'Progress' is always simple looking at the top, complicated at the bottom

When you are a 'big person', residing at the top of the human food chain, totally engaged in the concept of an ever upward Progress, you tend never to look down at the complexity of Life below your feet.

'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.

"The Last are sometimes First" : confounding Modernity's Terrible Simplifiers

Reduced (one of its characteristic terms) to an aphorism, Modernity is basically about believing that, in terms of intelligence and progress ,"the First (largest,newest, most complex) were always and inevitably First ".

And as the First, destined to succeed and endure.

(Also implying that the last are always and inevitably last and doomed to fail).

A simple - and terrible - and terribly wrong - scientific thesis.

1945's PROGRESS report : the newest and the biggest had produced atomic bombs and Auschwitz --- the oldest and the smallest had produced penicillin

The newest and biggest (dare we also say the brightest?) human civilizations at the top of the ever upward and outward arrow of progress had given the 1945 world nuclear and genocidal horror - but the tiny weak stupid fugal slime cells at the oldest bottom of that arrow of progress had given us life-saving penicillin.

Not a good year, then, for the whole idea of Progress itself....

The price of human life to racists : in 1861 Texas vs 1941 Belorussia

In the early 1860s , a Texas racist could buy good cotton land for $6 an acre - a big half section of 320 acres went for $2000 ------ about the same price as ONE top quality (young skilled healthy) slave.

Needless to say, in this age before modernity's machinery, you needed far more than one such field hand to work all those acres.

So the prudent kept their slaves as healthy as they could , for as long as they could.

Because most of the South's wealth was in human being slaves, not in land, buildings or machinery.

But when the Nazi racists invaded Russia in 1941 they saw it not as a land of milk and honey but as a land of machinery : all oil refineries and tractor factories , with no need at all for enslaved Slavs .

The Slavs were all to be starved to death as superfluous to needs, under the infamous Hunger Plan.

Because the Era of Modernity was greatly opposed to human slavery --- as far too expensive and far too inefficient --- at least as compared to enslaving iron and petroleum.

This opposition to human slavery was called 'Progress.'

But in the end , the Nazi racists' best known machines - their 'big iron' panzers - ran out of petroleum and so once again slaves (teams of enslaved farm oxen) were called forth - to haul them into battle ....

Mite is Right - Might is Right. Both ? Or Neither ?

There are niches enough for all : the large, medium and the small.

There is no evidence in the Earth's current environment that contradicts the idea that there won't always be room for some big and medium creatures,  above the size of the ever-present microbes.

But the scientific assumption  that the trend of evolutionary Progress is moving in a direction that indicated that only Big beings - ie humans and their herds - will dominate the Earth is hardly borne out by long term evidence.

Or by the current evidence that humanity is well equipped, mentally and technologically, to instantly blow itself all up.

This idea of evolutionary Progress was , in practise , further defined into the assumption that the only thing Big and complex, in an otherwise simple universe, were upper class western-oriented males .

People of colour, and other minorities, immigrants, the poor, women, children, the handicapped --- all were absorbed under the rubric of being potentially small and weak and unneeded on this evolutionary voyage.

This assumption guided the leadership of the Allies, Neutral and Axis nations of WWII - until it ended in disaster for all.

Instead we must accept that we are all, Big and small, stuck here together on Lifeboat Earth , willy nilly,  family : we Big can't divorce the small - and they can't divorce us.

We don't have to love each other - lambs and lions lying down together - but we must learn to accept the inevitably and agree to get along.

Accepting the fact is step one on Humanity's long course of post-Hubris recovery....

Modernization vs Modernity, made easy

Modernization (aka "Progress") was such things as fast safe comfortable steamships that made it easy for Englishman to migrate to becoming District Officers in northern India or for Indian students to travel to Oxford University.

Modernity was the counter-modernization ideology adopted by both Indians who objected to Englishmen becoming District officers in northern India and by Englishmen who objected to Indians students at Oxford University when they wanted to retain the parts of modernization that favoured them and attack the parts that did not...

So for example, Hitler that ultimate figure of Modernity, loved the fast armoured tanks that could let Germans travel quickly and safely from Berlin to Stalingrad, but objected strongly to the Russians used similar fast armoured tanks built at the Stalingrad tank factory to visit Hitler in his Berlin bunker.

Modernization is a highly inexact word to describe its effects : commensal globalization or global commensality is a much more accurate description because it adds emphasis to the willy-nilly-ness and two-way-street-ness of what was actually taking place....

In moral terms, WWII boils down to one simple - scientific - question : are the small a part of the future, or just of the past ?

 G F Hegel, the 19th century's most influential philosopher, was famous for claiming that history wasn't an endless cycles of birth, maturity and death laced with infinite variations , as people had always observed.

Instead, he ventured that history has a single purpose and a single goal  - together with a linear unbreakable path upwards to that goal  - linear, unidirectional "Progress" with a capital "P".

Herbert Spencer and a thousand others said that , scientifically, Progress of this sort actually existed, wasn't just an intellectual debating point, and that Darwin's Evolution showed not just why it happened but why it had to happen.

Species and cultures and societies and businesses and empires started out young as small ,weak and foolish and just mightier and mightier and wiser and wider as they got older and older.

The small were useful - yesterday - but now they were just speed bumps in the way of Progress.

