Usually we think of Globalization as a 'hands up' affair.
"Hands up, are we more opposed or more in favour of further globalization?"
In this light, globalization is seen strictly as a man-made affair, a choice we decide to make.
But the really important globalization, the globalization ancient beyond all time, Nature's globalization, isn't a human choice --- it is simply something we are stuck in: Suck it up. Reality Bites. Deal with it.
Think of it as Global Commensality.
As all life dining at the only table, on the only lifeboat we have.
Sure, we humans like to think we are responsible for the fallout from that nuclear test in the South Pacific than ended up falling on the grass the cow ate before we feed its milk to our kids in Northern Norway.
But actually it was Nature's air currents sweeping around the world that deposited that radioactivity, just as it turns one nation's pollution into acid rain for another country.
Nature's breezes are the ones that spread the ash and smoke from a southern Asian volcano's explosion's up into the atmosphere around the Northern hemisphere, giving its residents a year without summer---- or good enough harvests to prevent famine.
Nature's breezes also transport ,willy-nilly, tough hardy tiny bacteria and fungus spores across oceans and continents.
Birds and insects use those breezeways, to fly as far as from the south pole to the north pole.
Both sometimes also carry unwanted microbes or chemicals from continent to continent, blithely bypassing any sort of Borders & Customs restrictions that humanity might impose.
Ocean currents are equally successful at sending not just small creatures and microbes on floating matts of vegetation across vast oceans to new lands - they now send us other nation's plastic wastes
from 4000 miles away.
Those currents don't just move horizontally across the oceans - we learn in school that they rise and fall vertically from the surface to the deepest depths and vice versa --- creating the great food chain of the ocean by exchanging ocean floor mineral nutrients for surface biological waste nutrients.
El Nino and El Nina, those regular alternations in ocean surface water temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific (a place where far less than 1% of us have ever even passed through, let alone visited) have the most amazing consequences around the world.
For some it half a world away, it means dire droughts (or floods) and the real threat of famine.
As for the rest of us, it means higher or lower rain and snow fall and our local storms rise and fall in intensity and number.
Every inter-regional wind system from hurricanes to Trade Winds to Jet Stream are twisted askew.
To all of us, it means a rise and fall in the price of fish all over the globe as the upwelling of nutrients that feeds fish growth rises or falls --- a clear example of climate globalization affecting economic globalization.
Tectonic Plate Movements aren't usually thought of as part of globalization - but they are. That volcano in Indonesia that dusted the skies over England was part of the clash and crash of tectonic plates of course.
More importantly, those massive plates are anything but equal in shape and size and location.
They are constantly moving - moving closer to the
warm equator or closer the cold poles - and since land and ocean deal with incoming sunshine differently, that incessant movement constantly , slowly, changes the climate that feeds us all -----in an unequal and unpredictable fashion.
Fertile Crescents can become un-fertile deserts in a few thousand years - that is very much Time on a human scale.
In addition, when those plates move closer to or further from each other, they change the shape of the passages between oceans and part of oceans (seas and bays) and this changes the direction and strengths of the big ocean currents - such as the well known Gulf Stream.
We can imagine what that might mean !
But we haven't even got into the biggest globalization processes of them - those great cycling backwards and forwards, upwards and downwards, of Life's key nutrients : ,water, oxygen, carbon, useable nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, potassium, iron.
The human crisis caused by our carbon polluting the atmosphere shows us that this one action can affect all life : commensal globalization.
By way of closing, let us contrast this with one of the central tenets of that great counter-romantic ideology, Modernity.
In the great 'dance of the dialectic', Modernity never the less took up one of the streams of Romanticism that it sought to oppose: the one that insisted that nation's character emerged in part from the very molecules of the nation's soil incorporated into the nation's food and ultimately the nation's citizens.
"Blood and Soil" .
Admittably it was usually coached a little less blatantly than that, but in fact that was its essence.
