Movies and Chemistry: Keeping the Enchantment of Education

Several movies give you an “enchanting” back door or window into chemistry so that you can “beat” the tediousness of regular education and come into the field and its topics via these movies:

I.

The Man in the White Suit is a 1951 British comedy classic with Alec Guinness as a genius research chemist. He fiddles with his flasks and polymer and textile chemistry experiments until he invents a fabric that shows no wear and tear “forever.” This would seem like a great boon to humanity in its clothing needs but the chemist (“Sidney Stratton”) finds that both labor and management reject his discovery violently as it threatens jobs and profits. Textile or fabric polymer chemistry is at the heart of the plot.

Cry Terror! is a taut 1958 crime thriller movie with James Mason and Rod Steiger. The plot involves the terrorist threat of exploding a domestic airliner with a hidden RDX cache (a TNT successor) unless the demanded payment is made.

RDX was used by both sides in World War II. The U.S. produced about 15,000 long tons per month during WWII and Germany about 7,000 long tons per month. RDX had the major advantages of possessing greater explosive force than TNT, used in World War I and requiring no additional raw materials for its manufacture.

Semtex is a general-purpose plastic explosive containing RDX and PETN. It is used in commercial blasting, demolition, and in certain military applications.

A Semtex bomb was used in the Pan Am Flight 103 (known also as the Lockerbie) bombing in 1988. A belt laden with 700 g (1.5 lb) of RDX explosives tucked under the dress of the assassin was used in the assassination of former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.

The 1993 Bombay bombings used RDX placed into several vehicles as bombs. RDX was the main component used for the 2006 Mumbai train bombings and the Jaipur bombings in 2008. It also is believed to be the explosive used in the 2010 Moscow Metro bombings.

Traces of RDX were found on pieces of wreckage from 1999 Russian apartment bombings and 2004 Russian aircraft bombings. Further reports on the bombs used in the 1999 apartment bombings indicated that while RDX was not a part of the main charge, each bomb contained plastic explosive used as a booster charge.

Ahmed Ressam, the al-Qaeda Millennium Bomber, used a small quantity of RDX as one of the components in the bomb that he prepared to detonate in Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Eve 1999-2000; the bomb could have produced a blast forty times greater than that of a devastating car bomb.

In July 2012, the Kenyan government arrested two Iranian nationals and charged them with illegal possession of 15 kilograms (33 pounds) of RDX. According to the Kenyan Police, the Iranians planned to use the RDX for “attacks on Israeli, U.S., UK and Saudi Arabian targets.”

RDX was used in the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri on February 14, 2005.

In the 2019 Pulwama attack in India, 250 kg of high-grade RDX was used by Jaish-e-Mohammed. The attack resulted in the deaths of 44 Central Reserve Police Force personnel as well as the attacker.

Semtex was developed and manufactured in Czechoslovakia, originally under the name B 1 and then under the “Semtex” designation since 1964, labeled as SEMTEX 1A, since 1967 as SEMTEX H, and since 1987 as SEMTEX 10. Originally developed for Czechoslovak military use and export, Semtex eventually became popular with paramilitary groups and rebels or terrorists because prior to 2000 it was extremely difficult to detect, as in the case of Pan Am Flight 103.

The Russian apartment bombings were a series of explosions that hit four apartment blocks in the Russian cities of Buynaksk, Moscow and Volgodonsk in September 1999, killing more than 300, injuring more than 1,000, and spreading fear across the country. The bombings, together with the Invasion of Dagestan, triggered the Second Chechen War. The handling of the crisis by Vladimir Putin, who was prime minister at the time, boosted his popularity greatly and helped him attain the presidency within a few months.

The blasts hit Buynaksk on 4 September and in Moscow on 9 and 13 September. On 13 September, Russian Duma speaker Gennadiy Seleznyov made an announcement in the Duma about receiving a report that another bombing had just happened in the city of Volgodonsk. A bombing did indeed happen in Volgodonsk, but only three days later, on 16 September. Chechen militants were blamed for the bombings, but denied responsibility, along with Chechen president Aslan Maskhadov.

