If GOD is COMPLEXITY, He's not necessarily on the side of the BIG Battalions

Michael Marshall

Bacteria, like man-made proximity fuses, are very small but not necessarily simple.

Man-made polymer plastic molecules - or the world's largest molecule (the one large molecule of cell wall that wraps around and protects a bacteria's interior) - are big but not necessarily complex.

Modernity was naif in most ways, particularly when it came to the paradoxes of lifeforms.

It had a simplistic hierarchy of size and complexity - and could never stop from conflating the two.

Ever bigger and bigger hydro dams and cannons and skyscrapers  and battleships and on and on could always be trusted to get Modernist Man's juices flowing.

But inside a bacteria's tiny genome are packed a surprisingly large number of highly varied genes.

They don't program , for example, for 40 pounds of relatively undifferentiated muscle like you might see on the average male human.

Yes, its big, its butch, its bulky but frankly its like knitting : knot one purl one, knit one ,purl two - for billions of iterations.

By contrast each of a bacteria's hundreds of gene complexes can hide a completely different form of metabolism - those guys can eat a surprisingly wide variety of food stocks - thing that frankly we don't see as food.

That is why they have hung on on Earth for four billion years through extreme heat and cold, or poison gases and resource famines ; surviving millions of years of droughts and ice ages in deep sleep only to emerge alive and ready to rock and roll.

But us ?

Yes we're big.

Big like dinosaurs and all the other extinct mega fauna - and just about as vulnerable to even minor changes in our feeding regimes.

In our post-modern AGE OF COMMENSALITY we are beginning to accept that Life's tiniest beings have much hidden complexity under the hood that we are only just beginning to learn about.

Bring back the Dr Martin Henry Dawson from 1927 into the research labs of today and he'd hit the ground running - nothing we have uncovered in 85 years since would really throw him for a loop.

Been there, done that.....

"I" goes "CO" : human "I"solationism goes "CO"mmensal, 1939-1945

Michael Marshall

After 500 years of world dominance, something subtly changed in the psyche of Modernist Man over the relatively brief period of 1939-1945.

Modernist Man reluctantly began to accept that Humanity was not "I"solated above and beyond nature and stopped denying nature can affect us and that we can impact it.

Very tentatively, Modernist Man began to accept that Humanity was deeply embedded within nature --- and that like it or not, we along with all other Life on Earth, dine or die at a "CO"mmon table.

Now, admittedly, terms like Isolationism or Denialism are not conventionally used to describe MOdernity's relationship with Nature.

Instead those words evoke some Americans from the Midwest first fighting to remain isolationist, between 1939 to 1941, on the question of preventing the Polish Holocaust and then later, not missing a beat, going to their graves denying it ever happened.

But if we recall that in the 1940s many Midwesters did consider their "Polack" neighbours as lesser beings and much too close to Nature for comfort, we begin to see the parallels....

DUGWAY sets the world, the world half a world away, on fire ...

Michael Marshall

Dugway, Utah is in the American West -- one of the last strongholds of American Isolationism in late 1941 -- a part of the world still convinced it was a "fire-proof house, far from inflammable materials."

But a short year and a half later in 1943, Dugway (unlike the Inkspots) "was trying to set the world on fire" -- at least the German and Japanese parts of it anyway.

The firebombs and firebombing techniques developed there killed about a million people during WWII and God only knows how many millions since.

By the 1950s, Utah was home to HILL AFB   and hence the new home of the major Air Force base maintaining America's missile defenses.

 Naturally, the Soviets returned the possibility of 'death by fire' to Utah, in spades.

 Rest assured that both AFB Hill and Chemical and Germ Warfare Proving Grounds Dungay were well up there on their secondary nuclear target list, in the event that the Cold War got hot.

Far from being  isolated and insulated, Utah was now well in the crosshairs.

Nuclear War, that poisoned fruit of WWII and MOdernity, means that we can all 'die together' around global commensality's COmmon table.

Small world innit ?

Funny old world innit ?

FALLOUT means all Life dies at a COmmon table

Michael Marshall

"The fallout from the volcano Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 led to "The Year without Summer" across the Northern Hemisphere in 1816, in which hundreds of thousands died on the diseases of hunger."

"The fallout from the last Soviet H-Bomb test series led to increases in cancers all around the world."

"The fallout from the brutalities of the Germans upon ' just a bunch of Polacks' (culminating in the horrors of AUSCHWITZ), ultimately led to the deaths of the sons of many of those same  Isolationist parents, years later and half a non-isolated world away....

Few of us are likely to misunderstand these three sentences, even though the word fallout was first used, in its modern sense, only in 1949.

We now accept that a volcano or pandemic half a world away can reach out and bite us anywhere in the world - even in the heart of Isolationism - the American Heartland of the Mid-West.

We learned this first in 1945 at HIROSHIMA, when it became clear that either a rocket or a large bomber could travel half way around the world and drop a city leveling bomb on us.

We learned it even better by 1954, than none of us could live 'safe' in the countryside --- death would just come to us a little later - from radioactive dust drifting down from the sky from bombs a continent away.

And over and over, if a war happens in a part of the world judged vital by some superpower or other, we know sooner or later our kids will be called upon to get in there and die.

We now accept what Modernist Man did not -- that the world is just one big 'common table' and that we can dine together around it --- or all die together around it.

So people - which side are you on ?

Still believing in MOdernity, that Man is far above nature and we can do nothing to it - or it to us - that a little High Tech Science can't solve ?

Or do you now accept that we live , fully embedded ,inside Nature and Nature's limits, that we now live in "The Age of Commensality" ?

This is this century's global ideological divide ......

MOdernity's War (1939-1945) : SUCCESS or FAILURE ??

Michael Marshall

No one disputes that 1939 -1945 was MOdernity's War.

The only real question is, 'was that war a success or a failure for Modernity?'

Most historians still feel that that only Modernity's Science saved "The Civilized World" from the evils of the anti-modernist Nazis, when the Allied fighting man proved no equal to the German armed forces in pure fighting technique.

By contrast, I feel that Modernity was the overarching ideology of the war, shared across all the Allied and Axis nations.

I believe that the Axis and Allied nations both had overly-optimistic initial war aims in 1938-1942.

 These hubris-filled PLAN As  came from both sides' overly optimistic views of Modernity's potential to excel particularly well under war conditions.

( Modernity had made many previous claims to hold all the secrets of Synthetic Autarky.)

I , on the other hand, feel that almost anyone - including Modernists - can govern in good times.

But that it is during wars that Modernity particularly fails to deliver its promised goods.

So what Modernists on both sides did was come up with new PLAN Bs when their original PLAN A failed ---- and then barefacedly claim that this new PLAN B was their old PLAN A all along !

Unexpectedly it worked.

It worked I think because almost all historians ,until recently ,were themselves fully modernist, and thus swimming in the same Kool Aid they were supposed to be analyzing.

I have already pointed out that Dr Martin Henry Dawson inadvertently became part of one Plan B.

Dawson ,working in a spirit of COmmensality with penicillium fungus, had put trillions of tiny unicelled fungi chemical factories into 700 two liter flasks and thus helped bring naturally-grown penicillin to a point where the public demanded it be made in huge amounts.

Pfizer, who had been working with Dawson, simply piled those trillions upon trillions of tiny penicillium factories into a series of impressive looking four storey tall 'flasks' and bare-facedly called it 'High Technology'.

The media ever a sucker for pretty pictures over hard digging, fell for the story.

 They needed a new High tech wins the war success story when war medicine's original PLAN A (synthetic penicillin) failed to materialize despite a Manhattan Project-scaled effort in the US and UK.