Global Commensality insists ,by contrast, that very little of the local topsoil stays actually stays local for very long - always it is on the way to somewhere else , on its way to becoming something else.
Credit to Charles Lyell : Reality on Earth is a constant, steady, rapid low grade flux, integrated on top of great extremely slow cycles, ever circling back on themselves.
Discredit to Lyell as well : each iteration of the great cycles is actually also different from the one before it and after it.
Complexity on top of complexity on top of complexity.
Compared to Nature's globalization , human globalization is beginning to look like a piece of cake....
Thursday, May 3, 2012
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Causes of WWII: what we learn at 15 we never forget, UNFORTUNATELY...
WWII was run by the High School physics of 1895 , run by old Isaac Newton himself - his last hurrah.
This is because WWII was, in particular, an old man's war - almost all the world leaders were in their sixties or even older (hello Marshal Petain !)
These old men had all been young once.
We learn best - and never forget - what we learn around age 15.
So, half a century earlier, all the world's leaders, in every field of endeavor, had all been in high school learning the state of art of Science, as least as high school science teachers understood and taught it.
In 1895, HS teachers understood and taught state of the art science just as the leaders of 1895 Science understood the state of the art as well.
But this happy meeting of minds: from the world's top scientists to the dumbest of 15 year old (unwilling) HS physics student was about to end.
From now on, after 1895, the world's top scientists would have to grapple with new, unexpectedly highly complex, verities to replace Newton's old HS-physics -simple verities.
And if they found these new complicated verities unpalatable, imagine how much more so did the average HS science teacher find them to be.
First to understand, even dimly ; difficult but possible.
Then to demonstrate them physically : virtually impossible, even with the best most expensive university equipment.
Above all to set as exam questions for 15 year old minds, to render forth, inside of two hours, as correctly completed equations.
Simply not possible : the only correct answer any student /teacher/Nobel prize winner can say - thanks to post-1895 Science - is that "the photon is both a wave and a particle and as to where it is and was it it is, at any moment of time, is as good your guess ,teacher, as it is mine."
Not the sort of answers that parents and employers want to hear, nor the sort of answer that science teachers want to produce, if they expect to paid well and much respected.
So,it was not just the old men who ran WWII, but all the young men and women running the actual scientific side of the war, who continued to be taught in, and at least half believe, the old Newtonian verities.
Still are taught them, in fact !
This more than 100 years after they began to be seen, at best, as merely an approximately correct version of a sub section of real physics (IE relativity and quantum physics).
Published Science - in GCR's definition of that term - IE published in peer-reviewed ,credible, journals in basic science, changed greatly, after 1895 ,without really impacting the world at all ---- in the physical sense.
Even its intellectual impact was muted until the 1980s - if even then.
Popular Science ran WWII - which is to say Science as understood by the general population - including Prime Ministers, Presidents and dictators.
And that Popular Science still saw humanity's ability to mold and re-shape Nature and Reality in such exalted, unrealistic, fashion that it led the leaders of the world 1939-1945 into History's most horrific war, simply by extrapolating what they had been taught 50 years earlier in science classes.
To make these distant events seem more pertinent to today (and tomorrow) : the old men running the world today also last learned what little science they know 50 years ago - back before the rise of the environmental science for example.
Inside their perpetually-15-year-old-minds, the remnants of optimistic 1950s-era science still can't understand what this fuss about Climate Change is all about......
Hitler,Tojo,Norden's big error: trusting HIGH SCHOOL Physics..
Traditional High School level physics is, at best, only "sorta" okay.
But only if you agree to do no more with it, than to follow someone else's orders and to keep your mouth shut and your pen capped.
Shut and capped on the application of HS physics to any other world outside its proper - and severely limited - sphere.
But you really need a couple of Physics degrees and lots of maturity (and lots of post-doc discussions with your elders), before you are fit to talk up the limitations of all traditional (Newtonian) physics, not just HS physics, to any areas outside of things like bridge-building and chemical plant operating.
Some metaphors from the world of popular music making might make the reasons a little clearer.
