It was probably in late October 1940 , induced by the strain of setting up the world's first ever use of penicillin-the-antibiotic, that Dr Martin Henry Dawson began his long slow slide into a terminal case of MG (Myasthenia Gravis).
A Canadian study had only recently determined
that a sufferer from MG at that time lived an average of four and a half years.
Some lived much longer --- some much less.
However a rational individual , such as Dr Dawson was, would say he had till late April 1945 to live out his life.
He was proved exactly right - dying April 27th 1945.
I can't say he died happy, but I can speculate he didn't die unhappy .
Dawson lived just long enough to have the highly skeptical medical community around the world accept his claim that (systemic) (naturally-grown penicillin) (can cure SBE) --- yes, even the toughest cases of this hitherto invariable fatal disease more formally known as Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis.
I have written before of the jaw-dropping fact that by 1950, just five short years later, it was widely agreed that SBE had become, to quote Dr Charles Friedberg in the world famous medical journal JAMA, "the most common form of heart disease that can be cured."
In early 1945, as Dawson lay dying, with his labours just completed, he won his race by the narrowest of margins.
JAMA , house organ of the American Medical Association (AMA) finally agreed to feature his long article on his four and half year battle - against his colleagues, his own government and his own body - to offer up "PROOF OF CONCEPT" on his bold claims.
Because he actually made three different, equally bold, claims.
He said the incurable SBE could be cured.
He said penicillin was much better as a systemic antibiotic, if people would only try it, than it ever was as Alexander Fleming's topical antiseptic.
Finally, and most boldly by far, he said naturally grown penicillin , grown by trillions of incredibly tiny little biotech factories called unicell fungi , would be cheaper, better, more available than anything chemists might be able to synthesize.
He said that the big wartime projects of MOdernity's 'Chemical Man' are not inevitably smarter than the efforts put for by the smallest and weakest members of Life.
In 1945 that offered up a stinging rebuke to the entire civilized world.
It was a sting felt never more strongly that in Germany, home of Modernist Chemistry, which had recently put its chemistry to its most spectacular use ever --- in the steam baths of Auschwitz.
He was proven right, then, on all three points and is still right today.
Dawson's decision to work with Nature, not against her, and work with Nature's 's weakest beings to save humanity's weakest beings, was COmmensality at its finest.
His battle to save a handful of SBE patients (judged to be the lowest of the low , the 4Fs of the 4Fs, during a war effort focussed on 1A soldiers) moved an older couple in Brooklyn New York .
They had lost a daughter in the age before Dawson introduced antibiotics into a doubting world.
The husband, egged on by his wife, resolved to do something about it.
At that time he was the boss of a medium sized company that was best known for making citric acid for the soda pop industry.
He would stick that company's neck way out on the line and gamble big on Dawson's claim that the tiny little penicillin factories could do the job better, faster, cheaper, safer, than anything American's chemists could come up with.
Once he made that decision he went all out - like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stockbroker Dodds in the short story, "A Shadow Before" , he became a bear in a bull stock market .
If his gamble failed - and all the betting money said it would - his firm would be ruined.
But Oh ! If it succeeded !
If it succeeded, penicillin would arrive just in time, after all, for the expected heavy casualties of D-Day and just in time for the millions of people around the world dying of infectious diseases as a result of years of wartime malnutrition.
His firm would smothered in thanks and drowned in profits.
That man, John L Smith, was proven right by Dawson and his firm, Pfizer, never did look back from that decision.
For Dawson, his race against a dead-line was a personal race --- to prove up his concept, against fierce resistance from his body and his government, before he himself was - dead.
On the same tiny island (Manhattan), in the same time period
(WWII) , at the same university (Columbia), there was another much better known race against a deadline.
This dead-line was peace - the end of the war.
If the war ended before the Manhattan Project offered up its "PROOF OF CONCEPT" by successfully wiping out a city filled with people and factories, the atomic bomb would die still born - billions spent but the bomb never used.
After all, billions were spent on poison gas and germ warfare yet none of it was ever used.
Because along with Peace came massive spending cuts on war projects.
All that research money would vanish forever, at war's end - unless there was PROOF OF CONCEPT of this untried super weapon.
It was this, not the fear of a Nazi Atomic Bomb, which had vanished in Britain or Russia by the Fall of 1942 and not incidentally both were the enemies of Germany most likely to be on the dying end of a German A Bomb, which actually drove the American Manhattan Project.
The dead in this dead-line was 100,000 dead civilians : PROOF OF CONCEPT personified in ash and traces on the concrete.
This cold callous mental calculation, by scientists as well as military men, was MOdernity at its very worst.
So, two parallel but totally different races against dead - lines , operating a few hundred metres apart from each other in Harlem : MOdernity versus COmmensality.
Now there's a story !
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
a COmmensalist history of WWII
The consensus history of WWII was written during and immediately after the war itself, by men (mostly) ; men aged between their forties to sixties in 1945.
This consensus view of WWII has been frequently challenged, starting in the 1960s but still guides our view of the war, particularly among the casual public.
Those men were fully Modernist men - far too young to have come of age before The Second Industrial Revolution (aka "HARD MODERNITY" or "FULL BORE MODERNITY").
Equally they were far too young to have come of age in the era that replaced Modernity : Commensality.
They saw this Modernist War through eyes so attuned perfectly to Modernity as to not even be aware it was a Modernist War between rival Modernist empires.
They focussed on the very real differences that divided Modernist capitalist country from Modernist communist or fascist or nazi country.
But they failed to see that all six major combatants,plus some dished earlier in the war (France,the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy),were imperialistic empires.
Imperialism 's division between "equality among mature citizens" and "non-equality for non-mature/non-citizens" is the very essence of Modernity --- if you write in "Nature & Humans-close-to-Nature" for "non-mature/non-citizen" , as any good Modernist would.
What they failed to see is what the elites in all the combatants and neutral countries had in common: an unthinking acceptance of Modernity's values.
Modernity had its critics back in the early 1940s but what is striking is how clay-bound the feet of the most jaded critic still were - how by the values of 2012, they still had too much of the system that they sought to attack buried deep in their intellectual bones.
