It is arresting to chart the type of names Halifax ,Nova Scotia based NGOs have given themselves over the years.
It can tell us - muchly - about changes over time in communication and transport and how people alter what they conceive of as their home and region.
Nova Scotia originally was much larger - making up most of the province of New Brunswick, all of PEI province, and all of Cape Breton (which itself was a short-lived province, and so should be again).
These three provinces have long called themselves the Maritime provinces or more simply and more commonly, the Maritimes.
After 1949 and the entry of Newfoundland and Labrador as Canada's tenth province, the powers-to-be in Ottawa found all four provinces "Down East" to be provincial beyond belief (this from 1950s Ottawa, that hotbed-not of worldly sophistication !)
So they got lumped together as Atlantic Canada - neatly excluding the large portion of Quebec that is by any standards of science, in Canada and fully in the Atlantic coastal zone.
Halifax has always been the capital and biggest city by far of Nova Scotia.
And since WWII, it has been the biggest city by far of Atlantic Canada and its unofficial capital ---and one of five unofficial regional capitals of Canada.
When transportation was so bad in Nova Scotia that all rural seats had to be represented in Halifax legislature by Halifax men with business or family ties to that rural area, what would be called today NGOs tended to be realistic and 1840s educators called their new NGO, the Halifax Mechanics' Institute.
But once rail and steam ship travel was more reliable and speedy, one sees the Nova Scotia Institute for Science in the 1860s.
By the 1930s, it was common to see NGOs calling themselves the Maritime School of Social Work.
New post 1970 NGOs, set up by the boomer generation, tended to call themselves the Atlantic Filmmakers Co-op.
(This was real hubris as this co-op of volunteer 'hands-on' amateurs really was effectively Halifax area based.)
Recently, St Mary's university and the Atlantic School of Theology, two second tier post secondary institutions in national Canadian terms, and located in the smallest by far region in Canada in terms of wealth and population, set up The Canadian Centre for Ethics in Public Affairs (CCEPA) .
Chutzpah bravo !! Why should all the national NGOs have to be run by default out of Ottawa or Toronto ?
Now the "Global Commensality NEWS" - is my blog and journal an attempt by a Haligonian to bypass Canada and cover the planet ?
No.
"Global Commensality" is one concept, utterly indivisible - that is why it is in my blog and journal title and my key subject area.
In fact, while I am thinking globally on this subject, I have tried to limit myself to reporting locally.
I am working hard to find the hyper-local 'angle' to any international news stories about 'global commensality versus late modernity' (aka Doomers versus Deniers.)
Can't see, though, why some local Halifax based physicist couldn't blog - straight-faced - under the moniker of Multi-Universe Maven : go for it !
Showing posts with label global commensality news. Show all posts
Showing posts with label global commensality news. Show all posts
Thursday, May 17, 2012
My great-grandfather Eddie as my personal link to era of High Modernity
The dates of famous scientist Lise Meitner, 1978-1968, perhaps better fits the contours of the age of Peak Scientism and High Modernity.
But I never met her - I did meet and do remember my great-grandfather. He is my personal link, no matter how remote, to this era I write so much about, think so much about,dream so much about, but was not and never will be, a part of.
Great-grandfather, Edmund Ormrod Collinge, was conceived in December 1879, as Romanticism laying dying and lived just long enough to see it return in the guise of the foppish clothing worn by all aspiring British pop stars in the mid-sixties, before dying himself in August 3rd 1966.
As fitting his Era, he worked in Engineering, in the British sense of that term, in the North of England where 'muck is money'.
He loved motorcycles and my grandmother May's first memory (she was born in 1900) was riding on the back of her dad's motorbike with her baby brother beside her. This was well before WWI and not long after such powerful bikes were perfected.
His sons love the new science of radio and radar - my father planned to follow along as an engineer too but ended up instead as a naval navigation/gunnery officer and a philosopher-painter.
Eddie's great-grandson Richard did become a flying navigation officer in Canada's airforce, on Hercules aircraft, before becoming a project officer for an investment bank.
