Once upon a time, forces long thought to be in hot opposition to each other made a common bed together.
Political/economic elites united with scientific elites - and the two united in both private enterprise and in command economies such as Nazi Germany and the USSR.
They all shared a common vision and the few individuals opposed to that vision (for to claim the critics as 'forces' would greatly exaggerate their strength and unity of purpose) found little foothold among the public to share their reasoned opposition to that vision.
Huge, highly expensive and risky super-projects would be undertaken by the scientific elites, paid for by monies raised diverted by the political and economic worlds.
The rare unity across CP Snow's cultural divide and the even rarer willingness to divert monies into wild and wooly schemes happened because these super projects were judged essential for a nation-state's very survival, let alone also ensuring it remaining as a super nation in an age of super modernity and super men.
The apogee of this super or hyper modern faith in scientism was the New York World's Fair of 1939-1940.
My cohort (those born between 1940 and 1956) , the transitional cohort between modernity and the times after modernity, never knew first hand of the excited expectations thrown up by this famous fair.
But our parents, teachers and employers did ....
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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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