Unfortunately for the rest of us, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Tojo all had a first rate science education at their gymnasiums (the advanced sort of high school common outside of North America) .
One that in their generation was reserved only for the elites destined to run the world in all fields of endeavour.
If these four became Jacob Burkhardt's much feared 'terrible simplifiers', we should lay much of the blame at the feet of their gymnasium science teachers who taught them everything there was to know about seeing reality through the terrible scientific lenses of simplicity.
But the steps from this sort of scientific education to becoming 'mass murderers in the name of science' is not inevitable.
Because Canadian Dr Martin Henry Dawson had a similar science education.
However, during in the lead up to WWII, he chose instead to become one of science's first complexifiers.
He announced over and over to a collective scientific yawn, that when it comes to modifying genetics, sometimes (and totally unexpectedly) the Last (the bacteria) came First, besting the efforts of science's smartest men in the universe....
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
No comments:
Post a Comment