Pushing & Pulling Modernity's Terrible Simplifiers

In the 1880s, the competing successes of both branches of science --- the real world oriented applied and natural history folks and the lab-bound experimental theory-oriented natural philosophy folks - gave Modernity a doubly fierce intensity of purpose.

Fear complemented Hubris inside their minds.

Non-Aryans under Modernity : from ally to enemy to input

One can't imagine youthful (second generation) Nazi scientists being content with merely removing the hair, teeth and skin from all the world's 'unfit', before burning their bodies for fuel, in the manner it was done way back in papa's day.

Instead these 'impure' bodies would be burned in high tech, high temperature atomic refineries.

How HGT helped end Modernity

It is too frequently claimed, by tenured people well schooled in the logical and analytical skills of philosophy and who thus really shown know better , that postmodernity is all about relativism and modernity is all about absolutes.

But is this in anyway accurate ?

Synthesize anything, perfectly

The goal of modern scientism era synthesists was not to synthesize everything : in their minds 'everything' already existed : way too much of 'everything' ---- and none of it perfect.

October 1940 closing of the New York World's Fair & 'The World of Yesterday'

One can only imagine that after reading about or witnessing the exuberant optimism still omnipresent at the October 27th 1940 closing of the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair, many mommies and daddies apparently went straight to bed ... and made babies.

Lots and lots of babies.

How else to account for the world's near simultaneous Boom in Baby births a few months later in 1941---- this,  after a decade of steady decline ?

Scientism wins (and loses) WWII's victory legacy

Despite the many, many high tech weapons of death first used (and first perfected) in WWI, we still tend to recall it as a war of "elan" and of long lines of terribly brave doomed men charging machine gun posts with only their bayonets or horses.

By contrast, one can almost forget that there were any foot soldiers involved in the various famous victories of WWII, particularly among the victories of the western Allies and the Axis.

Environmentalism : HOPE, as well as fear ...

It is easy - too too easy - to credit fear, fear of Fifties nuclear war and fallout in particular, as the main reason for the Early Seventies worldwide rise of the Environmental Movement.

As one of those young 1950s Boomers who did join the formally organized environmental movement early in the 1970s and who now has a great interest in the history of the early days of the Environmental Movement,  may I beg to differ?

Not seeking tenure, I offer up only my memories as the primary archival source for my historical thesis.

1936 vs 1941 : modern and postmodern kids' birth dates mere 5 years apart

This shaggy shaggy dog story is really - eventually - about climate change, but for now lie back and try to imagine two senior citizens, raised in the same small North American city.

9.5 Theses about climate DENIERS

It is hard to nail something up , on the internet , but here it goes anyway :

(1) I believe - as a percentage - more Protestants than Catholics deny human climate change and that they do so more vehemently.

why focus on Allied FAILURES of WWII ?

Why not focus on the Axis failures of WWII ?

Why not, you say, use a sawed-off shotgun at short range on a big fish in a small barrel ?

Hum, tempting  - too tempting obviously for all the world's Rogue Boomers - people like Stephen Harper and Tony Abbott : 'we won the war, did nothing wrong, so no need to change nothing, carry on, business  as usual.'

Rogue Boomers with short noses are more than usually handicapped by nature - being so unable to see beyond the end of it.

All three sides* in WWII expected a short cheap war - and all sides were wrong : that is the real lesson of WWII : the naivete easy optimism of pre-war Modernity and Scientism was revealed to all - or rather should have been.

(*Because remember, for a shamefully long time, the majority of the world's population was not at Germany or Britain's side but rather was Neutral.)

We don't have to wait till the current climate change crisis plays out to drawn the needed lesson that there is no pointing denying that there are limits to human abilities to control unpleasant change.

We already had the lesson - and the exam - during the six bloody and long and disappointing years of WWII : when time and time again all sides were told that a technology breakthrough, a new superweapon, would end the war quickly, cheaply and painlessly.

The truth be known, the WWII traffic in super hero instant solutions between children's comic books and senior leaders' Minute books are unceasing ....

1939-1945, as a cure for overweening science ...

"The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly." - Abraham Lincoln 

In the end, it turned out that the only way to clip modernist science's wings were to let it fly : WWII was modernist science's first and thankfully, only, world war it fully commanded.

If  'commanded' is the right word for what actually transpired.

What an unholy, immoral, mess it was, too.

Six years later, even the partisans of modernist science cum scientism must have felt a bit more humble (though they never really recanted, not even on their deathbeds).

But fortunately, even they must eventually all die out and the generation after them, born 1940 or later, never really bought into modernist science's hubris-filled visions.

The period 1945 - 2015 marks a period of transition : the men of scientism gradually aging and gradually tiring of the game while the new generation gets bolder and bolder in denouncing the earlier generation's utopian visions.