A suspicious device resembling those used in the bombings was found and defused in an apartment block in the Russian city of Ryazan on 22 September. On 23 September, Vladimir Putin praised the vigilance of the inhabitants of Ryazan and ordered the air bombing of Grozny, which marked the beginning of the Second Chechen War. Three FSB agents who had planted the devices at Ryazan were arrested by the local police, with the devices containing a sugar-like substance resembling RDX.

II.

The movie Khartoum (1966) has General Charles Gordon traveling to Sudan in 1884 to quell the “mad mullah” the Mahdi. (Osama bin Laden of his day).
At the train station where General Gordon starts his trip, there’s a railway ad sign that promotes the use of “Wright’s Coal Tar Soap.”

This gives us a sign of the rise of the modern chemical industry.

III.

Think of “Sherlock Holmes” in terms of all the movies and TV series or the original stories and books:

Holmes has to explain to Watson how he survived the assassination attempt on him by Moriarty, “the Napoleon of Crime” who threw him off the Reichenbach Falls. Holmes explains that he faked Moriarty out and clung to a bush or something and was (obviously) not killed.

Holmes tells Watson what he does when he returns to civilization and travels and studies for some three years:

“I then passed through Persia, looking in at Mecca, and paid a short but interesting visit to the Khalifa at Khartoum, the results of which I communicated to the Foreign Office. Returning to France, I spent some months in a research into the coal-tar derivatives, which I conducted in a laboratory at Montpellier, in the south of France.”

The context implies the year 1894.

There is clear evidence that Mr. Holmes was deeply involved in the research of coal-tar derivatives as early as 1889 when the events of the Copper Beeches matter were transpiring.

We are told that on an evening in 1889, Mr. Holmes was seated in 221B Baker Street at the deal table loaded with retorts and test tubes. He was settling down to one of those all-night chemical researches in which he frequently indulged.

The research work was interrupted by a message of distress from Violet Hunter. Watson found that there was a train the next morning, and Holmes tells Watson:

“That will do very nicely. Then perhaps I had better postpone my analysis of the acetones as we may need to be at our best in the morning.”

It is clear that Holmes was engaged in coal-tar research long before his visit to Montpellier in the south of France.

The quotation from the Copper Beeches story refers to acetones, not to coal-tar derivatives.

“In the fractional distillation of coal-tar, the distillate separates into five distinct groups or layers, depending upon the stage of the process and the amount of heat applied. Category-one of the five includes benzene, toluene, xylenes and cumenes.

Acetones [dimethelketone-CH3COCH3] may be derived from the oxidation of cumene. And cumene [isopropylbenzene-C6H5C(CH3)2] is derived by distillation from the coal-tar naphtha fractions.”

Cumenes are derived from coal-tar, and acetones are derived from cumenes. Thus, a study of the acetones is, necessarily, research into coal-tar derivatives.

The rise of chemical engineering and organic chemistry are at the heart of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

Thus we can “climb” into chemistry via these books and movies and keep a feeling of enchantment as a kind of educational “shoehorn.”

Movies As Education: Books and Selves

La Notte (English: The Night) is a 1961 Italian drama directed by Michelangelo Antonioni. The film stars Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau, and Monica Vitti (with Umberto Eco, the novelist, appearing in a cameo).

Filmed on location in Milan, the film depicts a day in the life of an unfaithful married couple and their deteriorating relationship.

In 1961, La Notte received the Golden Bear (at the Berlin International Film Festival, the first for an Italian film) and the David di Donatello Award for Best Director.

La Notte is the central film of a trilogy, beginning with L’Avventura (1960) and ending with L’Eclisse (1962).

The movie follows Giovanni Pontano (Marcello Mastroianni), a distinguished writer, and his beautiful wife Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) as they visit their dying friend Tommaso Garani (Bernhard Wicki) who is hospitalized in Milan. Giovanni’s new book, La stagione (The Season), has just been published, and Tommaso praises his friend’s work.

La Notte reflects the director’s intuition that “you are what you read,” and books create a kind of thread through the story.

The dying, hospitalized patient has recently published an article on the famous philosophical writer Theodor Adorno. At the party the couple drifts into, the works of the AustrianJewish writer, Hermann Broch, are mentioned. Essentially, in a depressing glitzy world of lost and semi-lost souls, reading and books constitute a kind of emotional life raft or direction-finding compass, at least potentially. Antonioni frequently uses this motif.