I don't know enough about Dr Martin Henry Dawson and his potentially clay-bound feet to say much about him one way or the other.
But then his deeds form his autobiography, showing him to be at least a pre-Commensalist and so it would seem that he and his little team must have viewed this unfolding Modernist war with very jaundiced eyes.
Their story,the birth of an early Commensalist success story during and despite WWII , thus forms the backbone to my much larger story of Modernity's many signal failures during that war, its war.
The backbone and the contrast ---- the cheery, hopeful commensal frame to a modernist painting of a moral Hell on Earth....
This consensus view of WWII has been frequently challenged, starting in the 1960s but still guides our view of the war, particularly among the casual public.
Those men were fully Modernist men - far too young to have come of age before The Second Industrial Revolution (aka "HARD MODERNITY" or "FULL BORE MODERNITY").
Equally they were far too young to have come of age in the era that replaced Modernity : Commensality.
They saw this Modernist War through eyes so attuned perfectly to Modernity as to not even be aware it was a Modernist War between rival Modernist empires.
They focussed on the very real differences that divided Modernist capitalist country from Modernist communist or fascist or nazi country.
But they failed to see that all six major combatants,plus some dished earlier in the war (France,the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy),were imperialistic empires.
Imperialism 's division between "equality among mature citizens" and "non-equality for non-mature/non-citizens" is the very essence of Modernity --- if you write in "Nature & Humans-close-to-Nature" for "non-mature/non-citizen" , as any good Modernist would.
What they failed to see is what the elites in all the combatants and neutral countries had in common: an unthinking acceptance of Modernity's values.
Modernity had its critics back in the early 1940s but what is striking is how clay-bound the feet of the most jaded critic still were - how by the values of 2012, they still had too much of the system that they sought to attack buried deep in their intellectual bones.
I don't know enough about Dr Martin Henry Dawson and his potentially clay-bound feet to say much about him one way or the other.
But then his deeds form his autobiography, showing him to be at least a pre-Commensalist and so it would seem that he and his little team must have viewed this unfolding Modernist war with very jaundiced eyes.
Their story,the birth of an early Commensalist success story during and despite WWII , thus forms the backbone to my much larger story of Modernity's many signal failures during that war, its war.
The backbone and the contrast ---- the cheery, hopeful commensal frame to a modernist painting of a moral Hell on Earth....
BRAZILIAN butterfly wings flutter : Tornado of Death in TEXAS --- "Who remembers the POLES nowadays?"
In MOdernity Man's disconnected world, the Earth is a passive bare backdrop where the human actors live apart from one another until they chose to directly engage each other.
"Why should I care ?", they aggressively ask.
"The fluttering of some obscure butterfly's wings in the jungles of Brazil can't possibly effect whether me and my home in Texas survive the next tornado."
But in the world of the COmmensality, the surface of the world is an active actor, along with all the life forms upon it - all Life lives within a complex web of interconnections where what ever happens to one will ultimately affect all others.
Today, we of the Commensality have no trouble accepting that Edward Lorenz's butterfly fluttering in Brazil can affect the force and direction of a Texas Twister.
Similarly we understand now that what happened to those far off Poles in 1939 did ended up affecting all of us.
By 1942, boys from Texas born of those parents who couldn't give a damn about the fate of the 1939 Polish butterflies broken upon the wheel, were dying all over the world in a Texas-sized Tornado of Death.
On August 22nd 1939, Hitler gave a very famous speech to his assembled military elite about the upcoming war against Poland.
The last sentence of one paragraph is particularly famous despite the fact that it might be fabricated.
(I do not think it was.)
Earlier in the paragraph Hitler had reminded his listeners that Genghis Khan sent millions of women and children to their deaths but today is remembered only as the founder of a great state.
Now in the last sentence, he reminds them that the mass killing of the Armenians only 20 years earlier hadn't caused much of an outcry at the time or in the years since.
(At the time this was very true.)
After the Holocaust this sentence came to be seized upon as the forerunner to the Jewish Holocaust - which it was - but very very indirectly.
Because the meat of the paragraph - and I mean red meat,blood, violence,horror, death - is in the middle sentences.
No vagueness here - Hitler says he has given orders to his death squads to relentlessly kill Polish women and children without mercy.
Polish women and children relentlessly and without mercy - not yet a decision to relentlessly kill Jewish women and children without mercy - that came 2 years later.
(True, many of these early Polish victims were Jewish and or socialist-communist but the focus was above all on Polish nationalistic intellectuals - the natural leadership of the Polish people --- Hitler wanted to destroy the Poles as a nation, without wishing to kill every last one of them - just most of them.)
The veracity of this sentence has never been questioned - only worse - it has been totally forgotten !
Within days of the outbreak of the war, the entire world press had many verified accounts of savage brutality imposed by German troops and police upon Poles - soldiers and civilians.
This reporting continued for more than nine months - from September 1939 to May 1940, that crucial period wherein an united Europe, let alone an united free world, could have ganged together collectively to overpower Hitler and ended WWII in its tracks.
(After the May - June 1940 Fall of France et al, the few remaining neutrals of Europe were too weak to take him on, with Britain's weak help, without suffering a brutal defeat upon themselves.)
I fully accept that.
But before that - before, before, before - what was their excuse beyond MOdernity's cold indifference?
For nine long months - long enough to bear a child - the world watched while Hitler broke Poland like a butterfly upon a wheel - watched and did nothing.
France and Britain (and their empires and commonwealths) did almost nothing.
Nothing that is in terms of an effective offensive attack on Hitler's Western Front while all of what little military hardware he did have (and it was not much) and the bulk of his troops were deep into Poland in the East.
But at least, to their eternal credit, they did declare war on Hitler as they promised they would if he attacked Poland.
That promise was made in March 1939 and it was not until March 1945, six long, long, long years later, that British troops finally moved onto German soil to engage Hitler.
A chivalrous gesture but chivalry of the most muted sort.
Most of the world can claim no moral credits at all for their behavior during those nine fatal months : better that Hannah Arendt had focused on this time period and to have spoken of the "THE BANALITY OF (SEEING NO) EVIL" .