What comes after , Heaven alone only knows....

1945 : annus mirabilis or annus horribilis for Scientism ?

I have always been fascinated by the Janus-like nature of the year 1945 in its relationship to Science and the undue worship thereof.

1945 was the year that it was widely admitted that it was only the Allies' mild-mannered/white-coated men of modern science who had bested the superior combat skills of the jackbooted henchmen of the Axis and so won the war for humanity.

A good year for Scientism.

But 1945 was also the year that we now conventionally mark the start of post-modern science... and hence marks the end of modern science.

Surely then a bad year for Scientism.

Clearly we have two views on the alleged success of modern science in 1945 - one made at the time and still held firmly by elderly academics and citizens and another made forty years later and just as firmly held by young academics.

One credits it for ending the war on behalf of the morally right side and the other blames it for starting the war and behaving so beastly during it.

All Life is Family , part one and two, explores why it was possible for most of the modernist audience of 1945 not to see the many failings of wartime science on both sides, technical as well as moral, running from 1939 through to war's end.

And why historians ever since have repeated this initial error.

The war is simply never broken out of its narrative mode to present the predictions that each and every participant had made at a particular point in time together with an assessment of whether those predictions came to pass.

Who, for example, predicted that Hitler won't conquer Moscow within four months after June 1941 ?

No one that I am aware of, as Stalin himself soon had his doubts about this capitol's survival - some military 'experts' even publicly ventured that Moscow would fall in mere weeks not months !

Predictions proved about as inaccurate during WWII as they had all throughout history - only this time they were pressed forward with the strong claim that they were backed by the best science.

If so, the best science was wrong, over and over and over for six long years.

And if "All Life is Family" is the first to say so, so be it .....

Technology makes planes that fly ; Science merely makes claims that MIGHT fly

The DC-3 , a plane that technologists designed 80 years ago, is still flying in commercial airlines around the world despite the fact that the last civilian units were built over 70 years ago.

Made of the claims that Scientists made 80 years ago about the world and reality have failed to stand the test of time  ---but the DC-3s built back then still fly as good as they always did !

This is why I have the highest possible regard for small "s" science , as broadly defined as possible - and that definition includes all of us who have ever tinkered, by trial and error and careful observation of existing actions , to make something better.

But I regard  the exalted claims of the successes of capital "S" Science,Scientists and Scientism with the attitude of a critic from Missouri : "Show Me !" ....

the last VICTORIAN war : 1939-1945

Looking over today's crop of leaders in politics, business and culture and comparing them with the world leaders of the 1940s, one is struck by today's leaders' comparative youth.

By contrast, the world of WWII was run by the white-haired teenagers of the Victorian Age.


Normally war is said to be an event for young men and young men's energy, but between1939-1945 the young men silently and glumly marched off to fight, while back home - in charge - the old men postponed their retirements and found a second wind.

They would replay WWI all over and this time, run it their way - not the way of their fathers.

Today's teenagers view the reforming (thermosetting) promises of  Scientism through the cynical and disappointed eyes of 125 years of broken promises, but the eternal teenagers who ran WWII were born in the first flush of the Age of Scientism and never stopped believing.

They still remained as hopeful that Scientism's reforming promises would finally deliver when the last of them died in the early 1970s as when they were still the naively optimistic teenagers of the years of good Queen Victoria's reign.

WWII was not uniquely a war between scientists and technologists - one could make the case that the Napoleonic wars and last year's war were also wars between scientists and technologists.

the last war of unalloyed SCIENTISM : 1939-1945

But it was uniquely the only big war fought between true believers in reform Scientism on all sides : Allies, Axis and Neutrals.

But reform Scientism delivered its first big disappointments in that war , signally failed to do what it had long pledged it could do, if only it was given its head and released from the shackles of old outdated sentiments.

As a permanent reminder of that failure, reform Scientism's seventy years on Earth by 1945 were marked by that war's seventy million dead : a million for each year of Scientism's existence....

1939-1945 : the War of Scientism's modernist "Four Freedoms"

In the Spring of 1939, at the the New York World's Fair, Modernity or Scientism (the words are totally inter-changable) promised the deserving parts of the world a future of Four Freedoms: eventual freedom from material limitations, from catastrophes like the weather, from dependence upon lesser breeds and beings and, above all , from uncertainty.

In Fall of 1945, another set of Four Freedoms - originating from a speech given by  FDR in January 1941 - seemed to offer all the world's human beings a more credible and attractive life --- if equally set at some distant date in the future.

But also in the Fall of 1945, a few people, on the way to becoming post-modernist, were beginning to ask whether even those Four Freedoms were an adequate or accurate rebuttal to Modernism's Four Freedoms.

Today, to be fully post-Modernist  and to be fully post-Scientism , to be fully in the Twenty First Century , is to totally accept the permanent existence of material limitations, catastrophes, uncertainty and the right of existence for lesser breeds and lesser beings.

