As a religiously devote child in the Fifties, I somehow got the impression that WWII only ended because the penicillium fungus (David) was saving more kids than Civilization (Goliath) was capable of gassing or bombing.
As an adult, I realize now that I was not far wrong.
From opposing moral positions, Dr Henry Dawson's primitive penicillium and the advanced Auschwitz doctors, together, put the fatal 'post' into modernity.
And so, gradually, we collectively changed our minds. No longer did we believe biological progress to be linear --- and exclusively directed towards human 'civilization'. Instead it involved all creatures and proceeded in all directions.
But it seems that not everyone got the memo. Old guard believers in "man-centred" Progress are still around and still destroying this planet.
I believe my book about the Dawsonian revolution, about the 'other' Manhattan Project, is that true rarity : a page-turning Good News Story from that Bad News War.
And if re-telling it helps in any small way to forestall the rush to destroy this planet in the Sixth Extinction, so much the better...
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