1945's choices : the Modern exclusionary values that gave us Auschwitz or the post Modern values that gave us 'Public Domain' penicillin ?

In early 1945, two Manhattan doctors had dueling visions of the possible world ahead.

The prominent one, Foster Kennedy ,  wanted to kill all babies with developmental issues.

The unknown other, Henry Dawson, wanted all babies in the world to have access to cheap, abundant (Public Domain) penicillin.

By the end of 1945, the unknown Dawson was dead but - perhaps surprisingly - his idea lived on after him.


Because, with the beginnings of  public revulsion over the revelations of Auschwitz doctors and children coming out of the Nuremberg trials, it was clear that Dawson had won most of the educated public over to his vision.

And this only a few years after public polls indicated that the majority of the educated public favoured Foster Kennedy's murderous proposals instead.

Dawson's unstinting efforts to make wartime penicillin truly inclusive had greatly shortened his life, but clearly they hadn't been totally in vain ....

post Modern age ushered in by baby's whimper, not Bomb's bang

Two 'Booms' occurred in 1945 : which was more important ?

It was the year 1945, all historians seem to agree , that ushered out the Modern age and ushered in the post Modern age : and ushered it in with some sort of a bang.

But what sort of bang : was it the secretive Manhattan Project's Atom Bomb big Boom !!! ?

Or was it the smallest Manhattan Project's inclusive vision of penicillin priced and available for all , a vision that encouraged women all over the world to see a brighter future ahead and gave them reason to want to get pregnant ?

Was it then the penicillin-and-good-health fueled Baby Boom that really ushered in our current age ?

Was an old age ushered out by a newborn baby's contented whimper ?

That's sort of my take : yes, revulsion against yesterday's exclusionary values that gave us Auschwitz.

But also gratitude for today's inclusionary values that gave us  'cheap and abundant penicillin for all' , with its promise of a healthy childhood ahead for most newborn children.....

The smallest Manhattan project had the BIGGEST impact : the irony of 75 years on ...

With the hindsight of 75 years on, for the Modern Age 1945 turned out to be "the best of times and the worst of times" , its apogee and  its nadir.

The triumph of the biggest Manhattan Project : America's exclusive patent on the ability to synthesize and destroy the atomic building blocks of reality, seemed to demonstrate how potentially profitable the total control of Nature could be.

By contrast, the smallest Manhattan Project seemed a throwback to an earlier age.

It went back to Nature and to the penicillium mold to provide a medical miracle and then compounded this affront to the modern ethos by inclusively and cheaply offering it to all :  to the poor, to the tired and to the huddled.

But if exclusivity and the synthetic were the hallmark of the Modern Age, our present age always seeks the greatest possible inclusivity and much prefers the natural over the artificial.

Perhaps then, in one of history's frequent ironies, 1945's smallest Manhattan Project turned out to have had the biggest impact after all......

The irony of 1945's twin triumphs ...

1945 was , on any account, an extraordinary year, not the least for its twin scientific triumphs.

At the time, it was almost universally held that the Man-made Bomb was the way of an atomic future so bright we'd have to wear shades .

By contrast, 1945's new Microbe-made medicine (natural penicillin) was viewed as but a temporary anomaly, a dusty throw back to the outdated caldron practises of medieval midwives.

But more than a half century later we are no longer so sure of all of this.

Atomic energy has not at all fulfilled its early promise.

Meanwhile, microbiology and biotechnology (descendants of 1945's natural-produced penicillin) have far outshot their 1945 rival, synthetic chemistry.

So today, with 20/20 hindsight, while 1945 can still feel like the apogee of the Modern age,it is also revealed as its very nadir.

Because 1945 is now seen as the birthday of our present post-Modern age.

In which case, Henry Dawson's twin follies of advocating on behalf of small individuals and on behalf of small microbes can be seen as promoting a distinguishing hallmark of postmodernity.

For few of us, under the age of eighty, devote much energy these days to replacing our current rainbow of many small cultures with a return to yesterday's dreary unitary monoculture of constipated WASP-dom.....

Are the small just a tiny part of the Modern past or a vital part of the Postmodern future ?

Two hundred years from the event, historians will be telling classrooms that when it comes to exam time, they should remember that WWII boiled down to just one issue.

One - scientific - issue.

Were the small to be considered just a tiny part of Modernity's dusty past or were they to be a vital part of the (postmodern/multi-coloured) future ?

In early 1939 , on one side was virtually all of the world's educated.

