In 1940, Big Pharma only wants to sell its profitable-expensive (patented drugs) to those who could afford to pay for them directly : just as the AMA only wanted doctors to heal those who could afford to pay directly for its members profitably-expensive services.
Against this, some doctors like Henry Dawson believed that all life dined at a common table and that all life deserved a chance to live , all life deserved medical care, including penicillin.
He did not believe in dividing the world into "life worthy of wartime penicillin" and "life unworthy of wartime penicillin".
Showing posts with label postmodernity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label postmodernity. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
Tuesday, August 27, 2013
The irony of 1945's twin triumphs ...
1945 was , on any account, an extraordinary year, not the least for its twin scientific triumphs.
At the time, it was almost universally held that the Man-made Bomb was the way of an atomic future so bright we'd have to wear shades .
By contrast, 1945's new Microbe-made medicine (natural penicillin) was viewed as but a temporary anomaly, a dusty throw back to the outdated caldron practises of medieval midwives.
But more than a half century later we are no longer so sure of all of this.
Atomic energy has not at all fulfilled its early promise.
Meanwhile, microbiology and biotechnology (descendants of 1945's natural-produced penicillin) have far outshot their 1945 rival, synthetic chemistry.
So today, with 20/20 hindsight, while 1945 can still feel like the apogee of the Modern age,it is also revealed as its very nadir.
Because 1945 is now seen as the birthday of our present post-Modern age.
In which case, Henry Dawson's twin follies of advocating on behalf of small individuals and on behalf of small microbes can be seen as promoting a distinguishing hallmark of postmodernity.
For few of us, under the age of eighty, devote much energy these days to replacing our current rainbow of many small cultures with a return to yesterday's dreary unitary monoculture of constipated WASP-dom.....
At the time, it was almost universally held that the Man-made Bomb was the way of an atomic future so bright we'd have to wear shades .
By contrast, 1945's new Microbe-made medicine (natural penicillin) was viewed as but a temporary anomaly, a dusty throw back to the outdated caldron practises of medieval midwives.
But more than a half century later we are no longer so sure of all of this.
Atomic energy has not at all fulfilled its early promise.
Meanwhile, microbiology and biotechnology (descendants of 1945's natural-produced penicillin) have far outshot their 1945 rival, synthetic chemistry.
So today, with 20/20 hindsight, while 1945 can still feel like the apogee of the Modern age,it is also revealed as its very nadir.
Because 1945 is now seen as the birthday of our present post-Modern age.
In which case, Henry Dawson's twin follies of advocating on behalf of small individuals and on behalf of small microbes can be seen as promoting a distinguishing hallmark of postmodernity.
For few of us, under the age of eighty, devote much energy these days to replacing our current rainbow of many small cultures with a return to yesterday's dreary unitary monoculture of constipated WASP-dom.....
Social Darwinism turns Peace into Undeclared War...
The attributes of the Age of the Big (Social Darwinism Mk I) makes the idea of contrasting it with the concept of the War of the Big (Social Darwinism Mk II) a moot point.
This is because the Social Darwin idea of reducing all Life to an unceasing, total, struggle for life or death means that only a formal declaration on paper could separate Darwinian War from Darwinian Peace.
It was always assumed , without much proof, that in this struggle the big would inevitably triumph over the small and then the ever bigger would do likewise over the merely 'big' .
By contrast ,Henry Dawson championed the small all his life - it must have come almost naturally to him, with his coming from a Canadian province that was increasingly viewed as too small to be relevant to Canadian values.
But he also noticed in his scientific investigations that while the big did thrive in stable circumstances, the small could still at least survive in hidden niches.
But in non-stable times, the big (over-extended) broke up, while the small (insured against normal hard times) took it all in stride.
Rather than modern science quickly dismissing Life's small as just part of evolution's dusty, distant beginnings, he felt they should give the small a second glance - and a second chance.
He extended this in the 1930s to those judged chronically ill and second rate and then, in the war years , to those American young people with SBE who were judged to be 'life unworthy of expensive medical care during a military crisis' .
Modern science had no time for his theory - his championing of the small was viewed as a damning folly from a medical scientist with an otherwise worthy medical career.
But post modernity science is largely shaped around the concept of reality's inherent complexity and diversity : admitting that reality will always consist of the mixing together of large and small phenomena and large and small beings.
In this long view, Dawson's folly begins to look quite prescient ...
This is because the Social Darwin idea of reducing all Life to an unceasing, total, struggle for life or death means that only a formal declaration on paper could separate Darwinian War from Darwinian Peace.
It was always assumed , without much proof, that in this struggle the big would inevitably triumph over the small and then the ever bigger would do likewise over the merely 'big' .
By contrast ,Henry Dawson championed the small all his life - it must have come almost naturally to him, with his coming from a Canadian province that was increasingly viewed as too small to be relevant to Canadian values.
But he also noticed in his scientific investigations that while the big did thrive in stable circumstances, the small could still at least survive in hidden niches.
But in non-stable times, the big (over-extended) broke up, while the small (insured against normal hard times) took it all in stride.
Rather than modern science quickly dismissing Life's small as just part of evolution's dusty, distant beginnings, he felt they should give the small a second glance - and a second chance.
He extended this in the 1930s to those judged chronically ill and second rate and then, in the war years , to those American young people with SBE who were judged to be 'life unworthy of expensive medical care during a military crisis' .
Modern science had no time for his theory - his championing of the small was viewed as a damning folly from a medical scientist with an otherwise worthy medical career.
But post modernity science is largely shaped around the concept of reality's inherent complexity and diversity : admitting that reality will always consist of the mixing together of large and small phenomena and large and small beings.
In this long view, Dawson's folly begins to look quite prescient ...
Sunday, August 25, 2013
Are the small just a tiny part of the Modern past or a vital part of the Postmodern future ?
Two hundred years from the event, historians will be telling classrooms that when it comes to exam time, they should remember that WWII boiled down to just one issue.
One - scientific - issue.
Were the small to be considered just a tiny part of Modernity's dusty past or were they to be a vital part of the (postmodern/multi-coloured) future ?
In early 1939 , on one side was virtually all of the world's educated.
On the other, was Henry Dawson : and that was his folly.
By late 1945 , Henry Dawson was dead and gone and so his current opinion was irrelevant.
But many of the world's younger educated had moved - under the course of many events - one begun by Henry himself - to doubt their parents' and grantparents' position on the matter.
For if the smartest pundits of the war's end were sure that 1945 represented the apogee of modern bigness , by about 1978 leading commentators are just as sure it actually represented Modernity's nadir and the birth of our present day Postmodernity.
