Monday, March 28, 2011

Dinosaurs, Saber-Toothed Tigers,Nazis --- gone,gone,gone

75 years after the rise of the One Big Master Race, the one holding the one Master Key to fit in the one Master Lock of Charles Lyell's
world of stasis and equilibrium, we can better see that the Nazis were not anti-modern barbarians as is often claimed about them by others.

 Rather we can now see them , as they themselves claimed to be :  the people who best took the full logic of Modernist Science to its ultimate conclusion.

Its ultimately absurd conclusion, because Modernist Science was Bad Science.

It always had been, but it wasn't broadly revealed as such until 1939-1945.

The War stressed the tape holding Modernist Science together well beyond the breaking point.

The unexpected result was not just that many citizens of the Axis changed their mind about the value of Modernist Science, but that also so did many people in the Allied and Neutral countries as well.

WWII was the triumph of the weak and the wild over the forces of the might and of the will.

The bacteria and the Jews were still there but the mighty Third Reich like the dinosaurs before it was gone.

As had happened so often in the past history of global catastrophes, r-selected trumped K-selected once again...

Saturday, March 5, 2011

During WWII, the "4Fs of the 4Fs of the 4Fs" were the non-motile bacteria

No head or eyes or ears or nose or mouth, no arms or legs, just incredibly tiny bags of salty water floating about where ever the currents took them.

No wonder that during WWII zoologists and eugenicists (is there a difference?) called the non-motile bacteria living fossils from the childhood of the origins of life.

The stupidest of the stupidest, the unfittest of the unfit.

Sulfa drugs were expected to make short work of them and soon all the infectious hospitals would close for good.

Problem solved.

But it turns out that non-motile bacteria have been on earth for 4 billion years and will be here long after we depart.

They occupy every possible spot on Earth - hottest to the coldest, high in the stratosphere to deep in the bowels of the earth.

They are so numerous and successful that their biomass outweighs us and all the mammals even though we individually outweigh them individually a trillion times over.

Most of the cells in us aren't us at all - they're them.

Now that is a miscegenation nightmare for the latent eugenicist !

They can do things to DNA that we can only dream of - including altering our DNA to better suit them.

No better proof of how off target was the very concept of the unfit than how the educated middle class of WWII viewed the unfit bacteria world....

WWII's biggest battle didn't happen between six military empires

You all know the score: WWII was all about the empires ---- the
empires of Britain and American and Russia and China fighting the empires of Germany and Japan.

Six huge military empires (and their allies) with hundreds of millions of men under arms, fighting for six long years all over six huge continents.

75 million dead, trillions and trillions of dollars of non-renewable resources blown up or sunk or burned.

K-selected history with a vengeance.

The God of WWII history books seems definitely on the side of the big battalions.

But I argue the biggest battle of World War Two actually happened off the battlefield and occurred instead, inside the educated middle class's collective conscience - and I aim to compress that battle into three short hours and three tiny rooms in a New York hospital and thrust it onto a stage near you.

This is the r-selected history of WWII - cutting it down to the essence...

WWII's biggest battle happened inside our collective conscience

History is written by the losers, not the winners - the winners have better things to do.

It is written by the losers with l'argent .

As a result, history's losers say that Modernity won WWII -  by defeating the forces of darkness that were the Nazis and their friends.

So why then was the film TRIUMPH OF THE WILL was replaced at the moment of victory by the film ... DOUBLE INDEMNITY ?

!!!!!!!!!

 Surely this must rank as the sourest victory pageant ever staged.

It rather casts doubt on just how strong a triumph for Modernity were the victories of 1945.

I argue that ,in fact , the unexpected events of 1939-1945 dealt Modernity such a severe blow that it never recovered.

 And that the last 65 years have merely recorded its slow steady death throes.

No where is this more clearly seen than in the concept of the unfit, a concept that held wide support among the world's educated middle class from Berlin to Boston and from Toyko to Moscow  for almost a hundred years.

But that concept 'unfit' was transformed - in the narrow Henry Dawson sense of that word - by the actions of the 'unfit' and the 'fit' during WWII.

Remember the unfit's ranks could take in not only most of humankind but also most of the planet's lifeforms and even most inanimate planetary activities like the weather.

You and I probably fitted into it at various times and circumstances.

So a change in the concept of the term was bound to change almost everything.

But pushed to the wall in 1939-1945 by the fit, the unfit unexpectedly bit back hard and Modernity itself faltered.

This was because the conscience of educated middle class was gradually badly troubled by the events of WWII.

Slowly but surely, its members became progressively less and less glib about making easy assertions that the world neatly (and permanently) divided itself into the fit and the unfit.

After 1945, PostModernity then slowly arose from the resulting  moral ruins....