We find this kind of reading and books-centered view of people interpreting their (bewildering) worlds in the works of the French thinker Charles Péguy (who died in battle during World War I in 1914):

“The Jew,” he declares in a passage that has become famous, “is a man who has always read, the Protestant has read for three hundred years, the Catholic for only two generations.”

(quoted in Consciousness and Society, H. Stuart Hughes, Vintage Books, paperback, 1958, page 355)

Charles Péguy is also central to Louis Malle’s classic French film Au revoir les enfants (English: “Goodbye, Children”).

If we “zoom out” and look for a meta-intelligent lesson, we can say that reading, writing, and arithmetic, the three basics mentioned in the phrase we all know, are very deeply entwined with who we are. Stories explain us to ourselves, and stories involve books and reading in our “Gutenberg world.”

The replacement of these by various (post-Gutenberg) screens and games may or may not be thought of as a variant since they constitute a kind of “pseudo-participation” and not participation based on perusal.

Multiple Searchlights Give You Understanding

Naive views of world events and world history are mono-causal but the world is always “multifactorial.” The Left and the Right keep on pushing these “perfect myopia” analyses:

For example, in the movie masterpiece Reds from 1981, John Reed (played by Warren Beatty) keeps repeating that the cause of World War I is and will be J.P. Morgan’s loans and profits, a variant of “vulgar Marxism.”

We have already seen that one cannot understand World War I and the “winds of war” leading up to it without several layers of analysis including the globalization forces from 1870-1914 and the rise of an integrated Atlantic economy (Professor Jeffrey Williamson book); the rise of the Anglo-German antagonism (described in Paul Kennedy’s excellent book); the flow of loan capital and debts described in Herbert Feis’s classic, re-issued in 1965 and described here:

“This book, published for the Council on Foreign Relations, does not deal directly with the war or with its origins, but it has been included in this category because few books published in recent years have made more substantial contributions to the history of pre-war international relations in the broadest sense.

Feis’s book is the first adequate treatment of international loans in the years from 1870 to 1914, a subject the importance of which has long been recognized but the discussion of which has never got far beyond the stage of loose generalities. The scientific treatment of it involves a thorough command of the extensive literature of pre-war diplomacy as well as an intimate acquaintance with the sources of international finance.

So far as the reviewer can see, Feis has not missed anything of importance. He not only knows the material, but he knows how to use it; he understands the political motives and considerations which lay behind these financial transactions. A large part of the volume is taken up with a pioneer study of the character of British, French and German foreign investments and the general policies followed by the governments towards investments abroad. The remainder is devoted to a review of the major enterprises—the financing of Russia, the Balkan States, Egypt, Morocco, China and some of the less important countries. Other chapters deal with the vexed problems of Balkan and Asiatic railway. In many instances Feis’s treatment is the only adequate one in existence, but even in the larger sense the book is a reliable and thoroughly readable piece of research, one that no student of international relations can afford to overlook.”

(William L. Langer’s review of Europe: the World’s Banker, 1870-1914 by Herbert Feis)

On top of all this, we have the problem of parochial and tribal and personal “sleepwalking,” captured so well by Professor Christopher Clark:

The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 is historian Christopher Clark’s riveting account of the explosive beginnings of World War I.

The drastic changes in attitudes, society, values and mentalities is then captured, for post-World War I England, by Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End:

Parade’s End (1924-1928) is a tetralogy of novels by the British novelist and poet Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939). The novels chronicle the life of a member of the English gentry before, during and after World War I.

Only this type of “multifactorial” panorama—what we call “circum-spective intelligence” or “meta-intelligence”—can give you the multiple searchlights you need.

Where the searchlight views intersect is where understanding begins.

Everything else is monomaniacal cartooning à la the “simp” analysis of John Reed in the brilliant movie Reds, from 1981.

Education and the World’s Confusion

Students need to understand that the world and history and the mood of the moment are always a “confusing swirl,” as experience shows, and that implies the present intersection of world/history/mood is also such a confusing “opaque windshield.”

Take the example of Europe after World War I. Mussolini leaves his position at the left-wing paper Avanti! (English: “Forward”) and founds the bellicose Il Populo d’Italia (English: “The People of Italy”), which is nationalist and warlike.

