For 60 years Modernity promised food for all in the form of little food pills, made artificially out of "air,water and useless coal tar".
The wonders of modern chemistry behold: the promises made at the New York World's Fair of 1939-1940 for the millionth time: food pills aplenty, for all.
But shortly after WWII started , severe hunger appeared throughout much of the world.
That was soon followed by mass starvation in so many places that ultimately lack of enough of the right sort of food killed more people during and after the war than did combat or execution could ever dream of doing.
Where was Modernity's magical little food pills when the world really needed them ?
Millions died in parts of the British,German,Japanese,Russian and American empires from starvation.
But these ignoble five, the leading lights of modern science, couldn't even invent enough food pills to save their own people.
The advantages of the little food pills was never claimed to be their taste - even their most ardent proponents admitted to that.
No, their ace in the hole was the claim they would be invulnerable to the vagaries of weather, pests and disease.
As well, everyone knew that war leads to harsh food blockades by the enemy and big demands on a country's agricultural sector from their own military.
Blockades lead to the end of imported foodstuffs, animals feed and fertilizers.
Your own military demands to take away farm labour to the army and to turn the tractor factories into making tanks and the fertilizer plants into making explosives.
But the chemists promised that just a few huge plants would quickly turn the very air and water, abundant and free, together with the equally abundant, useless, hills of coal waste into cheap, healthy, balanced meals 'in a pill'.
This would stave off death and lead to a military victory for the nation with the best pills.
But it never happened, not once, in all of the six long years of competing warfare between nations of battling Big Scientists.
Big Science ??? Big Mouth: All talk: No Action.
Blowhards.
Modern Science's boasts turned out to be as hollow and as wretched as its morality proved to be.
1939-1945 the Apogee of Modernity you say ?
Aye, and its Nadir as well ...
Monday, February 27, 2012
All Life is commensal ; No Lifeform is an island...
If as modernists claimed, all matter and energy is fully convertable but eternal and indestructible, we could, in effect 'freeze' Time itself.
Time would continue to unfold but its effects would be invisible : our minds would live forever and nothing else outside the human mind what last long enough to show signs of aging - it would be constantly and aggressively broken down and transmutated into something ever newer, ever bigger, ever better.
We would live in the world of the First Law.
The first law of thermodynamics.
But in fact, there are at least two laws of thermodynamics and the second says Time's Arrow means that while energy and matter do live on forever and ever, they become less and less useful to us or themselves.
Eventually all matter and energy will be spread out evenly throughout the Universe as a form of tepid pudding, almost totally incapable of stirring.
The human mind whether it is trapped inside five pounds of porridgy brain or trapped inside some lines etched on a silicon chip, will be part of this long slow slide down to entropy.
In fact, life gives every appearance of being a highly fagile - hence rare - form of matter and energy.
That it continues to flourish - at least on this tiny blue-green planet - is a wonder.
Take away all the bacteria, as an example, and ALL life above them would cease.
Take away all the animals, and leave us humans together with all the other life forms and Life would go on, but it ways that might make our human life on earth very short matter.
get rid of all humans - just like that - overnite and a whole host of species, bacteria and others would vanish forthwith and many others would have to struggle hard to adapt without us.
WWII put into actions the then universal belief that we don't need most forms of life, not really.
Not all agreed - Dawson's tiny Vita Cum mensa project set out to prove this idea wrong.
Did he succeed ?
I think he did ...
Time would continue to unfold but its effects would be invisible : our minds would live forever and nothing else outside the human mind what last long enough to show signs of aging - it would be constantly and aggressively broken down and transmutated into something ever newer, ever bigger, ever better.
We would live in the world of the First Law.
The first law of thermodynamics.
But in fact, there are at least two laws of thermodynamics and the second says Time's Arrow means that while energy and matter do live on forever and ever, they become less and less useful to us or themselves.
Eventually all matter and energy will be spread out evenly throughout the Universe as a form of tepid pudding, almost totally incapable of stirring.
The human mind whether it is trapped inside five pounds of porridgy brain or trapped inside some lines etched on a silicon chip, will be part of this long slow slide down to entropy.
In fact, life gives every appearance of being a highly fagile - hence rare - form of matter and energy.
That it continues to flourish - at least on this tiny blue-green planet - is a wonder.
Take away all the bacteria, as an example, and ALL life above them would cease.
