The consensus history of WWII was written during and immediately after the war itself, by men (mostly) ; men aged between their forties to sixties in 1945.
This consensus view of WWII has been frequently challenged, starting in the 1960s but still guides our view of the war, particularly among the casual public.
Those men were fully Modernist men - far too young to have come of age before The Second Industrial Revolution (aka "HARD MODERNITY" or "FULL BORE MODERNITY").
Equally they were far too young to have come of age in the era that replaced Modernity : Commensality.
They saw this Modernist War through eyes so attuned perfectly to Modernity as to not even be aware it was a Modernist War between rival Modernist empires.
They focussed on the very real differences that divided Modernist capitalist country from Modernist communist or fascist or nazi country.
But they failed to see that all six major combatants,plus some dished earlier in the war (France,the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy),were imperialistic empires.
Imperialism 's division between "equality among mature citizens" and "non-equality for non-mature/non-citizens" is the very essence of Modernity --- if you write in "Nature & Humans-close-to-Nature" for "non-mature/non-citizen" , as any good Modernist would.
What they failed to see is what the elites in all the combatants and neutral countries had in common: an unthinking acceptance of Modernity's values.
Modernity had its critics back in the early 1940s but what is striking is how clay-bound the feet of the most jaded critic still were - how by the values of 2012, they still had too much of the system that they sought to attack buried deep in their intellectual bones.
I don't know enough about Dr Martin Henry Dawson and his potentially clay-bound feet to say much about him one way or the other.
But then his deeds form his autobiography, showing him to be at least a pre-Commensalist and so it would seem that he and his little team must have viewed this unfolding Modernist war with very jaundiced eyes.
Their story,the birth of an early Commensalist success story during and despite WWII , thus forms the backbone to my much larger story of Modernity's many signal failures during that war, its war.
The backbone and the contrast ---- the cheery, hopeful commensal frame to a modernist painting of a moral Hell on Earth....
Showing posts with label age of commensality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label age of commensality. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
BRAZILIAN butterfly wings flutter : Tornado of Death in TEXAS --- "Who remembers the POLES nowadays?"
In MOdernity Man's disconnected world, the Earth is a passive bare backdrop where the human actors live apart from one another until they chose to directly engage each other.
"Why should I care ?", they aggressively ask.
"The fluttering of some obscure butterfly's wings in the jungles of Brazil can't possibly effect whether me and my home in Texas survive the next tornado."
But in the world of the COmmensality, the surface of the world is an active actor, along with all the life forms upon it - all Life lives within a complex web of interconnections where what ever happens to one will ultimately affect all others.
Today, we of the Commensality have no trouble accepting that Edward Lorenz's butterfly fluttering in Brazil can affect the force and direction of a Texas Twister.
Similarly we understand now that what happened to those far off Poles in 1939 did ended up affecting all of us.
By 1942, boys from Texas born of those parents who couldn't give a damn about the fate of the 1939 Polish butterflies broken upon the wheel, were dying all over the world in a Texas-sized Tornado of Death.
On August 22nd 1939, Hitler gave a very famous speech to his assembled military elite about the upcoming war against Poland.
The last sentence of one paragraph is particularly famous despite the fact that it might be fabricated.
(I do not think it was.)
Earlier in the paragraph Hitler had reminded his listeners that Genghis Khan sent millions of women and children to their deaths but today is remembered only as the founder of a great state.
Now in the last sentence, he reminds them that the mass killing of the Armenians only 20 years earlier hadn't caused much of an outcry at the time or in the years since.
(At the time this was very true.)
After the Holocaust this sentence came to be seized upon as the forerunner to the Jewish Holocaust - which it was - but very very indirectly.
Because the meat of the paragraph - and I mean red meat,blood, violence,horror, death - is in the middle sentences.
No vagueness here - Hitler says he has given orders to his death squads to relentlessly kill Polish women and children without mercy.
Polish women and children relentlessly and without mercy - not yet a decision to relentlessly kill Jewish women and children without mercy - that came 2 years later.
(True, many of these early Polish victims were Jewish and or socialist-communist but the focus was above all on Polish nationalistic intellectuals - the natural leadership of the Polish people --- Hitler wanted to destroy the Poles as a nation, without wishing to kill every last one of them - just most of them.)
The veracity of this sentence has never been questioned - only worse - it has been totally forgotten !
Within days of the outbreak of the war, the entire world press had many verified accounts of savage brutality imposed by German troops and police upon Poles - soldiers and civilians.
This reporting continued for more than nine months - from September 1939 to May 1940, that crucial period wherein an united Europe, let alone an united free world, could have ganged together collectively to overpower Hitler and ended WWII in its tracks.