Avanti! was an Italian daily newspaper, born as the official voice of the Italian Socialist Party, published since 25 December 1896. It took its name from its German counterpart Vorwärts, the party-newspaper of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Il Populo d’Italia, was an Italian newspaper which published editions every day with the exception for Mondays founded by Benito Mussolini in 1914, after his split from the Italian Socialist Party.

Mussolini was a complete tactical opportunist and his profound flip-flops indicate that “the winds” of mood and opinion were capricious and somewhat blind to its own twists and turns.

Take the case of the (later) famous anti-fascist Arturo Toscanini, the great music conductor. His trajectory is non-linear and as “jumpy” as Mussolini’s, going the other way:

“From the start Fascism was an eclectic movement and in its early days in 1919 it attracted a number of people who, including some, such as the great conductor Arturo Toscanini, who soon became its most determined opponents.”

(James Joll, Europe since 1870: An International History, Penguin Books, 1976, page 266)

Toscanini ran as a Fascist parliamentary candidate in Milan (1919) and this is a clue as to the tremendous disorientation in the wake of World War I.

In 1983, the outstanding Hebrew University scholar, Professor Sternhell, wrote Ni droite ni gauche. L’idéologie fasciste en France, which was translated to English three years later under the title, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France. The title of this classic by Sternhell—“neither right nor left”—captures via its very title, the indeterminate fusion and hodge-podge quality of modern ideologies. If they’re neither right nor left, where are they?

We could say there’s a deep pattern: World War I (yielding communism and fascism and Nazism) and then World War II (with atomic weapons and Auschwitz) and the Cold War have all left very disorienting legacies and since people in 2022 are legatees of these three wars, outlooks are very foggy. As the world becomes extremely confusing, people react accordingly and veer from mood to mood and opinion to opinion.

Education and Hegemonial Struggles

Dominance by Design, by Professor Michael Adas, is a very “intellectually useful” overview of the American thrust towards world domination by force, whether through the backdoor (covert means) or through the front door (invasion of Iraq in 2003, etc).

Michael Adas is the Abraham E. Voorhees Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.

“Long before the United States became a major force in global affairs, Americans believed in their superiority over others due to their inventiveness, productivity, and economic and social well-being. U.S. expansionists assumed a mandate to “civilize” non-Western peoples by demanding submission to American technological prowess and design. As an integral part of America’s national identity and sense of itself in the world, this civilizing mission provided the rationale to displace the Indians from much of our continent, to build an island empire in the Pacific and Caribbean, and to promote unilateral—at times military—interventionism throughout Asia. In our age of “smart bombs” and mobile warfare, technological aptitude remains preeminent in validating America’s global mission.

Michael Adas brilliantly pursues the history of this mission through America’s foreign relations over nearly four centuries from North America to the Philippines, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf. The belief that it is our right and destiny to remake foreign societies in our image has endured from the early decades of colonization to our current crusade to implant American-style democracy in the Muslim Middle East.

Dominance by Design explores the critical ways in which technological superiority has undergirded the U.S.’s policies of unilateralism, preemption, and interventionism in foreign affairs and raised us from an impoverished frontier nation to a global power. Challenging the long-held assumptions and imperatives that sustain the civilizing mission, Adas gives us an essential guide to America’s past and present role in the world as well as cautionary lessons for the future.”

(Harvard University Press, 2009)

The whole issue of hegemonial struggles (as opposed to left-wing emphasis on “class struggles”) is very eye-opening in terms of achieving a more comprehensive understanding of the newspapers and history books themselves.

For example, Paul Kennedy’s book, “The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism: 1860-1914” (1980) is a very important book in giving us this layer of reality which complicates the parallel layer of globalization forces from 1870-1914.

Globalization narrowly speaking is about econo-technical changes unifying prices and other economic variables, while hegemonial struggles involve the struggle for mastery by rival countries or blocs.

This book gives an account of the rivalry between Great Britain and Germany in the period leading to the First World War. It gives readers a thorough comparison of the two societies, their political cultures, economies, party politics, courts, the role of the press and pressure groups, and so on.

Hegemonial rivalries between nations, blocs, empires are a key “motor” in world history and globalization and this rivalry are entwined at all times. Holistic education is partly the understanding of how entwining governs the world around us, in all areas.

Education and Ambiguity Awareness: A Polyvalent World

Sleepwalkers and sleepwalking are both destructive and constructive and show us the ambiguity in all phenomena.