Even the Manhattan Project itself can be seen as a PLAN B too.

The original PLAN A (precision bombing, with high level B-29s and NORDEN Bombsights) failed totally in its claim to quickly bring Germany and Japan to their knees, without a need for an old-fashioned infantry-led invasion--- and without killing many innocent civilians.

Quietly Allied governments  fell back upon imprecise 'area bombing'  ----burning entire metropolitan cities, along with all their residents, evoking a faint hope clause that the heat of the fires might also twist those cities' war factories' machine tools into useless knots.

But precision-bombing with High Explosives (HE) had been sold as an entirely man-made success story --- as a fully Modernist effort --- as military autarky.

The Norden Bombsight it was claimed, would aim the bomb so well that it would surmount any attempts by Mother Nature to pull it off its anointed course.

Man's high explosives (HE) also works as well in snow, rain,wind and excessive cold/ hot as in fair weather.

But the time-proven alternatives to HE and precision bombing were always rejected by the military leaders, out of a gut instinct that the real credit for their success would go to Nature, not to Modernist Man.

These alternatives I term "CLOUD WARFARE" .

For these war clouds of Poison Gas, Smoke, Radiation (Fallout),Incendiary (Fire) and Germ only succeed if the wind and humidity levels are just so.

Mother Nature can either help move these killers onto the target or scatter it wildly far away, diluting beyond effectiveness.

Consider the most successful bombing efforts of WWII : the firestorms of Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo.

Despite the massive amounts of fire bombs dropped, Modernist Man couldn't create those fire storms - or if so, firestorms would have happened many times over during WWII.

No, Mother Nature had to step in, in COmmensal fashion, and lend a hand - by giving the bombing crews lots of wind combined with super dry air (low humidity levels).

The fire bombs did no more than act as a sort of barbecue starter - the real fuel was the wood of the city combined with all that oxygen continuously coming in on the wind.

The energy from a thousand tons of  magnesium, phosphorus and napalm is nothing against the energy put out by 100,000 tons of combustible wood and oxygen.

Ancient warfare always knew that nothing could destroy an enemy's empire like firing up their cities on a nice hot,dry, windy day - firestorms are as much a part of pre-modernity as they are of the WWII era.

Even Hiroshima was as much death by fire and radiation as it was death by explosion - and if the winds had been high, many more might have died in other communities - conversely if heavy rains had fallen as the Bomb dropped, deaths would have been reduced by being limited to the immediate blast area.

Darn !

Nature gets much of the credit for the death rate in either case.

But Hiroshima was successfully sold as High Tech when in reality it was as ancient a form of warfare as anything the Hittites ever thought up.

Dr Henry Dawson worked with Nature to save hundreds of thousands of lives --- but General Curtis LeMay also worked with Nature, only this time to take hundreds of thousands of lives.

So WWII's COmmensality, (its low tech PLAN B solution to high tech PLAN A  public relations disasters) proved very much a two-edged  sword.

I never claimed global commensality was all hearts and flowers....

Martin Henry Dawson : MAN of METTLE ...

Michael Marshall

Dr Martin Henry Dawson was not the first person to discover the nettles of Recombinant DNA and Penicillin : merely the first person to firmly "grasp their nettles" and run with them.

For Dawson was a scientist of deeds, not mere words.

Griffith and Fleming were basically content to
merely publicly detail these scientifically unorthodox nettles and then leave their grasping to others much braver.

For "Great Deeds take Great Courage", as it has been frequently noted for centuries:

"Tender-handed stroke a nettle, and it stings you, for your pains.
But grasp it like a man of mettle, And it soft as silk remains."
    (Works, Aaron Hill, 1750)

AUSCHWITZ & HIROSHIMA : the PLAN "B"s of MOdernity

Michael Marshall

Give credit where credit is due : MARTIN HENRY DAWSON planned, at the start of his war, to prove up his concept  that SBE can be permanently cured by the systemic (internal) use of naturally grown penicillin .

He fully accomplished this goal and in the process kick-started the wartime production of the world's best known, best loved, medicine.

He worked closely with some of the weakest members of the Family of Life, tiny unicelled fungi , to save the lives of some of the weakest members of the Family of Man : COmmensality at it its pioneering 1940s best.

But neither the Axis nor the Allied planned at the start of their wars to bring forth the delights of Auschwitz or Hiroshima.

Hitler had always wanted all the Jews out of Europe,yes, but expelled rather than all being killed in German factories of death.

But gassing them all became Job #1 for him when his PLAN A, Operation Barbarossa, failed in the winter of 1941-1942 because Russian mud proved a better soldier than German automotive skills.

 Killing all the Jews he could get his hands on became a sort of consolation prize, a PLAN B, when Hitler failed totally in his main, his real, objective --- taking and holding European Russia.

Similarly for FDR - he of the famous proclamation decrying the killing and burning to death of civilians in the comparatively small bombing raids of early WWII.

He and his scientists had a much better idea :
careful, precise, humane aiming via the top secret NORDEN BOMB SIGHT, accurate enough to "drop a bomb in a pickle barrel from 15,000 feet", it was said.

Designed precisely to destroy just the military target and  ensure no collateral damages among the nearby civilians.

But his Plan A was a total belly flop disaster.

Soon America was onto PLAN B.

Soon American bombers were trying very hard to burn out entire metropolitan cities , burning up everyone from granddaughter to grandmother, in the hopes the flames might also lick at the contents of the factories hidden somewhere inside that metropole.

Toyko, Dresden, Hiroshima --- a 100,000 dead and burnt, "just like that", in each city, in just one raid.

Hiroshima and Auschwitz were MOdernity's failures alright - morally - nearly everyone agrees on that.

But may I propose they were also MOdernity's technological
failures ---Plan B consolation prizes exalted by wartime propaganda as if they had been Plan A all along.

But we,we historians seventy years on, know better - don't we ?

With Hiroshima and Auschwitz as MOdernity's tarnished PLAN B consolation prizes and the unexpected triumph of natural penicillin's  PLAN A over MOdernity's failure to produce the much promised  synthetic penicillin, little wonder that COmmensality's star was on the rise in late1945.....

What Fleming actually deserved the Nobel Prize for

Michael Marshall

Sir Alexander Fleming carefully saved his example of a strange mold spore ruining his bacteria experiment, when most would have just thrown it away.

He safely 'spored-up' this rare mold mutation (not as an easy thing to do as it seems for someone not an expert in mold cultivation) so he could reproduce more of it ( relatively unmutated into uselessness) for ever and ever - and he gave those samples away freely to all the world for 15 years.

He repeatedly publicized , albeit weakly and inaccurately , the valuable qualities of his rare mold.

One can not imagine the highly competitive Howard Florey,  George Merck and the OSRD's Newton Richards being so generous with a rare mold sample that came their way.

In fact the evil Dr Richards, I contend, sat on a truly rare and incredibly useful mutation* of Fleming's original mold for years during the war, while millions were dying of disease - not even sending a sample to his good friend Florey.

(* Donated to the NRRL and OSRD by American pharma firm Squibb's English-born director of medical research, Dr George Harrop.)

Richards was hoping to use this boon to give American pharma firms a leg up over their traditional British and continental European rivals in the event his main goal - American-made synthetic penicillin - failed.

But Britain was supposed to be Allied with America.

I don't usually have much sympathy for the unlikeable Dr Florey, but with Allied friends like Richards, who needs Axis enemies ?

Florey was not much of a researcher but tireless as a bully of governments and businesses in his unceasing ambition to do something truly great - fortunately in this case, penicillin went along for the ride along with his ambition.