But Dawson's all-out efforts to defend the small under the assault of WWII values caused his premature death, so he wasn't around in his mid-eighties to enjoy his vindication.
That to was his folly ; or his eternal glory ...
One - scientific - issue.
Were the small to be considered just a tiny part of Modernity's dusty past or were they to be a vital part of the (postmodern/multi-coloured) future ?
In early 1939 , on one side was virtually all of the world's educated.
On the other, was Henry Dawson : and that was his folly.
By late 1945 , Henry Dawson was dead and gone and so his current opinion was irrelevant.
But many of the world's younger educated had moved - under the course of many events - one begun by Henry himself - to doubt their parents' and grantparents' position on the matter.
For if the smartest pundits of the war's end were sure that 1945 represented the apogee of modern bigness , by about 1978 leading commentators are just as sure it actually represented Modernity's nadir and the birth of our present day Postmodernity.
But Dawson's all-out efforts to defend the small under the assault of WWII values caused his premature death, so he wasn't around in his mid-eighties to enjoy his vindication.
That to was his folly ; or his eternal glory ...
Monday, May 6, 2013
Modern "Bigger is Better" vs Post-modern "Small is Beautiful"
Kiddies, don't agonize about the complex differences between modernity and postmodernity when your prof poses the question at your next final exam ( trust me on this one - they will).
Just remind yourself that great-grandpa back in the 1930s was as unlikely to say "small is beautiful" as today's intellectuals on public broadcasting would ever proclaim "bigger is better" ....
Just remind yourself that great-grandpa back in the 1930s was as unlikely to say "small is beautiful" as today's intellectuals on public broadcasting would ever proclaim "bigger is better" ....
Monday, April 8, 2013
1945 : Triumph of the Weak ; Mite is Right
If the triumph of post-1945 postmodernity over pre-1945 modernity means anything , it means the unexpected triumph of the mite-y over the mighty and the triumph of the weak over the wise.
And yes, the survival of the fittest (to a particular place and point in time) over those all-weather, all-terrain, all-the-time "fit" so beloved by modernists.
Ain't life grand ? And ironic ...
And yes, the survival of the fittest (to a particular place and point in time) over those all-weather, all-terrain, all-the-time "fit" so beloved by modernists.
Ain't life grand ? And ironic ...
Monday, January 21, 2013
Dawson's DIY penicillin a postmodernist "shot across the bow" of Modernist Big Pharma
Two hundred years from now, only the first of the Dawson team's many articles on wartime penicillin will still be cited and still considered seminal.
This, despite the fact that Nova Scotia-born Henry Dawson's last penicillin article told a surprised world that invariable fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis (the much dreaded SBE) had finally been cured - by his penicillin method that he had pioneered 5 years earlier.
But instead it is Dawson's first penicillin first article, the "impure but non toxic" article of May 5th 1941, that had (and continues to have) ramifications beyond any one disease, ramifications indeed beyond even medicine and science itself.
In that article, delivered before a large group of international medical researchers in Atlantic City and widely reported by the popular and scientific media from The New York Times to the South Africa Medical Journal, Dawson deliberately paired and then contrasted two oxymoronic phrases.
But first, recall that Dawson chose to appear in front of all his peers to praise his new drug to the heavens AND announce that it had no therapeutic effect on a series of four SBE cases in a row.
Trust me on this one : normally scientists do not rush to the biggest conference in town to proudly announce repeated failure.
But it wasn't the lack of therapeutic success from his impure natural penicillin that Dawson was really so eager to announce.
Rather it was the lack of toxic effects from his crude homemade mixture of natural penicillin and its natural impurities that he was so proud (and perhaps amazed) to announce.
(In a sort of 'reverse Ivory Soap', his starting penicillin brew was far less than 99 and 44 100th percent impure : pure penicillin made up only one part per million of his mixture !)
It could have had - perhaps even should have had - a highly deadly mycotoxin poison buried somewhere in that fungus mix, but God took pity on Humanity and it did not.
We do not have a complete version of Dawson's report and ad lib comments , only various precis. But assembled together, I believe we can garner Dawson's actual words and phrases used to prescribe his main intent behind this article.
He described how his tiny team made their hospital-grown crude (impure) and natural penicillin, calling it both more potent and much less toxic than the factory-made chemically pure synthetic sulfa drugs, less potent and more toxic, made by Big Pharma .
His takeaway line, as the CBC's Don Connolly likes to say, is that "despite being impure, homemade natural penicillin was actually less toxic and much more potent than factory-made pure synthetic sulfa drugs."
Today, in this postmodern age, this statement might hardly seem controversial ; but in 1940, at the apogee of Modernity, to diss the Du Pont slogan of "living better chemically" was to indulge in sheer heresy.
At the same university as Dawson (Columbia) and at the exact same time, famed German-scholars-in-exile Adorno and Horkheimer were busy dismantling 500 years of Modernity, brick by brick, and patiently reassembling them as Postmodernity.
Perhaps posthumously, their fellow university colleague Henry Dawson can lay claim to being among Postmodernity's first scientific converts.....
This, despite the fact that Nova Scotia-born Henry Dawson's last penicillin article told a surprised world that invariable fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis (the much dreaded SBE) had finally been cured - by his penicillin method that he had pioneered 5 years earlier.
But instead it is Dawson's first penicillin first article, the "impure but non toxic" article of May 5th 1941, that had (and continues to have) ramifications beyond any one disease, ramifications indeed beyond even medicine and science itself.
In that article, delivered before a large group of international medical researchers in Atlantic City and widely reported by the popular and scientific media from The New York Times to the South Africa Medical Journal, Dawson deliberately paired and then contrasted two oxymoronic phrases.
But first, recall that Dawson chose to appear in front of all his peers to praise his new drug to the heavens AND announce that it had no therapeutic effect on a series of four SBE cases in a row.
Trust me on this one : normally scientists do not rush to the biggest conference in town to proudly announce repeated failure.
But it wasn't the lack of therapeutic success from his impure natural penicillin that Dawson was really so eager to announce.
Rather it was the lack of toxic effects from his crude homemade mixture of natural penicillin and its natural impurities that he was so proud (and perhaps amazed) to announce.
(In a sort of 'reverse Ivory Soap', his starting penicillin brew was far less than 99 and 44 100th percent impure : pure penicillin made up only one part per million of his mixture !)
It could have had - perhaps even should have had - a highly deadly mycotoxin poison buried somewhere in that fungus mix, but God took pity on Humanity and it did not.
We do not have a complete version of Dawson's report and ad lib comments , only various precis. But assembled together, I believe we can garner Dawson's actual words and phrases used to prescribe his main intent behind this article.