The World War I chronicle of Professor Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers, from 2012, is described this way:

On the morning of June 28, 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie Chotek, arrived at Sarajevo railway station, Europe was at peace. Thirty-seven days later, it was at war. The conflict that resulted would kill more than fifteen million people, destroy three empires, and permanently alter world history.

The Sleepwalkers reveals in gripping detail how the crisis leading to World War I unfolded. Drawing on fresh sources, it traces the paths to war in a minute-by-minute, action-packed narrative that cuts among the key decision centers in Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Paris, London, and Belgrade.

Distinguished historian Christopher Clark examines the decades of history that informed the events of 1914 and details the mutual misunderstandings and unintended signals that drove the crisis forward in a few short weeks.

How did the Balkans—a peripheral region far from Europe’s centers of power and wealth—come to be the center of a drama of such magnitude? How had European nations organized themselves into opposing alliances, and how did these nations manage to carry out foreign policy as a result? Clark reveals a Europe racked by chronic problems—a fractured world of instability and militancy that was, fatefully, saddled with a conspicuously ineffectual set of political leaders. These rulers, who prided themselves on their modernity and rationalism, stumbled through crisis after crisis and finally convinced themselves that war was the only answer.

On the other hand, the great science writer and intellectual Arthur Koestler (died in 1983) in his own book, The Sleepwalkers, (originally, 1959) argues that the revolution in cosmology associated with the names of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, et al depended on visionary thinking, a kind of “sleepwalking.”

Lastly, the classic novel, The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch (died in 1851) condemns sleepwalking as the basis of Europe and Germany’s descent into nightmare.

Important works by Broch are The Sleepwalkers (German: “Die Schlafwandler,” 1932) and The Guiltless (German: “Die Schuldlosen,” 1950). The Sleepwalkers is a trilogy, where Broch takes “the degeneration of values” as his theme. Various generations are depicted as sleepwalking through their times and eras without any ability to “see past” their time, place, era. They were “sleepwalking.” This made them liable to demagogic deceptions and recruitment.

On the other hand, the experience and story of Kekulé (died 1896) and his scientific discoveries prodded by dreams and reveries and sleepwalking give us a story that argues against seeing sleepwalking as always negative:
Kekulé’s dream and “good kinds of sleepwalking.”

Friedrich August Kekulé, later Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz (7 September 1829 – 13 July 1896), was a German organic chemist. From the 1850s until his death, Kekulé was one of the most prominent chemists in Europe, especially in theoretical chemistry. He was the principal founder of the theory of chemical structure.

The new understanding of benzene (C6H6), and hence of all aromatic compounds, proved to be so important for both pure and applied chemistry after 1865 that in 1890 the German Chemical Society organized an elaborate appreciation in Kekulé’s honor, celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of his first benzene paper.

Here Kekulé spoke of the creation of the theory.

He said that he had discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule after having a reverie or day-dream of a snake seizing its own tail (this is an ancient symbol known as the ouroboros).

Kekulé’s story of “dreaming up” the structure of benzene (C6H6) gives us another historical example of Arthur Koestler-type “good sleepwalking” ie visionary dreams and reveries that really enhance “objective” concrete scientific analysis and not only art works.

It is educational to see the inner ambiguity of words and phenomena (such as sleepwalking) because this duality and “polyvalence” applies to many cases.

Science and Its Discontents: The Case of Natsume Sōseki (夏目 漱石) in Japan

Natsume Sōseki (夏目 漱石) is and was the most prestigious and respected novelist in modern Japan and every student has to engage with such novels of his as Botchan (坊っちゃん, “Young Master”) and Kokoro (こゝろ, or in post-war orthography こころ, “Heart”). Sōseki died in 1916.

Sōseki’s feeling that the modern world is some kind of runaway train with no brakes is expressed clearly in his 1913 novel, Kōjin (行人 , “The Wayfarer”).

One of Sōseki’s dialogues in the novel is about the current science and technology world, which was quite visible already then, and has a very nerve-racking or frightening tempo of a turbulent tsunami.

One character says:

“Now what you call insecurity is the insecurity of the entire human race, and it isn’t peculiar to you alone. Constant motion and flow is our very fate.

