the "Transitional Cohort" : those born after the Fall of France but before the rise of Elvis ...

A cohort ("generation" in lay-speak) is forever defined by the significant external events happening during its key formative ('coming of age') years.

For my cohort - born roughly between 1940 and 1956 and usually defined simply as "first wave Baby Boomers" -  its key characteristic is its 'neither nor' transitional aspect : neither fully and comfortably Modern nor fully and a comfortably post Modern.

Murray Howard Dawson ... and me

I never knew Murray Dawson and he never knew me.

He died July 24 2004, about 4 months before I began to get interested in his father's (Dr Martin Henry Dawson) amazing career.

But despite Murray being almost ten years older than me (he born September 23 1941, me on September 20 1951) I feel a kinship with him that I can never share with his surviving brother and sister , who I do know a little.

This is because Murray and I are of the post-Modernity generation, people who never knew a time before mass destruction nuclear bombs delivered by good-enough inaccuracy by jet bombers and continent spanning rockets, before Auschwitz, and before natural antibiotics like penicillin.

During the Error of Modernity (1875-1965) : only life that was modern was life worthy of life

What 'passed' (successfully) for intellectual activity during the Era of Modernity was mostly about sharply separating, dividing and classifying : in/out , normal/deviant , worthy/unworthy , fit/unfit.

It presumed everything in the universe should be able to be put in distinct boxes ---- and that it could remain there.

One box was good stuff - the other stuff was junk , to be tossed and binned.

(Ultimately found in the rubbish bin of Modernity were such as the entire Jewish,Roma and Slavic 'races'.  Along with rest of us who might be in anyway physically, mentally, emotionally or morally 'handicapped' and lacking in powerful friends).

The brief blip of Modernity (1875-1965) lost WWII - thank God !

Germany , Italy and Japan didn't lose WWII , not to judge by their present day prosperity and happiness that is far far higher now than even at the height of their world conquering triumphs.

Above all, they're still here - but Modernity (the philosophical glue that held Allied , Neutral and Axis together in 1939-1945) sure isn't.

Our monoculture of "BIG" is killing us and our only home - Earth

As was the case (on both sides) during WWII, we live in a (human) monoculture that worships the BIG and dismisses the small , despite the fact that Nature itself hardly reflects this scenario, in fact, much the reverse.

We do so because our powerful and elderly (the two conditions are often related) still support the values of their teenage to young adult formative years under the Late and not so Great era of Modernity.

Modernity's proponents felt it was inevitable that the "fit" ( ie the BIG and the ponderous) would inevitably have all the innings ,all the time, against the small and the nimble.

Today more and more of us younger folk are leaning into the values of post-Modernity, which shows an increased receptiveness to diversity , variety , the local and the small.

But will death take out the Modernists in our midst ( those deniers of any limits on the abilities of the BIG to laugh in the face of Nature's worst), before they take us all out ?

It is a grim race against time  --- which is why I think it is worth re-examining the last time Modernity and the BIG really got sand kicked in their face : WWII ....

WWII : Science at war against physical Reality...

Just because you come across the bodies of a lot of robbers over in the Sierra Madre part of town, this does not automatically mean it was the result of a fight between cops and robbers, good guys versus bad guys.

Sometimes it is nothing more than first a fight between robbers over spoils and then a fight between the surviving robbers and the physical reality of the Mexican desert, with reality biting last.

In terms of their approach to science, all the major combatant empires of WWII thought alike (reality was simpler than it appears)- but they differed wildly - militarily - on how best to divide up the global colonial pie.

However all their collective science efforts soon ran smack into the actual complexity of physical reality and ended up shattered upon it - though almost no one foresaw this ('this' being post-Modernity) at the time.

I think my thesis does a better job than the current historical consensus about WWII in explaining why, if the forces of modernity beat back the fascist forces of anti-modernity in 1945, does 1945 also mark the beginning of the end for the victorious modernity forces.

1945's choices : the Modern exclusionary values that gave us Auschwitz or the post Modern values that gave us 'Public Domain' penicillin ?

In early 1945, two Manhattan doctors had dueling visions of the possible world ahead.

The prominent one, Foster Kennedy ,  wanted to kill all babies with developmental issues.

