The Manhattan Engineering District aka The Manhattan Project aka The Bomb, was the biggest scientific project of WWII and indeed one of the biggest of all time.
In addition, it was one of the biggest engineering/manufacturing projects of the war.
By contrast, Martin Henry Dawson's wartime project, also set in Manhattan but sprouting no name at all, was one of the smallest projects of the war.
Deliberately small, in many ways.
Dawson sought to establish the absolute Right of LIFE for everyone in America - even the 4Fs of the 4Fs, even in the middle of a Total War.
Despite the small size of his project, despite the fact that he was dying of a disease that literally sapped all his energy, he succeeded where many other better funded, better connected social activists failed.
I suggest this was because his Jello-like conventional morality had the firm backbone of Dawson's understanding of new science discoveries that he had made.
He saw his numerous and powerful opponents as basing their appeals to him (to desist his project) on old and outdated scientific understandings , and so he could not and would not be moved.
If we base our morality on how we understand the ultimate realities and we see those ultimate realities through the Lens of Science, then when our scientific understanding changes so will our morality - with powerful consequences.
Our world and the world of 1942 looks very different: Dawson isn't the whole reason, but he's a mighty good place to start....
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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...
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