The era of Modernity and Progress was a deductive era, seeking the one and only absolutely correct and complete answer to every question ---- a great time to be a determinist, reductionist 'scientist'.
And thus a terribly bad era for historians, be they historians of nature (naturalists) or of humanity. Or indeed, if they are frontline medical clinicians like Dr Martin Henry Dawson, writing up a patient's history in a hospital setting.
Not a time then for them to be offering up an ever growing number of probable reasons possibly contributing to a given situation.
For Modernity and Progress hated diversity or plentitude, only hating probabilities and possibilities even worse : as Einstein opined, "(My) God does not play dice."
Einstein's era was a gassy Era (Zyklon B, if you have it, please), an era of "Terrible Simplicities", certainties, certitudes, normalcy.
Yet to the inductive natural historian (naturalist), out in the field, ever more possibilities and plentitude was their ticket to fame.
Oh to find a yet another tit mouse species (purple-colored even !) when the experts had claimed all tit mouses had been found and all were brown or gray !
Meanwhile the only philosopher type the majority of other philosophers recognized as truly being a philosopher, was sitting behind a desk in the lab.
Hard at work, trying to become famous in their branch of intellectual activity, trying to plenticide all this new plentitude as fast as it was being created.
Ignoring the warning of King Canute.
Seeking to reduce all of Reality down to a single paragraph long "Law of Everything".
Finally explaining the redheaded waitress's elliptic smile yesterday as being the result of the mechanical motion of a certain tiny sub atomic particle, in a distant part of the universe, eleven billion years earlier.
But historians are also fully philosophers : albeit philosophers who 'explain' but do not 'explain and predict specific actions'.
A natural historian will 'explain' why a very modern jet unexpectedly crashed in a lightning storm in a remote jungle airstrip by explaining that the weather is terrible hard to predict very accurately ----- even in big urban centres where expensive weather staff are plentiful, let alone in remote and poor parts of the world.
Most of us, still brainwashed from school, will argue that really is no explanation at all.
But the inductive historians' philosophy does fully explains Reality, as something simply being too vast and too complicated to ever be fully predictable for humanity.
They differ from the deductive philosophers only in not following up their explanations with specific predictions.
They thus fail to the test of being 'scientific' and
philosophers', at least in the self definition of those two as given by the lab-bound deducers.
But being economists in the way that few deductive scientists and philosophers are capable of being, the inducers hold fast to their view.
They insist the evidence shows that predicting future Reality accurately is simply far too expensive.
At least when set against the large amount of our limited waking hours and limited earthly resources (aka limited "money") we must devote to merely staying alive and warm.
By contrast, most our deductive philosophies still predict we will eventually make accurate and yet cheap predictions, if only we keep searching for the ultimate and absolute baseline truths that negate the need for all of today's topline expensive fact gathering and calculating.
(Translation of 'search' : you taxpayers continue to fund me doodling around in my lab.)
That Reality is ultimately 'knowable' in the sense of being predictable is not a fact though --- merely an opinion - and the opinion that predicting Reality is beyond our price range is another.
So we end up with a plentitude of opinions - and in the plenticidal era of Progress and Modernity, one had to be squashed - like a bug....
Showing posts with label zyklon-b. Show all posts
Showing posts with label zyklon-b. Show all posts
Monday, July 27, 2015
Saturday, June 20, 2015
Synthetic penicillin could heal WWII's bodies, but only natural penicillin could heal its soul as well
Determined not to 'lose face' and let down their side by being upstaged by native life-saving penicillin, for twenty long years (1928-1948) imperial Anglo-European medical science chased the mirage of synthetic (civilized-man-made) penicillin.
In fact, put this quest well above their real task - of saving lives.
Even during WWII.
A fracking disgrace.
But they never could make commercial synthetic penicillin (we still can't) and so almost all our antibiotics still begin with fungus-grown native penicillin.
Imagine that : the smallest and stupidest beings could make a miraculous lifesaving balm, when the smartest beings in the universe couldn't.
This surprising turn of events helped upend all our long cherished delusions about the natural order of progress and intelligence.
This held that intelligence, however defined, rose inevitably from virtually none at all among the oldest, smallest and stupidest right up to the newest, biggest and smartest beings in the universe : the civilized scientists who gave us Napalm, Plutonium and Zyklon-B.
And speaking of Zyklon-B, these same globally held views on a vertical ladder of intelligence and worthiness rising from the small to the great, is what justified (in their minds) the killings of all those with 'lives unworthy of life' by the Nazis.
No wonder then that ours, today, is a post-Modern, post-Progress age ...
In fact, put this quest well above their real task - of saving lives.
Even during WWII.
A fracking disgrace.
But they never could make commercial synthetic penicillin (we still can't) and so almost all our antibiotics still begin with fungus-grown native penicillin.