My interest in science and engineering- via this journal "Global Commensality NEWS" - is not in hands-on lab or field science but in these activities impact on society - and society upon them.....
But I never met her - I did meet and do remember my great-grandfather. He is my personal link, no matter how remote, to this era I write so much about, think so much about,dream so much about, but was not and never will be, a part of.
Great-grandfather, Edmund Ormrod Collinge, was conceived in December 1879, as Romanticism laying dying and lived just long enough to see it return in the guise of the foppish clothing worn by all aspiring British pop stars in the mid-sixties, before dying himself in August 3rd 1966.
As fitting his Era, he worked in Engineering, in the British sense of that term, in the North of England where 'muck is money'.
He loved motorcycles and my grandmother May's first memory (she was born in 1900) was riding on the back of her dad's motorbike with her baby brother beside her. This was well before WWI and not long after such powerful bikes were perfected.
His sons love the new science of radio and radar - my father planned to follow along as an engineer too but ended up instead as a naval navigation/gunnery officer and a philosopher-painter.
Eddie's great-grandson Richard did become a flying navigation officer in Canada's airforce, on Hercules aircraft, before becoming a project officer for an investment bank.
My interest in science and engineering- via this journal "Global Commensality NEWS" - is not in hands-on lab or field science but in these activities impact on society - and society upon them.....
"Peak Scientism" and the price of petro
The period roughly bracketed by 1878 and 1968 has as many names as my partner Rebecca has relatives (a warm shout-out to the baby-makers of the Little Vatican of Antigonish County Nova Scotia).
Call it Peak Scientism, High Modernity, Non-Renewable Modernity, Non-Renewal Progress, the Second Industrial Revolution, the Era of Positivism, the Counter-Romanticism Era.
Many more names besides those - and that is just in English.
Not easy, this close to the Beast, to get a consensus on its essence.
But one Powerpoint image of the many, many that Andrew Nikiforuk flashed on the screen at SMU's Sobey's Business School Building in Halifax last night, (hey - he said the talk was a work in progress !) grabbed me by my intellectual short and curlies.
It was brought to us by the handwritten capital letter M ; aka a graph of oil prices in current 2010 dollars in the vertical versus the years 1850 to 2010 in the horizontal.
The high price upper twin towers of that written capital M were just before the late 1870s and just after the early 1970s - the low price trough was the the exact period of the era of Peak Scientism and High Modernity.
Interestingly, coal, not oil, was the main energy source throughout almost that entire period - oil, by contrast, is what has fueled the post-modern era of hippy-dippy baby boomers : the oil boomer kids , my generation.
But that relatively tiny amount of petroleum was more than enough to fuel the mental/imaginative travel of billions - rather than fueling their actual - physical - travels.
Cars - racing cars, motecycles - freedom to go down any and every road in a clud of fumes,dust and speed. Rockets to universes unknown - away from spouse, kids, take-out-the-garbage, mortgage debt, bosses.
Personal airplanes as cars - not more bound to color along the lines of rail lines and two lane blacktop.
Freedom !!
"Global Commensality NEWS", that spokesperson for defending limits to personal freedom to do whatever you want to whoever you want when and wherever you want has two words to say:
In the air above this tiny remote community, two planes collided and all five on board died --- pieces of planes and body bits raining down over a one square kilometre area on the ground.
The myth is that flying in the air promises totally freedom to go anywhere as your whim hits you.
What actually does hit you, if you do give in to the urge to go just anywhere your fancy moves you, is someone else's wing tip : game over forever.
Small plane owners have less ,not more ,freedom than car owners or walkers - they must file a flight plan, time and speed and direction indicated - and stick to it - or planes collide.
This is with maybe one hundred thousand small plane owners in the air around the world at any one time - try to imagine 9 billion plane owners with a billion small planes crisscrossing the skies
randomly at any one moment.
Disaster !
This is Late Modernity's dream and delusion.
Please help us stop that delusion before they crash our entire planet instead of just their personal plane.
Or the song won't be "It's Raining Men" but rather "It's Raining Bits and Pieces of Men ! "......
