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.

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.

"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.

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 ?

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.

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.

Scientism's powerful ability to unite the polar opposites of CUT and RUN

     Scientism is the unbreakable faith belief that human mindpower will inevitably triumph over anything mere Nature can throw up.
     While its days of unquestioned total hegemony was only between 1875 and 1965, it still dominates the political and economic classes and is successfully winning back intellectual hegemony among the environmentalist classes, through the back door of hard core SF films and books.

the skygods & earthlings of 1936's "Anti-Bacterial Wars" : synthetic Sulfa versus natural Penicillin

    Rather incredulously, I slowly backed into the poop we call 2012's Climate Change Wars ---- from research I had been conducting on a highly similar war - from more than 75 years ago!
   That war, more a skirmish in its earliest stages, was between the old anti-bacterial agent, natural penicillin and the new anti-bacterial agent, synthetic Sulfa.

Post 1875-1965 Scientism's "SHATTERED CONSENSUS" : esteem-lowering news for McKitrick & Michaels

    Don't you sometimes wish you could actually meet a "junior" Fellow from one of those long-winded think-tanks?
   Or maybe just a hail-fellow-well-met type of fellow?
    When everyone is a "Senior", no one is a "Senior", my mom used always say.
   Is bluster and bombast just something they mix in the Kool-Aid ?
   Anyway, where was I ?
   Oh yes, crying crocodile tears over the losses in the all-important self esteem department for those two white guys, Ross McKitrick and Pat Michaels.

Charlie Koch's ruby-red slippers: DENYING his way back to daddy's "Lost Hegemony of Scientism"

    Okay it might not be the sort of book about Kansas and ruby-red slippers that L Frank Baum could write - maybe more in Joseph Conrad's line : "the horror! , the horror!".
    But I seriously think there is a book there , a psychologically-probing examination about "Charlie G" Koch's magnificent obsession over the sad fate of his father Fred's science/scientism.

We got the birth certificate , CATO : Denialism was birthed in America, more precisely in Wichita

    DENIERS are busy,busy,busy people, but among  all their other denials, they never hesitate to find time to deny that America could have possibly birthed the current president.
   They seem to feel that he is either the spawn of the Devil or the spawn of darkest Kenya ----and as part of the DENIERS' overall "Southern Strategy", either hallucination will work equally well at the ballot box.
   One thing they will never ever deny (or its bye-bye that life-sustaining greenback oxygen) is that the DENIER Movement was birthed in America - more precisely in Wichita Kansas's Koch-funded CATO INSTITUTE, back in 1974.
   Unfortunately for The-Fate-of -the-Planet, the rest of the world was too busy to notice.

The big "DISCONNECT" that drives the climate change debate

    When High Modernity (aka Scientism) lost the intellectual hegemony it held between 1875 and 1965, it did not also lose any political or economic power.
   So now we see a world that basically - publicly - says it worries about a steadily warming planet, but, in practise, does nothing to mitigate it.
   To exaggerate a lot, to make my point more vivid, it is as if the 99% agreed that that climate change was real and dangerous, but that the 1% did not.

"NINETY YEAR RULE" between epochs cum generations : ideas don't change, merely die out

   If Romanticism was born in the heady atmosphere of the 1790s, its replacement by Scientism in the 1870s might have no more significance than Scientism's replacement, in turn, in the 1960s : all were victims of the "Ninety Year Rule" .

   All of these replacements weren't the result of the intellectual triumph of exciting new ideas, but merely the fact that the last of the powerful men holding older, once-exciting, ideas had finally died.
   Depressing, because we may not have the luxury - this time - of waiting till the last of the Modernist/Scientism Limit-Deniers finally dies out some time in the 2030s...

Age of SCIENTISM was one (long) generation in length

   It is not at all uncommon to find scientists-emeritus publishing peer-reviewed articles in credible journals, well into their nineties and beyond (hello: Ernst Mayr !) - the US Senate has nothing on Science when it comes to being a culture dominated by powerful old men.

   In the case of the Age of Scientism ,circa 1870s -1960s , that meant it was one (long) "generation-of-scientists" in length.
   Scientists still publishing in May 1968, as the revolt that ended  Scientism broke out world wide, could also still remember its heady beginnings in the 1870s, as tiny children.
   Lise Meitner , 1878-1968 , for example : she was the physicist who first explained nuclear fission to the scientific world (but failed to get the Nobel Prize she deserved because she was a woman and a Jew.)
   So : elderly scientists watching TV coverage of worldwide student protests against the pollution caused by our industrial production of light bulbs,record-players, telephones - and cars.
   They must have been dumbfounded : they can remember when these items didn't exist and what a blessing their arrival seemed to be to everybody.
   Now these same items, their lifework, lay debased - by wild eyed, longhaired 18 year old know-everythings !
   In their childhood, these elderly scientists could see the Era of Scientism begin and then quickly climb to intellectual dominance.
   By 1895 - the start of their adult years, it reached a steady plateau of about 50 years in duration, and then in 1945 began a imperceptibly slow decline before dropping abruptly off the rock, in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
   Dr Martin Henry Dawson was conceived in late 1895 and died in early 1945 - his life thus spanned that long plateau of Scientism, without seeing either its contested beginning or its contested ending.
   His teachers, professors, bosses were always those children of the 1870s, always in full flush of enthusiasm for the 'new thing' of their youth.
  Any private doubts about Scientism that Dawson might have harbored, found few verbal supporters over his lifetime, at least among those in positions of power.
   But Scientism did not have many effective critics in its plateau days, even among those in the outliers of power.
   Dawson, then, had to become a 'critic of deed, not words' - and as such, he was very effective.
  His ideas may not have 'worked in theory'  (because he never articulated a theory !) , but tellingly and fatally for Scientism and Modernity, they worked very well in practice.....