What Hitler did during the Fall of 1939 in Poland was as evil as anything else he ever did - in other years he merely did different but equal forms of evil , and almost always the worst of these in Poland.
And it was known ,widely known at the time, to the whole of the newspaper-reading world.
But MOdernity Man said, "Who gives a tinker's damn about some Polacks ?" and turned to the sports page.
The Age of global Commensality will only truly arrive when we read about millions dying in some far off unknown province of the Congo and we do give a tinker's damn and a whole lot more.
The web of interconnectedness is as much moral as it is environmental - the two can not be separated.....
"Why should I care ?", they aggressively ask.
"The fluttering of some obscure butterfly's wings in the jungles of Brazil can't possibly effect whether me and my home in Texas survive the next tornado."
But in the world of the COmmensality, the surface of the world is an active actor, along with all the life forms upon it - all Life lives within a complex web of interconnections where what ever happens to one will ultimately affect all others.
Today, we of the Commensality have no trouble accepting that Edward Lorenz's butterfly fluttering in Brazil can affect the force and direction of a Texas Twister.
Similarly we understand now that what happened to those far off Poles in 1939 did ended up affecting all of us.
By 1942, boys from Texas born of those parents who couldn't give a damn about the fate of the 1939 Polish butterflies broken upon the wheel, were dying all over the world in a Texas-sized Tornado of Death.
On August 22nd 1939, Hitler gave a very famous speech to his assembled military elite about the upcoming war against Poland.
The last sentence of one paragraph is particularly famous despite the fact that it might be fabricated.
(I do not think it was.)
Earlier in the paragraph Hitler had reminded his listeners that Genghis Khan sent millions of women and children to their deaths but today is remembered only as the founder of a great state.
Now in the last sentence, he reminds them that the mass killing of the Armenians only 20 years earlier hadn't caused much of an outcry at the time or in the years since.
(At the time this was very true.)
After the Holocaust this sentence came to be seized upon as the forerunner to the Jewish Holocaust - which it was - but very very indirectly.
Because the meat of the paragraph - and I mean red meat,blood, violence,horror, death - is in the middle sentences.
No vagueness here - Hitler says he has given orders to his death squads to relentlessly kill Polish women and children without mercy.
Polish women and children relentlessly and without mercy - not yet a decision to relentlessly kill Jewish women and children without mercy - that came 2 years later.
(True, many of these early Polish victims were Jewish and or socialist-communist but the focus was above all on Polish nationalistic intellectuals - the natural leadership of the Polish people --- Hitler wanted to destroy the Poles as a nation, without wishing to kill every last one of them - just most of them.)
The veracity of this sentence has never been questioned - only worse - it has been totally forgotten !
Within days of the outbreak of the war, the entire world press had many verified accounts of savage brutality imposed by German troops and police upon Poles - soldiers and civilians.
This reporting continued for more than nine months - from September 1939 to May 1940, that crucial period wherein an united Europe, let alone an united free world, could have ganged together collectively to overpower Hitler and ended WWII in its tracks.
(After the May - June 1940 Fall of France et al, the few remaining neutrals of Europe were too weak to take him on, with Britain's weak help, without suffering a brutal defeat upon themselves.)
I fully accept that.
But before that - before, before, before - what was their excuse beyond MOdernity's cold indifference?
For nine long months - long enough to bear a child - the world watched while Hitler broke Poland like a butterfly upon a wheel - watched and did nothing.
France and Britain (and their empires and commonwealths) did almost nothing.
Nothing that is in terms of an effective offensive attack on Hitler's Western Front while all of what little military hardware he did have (and it was not much) and the bulk of his troops were deep into Poland in the East.
But at least, to their eternal credit, they did declare war on Hitler as they promised they would if he attacked Poland.
That promise was made in March 1939 and it was not until March 1945, six long, long, long years later, that British troops finally moved onto German soil to engage Hitler.
A chivalrous gesture but chivalry of the most muted sort.
Most of the world can claim no moral credits at all for their behavior during those nine fatal months : better that Hannah Arendt had focused on this time period and to have spoken of the "THE BANALITY OF (SEEING NO) EVIL" .
What Hitler did during the Fall of 1939 in Poland was as evil as anything else he ever did - in other years he merely did different but equal forms of evil , and almost always the worst of these in Poland.
And it was known ,widely known at the time, to the whole of the newspaper-reading world.
But MOdernity Man said, "Who gives a tinker's damn about some Polacks ?" and turned to the sports page.
The Age of global Commensality will only truly arrive when we read about millions dying in some far off unknown province of the Congo and we do give a tinker's damn and a whole lot more.
The web of interconnectedness is as much moral as it is environmental - the two can not be separated.....
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Etymologically, are BIOLOGISTS 'stupid' or 'thick' or what ??!!!
If you and I shared a meal together at a cafe, would any outsider automatically assume, a priori ,that one of us must have enjoyed the meal while the other of us must have been left indifferent?
Only biologists - or idiots - would.
(Or am I being redundant?)
Yes, I am hot under the collar, and with good reason.
The importance of just who is seated at the meal table (and how) has been noted as fundamental in all human cultures and over the entire course of recorded human history.
The term used to describe this crucial human ritual (in many societies the crucial ritual) is commensality.
It means simply the act of 'dining at a common table', end of story.
All at that table eat and get benefit from the food they eat - without denying some may eat more and get more benefit and vice versa.
It does NOT assume ,in advance, that some diners get no impact from the food they ate, good or bad; that's an impossible trick to pull off in human nutrition and I await the first scientist who proves me wrong.
It does, however, leave open a wealth of ways that commensality - that dining at a common table - can be arranged.
Let us consider just four variants to mix and match.
It is closed - only some can attend. It is open - all can attend.
It is hierarchical - whether or not all or only some can attend - some get the best seats and the most food.
It is egalitarian - perhaps only a few can attend, but within that group, all share seating choice and food amounts equally.
A few well know examples - in this case, from the Bible.
Jesus broke strict taboos to invite the poor, the sinner and the sick to dine with Himself and the rich and pious.
But some later Christian groups invited only those they judged 'saved' ( as we'd say today in Alabama) to their feasts, but at the feast all the 'saved' were judged equal participants.
