h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

But words like "enlightenment" and "racism" that have been used - bring to mind the rationalism of the Nineteenth Century associated with Auguste Comte and "Positivism" which was a logical advance on Paine's idea that God's Creation was made as a revelation to man and his perception.

Comte argued that our Life should build only on those things that could be brought into the "Light" and subjected to rational thought and examination, while ignoring that which remained Dark. "Positivism" became very popular by the end of the Nineteenth Century and with it talk of the "Dark Continent" and the "Dark Age", along with the sense of mission expressed by John Ruskin who urged his Oxford students to go and spread the light into the Dark places within Britain and around the World, lifting the Common People up from a world beset by Beveridge's "Giants'.

But just as Einstein destroyed the neatness of the Newtonian physical world and cosmic order, so Sigmund Freud and others, including his one time pupil Willhelm Reich, developed the idea of the vital importance and role of the Subconscious and irrational Mind. Reich in particular developed theories much like those of D.H. Lawrence which linked the tyranny of a rational and puritan conscious to various bodily postures as people sought to achieve "The Triumph of the Will" over their own "Darker" Nature. Reich saw "modern man" being "armoured" against Nature and created the idea of Sexual Healing. More or less at the same time artists were increasingly aware of the need to break out of the constrictions of an increasingly mechanical world and embrace "Primitivism"- e.g. the Diaghelev Ballet production of "The Rite of Spring" exactly one hundred years ago causing a storm in Paris on debut.

So modern thinking tends to be whollistic trying to embrace "the whole man" "The Family of Man" on Earth, and the whole of the Cosmos, which, it is now asserted, consists of more "Dark matter" that is not apparent to our conscious senses, and brings thought into realms of imagination, intuition, and invention rather than mere discovery .

Moreover- people like Tom Paine could happily argue for a world based upon the rational power of the Human Brain, because, as he himself acknowledged with gratitude to his Creator, he was particularly well-endowed with powers of reason, and therefore naturally saw himself as a "man of power" in his New World. From the time of Machiavelli such men had offered their services to governments.

But increasingly our lives are being run not by human intelligence but by the artifical intelligence of Computers ,and perhaps those experts in marketing who know how to exploit what computers find out : hence another 'scandal' about an 'adman' being recruited to advice the PM. And just this week Mr. Preston has reported on the revolution in the Stock Exchanges as the traditional traders are increasingly being replaced by massive computing power that can carry out their "mechanical operations" thousand of times faster.

In this "Big Bang" reality the idea of a timeless, stable and rational reality that Tom Paine could see may be said to come through the model of the Universe as explained by Stephen Hawkin in his "Brief History of Time". But on that scale we and all our works have absolutely no enduring importance or value. But then we may be a unique "experiment" in being such a rational, creative and self-aware life-form, the only real "audience" or "observer" and "witness" that Creation will ever have.

Does that matter? Some of those who survived the Holocaust and the Death Camps, seeing the death and destruction of all that mattered to them, said afterwards that it was a determination to survive in order to bear witness that kept them going and helped them to put up with the totally unacceptable and inhuman because they would be witnesses.

Cass

On Confucian philosophy, the Confucian doctrine of filial piety transformed Chinese society, sparing untold generations of the elderly especially, untold horrors of neglect.

There's currently a renewal effort on that underway, creation of a new Chinese law requiring adult children away from home to visit their parents at least annually.

Though its a law difficult of enforcement, Chinese workers working well away from their parents can appeal to it in order to get time away from work to look after elderly parents.

The socialand economic transformations of the past century have made the traditional Chinese extended family system all but impossible and they're struggling to find adequate ways of meeting human needs humanely.

ITIWBS

Very much in agreement.. The strong social ties within Chinese Society were one of the first things that I discovered through the works of Han Suyin- and then others, having benefitted myself to some extent from the fact that teachers are fourth or fifth on the list of those to whom a Chinese person must have a sense of debt all their lives.

