soon acted exactly the same way against their minorities and neighbouring nations as the previous aristocratic and capitalist rulers had done.
And to do so, they secretly murdered millions of all sorts of people over the decades, all the while publicly claiming to have ended capital punishment, except in cases of treason.
Once again deep rooted narrow nationalism cum imperialism seemed to have trumped the nominal world-wide official ideology.
And yes, doubletalk once again - though in this case, there seemed a widespread and genuine surprise among marxist & communist intellectuals that it all ended up this way.
The third clustering gathered the rest of the world's nations, be they dictatorships, monarchies or liberal democracies , united only around just one thing : the all out defence of well-off people's private property (and the nominal defence of the 'individual').
Once again doubletalk.
The defence of ill-gotten capital accumulation was sincere enough, but in practise most of the rewards and the protection of the law that was supposed to go to all individuals, instead went to native-born, educated, upper middle class, straight males of the dominant religious and ethnic group.
These nations might never declare formal military war against each other but they were always secretly at war against each other over matters of money.
In the form of nationalist trade wars, together with nationalist wars over intellectual property rights and nationalist wars over the flow of capital, labour and goods.
So once again, behind the smokescreen doubletalk of universal brotherhood of individual rights, nationalism trumps all.
One can only point to the immense secret efforts by both America and Britain, at the very depths of their Allied war against Hitler and Tojo, to beggar the other in postwar trade matters, to show how much greed is the real underlying ideology of many of our rulers.
And all three clusterings were united in giving unearned wealth to members of their privileged subgroups by taking from the weak.
The weak might be an internal group - their own majority ethnicity's poorest . Or it might be the more traditional form of imperialism - taking the natural resources and labour from ethnic and religious minorities inside the borders of their empire cum nation or from overseas 'colonies'.
So imperialism and nationalism actually united all three supposedly different ideological clusters.
But they then had to morally justify why it was so very morally wrong to steal private property of the strong but quite alright to steal the private and public property of the weak.
The traditional way was to claim that their nation-empire-civilization was the sole, best, bearer of the one true religion and that they weren't stealing at all - merely extracting a university tuition sized fee from the heathens in exchange for teaching them of this priceless boon.
But there were quite a number of one true and universal religions in the nineteenth century and this led to wars among them ---- as long as people still believed in religions.
But when people stopped believing that there was any real difference between Catholics and Protestants, indeed between Christians, Moslems and heathens, a new moral justification was required.
Now the true civilizations, those worthy enough to enslave other lesser beings and feel morally good about it, were the most scientific ones.
A peculiar form of science. mind you - one much beloved by Conservatives and Republicans of the day - because it said that Evolutionary success inevitably went to the big and ruthless over the small and weak.
Better science meant both better guns to put down the scientifically backward darkies and in feeling a warm moral glow while doing so.
Because if the darkies had fought back successfully, that would mean that they too are scientifically advanced and hence a worthy civilization, in evolutionary terms.
A clear example of this was how the West responded when Japan beat the Russians in the 1905 war.
But science is truly universal, at least in the big picture, so how then to justify why it was right for scientifically advanced England to invade backward China but not for scientifically advanced Japan to do the same ?
I have often thought the sudden rise of many new ideologies at the same time as the sudden rise of Scientism was somehow intimately connected.
I don't mean the people who founded these various -isms were insincere.
The Magnification of Small Differences
I just mean the success of these many brand new ideologies can be laid to the fact that they allowed 'moral' wars against each other among the world's powerful and ruthless, elites who were otherwise united in all worshipping at one new and universal religion - scientism and its offshoots : the new nationalism, the new imperialism, the new racism and the new social darwinism...
Wednesday, June 17, 2015
Dawson: I've treated pneumonia in the richest AND the poorest
Nothing made Dr Henry Dawson more angry than hearing his more 'progressive' colleagues pontificate on about how the poor were only kept alive because a misguidedly kindly society persisted in giving them the best possible medical care for their bloody pneumonias.
"Out there in Nature, the poor would all be dead".
The famed medical science research centre known as the Rockefeller Institute had a very tiny hospital attached and most of its patients were friends of the Rockefeller family, the equivalent of today's New York City billionaires.