So there we have it : the rise and the fall of Scientism, from apogee to nadir ....

"Triumph of the SCIENTIFIC Will" : WWII scientists as 'swimmers into technical sweetness leaping'..

Sure, sure: Hitler, Mussolini ,Tojo and Stalin and all that lot started the war, but it took the collective will of the world's best scientists and engineers to build their visions up into History's bloodiest, most heart-less war.

It was the scientists' war, the only truly Modernist war, the war of their big shiny machines . Scientism's big moment under the Klieg Lights.

It was Science's incautious pre-war claims that moved the politicians and the generals and the industrialists and - above all - the ordinary public of all nations to fund the killing machines --- in preference to returning  to the foot soldier led wars of earlier times.

Of course in the end, we never saw the scientists in the box in Nuremberg in 1945 : because many many more of us, back then, saw 1945 as the apogee of Modernist science rather than its death knell and the birth of post-modernity.....

Extreme optimism leads , inevitably, to extreme Paranoia : it sounds counterintuitive but its true

Optimistic Paranoia

If you think reality and the Natural World is far too simple and far too benign to pose much of a threat to Modern Man and you have lost your belief in the possibility of Divine (or Devilish) Acts of Providential Intervention, how do you account for why even simple things can go wrong with no obvious signs of intervention ?


You are left to blame it on other humans, usually working in huge, well organized, highly invisible secular conspiracies --- which is why there are no signs of their intervention.

But if you claim you are very religious, as most "optimistic paranoids" do, why not credit this to God or the Devil and their minions : isn't doing invisible things in mysterious ways supposed to be in their very un-Earthly nature?

And don't most religions also teach us that Man is fallible and imperfect - not at all the sort of being capable of pulling off huge conspiracies -- or in keeping his mouth shut if he did ?

Those who are extreme optimists about controlling Nature, (aka DENIERS of any limits on Man's abilities), in practise also act as if they disbelieve God or the Devil can interfere in human activities.

As a result they are left in the position of those Victorians who lost their traditional explanation crediting God or Nature for their strong sense of the Sublime and had to find new explanations to account for it : most opting for the new Technological Sublime, in many scholars' view.

DENIERS all believe in the Technological Sublime in spades, in the technical fix for what ever small, temporary, local, problems Nature or Man can throw our way.

Extreme optimism about Man controlling Nature leads to extreme paranoia about Man controlled by other men - acting in secret conspiracies....

But that isn't enough : for mixed in with the "awe" of the traditional sense of the Sublime, is also a healthy dollop of "fear".

Free floating fear - nationalistic,ethnic, whatever - really grew up along with the new age of Scientism , being in fact a product of it.

For if we no longer find it easy to fear the dark, the tiger or the Devil, we now must fear being overrun by the Yellow Peril or the Socialist Hordes or the Jewish Banksters instead......

the contested CLIMATES of post-hegemonic Modernity

Post-1945's competing, parallel, Hegemonies

The events of late summer and fall of 1945 gave quite a shock to Modernity - the underlying hegemonic worldview that lay behind ALL the competing ideologies of the war.

Modernity took quite a kicking - but kept on ticking, at least nominally.

The division, traditional since 1889, between the Left and the Right, hung on until after its 100th birthday in 1989, after which it refused any nourishment and died.

But all along and underneath, glacially slow but steady changes had been occurring along a broad front.

the Seventy Five Year reversal

In 1937, I think it would be fair to say that in America at least, most regarded the worst universities and the worst professors as being against Modernity while the best universities and best professors were regarded as being strongly for it.

By 2012, 75 years later, it is widely regarded that the reverse is true.

Our best universities are post modernist and even anti modernist - particularly in their basic science and humanities departments.

By contrast, Modernity survives in the run-of-the-diploma-mill type universities out in the more isolated parts of middle and southern America, particularly among the applied sciences.

Where ever Protestant fundamentalism and evangelicalism of the oldest sort flourishes, so does Modernist Science.

Bryant would be Amazed

William Jennings Bryant would be amazed - as should all students of the inexplicable.

But in fact 1875 marked both the decline, as well as the beginnings, of public Scientism based on the self-confident science of Newton, Dalton and Darwin.

Discoveries in the most basic sciences were starting to undermine  faith - but only among the most free-thinking -  in the certitudes of Newtonian Scientism --- at least among among basic scientists in the universities.

But Newtonian Scientism, if losing ground inside the Beltway of peer-reviewed science, was gaining far more ground in the non-peer-reviewed world of popular science, outside in the greater world.

Scientism had many - genuine - successes

Newtonian and Daltonian science was fuelling the tremendous successes of technology and engineering and invention between about 1865 to 1945 - a tremendous 80 year run.