“Man’s insecurity stems from the advance of science. Never once has science, which never ceases to move forward, allowed us to pause. From walking to ricksha, from ricksha to carriage, from carriage to train, from train to automobile, from there on to the dirigible, further on to the airplane, and further on and on, no matter how far we may go, it won’t let us take a breath. How far it will sweep us along, nobody knows for sure. It is really frightening.”

Yes, it is frightening, indeed, I agreed.

“It is frightening because the fate that the whole of humanity will reach in several centuries, I must go through—in my own lifetime—and at that all alone. That’s why it is frightening. In short, I gather within myself the whole insecurity of the human race, and distill that insecurity down into every moment, that is the fright that I am experiencing.”

(Natsume Sōseki, Kōjin [行人], Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1991, 9th printing, page 285)

Comment: There’s no need to dismiss these feelings as Luddite. They represent a reaction to the vertiginous or dizzying pace of the modern techno-protean change machine with no pause button.

Notice that Sōseki’s life (1867-1916) is basically congruent with Globalization I (i.e., the period of 1870-1913) discussed in the previous essay on Arthur Lewis’s classic Growth and Fluctuations, 1870-1913.

Sōseki has been, like his spokesmen in the citation above, swept up into a change-storm which led to a globalization backlash from 1914-1945, the era of deglobalization. WWI is the beginning bookend of all this.

Notice that the micro world of feelings and moods in the novel are resonant with the macro world though people at a certain time, such as the Sōseki protagonists, are not rigorous or prophetic theoreticians but rather groping in the dark.

What We Mean by “Towards a Composite Understanding of Education”

(MI slogan, motto or catchphrase)

Let’s be concrete and start with the title of the classic 1978 book by the Princeton professor and 1979 Nobel Prize winner, Sir Arthur Lewis, Growth and Fluctuations, 1870-1913 (introduced in the previous essay on “Looking Backwards and Forwards at the Same Time”).

Notice the following other dimensions that have to be included to “compositize” our understanding:

  1. The period 1870-1913/4 is called Globalization I by economic historians. Globalization in this view is not about Marco Polo, but the rise of world prices, such as for wheat.

  2. Paul Kennedy (Yale), who is known for his Rise and Fall of the Great Powers classic, wrote a tighter book called The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860-1914 (1980), described as follows:

    “This book gives an account of the rivalry between Great Britain and Germany in the period leading to the First World War. It gives readers a thorough comparison of the two societies, their political cultures, economies, party politics, courts, the role of the press and pressure groups, and so on. …”

  3. The first treaty between a European power and an Asian country was signed in 1902, “The Anglo-Japanese Alliance.”

    “In this book, Professor Nish deals with one of the most important aspects of far eastern politics in the critical period between 1894 and 1907. His object is to demonstrate how Britain and Japan, at first separately and later jointly, reacted to Russian encroachments in China and east Asia; he is concerned also with the policies of the other European powers and of the U.S., to whose hostility towards the Anglo-Japanese alliance after 1905 Britain showed…”

  4. The first defeat of a European by an Asian nation (i.e., the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-5). The famous Indian writer Pankaj Mishra wrote a recent book on this, showing how this defeat of a European country sent shock waves through the world and especially through the anti-colonial movements of Asia and Africa

  5. Partition of Africa:

    “Between 1870 and 1914 the whole of Africa, apart from one or two small areas, was partitioned by the European powers.”

    (David Thomson, England in the Nineteenth Century, 1815-1914, 1978, Penguin Books, page 203)

  6. Rise of Suburbia:

    “The 1890s saw the coming of the first electric trams, the first “tubes,” and the first motor-cars. By 1914, almost any provincial city of any size had its electric trams, mostly under municipal control, and London had its buses and underground (i.e., subway). “These changes in urban transport created suburbia.”

    (David Thomson, England in the Nineteenth Century, 1815-1914, 1978, Penguin Books, page 202)

In other words, the world itself is a crisscrossing composite of processes at different scales.

We have growth and fluctuations, the partition of Africa, suburbanization, Anglo-German tensions, techno-revolutions (including those in urban transport), interacting with Globalization I.

All of this culminated in the “guns of August” (i.e., World War I).

We are downstream from World War I, what the Germans call the “Urkatastrophe” (i.e., original calamity), and its reincarnation in World War II and its progeny, the Cold War.