On the other, was Henry Dawson : and that was his folly.

By late 1945 , Henry Dawson was dead and gone and so his current opinion was irrelevant.

But many of the world's younger educated had moved - under the course of many events - one begun by Henry himself - to doubt their parents' and grantparents' position on the matter.

For if the smartest pundits of the war's end were sure that 1945 represented the apogee of modern bigness , by about 1978 leading commentators are just as sure it actually represented Modernity's nadir and the birth of our present day Postmodernity.

But Dawson's all-out efforts to defend the small under the assault of WWII values caused his premature death, so he wasn't around in his mid-eighties to enjoy his vindication.

That to was his folly ; or his eternal glory ...

"Penicillin : Just in Time" , a movie just waiting to be made

Too bad so many books, movies and TV shows force us to remember how WWII ended with a bang over a city in Japan, with tens of thousands of young mothers and babies burning to death in the streets below.

Because WWII also ended with a whimper, in a city in the Netherlands, and this time with a young mother snatched from death , just in time, and her new baby happily and noisily whimpering at her breast.

Her salvation was stolen from Allied government stores and wafted gently down to her, strictly on the QT, via a RAF issued handkerchief used as a makeshift parachute, from a bomber riding shotgun above her nation.

Life-saving Natural Penicillin , the only truly Good News story of WWII,  just won't have happened during WWII,  if not for a few brave souls.

A few with the moral courage and the intellectual courage (and in one case, the  physical courage) to stand up to doubting colleagues and censuring government bureaucrats and who were willing to break laws and steal penicillin, to do what was right and to try and save lives while there was still time to do so.

A few brave souls can indeed change our whole world, for the better, forever....

1945 : as apogee AND nadir of Modern Science

Hitler may have successfully convinced his most rabid followers that the murder of every last Jew in Europe was a fitting consolation prize for his failure to deliver up western Russia as the new frontier for the Aryan super race in 1941.

But the rest of humanity regarding Auschwitz as a particularly (and peculiarly)  modern and scientific crime made it particularly hard for modern scientists in the rest of the world to present their continuing support of eugenics as the public face of postwar biology.

Still Auschwitz in the end proved a godsend to Oswald Avery's 1944 reductionist claims that Free Will didn't really exist but was simply manipulated by the chemical workings of a simple molecule called DNA.

Thanks to DNA, the old science of eugenics, ( ie its old positive program, along with a reduced version of its old negative program (now to be limited to families agreeing, semi-voluntarily, to the abortions of genetically 'damaged' foetuses) could carry on as before, but as the new science of DNA genetics.

DNA thus joined Atom-busting and Penicillin as three of the biggest triumphs of Modern Science, the three big Plan As that had emerged during WWII, if not all  as actual products of that war.

But let us look at these claims more closely.

 Atom-busting and atomic re-arranging is a natural event, discovered, rather than invented, by Modern Scientists.

It is based upon the discovery in 1896 (the same year that Henry Dawson was born) of natural radioactivity.

This is an event that is totally random and totally anti-deterministic ; we still have no idea when and why an individual atom breaks into two or more pieces.

I would thus take natural radioactivity as anti-modern, post modern, science at its most characteristic because it refutes one of three cornerstones of  all Modern Science : strong determinism .

This holds not just that every thing has a cause as to by it happens, but also that humans can discern that cause and then manipulate it to our advantage.

Another cornerstone of modern science is reductionism.

In the weak version of genetic reductionism, the one that we virtually all hold, it was already known by everybody before 1944, that whatever a gene was, at the bottom it had to exist as some arrangement of atoms.

(By contrast, strong genetic reductionism (chemical eugenics), as held by Avery, holds that once we know how those atoms are arranged, we can predict whether or not a girl will agree to date a particular boy.)

Viewed in this light, we might do well to remember that DNA manipulation was not invented by humans, but rather was only discovered by them  ---- and discovered by medical doctors, not geneticists.

Those medical doctors, led , above all, by Henry Dawson, discovered that some bacteria (intellectually as far from the mind of the modern scientist as can be) easily manipulate DNA in ways directly contrary to the Central Dogma of Biology and Genetics that genetic inheritance in vertical forward only.

(This vertical inheritance is the view that all that we are or can ever be , came directly from our (past) parents and their parents, an inheritance that is always strictly limited to remaining within our own species.)