Anyone who has ever played or sung popular music - or even just read about or hung about people who have - knows about the echo button and the reverb button.
We may be limited to knowing just what they sound like and how they differ. But real musicians & singers, real record and film producers, must be able to buy those effects successfully and economically.
Quickly they discover that any price point echo equipment will do the job - the cheapest ,oldest equipment even have their own (un-natural but charming) uses.
But cheap reverb simply sounds bad. And as your music making ears get more acute , even highly expensive reverb sounds bad.
And not just bad - unlike the few obvious and reliable controls on an inexpensive echo unit, the expensive reverb unit has many many controls that collectively can unpredictably veer from acceptably okay to horribly awful, at the mere touch of a dial.
Professionally-oriented musicians and producers are finally forced to learn a little physics to make sense of it all.
Echo, they learn, is a simple audio event, so simple in fact that high school physics students could and perhaps should, replicate it with a freeware, software, digital audio editor.
Record your voice - copy the sound and paste it forward on the editor screen (a metaphor for actually moving it forward in time by a few dozen thousands of a second (milliseconds) ).
Reduce the copy's volume relative to the original, and filter off some of the treble.
Voila ! A perfect echo - indistinguishable from one we can make in a cave.
Newton or Norden - maybe even Hitler - would have recognized what HS physics has done: solved a two body problem.
Body A, our voice, hits the cave's very distant wall and causes Body B, the wall, to reflect our voice back to us , but delayed by the distance (in space and time) between us and the wall and the return.
The effect is echo : the sound of our own voice in our ear, followed by tiny fraction of a second later, by an echo of our voice, reduced in volume and in brightness by the sound wave weakening itself as it passed from atom to atom, trillions of times over.
This is High School and University Undergraduate Physics in a nutshell - or rather a cave, a sort of Plato's cave in fact.
We come away after completing the course and going on with our lives, outside the real world of full time professional physics, think life is really like that : just two bodies,mechanical, linear, determinist cause and effect: life as clockwork.
But Reality in fact is mostly like the weather - or reverb - its a three body (IE multiple, maybe trillions upon trillions) problem.
Echo is simple because the distantly returning echo is too weak
upon finally reaching other walls to do more than die there as heat - standing in, incidentally, as proof of the Second Law of Thermodynamics --- the idea that all energy inevitably degrades down to useless low temperature 'heat' .
But in most buildings, the walls are close enough and hard enough to reflect back echo, but not 100.00000000000000000%
perfectly. There is a slight angle to the return: north south east west - it doesn't matter.
That means the earliest outgoing re-echo doesn't die in destructive interference with its incoming later original self.
Instead it hit the other wall and again is deflected slightly off angle in random fashion, dependent ultimately on how smooth the paint or plaster job is - and to air molecules and sound waves, it is never smooth enough.
In milliseconds, the voice sound - a three dimensional wave remember - a sort of bubble of sound, is reflecting back from all angles and interfering and re-enforcing echos in a madly complex but very ear-satisfying manner that we call reverb.
It took hundreds of the world's best physicists, working decades, with the best computer equipment at their disposal, to create an approximately acceptable form of reverb artificially.
Even mass produced, the best of that approximately good artificially-produced reverb still costs tens of thousands of dollars.
And actually, it is semi-artificially produced - the creators of the best reverb systems simply copy (sample) what Nature produces, without in fact knowing how to recreate those effects themselves 'from first principles'.
For reverb, substitute the weather in four days time or the climate in four decades time : issues that are vital to our species' survival and yet madly complex beyond any amount of HS physics.
By contrast, one feels that Hitler felt that the so called 'fog of war' was all baloney : the science of war was actually more like Newton's planetary motion than it was like predicting the weather.
So he moved little wooden counters on his war maps as if they were points, masses and forces on some half-remembered HS physics chalkboard.
Body A (a wooden counter labelled Army Group Centre) was
moved by a wooden stick to Body B (a wooden counter labelled Moscow defenses) and Voila !