In fact there was a very strong desire within British Imperialism to reconnect with the special values of Civilization from the great time of the Ancients dating especially from c1760, when the excavations at Pompeii revealed Roman life frozen in a moment in time. It led to additional interest in the struggles for Greek Independence and the creation of "Modern Greece" and the emancipation of Hindu Civilization from Moslem/Moghul oppression.

The idea of Greece and Rome as some kind of "Golden Age" for Humankind was more than a thousand years old, and people were thrilled to discover that there were still living remnants of that wise ancient world, which included India and China- and bringing these Civilizations back to life in the modern world so that they could produce something like another Renaissance was a strong theme of British interest.

So my point about Japan made in an earlier post was drawn from the way things appeared to Sir. Robert K Douglas Professor of Chinese at King's College London whose book "Europe and the Far East" published in 1904 was incredibly optimistic- especially because of the giant strides made by Japan in embracing what "The West" had to offer, while keeping and adapting its own values and traditions- and painted a very optimistic view of just how well China would be equipped to embrace "Liberalism" if it was able to go back to the old Confucionist "Institutes of Government"..

Of course part of the problem for both India and China was that they had both been conquered by alien powers during the European Middle Ages , powers that formed an alien and alienated ruling society that was not interested in the indigenous peoples or their civilizations, except as a source of wealth and power.

Frank Chin in his book "Ancestors" is the only person who I know of who has written of a wider support-group tradition within Chinese society in which in addition to knowing all about their own family and ancestors (and accepting the dues and duties that go with that) each family needs to keep track of the fortunes of a group of fifty families going back across thousands of years.

This is a very different "Humanism" from the 'rights of the individual ' one that has become dominant through Western Civilization. Self-control in relationships in accordance with 'right conduct' is of prime importance. So, for example, if a guest in your house expresses admiration for something you own, as the perfect host you are honour bound to give it to them as a present. But one assumes that anyone who is known to be effusive and lacking in self-control is soon treated as a social pariah and kept away from anywhere they could do 'harm'.. A US expert on China once observed on film that the Chinese have no word for "freedom"- the closest word meaning "self-willed".

Cass

> the ex-Anglican Bishop of Truro who criticised the resolution for not recognizing the need for "Christian Humanism"

In other words, international treaties should be explicitly Christian, and those which merely don't mention religion are somehow anti-Christian?

TRiG.

Trig

I think that the point that was being made was that the resolution under consideration had no place for what the Bishop called "Christian Humanism"- not that it was not exclusively based upon "Christian Humanism".

This had been a problem faced by Anglicanism for centuries because though Thomas Cranmer, as possibly the greatest Christian theologian in Europe, had created a Church of England liturgy and Prayer Book that was so carefully, indeed brilliantly, written that it could be read by Roman Catholics and Puritans of goodwill as consistent with their faith-- preserving its nature as a part of a Catholic-and universal Church in accordance with the aspirations of early Christianity- there were Roman Catholics and Protestants who could not accept worshipping with fellow Christians who could share the same words as them, but understand them in accordance with their own personal conscience/insight. The Pope ordered loyal Catholics not to accept the Anglican worship and Protestants, especially Puritans, demanded changes in Anglican worship that would make it impossible for them to share their worship with those who saw things differently. And when they failed to make the Anglican Church exclusively Protestant they set up their own Churches, or rather went to colonies or plantations where they could.

This was, of course, one of the reasons why many parts of Europe and the British Isles were war-torn for centuries, while the absence of such religious conflict to anything like the same degree became one of the important reasons why England, with the English people and those who came to work in England, managed to become the economic powerhouse of Europe and then the Global economy.

But throughout the war Winston Churchill had frequently asserted that the war was being fought for the sake of "Christian Civilization" threatened by the "Dark Age" barbarity of the Nazis and he called "The English Speaking Peoples" to stage a last ditch defence with "nothing to offer you but, blood, sweat, toil and tears". And many of the people who are prepared to put their lives "on the line" have been people who drew strength from the idea of something greater and more important than just Humanity- and deserve to have their own beliefs and goals acknowledged. I am not much of a one for ranking, but my short list for the greatest human beings of the Twentieth Century would start with Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela all could say "The struggle is my life" and hold to that because each drew strength from their religious beliefs.