My target is highly respectable DENIALISM , not the cranks ...

Michael Marshall

My denialist target is the unconscious bias still lurking within mainstream science and mainstream scientists.

I am not after, in the main, the cranks who deny HIV-AIDS/9-11/the Holocaust/Evolution/Climate Change etc.

I have much bigger fish to fry.

My target is The Enlightenment Project and its offshoots : Modernity/Positivism/Scientism and their collective claim that there is nothing in the universe we can not and will not know - eventually.

Scientists who say this are DENIERS all right, deniers of the possibility of limits to Certainty.

They freely admit the space trip to Perfect Certainty will be very long, very expensive, filled with disappointments and errors - but that Science will ultimately arrive.

I ,on the other hand feel ,we can never know or control much of Reality --- in part, simply for lack of money.

To take an example we all talk about but no one ever does anything about, the weather will never be perfectly known.

 It is simply too expensive to fund all the observation posts and computing power needed to do even a reasonably close-to-perfect prediction job.

The Science is there, has been there - but the money has not and never will be.

Partly it is a size issue.

Humans are simply too Big for quarks and too small for Quasars to know much about either without spending an inordinate amount of money that we haven't got to spend, not when more pressing human-sized problems face us.

If this sort of scientific DENIALISM is sheer Blue Sky/ Castles in Spain/ Pie in the Sky wishful thinking , the COMMENSALIST science alternative is refreshingly down to earth.

It cheerfully accepts limits and strives instead to see just how far we can push them along,  for the betterment of life on Earth.

I am aware of many other scientist authors/bloggers out there working to refute crank denialism.

 But I currently know only of a few scientists (insider agitators as it were) who are tackling my definition of denialism from inside their institutional home of mainstream science and mathematics.

That takes a high level of intellectual bravery and I salute them.

In upcoming blog posts I will discuss some of these pioneers' work to explore whether it parallels my own efforts....

POSITIVISM:MODERNITY:SCIENTISM:DENIALISM

Michael Marshall

Re-brand that old Platonist dreck all you want, it is still just  junk science under the hood.

Denying that there are limits to what humanity can know and do about Reality/the Universe/Life is not going to make those limits, those complexities, those uncertainties go away.

Pushing pseudo-certitudes to feed yours and our addiction for certainty, isn't go to help either.

Instead, dip your feet into the Diracian Sea of Uncertainty - the water is not as bad as you think.

Explore, enjoy, engage, challenge yourself.

Why deny yourself and others of one of Life's greatest pleasures: a sense of venturing into the unknown to see whatever can be seen....

NAS tipped to run American AUSCHWITZ after Nazi conquest ???

Organized Science, if it knows nothing else (a claim easy to defend), sure knows how to sing for its supper.

That is why Scientism is our one and only God.

Organized Science knows just when to switch sides and to start sucking up to the newest powerful entities in town and it knows just who is powerless enough to safely kick in the teeth.

It also picks its opponents it chooses to publicly battle very carefully so that none of the resulting mud sticks to its priestly skirts.

The NAS choose not to criticize Raymond Loewy's ROCKETPORT vision at the New York's World Fair of 1939-1940----- and silence is assent.

The Rocketport was the most scientifically loony idea at a Fair replete with scientifically loony ideas.

The so called 'Rocket' , a small ocean liner in size, was actually a cannon projectile fired in New York and designed to land in Paris  ------- somehow without the resulting enormous G-Forces mushing everybody inside the projectile into protoplasm.

(Humans might survive 200 Gs all over their body, if its only for a fraction of a second as in a car crash, but this voyage would impose at least 20,000 Gs for a fatally long time, even if we ignore the peak force of about 200,000 Gs at blast-off......)

Loewy got away with his loony tune idea because he claimed it came to him from studying scientific journals (rather than saying he saw it in a vision after praying to the Virgin Mary).

Whether the idea came from the Journal SCIENCE or MATTHEW 12 in the Bible, the idea was equally crazy.

But rest assured that the NAS would only have rushed forward to condemn it as scientifically invalid if the idea  had come from their bete noires in the camp of the dreaded 'Religion'.

The All-American idea of applied negative Eugenics (can you say Auschwitz, boys and girls ?) was a much more damaging loony idea the NAS choose not to publicly attack - until it was far far too late and after eugenics had been already discredited by the march of events in Eastern Europe.

That is what I mean by Science's Bad Faith --- its unwillingness to attack anything as unscientific, no matter how loony or deadly, if doing so risks lowering the awesome respect ordinary people still have for those 'wonder-working wizards' of science.

In the end, it all comes down to "JOBS,JOBS,JOBS" as that famous scientist Brian Mulroney once observed ---- he also said "there is no whore like an old whore".

True, so true.....