The job was done : cause and effect, linear war.
Army group A inevitably caused the effect upon Body B of entrapment and surrender : QID !
In reality, there were three (and more bodies) actually playing at this two body game.
Counters labelled "earlier-than-expected Fall rains and muddy roads" and "colder-than-expected-Winter-temperatures" also wanted to have their say.
Once they had their say and had turned simple HS physics echo into highly complex reverb, the jig - as they say - was up.
Up for Hitler, up for Tojo, up for Norden, up for Newton and above all - up for Modernity....
But only if you agree to do no more with it, than to follow someone else's orders and to keep your mouth shut and your pen capped.
Shut and capped on the application of HS physics to any other world outside its proper - and severely limited - sphere.
But you really need a couple of Physics degrees and lots of maturity (and lots of post-doc discussions with your elders), before you are fit to talk up the limitations of all traditional (Newtonian) physics, not just HS physics, to any areas outside of things like bridge-building and chemical plant operating.
Some metaphors from the world of popular music making might make the reasons a little clearer.
Anyone who has ever played or sung popular music - or even just read about or hung about people who have - knows about the echo button and the reverb button.
We may be limited to knowing just what they sound like and how they differ. But real musicians & singers, real record and film producers, must be able to buy those effects successfully and economically.
Quickly they discover that any price point echo equipment will do the job - the cheapest ,oldest equipment even have their own (un-natural but charming) uses.
But cheap reverb simply sounds bad. And as your music making ears get more acute , even highly expensive reverb sounds bad.
And not just bad - unlike the few obvious and reliable controls on an inexpensive echo unit, the expensive reverb unit has many many controls that collectively can unpredictably veer from acceptably okay to horribly awful, at the mere touch of a dial.
Professionally-oriented musicians and producers are finally forced to learn a little physics to make sense of it all.
Echo, they learn, is a simple audio event, so simple in fact that high school physics students could and perhaps should, replicate it with a freeware, software, digital audio editor.
Record your voice - copy the sound and paste it forward on the editor screen (a metaphor for actually moving it forward in time by a few dozen thousands of a second (milliseconds) ).
Reduce the copy's volume relative to the original, and filter off some of the treble.
Voila ! A perfect echo - indistinguishable from one we can make in a cave.
Newton or Norden - maybe even Hitler - would have recognized what HS physics has done: solved a two body problem.
Body A, our voice, hits the cave's very distant wall and causes Body B, the wall, to reflect our voice back to us , but delayed by the distance (in space and time) between us and the wall and the return.
The effect is echo : the sound of our own voice in our ear, followed by tiny fraction of a second later, by an echo of our voice, reduced in volume and in brightness by the sound wave weakening itself as it passed from atom to atom, trillions of times over.
This is High School and University Undergraduate Physics in a nutshell - or rather a cave, a sort of Plato's cave in fact.
We come away after completing the course and going on with our lives, outside the real world of full time professional physics, think life is really like that : just two bodies,mechanical, linear, determinist cause and effect: life as clockwork.
But Reality in fact is mostly like the weather - or reverb - its a three body (IE multiple, maybe trillions upon trillions) problem.
Echo is simple because the distantly returning echo is too weak
upon finally reaching other walls to do more than die there as heat - standing in, incidentally, as proof of the Second Law of Thermodynamics --- the idea that all energy inevitably degrades down to useless low temperature 'heat' .
But in most buildings, the walls are close enough and hard enough to reflect back echo, but not 100.00000000000000000%
perfectly. There is a slight angle to the return: north south east west - it doesn't matter.
That means the earliest outgoing re-echo doesn't die in destructive interference with its incoming later original self.
Instead it hit the other wall and again is deflected slightly off angle in random fashion, dependent ultimately on how smooth the paint or plaster job is - and to air molecules and sound waves, it is never smooth enough.