He described how his tiny team made their hospital-grown crude (impure) and natural penicillin, calling it both more potent and much less toxic than the factory-made chemically pure synthetic sulfa drugs, less potent and more toxic, made by Big Pharma .
His takeaway line, as the CBC's Don Connolly likes to say, is that "despite being impure, homemade natural penicillin was actually less toxic and much more potent than factory-made pure synthetic sulfa drugs."
"Living better chemically ?"
Today, in this postmodern age, this statement might hardly seem controversial ; but in 1940, at the apogee of Modernity, to diss the Du Pont slogan of "living better chemically" was to indulge in sheer heresy.
At the same university as Dawson (Columbia) and at the exact same time, famed German-scholars-in-exile Adorno and Horkheimer were busy dismantling 500 years of Modernity, brick by brick, and patiently reassembling them as Postmodernity.
Perhaps posthumously, their fellow university colleague Henry Dawson can lay claim to being among Postmodernity's first scientific converts.....
Sunday, May 6, 2012
Big but Simple, Small but Complex, the paradoxes of PO-MO Science refutes central tenet of MODERNITY
Modernity was birthed in the late 19th century ,when Darwinian Biology saw a definite, if meandering, directionality to progress, leading through random activity into self organization - onward to ever bigger and hence ever more "complex" beings .
This metaphor was extended to all things : Big Government, Big Corporations, Big Unions ,Big Bridges, Big Dams, Big Battleships , ever onwards.
Bigger was Better,Law of the Jungle, Might Makes Right: Darwin our God was definitely on the side of the Biggest Battalions.
But quantum physics and molecular biology in the 1930s put a question mark on these certitudes.
Or should have - if Science works like it claims it does.
For example, the alchemists' claim of transmutation of atoms turned out to be possible after all - the hundred plus elements were not just a given at the birth of the Universe.
So some physicists in the 1930s were speculating that in the seconds after the Big Bang, its immense heat and pressure fused subatomic particles into ever bigger subatomic particles and ultimately produced the lightest element hydrogen and a few of its lightest cousins.
What what could have given the truly tremendous energy and pressure needed, by quantum theory, to fuse the heaviest elements into being ?
A mystery.
But with the 1930s discovery of Super Novas, we now had a source for the immense energy needed.
It came from explosions of the biggest discrete objects in the Universe .
But there was a real paradox here : there is nothing bigger or more energetic than a Super Nova exploding, but all it could produce for all its labour was the tiny - and relatively simple - atom.
Yes, the simple atom : For by the 1930s, the new sciences of Polymer Chemistry and Bio Chemistry were coming to the conclusion that true complexity lay in the giant biological-created molecules.
These were a mixture of thousands of different atoms, but arranged in such complex three dimensional shapes that each enzyme or protein molecule to be an incredibly tiny but precise factory or robot.
Ironically, some claimed that it was Life's smallest beings, the microbes, who designed and used these giant molecules the best.
Martin Henry Dawson called this bacterial transmutation of biological molecules (like DNA) via HGT (horizontal gene transfers) "Transformation", but many others simply called it biological transmutation a la the alchemists and the elements .
So now ,big Super Novas produced small and simple atoms , while tiny microbes produced big and complex molecules.
But in fact, these discoveries made by Quantum Physics and Molecular Biology between 1890s to the 1930s seemed to hold
little 'real world' relevance to politicians and businessmen, until WWII (Modernity's War) exposed Modernity' weaknesses.
Martin Henry Dawson's friends, Floyd Odlum and Jackie Cochrane, were in turn close friends with the most influential advocate of air power in WWII : General Hap Arnold, US Army Air Force.
Arnold felt that Carl Norden had the war-winner in his bombsight, so deadly accurate there would be no need to use old-fashioned infantrymen like Dawson.
However, Newtonian Physics/ Norden Physics totally failed to get its promised bombs into the proverbial pickle barrel from 15,000 feet up.
The military were forced to go back to the ancient method used by the armies of tens of thousands of years earlier : firing up of entire cities.
(That and calling in those low tech/old fashioned infantrymen to once again close the deal.)
The fire came from the atomic bomb with such force that aiming accurately was rendered irrelevant -- even a miss still wiped out the entire city.
Suddenly, after August 1945, that long-haired Quantum-whatever physics stuff that had produced the a-bomb seemed to be something politicians, generals and newspaper editors would have to take seriously. Newton - and Norden - would have to go to the museum.
The revelation of Auschwitz's medical experiments in November 1945 had already made everyone question just what evil alley Galtonian Biology was leading humanity up.
Dr Joseph Mengele's 'research' (via photographs and measures of people's external bodies) leading to crude carving and sewing up of people to make the perfect race suddenly seemed irredeemably old-fashioned.
The future of genetics seemed to lie instead in tiny objects inside those bodies - lie inside the molecules of life.
Dawson's former colleagues at the Rockefeller Institute might just hold the new key to biology - via a sudden interest in researching Dawson's old DNA stuff.
Not that any politician or businessmen actually said that - not for 50 more years.
But the ambitious young at the leading edge of science sure did --- they moved into molecular biology from all branches of science after 1945, from physics and chemistry and geology as well from zoology and botany.
Daltonian Chemistry was in no better shape - its traditional method of choice - huge factory vats to heat up and heat down, under tremendous pressure, to create a few simple chemicals - also seemed suddenly irremediably old fashioned by 1945.
A tiny - invisible - fungus factory, as advocated by Martin Henry Dawson, could gracefully produce the Life-saving penicillin at normal temperature and pressures while the huge chemical plants just spun their wheels, failing to produce any synthetic penicillin.
The weak, as it turned out, might inherit the universe after all, just as the Bible claimed many eons ago....
This metaphor was extended to all things : Big Government, Big Corporations, Big Unions ,Big Bridges, Big Dams, Big Battleships , ever onwards.
Bigger was Better,Law of the Jungle, Might Makes Right: Darwin our God was definitely on the side of the Biggest Battalions.
But quantum physics and molecular biology in the 1930s put a question mark on these certitudes.
Or should have - if Science works like it claims it does.
For example, the alchemists' claim of transmutation of atoms turned out to be possible after all - the hundred plus elements were not just a given at the birth of the Universe.
So some physicists in the 1930s were speculating that in the seconds after the Big Bang, its immense heat and pressure fused subatomic particles into ever bigger subatomic particles and ultimately produced the lightest element hydrogen and a few of its lightest cousins.
What what could have given the truly tremendous energy and pressure needed, by quantum theory, to fuse the heaviest elements into being ?
A mystery.
But with the 1930s discovery of Super Novas, we now had a source for the immense energy needed.