Chain also shared the Nobel Prize with Fleming and Florey.

 He was a terrible chemist and lab organizer but his petty determination, in the Spring of 1940, to prove his penicillin was as potent as anything Norman Heatley could grow, did move the ambitious Florey off his inactive butt, once Chain showed him that penicillin might work, as at least a mouse systemic.

All three moved penicillin along its very leisurely path to actually saving lives, but I could credit a half dozen others equally worthy for what they did to push it into mass use before the War was over - clearly I feel Martin Henry Dawson did a great deal in this regard.

But it wouldn't have started without Fleming.

 Fungi that produce penicillin aren't really that rare. In addition, they easily mutate and so occasionally produce strains that produce enough penicillin to have an easily visible antibiotic effect.

They must have floated through many labs all over the world for the roughly 100 years of scientific labs, before Fleming finally took notice (and action) about it.

Thank you Sandy, for noticing and reacting ....

Give Fleet Street a Plowman's Lunch of Chalk & Bread : they'll nae know the difference ....

The British media still credits Sir Alexander Fleming with far more of the penicillin glory that he ever deserves.

To them, there is no more difference between Sir Alexander's mere call for synthetically-made penicillin to apply topically as an antiseptic and Dr Martin Henry Dawson's actual use of his own naturally-grown penicillin which he then injected by needle (ie systemically) as the world's first antibiotic, than there is between chalk and cheese.

So give the good man from Fleet Street a Plowman's Lunch of Chalk and Bread --- he'll nae know the difference.

I make the actual differences to be vast as the Atlantic Ocean is between the Old World Scot Fleming and the New World Scot Dawson - and four in nature.

First, the lazy Fleming merely offered a pious hope that someone else would make his synthetic penicillin - Dawson when no pharma company would help, grew his own, in a pilot plant sized operation of 700 2 litre flasks - all this done with his incredibly tiny team of overworked amateurs.

Secondly - synthetic versus naturally grown. Here Fleming had the nearly universal support of the 1920s to 1940s medical and scientific world behind his belief that synthetic penicillin would be better, cheaper, faster  and able to make vast quantities of the medicine.

Only Dawson disagreed - fortunately a hitherto obscure company disagreed along with him - they were both proven right: we still use naturally grown penicillin, not synthetic penicillin.

Dawson is long good, but that company, PFIZER, is very much with us.

Thirdly, Fleming saw penicillin only useful as a topical application to be applied to open surface wounds - a relative rarity in peacetime - and in truth - even in wartime.

Dawson saw the most common and dangerous infections spread their colonies and toxins all through the inside of a body - ie systemically.

A really successful medicine must do the same.

Most medicine is still used internally but given by pill - but when its a life or death immediate crisis, out comes Dr Dawson's old needle to save a life.

Fourthly, Fleming saw penicillin as an antiseptic - something that is a general killer but hopefully kills more germs than it does human cells.

Dawson saw penicillin as a killer highly specific only to bacteria (this specificity is part of what we now mean by the word antibiotic).

 In fact he quickly noted penicillin only rarely killed or slowed down bacteria -- it only worked when they were, in a sense, growing and molting their skins like lobsters -- it killed the invulnerable knight when he took off his armour to pee, as it were !

Dawson knew penicillin could finally cure the incurable, invariably fatal, common heart disease of SBE not because of its virulent ability to kill bacteria per amount of medicine used - penicillin actually falls only in the middle range here in terms of potency.

He knew it would work despite that relatively low level of potency, because a medicine that only kills bacteria and rarely binds to other substances in the body is both extremely non toxic and diffuses extremely well ( the two properties are related).

The heart valves infected in SBE aren't really well supplied with an internal source of blood - ironically its a case of "blood, blood everywhere but not a drop to drink".

To penetrate the dense biofilms on the heart valves, Dawson had to saturate the entire blood supply with an amount of penicillin that would kill the patient if it was of ordinary toxicity.

 At the same time, he had to hope that its extraordinary diffusion qualities would let a little of it penetrate the valve biofilms as the penicillin molecules and blood cells raced through the heart at speeds equivalent to a human spaceship.

If you are following all this, Dawson was using penicllin-the-systemic-antibiotic rather like Fleming's old penicillin-the-topical-antiseptic --- except that he was dabbing his penicillin antiseptic internally over the heart valves.

Truly a complex (and faintly ironic) first application for the new miracle drug.

(Meanwhile the body, unfortunately because of those same extraordinary diffusion qualities, was only too able to quickly extract the penicillin out of the blood stream, where it could do good ,and into the urine where it usually did nothing useful.)

Altogether, no Sisyphus ever rolled as heavy a stone up a hill as the terminally ill Dawson did in his efforts to offer proof of concept of the viability of naturally grown penicillin used systemically to cure SBE.

But he did it and moved the most incurable heart disease into the category of the most curable - a truly extraordinary achievement.

Frankly, I think it just might be Dawson, not that other Scottish Canadian , the eugenicist Tommy Douglas, who might deserve the title of the greatest ever Canadian.

85 years after the initial discovery of penicillin, it is too much to ask of Fleet Street to grasp these easily understood, fundamental, differences between Fleming's wildly inaccurate hopes and the actual penicillin we still use today ?

Two races against a dead - line, when "dead" not just a figure of speech

It was probably in late October 1940 , induced by the strain of setting up the world's first ever use of  penicillin-the-antibiotic, that Dr Martin Henry Dawson began his long slow slide into a terminal case of MG (Myasthenia Gravis).

A Canadian study had only recently determined
that a sufferer from  MG at that time lived an average of four and a half years.

Some lived much longer --- some much less.

However a rational individual , such as Dr Dawson was, would say he had till late April 1945 to live out his life.

He was proved exactly right - dying April 27th 1945.

I can't say he died happy, but I can speculate he didn't die unhappy .

Dawson lived just long enough to have the highly skeptical medical community around the world accept his claim that (systemic) (naturally-grown penicillin) (can cure SBE) --- yes, even the toughest cases of this hitherto invariable fatal disease more formally known as Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis.

I have written before of the jaw-dropping fact that by 1950, just five short years later, it was widely agreed that SBE had become, to quote Dr Charles Friedberg in the world famous medical journal JAMA, "the most common form of heart disease that can be cured."

In early 1945, as Dawson lay dying, with his labours just completed, he won his race by the narrowest of margins.

 JAMA , house organ of the American Medical Association (AMA) finally agreed to feature his long article on his four and half year battle - against his colleagues, his own government and his own body - to offer up "PROOF OF CONCEPT" on his bold claims.

Because he actually made three different, equally bold, claims.

He said the incurable SBE could be cured.

He said penicillin was  much better as a systemic antibiotic, if people would only try it, than it ever was as Alexander Fleming's topical antiseptic.

Finally, and most boldly by far, he said naturally grown penicillin , grown by trillions of incredibly tiny little biotech factories called unicell fungi , would be cheaper, better, more available than anything chemists might be able to synthesize.

He said that the big wartime projects of MOdernity's 'Chemical Man' are not inevitably smarter than the efforts put for by the smallest and weakest members of Life.

In 1945 that offered up a stinging rebuke to the entire civilized world.

It was a sting felt never more strongly that in Germany, home of Modernist Chemistry, which had recently put its chemistry to its most spectacular use ever --- in the steam baths of Auschwitz.

He was proven right, then, on all three points and is still right today.

Dawson's decision to work with Nature, not against her, and work with Nature's 's weakest beings to save humanity's weakest beings, was COmmensality at its finest.

His battle to save a handful of SBE patients (judged to be the lowest of the low , the 4Fs of the 4Fs, during a war effort focussed on 1A soldiers) moved an older couple in Brooklyn New York .