In milliseconds, the voice sound - a three dimensional wave remember - a sort of bubble of sound, is reflecting back from all angles and interfering and re-enforcing echos in a madly complex but very ear-satisfying manner that we call reverb.
It took hundreds of the world's best physicists, working decades, with the best computer equipment at their disposal, to create an approximately acceptable form of reverb artificially.
Even mass produced, the best of that approximately good artificially-produced reverb still costs tens of thousands of dollars.
And actually, it is semi-artificially produced - the creators of the best reverb systems simply copy (sample) what Nature produces, without in fact knowing how to recreate those effects themselves 'from first principles'.
For reverb, substitute the weather in four days time or the climate in four decades time : issues that are vital to our species' survival and yet madly complex beyond any amount of HS physics.
By contrast, one feels that Hitler felt that the so called 'fog of war' was all baloney : the science of war was actually more like Newton's planetary motion than it was like predicting the weather.
So he moved little wooden counters on his war maps as if they were points, masses and forces on some half-remembered HS physics chalkboard.
Body A (a wooden counter labelled Army Group Centre) was
moved by a wooden stick to Body B (a wooden counter labelled Moscow defenses) and Voila !
The job was done : cause and effect, linear war.
Army group A inevitably caused the effect upon Body B of entrapment and surrender : QID !
In reality, there were three (and more bodies) actually playing at this two body game.
Counters labelled "earlier-than-expected Fall rains and muddy roads" and "colder-than-expected-Winter-temperatures" also wanted to have their say.
Once they had their say and had turned simple HS physics echo into highly complex reverb, the jig - as they say - was up.
Up for Hitler, up for Tojo, up for Norden, up for Newton and above all - up for Modernity....
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
"NINETY YEAR RULE" between epochs cum generations : ideas don't change, merely die out
If Romanticism was born in the heady atmosphere of the 1790s, its replacement by Scientism in the 1870s might have no more significance than Scientism's replacement, in turn, in the 1960s : all were victims of the "Ninety Year Rule" .
All of these replacements weren't the result of the intellectual triumph of exciting new ideas, but merely the fact that the last of the powerful men holding older, once-exciting, ideas had finally died.
Depressing, because we may not have the luxury - this time - of waiting till the last of the Modernist/Scientism Limit-Deniers finally dies out some time in the 2030s...
All of these replacements weren't the result of the intellectual triumph of exciting new ideas, but merely the fact that the last of the powerful men holding older, once-exciting, ideas had finally died.
Depressing, because we may not have the luxury - this time - of waiting till the last of the Modernist/Scientism Limit-Deniers finally dies out some time in the 2030s...
Two centuries of direct family memories covers a number of EPOCHS
If you are 84 in this Post-Modern year of 2012 , while your father, who born in 1896 (at the height of the Age of Modernity) lived with his elderly grandmother (born in 1811) until 1901, there is a potential there for two centuries of direct family memories.
So you could find yourself telling your great-grandchildren, "I can remember my father telling me of hearing his grandmother recalling her early years growing up in a remote part of the Highlands in the 1810s, at the height of the Romantic Era."
I am not saying that Shirley Dawson Kirkland, eldest daughter of Dr Martin Henry Dawson, has in fact ever recounted such an account - but technically - she could have.
If Dawson's grandmother had gone further back and recounted to him what her parents or grandparents had told her of the effect upon their intellect world caused by the events of the French Revolution/end to the Age of Classicalism & Enlightenment/rise of the Age of Romanticism, we can span even more epochs and epoch changing events.
His grandmother Janet's parents and grandparents had lived through the heady transition from the Ages of Classicalism/ Enlightenment into the Age of Romanticism.
By contrast, Janet was fully a child and adult of the Age of Romanticism.
Just as Henry Dawson himself was fully a child and adult of the Age of Scientism.
But his parents, rather like his grandmother Janet's parents, were children of a time of dramatic transition - from Romanticism into Positivism.
His daughter Shirley and son Keith were teenagers in the Age of Modernity, pre-1945, but have spent the vast bulk of their lives in this Post Modern Era.