In fact, microbes ( bacteria, viruses,sub-viruses, together with the smallest plants and animals are happy to snip DNA from here and drop it there, willy nilly : horizontal inheritance, HGT, across species, genus and families.

This is the major source for most of the real interesting genetic variety, including why all the world's bacteria can become resistant to a new drug in just ten years.

HGT is another 'difficult-to-get-your-head-around-if-you-have-High-School-Science', postmodern scientific concept, but it was guised in 1945 as another Plan A from Modern Science.

Penicillin was not invented like the totally synthetic sulfa drugs that proceeded it but rather it is produced by incredibly tiny fungus factories smaller than the eye can see.

Henry Dawson - again - led the way in proposing and using natural penicillin today over obtaining synthetic penicillin - maybe - tomorrow.

 But the chuzpha-bound men of modern science, naturally, tried to "point-to-with-pride" to the large stainless steel human factories that (nominally) held the smaller fungus factories doing all the work, as the source of our penicillin : just another Plan A of Modern Science.

Cheek !

In fact Chemistry, the Queen of the Sciences until 1945, faded after the war as a direct result of the rise of postmodern science of microbiology ---- directly as a result of the failure of  wartime synthetic chemists to make penicillin and most other antibiotics.

So much of modern science's triumphs of 1945 can just as readily be shown to be the anti-modern triumphs of postmodern science....

Modernity dies in an Adorno Moment : 1939-1945

Between  April 30th 1939 (when the New York's World Fair opened) and the November 20th 1945 (when the Nuremberg Trials opened) a lot of water (together with a lot of blood and brains) flowed under one of Modern civilization's few remaining un-bombed bridges :  call it WWII.

If  to the bemused Theodor Adorno, New York's fair was Modernity's bizarre apogee , he also saw Nuremberg's trials as Modernity's appalling nadir.

But I doubt that even Adorno and his co-conspirator Max Horkheimer had really expected Modernity to soar , burn and crash just that quickly.

Yet it clearly happened. Few people doubt that our new Age of post-Modernity can not be precisely dated to very late in the year of 1945.

Just as very few people deny that the opening of New York's World Fair of 1939 captured the absolute peak of Modernist optimism and hubris.

Now WWI also resulted in dramatic change all around the world.

But I would argue that while the surface of Modernity in 1919 was readily and intensely cracked all over, the deep superstructure actually held stronger than ever.

People often see WWI's dramatic results as the results of long standing tensions, buried below the surface, suddenly precipitating in a crisis situation.

Perhaps : tensions buried under the surface, but not that deeply buried.

By contrast, the surface of immediately post WWII Modernity didn't crack at all but actually burnished all the brighter ("Better Science won the War"), but deep down inside , the moral core of Modernity had lost its appeal to the young.

Modernist elders simply didn't seen their own self-inflicted wounds and so did nothing to reduce its shock upon their young.

As a result, the assault on their children's and grandchildren's moral certitudes was all the more stunning due to their elders' failure to genuinely reflect upon the meaning of the events of 1945.

But demographically, the rot had truly set in and it was now only a matter of time ------ and of baby booms ----  and of funerals....

The promise of Penicillin : the only good news to ever come out of The Bad News War

Six long years later and in a very different world from what they had so confidently predicted they'd be in, back in 1939, the Allied world celebrated that they had won.

(Those of the world - the majority - who had remained neutral during some or all of the moral battle against Hitler's evil chimed in that they had helped, too, by killing this latter day Kaiser with their mouths.)

More accurately, the Allies had survived : calling it 'winning' was going more than a bit too far.

The Soviet Empire was in ruins, with its population base and physical superstructure permanently damaged.

Its 1939 belief that the capitalist nations would fight it out during WWII, while the Soviets stayed neutral awaiting the inevitable triumph of a wonderful world of Communism was revealed to be hopelessly wrong.

Its buoyant pre-war self confidence in the rightness of the Soviet cause was pretty well gone by 1947.

Over the next 45 years, it slowly, slowly, slowly slip down into third world conditions by the time the empire formally imploded in 1992.

The British Empire of 1939 - holding 25% of the world - the biggest and richest ever seen - began formally collapsing much earlier, in fact the day Labour was elected in July 1945.

But for many Britons and their world-wide admirers, the bounce had gone out of the Anglo strut around the time of the Fall of Singapore.

America in 1939 had said it had no Empire and wished only to live apart and above the worldly fray.

It instead ended up as the world's policeman - at such a high cost in terms of money and moral certitudes - that is still dragging itself ever downwards today.