It came from explosions of the biggest discrete objects in the Universe .
But there was a real paradox here : there is nothing bigger or more energetic than a Super Nova exploding, but all it could produce for all its labour was the tiny - and relatively simple - atom.
Yes, the simple atom : For by the 1930s, the new sciences of Polymer Chemistry and Bio Chemistry were coming to the conclusion that true complexity lay in the giant biological-created molecules.
These were a mixture of thousands of different atoms, but arranged in such complex three dimensional shapes that each enzyme or protein molecule to be an incredibly tiny but precise factory or robot.
Ironically, some claimed that it was Life's smallest beings, the microbes, who designed and used these giant molecules the best.
Martin Henry Dawson called this bacterial transmutation of biological molecules (like DNA) via HGT (horizontal gene transfers) "Transformation", but many others simply called it biological transmutation a la the alchemists and the elements .
So now ,big Super Novas produced small and simple atoms , while tiny microbes produced big and complex molecules.
But in fact, these discoveries made by Quantum Physics and Molecular Biology between 1890s to the 1930s seemed to hold
little 'real world' relevance to politicians and businessmen, until WWII (Modernity's War) exposed Modernity' weaknesses.
Martin Henry Dawson's friends, Floyd Odlum and Jackie Cochrane, were in turn close friends with the most influential advocate of air power in WWII : General Hap Arnold, US Army Air Force.
Arnold felt that Carl Norden had the war-winner in his bombsight, so deadly accurate there would be no need to use old-fashioned infantrymen like Dawson.
However, Newtonian Physics/ Norden Physics totally failed to get its promised bombs into the proverbial pickle barrel from 15,000 feet up.
The military were forced to go back to the ancient method used by the armies of tens of thousands of years earlier : firing up of entire cities.
(That and calling in those low tech/old fashioned infantrymen to once again close the deal.)
The fire came from the atomic bomb with such force that aiming accurately was rendered irrelevant -- even a miss still wiped out the entire city.
Suddenly, after August 1945, that long-haired Quantum-whatever physics stuff that had produced the a-bomb seemed to be something politicians, generals and newspaper editors would have to take seriously. Newton - and Norden - would have to go to the museum.
The revelation of Auschwitz's medical experiments in November 1945 had already made everyone question just what evil alley Galtonian Biology was leading humanity up.
Dr Joseph Mengele's 'research' (via photographs and measures of people's external bodies) leading to crude carving and sewing up of people to make the perfect race suddenly seemed irredeemably old-fashioned.
The future of genetics seemed to lie instead in tiny objects inside those bodies - lie inside the molecules of life.
Dawson's former colleagues at the Rockefeller Institute might just hold the new key to biology - via a sudden interest in researching Dawson's old DNA stuff.
Not that any politician or businessmen actually said that - not for 50 more years.
But the ambitious young at the leading edge of science sure did --- they moved into molecular biology from all branches of science after 1945, from physics and chemistry and geology as well from zoology and botany.
Daltonian Chemistry was in no better shape - its traditional method of choice - huge factory vats to heat up and heat down, under tremendous pressure, to create a few simple chemicals - also seemed suddenly irremediably old fashioned by 1945.
A tiny - invisible - fungus factory, as advocated by Martin Henry Dawson, could gracefully produce the Life-saving penicillin at normal temperature and pressures while the huge chemical plants just spun their wheels, failing to produce any synthetic penicillin.
The weak, as it turned out, might inherit the universe after all, just as the Bible claimed many eons ago....
Thursday, March 15, 2012
All of us, ALL OF US, have spent the majority of our lives in "The Age of Commensality"
BLOG MISSION STATEMENT :We must all learn to live together with and in Nature: all diners at her common table (commensal) or we must all learn to die together, frying in the upcoming global climate meltdown."
The Age of Commensality has a distinctly abrupt beginning as Eras go : bang ! -1945 - you're on !
That was the year of the Nuremberg Trial revelations about Auschwitz and Nazi Death Doctors, the year of Dresden and Hiroshima.
Bang ! indeed.
This means that unless you are 135 years old (and you're not) , the majority of your life has been spent not living in The Age of Modernity.
So what Age, then, have you been living in all these years ?
There is a wide (academic) consensus about the post-1945 changes in the way most of us humans perceive Reality and think about Reality.
But there is no consensus on whether they hang together in a consistent way and if so, exactly what then to call them.
The current placeholder name Postmodernity won't do and everyone knows it.
What will we then call the next Age after this and the one after that : Post-Post-Modernity and Post-Post-Post-Post-Modernity ?
Why bother with calling the 19th Century 'The Age of Romanticism' - why not simply call it The Age Of Post-Classicalism ?
My sense is that the Modern Age clearly thought and acted as if humans, in some essential sense, dined above and beyond Nature.
However, our own Age sees more and more clearly that we are bound into Nature, ie we're inside Nature and densely interconnected with all of it, like it or not.
I don't mean milk and honey/ lamb down with lions /turn the other cheek /interconnectedness --- I mean we're stuck into it.
If we are survive, we must see that our fellow life forms are also given their fair chance to survive as well, even if that means we must restrain our own appetites today so we can have a little something tomorrow.
We now intuitively realize that we all dine at one great common table.
Whenever things start to go wrong with the water,carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and you-name-it cycles, it hits everyone from bacteria to babies.
Commensality (as this word is used by students of religion and anthropology/sociology, not in the distinctly odd way biologists use it ) seems to me to be the term that best describes the basket of ideas that makes up Postmodernity.
I hope to hear of other rival terms that claim to better describe the post-modern condition.
Fair enough - bring 'em on cable boys and girls !
Anything is better than lamely continuing to use the term postmodernity.
Soon this 67 year old Old Age Pensioner will be older than the Age it has replaced - but 67 years on, it doesn't deserve to still be an orphan without a name ....
All of us, ALL OF US, have spent the majority of our lives in "The Age of Commensality"
 |
| Michael Marshall |
That was the year of the Nuremberg Trial revelations about Auschwitz and Nazi Death Doctors, the year of Dresden and Hiroshima.
Bang ! indeed.
This means that unless you are 135 years old (and you're not) , the majority of your life has been spent not living in The Age of Modernity.
So what Age, then, have you been living in all these years ?
There is a wide (academic) consensus about the post-1945 changes in the way most of us humans perceive Reality and think about Reality.
But there is no consensus on whether they hang together in a consistent way and if so, exactly what then to call them.
The current placeholder name Postmodernity won't do and everyone knows it.
What will we then call the next Age after this and the one after that : Post-Post-Modernity and Post-Post-Post-Post-Modernity ?
