'Riding the Tiger of Progress' - not Liberalism - was key meme of Modernity

For liberals to state that all people are born equal and that this is a condition that can neither be gained or lost, is to describe a static -  even tranquil - condition.

By contrast, the same liberals' idea of Progress sees all humanity as being born 'involuntary participants' in a series of life-or-death gladiator competitions ; Progress merely being Social Darwinism in its political correct dress-coat.

Life or death competitions where even the 'happy' winners are always looking back over their shoulders and where the losers believe they will lose their lives, in the long term if not in the short term.

So in the 1930s let's say, it was currently felt that the White race was winning over the Yellow race but that could change, if the Whites ever let down their guard for even a minute.

And within the White race of the 1930s, the Anglo Saxons were winning but the Jews were gaining, and so the Anglo Saxons must ever keep up their guard and even consider new counter measures.

While within the Jews, physically and mentally defectives were losing the intellectual race but winning the demographic race.

The idea of Progress is what allowed - is what allows - liberals to have their cake and eat it too : talk of equality but encourage a tigers' den of winners and losers.

But 'riding the tiger of progress' was uneasy work - and hence the Era of Modernity was noteworthy for its frequent communal pogroms of violence, fear and hatred against other 'gladiators' --WWII being merely the worst and best known....

As a political animal, I do tend to see Modernity as an ideology, not an Era

I freely admit, that as a longtime political animal (and as an Dal '80 political science graduate) I do tend to see the world through the glasses of 'political' ideologies.

That is, I see our internal/personal ways of viewing reality ultimately having sharp public/political (power/force/violence) consequences.

So, in many ways, JANUS MANHATTAN'S CHILDREN is as much a work of political science as it is of history.

This is because of its focus on WWII's shortfall between modernity's ideologies and physical reality.

This will encompass, just for example, examining the pre-WWII ideas about armies clashing vs WWII actual acted-out clash of physical armies vs post-WWII ideas about what did happen during those clashes.

War imagined (pre and post) versus War lived, to freely adapt Lucy Riall's definition of the new approach to biography in academic history.

History is particular good at going into German and Soviet archives and counting dead tanks to find out if Prokhorovka's reputed claim as the 'greatest tank battle in history' actually happened as publicly remembered.

While Political Science is excellent at determining what public/political capital that all the world's soldiers, politicians, deniers and video game designers made out of Prokhorovka's myth.

Similarly, conventional histories of WWII strategy are content to simply that the UK had less population and soldiers than Germany and so Britain was loath to invade Europe without American help.

But I intend to ask what private prejudices lay behind the Allied unwillingness to think of getting the 6 million strong volunteer dark-skinned Indian Army to invade occupied Europe --- instead of a waiting for a mere million white American conscripts instead ?

But I suspect that so strong is the hold of Modernity-cum-racism still upon the western mind that historians - even today - are loath to even think my suggestion can be taken seriously enough to be examined before being dismissed.

This is why I so adamantly reject the claim of Modernity 'merely' being a period in time (an Era), a period of time when the ideology of socialism/communism clashed with those of liberal/conservative capitalism and of fascism.

Instead I see these admittedly better known ideologies as being (during the Era of Modernity hegemony) absorbed into and completely affected by, the larger and newer supra-ideology of Modernity.

Similarly, in the hetro hegemony of today's Era of Postmodernity, these sub-ideologies along with that of the fading Modernity survive (all in altered postmodern forms) but all must compete against the fastest rising supra-ideology of Open Commensality....

Modern Era/Modernity: Matter/Anti-Matter

You have to admire the sheer audacity of Modernity as it sought a full compass rollback of the effects of the Modern Era, under the sheep's skin guise of daring to lead this counter-revolution under the name of Modernity !

Albeit it was a subconscious counter-revolution ---- all of its varied proponents went to their graves convinced they were furthering the pace of the Modern Era and merely working to destroy some of its dangerous foes.


So some of the Modern Era's most dangerous foes (and also its biggest supporters) were socialism, liberalism, communism, capitalism, fascism, democracy, totalitarianism.

Like some hair-brained firing squad, the entire world armed itself with intellectual rifles and formed a circle, with each ideology convinced that its opponent directly across the way was Modernity's worse enemy and the erstwhile 'friends' on either side of themselves were only a little bit better.

The Modern Era was notable for many things but it is possible to see that above all else was was truly new about it was the extreme mobility it brought to so many hitherto local human activities.

The increased reach, speed and universality of the flow in and out of local areas (and of entire sovereign nations) of capital, materials, products, patents, intellectual ideas, fashions and tastes, immigrants and warfare was extremely upsetting to most everybody at some time or other.

Reality now seemed seemed so complex, so diverse, so unpredictable, so rapidly changing as beyond human comprehension, let alone human control.

Modernity can thus be best seen as an intellectual claim that - contrary to this current false human sense about reality - a scientific study of Nature actually revealed that real reality was essentially simple, predictable and static, in uniformitarian equilibrium, and any change in it was so gradual as to appear invisible over the average human lifetime.

The Modern Era and Modernity were not one and the same train or even two trains running on parallel tracks, but two trains heading for a head-on wreck on the same track : WWI and WWII ....

Horse and Buggy Era political party "isms" vs today's new scientific reality : not up for the job ?

I am pro MULTIPLE choice !

Our electioneering rhetoric is, as always, as flexible as an Etch A Sketch ( big shout out to Mitt Romney !)


 But once in government, our party ideologies, those beloved "isms" of Liberalism, Conservatism and Socialism, are as rigid and unchanging today as at their birth 150 to 200 years ago - when the Horse and Buggy, not the Airbus A380, reigned supreme.

There you have our prolonged Global Climate crisis in a nutshell : Science has moved on in the 150 years since the exuberant Mid-Victorian Era and its naive optimism about Man's ability to control Reality, but our political "isms" remain locked in some dusty time warp.

By education, I am a political scientist, but my abiding interest is in physical science ---- but with the proviso that I view all science as political !

When I say Science has changed, I lie.

Oh yes, public (formally peer reviewed published) science has changed greatly since the 1860s : moving from an overwhelming emphasis on PRODUCTION science (science of the hubris-laden first law of thermodynamics) to a new emphasis on IMPACT science (science of the more-somber second law of thermodynamics).

But popular (aka public school science) science has not changed a pinch since the days of total Anglo Saxon Protestant dominance of science.

Newton, Dalton and Darwin still reign supreme and nothing of dour 20th century science, let alone that of the 21st century, dares stain the ever-optimistic laboratories and textbooks of your average high school science course.

Like Carthage, our current high school science boosterism 'must be destroyed' .

The writing and selecting of Public School textbooks ( physical and social science texts above all) are not really in the hands of teachers and scientists ---- they reveal instead the dead weight of the political-commercial elites who really run departments of education and district school boards.

All they ask of high school textbooks is that they are "uplifting" and "positive" (Service Club Boosterism science, as it were).

Ever more and more of that time-old Mid Victorian optimism that science can do almost anything and even if it (temporarily and locally) messes up ,science can also step in to fix the mess.

See it as a case of an ever more optimistic frantic whistling, past our current 'grave' climate graveyard.

If we truly want to save the planet and prevent global climate disaster, setting our sights and scopes on our truly God-awful high school science Babbitry would be an pretty good place to start......