The unknown other, Henry Dawson, wanted all babies in the world to have access to cheap, abundant (Public Domain) penicillin.

By the end of 1945, the unknown Dawson was dead but - perhaps surprisingly - his idea lived on after him.


Because, with the beginnings of  public revulsion over the revelations of Auschwitz doctors and children coming out of the Nuremberg trials, it was clear that Dawson had won most of the educated public over to his vision.

And this only a few years after public polls indicated that the majority of the educated public favoured Foster Kennedy's murderous proposals instead.

Dawson's unstinting efforts to make wartime penicillin truly inclusive had greatly shortened his life, but clearly they hadn't been totally in vain ....

WWII:began optimistically as Science, ended tragically as Engineering..

WWII, in other words, began in Modernism and ended in post-Modernism.

It should be understood at the onset that Science's task is strictly pedagogical and that it doesn't have to provide answers that are true, in any realistic sense, merely ones that are correct.

In other words, an excellent science experiment also is an excellent exam question.

I am speaking here of course only of the physical sciences, those sciences that form a subset of human psychology.

Their main function in life is to boost the students' self esteem and make them willing and - God Bless 'Em ! - even eager to take on the world outside the High School or University as a non-physical science grad.

These science experiments are meant to give non-scientists and non-engineers, and probably a lot of engineers and scientists as well , the confidence-building illusion that the world outside the lab is as controlled and predictable as it is inside the university's "sheltered workshop".

As I have said before, philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright's key insight (aka the "Cartwright machine")  is that the crucial component that Science, along with its machines, experiments and laboratories, requires to be a successful human activity is a metaphorical ROOF , to shelter those activities from messy Reality's wind, rain and dust.

And Frederick Christiansen argues that successful engineering often means adding yet more roofs to the designs-with-roofs coming out of the science labs, to make them robust enough to endure daily Reality.

So, for example, Newtonian ballistic equation solving (classical science at its purest) can take on a very different cast in actual battles of war.

Now our young university physics graduate is behind a gunnery rangefinder, high up on a heaving battleship in the dark of night, himself just barely awake.

 His battleship is making a desperate turn, in high wind and waves, and at top speed, to dodge a possible incoming torpedo.

Meanwhile our young officer is trying his absolute best to get his 12 inch gun turret to score at least on hit on an heavily armoured (and armed) enemy battleship.

The enemy is also is bobbing up and down and turning left and right at high speed in equally heavy seas a dozen or so miles away in the dark.

The enemy ship is trying just as hard to land one or two shots on the superstructure of his own battleship - which if it happens, will likely kill him and render moot any success at getting his battleship's guns to hit the enemy.

This, despite the fact that both his battleship's hull and its gun turrets, both heavily armoured, remain totally undamaged.

He has been taught to use Newtonian ballastics to hit and destroy 60,000 ton ships, only to discover that what he is really aiming for with his massive one ton armouring piercing shell is the 150 fragile pounds of his counterpart gunnery officer.

Neither officer will ever hit what they were aiming for, but both are likely to end up dead --- when their ships make the wrong turn and run into an enemy shell equally off target.

Ballastics has descended in to a good old fashioned low tech infantry fire fight: fire as many shots as quickly as you can in the general direction of the enemy and hope some by mischance actually hit him.

Forget even that it is nighttime and in heavy seas, with two ships very far apart, moving at top speed in irregular weaving patterns while bobbing up and down in the water irregularly.

And that the eye on the rangefinder is hindered by all the bright flashes and dense smoke of real battles.

Or that in the minute or two it takes to set range and elevation, the gun to be fired and for the shell to travels to its target, the other ship will have irregularly altered what ever semi-predictable course,speed and elevation it was following at the time of 'set'.

Think about the intermittent winds across the path of that dozen or so miles - winds with different temperatures and density of air - all which affect how a shell deviates from its Newtonian path.

The gun barrel, its wearing-out with repeated shooting and even its changing temperature from shot to shot, all effect the accuracy of our departing shell.

Each new shell is never been machined as true to its designed shape as one would like - just as the bags of propellant each display a random slightly difference in the amount of force they provide.

Many of these factors, but not all, can be accounted on the naval battleship range and after a number of shots, gunnery officers do hit a target and retire to the wardroom.