It was Henry Dawson's job for his two years at the Rockefeller Institute hospital to treat the pneumonias of the city's rich and famous with the world's best medical care.
Now he was a clinical researcher at Columbia Presbyterian teaching hospital where many of the patients were among the city's poorest and he treated their pneumonias as well.
So Dawson well knew - contrary to Social Darwinism theories from the medical progressives - that the survival of the people regarded as humanity's 'fittest' was just as dependent on good medical care as were the lives of the poor.
"Out there in Nature, the rich would all be dead as well..."
"Out there in Nature, the poor would all be dead".
The famed medical science research centre known as the Rockefeller Institute had a very tiny hospital attached and most of its patients were friends of the Rockefeller family, the equivalent of today's New York City billionaires.
It was Henry Dawson's job for his two years at the Rockefeller Institute hospital to treat the pneumonias of the city's rich and famous with the world's best medical care.
Now he was a clinical researcher at Columbia Presbyterian teaching hospital where many of the patients were among the city's poorest and he treated their pneumonias as well.
So Dawson well knew - contrary to Social Darwinism theories from the medical progressives - that the survival of the people regarded as humanity's 'fittest' was just as dependent on good medical care as were the lives of the poor.
"Out there in Nature, the rich would all be dead as well..."
Friday, May 29, 2015
WWII's clash of arms ended in 1945 but clash of its ideals continues
In September 1939, Britain (and France) did reluctantly go to war against Germany when it invaded Poland --- but hardly to protect this smaller, weaker nation from being being swallowed up by a bigger neighbour.
They basically sat on their hands while Germany, Slovakia and Russia invaded it and then divided it up.
Right to the end of the war and beyond, Britain (and now America) secretly horse-traded away the freedom of small nations; yes including the soon to be liberated Poland.
Traded then away without ever consulting their governments, let alone their populations.
The spirit of charity to weaker strangers (regardless of their economic or political value to the charity-giver) certainly did not animate any government during WWII.
The clash of arms of WWII did indeed happen between nations and as such, has been examined past the point of exhaustion by too many authors.
Examined but without however providing an unifying explanation to account for WWII's global indifference towards the lives of weaker strangers displayed by all three sides - Axis, Allies and Neutrals.
So to examine WWII's clash of ideals (because this disregard for the lives of weaker strangers was never universal at the individual level) we need to look well before and after 1945 and get down to the level of individuals .
Down right to the micro level , to examine over time the changing and differing opinions within families and between spouses.
For why was it so that a majority in every nation on earth in those years was so self confident that their indifference to the fate of weak strangers was scientifically (and hence morally) justified ?
I think we need to seek the origins for the universally brutal nature of WWII in the 1920s' changing attitudes towards the idea of charity, as displayed first at the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and hundreds of former 'charity' hospitals like it all over the world.
It has long been noted (and then ignored) that during the Era of Modernity the leading explanations for how reality worked were biological and even medical --- rather than theological, philosophical or based upon the hard sciences of physics and chemistry.
Social Darwinism is thus mis-named : it really is Medical Darwinism.
For it was the medical examinations conducted during national universal conscription selection processes that provided the data for so many peacetime, non-military, social decisions.
So medicine did not sit on the sidelines on WWII , merely patching up the wounded ---- then current medical value systems began WWII's clash of ideals and only a change in today's medical value systems can finally end it.....
They basically sat on their hands while Germany, Slovakia and Russia invaded it and then divided it up.
Right to the end of the war and beyond, Britain (and now America) secretly horse-traded away the freedom of small nations; yes including the soon to be liberated Poland.
Traded then away without ever consulting their governments, let alone their populations.
The spirit of charity to weaker strangers (regardless of their economic or political value to the charity-giver) certainly did not animate any government during WWII.
The clash of arms of WWII did indeed happen between nations and as such, has been examined past the point of exhaustion by too many authors.
Examined but without however providing an unifying explanation to account for WWII's global indifference towards the lives of weaker strangers displayed by all three sides - Axis, Allies and Neutrals.
So to examine WWII's clash of ideals (because this disregard for the lives of weaker strangers was never universal at the individual level) we need to look well before and after 1945 and get down to the level of individuals .
Down right to the micro level , to examine over time the changing and differing opinions within families and between spouses.