But, as C. Delisle Burns explained in "The First Europe" that was written in 1941 and published in 1947, Europe as an entity was the creation of Medieval Christendom with a particular Civilization that had mixed Greek art and philosophy, Jewish religion, and Roman arts of government to create "Christian Civilization" which was progressing well until the Black Death, which really started the whole Dance of Death sequence that came right down to the World Wars, a Europe based upon power, violence and militarism rather than "Moral Authority". There were those who hoped that Humanism based on the new Civilization of Science and Technology might provide that "Moral Authority", but amongst other problems, the Science and Technology of today is tomorrow's scrap heap, whereas writers like Arthur Miller, Jean Anouilh and Albert Camus could see that Greek theatre (and William Shakespeare) could explore eternal and unchanging aspects of the Human Condition that are as fresh today as they were in Ancient Times.

Cass

A book on contemporary and recent conditions in China I'd strongly reccomend is "Oracle Bones" by Peter Hessler, a retrospective by an American Journalist working in China who began his career there working as a Peace Corps sponsored English language teacher.

Posted 1 Minute Ago

Thanks for the suggestion ITIWBS. I'll look out for it.

Following your initial remarks a very good documentary on French TV this year, featuring the 'hidden famines' of Mao Tse Tung brought up to date the lives of those who recalled the grim Malthusian conditions that they had survived, with the modern reality being that the grandparents are still having to work because (especially where the one-child policy as been rigorously applied) not only have they been left behind by their children who have gone to work in the new cities, often so far away that they only make one trip 'back home' each year, but they are not 'home alone' since they are baby-sitting and then bringing up their grandchildren. One has to wonder what kind of post-traumatic stress-disorder China will be when and if it becomes the most powerfull country in the world.

In the early part of the Second World War Aldous Huxley produced a study of "The Grey Eminence" behind French foreign policy leading up to and during the Thirty Years War which produced a Holocaust across the German Plains that killed an estimated one third of the population- and a grim determination amongst German people to make sure that such things would never happen again thus calling up the spirit of German militarism and worship of simple material and earthly power.

Cass

On EU economic troubles, bad as the Greek economic crisis has been, its not remotely in a class with the contemporaneous (and continuing) Zimbabwean inflation, which has been worse than the post WWI German inflation.

That, is scary.

>> the 'hidden famines' of Mao Tse Tung <<

aside: I was reading somewhere recently about the "hidden famines" of the British - the Irish and Indian famines that killed tens of millions all told:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine_in_India#Scholarly_opinions
http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2012/12/irish-famine

On the last two paragraphs of Casserleon's post 81, first, some reflections on SETI, questions like the Fermi question on extraterrestrial life, "Where is everyone? Why are we not seeing teeming evidences of extraterrestrial technological civilization?" and their interpretations aside, I'll personally be unsurprised if the first discovery of such a civilization is one in one of the nearby galaxies.

There is a cosmological catch 22 to that in that the more distant a galaxy, the younger it is and the less time there's been for it to evolve life, intelligence and civilization.

On the last paragraph, on motivations driving holocaust survivors to survive, one has something akin to that with suicide survivors and people who've seriously contemplated suicide but restrained themselves from the attempt.

In the latter case, consideration that they'll be leaving a serious mess behind for survivors to clean up is often an important source of that self restraint.

In the former, they often simply don't care about that.

I've often thought that Emile Durkheim's choice of suicide for his pioneering sociological study was extremely insightful.