But even the most lifelike gunnery range practise, far more real-world than the university lab, does not prepare the gunnery crews for a real-world battle.

In a real battle, it is far more likely that three battleships and heavy cruisers on each side are all trying to hit each other at the same time : what fans of Newton like to call "many-bodied problems" , the kind they'd rather not talk about in the physics classroom.

Yet battleship gunnery crews in WWII were the best trained, best equipped, most scientifically up to date gunners of all the war effort : none of the six nations that had modern battleships spared any expense or scientific effort to make their gunners topnotch.

But equally, all the odds against the various gunners hitting their targets had been equally up-gunned.

Faster and more agile opposing ships, heavier armour, longer and bigger guns, extreme firing ranges, night fighting, heavy weather fighting, submarines and dive bombers coming at them as well as big shells : it just never stopped.

Most of the (hugely expensive, manned by thousands of highly trained men) aptly named "capital" ships that were sunk in WWII, did not fall before the big guns, but rather to much smaller,cheaper, simpler weapons : sea mines, torpedoes, dive bombers, kamikazes.

Ballastics and science hardly entered into most of those losses : instead very brave men got within pointblank range and then eyeballed their way to success.

Engineers can understand that 'can-do' attitude perfectly well....

Modernity: the 500 Year Reich

In retrospect, all of the promise of the New York's World Fair (1939-1940) turned out to be just the sad brief apogee of Late Modernity, indeed of all Modernity itself.

It hardly started out that way.

Five Hundred Years of Modernity was to be celebrated as part of the Fair's second year , marking the 500 years supposedly since Gutenberg invented the printing press --- and began the onset of cheap, mass produced, printed knowledge.

Talk of a 1000 Year Reich in places like Hitler's Germany, at this point, was just that : talk .

But Modernity's first 500 years was already safely in the record books and tangibly real, real for all to see and applaud.

In 1939, there seemed no reason why there shouldn't be at least another 500 years of triumph ahead for Modernity.

Yet it is now generally agreed that by the post-Auschwitz, post-Hiroshima, post-Katyn autumn of 1945 , Granddad's Modernity was well and truly broken.

And out of that wreckage gradually crawled a very different and very new era, our own Era of Post-Modernity.

What could have gone so terribly wrong, for Modernity to soar way to its apogee and then plunge way down to its nadir, in just six short years ?

Clearly it was World War Two (Modernity's own war, Modernity with its thrusters fully engaged) that was what had gone so badly wrong ....

MO goes po : K goes r : thermo-setable Reality becomes eternally thermo-softenable

Modernity optimistically and fervently believed that all of Reality , the entire chemical, biological and physical world, was plastic of a definite sort : thermo-set-able.

Everything - even human beings - was malleable but once set  perfectly and 'cured'  would remain thus - perfect - forever.

It was, in a sense, a view of reality as all K-selectable ; round rods for every round hole : every niche perfectly matched to an activity or being - forever.

Modernity feared, a fear never far away from this optimistic view of Reality, that Reality could also be plastic of the thermo-softening sort, if left in the wrong human hands : infinitely re-meltable in new shapes, most of them horrible mutations far far from beauty and utility.

Only a firm - tough - brutal - hand could keep the human forces of r-select from ruining Paradise.

Today we tend to more see Reality as r-selecting and thermo-softening : infinitely and eternally unpredictable.

But as post-Modernists, we tend to lay the credit or blame for this less at the feet of humans and more at the feet of Nature itself.

Humans can still create any chemical we can imagine, for example, but we no longer claim that we know, in advance , how it will interact with the world outside the lab.

This is because all of the hyperreal claims made by WWII authorities on both sides all fell flat on their face-----making us survivors eternally suspicious of extravagant claims about the human ability to precisely control Reality's plasticity.

Man manipulate the plasticity of Nature : yes.

But precisely manipulate that plasticity : no, no a thousand times no....

MODERNITY as just one vast marketing ploy

At its very base base, Modernity consists of convincing other people (call 'em customers or colonies, tis the same) that you are smart (progressive/a professional scientist) and they are stupid (backward/laypeople).

Modernity and Imperialism after all grew up together and declined together: post-modernity and de-colonization being pretty much one and the same thing.