Imagine that : the smallest and stupidest beings could make a miraculous lifesaving balm, when the smartest beings in the universe couldn't.
This surprising turn of events helped upend all our long cherished delusions about the natural order of progress and intelligence.
This held that intelligence, however defined, rose inevitably from virtually none at all among the oldest, smallest and stupidest right up to the newest, biggest and smartest beings in the universe : the civilized scientists who gave us Napalm, Plutonium and Zyklon-B.
And speaking of Zyklon-B, these same globally held views on a vertical ladder of intelligence and worthiness rising from the small to the great, is what justified (in their minds) the killings of all those with 'lives unworthy of life' by the Nazis.
No wonder then that ours, today, is a post-Modern, post-Progress age ...
Thursday, January 29, 2015
PLENTICIDE - not Ecocide or Mundicide
Plenticide is the deliberate 'pruning back' of 'excessive' anything (and everything) - simply because some/many/all people feel totally overwhelmed by abundance, either some of the time or all of the time.
Abundance of choice, abundance of complexity, abundance of competitors, abundance of debate and of decisions, the list goes on ---- plenticide happens because of primal fear from one or all of these reasons.
It needn't involve killing humans or even living beings - killing ideas and choices will do just as well in providing these plenticiders with their sought for relief.
A nuclear war or a big comet might destroy all life on it and even destroy its atmosphere forever - but this mundicide - death of a planet's life - because it was not a selective pruning back but rather a total loss of life and choice.
A tiny bit more deliberate is the incidental killing of lifeforms as human activity expands - ecocide - because we have been warned repeatedly that expanding these activities will lead to these deaths.
Criminal neglect or culpable negligence seems to be the terms we are looking for to describe these planet-wide crimes.
But plenticide refers to deliberate plans to kill lifeforms to deliberately reduce variety, debate, competition, complexity.
So the Holocaust system took up a well known insecticide Zyklon-B and used it to kill off human 'competitors' (Jews , Romas, Slavs) as well as farm bugs - because they felt both made life much more chaotic and complex for the German nation during WWII.
We fail ourselves if we only call such killing a genocide, because that says only what/who was killed and not really why.
That 'why' comes down to plenticide...
Abundance of choice, abundance of complexity, abundance of competitors, abundance of debate and of decisions, the list goes on ---- plenticide happens because of primal fear from one or all of these reasons.
It needn't involve killing humans or even living beings - killing ideas and choices will do just as well in providing these plenticiders with their sought for relief.
A nuclear war or a big comet might destroy all life on it and even destroy its atmosphere forever - but this mundicide - death of a planet's life - because it was not a selective pruning back but rather a total loss of life and choice.
A tiny bit more deliberate is the incidental killing of lifeforms as human activity expands - ecocide - because we have been warned repeatedly that expanding these activities will lead to these deaths.
Criminal neglect or culpable negligence seems to be the terms we are looking for to describe these planet-wide crimes.
Fear of overwhelming abundance
But plenticide refers to deliberate plans to kill lifeforms to deliberately reduce variety, debate, competition, complexity.
So the Holocaust system took up a well known insecticide Zyklon-B and used it to kill off human 'competitors' (Jews , Romas, Slavs) as well as farm bugs - because they felt both made life much more chaotic and complex for the German nation during WWII.
We fail ourselves if we only call such killing a genocide, because that says only what/who was killed and not really why.
That 'why' comes down to plenticide...
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
Po, Po Pitiful Mo : too many Boomers praising plentitude & practising plenticide ...
Modernity's great sin was not its assumption that all our God-given diversity was actually, at its core, very simple, predictable and controllable.
Rather the sin lay in the fact that when Modernity's scientists discovered this not to be the case, they and it did not desist.
Instead human Hubris set about trying to create an alternative artificial simplicity that was predictable and controllable by Man alone : the Triumph of the Will over the Wind.
It was war on two fronts : plenticiding all of Mother Nature's complex unpredictable chaos out of existence and substituting a Man-made synthetic order and simplicity in its place.
From a forever labile thermo-plastic natural reality, it tried to impose an eternally thermo-set artificial reality.
Most modernists never had any objections to using Zyklon-B to kill billions of bugs, but they did not want to see it used to kill millions of 'human germs'.
They generally preferred to let 'primitive lives judged unworthy of civilized life', like aboriginals around the world in peacetime and Slavs in wartime, to quietly wither on the vine -- from lack of land resources to feed, clothe, house and heat themselves.
The Nazis could have simply extracted most of the food, fuel and clothing from occupied Poland and Russia for themselves as 'a matter of wartime necessity'.
Then six million Jews in Eastern Europe - or maybe more - might have quietly died in the mix, from hunger-related diseases, along with 30 million of their Slavic neighbours.
After WWII, would have the world have not simply sighed and then speak softly of the cruel necessities of total war ?