Take away all the animals, and leave us humans together with all the other life forms and Life would go on, but it ways that might make our human life on earth very short matter.
get rid of all humans - just like that - overnite and a whole host of species, bacteria and others would vanish forthwith and many others would have to struggle hard to adapt without us.
WWII put into actions the then universal belief that we don't need most forms of life, not really.
Not all agreed - Dawson's tiny Vita Cum mensa project set out to prove this idea wrong.
Did he succeed ?
I think he did ...
Manhattan's VITA COM MENSA project, 1940-1945
Dr Martin Henry Dawson's day job was not particularly successful .
His brief career as a full time medical employee (and not as a student) between 1929 and 1945 can be over-simplified down to
this : sixteen wasted years at Columbia University fruitlessly seeking to prove that Rheumatoid Arthritis was caused by a reaction to a previous bout of Strep Throat.
It is now felt that Rheumatoid Arthritis is neither 'caused' or 'cured' in the common sense meanings of those words ,but rather simply happens at random, as a piece of very bad luck.
ALL of its 'triggers' - previous bouts of many different types of infection, stress, genetics, age, gender, temporary hormonal imbalances, heavy smoking, low vitamin d intake,etc - all lined up together , still won't give you the disease.
Some of these triggers definitely make it worse and thus are avenues into reducing the effect of Rheumatoid Arthritis, once you have gotten it --- but nothing will stop you from getting it, if the cards of fate stack up wrong.
Yes, these triggers do seem to increase your chances of getting it - but very very moderately, in of themselves.
What seems to 'cause' Rheumatoid Arthritis is a whole long series of
random mistakes in our immune systems -- a series of random bad luck errors, all combined together.
Dawson was no better than at all his contemporary colleagues in foreseeing all this - which has taken 80 more years of worldwide research by thousands of researchers to even get us this far.
One might claim that his last day job - finding a cure for a hitherto
very common, completely incurable, fatal disease (SBE) by the pioneering application of systemic NATURAL penicillin was itself epoch-making.
I suppose, but I wonder if Dawson saw it that way - it might see so, well, small potatoes to him.
Dawson was really a biologist trapped inside a physician's body - just as his main rival ,Howard Florey, was really a chemist trapped inside a physician's body.
More accurately and more fairly, Dawson was a naturalist trapped inside a clinician's body : because naturalist and clinician are very much of one mind in philosophy and methodology.
The naturalist inside Dawson was seeking to demonstrate that if humans had commensal bacteria, bacteria - equally - had commensal humans - that in fact, all life was interdependent.
Ie we all lived together willy-nilly in a hapless muddle, sometimes loving sometimes fighting, but ultimately and indirectly dependent on each other for our continued mutual survival.
This was not some softy fuzzy line that claimed that all beings were natural co-operators, mutualistic or symbiotic with all other Life.
But nor did Dawson see Life only as 'red in tooth and claw' - the Darwinian claim that all Life was either innocent human victim or vicious pathogen cum parasite.
His commensal world had bits of both visions of Life's interactions.
What his world didn't have was Man floating serenely above and beyond the vissitudes of Nature.
That allows us to see Dawson's Pen "G" project of 1939-1945 as a fully successful working example of his view of how Life actually muddles along in a commensal world.
If penicillin was a surefire killer of bacteria produced by their micro-rivals the penicillium fungi , it clearly wasn't totally successful, at least as viewed by modernistic man.
After all bacteria are still living and doing very well thank you.
Modernistic man was sure that we could produce a better version of penicillin, cheaply, quickly, in bulk and then kill off all pathogens for all time.
'Soon' ,said hubris-filled Sir Edward Mellanby (Florey's mentor) speaking about sulfa drugs, 'very soon we can start closing down our infectious diseases hospitals for good'.
Dawson never doubted that pathogen bacteria would soon find ways to resist any new drug that came along.
He also knew that drug-resistancy came at a heavy cost to bacteria .
Anyway, no bacteria was resistant to everything - to do so imposed such a heavy burden on them that they were quickly outbreed by other bacteria that put more energy into reproduction than into protection.
(Basically more/smaller r-selected bacteria outbreeding fewer/bigger K-selected bacteria.)
More penicillin , then, in his view, would strike a heavy but not fatal blow to the bacteria causing disease in Man.
Like the penicillium, penicillin would help keep the bacteria a bit more at bay , at best.
But something is better than nothing.
Dawson also wasn't confident that Man COULD produce penicillin quicker faster cheaper netter than the green slime at the bottom of his test tubes.
