Enraptured by Platonic delusions,the Modernity Project imagined Life to be basically stabilizable and hence oriented to the K-selected and the Very Large.
Ironically,but appropriately, when Project "BIG" finally fell, it was brought down by the smallest imaginable of opponents.
Martin Henry Dawson was actually a rather typical scientist in his willingness to pique Peak Modernity.
He did so because of his faith that his new Science was a more accurate interpretation of the world than their old Science -- that's pretty conventional scientific behavior.
It was the steel of this new belief that added backbone to his Jello-like conventional morality.
This steel encouraged him not to be content to simply regret the wrongs done to the weak during the war as 'horrible but necessary' , as so many American do-gooders did.
It led him to fight, with his dying breath, to improve the plight of the weak -- even if that meant taking on all his colleagues and his all-powerful federal government.
Yes he was a 'good person', a very good person --- but he also was a good scientist.
His chosen pique , ie Old French for prick/ needle/syringe, was only about .002 microns wide, the width of a strand of his transformation material (aka HGT DNA).
But while it was very small, it also went very deep; deep into the heart of Charles Darwin's predictable biological world of
Vertical Gene Transfers that fueled the certitudes of Social Darwinism and Eugenics & Biopolitics.
Equally small were the Anti-Matter fragments of Paul Dirac's
Sea that did so much to toss out the bland certitudes of John Dalton's vision of a predictable world.
Dawson and Dirac were basically ignored by mainstream science when they announced their discoveries in the early 1930s.
Neither, frankly, was the sort of charismatic personality that fire up a scientific audience with soaring phrases and visions.
But by 1945, Modernity - once given its oats in a war it could finally call its own - found that its predictable world was not in fact very predictable at all.
Slowly, for Science really only changes when enough Professors Emeritus die; slowly, slowly scientists began to see that Dawson and Dirac had better described Reality than Darwin and Dalton had ever done.
To today's leading-edge scientists, MO (Modernity) has indeed gone CO (Commensality) .
Our world is not something we can predict and control by Big exclusive projects, but it is something we can survive in, if we display the flexibility and inclusivity of the small.
HGT is the model Humankind must emulate if we are to survive and endure on this planet that Modernity's projects have so messed up.
We can all help MO go CO.....
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Project "BIG" brought down by the smallest imaginable opponents...
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martin henry dawson,
mo goes co,
peak modernity
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- 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...
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