The 1920s trend to replace mom's homemade bread with  industrialized white bread and Britain's attempt to create imperialized/militarized penicillin  during WWII are two shades of the same big lie.

In most rural Nova Scotia farmhouses until recently, the biggest and cosiest room in the house was the kitchen where the big wood stove was the entire house's only form of heat.

There the kids would gather after school - by necessity in winter - to keep warm and watch mom prepare and then cook biscuits ,made from flour and water, that the kids immediately consumed. Artificial chemical preservatives need hardly enter such an immediate process.

But starting in the 1920s, bread manufacturers and their clever Goebbels of Madison Avenue successfully convince a new generation of Moms - and kids - that  mom's homemade bread was unsafe and unhygenic.

Scientists in white gowns in white factories could  put the right sort of chemicals in bread to kill all germs - and not so incidentially  - allow factory bread to be shipped a thousand miles across a nation, sit about for weeks and still not grow mold before being consumed.

Germs were destroyed - as were local bakeries.

Re-casting Mom as a lesser breed

All the moms in the Nova Scotia rural hinterland became an internal colony, as she no longer baked bread to compete with Ben's , the huge breadmaker in the imperial metropolitan centre of Halifax.

Instead she focused on cutting fish at the local fishplant and with her earnings now bought Ben's fluffy white stuff.

When I was a kid, the local children were embarrassed to have to bring delicious homemade bread and baked-beans sandwiches to school and would trade it for sandwiches of Ben's bread and Kraft sandwich spread.

Howard Florey was the son of an industrialist and knew all there was to know about how modernity cum industrialization cum imperialism worked.

 He was always most reluctant to ever give anyone some of his penicillium spores (usually sending rubbishy mutant spores unlikely to produce penicillin, if he was pushed to respond conventionally as one scientist to another scientist's request for some of the material mentioned in his published article.)

By contrast, he was almost willing to be seen forcing some of his Oxford Standard dried penicillin powder upon you , so as to prove he had made dry penicillin first and had set down the standard for others to follow.

He was actually doing nothing that Britain's political and industrial elite hadn't already worked out for themselves long before.

Give a colonist a vial of British-made penicillin and he could save a life for a day but then he'd need to trade cheap Indian cotton for expensive British  penicillin, forever, if he hoped to go on saving Indian lives.

"Give a man a fish" et al, in a new guise.

Enter Pulvertaft, Atkinson and Duhig 

By contrast, Robert Pulvertaft and Nancy Atkinson had different plans.

Howard Florey visited both and publicly - reluctantly - praised both, but was really was privately furious at both.

Pulvertaft in Cairo, Egypt had used Florey-made and British industry-made dry penicillin powder but they often arrived in pretty bad shape - unlike a fungi spore they didn't really survive travel well.

 But Pulvertaft had also secretly got a sample of Fleming's penicillium spores mailed to him from a pal at Wellcome Labs in London - and as spores do  - they traveled perfectly well indeed and started into making penicillin right away.

He was, like a rural Nova Scotian mom, making homemade penicillin in front of the patients to be consumed on the spot - and so like mom, didn't really need a whole lot of fancy high tech chemistry to render his penicillin safe.

His patients were wounded soldiers in his large base hospital and the liquid penicillin was barely produced by the penicillium spores in the hospital lab than it was coursing through the veins of the grateful soldiers : drying and chemical preservatives hardly entered into this cosy setup.

And he freely began to teach the local natives and other military units how to make their own penicillin with spores of his.

His efforts made Florey and Whitehall very angry indeed --- Britain hoped, once it had synthesized penicillin , to see a huge trade in penicillin in exchange for Egyptian cotton etc.

Nancy Atkinson because she was located in Adelaide Australia, Florey's home town, had his number and knew of his peculiar - grasping - personality.

 She avoided approaching Florey, got her penicillin from Fleming himself and soon got a local Adelaide firm to make local penicillin and gave some spores to Duhig in Brisbane so he too could goose up the tardy government approach to providing enough penicillin for civilian as well as soldier.

Florey was very angry that he - as the long time away "local boy" -  hadn't been invited in to help in Australia. Maybe his selfish and secretive attitude had something to do with it ?