The Thirty years war effectively ruined any prospect of an early entry of the Germanies into the colonial race, in an age in which the Hapsburgs under Charles the Fifth of the Holy Roman Empire had effectively locked out all the other European powers, running their own overseas colonial effort through their Spanish and Portuguese holdings (Charles the Fifth's wife was the Portuguese heiress), dedicating their Germanic and east European holdings to a holding action that effectively permanently blocked any entry by the Ottoman Empire into the colonial race, invaded and occupied the Netherlands and Belgium, attempted to do the same to England and the British isles, until finally broken by the action versus the Spanish armada, invaded and occupied Italy and especially the Papal states, invaded and conquered, besides most of the Caribbean islands, Mexico, Peru, Central America, nearly all the inhabitable seaboard of the South American Atlantic coast, attempted the same under Hernando De Soto in what's now the American south east, repulsed by the southern confederation of the five civilized tribes and their allies the Sioux (The Sioux were established at the time in control of the Mississippi south of the Huron confederation, later nearly wiped out in that region by the tsunami wave action associated with the New Madrid earthquake - the entire Mississippi river temporarily ran backwards, catastrophically flooding the inhabited river front.) (Though the reception of the Spaniards under De Soto was initially hospitable, they behaved so badly the native Americans responded with a scorched earth campaign, evacuating and burning villages ahead of them, meanwhile engaging them in a non-stop running gauntlet, flanking the Spaniards bilaterally and keeping them constantly under attack), the Spanish succeeded in establishing a colony in the Philipines, though unlike most former Spanish colonies, the Philipines still have their native language. The conquistadores under Mendana also devastated much of Polynesia.

Making a long story short, the Holy Roman Empire under Charles the Fifth came closer to conquering the entire world than anyone else who ever tried, next runner up, Genghis Khan.




They also delayed the French and English entry into the colonial race for the first 100 years, despite the French and English sponsored voyages of Cabot in 1495 and after.

With the end of the thirty years war, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the expulsion of the Spaniards from the low countries, Sir Francis Drake's successful intelligence gathering raids on the Spanish Imperial archives at Seville, Spain and Cartagena, in what is nowadays Columbia, the English and the Netherlanders were able to quickly establish colonial empires, the British parallel to the Spanish holdings in America, the Netherlanders parallel to the Portuguese holdings in the far east.

The Germanics of central and eastern Europe remained bogged down with a holding action versus the Turks until the early 19th century and the collapse of the Hanseatic League in the Baltic, on the other hand, effectively put the quietus to any prospect of an early Germanic breakout into the colonial race from the Baltic, though the Danes and Swedes did succeed modestly on that.

One can reasonably trace the world wars of the 20th century to the policy mistakes of the Hapsburgs of the Age of Charles the Fifth.

#81 >> the rationalism of the Nineteenth Century ... positivism ... <<

It is interesting that the "rationalisation" of the latter part of the Twentieth Century became a by-word for job losses and hence a word associated with negativism for those thrown on the scrap heap ... sometimes whole towns and parts of the city were thrown on the scrap heap. It was the time of the great mergers where CEO's and shareholders could make a lot of money from rationalisation.

Stone Aart - the saturnalian Sybarite currently perched on Galbraiths Roost.

I am not sure that the term 'hidden famines' is actually appropriate- though perhaps the modern "Western World" has chosen to forget about much of world history. There was widespread awareness about the famines and also about the widespread indifference and fatalism. The Irish Famines for example have never been "hidden"-

It was such knowledge that added weight to the arguments of T.R.Malthus whose "Principles of Population" c1799 argued that populations will breed and eventualy outstrip food-supply producing the "Natural Checks" of "war, famine and disease"- horrors that would be better prevented by "Moral Restraint". Malthusianism was a major obsession for the next century or so, until the World Chaos of 1932-33 was produced by humankind producing more than was needed to feed itself- but this Capital-aided farming was not financially sustainable for Supply exceeded effective Demand.

Of course one of the controversial subjects is just why the population of the various parts of the British Isles increased so dramatically in the Eighteenth Century as did that of the Indian sub-continent- and one obvious factor is the developing globalisation led by England and then Britain, with English values of the resistance to arbitrary and exploitative government and the culture of the "common working man"- who was the basis of the "Sovereignty of the People" with government existing for the people not people for the government- and therefore that horrors like war, famine and disease should be checked by good governance.