But the Nazis killed Modernity stone dead (as well as six million Jews) when they chose to put their plenticidal-genocidal plans in writing.
For they at last made Modernity's always implicit plenticide fully explicit - indicating in writing that they deliberately planned to murder all the world's Jews with Zyklon-B, in an effort to remove a chaos-causing ethnicity from the Earth forever.
As a result, I don't see today's Sixth Extinction and yesterday's Holocaust as being all that different in their intentions, despite the wide difference in their methods and targets.
As a result of growing up in an transitional Era, we conflicted boomers are both Mo and Po --- practising plenticide semi-consciously on Nature with our actions --- all the while praising diversity and variety with our mouths.
But if we boomers don't start soon walking our talk, the earth & climate is surely doomed ..
Rather the sin lay in the fact that when Modernity's scientists discovered this not to be the case, they and it did not desist.
Instead human Hubris set about trying to create an alternative artificial simplicity that was predictable and controllable by Man alone : the Triumph of the Will over the Wind.
It was war on two fronts : plenticiding all of Mother Nature's complex unpredictable chaos out of existence and substituting a Man-made synthetic order and simplicity in its place.
From a forever labile thermo-plastic natural reality, it tried to impose an eternally thermo-set artificial reality.
Putting plenticide in writing
Most modernists never had any objections to using Zyklon-B to kill billions of bugs, but they did not want to see it used to kill millions of 'human germs'.
They generally preferred to let 'primitive lives judged unworthy of civilized life', like aboriginals around the world in peacetime and Slavs in wartime, to quietly wither on the vine -- from lack of land resources to feed, clothe, house and heat themselves.
The Nazis could have simply extracted most of the food, fuel and clothing from occupied Poland and Russia for themselves as 'a matter of wartime necessity'.
Then six million Jews in Eastern Europe - or maybe more - might have quietly died in the mix, from hunger-related diseases, along with 30 million of their Slavic neighbours.
After WWII, would have the world have not simply sighed and then speak softly of the cruel necessities of total war ?
But the Nazis killed Modernity stone dead (as well as six million Jews) when they chose to put their plenticidal-genocidal plans in writing.
For they at last made Modernity's always implicit plenticide fully explicit - indicating in writing that they deliberately planned to murder all the world's Jews with Zyklon-B, in an effort to remove a chaos-causing ethnicity from the Earth forever.
Plenticide & the Sixth Extinction
As a result, I don't see today's Sixth Extinction and yesterday's Holocaust as being all that different in their intentions, despite the wide difference in their methods and targets.
As a result of growing up in an transitional Era, we conflicted boomers are both Mo and Po --- practising plenticide semi-consciously on Nature with our actions --- all the while praising diversity and variety with our mouths.
But if we boomers don't start soon walking our talk, the earth & climate is surely doomed ..
Sunday, September 7, 2014
Natural penicillin's unexpected triumph --- against Synthetics' 1939-1945 war against Nature
Big Science - Synthetic Science - had a lot of triumphs during WWII, the war that its promises , not Hitler's megalomania, actually started.
Synthetic Oil, Synthetic Rubber, Synthetic Silk, Synthetic Quinine , Synthetic Man , Synthetic Penicillin all sought to replace 'unreliable' natural products with new improved Man-perfected 'predictable' substitutes.
Synthetic Plutonium (sic) , Synthetic DDT, Synthetic Zyklon-B , Synthetic Freon, and Synthetic Napalm went one step further when Man was considered to have created new products that Nature could never have dreamed up.
Thank God for Nature then !
And as for Man-made predictability , it is worth recalling that human chemists only make a tiny minority of all chemical compounds.
Chemists usually stumble on a compound with useful properties and then go to work on replacing its side chains until even better properties emerge.
But so too the environment and biological beings do the same to the sidechains of Man-made chemical compounds such as Freon and DDT.
In the process Nature created massive un-natural disasters Scientific Man could never have predicted precisely but human humility might have considered a distinct possibility .
The German chemical world's promise that in the very near future total synthetic autarky was possible allowed enough otherwise sensible adult Germans to go along with Hitler's megalomania talk of endless wars of conquest to get the whole ball of wax started.
Sensible adult Germans who should have personally remembered the failure of WWI's ersatz synthetics to feed and heat a starving , freezing nation under total blockade.
Synthetic Oil, Synthetic Rubber, Synthetic Silk, Synthetic Quinine , Synthetic Man , Synthetic Penicillin all sought to replace 'unreliable' natural products with new improved Man-perfected 'predictable' substitutes.
Synthetic Plutonium (sic) , Synthetic DDT, Synthetic Zyklon-B , Synthetic Freon, and Synthetic Napalm went one step further when Man was considered to have created new products that Nature could never have dreamed up.
Thank God for Nature then !
And as for Man-made predictability , it is worth recalling that human chemists only make a tiny minority of all chemical compounds.