(After the May - June 1940 Fall of France et al, the few remaining neutrals of Europe were too weak to take him on, with Britain's weak help, without suffering a brutal defeat upon themselves.)
I fully accept that.
But before that - before, before, before - what was their excuse beyond MOdernity's cold indifference?
For nine long months - long enough to bear a child - the world watched while Hitler broke Poland like a butterfly upon a wheel - watched and did nothing.
France and Britain (and their empires and commonwealths) did almost nothing.
Nothing that is in terms of an effective offensive attack on Hitler's Western Front while all of what little military hardware he did have (and it was not much) and the bulk of his troops were deep into Poland in the East.
But at least, to their eternal credit, they did declare war on Hitler as they promised they would if he attacked Poland.
That promise was made in March 1939 and it was not until March 1945, six long, long, long years later, that British troops finally moved onto German soil to engage Hitler.
A chivalrous gesture but chivalry of the most muted sort.
Most of the world can claim no moral credits at all for their behavior during those nine fatal months : better that Hannah Arendt had focused on this time period and to have spoken of the "THE BANALITY OF (SEEING NO) EVIL" .
What Hitler did during the Fall of 1939 in Poland was as evil as anything else he ever did - in other years he merely did different but equal forms of evil , and almost always the worst of these in Poland.
And it was known ,widely known at the time, to the whole of the newspaper-reading world.
But MOdernity Man said, "Who gives a tinker's damn about some Polacks ?" and turned to the sports page.
The Age of global Commensality will only truly arrive when we read about millions dying in some far off unknown province of the Congo and we do give a tinker's damn and a whole lot more.
The web of interconnectedness is as much moral as it is environmental - the two can not be separated.....
"Why should I care ?", they aggressively ask.
"The fluttering of some obscure butterfly's wings in the jungles of Brazil can't possibly effect whether me and my home in Texas survive the next tornado."
But in the world of the COmmensality, the surface of the world is an active actor, along with all the life forms upon it - all Life lives within a complex web of interconnections where what ever happens to one will ultimately affect all others.
Today, we of the Commensality have no trouble accepting that Edward Lorenz's butterfly fluttering in Brazil can affect the force and direction of a Texas Twister.
Similarly we understand now that what happened to those far off Poles in 1939 did ended up affecting all of us.
By 1942, boys from Texas born of those parents who couldn't give a damn about the fate of the 1939 Polish butterflies broken upon the wheel, were dying all over the world in a Texas-sized Tornado of Death.
On August 22nd 1939, Hitler gave a very famous speech to his assembled military elite about the upcoming war against Poland.
The last sentence of one paragraph is particularly famous despite the fact that it might be fabricated.
(I do not think it was.)
Earlier in the paragraph Hitler had reminded his listeners that Genghis Khan sent millions of women and children to their deaths but today is remembered only as the founder of a great state.
Now in the last sentence, he reminds them that the mass killing of the Armenians only 20 years earlier hadn't caused much of an outcry at the time or in the years since.
(At the time this was very true.)
After the Holocaust this sentence came to be seized upon as the forerunner to the Jewish Holocaust - which it was - but very very indirectly.
Because the meat of the paragraph - and I mean red meat,blood, violence,horror, death - is in the middle sentences.
No vagueness here - Hitler says he has given orders to his death squads to relentlessly kill Polish women and children without mercy.
Polish women and children relentlessly and without mercy - not yet a decision to relentlessly kill Jewish women and children without mercy - that came 2 years later.
(True, many of these early Polish victims were Jewish and or socialist-communist but the focus was above all on Polish nationalistic intellectuals - the natural leadership of the Polish people --- Hitler wanted to destroy the Poles as a nation, without wishing to kill every last one of them - just most of them.)
The veracity of this sentence has never been questioned - only worse - it has been totally forgotten !
Within days of the outbreak of the war, the entire world press had many verified accounts of savage brutality imposed by German troops and police upon Poles - soldiers and civilians.
This reporting continued for more than nine months - from September 1939 to May 1940, that crucial period wherein an united Europe, let alone an united free world, could have ganged together collectively to overpower Hitler and ended WWII in its tracks.
(After the May - June 1940 Fall of France et al, the few remaining neutrals of Europe were too weak to take him on, with Britain's weak help, without suffering a brutal defeat upon themselves.)
I fully accept that.
But before that - before, before, before - what was their excuse beyond MOdernity's cold indifference?
For nine long months - long enough to bear a child - the world watched while Hitler broke Poland like a butterfly upon a wheel - watched and did nothing.