But let's rehearse all the good things that came out of of WWII , at least as 1945 saw it.

Victory ( see above) .

Jet planes - jet fighter planes with radar , atomic bombs, proximity fused shells  and napalm.

Rockets - with atomic bombs.

Nuclear powered submarines - armed with atomic missiles.

Cheap ,clean power from atomic power plants. Energy too cheap to meter, with radiation levels too low to monitor.

Plastics, lots of plastics and other synthetic chemicals.

Chemical insecticides - based on nerve gas and the gases used at Auschwitz.

The United Nations for peace - with an absolute veto over any possible action for peace  handed over to the only nations powerful enough to cause a serious war.

And penicillin.

Penicillin and other life-saving antibiotics.

That's my case .

Please add your choices for the best news out of WWII in the comment section below.....

Evolution of tanks - like the Evolution of Life - is all about compromises and niches

Reality is so varied and changing (in ways we humans will never ever be able to totally control or predict) that Evolution continuously throws up many successful ("fittest") evolving life forms to fill its many and evolving niches.

I was reminded, again,  of this while reading of the terrifying battles around the Vistula River in the winter of 1945 between German Tiger II tanks and Soviet T-34 tanks.

The long gun and excellent optical sight of the Tiger II was so good it could accurately destroy the enemy's main battle tanks from distances of up to 2.5 miles ; something today's best tanks would be hard pressed to match.

High speed shells from a long gun barrel leave in a fast straight line,  thus being both accurate and able to punch through thick armour, but normally both these qualities fall off quickly at increasing distances.

Close up, shorter guns firing slower shells can punch through medium thick armour with sort of acceptably accuracy.

To combat this, the Tiger II had very thick armour all around, particularly in the front, making them hard to destroy at even short distances, but also making them very slow and heavy on the ground.

But on cold hard ground they moved quickly enough and turned about quickly enough and so were able to destroy T-34s at a safe distance and get to any new locations where they were needed to stop break throughs dead.

Then the weather got warmer - now man and tank on both sides had a new misery.

They were warmer ,yes, but now their boots or tank tracks got stuck in the mud.

It proved fatal for the Tiger IIs. Fittest in the older - cold weather - niche - they proved to be unfit for the mud niche.

With the Tiger IIs stuck fast in mud due to their heavy weight, the lighter T-34s nimbly moved in behind then and destroyed them at close range through the Tiger II's thinner rear armour.

In a niche of mud, they were - temporarily - the fittest.

Despite the reality of no one size fits all, modernist armies still dreamed of producing all-arounder tanks, the "fit" for all situations instead of the "fittest for particular situations".

It is relatively easy to produce tanks with big long guns, immense armour, high speed, "low to the ground-ness" and great traction off road.

But as a result they consume lots of fuel and so have short range and a high rate of mechanical breakdowns in rough terrain : heavy and fast means pushing the finite metal strength limits of transmissions, tracks and engines.

Their weight and size makes it hard to haul them back to the rear for safe repair over wartime's normally terrible road conditions and impossible for them to cross small bridges , or be put on planes, many trains or most transporter trucks.

And they really don't like mud : their tracks are made as wide as possible to defeat mud issues given their great weight of armour and gun -- but too wide in the tracks department and their speed and fuel usage suffers.

They are ponderously might yes, but nimbly mite they are not.

And like all machines, they just sit there when out of gas - human soldiers can keep on fighting without food, their bodies wasting down to supply the missing energy.

But tanks without fuel can't waste down their armour to provide fuel and just sit there useless.

Before the Vistula battle actually began, some of the German tanks were moved into position, without using any petroleum fuel, to be used "hull down" as pillboxes, hauled there under a layer of hay by teams of Polish horses.

The mite Polish horses ambled their way to the front lines, eating their fuel along the roadside as they went : slowly and neatly confounding the German mighty....

"Triumph of the SCIENTIFIC Will" : WWII scientists as 'swimmers into technical sweetness leaping'..

Sure, sure: Hitler, Mussolini ,Tojo and Stalin and all that lot started the war, but it took the collective will of the world's best scientists and engineers to build their visions up into History's bloodiest, most heart-less war.

It was the scientists' war, the only truly Modernist war, the war of their big shiny machines . Scientism's big moment under the Klieg Lights.

It was Science's incautious pre-war claims that moved the politicians and the generals and the industrialists and - above all - the ordinary public of all nations to fund the killing machines --- in preference to returning  to the foot soldier led wars of earlier times.