They had lost a daughter in the age before Dawson introduced antibiotics into a doubting world.

The husband, egged on by his wife, resolved to do something about it.

At that time he was the boss of a medium sized company that was best known for making citric acid for the soda pop industry.

He would stick that company's neck way out on the line and gamble big on Dawson's claim that the tiny little penicillin factories could do the job better, faster, cheaper, safer, than anything American's chemists could come up with.

Once he made that decision he went all out - like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stockbroker Dodds in the short story, "A Shadow Before" , he became a bear in a bull stock market .

If his gamble failed - and all the betting money said it would - his firm would be ruined.

But Oh ! If it succeeded !

If it succeeded, penicillin would arrive just in time, after all, for the expected heavy casualties of D-Day and just in time for the millions of people around the world dying of infectious diseases as a result of years of wartime malnutrition.

His firm would smothered in thanks and drowned in profits.

That man, John L Smith, was proven right by Dawson and his firm, Pfizer, never did look back from that decision.

For Dawson, his race against a dead-line was a personal race --- to prove up his concept, against fierce resistance from his body and his government, before he himself was - dead.

On the same tiny island (Manhattan), in the same time period
(WWII) , at the same university (Columbia), there was another much better known race against a deadline.

This dead-line was peace - the end of the war.

If the war ended before the Manhattan Project offered up its "PROOF OF CONCEPT" by successfully wiping out a city filled with people and factories, the atomic bomb would die still born - billions spent but the bomb never used.

After all, billions were spent on poison gas and germ warfare yet none of it was ever used.

Because along with Peace came massive spending cuts on war projects.

All that research money would vanish forever, at war's end - unless there was PROOF OF CONCEPT of this untried super weapon.

It was this, not the fear of a Nazi Atomic Bomb, which had vanished in Britain or Russia by the Fall of 1942 and not incidentally both were the enemies of Germany most likely to be on the dying end of a German A Bomb, which actually drove the American Manhattan Project.

The dead in this dead-line was 100,000 dead civilians : PROOF OF CONCEPT personified in ash and traces on the concrete.

This cold callous mental calculation, by scientists as well as military men, was MOdernity at its very worst.

So, two parallel but totally different races against dead - lines , operating a few hundred metres apart from each other in Harlem : MOdernity versus COmmensality.

Now there's a story !

a COmmensalist history of WWII

The consensus history of WWII was written during and immediately after the war itself, by men (mostly) ; men aged between their forties to sixties in 1945.

This consensus view of WWII has been frequently challenged, starting in the 1960s but still guides our view of the war, particularly among the casual public.

Those men were fully Modernist men - far too young to have come of age before The Second Industrial Revolution (aka "HARD MODERNITY" or  "FULL BORE MODERNITY").

Equally they were far too young to have come of age in the era that replaced Modernity : Commensality.

They saw this Modernist War through eyes so attuned perfectly to Modernity as to not even be aware it was a Modernist War between rival Modernist empires.

They focussed on the very real differences that divided Modernist capitalist country from Modernist communist or fascist or nazi country.

But they failed to see that all six major combatants,plus some dished earlier in the war (France,the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy),were imperialistic empires.


 Imperialism 's division between  "equality among mature citizens" and "non-equality for non-mature/non-citizens" is the very essence of Modernity --- if you write in "Nature & Humans-close-to-Nature" for "non-mature/non-citizen" , as any good Modernist would.

What they failed to see is what the elites in all the combatants and neutral countries had in common: an unthinking acceptance of Modernity's values.

Modernity had its critics back in the early 1940s but what is striking is how clay-bound the feet of the most jaded critic still were - how by the values of 2012, they still had too much of the system that they sought to attack buried deep in their intellectual bones.

I don't know enough about Dr Martin Henry Dawson and his potentially clay-bound feet to say much about him one way or the other.

But then his deeds form his autobiography, showing him to be at least a pre-Commensalist and so it would seem that he and his little team must have viewed this unfolding Modernist war with very jaundiced eyes.

Their story,the birth of an early Commensalist success story during and despite WWII , thus forms the backbone to my much larger story of Modernity's many signal failures during that war, its war.

The backbone and the contrast ---- the cheery, hopeful commensal frame to a modernist painting of a moral Hell on Earth....

BRAZILIAN butterfly wings flutter : Tornado of Death in TEXAS --- "Who remembers the POLES nowadays?"

In MOdernity Man's disconnected world, the Earth is a passive bare backdrop where the human actors live apart from one another until they chose to directly engage each other.

"Why should I care ?", they aggressively ask.

 "The fluttering of some obscure butterfly's wings in the jungles of Brazil can't possibly effect whether me and my home in Texas survive the next tornado."

But in the world of the COmmensality, the surface of the world is an active actor, along with all the life forms upon it - all Life lives within a complex web of interconnections where what ever happens to one will ultimately affect all others.

Today, we of the Commensality have no trouble accepting that Edward Lorenz's butterfly fluttering in Brazil can affect the force and direction of a Texas Twister.

Similarly we understand now that what happened to those far off Poles in 1939 did ended up affecting all of us.

By 1942, boys from Texas born of those parents who couldn't give a damn about the fate of the 1939 Polish butterflies broken upon the wheel, were dying all over the world in a Texas-sized Tornado of Death.

On August 22nd 1939, Hitler gave a very famous speech to his assembled military elite about the upcoming war against Poland.

The last sentence of one paragraph is particularly famous despite the fact that it might be fabricated.

(I do not think it was.)

Earlier in the paragraph Hitler had reminded his listeners that Genghis Khan sent millions of women and children to their deaths but today is remembered only as the founder of a great state.

Now in the last sentence, he reminds them that the mass killing of the Armenians only 20 years earlier hadn't caused much of an outcry at the time or in the years since.

(At the time this was very true.)

After the Holocaust this sentence came to be seized upon as the forerunner to the Jewish Holocaust - which it was - but very very indirectly.

Because the meat  of the paragraph - and I mean red meat,blood, violence,horror, death  - is in the middle sentences.

No vagueness here - Hitler says he has given orders to his death squads to relentlessly kill Polish women and children without mercy.


Polish women and children relentlessly and without mercy - not yet a decision to relentlessly kill Jewish women and children without mercy - that came 2 years later.

 (True, many of these early Polish victims were Jewish and or socialist-communist but the focus was above all on Polish nationalistic intellectuals - the natural leadership of the Polish people --- Hitler wanted to destroy the Poles as a nation, without wishing to kill every last one of them - just most of them.)

The veracity of this  sentence has never been questioned - only worse - it has been totally forgotten !

Within days of the outbreak of the war, the entire world press had many verified accounts of savage brutality imposed by German troops and police upon Poles - soldiers and civilians.

This reporting continued for more than nine months - from September 1939 to May 1940, that crucial period wherein an united Europe, let alone an united free world, could have ganged together collectively to overpower Hitler and ended WWII in its tracks.

(After the May - June 1940 Fall of France et al, the few remaining neutrals of Europe were too weak to take him on, with Britain's weak help, without suffering a brutal defeat upon themselves.)

I fully accept that.

But before that - before, before, before - what was their excuse beyond MOdernity's cold indifference?

For nine long months - long enough to bear a child - the world watched while Hitler broke Poland like a butterfly upon a wheel - watched and did nothing.

France and Britain (and their empires and commonwealths) did almost nothing.

Nothing that is in terms of an effective offensive attack on Hitler's Western Front while all of what little military hardware he did have (and it was not much) and the bulk of his troops were deep into Poland in the East.