He knew that the micro organisms, from his many pioneering observations, were very clever indeed - if only because they been at it for hundreds of millions of years, at least.
He simply dismissed people like Florey who planned to first synthesis penicillin before using it on 1A patients.
Dawson said, I will use both humans and 4F fungi to make my pen, and I will provide it to 4F and 1A patients alike.
WWII paralleled his efforts between 1940 and 1945 but its values were anything but commensal - in fact its very antithesis.
Dawson's little project can be seen as a successful attempt to suggest a small alternative to the big war and its values...
His brief career as a full time medical employee (and not as a student) between 1929 and 1945 can be over-simplified down to
this : sixteen wasted years at Columbia University fruitlessly seeking to prove that Rheumatoid Arthritis was caused by a reaction to a previous bout of Strep Throat.
It is now felt that Rheumatoid Arthritis is neither 'caused' or 'cured' in the common sense meanings of those words ,but rather simply happens at random, as a piece of very bad luck.
ALL of its 'triggers' - previous bouts of many different types of infection, stress, genetics, age, gender, temporary hormonal imbalances, heavy smoking, low vitamin d intake,etc - all lined up together , still won't give you the disease.
Some of these triggers definitely make it worse and thus are avenues into reducing the effect of Rheumatoid Arthritis, once you have gotten it --- but nothing will stop you from getting it, if the cards of fate stack up wrong.
Yes, these triggers do seem to increase your chances of getting it - but very very moderately, in of themselves.
What seems to 'cause' Rheumatoid Arthritis is a whole long series of
random mistakes in our immune systems -- a series of random bad luck errors, all combined together.
Dawson was no better than at all his contemporary colleagues in foreseeing all this - which has taken 80 more years of worldwide research by thousands of researchers to even get us this far.
One might claim that his last day job - finding a cure for a hitherto
very common, completely incurable, fatal disease (SBE) by the pioneering application of systemic NATURAL penicillin was itself epoch-making.
I suppose, but I wonder if Dawson saw it that way - it might see so, well, small potatoes to him.
Dawson was really a biologist trapped inside a physician's body - just as his main rival ,Howard Florey, was really a chemist trapped inside a physician's body.
More accurately and more fairly, Dawson was a naturalist trapped inside a clinician's body : because naturalist and clinician are very much of one mind in philosophy and methodology.
The naturalist inside Dawson was seeking to demonstrate that if humans had commensal bacteria, bacteria - equally - had commensal humans - that in fact, all life was interdependent.
Ie we all lived together willy-nilly in a hapless muddle, sometimes loving sometimes fighting, but ultimately and indirectly dependent on each other for our continued mutual survival.
This was not some softy fuzzy line that claimed that all beings were natural co-operators, mutualistic or symbiotic with all other Life.
But nor did Dawson see Life only as 'red in tooth and claw' - the Darwinian claim that all Life was either innocent human victim or vicious pathogen cum parasite.
His commensal world had bits of both visions of Life's interactions.
What his world didn't have was Man floating serenely above and beyond the vissitudes of Nature.
That allows us to see Dawson's Pen "G" project of 1939-1945 as a fully successful working example of his view of how Life actually muddles along in a commensal world.
If penicillin was a surefire killer of bacteria produced by their micro-rivals the penicillium fungi , it clearly wasn't totally successful, at least as viewed by modernistic man.
After all bacteria are still living and doing very well thank you.
Modernistic man was sure that we could produce a better version of penicillin, cheaply, quickly, in bulk and then kill off all pathogens for all time.
'Soon' ,said hubris-filled Sir Edward Mellanby (Florey's mentor) speaking about sulfa drugs, 'very soon we can start closing down our infectious diseases hospitals for good'.
Dawson never doubted that pathogen bacteria would soon find ways to resist any new drug that came along.
He also knew that drug-resistancy came at a heavy cost to bacteria .
Anyway, no bacteria was resistant to everything - to do so imposed such a heavy burden on them that they were quickly outbreed by other bacteria that put more energy into reproduction than into protection.
(Basically more/smaller r-selected bacteria outbreeding fewer/bigger K-selected bacteria.)
More penicillin , then, in his view, would strike a heavy but not fatal blow to the bacteria causing disease in Man.
Like the penicillium, penicillin would help keep the bacteria a bit more at bay , at best.
But something is better than nothing.