Of course in the end, we never saw the scientists in the box in Nuremberg in 1945 : because many many more of us, back then, saw 1945 as the apogee of Modernist science rather than its death knell and the birth of post-modernity.....

Penicillin : from Modern to ante-Modern in six bloody years

The biggest battle of WWII was NOT Stalingrad ( physically huge but intellectually a mere bun fight between History's worst dictators) but rather the battle over wartime penicillin : who makes it and who receives it.

For WWII definitely had a 'war within a war' aspect to it .


The billions of individuals who made up the modern global civilization of 1939 had six long - bloody  - years to re-evaluate whether the core values of their culture were really worth dying for, or were they only good for starting aggressive wars  - but not the sort of values for ending aggressive wars and securing permanent peace.

The New York World's Fair of 1939 promised a total world of man-made-ness but in the case of penicillin, man-made-ness ended in abject failure and it was Mother Nature that brought us this wonder drug when Man proved to be 'not up for the job'.

The world of 1939 eugenically exalted the Big and the Mighty and denigrated the weak and the small : penicillin (once it was a perfectly pure crystal shining brighter than a thousand suns) would be distributed on strictly Darwinian lines.

It would not be made in such quantities that would require the Allies to make one less bomber or battleship : so it would have to be rationed and so would go only to the eugenically 1A people .

(Be they fighting in foreign combat lines or winning the war behind some important desk in London or Washington.)

But by 1945, those same bombers were being pulled off their jobs of riding shotgun over the NRA nation and converted into butterflies to deliver life-saving grams of Nature-made penicillin to the dying all over the world : regardless of age, color, gender and economic status.

1945 was indeed the year that baby "Baby Boomers" started entering a very new , ante-Modern world......

1943 : Schindler's list versus America's non-list

wartime HOLOCAUST reports ignored by public

1993 : Fifty years after adult America first learned about the killing of millions of  European Jews - and did nothing about it - a new adult America was ready to turn a film about efforts to save some of those Jews into a massive movie hit.

Why not ?

 After all the vast bulk of those millions of film goers were under the age of 55* in 1993. In 1943, they were either tiny children or not even alive when their parents and grandparents first knew about the mass killing ---- but did nothing.

Their conscience, unlike those of their parents and grandparents, was perfectly clear and they felt free to watch the movie without severe attacks of regret and guilt.

If you were ten or older in June 1942, Schindler's List probably made you at least a bit uneasy....

But few Americans ( or Canadians or Britons, etc ) over the age of 55 in 1993 were so lucky.

They were old enough to remember the promises of Modernity before the events of Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and the Katyn Forest brought all those certitudes into question.

Modernity suffered a mortal body blow during WWII , in 1945 in particular.

But with most people over the age of 15 in 1945 in some way implicated in supporting the values of Modernity that had led to these events, only time and the deaths it produced, were likely to see Modernity seriously challenged .

The youngest people of Modernity were just starting to leave the workforce in 1993 and so Modernity's people were finally losing their hold on the reins of power.

Reduced it but did not eliminate it : as owners, authors, columnists, scholars, voters, they still did have a considerable but ever diminishing ability to impede a new hegemony, if no longer able to direct the old hegemony.

Today in late 2012, almost 20 years after the release of the movie, anyone under 75 is likely to watch Schindler's List without the twinge of personal conscience.

Pre-war Modernity still has its billions of fans - but they are not  there at the time, so they can only admire from second hand and I believe its hold on their emotions is thus correspondingly far less strong......

* I think anyone born in 1937 or 1938 or late , ie under the age of about 7 or 8 in the Fall of 1945  is unlikely to have read the wartime daily papers or follow the nightly wartime radio news, with their steady if very low key presentation of reports detailing reported mass killings of Jews and others.

By way of pointed contrast, young Philip Roth born in early 1933 and later a famous novelist, does remember those reports very well.

the contested CLIMATES of post-hegemonic Modernity

Post-1945's competing, parallel, Hegemonies

The events of late summer and fall of 1945 gave quite a shock to Modernity - the underlying hegemonic worldview that lay behind ALL the competing ideologies of the war.

Modernity took quite a kicking - but kept on ticking, at least nominally.

The division, traditional since 1889, between the Left and the Right, hung on until after its 100th birthday in 1989, after which it refused any nourishment and died.