Why bother with calling the 19th Century 'The Age of Romanticism' - why not simply call it The Age Of Post-Classicalism ?
My sense is that the Modern Age clearly thought and acted as if humans, in some essential sense, dined above and beyond Nature.
However, our own Age sees more and more clearly that we are bound into Nature, ie we're inside Nature and densely interconnected with all of it, like it or not.
I don't mean milk and honey/ lamb down with lions /turn the other cheek /interconnectedness --- I mean we're stuck into it.
If we are survive, we must see that our fellow life forms are also given their fair chance to survive as well, even if that means we must restrain our own appetites today so we can have a little something tomorrow.
We now intuitively realize that we all dine at one great common table.
Whenever things start to go wrong with the water,carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and you-name-it cycles, it hits everyone from bacteria to babies.
Commensality (as this word is used by students of religion and anthropology/sociology, not in the distinctly odd way biologists use it ) seems to me to be the term that best describes the basket of ideas that makes up Postmodernity.
I hope to hear of other rival terms that claim to better describe the post-modern condition.
Fair enough - bring 'em on cable boys and girls !
Anything is better than lamely continuing to use the term postmodernity.
Soon this 67 year old Old Age Pensioner will be older than the Age it has replaced - but 67 years on, it doesn't deserve to still be an orphan without a name ....
Monday, March 12, 2012
Yes , WWII was a HIGH TECH triumph - it was just LOW TECH that it couldn't handle...
The HIGH TECH successes of WWII ?
Where do we begin?
The A-Bomb of course, along with the B-29 intercontinental heavy bomber and the Norden Bombsight. The V-2 sub-orbital ballistic missile, against which there was ( and is) no defense, suitable to be upgraded with the newer, smaller, atomic bombs for added horror.
That American inter-war wonder of the modern age, the prison gas chamber, adapted to large scale use at Auschwitz , where when combined together with the best practices in computerized database tracking, worked to ensure that mass murders were no longer undocumented, undisciplined, melees.
The Hunger Plan - the plan to double the agriculture output of a million square kilometres of Eastern Europe and Russia.
This to be achieved by killing the existing 50 million residents and their useless mouths (and hands and brains).
They would be replaced by a hundred thousand big tractors powered by petroleum from the Caucasus and controlled by skilled Aryan operators.
Scientific, Mechanical, Agriculture, done right.
LOW TECH failures - well yes, a few, but hardly worth mentioning in the standard triumphant accounts of the war.
For example, the Americans could put a Bomb on Hiroshima (and ultimately a Man on the Moon), but couldn't seem to put a waterproof boot on its lowly MOS 745s (infantry rifleman) in wet, cold, Italy in the late summer of 1943.
Trenchfoot has low tech solutions but Scientific America couldn't find them - or more likely, deemed them too boringly low tech to assign its best talents toward.
LOW TECH failure #1, #2, #3,#4 ad infinitum ?
The failure of human society to at the very least feed everybody a basic diet.
Now don't start by blaming Mother Nature for WWII's famine deaths.
Compared to say 1936 or 1946, the war years were ones without dramatic floods or droughts --- we should have expected surpluses not mass famine.
Let me repeat -- more people died of hunger and hunger diseases as a result of WWII, than died in combat or by execution by gas or gun.
Nature , in those war years, stood ready to yield up her bounty to not just feed the world but make it fat.
Modernity failed to cultivate that potential bounty and then further failed to equitably distribute what food it did produce.
Even Modernity can feed enough of the world , to stave off mass famine, in peacetime.
But in wartime, when it was given its head to do much better, it instead SNAFU-ed up big time.
Postmodernity was birthed in the mass famine of 1945-1946.
A philosophy that couldn't even handle the most basic, most essential task that Humanity requires - Food - is not worthy of our respect or our loyalty.
When the global environmental meltdown goes Postal, do you really want Modernity's zealots to be put back in the driver's seat?
Wasn't one WWII, two WWIIs too many ???????
Where do we begin?
The A-Bomb of course, along with the B-29 intercontinental heavy bomber and the Norden Bombsight. The V-2 sub-orbital ballistic missile, against which there was ( and is) no defense, suitable to be upgraded with the newer, smaller, atomic bombs for added horror.
That American inter-war wonder of the modern age, the prison gas chamber, adapted to large scale use at Auschwitz , where when combined together with the best practices in computerized database tracking, worked to ensure that mass murders were no longer undocumented, undisciplined, melees.
The Hunger Plan - the plan to double the agriculture output of a million square kilometres of Eastern Europe and Russia.
This to be achieved by killing the existing 50 million residents and their useless mouths (and hands and brains).
They would be replaced by a hundred thousand big tractors powered by petroleum from the Caucasus and controlled by skilled Aryan operators.
Scientific, Mechanical, Agriculture, done right.
LOW TECH failures - well yes, a few, but hardly worth mentioning in the standard triumphant accounts of the war.
For example, the Americans could put a Bomb on Hiroshima (and ultimately a Man on the Moon), but couldn't seem to put a waterproof boot on its lowly MOS 745s (infantry rifleman) in wet, cold, Italy in the late summer of 1943.
Trenchfoot has low tech solutions but Scientific America couldn't find them - or more likely, deemed them too boringly low tech to assign its best talents toward.
LOW TECH failure #1, #2, #3,#4 ad infinitum ?
The failure of human society to at the very least feed everybody a basic diet.
Now don't start by blaming Mother Nature for WWII's famine deaths.
Compared to say 1936 or 1946, the war years were ones without dramatic floods or droughts --- we should have expected surpluses not mass famine.
Let me repeat -- more people died of hunger and hunger diseases as a result of WWII, than died in combat or by execution by gas or gun.
Nature , in those war years, stood ready to yield up her bounty to not just feed the world but make it fat.
Modernity failed to cultivate that potential bounty and then further failed to equitably distribute what food it did produce.
Even Modernity can feed enough of the world , to stave off mass famine, in peacetime.
But in wartime, when it was given its head to do much better, it instead SNAFU-ed up big time.
Postmodernity was birthed in the mass famine of 1945-1946.
A philosophy that couldn't even handle the most basic, most essential task that Humanity requires - Food - is not worthy of our respect or our loyalty.
When the global environmental meltdown goes Postal, do you really want Modernity's zealots to be put back in the driver's seat?
Wasn't one WWII, two WWIIs too many ???????
Sunday, March 11, 2012
WWII : 20th Century Dress Rehearsal for a 21st Century Global Meltdown....
On all sides, WWII (Modernity's War) was exalted to be the planned Triumph of Man's Will over the Ways of Nature.
But it hardly turned out that way did it?