Endless variety, in other words, lies within the simple meaning of commensality.
Some one hundred years ago some scientists -biologists - totally deranged the meaning of commensality for their own wicked, debased, ends and in the 'honor among thieves' fashion of scientists, almost all other scientists follow the biologists in lock step and use their warped definition.
Except (thanks be to God !) those social scientists actually researching real world commensal activities.
I would never deny that the biologists too are also studying a real world activity and that it too deserves a name that accurately and etymologically describes its key characteristic.
But commensality definitely isn't that word .
When I say we are living in the new AGE OF COMMENSALITY
since 1945, I simply mean that we are more and more realizing that humanity is within Nature, not above it.
So we exist within a highly complicated intertwining supra-dependency : all life on earth 'dines at a common table' of interconnected and inter-dependent resource and energy flows.
This is "global commensality" : all life on Earth is invited to a table the size of the entire Earth (and Solar System).
In plain English, if the Sun were to noticeably reduce its output for 80 years, even those bacteria deep in the mud at the very depths of the deepest basins of the ocean would eventually notice it.
They are not part of our Food Chain but they are part of our Air Chain and our Temperature Chain.
We dine together - on conventional food as well as air,water and heat - but we don't dine in harmony.
No, all us life forms squabble amongst ourselves over what is our proper share.
This is not a sort of mutalistic 'hearts and roses' commensality - but it is commensality.
Hopeful human rationality - so often debased for evil ends - will this time let us see that we must learn to share the Earth with these various Golden Gooses and restrain our endless appetite, if we want to share some of their golden eggs far into the future.....
Only biologists - or idiots - would.
(Or am I being redundant?)
Yes, I am hot under the collar, and with good reason.
The importance of just who is seated at the meal table (and how) has been noted as fundamental in all human cultures and over the entire course of recorded human history.
The term used to describe this crucial human ritual (in many societies the crucial ritual) is commensality.
It means simply the act of 'dining at a common table', end of story.
All at that table eat and get benefit from the food they eat - without denying some may eat more and get more benefit and vice versa.
It does NOT assume ,in advance, that some diners get no impact from the food they ate, good or bad; that's an impossible trick to pull off in human nutrition and I await the first scientist who proves me wrong.
It does, however, leave open a wealth of ways that commensality - that dining at a common table - can be arranged.
Let us consider just four variants to mix and match.
It is closed - only some can attend. It is open - all can attend.
It is hierarchical - whether or not all or only some can attend - some get the best seats and the most food.
It is egalitarian - perhaps only a few can attend, but within that group, all share seating choice and food amounts equally.
A few well know examples - in this case, from the Bible.
Jesus broke strict taboos to invite the poor, the sinner and the sick to dine with Himself and the rich and pious.
But some later Christian groups invited only those they judged 'saved' ( as we'd say today in Alabama) to their feasts, but at the feast all the 'saved' were judged equal participants.
Endless variety, in other words, lies within the simple meaning of commensality.
Some one hundred years ago some scientists -biologists - totally deranged the meaning of commensality for their own wicked, debased, ends and in the 'honor among thieves' fashion of scientists, almost all other scientists follow the biologists in lock step and use their warped definition.
Except (thanks be to God !) those social scientists actually researching real world commensal activities.
I would never deny that the biologists too are also studying a real world activity and that it too deserves a name that accurately and etymologically describes its key characteristic.
But commensality definitely isn't that word .
When I say we are living in the new AGE OF COMMENSALITY
since 1945, I simply mean that we are more and more realizing that humanity is within Nature, not above it.
So we exist within a highly complicated intertwining supra-dependency : all life on earth 'dines at a common table' of interconnected and inter-dependent resource and energy flows.
This is "global commensality" : all life on Earth is invited to a table the size of the entire Earth (and Solar System).
In plain English, if the Sun were to noticeably reduce its output for 80 years, even those bacteria deep in the mud at the very depths of the deepest basins of the ocean would eventually notice it.
They are not part of our Food Chain but they are part of our Air Chain and our Temperature Chain.
We dine together - on conventional food as well as air,water and heat - but we don't dine in harmony.
No, all us life forms squabble amongst ourselves over what is our proper share.
This is not a sort of mutalistic 'hearts and roses' commensality - but it is commensality.
Hopeful human rationality - so often debased for evil ends - will this time let us see that we must learn to share the Earth with these various Golden Gooses and restrain our endless appetite, if we want to share some of their golden eggs far into the future.....
Friday, March 16, 2012
Who or what are the NATURE-DENIERS you ask ?
You've heard about Jewish Holocaust deniers and about Climate Holocaust deniers but who, you ask in bewilderment, are the NATURE-DENIERS ?
Well they're not Commensalists - the Age of Commensality believes all life on Earth, willy-nilly, dines at a common table (in a word is all commensal) - it believes mankind is not above Nature but fully in it - so it hardly denies Nature .
No, these deniers are all varieties of Modernists, people who believe that we can, if necessary, get along perfectly well without natural resources or indeed without Nature and even without those people they see as being closest to Nature.
The millions of people that the Nazis shot, gassed and starved in their Holocaust were (*almost) all people they viewed as living in a world far away from civilized man and close to (bestial) Nature.
(* I admit I think the Nazis had mixed feelings about the Communist commissars, Polish intellectuals and educated Jews that they killed .
They saw most Poles, Slavs and Jews as close to animals and germs but saw the intellectuals among them as even more dangerous, because they were both 'smart' and 'dirty' .)
It must be admitted that the Nazis lacked ambition - they only killed 6 million in the most organized part of their killing spree.
Today's climate change deniers might just end up killing 6 billion of us if the world's climate goes to hell in a hand basket at the same time we run out of agricultural necessities like phosphorus.
(Solar might get us past the worst of the end of oil and coal -- but we can't expect the nuclear industry to transform us up a mess of the element phosphorus out of lead like some 21st century alchemist.)
The climate change deniers along with the environmental degradation deniers and resource depletion deniers are like the Nazis in basically denying that Nature can bite back .
So they assume, for example, that Nature can take all the Co2 we can hand it and just deal with it, somehow.