But at least, to their eternal credit, they did declare war on Hitler as they promised they would if he attacked Poland.

That promise was made in March 1939 and it was not until March 1945, six  long, long, long  years later, that British troops finally moved onto German soil to engage Hitler.

A chivalrous gesture but chivalry of the most muted sort.

Most of the world can claim no moral credits at all for their behavior during those nine fatal months : better that Hannah Arendt had focused on this time period and to have spoken of the "THE BANALITY OF (SEEING NO) EVIL" .

What Hitler did during the Fall of 1939 in Poland was as evil as anything else he ever did - in other years he merely did different but equal forms of evil , and almost always the worst of these in Poland.

And it was known ,widely known at the time, to the whole of the newspaper-reading world.

But MOdernity Man said, "Who gives a tinker's damn about some Polacks ?" and turned to the sports page.

The Age of global Commensality will only truly arrive when we read about millions dying in some far off unknown province of the Congo and we do give a tinker's damn and a whole lot more.

The web of interconnectedness is as much moral as it is environmental - the two can not be separated.....

Etymologically, are BIOLOGISTS 'stupid' or 'thick' or what ??!!!

If you and I shared a meal together at a cafe, would any outsider automatically assume, a priori ,that one of us must have enjoyed the meal while the other of us must have been left indifferent?

Only biologists - or idiots - would.

(Or am I being redundant?)

Yes, I am hot under the collar, and with good reason.

The importance of just who is seated at the meal table (and how) has been noted as fundamental in all human cultures and over the entire course of recorded human history.

The term used to describe this crucial human ritual (in many societies the crucial ritual) is commensality.

It means simply the act of 'dining at a common table', end of story.

All at that table eat and get benefit from the food they eat - without denying some may eat more and get more benefit and vice versa.

It does NOT assume ,in advance, that some diners get no impact from the food they ate, good or bad; that's an impossible trick to pull off in human nutrition and I await the first scientist who proves me wrong.

It does, however, leave open a wealth of ways that commensality - that dining at a common table - can be arranged.

Let us consider just four variants to mix and match.

It is closed - only some can attend. It is open - all can attend.

It is hierarchical - whether or not all or only some can attend - some get the best seats and the most food.

It is egalitarian - perhaps only a few can attend, but within that group, all share seating choice and food amounts equally.

A few well know examples - in this case, from the Bible.

Jesus broke strict taboos to invite the poor, the sinner and the sick to dine with Himself and the rich and pious.

But some later Christian groups invited only those they judged 'saved' ( as we'd say today in Alabama) to their feasts, but at the feast all the 'saved' were judged equal participants.

Endless variety, in other words, lies within the simple meaning of commensality.

Some one hundred years ago some scientists -biologists - totally deranged the meaning of commensality for their own wicked, debased, ends and in the 'honor among thieves' fashion of scientists, almost all other scientists follow the biologists in lock step and use their warped definition.

Except (thanks be to God !) those social scientists actually researching real world commensal activities.

I would never deny that the biologists too are also studying a real world activity and that it too deserves a name that accurately and etymologically describes its key characteristic.

But commensality definitely isn't that word .

When I say we are living in the new AGE OF COMMENSALITY
since 1945, I simply mean that we are more and more realizing that humanity is within Nature, not above it.

So we exist within a highly complicated intertwining supra-dependency : all life on earth 'dines at a common table' of interconnected and inter-dependent resource and energy flows.

This is "global commensality" : all life on Earth is invited to a table the size of the entire Earth (and Solar System).

In plain English, if the Sun were to noticeably reduce its output for 80 years, even those bacteria deep in the mud at the very depths of the deepest basins of the ocean would eventually notice it.

They are not part of our Food Chain but they are part of our Air Chain and our Temperature Chain.

We dine together - on conventional food as well as air,water and heat - but we don't dine in harmony.

No,  all us life forms squabble amongst ourselves over what is our proper share.

This is not a sort of mutalistic 'hearts and roses' commensality - but it is commensality.

Hopeful human rationality - so often debased for evil ends - will this time let us see that we must learn to share the Earth with these various Golden Gooses and restrain our endless appetite, if we want to share some of their golden eggs far into the future.....

Who or what are the NATURE-DENIERS you ask ?

You've heard about Jewish Holocaust deniers and about Climate Holocaust deniers but who, you ask in bewilderment, are the NATURE-DENIERS ?

Well they're not Commensalists - the Age of Commensality believes all life on Earth, willy-nilly, dines at a common table (in a word is all commensal) - it believes mankind is not above Nature but fully in it - so it hardly denies Nature .

No, these deniers are all varieties of Modernists, people who believe that we can, if necessary, get along perfectly well without natural resources or indeed without Nature and even without those people they see as being closest to Nature.

The millions of people that the Nazis shot, gassed and starved in their Holocaust were (*almost) all people they viewed as living in a world far away from civilized man and close to (bestial) Nature.

(* I admit I think the Nazis had mixed feelings about the Communist commissars, Polish intellectuals and educated Jews that they killed .

 They saw most Poles, Slavs and Jews as close to animals and germs but saw the intellectuals among them as even more dangerous, because they were both 'smart' and 'dirty' .)

It must be admitted that the Nazis lacked ambition - they only killed 6 million in the most organized part of their killing spree.

Today's climate change deniers might just end up killing 6 billion of us if the world's climate goes to hell in a hand basket at the same time we run out of agricultural necessities like phosphorus.

(Solar might get us past the worst of the end of oil and coal -- but we can't expect the nuclear industry to transform us up a mess of the element phosphorus out of lead like some 21st century alchemist.)

The climate change deniers along with the environmental degradation deniers and resource depletion deniers are like the Nazis in basically denying that Nature can bite back .

So they assume, for example, that Nature can take all the Co2 we can hand it and just deal with it, somehow.

"Suck it up Nature !"

Modernity is supposed to have an Imperialistic side , a sort of evil twin brother hidden off to the side.

Bosh, I say, bosh.

Modernity only had one colony and always one colony  -  Nature.

Every other subject they colonized - from women and children, the poor and the disabled, to people in places like India and Africa - were always subjugated because they were judged close to Nature ------- and hence fair game.

Notice that none of the modernist nations ever seriously thought of turning other modernist nations into colonies -- this was called 'honor amongst modernists' ....

The paradox of our new AGE of COMMENSALITY

Our new Age of Commensality is based on Science, but not really based on Scientists.

The bulk of our scientists have given tepid lip service to the discoveries of their colleagues that form the basis for Commensality.

But they have not really accepted or fully acted upon the intellectual implications of those discoveries for their own work or their own world view.

In other words, these discoveries have become Public (published in peer reviewed journals, including all of the biggest) but they haven't become Popular (for example, taught in high school classrooms  or put front and centre in high school textbooks).

Modernity has lost its cachet in basic science but flourishes almost as strong as ever in applied science - and above all in applied technology (that warm fetid home of the NATURE-DENIERS) .

Asking school boards to teach commensality might be too much to ask.

(Somehow talking about Nature makes these so called "Evangelicals" reach for their unregistered long gun... don't know, maybe the thought that  Jesus was all for Commensality makes them 'agin it', on principle.)

But why don't High Schools at least teach "Quantum Physics for the Non Scientist" as it is the basis of all science and has been so for 100 years ?

The best place to take on the NATURE-DENIERS is probably not in the classroom.

No one is more timid and PC than a school board administrator so we best stick to more open and public forums such as blogs and at public meetings.....

All of us, ALL OF US, have spent the majority of our lives in "The Age of Commensality"

Michael Marshall

The Age of Commensality has a distinctly abrupt beginning as Eras go : bang ! -1945 - you're on !