But all along and underneath, glacially slow but steady changes had been occurring along a broad front.

the Seventy Five Year reversal

In 1937, I think it would be fair to say that in America at least, most regarded the worst universities and the worst professors as being against Modernity while the best universities and best professors were regarded as being strongly for it.

By 2012, 75 years later, it is widely regarded that the reverse is true.

Our best universities are post modernist and even anti modernist - particularly in their basic science and humanities departments.

By contrast, Modernity survives in the run-of-the-diploma-mill type universities out in the more isolated parts of middle and southern America, particularly among the applied sciences.

Where ever Protestant fundamentalism and evangelicalism of the oldest sort flourishes, so does Modernist Science.

Bryant would be Amazed

William Jennings Bryant would be amazed - as should all students of the inexplicable.

But in fact 1875 marked both the decline, as well as the beginnings, of public Scientism based on the self-confident science of Newton, Dalton and Darwin.

Discoveries in the most basic sciences were starting to undermine  faith - but only among the most free-thinking -  in the certitudes of Newtonian Scientism --- at least among among basic scientists in the universities.

But Newtonian Scientism, if losing ground inside the Beltway of peer-reviewed science, was gaining far more ground in the non-peer-reviewed world of popular science, outside in the greater world.

Scientism had many - genuine - successes

Newtonian and Daltonian science was fuelling the tremendous successes of technology and engineering and invention between about 1865 to 1945 - a tremendous 80 year run.

 Particularly in those truly awesome years between 1872 and 1912.

These successes made the world we still live in today ; a world vastly different, overnight, from the relatively unchanged world humanity had lived for tens of thousands of years.

Our world in the 100 years since the end of Scientism's most powerful surge of creativity and productivity has seen only incremental improvements - and yes I include the Internet in that.

So Modernity and Scientism has reasons to be cocky --- but as usual, Hubris is a very hard genie to put back into the bottle once taken out for a stroll.

Scientism's biggest failure : WWII

Its efforts to extend these real successes into all areas of human activity produced ultimately the horrors of World War II and beyond.

But that lay in the future. For now, it reigned secure in politics, business and economics, the military, among the media, among the applied sciences in physical sciences and social sciences.

It was very strong among socialists and all people who thought themselves progressives (of all stripes) and in the art world and among the avant garde.

Its biggest opponents were a very large but relatively powerless group of religiously-minded people : catholic priests united with rural protestant preachers and the orthodox of all world faiths.

Its most worrisome critics were tiny in number - but disconcerting in origins - the well educated, upper middle class children of Modernist parents who choose 'to go back to the land' - the Nearings and GK Chesterton are probably among  the best known.

But the events of late 1945 changed all that : the number of critics of modernist science grew ever steadily among the basic hard physical scientists and among the counter-culture tribe.

Today's powerful - parallel - dual hegemonies

Almost seventy years on, we have two separate but powerful hegemonies inhabiting the same small planet.

Modernity is still dominant among the politically,economically, militarily powerful but weak among those who are intellectually and culturally powerful.

A billionaire doesn't really need a billion dollars a year to feel well off and he knows it.

 He sees a professor living on $80,000 a year and is jealous because that woman is living as well off as him, but in addition has great intellectual prestige -- while he is regarded as just a former gas jokey who got lucky and made $17 billion from his clever new idea in fuel distribution technology.

His friends at the club feel he is smart - but why doesn't the world agree?

He is smart. But his company is also one of America's leading CO2 polluters and so he is both clever in terms of 19th century scientism and yet dumb in terms of 21st century commensalist science.

Global Commensality Science triumphs in peer-review

Global Commensality science is equally frustrated - it knows its basic science is correct but it hasn't yet got a chance to deliver the technology innovations that would show life would be much happier in a post-modernist scientific world.

However, the growing number of the wealthy, well educated ,young who deliberately choose to live in the central sections of big cities and and then deliberately walk everywhere, has to be seen as a leading edge of an upcoming change.

The well connected/globally wired but walkable, densely populated, compact city does seem to point to a new emerging hegemony, as yet unnamed.....

newest kids on the block: EARTHLINGS

500 years of Skygods
Skygods have been around for 500 years, if not thousands of years, miners of the Earth, its cut 'n' run artists.

But Earthlings are genuinely new - growing gradually in numbers since the end of WWII, with three prominent growth bumps in 1945, 1955 and 1965.

V-2 ballastic rockets and the A-Bomb convinced America's leading Air Force commander Hap Arnold that under Modernity, war had changed profoundly.