Dawson also wasn't confident that Man COULD produce penicillin quicker faster cheaper netter than the green slime at the bottom of his test tubes.
He knew that the micro organisms, from his many pioneering observations, were very clever indeed - if only because they been at it for hundreds of millions of years, at least.
He simply dismissed people like Florey who planned to first synthesis penicillin before using it on 1A patients.
Dawson said, I will use both humans and 4F fungi to make my pen, and I will provide it to 4F and 1A patients alike.
WWII paralleled his efforts between 1940 and 1945 but its values were anything but commensal - in fact its very antithesis.
Dawson's little project can be seen as a successful attempt to suggest a small alternative to the big war and its values...
In LATIN ,"Con" becomes "Com" before words beginning with "M", like MENSA
Ouch !!!
This may look almost exactly like my other, soon to be deceased, blog VITA CON MENSA and ..... it is.
But it turns out , in Latin, "Con" becomes "Com" before words that begin with "M" -- like Mensa : hence its commensal not conmensal in language based on Latin, such as modern day English...
Sigh - apologies.
This may look almost exactly like my other, soon to be deceased, blog VITA CON MENSA and ..... it is.
But it turns out , in Latin, "Con" becomes "Com" before words that begin with "M" -- like Mensa : hence its commensal not conmensal in language based on Latin, such as modern day English...
Sigh - apologies.
Saturday, February 25, 2012
The Banality of Sulzberger's and Darwin's "Hegelian Shrugs"
The entire civilized world knew well about the WWII Shoah of the Jews while it was happening - even regretted it, but also saw it as something they were powerless to stop : they displayed 'The Hegelian Shrug' that:
Briefly reported these stories ,yes, but 'Buried Them In The Back Of The Times' : the very stones may have cried out in horror, but no NYT editorials ever did -- not on Arthur H.'s watch.
Darwin never advocated that civilized humanity go out and deliberately murder all the weaker bits of humanity as fast as they could.
He didn't have to --- all he had to do was observe what was already happening and lend his considerable scientific credibility to the claim that we can do nothing to prevent it.
Darwin merely shrugged his Hegelian shoulders in his widely-read books and sighed as he saw the inevitability of the "civilized races exterminating the savage races around the world".
Between the 1860s and the 1960s, millions of decent Canadians joined hundreds of millions of decent people all around the world in regretting the inevitable 'withering away' of the Noble Red Man in the face of advancing civilization and progress.
'Withering away' really meant death by slow starvation and hunger-diseases.
All this should make any of us cautious in taking too high a moral stance against the Schreibtischtater (desk killers) in the German Post Office, Railways,etc as they did their bit for The Final Solution.
For many of them, too, probably sighed a brief regret and gave a Hegelian Shrug about the inevitability of it all, before returning to stamping their papers and forms.
Bystanders and Banality and Evil are all intimately interconnected as Hannah Arendt discovered long ago in Jerusalem....
"When History decides to make omelettes, unfortunately some eggs must be broken, and while we sincerely regret this, we can do nothing to impede the inevitable progress of History but merely stand on the sidelines wringing our hands."This is why NEW YORK TIMES publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger reported , like any good reporter should , the credible claim that 3 million Polish Jews had already been killed by the Germans by the war's midway point and the equally credible report that a single American firebombing raid on Toyko had killed a million civilians.
Briefly reported these stories ,yes, but 'Buried Them In The Back Of The Times' : the very stones may have cried out in horror, but no NYT editorials ever did -- not on Arthur H.'s watch.
Darwin never advocated that civilized humanity go out and deliberately murder all the weaker bits of humanity as fast as they could.
He didn't have to --- all he had to do was observe what was already happening and lend his considerable scientific credibility to the claim that we can do nothing to prevent it.
Darwin merely shrugged his Hegelian shoulders in his widely-read books and sighed as he saw the inevitability of the "civilized races exterminating the savage races around the world".
Between the 1860s and the 1960s, millions of decent Canadians joined hundreds of millions of decent people all around the world in regretting the inevitable 'withering away' of the Noble Red Man in the face of advancing civilization and progress.
'Withering away' really meant death by slow starvation and hunger-diseases.
All this should make any of us cautious in taking too high a moral stance against the Schreibtischtater (desk killers) in the German Post Office, Railways,etc as they did their bit for The Final Solution.
For many of them, too, probably sighed a brief regret and gave a Hegelian Shrug about the inevitability of it all, before returning to stamping their papers and forms.
