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......

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 ......

DEXTER best Modernist govt NS ever had --- just too bad we live in postmodernist times...

If postmodernist times believe in de-centralization, the local, small is beautiful, DIY/PUNK and Off-the-Grid , modernity * just as surely worships megaprojects and the idea that ever bigger is ever better.

Darrell Dexter's NDP government here in Nova Scotia isn't bad  (ie isn't corrupt) and is giving us the kind of competent "modern" government we can only wish we had had in the 1970s and 1980s.

The problem is that we are living in the 21st century and in postmodernist times.

Mr Dexter's worship of the sort of large scale industrial projects his father worked at when Darrell was a child is almost admirable, in  an act-of-filial-piety-sort-of-way , but it is not good for the long term overall economy of Nova Scotia - an economy that includes our friends the birds, bugs and bees as well as us.

Old fashioned open cage fish farms are a disaster - he knows that - but their proponent is promising a big factory building with 400 unionized jobs of the sort we haven't seen since Dexter's childhood in the Fifties and Sixties.

So he takes the bait ----- and the hook.

An older hook was cast by our PM, Stephen Harper : billions to build ships in Halifax.

Dexter staked his party's fate on getting that contract. Now it is being held up and any pip from Dexter on anything that might point fingers at Harper could delay and delay those shipbuilding megaproject jobs.

So when Harper cut the Confederation-promised rail link between Nova Scotia and "Canada" , don't expect Dexter to lead the charge to the Supreme Court to restore the rail link.

I call this a postmodernist era, because that is the academic consensus : but I personally see it more as a transitional period, post-hegemonic, where moderns (skygods) war it out with postmodernist commensalists ( earthlings).

Darrell Dexter's fiercest critics are within his own party, within the postmodernist section of it.

The battle between skygods vs earthlings could ultimately tear the NS NDP apart into two separate parties.

I doubt whether Dexter will be NS's last NDP premier but my bet is he could be the last Modernist NDP premier of this "small is beautiful" oriented province.

Remember Elizabeth May birthed the SMALL PARTY here 30 years ago ....

* modernity is pre-1945 style thinking ; postmodernity is post-1945 type thinking .....

a Modernist is anyone who has never changed a diaper...

Hitler, Stalin, Mao,Tojo -  do you think any of those utopian dreamers ever changed a diaper?