I have said that the biggest reason for the long delay in providing wartime penicillin to those dying for lack of it was Florey, Flemings and AN Richards' obsession with weaponizing it.

By this I meant they rejected Pulvertaft and Duhig's implicit argument that penicillin was best used systemically (injected into the entire body) for life-threatening blood poisoning because - technically, as a drug - that is where it worked best.

 And that this being the case, life-threatening blood poisoning cases were almost always sent to the big hospitals with a big enough lab and staff  to make the penicillin,on the spot, for the steady stream of blood poisoning cases coming in.

There was no need to waste time making penicillin a stable enough material to send from a central factory to store in regional warehouses until traveling detail salesmen had sold it in small amounts to individual GPs.

Disagreeing strenuously,  Florey, Fleming, Richards et al felt the greatest war need was for a local antiseptic to be poured or sprinkled inside wounds on the battlefield , soon as a soldier was wounded.

Let me say that more careful research,after the war,( including some by Pulvertaft himself) concluded this was an artificial problem - and that into this square artificial hole both the round sulfa and round wartime penicillin were reluctantly pushed - both failing , but for different reasons.

But sulfa and penicillin did save many lives, but not on the battlefield, but rather back in the base hospital, doing what they did best - reach into every part of the body and killing bacteria out in the open.

Killing bacteria in hard to get to places remained (and remains) hard to do - but if these bacteria did not get into the blood stream, they were almost never fatal in and of themselves.

Weaponized penicillin was imperialized penicillin

But let us now combine weaponized penicillin with imperialized penicillin : because a dry , stable, complicatedly mass produced penicillin also suited the post war aims of Britain : to profitably sell high tech medicine to nations less advanced than European ones.

Convincing the lesser breeds that homemade (really made by skilled microbiologists in big hospital labs) penicillin, like homemade bread, was so un-civilizied , was at least half the battle.....

Henry Dawson : The biography of dull dishwater or of the first modernist to leave the reservation and go PoMo ?

I don't doubt that Henry Dawson's colleagues felt he made a 'perfectly competent associate professor' ( in the most damming sense of that ominous phrase) ---- but that as an individual he was a man extremely unremarkable and totally non memorable.

Even those who knew him very well, and who choose to write their personal and scientific memoirs, still found virtually nothing to say about Dawson.

I have been attempting to write his non-authorized biography for almost nine years now and I still know very little about the inner Dr Dawson.

What keeps me happily to my post is my fascination with what Dr Dawson did , not what he said or felt - that, and the lure involved in searching for a reasonable explanation why this most ordinary of men did the things he did , and under the most trying conditions imaginable.

We have accounts of the Modern Age and of our own Post Modern Age, just as we have biographies of Modernists and of Post Modernists.

But in Henry Dawson we have the rarest of rare species : a Modernist caught is the process of becoming a Post Modernist and in the process, shaking the world around us completely.

So a dull as dishwater backwater modernist ? Or a world-class disturber of Modern decorum, a ravager of Modernity ? Or a bit of both, a sort of latter-day Henry Alline ?

I chose Answer three......

"Triumph of the SCIENTIFIC Will" : WWII scientists as 'swimmers into technical sweetness leaping'..

Sure, sure: Hitler, Mussolini ,Tojo and Stalin and all that lot started the war, but it took the collective will of the world's best scientists and engineers to build their visions up into History's bloodiest, most heart-less war.

It was the scientists' war, the only truly Modernist war, the war of their big shiny machines . Scientism's big moment under the Klieg Lights.

It was Science's incautious pre-war claims that moved the politicians and the generals and the industrialists and - above all - the ordinary public of all nations to fund the killing machines --- in preference to returning  to the foot soldier led wars of earlier times.

Of course in the end, we never saw the scientists in the box in Nuremberg in 1945 : because many many more of us, back then, saw 1945 as the apogee of Modernist science rather than its death knell and the birth of post-modernity.....

Skygods vs Earthlings: a post-Modernist history of WWII

Modernity finally gets its own WAR

The historians of 75 years ago could only see the things that made the leading warring nations different but with the passage of time and today's new era, younger historians are beginning to see the thing that all the leading warring nations held in common: Modernity.
World War II was like all the certitudes of grade 11 High School Science, armed with machine guns and unleashed upon the physical reality outside the laboratory door : the most violent, evil, catastrophe that Humanity has ever inflicted upon itself.