The more you can “compositize” the elements of this “historical matrix,” the deeper your MetaIntelligence will be. Hence the catchphrase for the MI site:

Towards a Composite Understanding of Education

Education and the Problems of Intellectual Fashions

One of our tasks is to avoid “captive mind” syndrome. A key ingredient in this is avoiding being “vacuumed up” in group mental pressures of the moment. Here’s an example:

Think back to the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Kubrick classic from the sixties.

Why is it structured the way it is? The “killer ape” discovers the use of skeletal remains as weapons for killing and a bone flies out of his grasp and becomes the spaceship with Keir Dullea and HAL 9000 (the computer), and the monolith and the space “Mysticism” of Kubrick/Arthur C. Clarke.

All of this comes out of Robert Ardrey’s best seller African Genesis from 1961 which obsessed Kubrick. (Ardrey wrote many famous anthropology books such as The Territorial Imperative).

It starts, “Not in innocence or in Asia was mankind born.”

The “not in innocence” refers to the killer-ape aspect of man: man is a talking murderous ape, according to this view.

Not in Asia refers to Africa as “cradle of humanity,” hence “not in Asia.”

All of this Robert Ardrey mental fashion imbued Kubrick and the movie. It comes out of Ardrey’s encounter with Raymond Dart of Witwatersrand University who argued that fossils of early man show signs of blunt force trauma (such as the find, Taung Child) and this indicates that man is basically a kind of killer by nature. This confirmed Dart’s experience as a medic in World War I, where he was traumatized by all the brutality. From 1925 and Dart’s announcements from Africa, these beliefs began to infect all thinking worldwide and the writer Robert Ardrey was the “Saint Paul” of these beliefs with Dart as the origin.

By the time one gets to Arthur C. Clarke/Stanley Kubrick and the movie 2001, this “mindset” (i.e., Dart/Ardrey/World War I/killer ape view) tyrannizes the atmosphere worldwide.

All of these beliefs were refuted later but at the time it was most difficult to fend off this “vacuum cleaner” of intellectual atmosphere.

Thus a task of education is realizing the rigid “pre-shaping” of the mind that can easily sweep one along since one is semi-blind to the very existence of such a “Zeitgeist bullying” and its grip on our intellectual “invisible axioms.”

Essay 103: “Nervous Breakdowns” for Countries or Regions?

Hannah Arendt who became world famous with her Eichmann in Jerusalem 1960s book, says in her essays that Europe in the twentieth century was determined by a kind of national “nervous breakdown” in and centered on Germany.

If we allow for the fact that this is a “façon de parler” (way of expressing something) and not a rigorous comparison (a country is not one person writ large) Arendt’s figure of speech is suggestive and evocative.

Here’s an example. In 1919, Walter Gropius (died in 1969) gave a speech to students of his “Bauhaus” school, which sounds like a person picking up on a kind of national nervous breakdown:

First of all, Walter Adolph Georg Gropius was a German architect and founder of the Bauhaus School, who, along with Alvar Aalto, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modernist architecture. He is a founder of Bauhaus in Weimar.

Gropius says (July 1919, speech to Bauhaus students):

“We find ourselves in a tremendous catastrophe of world history, a transformation of the whole of life and the whole of inner man.
We now have to forget the time before the war, which was totally different.

The more quickly we adapt to the new changed world, to its new, if austere beauties, the sooner the individual will be able to find his subjective happiness.
We will be more spiritual and profound as a result of the German distress.
As the economic opportunities sink, the spiritual ones have already risen enormously.”

(quoted in German Expressionism, University of California Press, 1990, edited by Rose-Carol Washton Long, page 250, “July 1919 Gropius speech to Bauhaus students”).

We are reminded of Kierkegaard’s (died in 1855) anatomy of the kinds of human despair in his The Sickness unto Death.

The Gropius despair is a bit different because it mirrors a real or imagined German national catastrophe which is folded into a “catastrophe of world history.”

World War I and its aftermath loom as a kind of infinite “desolation row” for Gropius and we cannot judge what percentage of the despair is German and what percentage has to do with Gropius’s subjective state of mind.

In any case, we do have the sense of a “nervous breakdown” atmosphere, nationally and personally.

Might we also wonder if Anglo-America is flirting with such a “nervous breakdown” in 2019?