Call it Peak Scientism, High Modernity, Non-Renewable Modernity, Non-Renewal Progress, the Second Industrial Revolution, the Era of Positivism, the Counter-Romanticism Era.
Many more names besides those - and that is just in English.
Not easy, this close to the Beast, to get a consensus on its essence.
But one Powerpoint image of the many, many that Andrew Nikiforuk flashed on the screen at SMU's Sobey's Business School Building in Halifax last night, (hey - he said the talk was a work in progress !) grabbed me by my intellectual short and curlies.
It was brought to us by the handwritten capital letter M ; aka a graph of oil prices in current 2010 dollars in the vertical versus the years 1850 to 2010 in the horizontal.
The high price upper twin towers of that written capital M were just before the late 1870s and just after the early 1970s - the low price trough was the the exact period of the era of Peak Scientism and High Modernity.
Interestingly, coal, not oil, was the main energy source throughout almost that entire period - oil, by contrast, is what has fueled the post-modern era of hippy-dippy baby boomers : the oil boomer kids , my generation.
But that relatively tiny amount of petroleum was more than enough to fuel the mental/imaginative travel of billions - rather than fueling their actual - physical - travels.
Cars - racing cars, motecycles - freedom to go down any and every road in a clud of fumes,dust and speed. Rockets to universes unknown - away from spouse, kids, take-out-the-garbage, mortgage debt, bosses.
Personal airplanes as cars - not more bound to color along the lines of rail lines and two lane blacktop.
Freedom !!
"Global Commensality NEWS", that spokesperson for defending limits to personal freedom to do whatever you want to whoever you want when and wherever you want has two words to say:
St Brieux, Saskatchewan
In the air above this tiny remote community, two planes collided and all five on board died --- pieces of planes and body bits raining down over a one square kilometre area on the ground.
The myth is that flying in the air promises totally freedom to go anywhere as your whim hits you.
What actually does hit you, if you do give in to the urge to go just anywhere your fancy moves you, is someone else's wing tip : game over forever.
Small plane owners have less ,not more ,freedom than car owners or walkers - they must file a flight plan, time and speed and direction indicated - and stick to it - or planes collide.
This is with maybe one hundred thousand small plane owners in the air around the world at any one time - try to imagine 9 billion plane owners with a billion small planes crisscrossing the skies
randomly at any one moment.
Disaster !
This is Late Modernity's dream and delusion.
Please help us stop that delusion before they crash our entire planet instead of just their personal plane.
Or the song won't be "It's Raining Men" but rather "It's Raining Bits and Pieces of Men ! "......
Never invest in a stock that actuaries and accountants are bailing from....
If seems a safe rule: if the number-crunchers and bean-counters don't like a project why should little old un-informed you invest your hard-earned pesos into it ?
A current stock those geeks with calculators and glasses and briefcases (briefcases - in the 21st century !) are jumping ship and swimming away from as fast as they can is theHeartless Heartland Institute and atmospheric carbon pollution denial.
Insurance company dudes mostly - the same guys that pay the giga-dollar bill bills when coastal mega-cities are flooded out in bigger-than-normal storms.
They don't like the math.
Neither does "Global Commensality NEWS" .
Now I realize - their abject protestations to the contrary , that business people do not really rely on math but rather on faith,optimism, hubris (in equal parts) to seal the deal on any project.
But that is in the CEO's manic phase.
When she or he is in their depressive state, they do listen to accountants and angry shareholders with class action suits.
European insurance CEOs have been to the black night of the soul on climate change disasters and fled the scene.
Finally, thankfully, North American insurance is beginning to do the same...
A current stock those geeks with calculators and glasses and briefcases (briefcases - in the 21st century !) are jumping ship and swimming away from as fast as they can is the
Insurance company dudes mostly - the same guys that pay the giga-dollar bill bills when coastal mega-cities are flooded out in bigger-than-normal storms.
They don't like the math.
Neither does "Global Commensality NEWS" .
Now I realize - their abject protestations to the contrary , that business people do not really rely on math but rather on faith,optimism, hubris (in equal parts) to seal the deal on any project.