Since they were not even 15 and 17 when the Bomb dropped on Hiroshima, I would say they, also, were children of a transition period (Modernity to Post-Modernity).
Through the eyes of just this one family, we can tell one hell of a story, of epochs succeeding epochs and being succeeded in turn.
And I aim to tell just that story....
So you could find yourself telling your great-grandchildren, "I can remember my father telling me of hearing his grandmother recalling her early years growing up in a remote part of the Highlands in the 1810s, at the height of the Romantic Era."
I am not saying that Shirley Dawson Kirkland, eldest daughter of Dr Martin Henry Dawson, has in fact ever recounted such an account - but technically - she could have.
If Dawson's grandmother had gone further back and recounted to him what her parents or grandparents had told her of the effect upon their intellect world caused by the events of the French Revolution/end to the Age of Classicalism & Enlightenment/rise of the Age of Romanticism, we can span even more epochs and epoch changing events.
His grandmother Janet's parents and grandparents had lived through the heady transition from the Ages of Classicalism/ Enlightenment into the Age of Romanticism.
By contrast, Janet was fully a child and adult of the Age of Romanticism.
Just as Henry Dawson himself was fully a child and adult of the Age of Scientism.
But his parents, rather like his grandmother Janet's parents, were children of a time of dramatic transition - from Romanticism into Positivism.
His daughter Shirley and son Keith were teenagers in the Age of Modernity, pre-1945, but have spent the vast bulk of their lives in this Post Modern Era.
Since they were not even 15 and 17 when the Bomb dropped on Hiroshima, I would say they, also, were children of a transition period (Modernity to Post-Modernity).
Through the eyes of just this one family, we can tell one hell of a story, of epochs succeeding epochs and being succeeded in turn.
And I aim to tell just that story....
Age of SCIENTISM was one (long) generation in length
It is not at all uncommon to find scientists-emeritus publishing peer-reviewed articles in credible journals, well into their nineties and beyond (hello: Ernst Mayr !) - the US Senate has nothing on Science when it comes to being a culture dominated by powerful old men.
In the case of the Age of Scientism ,circa 1870s -1960s , that meant it was one (long) "generation-of-scientists" in length.
Scientists still publishing in May 1968, as the revolt that ended Scientism broke out world wide, could also still remember its heady beginnings in the 1870s, as tiny children.
Lise Meitner , 1878-1968 , for example : she was the physicist who first explained nuclear fission to the scientific world (but failed to get the Nobel Prize she deserved because she was a woman and a Jew.)
So : elderly scientists watching TV coverage of worldwide student protests against the pollution caused by our industrial production of light bulbs,record-players, telephones - and cars.
They must have been dumbfounded : they can remember when these items didn't exist and what a blessing their arrival seemed to be to everybody.
Now these same items, their lifework, lay debased - by wild eyed, longhaired 18 year old know-everythings !
In their childhood, these elderly scientists could see the Era of Scientism begin and then quickly climb to intellectual dominance.
By 1895 - the start of their adult years, it reached a steady plateau of about 50 years in duration, and then in 1945 began a imperceptibly slow decline before dropping abruptly off the rock, in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Dr Martin Henry Dawson was conceived in late 1895 and died in early 1945 - his life thus spanned that long plateau of Scientism, without seeing either its contested beginning or its contested ending.
His teachers, professors, bosses were always those children of the 1870s, always in full flush of enthusiasm for the 'new thing' of their youth.
Any private doubts about Scientism that Dawson might have harbored, found few verbal supporters over his lifetime, at least among those in positions of power.
But Scientism did not have many effective critics in its plateau days, even among those in the outliers of power.
Dawson, then, had to become a 'critic of deed, not words' - and as such, he was very effective.
His ideas may not have 'worked in theory' (because he never articulated a theory !) , but tellingly and fatally for Scientism and Modernity, they worked very well in practice.....
In the case of the Age of Scientism ,circa 1870s -1960s , that meant it was one (long) "generation-of-scientists" in length.