There is little consensus on what exactly PostModernism is or is not , but all observers agree that VJ Day 1945 marked the beginnings of PostModernity ---- and the death throes of unreconstructed Modernity.
Actually I should say that is the academic understanding of 1945's consequences (few would disagree that Modernity finds little traction on your average university campus these days !)
But things are quite different down here at Ground Zero : there is little evidence that the Chambers of Commerce and the conservative Political Parties have ever heard about PostModernity's triumph among the thinking class.
For here at Ground Zero, practice is dominated by those who do (and deny) , not by those who think.
Man's Will is still expected to overcome, in the best 1930s style, any limits Nature may impose on Life.
Its not that Republicans and corporate CEOs totally deny there are any problems with our relations with Nature - far from it.
It is just that they steadfastly deny these problems - and others - can not be solved in time by Man's mental ingenuity, a little hard work and some cash.
World War Two should remind us that while Republicans,Soviets, Nazis and CEOs can govern more or less successfully in peacetime, war has a way of revealing the flaws in Modernity's Platonic certitudes....
But it hardly turned out that way did it?
There is little consensus on what exactly PostModernism is or is not , but all observers agree that VJ Day 1945 marked the beginnings of PostModernity ---- and the death throes of unreconstructed Modernity.
Actually I should say that is the academic understanding of 1945's consequences (few would disagree that Modernity finds little traction on your average university campus these days !)
But things are quite different down here at Ground Zero : there is little evidence that the Chambers of Commerce and the conservative Political Parties have ever heard about PostModernity's triumph among the thinking class.
For here at Ground Zero, practice is dominated by those who do (and deny) , not by those who think.
Man's Will is still expected to overcome, in the best 1930s style, any limits Nature may impose on Life.
Its not that Republicans and corporate CEOs totally deny there are any problems with our relations with Nature - far from it.
It is just that they steadfastly deny these problems - and others - can not be solved in time by Man's mental ingenuity, a little hard work and some cash.
World War Two should remind us that while Republicans,Soviets, Nazis and CEOs can govern more or less successfully in peacetime, war has a way of revealing the flaws in Modernity's Platonic certitudes....
Saturday, October 30, 2010
1945: how the Official Histories of wartime MODERNITY fabricated victory from the wreckage of defeat
ABSTRACT: When WWII Modernity's PLAN A failed in 1944, a totally different (and postmodernist) PLAN B stepped in at the last minute to save the day.
After the war, (modernist) Official Histories from organizations like the OSRD recast the methods and motivations of PLAN B organizers to make them appear to have been part of PLAN A all along.
Meanwhile, the original PLAN A ( and PLAN B for that matter ) were relegated to mere footnotes.
It is time overdue for a more accurate retelling, keeping PLAN A and PLAN B to their original separate (but parallel) paths.
*************************
If I had to paraphrase all the Official Histories of World War Two Big Science organizations to a terse Hollywoodian 'High Concept Moment', it would sound like this:
After the war, (modernist) Official Histories from organizations like the OSRD recast the methods and motivations of PLAN B organizers to make them appear to have been part of PLAN A all along.
Meanwhile, the original PLAN A ( and PLAN B for that matter ) were relegated to mere footnotes.
It is time overdue for a more accurate retelling, keeping PLAN A and PLAN B to their original separate (but parallel) paths.
*************************
If I had to paraphrase all the Official Histories of World War Two Big Science organizations to a terse Hollywoodian 'High Concept Moment', it would sound like this:
"Thanks to Allied Big Science (cue 'Hands Across the Water'), a Norden bombsight could flawlessly drop an A-Bomb into the centre of a deep barrel of fermenting - but very pure - penicillin from 15,000 feet ."
Friday, October 29, 2010
AGAPE penicillin: Nature Won; Modernity Zero
Sixty five years later is Einstein's famous formula still the one that best describes 1945 ?
ie E=MC2
Or was the most lasting impact of 1939-1945's MODERN-WORLD war the fact that yesterday's Big MO (Modernity) lost.
And that Nature won.
And that in 1945, out of the resulting wreckage crawled PostModernity, aka us PO folk (the baby boom generation and our children and children's children ) ?
(Sadly resigned godparents: Adorno and Horkheimer.)
IE, is "WWII=MOgoesPO" today's best short, short,
short but correct formulaic answer to the exam request to sum up mankind's biggest, bloodiest war ever ?
ie E=MC2
Or was the most lasting impact of 1939-1945's MODERN-WORLD war the fact that yesterday's Big MO (Modernity) lost.
And that Nature won.
And that in 1945, out of the resulting wreckage crawled PostModernity, aka us PO folk (the baby boom generation and our children and children's children ) ?
(Sadly resigned godparents: Adorno and Horkheimer.)
IE, is "WWII=MOgoesPO" today's best short, short,
short but correct formulaic answer to the exam request to sum up mankind's biggest, bloodiest war ever ?
who lost the last MODERN--WORLD war, 1939-1945 ?
You mean the one where Modernity (Big MO) warred with the World?
Big MO lost and lost badly.
'Nature Bats Last' (and Nature bats long and deep) .
And in 1945, out of the resulting wreckage crawled PostModernity, aka POMO or simply PO.
All of us alive today - all of us - have spent the majority of our lives as 'PO folks' in the 65 years since 1945.
Our godparents ?
Some folks called Adorno and Horkheimer.
Forget the claim that modernist claim that 1945 means E=MC2.
Time has revealed that 1945's actual formula to be this:
WWII=MOgoesPO
Big MO lost and lost badly.
'Nature Bats Last' (and Nature bats long and deep) .
And in 1945, out of the resulting wreckage crawled PostModernity, aka POMO or simply PO.
All of us alive today - all of us - have spent the majority of our lives as 'PO folks' in the 65 years since 1945.
Our godparents ?
Some folks called Adorno and Horkheimer.
Forget the claim that modernist claim that 1945 means E=MC2.
Time has revealed that 1945's actual formula to be this:
WWII=MOgoesPO
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Healing the Heartless
Seventy Five Million people - at least - had their lives greatly shortened by the events of World War Two.
Died. Dead. If not during the war itself, then not long after.
Set against that toll (the worst ever disaster in human history) the act of extending, for a few years, the lives of about 25 civilians with a physical heart disease may not stack up for much.
Connecting the two - vast military forces raging overseas with a small quiet medical affair that could have just as easily happened in peacetime - may seem impossible.
But I think there is a strong connector and it is that the curing those physical heart cases was dependent on first healing some Home Front civilians of a metaphorical heart disease far more deadly than Endocarditis : Scientific Heartlessness/ Scientific SansCoeur.