1945: 36 Hour War
This in turn led Life Magazine, in the Fall of 1945, to do a special feature on a 36 hour war totally destroying New York, based on nuclear tipped rockets launched from Africa. No hemisphere was any longer free from the horrors of total war.

Combine this with the revealed horrors of Modernity's Eugenics at Auschwitz, and we see the ushering-in of the beginnings of our post-hegemonic age: Modernity no longer had the uncontested support of  middle class humanity.

1955: Fallout from Operation Castle Bravo
It was the world's first true H-Bomb test and its most famous: fallout from this American test in a remote Pacific atoll first killed a Japanese fisherman a 1000 km from the site, then mixed into the atmosphere to fall onto food all over the world.

Our bodies prefer to take up fallout's deadly Strontium 90 atoms, over those of  life-giving calcium.

 Once permanently installed in our bones, they ignited (the then always fatal) childhood leukemia.

Like the plagues brought to us by Modernity's rapid new international jet travel breaking glacial national quarantines, it once again reminded us that no spot on Earth was remote enough to be safe from events in any other part of it.

1965: No Life - Ever - on Mars or Venus : This is Life's only Lifeboat
In 1965, we began getting accurate scientific measurements from the atmospheres and surfaces of Mars and Venus - our only likely alternative homes to Earth.

 Hard Science Fiction, the porn of Modernity, had fed us delusions for 100 years that we could ruin Earth and then move easily to Earth 2.0 on Mars or Venus. No more: both were revealed as cold and hot versions of  'Hell On Wheels' .

The hippie, alternative, counter-culture, green, environmental , global-commensalist movement began in earnest : EARTHLINGS....

Celebrating the UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES of 50 years of right wing elite levelling : 1964-2014

 Goldwater Affect

Starting at the 1964 San Francisco Republican National Convention, right wingers world wide have wage an unrelenting almost 50 year long  war to 'level' left wing elites, as they understand them.

Time perhaps, to see what has been achieved..... and at what cost to the right wing itself.

1945 Annus Mirabilis

It is fair to say that in early 1945, the right wing globally was Hegemonic ; we saw the world through their ideological eyes and we were basically respectful to all elites - and the right, of course, occupied most of the seats at the table of the elect.

So we respected them above all.

But the rapidly post-hegemonic world that emerged at the end of 1945 troubled the previously hegemonic Right most of all.

 Reds Under The Bed

At first, their response was to blame it on hardline communists at home and abroad, but by 1964 they began to see that their real enemy was social-cultural not military-political and was coming from softline left-liberals.

Clinton vs Kennedy

Right wingers threw off centuries of deference to elites , even to elites not of their own tastes and vociferously exposed the post-1964 sex life of President Clinton in a way they never did for the pre-1964 President Kennedy ---- though Kennedy was probably more sexually active outside marriage than Clinton.

But a rising tide of elite levelling - intended only for left-liberal elites - levels all elites.

Ironic "Backfire",  50 Years Later

Ironically we can credit today's sexual, ethnic and religious liberations to the hard righters of the Goldwater Convention.

The Right would not be so beleaguered today, if its attack dogs hadn't given permission for all sorts of levellers to attack elites.

In the cultural chaos of our post-hegemonic world, media forces , once unleashed, wander as they will.

When most of the world's elites are right wingers, any sort of levelling talk is like speaking of rope in a house of a man about to be hung...

I know nothing - I hope - about academic post-hegemony

I find reading academic works on post-hegemony feels like being fracked in the butt by a sociology thesis - the jargon will tear your insides out like nothing else can.

All I believe is that something very important happened in 1945, after 500 years of stability.

Modernity didn't die but it was wounded, its hegemony assailed - one could fancy you could even heard its last breaths.

Post-modernity didn't replace modernity, but it was birthed that year and one could almost hear its faint first yelps.

So, nope, no shiny brand new hegemony dominating the high ground, replacing the earlier hegemony.

That is a very modernist notion and feels almost quaint to say in 2012.

Instead we see competing hegemonies occupying different parts of that high ground - an concept that itself is typically post-modernist and 2012-up-to-dated.

So I am saying that pre-1945 Modernity survived almost unchanged,  but limited to areas such as politics, business, some applied sciences, among wealthy retirees - call them all 'the denier classes', from their position on climate change.

But they really deny any and all thought that there can ever be biological or material limits on man's will to do whatever he wants ---- and to correct quickly any mistakes he might very occasionally make.