"Suck it up Nature !"
Modernity is supposed to have an Imperialistic side , a sort of evil twin brother hidden off to the side.
Bosh, I say, bosh.
Modernity only had one colony and always one colony - Nature.
Every other subject they colonized - from women and children, the poor and the disabled, to people in places like India and Africa - were always subjugated because they were judged close to Nature ------- and hence fair game.
Notice that none of the modernist nations ever seriously thought of turning other modernist nations into colonies -- this was called 'honor amongst modernists' ....
Well they're not Commensalists - the Age of Commensality believes all life on Earth, willy-nilly, dines at a common table (in a word is all commensal) - it believes mankind is not above Nature but fully in it - so it hardly denies Nature .
No, these deniers are all varieties of Modernists, people who believe that we can, if necessary, get along perfectly well without natural resources or indeed without Nature and even without those people they see as being closest to Nature.
The millions of people that the Nazis shot, gassed and starved in their Holocaust were (*almost) all people they viewed as living in a world far away from civilized man and close to (bestial) Nature.
(* I admit I think the Nazis had mixed feelings about the Communist commissars, Polish intellectuals and educated Jews that they killed .
They saw most Poles, Slavs and Jews as close to animals and germs but saw the intellectuals among them as even more dangerous, because they were both 'smart' and 'dirty' .)
It must be admitted that the Nazis lacked ambition - they only killed 6 million in the most organized part of their killing spree.
Today's climate change deniers might just end up killing 6 billion of us if the world's climate goes to hell in a hand basket at the same time we run out of agricultural necessities like phosphorus.
(Solar might get us past the worst of the end of oil and coal -- but we can't expect the nuclear industry to transform us up a mess of the element phosphorus out of lead like some 21st century alchemist.)
The climate change deniers along with the environmental degradation deniers and resource depletion deniers are like the Nazis in basically denying that Nature can bite back .
So they assume, for example, that Nature can take all the Co2 we can hand it and just deal with it, somehow.
"Suck it up Nature !"
Modernity is supposed to have an Imperialistic side , a sort of evil twin brother hidden off to the side.
Bosh, I say, bosh.
Modernity only had one colony and always one colony - Nature.
Every other subject they colonized - from women and children, the poor and the disabled, to people in places like India and Africa - were always subjugated because they were judged close to Nature ------- and hence fair game.
Notice that none of the modernist nations ever seriously thought of turning other modernist nations into colonies -- this was called 'honor amongst modernists' ....
The paradox of our new AGE of COMMENSALITY
Our new Age of Commensality is based on Science, but not really based on Scientists.
The bulk of our scientists have given tepid lip service to the discoveries of their colleagues that form the basis for Commensality.
But they have not really accepted or fully acted upon the intellectual implications of those discoveries for their own work or their own world view.
In other words, these discoveries have become Public (published in peer reviewed journals, including all of the biggest) but they haven't become Popular (for example, taught in high school classrooms or put front and centre in high school textbooks).
Modernity has lost its cachet in basic science but flourishes almost as strong as ever in applied science - and above all in applied technology (that warm fetid home of the NATURE-DENIERS) .
Asking school boards to teach commensality might be too much to ask.
(Somehow talking about Nature makes these so called "Evangelicals" reach for their unregistered long gun... don't know, maybe the thought that Jesus was all for Commensality makes them 'agin it', on principle.)
But why don't High Schools at least teach "Quantum Physics for the Non Scientist" as it is the basis of all science and has been so for 100 years ?
The best place to take on the NATURE-DENIERS is probably not in the classroom.
No one is more timid and PC than a school board administrator so we best stick to more open and public forums such as blogs and at public meetings.....
The bulk of our scientists have given tepid lip service to the discoveries of their colleagues that form the basis for Commensality.
But they have not really accepted or fully acted upon the intellectual implications of those discoveries for their own work or their own world view.
In other words, these discoveries have become Public (published in peer reviewed journals, including all of the biggest) but they haven't become Popular (for example, taught in high school classrooms or put front and centre in high school textbooks).
Modernity has lost its cachet in basic science but flourishes almost as strong as ever in applied science - and above all in applied technology (that warm fetid home of the NATURE-DENIERS) .
Asking school boards to teach commensality might be too much to ask.
(Somehow talking about Nature makes these so called "Evangelicals" reach for their unregistered long gun... don't know, maybe the thought that Jesus was all for Commensality makes them 'agin it', on principle.)
But why don't High Schools at least teach "Quantum Physics for the Non Scientist" as it is the basis of all science and has been so for 100 years ?
The best place to take on the NATURE-DENIERS is probably not in the classroom.
No one is more timid and PC than a school board administrator so we best stick to more open and public forums such as blogs and at public meetings.....
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 ....
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Other Lifeforms make much of our chemists' compounds and molecules
"We must all learn to live together within Nature: all diners at her common table (commensal) or all learn to die together, frying up in the upcoming global climate meltdown." (Blog Mission Statement.)If you believe your High School Chemist teacher, a very unwise thing to do, you might think that chemists spend their days creating things out of atoms and elements.
I won't say it never happens or that it had never happened, but its rare.
Chemists might occasionally work with molecules
of a pure element ,but generally, if atoms and elements were human beings, they'd be described as compulsive 'joiners' .
For simple molecules and compounds, they usually do the joining themselves, assisted by a natural catalyst that just happens to be hanging about combined with geological heat and pressure.
But if what they're joining is something complex and hence useful, it might take millions or billions of years to happen on its own, chemically and geologically.
That is unless a really good catalyst is giving a helping hand , like those biological wonder-workers, the enzymes.
Reactions that have a half-live of billions of years can then take place in milliseconds, at ordinary temperature and pressure.
This is why all those 'Chemistry is Modern Alchemy' ads are really bosh.
They don't actually make nylons out of pure hydrogen gas, pure oxygen gas and pure carbon atoms - at least not economically - not in a million years.
No, they start with coal tar, (and water and air and many other unnamed chemical reagents) which far from being useless waste, is actually the end product of billions of years of life forms creating complex carbon ringed molecules with enzymes.