France and Britain (and their empires and commonwealths) did almost nothing.
Nothing that is in terms of an effective offensive attack on Hitler's Western Front while all of what little military hardware he did have (and it was not much) and the bulk of his troops were deep into Poland in the East.
But at least, to their eternal credit, they did declare war on Hitler as they promised they would if he attacked Poland.
That promise was made in March 1939 and it was not until March 1945, six long, long, long years later, that British troops finally moved onto German soil to engage Hitler.
A chivalrous gesture but chivalry of the most muted sort.
Most of the world can claim no moral credits at all for their behavior during those nine fatal months : better that Hannah Arendt had focused on this time period and to have spoken of the "THE BANALITY OF (SEEING NO) EVIL" .
What Hitler did during the Fall of 1939 in Poland was as evil as anything else he ever did - in other years he merely did different but equal forms of evil , and almost always the worst of these in Poland.
And it was known ,widely known at the time, to the whole of the newspaper-reading world.
But MOdernity Man said, "Who gives a tinker's damn about some Polacks ?" and turned to the sports page.
The Age of global Commensality will only truly arrive when we read about millions dying in some far off unknown province of the Congo and we do give a tinker's damn and a whole lot more.
The web of interconnectedness is as much moral as it is environmental - the two can not be separated.....
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Etymologically, are BIOLOGISTS 'stupid' or 'thick' or what ??!!!
If you and I shared a meal together at a cafe, would any outsider automatically assume, a priori ,that one of us must have enjoyed the meal while the other of us must have been left indifferent?
Only biologists - or idiots - would.
(Or am I being redundant?)
Yes, I am hot under the collar, and with good reason.
The importance of just who is seated at the meal table (and how) has been noted as fundamental in all human cultures and over the entire course of recorded human history.
The term used to describe this crucial human ritual (in many societies the crucial ritual) is commensality.
It means simply the act of 'dining at a common table', end of story.
All at that table eat and get benefit from the food they eat - without denying some may eat more and get more benefit and vice versa.
It does NOT assume ,in advance, that some diners get no impact from the food they ate, good or bad; that's an impossible trick to pull off in human nutrition and I await the first scientist who proves me wrong.
It does, however, leave open a wealth of ways that commensality - that dining at a common table - can be arranged.
Let us consider just four variants to mix and match.
It is closed - only some can attend. It is open - all can attend.
It is hierarchical - whether or not all or only some can attend - some get the best seats and the most food.
It is egalitarian - perhaps only a few can attend, but within that group, all share seating choice and food amounts equally.
A few well know examples - in this case, from the Bible.
Jesus broke strict taboos to invite the poor, the sinner and the sick to dine with Himself and the rich and pious.
But some later Christian groups invited only those they judged 'saved' ( as we'd say today in Alabama) to their feasts, but at the feast all the 'saved' were judged equal participants.
Endless variety, in other words, lies within the simple meaning of commensality.
Some one hundred years ago some scientists -biologists - totally deranged the meaning of commensality for their own wicked, debased, ends and in the 'honor among thieves' fashion of scientists, almost all other scientists follow the biologists in lock step and use their warped definition.
Except (thanks be to God !) those social scientists actually researching real world commensal activities.
I would never deny that the biologists too are also studying a real world activity and that it too deserves a name that accurately and etymologically describes its key characteristic.
But commensality definitely isn't that word .
When I say we are living in the new AGE OF COMMENSALITY
since 1945, I simply mean that we are more and more realizing that humanity is within Nature, not above it.
So we exist within a highly complicated intertwining supra-dependency : all life on earth 'dines at a common table' of interconnected and inter-dependent resource and energy flows.
This is "global commensality" : all life on Earth is invited to a table the size of the entire Earth (and Solar System).
In plain English, if the Sun were to noticeably reduce its output for 80 years, even those bacteria deep in the mud at the very depths of the deepest basins of the ocean would eventually notice it.
They are not part of our Food Chain but they are part of our Air Chain and our Temperature Chain.
We dine together - on conventional food as well as air,water and heat - but we don't dine in harmony.
No, all us life forms squabble amongst ourselves over what is our proper share.
This is not a sort of mutalistic 'hearts and roses' commensality - but it is commensality.
Hopeful human rationality - so often debased for evil ends - will this time let us see that we must learn to share the Earth with these various Golden Gooses and restrain our endless appetite, if we want to share some of their golden eggs far into the future.....
Only biologists - or idiots - would.
(Or am I being redundant?)
Yes, I am hot under the collar, and with good reason.