Tomorrow had no place for them.

This was the general tenor of the Modern Age between the 1870s and the 1960s.

Many people made moral arguments against this claim - but morality carried far less weight in this age than did science.

Henry Dawson also made moral arguments against this scientific central dogma , but where he seemed downright foolish to his colleagues was that he also said that he had scientific evidence - proof - that this dogma wasn't actually confirmed out there,  in the real world.

A man of deeds ,not words, his scientific articles cut little ice : that had to wait for someone like Stephen Jay Gould a half century later.

By then  ,of course, Gould was writing to the half converted.

But what had made the world change its mind ?

Blame on the events of that momentous year 1945.

1945 was both the apogee and nadir of the Modern Age.

Apogee with one project from Manhattan that assembled a scientific team almost as big and strong as The Bomb's explosion itself.

Nadir with another project from Manhattan that had a scientific team almost as small and as weak as those that manufactured the cure and almost as small and as weak as the intended patients.

Robert Oppenheimer led one team ; Henry Dawson the other.

Time is starting to tell as to who ultimately had the greater impact.....

Between PROGRESS and PROTONS : "The Missing Middle" , where we actually live

Thirties Reductionism said that once scientists knew the behavior of one of the Protons that made up Winston Churchill's body (and multiplied it by a trillion trillion trillion identical protons), they could then predict Churchill's behavior over the 1936 Abdication Crisis.

Thirties Reification said that Human Progress is real and concrete and since it was so clearly evident that Human Progress 'wants to get ever bigger and bigger',then dividing Human Progress up into the two billion individual people that existed in the world in 1939, would allow us to predict that particular individual Scott Nearing would also approve of things getting ever bigger.

But in fact he became famous for disagreeing bigger is better.

The average behavior of heterogeneous aggregates does not let us predict the behavior of an individual human being , anymore than than the behavior of  individual proton helps us predict the average behavior of  a heterogeneous aggregate.

Heterogeneous , because Churchill was not a vast crystal of trillions upon trillions of undifferentiated protons but rather a very  stratified collection of protons in a great variety of differently-sized and differently-arranged components that led each component to very unexpectedly different behavior.

And Human Progress had no protons, or even human individuals, within it, because it was simply an abstract idea rather a concrete physical object.

What most Thirties intellectual thought was desperately missing was in giving adequate attention to the vast "Missing Middle" between Protons and Progress, because inside that "Missing Middle" lies the life we actually live, including our twin delusions of reductionism and reification.

However, I believe that the prism of Commensality does allow us to re-capture that "Missing Middle" , and thus allows us to better understand Thirties intellectual thought's sad grandchild, WWII .....

Tortoise vs Hare : predicting our world in 1945....

On September 2nd 1939, when the British Empire declared war on the German Empire (thus ensuring we would have another world war), there were two main scientific theories predicting the shape of our world at the war's end.

The far more popular theory at the time was called Modernity, Social Darwinism or simply 'Might is Right'.

 It said Evolution was a vertical affair, with wiser and more mighty entities inevitably and naturally replacing entities that were weaker and more foolish.

The other, far less popular theory, saw Evolution as a horizontal activity, with the weaker and simple-minded entities continuing to co-exist for ever and ever, in global commensality, with the bigger and more complex entities.

It even went further than that.

It claimed that on not-infrequent occasion, the smaller and more simple would even triumph over the larger, more complex and more sophisticated entities in the fundamental effort to survive.

Now it is obviously that these diametrically opposed theories could not both be right.

"the hyssop and The Cedars" will look closely at the course of  WWII to see how accurate each scientific theory was in predicting the twisting course of that awful - and unexpectedly awfully long - war.....

For the middle class of the Modernist Age, being double-dipped for their daily bread was a honor not a curse : hence their horror of hospital-made penicillin

Hard to believe that our grandparents were glad to be first soaked by milling corporations for the firms' processing away of life-giving vitamins from their flour and bread and then soaked a second time when the millers' added expensive man-made processed vitamins back in again.

It was called "Progress" and it was good.


Mom's home-made bread, prepared right in front of her kids in the kitchen, just had to be crawling with lethal germs  might even be made with (horrors) healthy vitamin-rich whole wheat flour), so it was much wiser to buy some factory-made white trash at the store.

Likewise, what family would allow their own family doctor to safely make penicillin up ( by themselves !) , to inject into a dying patient they had treated faithful for 35 years ?

Hoisted on their own modernist cum pharmaceutical petard, middle class patients between 1928 and 1943 didn't want hospital-made penicillin, even if they wound die without it ....

TOP DRAWER people have not changed their mind about Science, scientists have changed their minds about TOP DRAWER people ...

Michael Marshall

Scientists haven't changed their minds on GOD - they still don't believe in GOD, by and large.

But they are no longer certain HE is on the side of the Big Battalions.

They no longer believe Charles Darwin's claim that civilized man will inevitably kill off the weak and the small.

Instead they fear Humanity's stay on earth will be relatively short and it will end up being inherited, once again, by the meekest of the meek - the microbes.

Naturally, this does not leave the people in the Big Battalions and in the skyscrapers of Ever-Upward-Human-Progress very happy.

 That is what I  take away from Gordon Gauchat's study on why the Republicans hate 'Science' ....