To save us massive amounts of capital and energy, we use these biologically-synthesized molecules as starting blocks for human ingenuity to turn into nylons and thousands of other things.
But once coal and petroleum are gone and trees too valuable to burn up to create wood tar, we are going to find chemists will need much more energy and capital ( both in very short supply when coal and petroleum is gone) to create the wonders of chemistry from just simple pure elements and atoms.
Biology is the basement foundation of today's organic chemistry production, we can not - despite economists' claims - 'in effect, get along perfectly well without it'.....
Other Lifeforms make much of our chemists' compounds and molecules
If you believe your High School Chemist teacher, a very unwise thing to do, you might think that chemists spend their days creating things out of atoms and elements.
Michael Marshall
I won't say it never happens or that it had never happened, but its rare.
Chemists might occasionally work with molecules
of a pure element ,but generally, if atoms and elements were human beings, they'd be described as compulsive 'joiners' .
For simple molecules and compounds, they usually do the joining themselves, assisted by a natural catalyst that just happens to be hanging about combined with geological heat and pressure.
But if what they're joining is something complex and hence useful, it might take millions or billions of years to happen on its own, chemically and geologically.
That is unless a really good catalyst is giving a helping hand , like those biological wonder-workers, the enzymes.
Reactions that have a half-live of billions of years can then take place in milliseconds, at ordinary temperature and pressure.
This is why all those 'Chemistry is Modern Alchemy' ads are really bosh.
They don't actually make nylons out of pure hydrogen gas, pure oxygen gas and pure carbon atoms - at least not economically - not in a million years.
No, they start with coal tar, (and water and air and many other unnamed chemical reagents) which far from being useless waste, is actually the end product of billions of years of life forms creating complex carbon ringed molecules with enzymes.
To save us massive amounts of capital and energy, we use these biologically-synthesized molecules as starting blocks for human ingenuity to turn into nylons and thousands of other things.
But once coal and petroleum are gone and trees too valuable to burn up to create wood tar, we are going to find chemists will need much more energy and capital ( both in very short supply when coal and petroleum is gone) to create the wonders of chemistry from just simple pure elements and atoms.
Biology is the basement foundation of today's organic chemistry production, we can not - despite economists' claims - 'in effect, get along perfectly well without it'.....
Who is the Commensalist ????
We must all learn to live together within Nature: all diners at her common table (commensal) or all learn to die together, frying up in the upcoming global climate meltdown." (Blog Mission Statement.)
Well.... it isn't me --- I mean I am a commensalist, very much so ---- but I am not THE COMMENSALIST
I consider that honor belongs to Martin Henry Dawson.
Dawson was not the first or the most prominent basic scientist to dive deep into biological commensality, in the exact scientific sense of the word.
Nor was he the first by any means to demonstrate acts of ethical commensality - that happened a long, long time ago.
But I believe he was the first ever to act ethically upon what he had newly learned scientifically : in my sense of the terms, he exhibited Scientific Good Faith rather than Scientific Bad Faith .
That is his Popular Science (assembling a small ramshackle operation to grow penicillium slime so he could save the lives of unwanted terminal 4F patients with impure penicillin) ( a joint commensal operation of doctors, 4F patients and microbes) was created in the same spirit as what he had learned in his Public Science : seeing Nature's smallest, weakest, "stupidest" beings display the amazing ability to surmount difficulty after difficulty to go on living.
At a time when all his medical and scientific colleagues world wide had drunk deep of the Kool Aid of Chemical Autarky and produced no penicillin, he worked instead with Nature's smallest, weakest beings to help Humanity's smallest, weakest beings when they needed it most ...
To add that he did all this when he himself was dying of a painful disease, seems almost trite.....
Who is the Commensalist ????
|
| Michael Marshall |
I consider that honor belongs to Martin Henry Dawson.
Dawson was not the first or the most prominent basic scientist to dive deep into biological commensality, in the exact scientific sense of the word.
Nor was he the first by any means to demonstrate acts of ethical commensality - that happened a long, long time ago.
But I believe he was the first ever to act ethically upon what he had newly learned scientifically : in my sense of the terms, he exhibited Scientific Good Faith rather than Scientific Bad Faith .
That is his Popular Science (assembling a small ramshackle operation to grow penicillium slime so he could save the lives of unwanted terminal 4F patients with impure penicillin) ( a joint commensal operation of doctors, 4F patients and microbes) was created in the same spirit as what he had learned in his Public Science : seeing Nature's smallest, weakest, "stupidest" beings display the amazing ability to surmount difficulty after difficulty to go on living.
At a time when all his medical and scientific colleagues world wide had drunk deep of the Kool Aid of Chemical Autarky and produced no penicillin, he worked instead with Nature's smallest, weakest beings to help Humanity's smallest, weakest beings when they needed it most ...
To add that he did all this when he himself was dying of a painful disease, seems almost trite.....
The very naughty Charles LYELL ....
"We must all learn to live together within Nature: all diners at her common table (commensal) or all learn to die together, frying up in the upcoming global climate meltdown." (Blog Mission Statement.)
Modernist Man still views life on earth through the prism of geology, the legacy of that very wicked barrister Sir Charles Lyell.
Man's continued existence on Planet Earth, in this schema, is practically guaranteed by the fact that the geological processes of the earth are supposedly uniform in character , uniform all over the world and uniform in nature back to the beginnings of time.
Supposedly these geological forces are what created and sustain the great natural cycles - the circulation streams of rain, water and air and of oxygen,nitrogen, carbon, sulfur et al.
But while it is true that because our planet was stony with a fluid metallic core, this allowed life the ability to begin here, most of those vast natural circulations wouldn't exist if life, Microbe Life mostly, didn't sustain them.
In fact most of the minerals and ore bodies that we take for granted as being of geological origin, actually were created and assembled by biological forces.
True, Geology gave us all the elements that make up the Earth - but most of our minerals and compounds owe some or all of their creation to Life forces.
Man, pace Robert Solow, could not live on rocks alone - we need Life to live ; all Life....
The very naughty Charles LYELL ....
|
| Michael Marshall |
Man's continued existence on Planet Earth, in this schema, is practically guaranteed by the fact that the geological processes of the earth are supposedly uniform in character , uniform all over the world and uniform in nature back to the beginnings of time.
