Tortoise vs Hare : predicting our world in 1945....

On September 2nd 1939, when the British Empire declared war on the German Empire (thus ensuring we would have another world war), there were two main scientific theories predicting the shape of our world at the war's end.

The far more popular theory at the time was called Modernity, Social Darwinism or simply 'Might is Right'.

 It said Evolution was a vertical affair, with wiser and more mighty entities inevitably and naturally replacing entities that were weaker and more foolish.

The other, far less popular theory, saw Evolution as a horizontal activity, with the weaker and simple-minded entities continuing to co-exist for ever and ever, in global commensality, with the bigger and more complex entities.

It even went further than that.

It claimed that on not-infrequent occasion, the smaller and more simple would even triumph over the larger, more complex and more sophisticated entities in the fundamental effort to survive.

Now it is obviously that these diametrically opposed theories could not both be right.

"the hyssop and The Cedars" will look closely at the course of  WWII to see how accurate each scientific theory was in predicting the twisting course of that awful - and unexpectedly awfully long - war.....

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    On one side : the SKY GODs , utopians clinging to outdated science, all to bolster their denial of any limits to humanity's potential in a limitless Universe.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.....

Science entangled within Society, Society entangled within Science : dining at a common table

   "Global Commensality" is such a protean metaphor, n'est ce pas ?
    Global, of course in the French sense, means all-encompassing.
    Commensality - of course means "dining together", which has to be the world's second oldest intimate "profession".




    Science and Society influence each other so much, round and round and, it is as if they dine together frequently at some common table.
   Like Mr Dooley's Supreme Court, do the journals NATURE and SCIENCE follow (and review) the election returns -- and the Supreme Court?
  Of course, eventually.
   Just as the Supreme Court- most famously in "Buck versus Bell" - eventually follows (reviews) NATURE and SCIENCE.
  This is why GCR's name (global - commensality -review) is a bit of a tease and a bit of a pun: yes it is following and reviewing the eternal re-cycling of scarce life-resources among on all life forms on Earth.
   But it is also following and reviewing the co-mingling of the body fluids of Science and Society as they work with and against each other, stuck together on this tiny lifeboat we call our only home....


   

DENIERS are liberals, DOOMERS are conservative, n'est ce pas ?

   Wrong, wrong, wrong.
   Totally wrong : this oddball idea that DENIERS are conservatives.

   Only the Liberal mind holds that reality is totally knowable and totally perfectible with the application of enough human willpower.
   So we hear the Liberal mind at work when we hear the Denier proclaim: "If there is too much carbon pollution in the atmosphere, we will find the technology to sequester it back into the ground, cheaply, easily and safely."
    And : "Let us not impede the ever upward pace of progress by all these alarmist doubts and fears."
   By contrast, it is the Conservative mind that doubts that humanity is perfectible, it is the conservative who, in a theological sense, believes that all of us are sinners.
   If they further believe that Jesus - strictly according to the Bible, seems to have liked having sinners at His dining table - then they end up at one with GCR :
    If all are sinners, and sinners end up at the big table, then we all dine at the big table : global commensality in a nutshell.
   Doomers doubt that perfect solutions exist to safely allow ever-increasing HCP (human carbon pollution) of the atmosphere - or that they are easily and cheaply obtained .
   They worry the actions of a few excessive-carbon diners will spoil the dinners of all, carbon-diners or not - a highly conservative viewpoint, by any standard.
   Funny old world, ain't it ?

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.....