For why was it so that a majority in every nation on earth in those years was so self confident that their indifference to the fate of weak strangers was scientifically (and hence morally) justified ?
I think we need to seek the origins for the universally brutal nature of WWII in the 1920s' changing attitudes towards the idea of charity, as displayed first at the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and hundreds of former 'charity' hospitals like it all over the world.
It has long been noted (and then ignored) that during the Era of Modernity the leading explanations for how reality worked were biological and even medical --- rather than theological, philosophical or based upon the hard sciences of physics and chemistry.
Social Darwinism is thus mis-named : it really is Medical Darwinism.
For it was the medical examinations conducted during national universal conscription selection processes that provided the data for so many peacetime, non-military, social decisions.
So medicine did not sit on the sidelines on WWII , merely patching up the wounded ---- then current medical value systems began WWII's clash of ideals and only a change in today's medical value systems can finally end it.....
Wednesday, April 29, 2015
'Riding the Tiger of Progress' - not Liberalism - was key meme of Modernity
For liberals to state that all people are born equal and that this is a condition that can neither be gained or lost, is to describe a static - even tranquil - condition.
By contrast, the same liberals' idea of Progress sees all humanity as being born 'involuntary participants' in a series of life-or-death gladiator competitions ; Progress merely being Social Darwinism in its political correct dress-coat.
Life or death competitions where even the 'happy' winners are always looking back over their shoulders and where the losers believe they will lose their lives, in the long term if not in the short term.
So in the 1930s let's say, it was currently felt that the White race was winning over the Yellow race but that could change, if the Whites ever let down their guard for even a minute.
And within the White race of the 1930s, the Anglo Saxons were winning but the Jews were gaining, and so the Anglo Saxons must ever keep up their guard and even consider new counter measures.
While within the Jews, physically and mentally defectives were losing the intellectual race but winning the demographic race.
The idea of Progress is what allowed - is what allows - liberals to have their cake and eat it too : talk of equality but encourage a tigers' den of winners and losers.
But 'riding the tiger of progress' was uneasy work - and hence the Era of Modernity was noteworthy for its frequent communal pogroms of violence, fear and hatred against other 'gladiators' --WWII being merely the worst and best known....
By contrast, the same liberals' idea of Progress sees all humanity as being born 'involuntary participants' in a series of life-or-death gladiator competitions ; Progress merely being Social Darwinism in its political correct dress-coat.
Life or death competitions where even the 'happy' winners are always looking back over their shoulders and where the losers believe they will lose their lives, in the long term if not in the short term.
So in the 1930s let's say, it was currently felt that the White race was winning over the Yellow race but that could change, if the Whites ever let down their guard for even a minute.
And within the White race of the 1930s, the Anglo Saxons were winning but the Jews were gaining, and so the Anglo Saxons must ever keep up their guard and even consider new counter measures.
While within the Jews, physically and mentally defectives were losing the intellectual race but winning the demographic race.
The idea of Progress is what allowed - is what allows - liberals to have their cake and eat it too : talk of equality but encourage a tigers' den of winners and losers.
But 'riding the tiger of progress' was uneasy work - and hence the Era of Modernity was noteworthy for its frequent communal pogroms of violence, fear and hatred against other 'gladiators' --WWII being merely the worst and best known....
Friday, March 20, 2015
When the upward causation of 'invariably fatal' SBE meets the downward causation of Dawson's agape penicillin
Let us accept - for the sake of the argument - the unproven assumption that many kids could even get SBE disease out there in the Social Darwinists' belovedly savage "Nature" that existed before Christian compassion peed on their picnic.
Then, yes, the SBEs' premature death out there in early Nature does seem assured - even 'invariable'.
A clear case of what philosophic reductionists (such as Adolf Hitler) liked to call "upward causation", mandated from the virile little bacteria at the bottom to the big - damaged - heart valves at the top.
Seemingly, end of story.
But remember, even when the evolutionary upward causation of tiny mutating genes throw ups three headed horses, the varying reproductive odds out there in the big eternal environment also get to have their say.
And to date, those reproductive odds has shown a decided preference for horses with only one head.
A clear example of Evolution's "downward causation" (from the top big to the bottom small) having its two cent say on the final results.