That was the year of the Nuremberg Trial revelations about Auschwitz and Nazi Death Doctors, the year of  Dresden and Hiroshima.

Bang ! indeed.

This means that unless you are 135 years old (and you're not) , the majority of your life has been spent not living in The Age of Modernity.

So what Age, then, have you been living in all these years ?

There is a wide (academic) consensus about the post-1945 changes in the way most of us humans perceive Reality and think about Reality.

But there is no consensus on whether they hang together in a consistent way and if so, exactly what then to call them.

The current placeholder name Postmodernity won't do and everyone knows it.

What will we then call the next Age after this and the one after that : Post-Post-Modernity and Post-Post-Post-Post-Modernity ?

Why bother with calling the 19th Century 'The Age of Romanticism' - why not simply call it The Age Of  Post-Classicalism ?

My sense is that the Modern Age clearly thought and acted as if humans, in some essential sense, dined above and beyond Nature.

However, our own Age sees more and more clearly that we are bound into Nature, ie we're inside Nature and densely interconnected with all of it, like it or not.

I don't mean milk and honey/ lamb down with lions /turn the other cheek /interconnectedness --- I mean we're stuck into it.

If we are survive, we must see that our fellow life forms are also given their fair chance to survive as well, even if that means we must restrain our own appetites today so we can have a little something tomorrow.

We now intuitively realize that we all dine at one great common table.

 Whenever things start to go wrong with the water,carbon, nitrogen,  phosphorus and you-name-it cycles, it hits everyone from bacteria to babies.

Commensality (as this word is used by students of religion and anthropology/sociology, not in the distinctly odd way biologists use it ) seems to me to be the term that best describes the basket of ideas that makes up Postmodernity.

I hope to hear of other rival terms that claim to better describe the post-modern condition.

Fair enough - bring 'em on cable boys and girls !

Anything is better than lamely continuing to use the term postmodernity.

 Soon this 67 year old Old Age Pensioner will be older than the Age it has replaced - but 67 years on, it doesn't deserve to still be an orphan without a name ....

All of us, ALL OF US, have spent the majority of our lives in "The Age of Commensality"

BLOG MISSION STATEMENT :We must all learn to live together with and in Nature: all diners at her common table (commensal) or we must all learn to die together, frying in the upcoming global climate meltdown."   

The Age of Commensality has a distinctly abrupt beginning as Eras go : bang ! -1945 - you're on !

That was the year of the Nuremberg Trial revelations about Auschwitz and Nazi Death Doctors, the year of  Dresden and Hiroshima.

Bang ! indeed.

This means that unless you are 135 years old (and you're not) , the majority of your life has been spent not living in The Age of Modernity.

So what Age, then, have you been living in all these years ?

There is a wide (academic) consensus about the post-1945 changes in the way most of us humans perceive Reality and think about Reality.

But there is no consensus on whether they hang together in a consistent way and if so, exactly what then to call them.

The current placeholder name Postmodernity won't do and everyone knows it.

What will we then call the next Age after this and the one after that : Post-Post-Modernity and Post-Post-Post-Post-Modernity ?

Why bother with calling the 19th Century 'The Age of Romanticism' - why not simply call it The Age Of  Post-Classicalism ?

My sense is that the Modern Age clearly thought and acted as if humans, in some essential sense, dined above and beyond Nature.

However, our own Age sees more and more clearly that we are bound into Nature, ie we're inside Nature and densely interconnected with all of it, like it or not.

I don't mean milk and honey/ lamb down with lions /turn the other cheek /interconnectedness --- I mean we're stuck into it.

If we are survive, we must see that our fellow life forms are also given their fair chance to survive as well, even if that means we must restrain our own appetites today so we can have a little something tomorrow.

We now intuitively realize that we all dine at one great common table.

 Whenever things start to go wrong with the water,carbon, nitrogen,  phosphorus and you-name-it cycles, it hits everyone from bacteria to babies.

Commensality (as this word is used by students of religion and anthropology/sociology, not in the distinctly odd way biologists use it ) seems to me to be the term that best describes the basket of ideas that makes up Postmodernity.

I hope to hear of other rival terms that claim to better describe the post-modern condition.

Fair enough - bring 'em on cable boys and girls !

Anything is better than lamely continuing to use the term postmodernity.

 Soon this 67 year old Old Age Pensioner will be older than the Age it has replaced - but 67 years on, it doesn't deserve to still be an orphan without a name ....

Other Lifeforms make much of our chemists' compounds and molecules

Michael Marshall

If you believe your High School Chemist teacher, a very unwise thing to do, you might think that chemists spend their days creating things out of atoms and elements.

I won't say it never happens or that it had never happened, but its rare.

Chemists might occasionally work with molecules
of a pure element ,but generally, if atoms and elements were human beings, they'd be described as compulsive 'joiners' .

For simple molecules and compounds, they usually do the joining themselves, assisted by a natural catalyst that just happens to be hanging about combined with geological heat and pressure.

But if what they're joining is something complex and hence useful, it might take millions or billions of years to happen on its own, chemically and geologically.

That is unless a really good catalyst is giving a helping hand , like those biological wonder-workers, the enzymes.

Reactions that have a half-live of billions of years can then take place in milliseconds, at ordinary temperature and pressure.

This is why all those 'Chemistry is Modern Alchemy' ads are really bosh.

They don't actually make nylons out of  pure hydrogen gas, pure oxygen gas and pure carbon atoms - at least not economically - not in a million years.

No, they start with coal tar, (and water and air and many other unnamed chemical reagents) which far from being useless waste, is actually the end product of billions of years of life forms creating complex carbon ringed molecules with enzymes.

To save us massive amounts of capital and energy, we use these biologically-synthesized molecules as starting blocks for human ingenuity to turn into nylons and thousands of other things.

But once coal and petroleum are gone and trees too valuable to burn up to create wood tar, we are going to find chemists will need much more energy and capital ( both in very short supply when coal and petroleum is gone) to create the wonders of chemistry from just simple pure elements and atoms.

Biology is the basement foundation of today's organic chemistry production, we can not - despite economists' claims - 'in effect, get along perfectly well without it'.....

Other Lifeforms make much of our chemists' compounds and molecules

"We must all learn to live together within Nature: all diners at her common table (commensal) or all learn to die together, frying up in the upcoming global climate meltdown."   (Blog Mission Statement.)

If you believe your High School Chemist teacher, a very unwise thing to do, you might think that chemists spend their days creating things out of atoms and elements.

I won't say it never happens or that it had never happened, but its rare.

Chemists might occasionally work with molecules
of a pure element ,but generally, if atoms and elements were human beings, they'd be described as compulsive 'joiners' .

For simple molecules and compounds, they usually do the joining themselves, assisted by a natural catalyst that just happens to be hanging about combined with geological heat and pressure.

But if what they're joining is something complex and hence useful, it might take millions or billions of years to happen on its own, chemically and geologically.

That is unless a really good catalyst is giving a helping hand , like those biological wonder-workers, the enzymes.

Reactions that have a half-live of billions of years can then take place in milliseconds, at ordinary temperature and pressure.

This is why all those 'Chemistry is Modern Alchemy' ads are really bosh.

They don't actually make nylons out of  pure hydrogen gas, pure oxygen gas and pure carbon atoms - at least not economically - not in a million years.

No, they start with coal tar, (and water and air and many other unnamed chemical reagents) which far from being useless waste, is actually the end product of billions of years of life forms creating complex carbon ringed molecules with enzymes.