Calling upon Science and Nature to justify a lack of compassion for those not among your own kind was Modernity's abiding moral failing.
It was displayed not just during modern warfare or in everything that Hitler ever did - it was habitual, in varying degrees, among most all of us back then.
Only Time will tell us what abiding moral failings of this postmodernist/quantum/commensal age will engender - I am sure that Heartlessness will be chief among them.
But hopefully we will no longer boast about our heartlessness as being based on the best scientific discoveries from Nature.
The decline of Modernity came not from any external assaults, rather it rotted from within, from among its strongest supporters, the Scientist.
This happened when a few, then some, and finally many, saw that Nature did not favour heartlessness at all but rather the opposite, and translated that new knowledge into concrete human behavior : they changed their day-to-day ethics accordingly.
It wasn't a rapid or smooth process nor has it ended yet but it had to start somewhere and Dawson's story is as close to the beginnings as I have been able to find AND it had consequences that we have all felt personally - so it it is an excellent place to start recalling when Mo went Po, if only because the first person cured of the metaphorical heart disease was Dr Dawson himself.
Not that he was heartless by any means anytime in his life, but he was a proud member of a relatively new profession, that of the Clinical Investigator, which had the potential for exposing all the ambiguities of Modernity's reforming spirit.
Only when Dawson started questioning the disinterested objectivity he always had upheld so strongly, was he himself on the road away from Mo and heading for Po.....
Died. Dead. If not during the war itself, then not long after.
Set against that toll (the worst ever disaster in human history) the act of extending, for a few years, the lives of about 25 civilians with a physical heart disease may not stack up for much.
Connecting the two - vast military forces raging overseas with a small quiet medical affair that could have just as easily happened in peacetime - may seem impossible.
But I think there is a strong connector and it is that the curing those physical heart cases was dependent on first healing some Home Front civilians of a metaphorical heart disease far more deadly than Endocarditis : Scientific Heartlessness/ Scientific SansCoeur.
Calling upon Science and Nature to justify a lack of compassion for those not among your own kind was Modernity's abiding moral failing.
It was displayed not just during modern warfare or in everything that Hitler ever did - it was habitual, in varying degrees, among most all of us back then.
Only Time will tell us what abiding moral failings of this postmodernist/quantum/commensal age will engender - I am sure that Heartlessness will be chief among them.
But hopefully we will no longer boast about our heartlessness as being based on the best scientific discoveries from Nature.
The decline of Modernity came not from any external assaults, rather it rotted from within, from among its strongest supporters, the Scientist.
This happened when a few, then some, and finally many, saw that Nature did not favour heartlessness at all but rather the opposite, and translated that new knowledge into concrete human behavior : they changed their day-to-day ethics accordingly.
It wasn't a rapid or smooth process nor has it ended yet but it had to start somewhere and Dawson's story is as close to the beginnings as I have been able to find AND it had consequences that we have all felt personally - so it it is an excellent place to start recalling when Mo went Po, if only because the first person cured of the metaphorical heart disease was Dr Dawson himself.
Not that he was heartless by any means anytime in his life, but he was a proud member of a relatively new profession, that of the Clinical Investigator, which had the potential for exposing all the ambiguities of Modernity's reforming spirit.
Only when Dawson started questioning the disinterested objectivity he always had upheld so strongly, was he himself on the road away from Mo and heading for Po.....
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
the coalition of the Un-willing
On the afternoon of September 2st 1939, it seemed as if the global coalition of those nations willing to face down Hitler numbered exactly "zero".
(Poland had no moral choice to make - it was simply invaded.)
But Britain and France still had sizable numbers of their elite willing to listen to Italy's plea for a conference to settle this dispute between neighbours 'honorably' - as was done at earlier ...at Munich.
So World War II was by no means a certainty that afternoon.
Only at 1130 pm that night, during a tremendous thunderstorm, when the British Cabinet voted to go to war with Germany next morning, unless it ceased its war against Poland, did the 'world war' portion of the localized German-Polish war really begin.
As the 'Greatest Generation ever' basks in the glow of praise for doing its bit in 'the Best War ever'/ 'the last Good war' , it is worth recalling the long,long timeline of just when (or even if) each nation on earth decided to join the coalition of the willing against Hitler - and whether or not they followed these bold words up, by actually sending their citizens into combat.
Some waited the full twelve years from 1933 to 1945 to oppose Herr Hitler (and only verbally at that) and some never did.
The very first combatant nation was Germany , on August 31 1939. The last new combatant was the USSR, going to war against Japan on August 8th 1945.
In between those six years, the world's nations shifted their feet from side to side to side, going from neutrality to supporting one side but remaining neutral, to joining them formally as an ally to changing sides or back again to neutrality and just about everything in between.
Many only joined the war against Hitler in the Spring of 1945, with Germany defeated and in fear they would be denied a seat in the proposed postwar United Nations organization, unless they at least declared war on Hitler before Berlin surrendered.
At any one time, a nation's formal decision about wartime status and its more informal 'leanings' to one side or other (or the intensity of its commitment to its allies) were usually opposed by a good sum of its citizens as 'going too far' or 'not far enough'.
Really 'the coalition of those willing to oppose Hitler' was in the end made of of individuals, not nations.
They joined it one at a time and varied day by day in the intensity of their commitment against Hitler's ideals.
Looking for the opponents to Hitlerism at the level of 'the nation' reveals that all nations on earth were immorally slow to take him on and is a crude measure of the long road to defeating the ideas of Hitler as well as just his military forces.
Individuals both did much,much better than the various nations - and much,much worse...
(Poland had no moral choice to make - it was simply invaded.)
But Britain and France still had sizable numbers of their elite willing to listen to Italy's plea for a conference to settle this dispute between neighbours 'honorably' - as was done at earlier ...at Munich.
So World War II was by no means a certainty that afternoon.
Only at 1130 pm that night, during a tremendous thunderstorm, when the British Cabinet voted to go to war with Germany next morning, unless it ceased its war against Poland, did the 'world war' portion of the localized German-Polish war really begin.
As the 'Greatest Generation ever' basks in the glow of praise for doing its bit in 'the Best War ever'/ 'the last Good war' , it is worth recalling the long,long timeline of just when (or even if) each nation on earth decided to join the coalition of the willing against Hitler - and whether or not they followed these bold words up, by actually sending their citizens into combat.
Some waited the full twelve years from 1933 to 1945 to oppose Herr Hitler (and only verbally at that) and some never did.
The very first combatant nation was Germany , on August 31 1939. The last new combatant was the USSR, going to war against Japan on August 8th 1945.