The importance of just who is seated at the meal table (and how) has been noted as fundamental in all human cultures and over the entire course of recorded human history.
The term used to describe this crucial human ritual (in many societies the crucial ritual) is commensality.
It means simply the act of 'dining at a common table', end of story.
All at that table eat and get benefit from the food they eat - without denying some may eat more and get more benefit and vice versa.
It does NOT assume ,in advance, that some diners get no impact from the food they ate, good or bad; that's an impossible trick to pull off in human nutrition and I await the first scientist who proves me wrong.
It does, however, leave open a wealth of ways that commensality - that dining at a common table - can be arranged.
Let us consider just four variants to mix and match.
It is closed - only some can attend. It is open - all can attend.
It is hierarchical - whether or not all or only some can attend - some get the best seats and the most food.
It is egalitarian - perhaps only a few can attend, but within that group, all share seating choice and food amounts equally.
A few well know examples - in this case, from the Bible.
Jesus broke strict taboos to invite the poor, the sinner and the sick to dine with Himself and the rich and pious.
But some later Christian groups invited only those they judged 'saved' ( as we'd say today in Alabama) to their feasts, but at the feast all the 'saved' were judged equal participants.
Endless variety, in other words, lies within the simple meaning of commensality.
Some one hundred years ago some scientists -biologists - totally deranged the meaning of commensality for their own wicked, debased, ends and in the 'honor among thieves' fashion of scientists, almost all other scientists follow the biologists in lock step and use their warped definition.
Except (thanks be to God !) those social scientists actually researching real world commensal activities.
I would never deny that the biologists too are also studying a real world activity and that it too deserves a name that accurately and etymologically describes its key characteristic.
But commensality definitely isn't that word .
When I say we are living in the new AGE OF COMMENSALITY
since 1945, I simply mean that we are more and more realizing that humanity is within Nature, not above it.
So we exist within a highly complicated intertwining supra-dependency : all life on earth 'dines at a common table' of interconnected and inter-dependent resource and energy flows.
This is "global commensality" : all life on Earth is invited to a table the size of the entire Earth (and Solar System).
In plain English, if the Sun were to noticeably reduce its output for 80 years, even those bacteria deep in the mud at the very depths of the deepest basins of the ocean would eventually notice it.
They are not part of our Food Chain but they are part of our Air Chain and our Temperature Chain.
We dine together - on conventional food as well as air,water and heat - but we don't dine in harmony.
No, all us life forms squabble amongst ourselves over what is our proper share.
This is not a sort of mutalistic 'hearts and roses' commensality - but it is commensality.
Hopeful human rationality - so often debased for evil ends - will this time let us see that we must learn to share the Earth with these various Golden Gooses and restrain our endless appetite, if we want to share some of their golden eggs far into the future.....
Friday, March 16, 2012
Who or what are the NATURE-DENIERS you ask ?
You've heard about Jewish Holocaust deniers and about Climate Holocaust deniers but who, you ask in bewilderment, are the NATURE-DENIERS ?
Well they're not Commensalists - the Age of Commensality believes all life on Earth, willy-nilly, dines at a common table (in a word is all commensal) - it believes mankind is not above Nature but fully in it - so it hardly denies Nature .
No, these deniers are all varieties of Modernists, people who believe that we can, if necessary, get along perfectly well without natural resources or indeed without Nature and even without those people they see as being closest to Nature.
The millions of people that the Nazis shot, gassed and starved in their Holocaust were (*almost) all people they viewed as living in a world far away from civilized man and close to (bestial) Nature.
(* I admit I think the Nazis had mixed feelings about the Communist commissars, Polish intellectuals and educated Jews that they killed .
They saw most Poles, Slavs and Jews as close to animals and germs but saw the intellectuals among them as even more dangerous, because they were both 'smart' and 'dirty' .)
It must be admitted that the Nazis lacked ambition - they only killed 6 million in the most organized part of their killing spree.
Today's climate change deniers might just end up killing 6 billion of us if the world's climate goes to hell in a hand basket at the same time we run out of agricultural necessities like phosphorus.
(Solar might get us past the worst of the end of oil and coal -- but we can't expect the nuclear industry to transform us up a mess of the element phosphorus out of lead like some 21st century alchemist.)
The climate change deniers along with the environmental degradation deniers and resource depletion deniers are like the Nazis in basically denying that Nature can bite back .
So they assume, for example, that Nature can take all the Co2 we can hand it and just deal with it, somehow.
"Suck it up Nature !"
Modernity is supposed to have an Imperialistic side , a sort of evil twin brother hidden off to the side.
Bosh, I say, bosh.