They see themselves as Pierre-Simon LaPlace would - as skygods - high above Nature.

Post-1945 thinkers are usually but not always younger - they accept that there are limits to what Humanity can hope to do.

They accept we humans are deeply embedded in the web of life and that we must be global commensalists and share the Earth, because it is the only lifeboat in the Universe that Life has got.

Think of them as earthlings - particularly in relationship to their polar opposites - the skygods.

The earthlings dominate in areas like the life sciences, among greens and environmentalists - and among some of the young.

That is enough for you to know about post-hegemony as I see it.

I might attempt to describe hegemony of course - good luck !

It can be thought of  as when sincere opponents to a system of government or society nevertheless coach their opposition in terms that the government or society's elite have provided - the day in day out total emersion bath of schooling, media, political talk etc.

Successful hegemony isn't seen as an ideology - but as pure common sense and even as 'the way of nature' - unchangeable even if we wanted to change it.

1945 : the climatic Battle over MODERN synthetic penicillin vs POSTMODERN natural penicillin

    If we see Postmodernity as organic and natural, versus High Modernity's love for the synthetic and the man-made (and I think we all do) why then do we focus on 1945's Auschwitz and Hiroshima as the climatic revelations that signal the switch from the Era of Modernity to the Era of post-Modernity ?

    I have been doing a re-think in preparation for a talk I am giving about MH Dawson and his tiny team's approach to inventing "GP" penicillin and in fact their approach to all things weak and small, versus the thinking of his immense (and immense-oriented) opponents.
   It seems to me that we can see in the battle that Dawson and natural penicillin finally won in late 1945 against the forces for synthetic penicillin, led by the OSRD and Vannevar Bush & Newton Richards, the real roots of the Fall of Modernity and the Rise of the Post Modern, Globally Commensal, Age....

Don't waste your time scanning newspapers of 1945 for reports of MODERNITY's demise...

      The current view that 1945 was the year that Modernity died and Post-Modernity was born wasn't shared by many in that crucial year - at least not consciously.
     No doubt, at all, that many in 1945 were alarmed by modernity's latest 'triumphs' - but even more found those triumphs exhilarating in their potential.
    No, 1945 was established as the year that Post Modernity was born (for once, a curiously apt metaphor) by senior university historians picking suspects out of a police line-up after their university had been occupied and trashed, in May 1968.

    Long-haired protester after long-haired protester: it was soon evident that the vast bulk of them had awoken to life, after 1945.
     (Age ??? I'm 22. Hum, 1968 minus 22 equals 1946, again !)
    Baby-boomers, in another words, were leading the charge against all that most 1960s era senior professors held holy: progress and modernity.
   But what boom - merely the regular boom in pregnancies after every one of humanity's wars or could it just be, perish the impure thought, the babies born post the atomic boom ?
   Post the boom and smoke of Dresden ? Post the human smoke of Auschwitz ?
    Modernity's hegemony was broken in 1945 - yes ! - but among babies not yet born.
   By 1965 to 1973 however, they were fully ready to deny that hegemony and did so - in spades....
   So, a revision: Post Modernity was conceived in 1945, but it first started voting with its feet, in 1968.....

Science under the microscope: the old BIG question versus the new BIG question

   GCR is not at all interested in the old BIG question that animated so many researchers for so many years : how exactly are scientific discoveries  made ?
   The new BIG question for ordinary citizens/activists as well as for those academics in the areas of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the History and Philosophy of Science (HPST), is this:

 How exactly are scientific discoveries made popular ?

   Not made public, mark you well : how are they made popular - popular enough in some cases to overthrow the old paradigms of not just professional scientists but of all world culture.
   In particular, GCR is driven to find out why the startling discoveries made in science between 1895 and 1935 are still not popular science.
    Popular as in, 'found in public school teaching and textbooks' or as in 'found in the mindsets of politicians,newspaper editors and CEOs - not to mention their voters,readers and customers.'
  Why did it take the Apocalypse of 1945 to even begin the process of popularization?
   And if Modernity did fall in 1945 as 'everybody* claims', why is it still alive and well in the 2010s - in fact, a very fit competitor to its fresh young replacement - Global Commensality ?
   (*Albeit the Deniers yet have not addressed this question, but rest assured - when they do ,they will deny this consensus as well. )
   Peering through this historical prism, GCR tends to see the current debate between Deniers and Doomers as a re-hash of the old,old debate between Sky Gods and Earthlings, from the time of WWII...