Scientists still publishing in May 1968, as the revolt that ended Scientism broke out world wide, could also still remember its heady beginnings in the 1870s, as tiny children.
Lise Meitner , 1878-1968 , for example : she was the physicist who first explained nuclear fission to the scientific world (but failed to get the Nobel Prize she deserved because she was a woman and a Jew.)
So : elderly scientists watching TV coverage of worldwide student protests against the pollution caused by our industrial production of light bulbs,record-players, telephones - and cars.
They must have been dumbfounded : they can remember when these items didn't exist and what a blessing their arrival seemed to be to everybody.
Now these same items, their lifework, lay debased - by wild eyed, longhaired 18 year old know-everythings !
In their childhood, these elderly scientists could see the Era of Scientism begin and then quickly climb to intellectual dominance.
By 1895 - the start of their adult years, it reached a steady plateau of about 50 years in duration, and then in 1945 began a imperceptibly slow decline before dropping abruptly off the rock, in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Dr Martin Henry Dawson was conceived in late 1895 and died in early 1945 - his life thus spanned that long plateau of Scientism, without seeing either its contested beginning or its contested ending.
His teachers, professors, bosses were always those children of the 1870s, always in full flush of enthusiasm for the 'new thing' of their youth.
Any private doubts about Scientism that Dawson might have harbored, found few verbal supporters over his lifetime, at least among those in positions of power.
But Scientism did not have many effective critics in its plateau days, even among those in the outliers of power.
Dawson, then, had to become a 'critic of deed, not words' - and as such, he was very effective.
His ideas may not have 'worked in theory' (because he never articulated a theory !) , but tellingly and fatally for Scientism and Modernity, they worked very well in practice.....
Earthlings versus the Sky Gods : 1945 and "THE FALL OF MODERNITY"
Everyone agrees that Post-Modernity began after 1945 and that thus, in some muted --- pastel --- fashion, Modernity must also have began its slow decline in that same momentous year.
Most writers just dial in some reference to Auschwitz and Hiroshima and leave the rest unsaid and assumed
- a few might add a bit more references to the bombing of Hamburg and Dresden and the revelations of the Nuremberg Trials, particularly the so-called Doctors' Trials.
So 1945, Year of Revolution.
Could any other "Year of Revolution" have happened in such an un-dramatic fashion?
No leaders' fiery speeches, no burning Manifestos, no mass protests or barricaded streets.
For 1945 was a Revolution from within, a collapse, a revolution of failure,defeat, negation.
Modernity defeated itself, Modernity simply self-destructed.
In 1939 it set itself the highest possible goals - this would be history's first fully modern war, its first fully scientific war (or at least first fully scientism war).
Of course, nothing in WWII worked out as its various protagonists planned.
Its seers and futurists were equally naft in their predictions.
At the cost of 60 million dead , billions emotionally scarred and trillions in waste and destruction, Modernity laid an egg.
Or a mushroom - your taste......
Most writers just dial in some reference to Auschwitz and Hiroshima and leave the rest unsaid and assumed
- a few might add a bit more references to the bombing of Hamburg and Dresden and the revelations of the Nuremberg Trials, particularly the so-called Doctors' Trials.
So 1945, Year of Revolution.
Could any other "Year of Revolution" have happened in such an un-dramatic fashion?
No leaders' fiery speeches, no burning Manifestos, no mass protests or barricaded streets.
For 1945 was a Revolution from within, a collapse, a revolution of failure,defeat, negation.
Modernity defeated itself, Modernity simply self-destructed.
In 1939 it set itself the highest possible goals - this would be history's first fully modern war, its first fully scientific war (or at least first fully scientism war).
Of course, nothing in WWII worked out as its various protagonists planned.
Its seers and futurists were equally naft in their predictions.
At the cost of 60 million dead , billions emotionally scarred and trillions in waste and destruction, Modernity laid an egg.
Or a mushroom - your taste......
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