To save us massive amounts of capital and energy, we use these biologically-synthesized molecules as starting blocks for human ingenuity to turn into nylons and thousands of other things.

But once coal and petroleum are gone and trees too valuable to burn up to create wood tar, we are going to find chemists will need much more energy and capital ( both in very short supply when coal and petroleum is gone) to create the wonders of chemistry from just simple pure elements and atoms.

Biology is the basement foundation of today's organic chemistry production, we can not - despite economists' claims - 'in effect, get along perfectly well without it'.....

Who is the Commensalist ????

Michael Marshall

Well.... it isn't me --- I mean I am a commensalist, very much so ---- but I am not THE COMMENSALIST

I consider that honor belongs to Martin Henry Dawson.

Dawson was not the first or the most prominent basic scientist to dive deep into biological commensality, in the exact scientific sense of the word.

Nor was he the first by any means to demonstrate acts of ethical commensality - that happened a long, long time ago.

But I believe he was the first ever to act ethically upon what he had newly learned scientifically : in my sense of the terms, he exhibited Scientific Good Faith rather than Scientific Bad Faith .

That is his Popular Science (assembling a small ramshackle operation to grow penicillium slime so he could save the lives of unwanted terminal 4F patients with impure penicillin) ( a joint commensal operation of doctors, 4F patients and microbes) was created in the same spirit as what he had learned in his Public Science : seeing Nature's smallest, weakest, "stupidest" beings display the amazing ability to surmount difficulty after difficulty to go on living.

At a time when all his medical and scientific colleagues world wide had drunk deep of the Kool Aid of  Chemical Autarky and produced no penicillin, he worked instead with Nature's smallest, weakest beings to help Humanity's smallest, weakest beings when they needed it most ...

To add that he did all this when he himself was dying of a painful disease, seems almost trite.....

Who is the Commensalist ????

We must all learn to live together within Nature: all diners at her common table (commensal) or all learn to die together, frying up in the upcoming global climate meltdown."   (Blog Mission Statement.)

Well.... it isn't me --- I mean I am a commensalist, very much so ---- but I am not THE COMMENSALIST

I consider that honor belongs to Martin Henry Dawson.

Dawson was not the first or the most prominent basic scientist to dive deep into biological commensality, in the exact scientific sense of the word.

Nor was he the first by any means to demonstrate acts of ethical commensality - that happened a long, long time ago.

But I believe he was the first ever to act ethically upon what he had newly learned scientifically : in my sense of the terms, he exhibited Scientific Good Faith rather than Scientific Bad Faith .

That is his Popular Science (assembling a small ramshackle operation to grow penicillium slime so he could save the lives of unwanted terminal 4F patients with impure penicillin) ( a joint commensal operation of doctors, 4F patients and microbes) was created in the same spirit as what he had learned in his Public Science : seeing Nature's smallest, weakest, "stupidest" beings display the amazing ability to surmount difficulty after difficulty to go on living.

At a time when all his medical and scientific colleagues world wide had drunk deep of the Kool Aid of  Chemical Autarky and produced no penicillin, he worked instead with Nature's smallest, weakest beings to help Humanity's smallest, weakest beings when they needed it most ...

To add that he did all this when he himself was dying of a painful disease, seems almost trite.....

The very naughty Charles LYELL ....

Michael Marshall

Modernist Man still views life on earth through the prism of geology, the legacy of that very wicked barrister Sir Charles Lyell.

Man's continued existence on Planet Earth, in this schema, is practically guaranteed by the fact that the geological processes of the earth are supposedly uniform in character , uniform all over the world and uniform in nature back to the beginnings of time.

Supposedly these geological forces are what created and sustain the great natural cycles - the circulation streams of  rain, water and air and of oxygen,nitrogen, carbon, sulfur et al.

But while it is true that because our planet was stony with a fluid metallic core, this allowed life the ability to begin here, most of those vast natural circulations wouldn't exist if life, Microbe Life mostly, didn't sustain them.

In fact most of the minerals and ore bodies that we take for granted as being of geological origin, actually were created and assembled by biological forces.

True, Geology gave us all the elements that make up the Earth - but most of our minerals and compounds owe some or all of their creation to Life forces.

Man, pace Robert Solow, could not live on rocks alone - we need Life to live ; all Life....

The very naughty Charles LYELL ....

"We must all learn to live together within Nature: all diners at her common table (commensal) or all learn to die together, frying up in the upcoming global climate meltdown."   (Blog Mission Statement.)

Modernist Man still views life on earth through the prism of geology, the legacy of that very wicked barrister Sir Charles Lyell.

Man's continued existence on Planet Earth, in this schema, is practically guaranteed by the fact that the geological processes of the earth are supposedly uniform in character , uniform all over the world and uniform in nature back to the beginnings of time.

Supposedly these geological forces are what created and sustain the great natural cycles - the circulation streams of  rain, water and air and of oxygen,nitrogen, carbon, sulfur et al.

But while it is true that because our planet was stony with a fluid metallic core, this allowed life the ability to begin here, most of those vast natural circulations wouldn't exist if life, Microbe Life mostly, didn't sustain them.

In fact most of the minerals and ore bodies that we take for granted as being of geological origin, actually were created and assembled by biological forces.

True, Geology gave us all the elements that make up the Earth - but most of our minerals and compounds owe some or all of their creation to Life forces.

Man, pace Robert Solow, could not live on rocks alone - we need Life to live ; all Life....

It is a crisis as small as your NEWBORN ; it is a crisis as big as PLANET EARTH...

       

"Man ABOVE Nature no longer : we are all 'Nature' and we all dine together at a common table ; to paraphrase King Edward VII, "we are ALL commensalists nowadays ..."

Michael Marshall

This is this century's moral and political crisis - a crisis between this century's Commensality and the last century's Modernity ; a crisis much bigger than anything the 20th Century could throw up.

This because because despite all the violence and hatred between Communism , Capitalism and the various flavors of Fascism , they at least were all united in being Modernists, Modernists bickering amongst themselves over how best to butcher the Planet and its resources.

There doesn't seem, at first, to be any common ground between the Deniers (Fry-ers) and the green-minded citizen, but there is ---most people ultimately do want to live.

The fanatics - like Hitler and his gang - really did believe it was Better to be Dead than Red , but most us will do almost anything to live , waiting for a better day to come along.

When the temperature rises all over the planet, it might start to melt even the coldest, hardest hearts among the Modernist, leading them to see they must compromise their greed, if they wish to continue to live.

Let us pray that the greedy of this world are willing to settle for a half loaf, so the world can return to dining together, commensally, in more or less harmony....

It is a crisis as small as your NEWBORN ; it is a crisis as big as PLANET EARTH...

"We must all learn to live together within Nature: all diners at her common table (commensal) or all learn to die together, frying up in the upcoming global climate meltdown."   (Blog Mission Statement.)

             
"Man ABOVE Nature no longer : we are all 'Nature' and we all dine together at a common table ; to paraphrase King Edward VII, "we are ALL commensalists nowadays ..."

This is this century's moral and political crisis - a crisis between this century's Commensality and the last century's Modernity ; a crisis much bigger than anything the 20th Century could throw up.

This because because despite all the violence and hatred between Communism , Capitalism and the various flavors of Fascism , they at least were all united in being Modernists, Modernists bickering amongst themselves over how best to butcher the Planet and its resources.

There doesn't seem, at first, to be any common ground between the Deniers (Fry-ers) and the green-minded citizen, but there is ---most people ultimately do want to live.

The fanatics - like Hitler and his gang - really did believe it was Better to be Dead than Red , but most us will do almost anything to live , waiting for a better day to come along.