Modernity only had one colony and always one colony - Nature.
Every other subject they colonized - from women and children, the poor and the disabled, to people in places like India and Africa - were always subjugated because they were judged close to Nature ------- and hence fair game.
Notice that none of the modernist nations ever seriously thought of turning other modernist nations into colonies -- this was called 'honor amongst modernists' ....
Well they're not Commensalists - the Age of Commensality believes all life on Earth, willy-nilly, dines at a common table (in a word is all commensal) - it believes mankind is not above Nature but fully in it - so it hardly denies Nature .
No, these deniers are all varieties of Modernists, people who believe that we can, if necessary, get along perfectly well without natural resources or indeed without Nature and even without those people they see as being closest to Nature.
The millions of people that the Nazis shot, gassed and starved in their Holocaust were (*almost) all people they viewed as living in a world far away from civilized man and close to (bestial) Nature.
(* I admit I think the Nazis had mixed feelings about the Communist commissars, Polish intellectuals and educated Jews that they killed .
They saw most Poles, Slavs and Jews as close to animals and germs but saw the intellectuals among them as even more dangerous, because they were both 'smart' and 'dirty' .)
It must be admitted that the Nazis lacked ambition - they only killed 6 million in the most organized part of their killing spree.
Today's climate change deniers might just end up killing 6 billion of us if the world's climate goes to hell in a hand basket at the same time we run out of agricultural necessities like phosphorus.
(Solar might get us past the worst of the end of oil and coal -- but we can't expect the nuclear industry to transform us up a mess of the element phosphorus out of lead like some 21st century alchemist.)
The climate change deniers along with the environmental degradation deniers and resource depletion deniers are like the Nazis in basically denying that Nature can bite back .
So they assume, for example, that Nature can take all the Co2 we can hand it and just deal with it, somehow.
"Suck it up Nature !"
Modernity is supposed to have an Imperialistic side , a sort of evil twin brother hidden off to the side.
Bosh, I say, bosh.
Modernity only had one colony and always one colony - Nature.
Every other subject they colonized - from women and children, the poor and the disabled, to people in places like India and Africa - were always subjugated because they were judged close to Nature ------- and hence fair game.
Notice that none of the modernist nations ever seriously thought of turning other modernist nations into colonies -- this was called 'honor amongst modernists' ....
The paradox of our new AGE of COMMENSALITY
Our new Age of Commensality is based on Science, but not really based on Scientists.
The bulk of our scientists have given tepid lip service to the discoveries of their colleagues that form the basis for Commensality.
But they have not really accepted or fully acted upon the intellectual implications of those discoveries for their own work or their own world view.
In other words, these discoveries have become Public (published in peer reviewed journals, including all of the biggest) but they haven't become Popular (for example, taught in high school classrooms or put front and centre in high school textbooks).
Modernity has lost its cachet in basic science but flourishes almost as strong as ever in applied science - and above all in applied technology (that warm fetid home of the NATURE-DENIERS) .
Asking school boards to teach commensality might be too much to ask.
(Somehow talking about Nature makes these so called "Evangelicals" reach for their unregistered long gun... don't know, maybe the thought that Jesus was all for Commensality makes them 'agin it', on principle.)
But why don't High Schools at least teach "Quantum Physics for the Non Scientist" as it is the basis of all science and has been so for 100 years ?
The best place to take on the NATURE-DENIERS is probably not in the classroom.
No one is more timid and PC than a school board administrator so we best stick to more open and public forums such as blogs and at public meetings.....
The bulk of our scientists have given tepid lip service to the discoveries of their colleagues that form the basis for Commensality.
But they have not really accepted or fully acted upon the intellectual implications of those discoveries for their own work or their own world view.
In other words, these discoveries have become Public (published in peer reviewed journals, including all of the biggest) but they haven't become Popular (for example, taught in high school classrooms or put front and centre in high school textbooks).
Modernity has lost its cachet in basic science but flourishes almost as strong as ever in applied science - and above all in applied technology (that warm fetid home of the NATURE-DENIERS) .
Asking school boards to teach commensality might be too much to ask.
(Somehow talking about Nature makes these so called "Evangelicals" reach for their unregistered long gun... don't know, maybe the thought that Jesus was all for Commensality makes them 'agin it', on principle.)
But why don't High Schools at least teach "Quantum Physics for the Non Scientist" as it is the basis of all science and has been so for 100 years ?
The best place to take on the NATURE-DENIERS is probably not in the classroom.
No one is more timid and PC than a school board administrator so we best stick to more open and public forums such as blogs and at public meetings.....
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