Chemists usually stumble on a compound with useful properties and then go to work on replacing its side chains until even better properties emerge.
But so too the environment and biological beings do the same to the sidechains of Man-made chemical compounds such as Freon and DDT.
In the process Nature created massive un-natural disasters Scientific Man could never have predicted precisely but human humility might have considered a distinct possibility .
The German chemical world's promise that in the very near future total synthetic autarky was possible allowed enough otherwise sensible adult Germans to go along with Hitler's megalomania talk of endless wars of conquest to get the whole ball of wax started.
Sensible adult Germans who should have personally remembered the failure of WWI's ersatz synthetics to feed and heat a starving , freezing nation under total blockade.
Auschwitz to help birth the Perfect Man , Man-Made Man, Synthetic Man
During WWII, Germans killed tens of millions of Slavs, Jews, Romas and Aryan 'unfits' , all part of a huge (scientific) war within a smaller (military) war .
That scientific war , a deadly serious war that both proceeded and succeeded WWII's nominally important military war, sought to replace Nature's messy plenitude of many imperfect natural types with one Man-made perfect , perfectly static , type.
The synthesis-minded, Nature's breakers , were going to tame these unruly bucking natural broncos.
Just as the Victorian Era pornographers had virtually tamed similar bucking uppity feminist women with stirrups* in their texts and images.
(*Victorian male doctors read pornography as much as other Victorian men did and they later renamed the foot rests for their female patients as "stirrups".)
The stinky,slinky, slimy , constantly mutating fungal molds existing in an unstable, unpredictable world midway between the solid/dry and the wet/flowing , were a particular bete noire to Modern Man , as a glance at that era's most feared monsters ( H P Lovecraft anyone ?) will readily attest.
This is the real, if largely unconscious , reason why 1939-1945's synthetic chemists warred against the penicillium mold (and not the enemy) and why doctors of that period declined to use perfectly safe, effective natural penicillin to save the dying.
But the penicillium was (and remains) one bucking bronco these chemical breakers never could break.
Hitler and the synthetic chemists thought they were good - but then Hitler and the chemists had never tangled with the Strawberry Roan ...
Saturday, September 6, 2014
1945's apogee of Modern science , Big science, Synthetic science : Zyklon-B, Plutonium, Napalm , DDT , Freon and leaded gas
Wow ! Quite a lot for Big Science (particularly chemists and synthetic scientists) to celebrate in 1945.
Set against that , a bit of a minor and undoubtedly temporary disappointment.
For there was (also in 1945) the totally unexpected failure by a thousand of the smartest guys in the room - nay the entire universe - to quickly synthesize the simple small molecule made by some small and extremely simple beings : penicillin.
Flash forward Gordon to 2015.
Chemistry (what's left of it) is now Green , a johnny-come-lately attempt to regain ground lost to biology and penicillin-mediated microbiology in particular.
And yes penicillin is still unpatented, still cheap and abundant, still only created by those extremely simple minded little slime cretins.
Synthetic is now passe , un-cool, like white bread to whole grain bread , and natural is the thing.
We're almost all post-moderns now (angry old white protestant male deniers of climate change, Auschwitz and post-modernity aside.)
For once Big Modern Synthetic Science was given its head (aka WWII) , a lot of us apparently didn't like what we saw.
That is why I find 1945's climatic battle between modern synthetic penicillin and postmodern natural penicillin so darn fascinating.
For the long, broad and convoluted battle between modernity and postmodernity is a story only a seasoned academic could love or fully understand.
But the tale of 1945 penicillin is a tight page turner that both laity and ivory tower can really enjoy...
Set against that , a bit of a minor and undoubtedly temporary disappointment.
For there was (also in 1945) the totally unexpected failure by a thousand of the smartest guys in the room - nay the entire universe - to quickly synthesize the simple small molecule made by some small and extremely simple beings : penicillin.
Flash forward Gordon to 2015.
Chemistry (what's left of it) is now Green , a johnny-come-lately attempt to regain ground lost to biology and penicillin-mediated microbiology in particular.
And yes penicillin is still unpatented, still cheap and abundant, still only created by those extremely simple minded little slime cretins.
Synthetic is now passe , un-cool, like white bread to whole grain bread , and natural is the thing.
We're almost all post-moderns now (angry old white protestant male deniers of climate change, Auschwitz and post-modernity aside.)
For once Big Modern Synthetic Science was given its head (aka WWII) , a lot of us apparently didn't like what we saw.
That is why I find 1945's climatic battle between modern synthetic penicillin and postmodern natural penicillin so darn fascinating.
For the long, broad and convoluted battle between modernity and postmodernity is a story only a seasoned academic could love or fully understand.
But the tale of 1945 penicillin is a tight page turner that both laity and ivory tower can really enjoy...
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