But that is in the CEO's manic phase.
When she or he is in their depressive state, they do listen to accountants and angry shareholders with class action suits.
European insurance CEOs have been to the black night of the soul on climate change disasters and fled the scene.
Finally, thankfully, North American insurance is beginning to do the same...
Andrew Nikiforuk: Addiction to energy slaves fuels our heartlessness,violence - and OBESITY & SLOTH
This is because it would actually worsen our current addiction to energy slaves, laziness and heartlessness - if only because, this time, we'd kid ourselves that at least our consciences were clear.
Nikiforuk himself seems a fount of natural energy ,winning about as many major - highly different- awards for writing and advocacy as he has written major - highly different - books and articles on a wide variety of subjects.
May I venture that his latest book, "The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude", forthcoming this Fall * and which Andrew previewed for the first time in public at SMU, may vault
him out of the ranks of journalism and into the ranks of public intellectuals.
Appropriate for a lecture delivered at a Catholic University and sponsored - in part - by that university's Philosophy Department and by CCEPA ,(Canadian Centre for Ethics in Public Policy, itself a joint venture of SMU and AST (the Atlantic School of Theology), Nikiforuk referenced the moral impact that slavery has always had upon the masters of those slaves.
In particular, Andrew focused on slave-owning's conversion, in the last two centuries, from something a relatively few families did (with a few dozen slaves each) to something all human families now do with thousands of slaves each.
No longer human slaves (at least not usually in our homes - we prefer to hide them in factories in rural China), instead these are machine-energy slaves, with about the same (lack of) rights as past human slaves.
Powered mostly by Non-Renewable-Modernity's greatest gift to ever-upward progress : fossil fuels, that gift from the past that does not keep on giving.
Current obesity levels and addiction to GPS travel are really nothing new points out Nikiforuk : whenever slaves are abundant,obedient (on pain of painful death) and clever, masters will end up relying upon them for everything but eating and burping.
Sloth neatly combines with a heartlessness to the slaves' continuing existence, as long as the violence of every master society and their armies, can keep bringing in new fresh supplies.
Only when slaves are expensive and in sort supply does their treatment then to improve.
But this depressing picture can be removed, Nikiforuk seemed to argue, if we morally re-embrace useful, healthy physical labour as a positive virtue and return again to the religious injunction against owning any slaves - human, animal or inanimate.
St Benedict walked away from slave-owning and its mindset and set up a worldwide order, fueled this time by the practises of a small remote peasant village where healthy useful work was combining with knowing how to enjoy life, simply, with family and friends.
What our world is waiting for - without even knowing it - says Nikiforuk, quoting approvingly from one of Global Commensality NEWS's favourite thinkers, Alastair MacIntyre, is a new St Benedict....
*At all the biggest - not alway the best - bookstores.
Global Commensality NEWS : MODERNITY ain't dead - yet !
Baring reliable dental records to the contrary, reports of the death of MODERNITY circa 1945 (as a result of collateral damage from the first Nuremberg Trial) have been greatly exaggerated.
So here I am sitting at the GCN ("Global Commensality NEWS") obit desk trying my darndest to write an obit - 70 years later - for "the Era that refuses to die", but yet must die, if humanity is to live.
This does not mean that instead of bringing you hopeful news of the new Era of Global Commensality, I will now turn the GCN journal into a sort of "Modernity Deathwatch Bulletin".
I will have to balance both situations in my news reporting.
But have no doubt exactly where I stand:
So here I am sitting at the GCN ("Global Commensality NEWS") obit desk trying my darndest to write an obit - 70 years later - for "the Era that refuses to die", but yet must die, if humanity is to live.
This does not mean that instead of bringing you hopeful news of the new Era of Global Commensality, I will now turn the GCN journal into a sort of "Modernity Deathwatch Bulletin".
I will have to balance both situations in my news reporting.
But have no doubt exactly where I stand:
GCN's mission, as I see it, is to convince you, all of you , that we must finally make our goodbyes with Modernity and warmheartedly embrace Global Commensality, if humanity and this planet is to survive into the next centuries...
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