In September 1940, the upward causation of Aaron (Leroy) Alston's inevitably death from SBE (subacute bacterial endocarditis - the disease that made Rheumatic Fever the number one killer of kids for 50 years) hit a speed bump.
Inspired by Alston's black activist spunk, a middle aged doctor (Martin Henry Dawson) decided to strike his own personal blow for freedom during WWII by trying to stop Social Darwinists in America from doing to SBE patients what Hitler was already doing to their counterparts in Germany under the Aktion T4 program.
Despite Dawson's best efforts with his historic home-brewed antibiotic injections, Alston did not survive in the end, but Dawson's efforts ultimately ensured that ten billion of us - so far - have led longer happier healthier years.
Seventy five years later, the downward causation of Dawson's agape penicillin is still working itself out in all its complex manifestations, all over our world.
Try and reduce that .....
Then, yes, the SBEs' premature death out there in early Nature does seem assured - even 'invariable'.
A clear case of what philosophic reductionists (such as Adolf Hitler) liked to call "upward causation", mandated from the virile little bacteria at the bottom to the big - damaged - heart valves at the top.
Seemingly, end of story.
But remember, even when the evolutionary upward causation of tiny mutating genes throw ups three headed horses, the varying reproductive odds out there in the big eternal environment also get to have their say.
And to date, those reproductive odds has shown a decided preference for horses with only one head.
A clear example of Evolution's "downward causation" (from the top big to the bottom small) having its two cent say on the final results.
In September 1940, the upward causation of Aaron (Leroy) Alston's inevitably death from SBE (subacute bacterial endocarditis - the disease that made Rheumatic Fever the number one killer of kids for 50 years) hit a speed bump.
Inspired by Alston's black activist spunk, a middle aged doctor (Martin Henry Dawson) decided to strike his own personal blow for freedom during WWII by trying to stop Social Darwinists in America from doing to SBE patients what Hitler was already doing to their counterparts in Germany under the Aktion T4 program.
Despite Dawson's best efforts with his historic home-brewed antibiotic injections, Alston did not survive in the end, but Dawson's efforts ultimately ensured that ten billion of us - so far - have led longer happier healthier years.
Seventy five years later, the downward causation of Dawson's agape penicillin is still working itself out in all its complex manifestations, all over our world.
Try and reduce that .....
Tuesday, August 27, 2013
Social Darwinism turns Peace into Undeclared War...
The attributes of the Age of the Big (Social Darwinism Mk I) makes the idea of contrasting it with the concept of the War of the Big (Social Darwinism Mk II) a moot point.
This is because the Social Darwin idea of reducing all Life to an unceasing, total, struggle for life or death means that only a formal declaration on paper could separate Darwinian War from Darwinian Peace.
It was always assumed , without much proof, that in this struggle the big would inevitably triumph over the small and then the ever bigger would do likewise over the merely 'big' .
By contrast ,Henry Dawson championed the small all his life - it must have come almost naturally to him, with his coming from a Canadian province that was increasingly viewed as too small to be relevant to Canadian values.
But he also noticed in his scientific investigations that while the big did thrive in stable circumstances, the small could still at least survive in hidden niches.
But in non-stable times, the big (over-extended) broke up, while the small (insured against normal hard times) took it all in stride.
Rather than modern science quickly dismissing Life's small as just part of evolution's dusty, distant beginnings, he felt they should give the small a second glance - and a second chance.
He extended this in the 1930s to those judged chronically ill and second rate and then, in the war years , to those American young people with SBE who were judged to be 'life unworthy of expensive medical care during a military crisis' .
Modern science had no time for his theory - his championing of the small was viewed as a damning folly from a medical scientist with an otherwise worthy medical career.
But post modernity science is largely shaped around the concept of reality's inherent complexity and diversity : admitting that reality will always consist of the mixing together of large and small phenomena and large and small beings.
In this long view, Dawson's folly begins to look quite prescient ...
This is because the Social Darwin idea of reducing all Life to an unceasing, total, struggle for life or death means that only a formal declaration on paper could separate Darwinian War from Darwinian Peace.
It was always assumed , without much proof, that in this struggle the big would inevitably triumph over the small and then the ever bigger would do likewise over the merely 'big' .
