MODERNITY FALLS 1945

   There is no consensus on the name for the Era we are presently living - the era after the Era of Modernity. But all agree that it began in 1945.

   That means that every single one of us has has spent the majority of our lives living in this "Era-Without-A-Name".

  Rather embarrassing that : perhaps it will be left to our ancestors to name this era retrospectively.

   Then billions will perhaps know us as Commensalities, when we never heard the word while alive, let alone ever thought of ourselves that way.

   A child whose birthday everyone knows , but who no one is willing to christen, is an unusual child indeed.

  Why then the nigh-universal consensus that this post modernity era we are living in all began in 1945?

   It was not as if nothing else happened in 1945, so it had some plenty of time on its hands to dream up post-modernity.

  1945 was the year the world finally ending its worst conflict : WWII.

   With the occupation of enemy lands long hidden from the world, reports of horrible things were finally confirmed by the Allied armies : the concentration camps and death camps.

  Soon the upcoming Nuremberg Trials would reveal that death camps like Auschwitz also held plenty of evidence of unbelievably cruel medical experiments on innocent human children.

  Gas Chambers or Doctor Mengele, all worked together to advance the ultimate intentions of Galtonian Genetic Biology.

   All worked to create the perfect Master Race, even if that meant that those judged non-master races had to pay the ultimate penalty to make it all happen. 

  Meanwhile in August 1945, the Americans dropped single bombs, from single planes,  yet big enough to wiped out big cities - cities like Hiroshima.
   Hitherto, thousands of planes and hundreds of thousands of bombs ( and a perfect storm of weather) had been needed to wipe out a city.

  Since the Americans alone had thousands of these big planes ,B-29s, (planes able as well to fly half way around the world) that meant we suddenly faced a world where the next big war might mean all cities everywhere facing annihilation.

   Meanwhile the ineffectiveness of any defense against the German V-2 rockets reminded us that while we might be able to shoot down the B-29s before they reached our cities, soon even that option would be closed off.

   So Newtonian Physics was also in its final phase : no longer content on measuring the transit of planets, it had moved up to destroying planets instead.

   Hiroshima, Hamburg, Toyko, Dresden, London, Rotterdam, Warsaw - city after city shattered  with depressing ease.

   Equal depressing was the thought that Auschwitz was merely the culmination of six years of killing in the name of Genetics.

  But also in 1945, World War II was credited (wrongly) for bringing at least a bit of good news.
   In a race against time, tiny simple stupid Microbes had beaten the best of the world's chemists (The1940s Masters of the Universe) to produce natural penicillin when Mankind failed to make synthetic penicillin.
    What today is an enormous industry, bio or micro technology, never looked back.

 By contrast, Daltonian Chemistry, hitherto the Queen of Science particularly in Industry, started a long slow slide into invisibility.  

   The jewels of  the Era of Modernity were these three: Newtonian Physics, Daltonian Chemistry and Galtonian Genetic Biology.

   With all three in ruins by the end of 1945, Modernity 's Fall was all but available....