Bystanders and Banality and Evil are all intimately interconnected as Hannah Arendt discovered long ago in Jerusalem....
Friday, February 24, 2012
Vita Con Mensa: 1939-1945
Did anything else happen between 1939 and 1945 besides WWII?
Was there ever a possibility that the world could have gotten along more or less in peace, muddling through, between 1939 and 1945?
Is there a possibility of an alternative history for 1939-1945?
I think that Martin Henry Dawson's tiny natural
penicillin project(1939-1945) ,offered one such alternative.
An alternative approach for the civilized portion of Humankind to take to Nature and other weaker/poorer/darker Human Beings than the hostile approach they did take.
So then 1939-1945 offers the possibility of two intertwining, parallel, stories - the big (unsustainably evil) one that the Modern World did take and the alternative small (sustainably decent) path that Dawson's team chose to trod.
'Begin by Comparing and Contrasting' , says every teacher - and it seems a good approach to take here as well ....
Was there ever a possibility that the world could have gotten along more or less in peace, muddling through, between 1939 and 1945?
Is there a possibility of an alternative history for 1939-1945?
I think that Martin Henry Dawson's tiny natural
penicillin project(1939-1945) ,offered one such alternative.
An alternative approach for the civilized portion of Humankind to take to Nature and other weaker/poorer/darker Human Beings than the hostile approach they did take.
So then 1939-1945 offers the possibility of two intertwining, parallel, stories - the big (unsustainably evil) one that the Modern World did take and the alternative small (sustainably decent) path that Dawson's team chose to trod.
'Begin by Comparing and Contrasting' , says every teacher - and it seems a good approach to take here as well ....
Thursday, February 23, 2012
NON-RENEWABLE MODERNITY: R.I.P. 1873-1973
It was the Age of the Fossils ; it was the Age of the Moderns.
Non-Renewable Fossil Fuel powered Modernity and when the Fossils ran out the door, so did Modern Man.
Modernity, severely wounded in its own self-inflicted disaster of WWII , finally died during the Energy Crisis of 1973.
Modernity just ran out of steam and just ran out of energy : at least it ran out of endless amounts of nearly free energy - the given that Modernists seemingly took for granted.
Still isn't it a little jarring, maybe even a little ironic , n'est pas ?
This unexpected yoking together of Modern Modernity and Ancient Fossils: oil and water, chalk and cheese.
Well it seems that way to me, but the Modernists (cum Climate Change Deniers) are notorious for having no sense of the ironic.
Maybe they figure that's a job best left for the PO-MO crowd.
Non-Renewal Modernity had a best before due date and 1973 said it was well past due.
This era's energy will not just be renewable energy, it will also be highly dispersed and highly decentralized - it will be as SMALL as Modernity was characteristically concentrated & BIG.
The r-selected will inherit the K-selected Earth, so to speak.
I hope, soon ,to read some books that place Modernity's (economic) demise with the Fossils' departure in the Fall of 1973.
That would be a pleasant break from all those authors that simply repeat the old wheeze that Modernity died (morally) in the hellfires of Hiroshima and Auschwitz in 1945....
Non-Renewable Fossil Fuel powered Modernity and when the Fossils ran out the door, so did Modern Man.
Modernity, severely wounded in its own self-inflicted disaster of WWII , finally died during the Energy Crisis of 1973.
Modernity just ran out of steam and just ran out of energy : at least it ran out of endless amounts of nearly free energy - the given that Modernists seemingly took for granted.
Still isn't it a little jarring, maybe even a little ironic , n'est pas ?
This unexpected yoking together of Modern Modernity and Ancient Fossils: oil and water, chalk and cheese.
Well it seems that way to me, but the Modernists (cum Climate Change Deniers) are notorious for having no sense of the ironic.
Maybe they figure that's a job best left for the PO-MO crowd.
Non-Renewal Modernity had a best before due date and 1973 said it was well past due.
This era's energy will not just be renewable energy, it will also be highly dispersed and highly decentralized - it will be as SMALL as Modernity was characteristically concentrated & BIG.
The r-selected will inherit the K-selected Earth, so to speak.
I hope, soon ,to read some books that place Modernity's (economic) demise with the Fossils' departure in the Fall of 1973.
That would be a pleasant break from all those authors that simply repeat the old wheeze that Modernity died (morally) in the hellfires of Hiroshima and Auschwitz in 1945....
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