By contrast ,Henry Dawson championed the small all his life - it must have come almost naturally to him, with his coming from a Canadian province that was increasingly viewed as too small to be relevant to Canadian values.
But he also noticed in his scientific investigations that while the big did thrive in stable circumstances, the small could still at least survive in hidden niches.
But in non-stable times, the big (over-extended) broke up, while the small (insured against normal hard times) took it all in stride.
Rather than modern science quickly dismissing Life's small as just part of evolution's dusty, distant beginnings, he felt they should give the small a second glance - and a second chance.
He extended this in the 1930s to those judged chronically ill and second rate and then, in the war years , to those American young people with SBE who were judged to be 'life unworthy of expensive medical care during a military crisis' .
Modern science had no time for his theory - his championing of the small was viewed as a damning folly from a medical scientist with an otherwise worthy medical career.
But post modernity science is largely shaped around the concept of reality's inherent complexity and diversity : admitting that reality will always consist of the mixing together of large and small phenomena and large and small beings.
In this long view, Dawson's folly begins to look quite prescient ...
Thursday, April 18, 2013
Tortoise vs Hare : predicting our world in 1945....
On September 2nd 1939, when the British Empire declared war on the German Empire (thus ensuring we would have another world war), there were two main scientific theories predicting the shape of our world at the war's end.
The far more popular theory at the time was called Modernity, Social Darwinism or simply 'Might is Right'.
It said Evolution was a vertical affair, with wiser and more mighty entities inevitably and naturally replacing entities that were weaker and more foolish.
The other, far less popular theory, saw Evolution as a horizontal activity, with the weaker and simple-minded entities continuing to co-exist for ever and ever, in global commensality, with the bigger and more complex entities.
It even went further than that.
It claimed that on not-infrequent occasion, the smaller and more simple would even triumph over the larger, more complex and more sophisticated entities in the fundamental effort to survive.
Now it is obviously that these diametrically opposed theories could not both be right.
"the hyssop and The Cedars" will look closely at the course of WWII to see how accurate each scientific theory was in predicting the twisting course of that awful - and unexpectedly awfully long - war.....
The far more popular theory at the time was called Modernity, Social Darwinism or simply 'Might is Right'.
It said Evolution was a vertical affair, with wiser and more mighty entities inevitably and naturally replacing entities that were weaker and more foolish.
The other, far less popular theory, saw Evolution as a horizontal activity, with the weaker and simple-minded entities continuing to co-exist for ever and ever, in global commensality, with the bigger and more complex entities.
It even went further than that.
It claimed that on not-infrequent occasion, the smaller and more simple would even triumph over the larger, more complex and more sophisticated entities in the fundamental effort to survive.
Now it is obviously that these diametrically opposed theories could not both be right.
"the hyssop and The Cedars" will look closely at the course of WWII to see how accurate each scientific theory was in predicting the twisting course of that awful - and unexpectedly awfully long - war.....
Wednesday, September 26, 2012
All Optimists - without exception - are Social Darwinists ; all Pessimists are Altruists
 |
| Always the OPTIMIST |
An optimist believes that there is only one simple, perfect, permanent solution to each of Life's relatively few difficulties.
Someone more skeptical and cautious sees many possible solutions to each of Life's many and complex problems: all imperfect, impermanent and all highly contingent.
Yesterday's wild-eyed optimistic science - that of Newton, Dalton & Darwin - is still worshipped in High Schools around the world
And right now , wild-eyed cock-eyed optimism ,(aka Yesterday's Science - the science of Newton, Dalton and Darwin still worshipped in High School laboratory chapels around the world) , is killing this planet - destroying tomorrow's world for our kids and grandkids.
And we're just letting it all happen.
When there is only one possible - simple - certain - permanent - solution to every problem, what do you do with the rest - the imperfect solutions ?
Those mouchers, those useless mouths, those "unfit" ideas, those takers not makers , those 47% type ideas ?
You eliminate those ideas like an eugenicist eliminates the unfit.
But when you doubt that this or any solution will work perfectly and permanently in each and every set of circumstances, what do you do with today's less than perfect solutions ?
Like a pack rat, you preserve them for another day and another situation - you redeem them - see if they can serve the community with pride under different circumstances.