When the temperature rises all over the planet, it might start to melt even the coldest, hardest hearts among the Modernist, leading them to see they must compromise their greed, if they wish to continue to live.

Let us pray that the greedy of this world are willing to settle for a half loaf, so the world can return to dining together, commensally, in more or less harmony....

" Commensal ---- or FRY !!!!!! "

Michael Marshall

The choice is stark --- the debate will be heated.

We must all learn to live together: all diners at Mother Nature's common table, commensal --- or we will all fry together in the upcoming global climate meltdown.

The above catchphrase sums it all up very succinctly : "Commensal ---- or FRY !!!!" *


We will all be either Commensals or Fries : just as in different situations we all seem to end up either Roundheads or Cavaliers/ Union Blue or Confederate Grey / BLUE staters or RED staters.

In the old days, say up to about 1973, the choice was equally stark and the debate equally heated.

It was about dividing Humanity's strictly limited pie.

 How much to the workers ? How much left then to the bosses ?

A Zero-Sum Game.

Dressed up in its Sunday Best, it was the battle between Socialism and Capitalism.

It even engaged future King Edward VII.

Today there is a new battle, but still over the same old pie - more or less.

Today's Humanity Pie is much bigger --- much much bigger - and that is the problem.

Its bigger but it is making us sick - and making the whole world sick - because it is so big - too big.

One side of us says that unless Mankind learns to restrain its appetites and saves a little grain for Mother Nature's Golden Goose, it will stop laying its Golden Eggs for us.

The other side says we can , in effect, live very well without natural resources, nature's species - and to be frank about it - without most other people.

Like the birds and the bees and the trees, they are all 'useless mouths' consuming what could - and should - be Modernist Man's alone.

You know where I stand on this new debate that
is riveting and dividing all of Human Society.

 I believe Science has shown for over hundred years - even if most scientists won't admit it - that all multi-celled life on Earth is highly and totally interdependent on each other and above all on the uni-celled life forms living invisibly on and around us.

Only these tiny life forms can truly see us multi-celled beings as 'useless mouths' they could well live without.

We can't say the reverse.

We multi-celled beings are all parasites , feeding off the world the microbes made viable well before we ever got here.

If we disappeared it still would be as viable - but if we got rid of ALL the microbes we ourselves won't be here very long - all of us would be dead in a few months.

Mankind's greedy environmental and climate changes won't really FRY the planet .

But it does mean, at the very least, that billions of humans would die.

At worse,we might even tip the world into a climate state where almost all but the tiniest multi-celled beings would die - leaving only the meekest of Live to inherit the Earth.

As the very last of our global corporate CEOs fries, I wonder if he (and it will be a HE for sure) will go off to 'that even hotter place' humming Alanis's tune, "isn't it ironic..."

* When the pioneers tumbled themselves
and their barn-fed pigs off the boat and into the New World's heavily-treed wilderness, they shoved their swine off into the woods to forge for themselves, telling them , "Root Hog ---- Die !!!!!".

Today, it much the same - either Mankind learns to live within Nature's means or he will fry up this Planet.

This is today's existential crisis for today's Modernist Man :

DENY... & FRY !!!

" Commensal ---- or FRY !!!!!! "

"We must all learn to live together within Nature: all diners at her common table (commensal) or all learn to die together, frying up in the upcoming global climate meltdown."   (Blog Mission Statement.)

The choice is stark --- the debate will be heated.

We must all learn to live together: all diners at Mother Nature's common table, commensal --- or we will all fry together in the upcoming global climate meltdown.

The above catchphrase sums it all up very succinctly : "Commensal ---- or FRY !!!!" *


We will all be either Commensals or Fries : just as in different situations we all seem to end up either Roundheads or Cavaliers/ Union Blue or Confederate Grey / BLUE staters or RED staters.

In the old days, say up to about 1973, the choice was equally stark and the debate equally heated.

It was about dividing Humanity's strictly limited pie.

 How much to the workers ? How much left then to the bosses ?

A Zero-Sum Game.

Dressed up in its Sunday Best, it was the battle between Socialism and Capitalism.

It even engaged future King Edward VII.

Today there is a new battle, but still over the same old pie - more or less.

Today's Humanity Pie is much bigger --- much much bigger - and that is the problem.

Its bigger but it is making us sick - and making the whole world sick - because it is so big - too big.

One side of us says that unless Mankind learns to restrain its appetites and saves a little grain for Mother Nature's Golden Goose, it will stop laying its Golden Eggs for us.

The other side says we can , in effect, live very well without natural resources, nature's species - and to be frank about it - without most other people.

Like the birds and the bees and the trees, they are all 'useless mouths' consuming what could - and should - be Modernist Man's alone.

You know where I stand on this new debate that
is riveting and dividing all of Human Society.

 I believe Science has shown for over hundred years - even if most scientists won't admit it - that all multi-celled life on Earth is highly and totally interdependent on each other and above all on the uni-celled life forms living invisibly on and around us.

Only these tiny life forms can truly see us multi-celled beings as 'useless mouths' they could well live without.

We can't say the reverse.

We multi-celled beings are all parasites , feeding off the world the microbes made viable well before we ever got here.

If we disappeared it still would be as viable - but if we got rid of ALL the microbes we ourselves won't be here very long - all of us would be dead in a few months.

Mankind's greedy environmental and climate changes won't really FRY the planet .

But it does mean, at the very least, that billions of humans would die.

At worse,we might even tip the world into a climate state where almost all but the tiniest multi-celled beings would die - leaving only the meekest of Live to inherit the Earth.

As the very last of our global corporate CEOs fries, I wonder if he (and it will be a HE for sure) will go off to 'that even hotter place' humming Alanis's tune, "isn't it ironic..."

* When the pioneers tumbled themselves
and their barn-fed pigs off the boat and into the New World's heavily-treed wilderness, they shoved their swine off into the woods to forge for themselves, telling them , "Root Hog ---- Die !!!!!".

Today, it much the same - either Mankind learns to live within Nature's means or he will fry up this Planet.

This is today's existential crisis for today's Modernist Man :

DENY... & FRY !!!

When Modernity said MAN above Nature, they meant it ...

Michael Marshall

The MAN bit I mean.

Modernists did (and still do) see women,children ,natives, savages,primitives, animals, ethnic minorities, the 'defective' and pretty well everybody else but themselves as part of Nature, far, far, far below them.

If you plug in  'well-off' ,'powerful', 'but still angry' ,'old', 'white' ,'protestant', 'males' you pretty well have the sort of MAN that still ,still, thinks he is not part of Nature but flying in a sort of reverie/haze/daze miles above it.

In his mind.

And I mean that literally not figuratively - these guys sorta, half, admit that their bodies are part of sordid, damp, sticky, icky, Ole Nature.

But their minds, their minds !!!

Their pure Platonic , all-seeing, all-hearing, all-knowing, minds.

They are not part of part of Nature, but rather live in a parallel universe of mathematics, logic, rationality, utilitarianism .

Cool, calculating ,un-emotional, un-sentimental Man.

This is the sort of wet dream that all well-fed ,well-off, underworked & over-praised teenage boys have.

The sort of day-dreams you have when mom and dad wait on you hand and foot and you grow up thinking the whole world is your oyster.

Spoil your child and he will end up, inevitably, spoiling your world - your whole world, from the top of the atmosphere to the bottoms of the ocean.

If our teenage sons still have these wet dreams when they grow up, then the world knows them Modernists ( or Republicans or Soviets or Fascists or Progressives.)

However, rather like the Pharisee said long ago,  "I thank God that I am not a Modernist ---- I am a Commensalist..."