Modernity's scientists - scientists of faith - lost the physical war but crucially won the postwar battle of words, won the war of books, myths and movies (or did they ?)

1945 : MO goes PO

Because today historians are starting to uncover the stories of WWII's evidence-based scientists ,who resisted the onslaught of science based on faith , as best they could.

Above all, younger historians are starting to tell Mother Nature's version of WWII, because she easily bested Modernity's science, time and again.

Now we can see post-war 1945 for what it really was : the time when MO goes PO, when Modernity began to fade and be gradually replaced by post-Modernity's new Global Commensality Era.........

Erroneous common sense vs nonsensical Reality : Sciences, solid vs quantum

quantum-modernity

Modernists such as think tank climate deniers pride themselves on their side's "solid science" , their "common sense" science developed from that reliably Anglo Saxon trio of Newton, Dalton & Darwin .

They dismiss the other side's (quantum-based) science as "nonsensical".

On both counts they are correct but unfortunately, also in error.

(Rather like a quantum particle which can be shown by experiment to be in two places at once and also both a particle and a wave.)

Nineteen Century science - the only sort of science that 21st century university undergraduates and high school seniors are ever taught, is indeed solid and commonsensical.

Unfortunately, starting in the 1890s it was also shown to be fundamentally wrong (more accurately : wrong at fundamental scales) and only apparently semi-accurate over a limited (but very common) scale of activities.

Up until about 1947, nothing we had ever built in the Age of Modernity (except perhaps natural penicillin antibiotics) reflected the new quantum sciences of physics,chemistry and biology.

Not even the A-Bomb.

But starting with transistors and other semi conductors, almost everything truly major invented since then has been only possible by understanding and accepting quantum science's take on reality.

We can still safely build huge bridges and dams using only old Newton's rules, but I won't want to land a plane using a GPS system built by Newtonian Science : crash ,boom, dead !

What we take to be solid actually isn't fundamentally solid - not from those little hard elastic balls we thought were atoms, right down to the smallest possible sub atomic building block, sorry random vacuum energy flux.

And a great deal of quantum science is indeed non-intutitive and nonsensical but the measurements do not lie ; to parts per million they are real, they are reality.

Our sense impressions are at fault : not Reality.

By contrast much of Newton's & Maxwell's most fundamental laws fail embarrassingly at crucial points.

Nineteenth century science convinced engineers, at least, that feathers fell as fast as lead ball (in a vacuum) and that the sun's gravity "force" affected the earth via "spooky action at a distance" : neither ideas seem on the surface to be commonsensical.

But they were (and are) wildly popular notions among modernists and deniers despite all that.

Why ?

I would argue this is because Nineteenth Century Science promised us that while our macro (Man-sized) world of volcano and weather sized objects and events seemed complex, dynamic and uncertain, it reassured us that underneath - at the most fundamental level - Reality was actually solid, simple, certain, regular.

 Fundamentally Reality was knowable, controllable and manipulatable by Man.

A libertarian capitalist or socialist's dream : in Isaiah Berlin's formulation : Liberty for Man and Slavery for Atoms.

What quantum science revealed was exactly the reverse: a man sized rock was solid - particularly if your car hit it - but neither its fundamental atoms or their tinier components were solid - really just flickering bits of energy : altogether the wrong sort of eternally shifting sand to set the foundations of an ideology of certitudes upon.

Quantum science and Solid science of modernity / libertarianism / climate denial are fundamentally opposed - only one can be true.

No science experiment - even at the high school level - shows that solid science beats quantum science ; always solid science is a subset of quantum science, a useful subset that sometimes works - and then embarrassingly - sometimes does not.

But quantum science's revealing of the reality at its most fundamental has split over into post-modernity ; in fact helped create it and sustain it.

Post-modernity is quantum-modernity ......

Sun-hegemony in a post-hegemonic world

It is a very very brave - and rare - reader of the TORONTO SUN who publicly dares to define the group hegemony among its readers.

But recently, 6% of those readers defied the SUN Hegemony that there is no change in the Climate.