You don't write them off forever - you don't toss them aside like a used condom - you treat them them like those people who are down today, but not out - because, with a little help and sympathy, they might be up and about tomorrow.
Mitt Romney says his action plan actually consists of nothing more than free floating optimism.
Should we really be surprised then about his secret speech writing off the 47% as 'useless mouths' ?
I don't think so....
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
As a EUGENICIST, Romney exceeds even Hitler , who never thought 47% of Germans were 'unfit'
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| the UNFIT vote democrat |
The other half of us pay no federal taxes and are the takers, the moochers, the dependents,the self-defined victims, Nature's 'unfit.'
Victorian 'culture wars' re-emerge into 21st century presidential election
Out in the real world, before Victorians brought in sentimental campaigns to protect children, slaves, women and animals, these 'unfit' would die a short and natural death.
But now soft-headed (Democrat) governments have kept this half of us alive artificially --- under Romney all this would change.
But some years, perhaps even Romney fits into these 'unfit' ---as in some years he too may have paid no taxes.
I don't know this for a fact admittably, but I am hardly alone in strongly suspecting it, if only from his most electorally costly decision: the decision NOT to reveal his past income tax returns.
But there is another view of Darwin and Herbert Spencer that doesn't throw out their baby with the bathwater: it is this that "the fittest will survive".
OOOOOOH !!! Did I say a bad thing ?
I don't think so and here is why:
'Fit' or 'fittest' : what's the difference ?
A tiny jockey doesn't seem particularly 'fit' versus a football quarterback but try to 'fit' that quarterback on the backside of a horse in a horserace and we begin to see that while the term 'fit' (and hence un-fit) is static, permanent and eternal, the term 'fittest' is highly contingent and varies from time to time and place to place.
In a world of the First Law (of thermodynamics), the fit will survive : it is stable and permanent and static.
But if the world is better described by the Second Law (of thermodynamics) and is is in constant and dynamic and chaotic change, then sometimes and somewhere , the small and the small eaters (those frequently judged unfit) will actually often do much better than the big and big eater.
Fantasy says that "God is on the side of the battalions of the biggest eaters", but the Earth's long history, grounded in ancient dead giant dinosaur bones and huge healthy present day populations of tiny bacteria, suggests otherwise.
Blue Sky fantasy or Grounded reality : no guess as to which world Mr Romney drinks the Kool-Aid in.....
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
K-selection dominates history, First Law of Thermodynamics claims
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| Triumph of the K-selected ? |
That First Law implies just one thing : that Reality is, on the whole and in the long term, simple, predictable and stable.
In other words, Reality is generally at or approaching Equilibrium.
In such conditions it seemed only natural that "the K-selected of all the K-selected", Man, would totally dominate "the niche of all niches",the Universe, a niche so vast that growth and expansion of man's domain was effectively infinite.
The K or the r : who has dominated history ?
Victorians didn't use the term "K-selected" but they knew, used and believed in the concept.
Bigger is better, might is right, law of the jungle, God is on the side of the bigger battalions.
Never ending -ever upward - progress of ever bigger and more complex beings.
Bigger cities, bigger empires, bigger companies, bigger profits : ever onward and upwards : a tumour with "room to grow" (as if cancer chose to mate with Ontario premier Bill Davis).
But some Victorians - more sentimentalists than social darwinians, chose (consciously or unconsciously) to focus on the more fundamental of the two laws of thermodynamics : the Second Law.
And it portrayed a Universe of constant, but uncertain, change : progress yes, but downwards.
A niche that steadily was getting smaller over time, with beings constantly forced to adjust to less and less incoming "useful" resources of matter and energy.
Who was right ?
Have K-selected giants dominated the world's history of life over the last 4 billion years ?
Or have tiny nimble r-selected survivors successfully endured whatever reality has thrown at them , for the last 4 billion years ?
Dinosaurs or bacteria : who has been around the longest, dominated more habitats, had more individual unique members, had the greater biomass .
The K or the r ?
Put it like that to the libertarian think tanks of Washington and even they, they of the intellect a mile wide and an inch deep, even they squirm in embarrassed silence ....
Saturday, September 8, 2012
Forgotten by design : Victorians loved Sentimentality as much as Social Darwinism
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| Victorian Values ??? |
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....
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