Supposedly these geological forces are what created and sustain the great natural cycles - the circulation streams of rain, water and air and of oxygen,nitrogen, carbon, sulfur et al.
But while it is true that because our planet was stony with a fluid metallic core, this allowed life the ability to begin here, most of those vast natural circulations wouldn't exist if life, Microbe Life mostly, didn't sustain them.
In fact most of the minerals and ore bodies that we take for granted as being of geological origin, actually were created and assembled by biological forces.
True, Geology gave us all the elements that make up the Earth - but most of our minerals and compounds owe some or all of their creation to Life forces.
Man, pace Robert Solow, could not live on rocks alone - we need Life to live ; all Life....
It is a crisis as small as your NEWBORN ; it is a crisis as big as PLANET EARTH...
"We must all learn to live together within Nature: all diners at her common table (commensal) or all learn to die together, frying up in the upcoming global climate meltdown." (Blog Mission Statement.)
"Man ABOVE Nature no longer : we are all 'Nature' and we all dine together at a common table ; to paraphrase King Edward VII, "we are ALL commensalists nowadays ..."
This is this century's moral and political crisis - a crisis between this century's Commensality and the last century's Modernity ; a crisis much bigger than anything the 20th Century could throw up.
This because because despite all the violence and hatred between Communism , Capitalism and the various flavors of Fascism , they at least were all united in being Modernists, Modernists bickering amongst themselves over how best to butcher the Planet and its resources.
There doesn't seem, at first, to be any common ground between the Deniers (Fry-ers) and the green-minded citizen, but there is ---most people ultimately do want to live.
The fanatics - like Hitler and his gang - really did believe it was Better to be Dead than Red , but most us will do almost anything to live , waiting for a better day to come along.
When the temperature rises all over the planet, it might start to melt even the coldest, hardest hearts among the Modernist, leading them to see they must compromise their greed, if they wish to continue to live.
Let us pray that the greedy of this world are willing to settle for a half loaf, so the world can return to dining together, commensally, in more or less harmony....
It is a crisis as small as your NEWBORN ; it is a crisis as big as PLANET EARTH...
"Man ABOVE Nature no longer : we are all 'Nature' and we all dine together at a common table ; to paraphrase King Edward VII, "we are ALL commensalists nowadays ..."
This is this century's moral and political crisis - a crisis between this century's Commensality and the last century's Modernity ; a crisis much bigger than anything the 20th Century could throw up.
Michael Marshall
This because because despite all the violence and hatred between Communism , Capitalism and the various flavors of Fascism , they at least were all united in being Modernists, Modernists bickering amongst themselves over how best to butcher the Planet and its resources.
There doesn't seem, at first, to be any common ground between the Deniers (Fry-ers) and the green-minded citizen, but there is ---most people ultimately do want to live.
The fanatics - like Hitler and his gang - really did believe it was Better to be Dead than Red , but most us will do almost anything to live , waiting for a better day to come along.
When the temperature rises all over the planet, it might start to melt even the coldest, hardest hearts among the Modernist, leading them to see they must compromise their greed, if they wish to continue to live.
Let us pray that the greedy of this world are willing to settle for a half loaf, so the world can return to dining together, commensally, in more or less harmony....
" Commensal ---- or FRY !!!!!! "
"We must all learn to live together within Nature: all diners at her common table (commensal) or all learn to die together, frying up in the upcoming global climate meltdown." (Blog Mission Statement.)
The choice is stark --- the debate will be heated.
We must all learn to live together: all diners at Mother Nature's common table, commensal --- or we will all fry together in the upcoming global climate meltdown.
The above catchphrase sums it all up very succinctly : "Commensal ---- or FRY !!!!" *
We will all be either Commensals or Fries : just as in different situations we all seem to end up either Roundheads or Cavaliers/ Union Blue or Confederate Grey / BLUE staters or RED staters.
In the old days, say up to about 1973, the choice was equally stark and the debate equally heated.
It was about dividing Humanity's strictly limited pie.
How much to the workers ? How much left then to the bosses ?
A Zero-Sum Game.
Dressed up in its Sunday Best, it was the battle between Socialism and Capitalism.
It even engaged future King Edward VII.
Today there is a new battle, but still over the same old pie - more or less.
Today's Humanity Pie is much bigger --- much much bigger - and that is the problem.
Its bigger but it is making us sick - and making the whole world sick - because it is so big - too big.
One side of us says that unless Mankind learns to restrain its appetites and saves a little grain for Mother Nature's Golden Goose, it will stop laying its Golden Eggs for us.
The other side says we can , in effect, live very well without natural resources, nature's species - and to be frank about it - without most other people.
Like the birds and the bees and the trees, they are all 'useless mouths' consuming what could - and should - be Modernist Man's alone.
You know where I stand on this new debate that
is riveting and dividing all of Human Society.
I believe Science has shown for over hundred years - even if most scientists won't admit it - that all multi-celled life on Earth is highly and totally interdependent on each other and above all on the uni-celled life forms living invisibly on and around us.
Only these tiny life forms can truly see us multi-celled beings as 'useless mouths' they could well live without.
We can't say the reverse.
We multi-celled beings are all parasites , feeding off the world the microbes made viable well before we ever got here.
If we disappeared it still would be as viable - but if we got rid of ALL the microbes we ourselves won't be here very long - all of us would be dead in a few months.
Mankind's greedy environmental and climate changes won't really FRY the planet .
But it does mean, at the very least, that billions of humans would die.
At worse,we might even tip the world into a climate state where almost all but the tiniest multi-celled beings would die - leaving only the meekest of Live to inherit the Earth.
As the very last of our global corporate CEOs fries, I wonder if he (and it will be a HE for sure) will go off to 'that even hotter place' humming Alanis's tune, "isn't it ironic..."
* When the pioneers tumbled themselves
and their barn-fed pigs off the boat and into the New World's heavily-treed wilderness, they shoved their swine off into the woods to forge for themselves, telling them , "Root Hog ---- Die !!!!!".
Today, it much the same - either Mankind learns to live within Nature's means or he will fry up this Planet.