In between those six years, the world's nations shifted their feet from side to side to side, going from neutrality to supporting one side but remaining neutral, to joining them formally as an ally to changing sides or back again to neutrality and just about everything in between.
Many only joined the war against Hitler in the Spring of 1945, with Germany defeated and in fear they would be denied a seat in the proposed postwar United Nations organization, unless they at least declared war on Hitler before Berlin surrendered.
At any one time, a nation's formal decision about wartime status and its more informal 'leanings' to one side or other (or the intensity of its commitment to its allies) were usually opposed by a good sum of its citizens as 'going too far' or 'not far enough'.
Really 'the coalition of those willing to oppose Hitler' was in the end made of of individuals, not nations.
They joined it one at a time and varied day by day in the intensity of their commitment against Hitler's ideals.
Looking for the opponents to Hitlerism at the level of 'the nation' reveals that all nations on earth were immorally slow to take him on and is a crude measure of the long road to defeating the ideas of Hitler as well as just his military forces.
Individuals both did much,much better than the various nations - and much,much worse...
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
What a difference one little substitute word can make...
My partner Rebecca said some very nice things about this, my new blog.
But I am afraid I misled her a little in describing my take on Postmodernity.
I meant to say that Modernity was a particular and peculiar form of 'Aesthetics masquerading as Science' ---- and functioning as an entire worldview and ideology.
And that Postmodernity was more than 'just' the aesthetics of contemporary painting, pop music and architecture - it was another particular form of Aesthetics and also functioning as an entire worldview and ideology.
I think I have now found a succinct way to describe the difference between Modernity and Postmodernity and it is in the new subtitle of this blog .
My take is that between 1939 and 1945 (and in the immediate postwar period), many - but by no means all - of the middle class educated people in the most modern countries in the world changed their minds.
They decided, albeit in a subdued and inchoate fashion, that all life was in some sense
worthy of life and dignity and worth.
When they repudiated Eugenics (and again not everybody did) they repudiated the core tenets of Modernity --- just as Professors Adorno and Horkheimer had insisted they had to do in 1944, in their famous little mimeo-book ( Dialetic of the Enlightenment), circulating throughout the campus of Columbia University in New York City.
Currently, there is no record of what Professor Martin Henry Dawson, also at the same university at the same time, thought about Adorno and Horkheimer's claim - or in fact about virtually anything - we have no personal papers.
But in his public 'biography of deeds', he certainly acted in a postmodern fashion - giving up his life to save the life of someone (Charlie Aronson) who many American doctors considered a prime example of the fact that only 'some life is worthy of life'.
In one of those improbable coincidences that make up reality,Dr Foster Kennedy advocated that only some lives are worthy of life and that all others should be killed (at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association) on the same day as Dawson first announced (at the annual meeting of the American Clinical Society) that he was trying to save the lives of the unfit, with some penicillin he had brewed up himself.
In a sense, to Kennedy's statement, Dawson merely substituted the little word "all" for "some" and then forcibly acted upon that statement, against the greatest of obstacles.
Mo only truly goes Po when somebody actually does something concrete.
And it was Martin Henry Dawson putting PoMo thought into PoMo action that made all the difference - for Charlie and then ultimately, for all of us .....
@MichaelMarshallMogoesPo
But I am afraid I misled her a little in describing my take on Postmodernity.
I meant to say that Modernity was a particular and peculiar form of 'Aesthetics masquerading as Science' ---- and functioning as an entire worldview and ideology.
And that Postmodernity was more than 'just' the aesthetics of contemporary painting, pop music and architecture - it was another particular form of Aesthetics and also functioning as an entire worldview and ideology.
I think I have now found a succinct way to describe the difference between Modernity and Postmodernity and it is in the new subtitle of this blog .
Taking the widest view of the term Postmodernity : converting it - but only very slightly - from my emphasis on ethics and morality to one of aesthetics - it can be phrased as a difference in the sort of people we find aesthetically attractive.
Today we are far more willing to see attractiveness in many more body shapes, skin colors and lifestyles - or at least to let other people see beauty in people we don't find that particularly attractive.
It is typical of this Postmodernity era to learn of a recent poll saying that most of us find a person of mixed color ( the tawny or coffee colored flesh tone so common in places like Brazil) as the most attractive physical type.
(Just as it is a hangover from our grandparents' Modernity era to learn that most high fashion models continue to be the icy blue-eyed blonds of 1930s Aryan wet dreams.)
My take is that between 1939 and 1945 (and in the immediate postwar period), many - but by no means all - of the middle class educated people in the most modern countries in the world changed their minds.
They decided, albeit in a subdued and inchoate fashion, that all life was in some sense
worthy of life and dignity and worth.
When they repudiated Eugenics (and again not everybody did) they repudiated the core tenets of Modernity --- just as Professors Adorno and Horkheimer had insisted they had to do in 1944, in their famous little mimeo-book ( Dialetic of the Enlightenment), circulating throughout the campus of Columbia University in New York City.
Currently, there is no record of what Professor Martin Henry Dawson, also at the same university at the same time, thought about Adorno and Horkheimer's claim - or in fact about virtually anything - we have no personal papers.
But in his public 'biography of deeds', he certainly acted in a postmodern fashion - giving up his life to save the life of someone (Charlie Aronson) who many American doctors considered a prime example of the fact that only 'some life is worthy of life'.
In one of those improbable coincidences that make up reality,Dr Foster Kennedy advocated that only some lives are worthy of life and that all others should be killed (at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association) on the same day as Dawson first announced (at the annual meeting of the American Clinical Society) that he was trying to save the lives of the unfit, with some penicillin he had brewed up himself.
In a sense, to Kennedy's statement, Dawson merely substituted the little word "all" for "some" and then forcibly acted upon that statement, against the greatest of obstacles.
Mo only truly goes Po when somebody actually does something concrete.
And it was Martin Henry Dawson putting PoMo thought into PoMo action that made all the difference - for Charlie and then ultimately, for all of us .....
@MichaelMarshallMogoesPo
Friday, June 25, 2010
We agree WHEN Mo started going PO, but not necessarily why
Martin Henry Dawson , on enlistment, 1915
My partner, Rebecca, has tried to explain the meaning behind the title of my latest blog "MO goes PO" .
All I can add is that there is overwhelming agreement that the Mo-to-Po revolution began fairly abruptly, in 1945.
You remember 1945, the end of 'double-u, double-u, two' , the so called last good war and the last good generation.
Few people have given a good account why PoMo began then, AND in the nations of the moral victors.
If the good guys are just won the war against the bad guys, why were the good guys leading the way in uneasily evaluating their own values ?
I hope "MO goes PO" succeeds in telling us why....
@ArcadianRecord
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