 No word as yet if other modern readers of this most modernist of Canadian newspapers headed out, cane & walker at hand, to torch the offending six percent's retirement homes and extended care villas.

The Toronto Sun planted a news story entitled "Green Drivel Exposed" ---- exposed by journalist Lorrie Goldstein as a suitable cue, in case readers were still unsure how to vote in the poll below the story that asked  " Do you think global warming is a real threat ?"

Now in the good old days, back in Albania or Alberta, you could be sure that 99.87% would answer correctly , with the other .13% presently 'recovering from their injuries' in police custody.

But in this post-wildrose-spring, things are much freer now and while 6 % said "yes" ---  mysteriously 91% answered "no" and only 3% gave the correct answer  which was "it won't be my problem" .

I don't know if you have seen a recent photo of the moderns en masse --- the white hair , the knobby knees, the walkers , the canes, the oxygen assists - it is a sight to behold.

Most have lost a lot of weight from their heyday back in the 1950s, and are down to about ninety pounds of skin, bones and bile.

I really think bile must be the only biological substance that goes up in production as we age.

Now if the same question was asked at ,ehem, the greenbloggers website, I have a feel that 91% would have given the correct answer for its editors : "yes we believe in global warming" .

We're in a post-hegemonic world and the varying hegemonies will have to war it out for control of the collective political consensus, if it still can be re-consituted , while the skies above get ever hotter and the planet below watches its biodiversity flatline.

The effort to save the earth should be a race against aging as much as it is against Time.

However, with the aging moderns getting fresh new supporters among the millions of young "Spacers", as starry-eyed about Mars Colonies as they are about saving the rainbow-blowing LGBT-friendly whales, this battle will go on for a very long,long time - a longer time than the planet has to right itself......

1945 : the climatic Battle over MODERN synthetic penicillin vs POSTMODERN natural penicillin

    If we see Postmodernity as organic and natural, versus High Modernity's love for the synthetic and the man-made (and I think we all do) why then do we focus on 1945's Auschwitz and Hiroshima as the climatic revelations that signal the switch from the Era of Modernity to the Era of post-Modernity ?

    I have been doing a re-think in preparation for a talk I am giving about MH Dawson and his tiny team's approach to inventing "GP" penicillin and in fact their approach to all things weak and small, versus the thinking of his immense (and immense-oriented) opponents.
   It seems to me that we can see in the battle that Dawson and natural penicillin finally won in late 1945 against the forces for synthetic penicillin, led by the OSRD and Vannevar Bush & Newton Richards, the real roots of the Fall of Modernity and the Rise of the Post Modern, Globally Commensal, Age....

This un-civil war of words is "The News Story of the Century" and it is 3000 years old ...

    On one side : the SKY GODs , utopians clinging to outdated science, all to bolster their denial of any limits to humanity's potential in a limitless Universe.
   On the other side: the EARTHLINGs, realists accepting the newest science, believing that the Earth is a rare, perhaps unique, human-friendly planet that nevertheless operates under biological and material restraints that must be obeyed.

   On the question of whether humanity's carbon pollution of the atmosphere will change our climate in highly de-stabilizing ways, these two sides are better known as Deniers versus Doomers.
    I believe the new science brings us much good news along with the bad.
    The new post 1945, post-modern science's central metaphor of global commensality says that 'all life on Earth dines at one table, shares but one lifeboat' , that all life survives by taking in each other's laundry - recycling scarce biological resources over and over.
   It reassures us that Life has endured some hard knocks on Earth over the last 4 billion years, but it has surmounted them and flourished - by not having its grasp exceed its reach, Robert Browning to the contrary.....

Don't waste your time scanning newspapers of 1945 for reports of MODERNITY's demise...

      The current view that 1945 was the year that Modernity died and Post-Modernity was born wasn't shared by many in that crucial year - at least not consciously.
     No doubt, at all, that many in 1945 were alarmed by modernity's latest 'triumphs' - but even more found those triumphs exhilarating in their potential.
    No, 1945 was established as the year that Post Modernity was born (for once, a curiously apt metaphor) by senior university historians picking suspects out of a police line-up after their university had been occupied and trashed, in May 1968.