This is today's existential crisis for today's Modernist Man :
DENY... & FRY !!!
" Commensal ---- or FRY !!!!!! "
The choice is stark --- the debate will be heated.
Michael Marshall
We must all learn to live together: all diners at Mother Nature's common table, commensal --- or we will all fry together in the upcoming global climate meltdown.
The above catchphrase sums it all up very succinctly : "Commensal ---- or FRY !!!!" *
We will all be either Commensals or Fries : just as in different situations we all seem to end up either Roundheads or Cavaliers/ Union Blue or Confederate Grey / BLUE staters or RED staters.
In the old days, say up to about 1973, the choice was equally stark and the debate equally heated.
It was about dividing Humanity's strictly limited pie.
How much to the workers ? How much left then to the bosses ?
A Zero-Sum Game.
Dressed up in its Sunday Best, it was the battle between Socialism and Capitalism.
It even engaged future King Edward VII.
Today there is a new battle, but still over the same old pie - more or less.
Today's Humanity Pie is much bigger --- much much bigger - and that is the problem.
Its bigger but it is making us sick - and making the whole world sick - because it is so big - too big.
One side of us says that unless Mankind learns to restrain its appetites and saves a little grain for Mother Nature's Golden Goose, it will stop laying its Golden Eggs for us.
The other side says we can , in effect, live very well without natural resources, nature's species - and to be frank about it - without most other people.
Like the birds and the bees and the trees, they are all 'useless mouths' consuming what could - and should - be Modernist Man's alone.
You know where I stand on this new debate that
is riveting and dividing all of Human Society.
I believe Science has shown for over hundred years - even if most scientists won't admit it - that all multi-celled life on Earth is highly and totally interdependent on each other and above all on the uni-celled life forms living invisibly on and around us.
Only these tiny life forms can truly see us multi-celled beings as 'useless mouths' they could well live without.
We can't say the reverse.
We multi-celled beings are all parasites , feeding off the world the microbes made viable well before we ever got here.
If we disappeared it still would be as viable - but if we got rid of ALL the microbes we ourselves won't be here very long - all of us would be dead in a few months.
Mankind's greedy environmental and climate changes won't really FRY the planet .
But it does mean, at the very least, that billions of humans would die.
At worse,we might even tip the world into a climate state where almost all but the tiniest multi-celled beings would die - leaving only the meekest of Live to inherit the Earth.
As the very last of our global corporate CEOs fries, I wonder if he (and it will be a HE for sure) will go off to 'that even hotter place' humming Alanis's tune, "isn't it ironic..."
* When the pioneers tumbled themselves
and their barn-fed pigs off the boat and into the New World's heavily-treed wilderness, they shoved their swine off into the woods to forge for themselves, telling them , "Root Hog ---- Die !!!!!".
Today, it much the same - either Mankind learns to live within Nature's means or he will fry up this Planet.
This is today's existential crisis for today's Modernist Man :
DENY... & FRY !!!
When Modernity said MAN above Nature, they meant it ...
"We must all learn to live together within Nature: all diners at her common table (commensal) or all learn to die together, frying up in the upcoming global climate meltdown." (Blog Mission Statement.)The MAN bit I mean.
Modernists did (and still do) see women,children ,natives, savages,primitives, animals, ethnic minorities, the 'defective' and pretty well everybody else but themselves as part of Nature, far, far, far below them.
If you plug in 'well-off' ,'powerful', 'but still angry' ,'old', 'white' ,'protestant', 'males' you pretty well have the sort of MAN that still ,still, thinks he is not part of Nature but flying in a sort of reverie/haze/daze miles above it.
In his mind.
And I mean that literally not figuratively - these guys sorta, half, admit that their bodies are part of sordid, damp, sticky, icky, Ole Nature.
But their minds, their minds !!!
Their pure Platonic , all-seeing, all-hearing, all-knowing, minds.
They are not part of part of Nature, but rather live in a parallel universe of mathematics, logic, rationality, utilitarianism .
Cool, calculating ,un-emotional, un-sentimental Man.
This is the sort of wet dream that all well-fed ,well-off, underworked & over-praised teenage boys have.
The sort of day-dreams you have when mom and dad wait on you hand and foot and you grow up thinking the whole world is your oyster.
Spoil your child and he will end up, inevitably, spoiling your world - your whole world, from the top of the atmosphere to the bottoms of the ocean.
If our teenage sons still have these wet dreams when they grow up, then the world knows them Modernists ( or Republicans or Soviets or Fascists or Progressives.)
However, rather like the Pharisee said long ago, "I thank God that I am not a Modernist ---- I am a Commensalist..."
When Modernity said MAN above Nature, they meant it ...
Modernists did (and still do) see women,children ,natives, savages,primitives, animals, ethnic minorities, the 'defective' and pretty well everybody else but themselves as part of Nature, far, far, far below them.The MAN bit I mean.
Michael Marshall
If you plug in 'well-off' ,'powerful', 'but still angry' ,'old', 'white' ,'protestant', 'males' you pretty well have the sort of MAN that still ,still, thinks he is not part of Nature but flying in a sort of reverie/haze/daze miles above it.
In his mind.
And I mean that literally not figuratively - these guys sorta, half, admit that their bodies are part of sordid, damp, sticky, icky, Ole Nature.
But their minds, their minds !!!
Their pure Platonic , all-seeing, all-hearing, all-knowing, minds.
They are not part of part of Nature, but rather live in a parallel universe of mathematics, logic, rationality, utilitarianism .
Cool, calculating ,un-emotional, un-sentimental Man.
This is the sort of wet dream that all well-fed ,well-off, underworked & over-praised teenage boys have.
The sort of day-dreams you have when mom and dad wait on you hand and foot and you grow up thinking the whole world is your oyster.
Spoil your child and he will end up, inevitably, spoiling your world - your whole world, from the top of the atmosphere to the bottoms of the ocean.
If our teenage sons still have these wet dreams when they grow up, then the world knows them Modernists ( or Republicans or Soviets or Fascists or Progressives.)
However, rather like the Pharisee said long ago, "I thank God that I am not a Modernist ---- I am a Commensalist..."
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