Age of Enlightenment has been replaced —— by the Age of Entanglement

 Danny Hillis says it very well indeed.  His blog post is well worth reading and pondering.

The five hundred year old Age of Enlightenment occurred when man, mostly males of the European part of the human species, deluded themselves into thinking they had discovered the few - simple - laws of reality and could now easily replace some and soon all of the products and environments provided by Mother Nature, with superior man-made, human-made products & environments : Synthetic Autarky, High Modernity.

But today, we are coming to realize that we are thoroughly entangled, somewhere stuck in the middle, with Mother Nature’s species, products & environments, with all other human beings and with our own human made technologies and environments.

I only want to add that WWII and 1945 was the turning point, when the whole world came to accept that the vast European civilization was far far superior to the tiny fungal molds when it came to manufacturing *Zyklon B to murder millions of little children, but that the slimy little molds were far superior in making penicillin, to save the lives of millions of little children....

* As always with reality, its a bit more complicated than that. Zyklon B is better known as Prussic Acid or simply (hydrogen) cyanide, HCN, and works well to kill fungus and molds. 

However, the bacteria , species like pseudomonas, often produces HCN as a secondary metabolite, which almost incidentally, kills nearby fungus. Similarly some species of fungus, the penicillium being the best known, sometimes produce penicillin as a secondary metabolite, which almost incidentally kills nearby bacteria.... 

WWII was the Apogee and Nadir of High Modernity

 

Somewhere in steamy south-east Asia, High Modernity got thoroughly entangled with Mother Nature...

By the summer of 1945, judging by their chalked up graffiti and freely exchanged verbal jibes, many American servicemen heading into the Pacific War expected it to be over by the summer of 1947 - at the earliest.

No doubt many Chinese and Japanese felt the same way.

 If that had actually happened, ie if the Atomic Bomb hadn’t worked in its July 1945 test,, WWII might today be known as ‘The Ten Year War’.

It would dating from the start of the Japanese invasion of China south of Manchuria in 1937 until the last unit formally surrendered somewhere in the vast Japanese Zone of occupation sometime in late 1947 after a hard-fought bunker to bunker conventional war.

None of the world’s elite - or in the general population for that matter - thought this inter-connected series of wars would last anywhere near that long when the wars started in 1937 and then expanded in 1939 and 1941.

In 1937, the Japanese Army promised and expected a very short war conquering all of the vastness of China and the public and politicians back home did not visibly balk at that claim.

After the extraordinarily rapid conquest of France et al in June 1940, the Germany Army and Air Force had a Happy Year, when Germany seemed just as likely to quickly invade and conquer the tough British and then the vastness of Russia.

Again elite opinion around the world generally concurred -in print - on the record.

Japan, too had a Happy Period, (albeit of only of six months - from December 1941 to early June 1942) where nobody seemed able to stop their 360 degree invasion efforts.

High speed mass tank attacks, backed by high speed ground support aircraft, had seemed to make war winning land campaigns an extraordinarily violent but short term event. 

Equally, high speed, long range  aircraft carrier battle groups hosting hundreds of high speed planes to protect the paratroopers and amphibious marines landing anywhere and everywhere, seemed to promise the same brief but violent success in sea based wars.

Wars that all the smartest people in the universe thought might last ten weeks and then extended to ten years require a serious explanation and this blog is dedicated to providing one possible explanation.

Briefly, it is that High Modernity fundamentally rejected a million years of human experience that said, in the long run and in the wide view, Nature - not other humans - were our greatest opponents.

The adults of WWII, are almost all dead now, but many of us grew up knowing them well as parents and grand-parents, did not - intellectually- consider the tiger or the typhoon or the hurricane to be something mankind would much have to worry about in the near future.

Emotionally, facing an actual tiger or typhoon was still frightening, but around the dining room table  in ordinary times, they displayed a naive faith that scientists & engineers had most of Nature’s scary bits well in hand.

Ideologies, human ideologies, was what terrified them : other humans supportive of capitalism, socialism,communism, liberalism, fascism, westernism, orientalism, you name it.

Religions, other people’s religions, disturbed many people as well. Differing ethnicities (people rather like yourself but with a different language, culture & history) terrified many people almost as much as the thought of different races did (a ‘race’ being people of a different color of skin  living distant from yourself).

Most histories of WWII focus on these conflicts between humans and their ideology as being the main substance of the war, with barriers like climate and geography being minor side issues easier to overcome than human opponents.

I agree in only that it clearly was conflict between humans that started the wars, but that it was the weakness of humans - on all sides - in combatting the forces of Nature,  that made it last as long as it did.

High Modernity was the Age of Synthetic Autarky, wherein humanity sought to ultimately replace all of Nature with man-made products in a man-remade environment. They felt they could stand aside from Nature, the Nature of plants & animals and also the Nature of lesser human beings.

So, for example, the Germans clearly thought that machines could easily replace the 50 to 100 million people they meant to ultimately kill, starve or expel from Eastern Europe-Western Russia.

I believe, gradually, over many disappointments fighting this long wide war, humanity began to lose their faith in the human ability to simply displace Nature.

Slowly, slowly (for many, 80 years on, it still hasn’t happened yet) humanity began to accept that they were fully entangled with all of Nature and with all of humanity.

We all dine at a common table on Lifeboat Earth.

High Modernity is still around but no longer dominant, for we have now entered The Age of Entanglement....