 Particularly in those truly awesome years between 1872 and 1912.

These successes made the world we still live in today ; a world vastly different, overnight, from the relatively unchanged world humanity had lived for tens of thousands of years.

Our world in the 100 years since the end of Scientism's most powerful surge of creativity and productivity has seen only incremental improvements - and yes I include the Internet in that.

So Modernity and Scientism has reasons to be cocky --- but as usual, Hubris is a very hard genie to put back into the bottle once taken out for a stroll.

Scientism's biggest failure : WWII

Its efforts to extend these real successes into all areas of human activity produced ultimately the horrors of World War II and beyond.

But that lay in the future. For now, it reigned secure in politics, business and economics, the military, among the media, among the applied sciences in physical sciences and social sciences.

It was very strong among socialists and all people who thought themselves progressives (of all stripes) and in the art world and among the avant garde.

Its biggest opponents were a very large but relatively powerless group of religiously-minded people : catholic priests united with rural protestant preachers and the orthodox of all world faiths.

Its most worrisome critics were tiny in number - but disconcerting in origins - the well educated, upper middle class children of Modernist parents who choose 'to go back to the land' - the Nearings and GK Chesterton are probably among  the best known.

But the events of late 1945 changed all that : the number of critics of modernist science grew ever steadily among the basic hard physical scientists and among the counter-culture tribe.

Today's powerful - parallel - dual hegemonies

Almost seventy years on, we have two separate but powerful hegemonies inhabiting the same small planet.

Modernity is still dominant among the politically,economically, militarily powerful but weak among those who are intellectually and culturally powerful.

A billionaire doesn't really need a billion dollars a year to feel well off and he knows it.

 He sees a professor living on $80,000 a year and is jealous because that woman is living as well off as him, but in addition has great intellectual prestige -- while he is regarded as just a former gas jokey who got lucky and made $17 billion from his clever new idea in fuel distribution technology.

His friends at the club feel he is smart - but why doesn't the world agree?

He is smart. But his company is also one of America's leading CO2 polluters and so he is both clever in terms of 19th century scientism and yet dumb in terms of 21st century commensalist science.

Global Commensality Science triumphs in peer-review

Global Commensality science is equally frustrated - it knows its basic science is correct but it hasn't yet got a chance to deliver the technology innovations that would show life would be much happier in a post-modernist scientific world.

However, the growing number of the wealthy, well educated ,young who deliberately choose to live in the central sections of big cities and and then deliberately walk everywhere, has to be seen as a leading edge of an upcoming change.

The well connected/globally wired but walkable, densely populated, compact city does seem to point to a new emerging hegemony, as yet unnamed.....

Doubting Reality : (Koch's red slippers) birthing DENIAL in a Mayberry sort of town

"Denying Life after the 1950s"  (birthing DENIAL in a Mayberry sort of time & town)

Growing up in a Mayberry sort of town, a little place on the prairie , is just the sort of thing that might make a feller want to doubt reality: current reality anyway.

So it can hardly be unexpected that Charlie-Koch-from-Wichita turned out the way he has : spending his vast fortune in trying to turn the whole world back to a time and place long gone ---- the heyday of high Modernity and Scientism in the early 1950s ----- in a small city in rural Middle America.

So it is not surprising to discover that Mr Koch and all the front organizations he funds are not really into denying climate change and science as such.

They are more into denying the changes in the physical world, in society - and yes in science - that allowed us to even notice that the climate was changing and in fact had been changing, ever since the birth of Scientism in the 1870s.

A collective set of changes that we call the Post-Modern World and even "the Age of Global Commensality" .

The process of man-made climate change is so tied to the period of High Modernity & Scientism (1875-1965) the period that Koch and hundreds of millions of others regard as the high point of humanity, that to accept the first is to deny the worth of the second.

This they can not and will not do.....

SVE's "awkward" sub-title is no accident

Why does  SVE 's sub-title run so 'trippingly-not'  off the tongue?

Moderns versus Post-Modernity indeed - why not moderns versus post-moderns or Modernity versus Post-Modernity ?

I constructed it that way because I have come to believe that while our world has decisively and permanently changed (ie is clearly post-modern in its structure) --- we haven't.

Or at least 80% of us haven't - a clear majority in anybody's books.

Our world has changed - bringing forth real biological and material restraints for us to butt our heads against.

However, inside those heads, inside our still-Modern heads,  our wills have not changed or accepted those restraints as real.

We still expect "The Spirit of Scientism" to pull yet another rabbit out of the hat at the last minute to save our bacon.

(Quite a post-hegemonic mixing of metaphors there - no ?)

So what do we  - the 20% - do about this crisis ?

We must strive to reconcile humanity to the fact that the physical world, outside their minds, has changed for good and that they must re-calibrate their dreams, hopes, illusions, delusions, to match......