    Long-haired protester after long-haired protester: it was soon evident that the vast bulk of them had awoken to life, after 1945.
     (Age ??? I'm 22. Hum, 1968 minus 22 equals 1946, again !)
    Baby-boomers, in another words, were leading the charge against all that most 1960s era senior professors held holy: progress and modernity.
   But what boom - merely the regular boom in pregnancies after every one of humanity's wars or could it just be, perish the impure thought, the babies born post the atomic boom ?
   Post the boom and smoke of Dresden ? Post the human smoke of Auschwitz ?
    Modernity's hegemony was broken in 1945 - yes ! - but among babies not yet born.
   By 1965 to 1973 however, they were fully ready to deny that hegemony and did so - in spades....
   So, a revision: Post Modernity was conceived in 1945, but it first started voting with its feet, in 1968.....

COMMENSALITE versus COMMENSALISM: c'est simple

   You've heard of commensalism, no matter how vaguely.
   It was born in 1874 , about the time some natural historians/ naturalists re-birthed themselves as biologists ----- so it is very much part of the sacred dogma in the Church of Biology.

   I'll define it this way (hopefully in a way that most biologists would approve): you are peacefully eating your dinner and minding your own business, and I come up and start eating your food, without as much as a 'by your leave' or 'I beg your pardon' - and if I neither pay you or shot you after I finish eating, then I am a commensal and I practice commensalism.
   Ugh ! Sounds pretty attractive, doesn't it ?
   Wait, wait , it gets worse ---- in this definition, albeit unofficially, all commensals are weak and tiny and stupid while their forgiving hosts are big and strong and smart.
   And kind, very kind.
   Is this stuff real or what ? Are biologists drinking their own koolaid or what ?
   Well ,if you view reality from a top of an Ivory Tower like a sort of Professorial Harry Lime, all lifeforms beneath you are nothing but dots, and yes you can view commensality (the other word) in this severely deranged fashion.
   Commensality, both the word and the concept, are thousands of years old - which is to say, thousands of years older that the 1874 neologism of commensalism.
   Today's concept of commensalism remains perhaps the best prism we have, into the soul of 19th century Social Darwinism, Eugenics and that biologist manque chappie, A. Hitler.
   It's mean, it's heartless and it's totally inaccurate.
   Commensality can be mean and heartless too.
   If it is closed commensality, it means only your kinda people ever get invited to dine with you on $16 orange juice --- if the rest have no food and starve, that's tough --- am  I supposed to be my Chadian sister's keeper?
   Ie, the caste system as practiced in India or at any golf and country club here, is closed commensality.
   Canada's food aid policy under the heartless Harper's conservative party is closed commensality too - the only food aid he intends to voluntarily give out, is to nations that do not really need it.
   Jesus - no word if he was ever a biologist , or a conservative , and I sure hope not - practiced open commensality.
   You remember - Him inviting civic servants (tax collectors) and HOs ( ladies of that oh so fertile crescent) to break communion with him - the nerve !
   Global commensality - my 2012 neologism - is different yet again, yet strangely related to Jesus and  to the biologists.
   Like Jesus's vision, it is very open - only open, this time, to all life on the planet.
   Not an open invite commensality though - more like "we're all stuck in this together, get over it, suck it up, adapt" type of globally-open commensality.
   Like the biologists' vision, it still involves the very big and the very small in commensal relationships.
   Yes, some of  the small do still sponge off the big - but in turn all of the big sponge off all the small.
   More accurately, most of the very small could survive very well if the big never existed --- but all the big would die in months if none of the very small ceased to exist.
   So, global commensality is this blog's name ---- and its game.
   Modernity - the science of humanity in the 150 years between the Reform Act of 1832 and the Diversity legislation of the early 1980s  - saw all life other than AWGs as mere dots, in Harry Lime's sense of that word.
   Man - and I do mean man not woman - viewed reality from the top of a horn of ivory, as in a dream.
   Man was a sky god, above and outside Nature.
   Think of modernist science as limit-DENIERS, and you won't go far wrong.
   By contrast, our post-modern world increasingly accepts humanity is embedded fully into nature at the ground level, with this planet our only lifeboat - and with us depending on all other life for our continued survival.
   This blog is on the side of this new science and these new scientists.....