But these were not common British values and the whole basis of English Society was swept away in order to create a new "British" way most notably in this case with the "Poor Law Amendment Act" of 1834 which in effect swept away the English tradition of "care within the community" because of the ideas of writers at the time like Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham and Malthus that helped to achieve "convergence" within Great Britain and Ireland, with Scotland and Ireland having had nothing like the English Poor Law in which all English people had an automatic right to be supported.

In the 1690s when about one fifth of the population of Scotland was wandering around as "Sourners"- people given a licence to beg, who had formed into gangs who might descend upon isolated homes and ask for alms, Fletcher of Saltoun suggested in the Scottish Parliament that they should all be turned into slaves- a very widespread global system to cope with such a crisis. In fact the Scottish Parliament decided to set up schools so that "education x3" could be the salvation of the Scottish people. It was especially once the English ecomony was growing and Scots became workers of choice throughout Britain and its developing empire (as Niall Ferguson explained in "Empire. How Britain Made the Modern World").

In fact immigration into England seems to have been very closely connected with the economic and population growth in Scotland and Ireland.. William Cobbett said of England in the 1820s whenever you saw a group of men working the people doing the actual work would be English and Irish, with a Scotsman overseeing them. And as Scotland did in fact have something akin to slavery in the "Bondsman" system that applied especially to the mines, Scots were valued as plantation overseers in the "New World".

As with more recent migrants it is fair to assume that those in work abroad tried to get funds 'back home': and certainly by the 1820s after the Union with Ireland large numbers of Irishmen made the short crossing to Scotland to work as temporary farm workers, earning enough before going home to harvest their potatoes to pay the annual rent for their own small plots. And Cobbett described the prevalence of Irish gangs around harvest time in the South of England, while of course Irish migration to the Lancashire region was massively important, with (I presume) the Lancashire-Irish being expected (much the same as British West Indian ) to return laden with presents and gifts when they went 'back home' for family 'wakes' and such.

But the combination of the New Poor Law Act of 1834 followed two years later by a severe economic depression thrust the British and European economy into "Hard Times" which must have hit this Irish 'travelling" way of life very hard, with poor Irish families more than ever dependent upon what they could produce from their potato plots..Before 1834 the local Poor Law would use the Settlement Law of Charles II in order to sent anyone applying for poor relief back to their "home parish", and (it was certainly alleged) this was exploited by the migrant Irish who came over temporarily, sent back to Ireland whatever they could afford, and then when there was no more work and they had no more money they would go to the Poor Law authorities who would pay their passage back home.

I have suggested in the past (and never recieved any response from those who should know better than me) that this situation may not have been helped when 'Father Matthew' took 'teetotalism' from Manchester to Cork c1838 with the result that almost a third of the Irish people "took the pledge" and gave up alcohol. I understand that producing "Pocheen" had traditionally been one of the ways that poor Irish women ( like ale-wives and such around the world) had made some kind of living with Irish "Wakes" always in need of drink and, considering the continuing importance of the "Drinks Industry" in Ireland, this particular religious intervention surely can only have further reduced the options of the poorest people either in terms of useful crops or as means to make some money.

Of course another commonly explained factor in the population increase is the new distribution of plants that came with globalisation, none more important than the potato, which a book published in the 1640s heralded as THE cure to famines. In the economic depression of the late 1830s and 1840s populations in many parts of Europe became too heavily dependent upon growing potatoes, as a mono-crop and this surely contributed to creating the conditions that caused the crop failures and potato famines that were especially severe in Ireland, Scotland and Belgium.

Cass

ITIWBS

Re Charles V- Lord Acton on "The Beginning of the Modern State"heralded the coronation of Charles V by the Pope at Bologna in 1530 as THE key moment in Modern History when the posibility of establishing world dominion by a secular power thanks to purely Earthbound attributes replaced the moral and theoretically Heaven-based authority of the Papacy. It created the law of modern history that all power will thus tend to expand and impose itself upon others, unless checked by combinations of smaller powers that had up to this the end of the Victorian Era checked this arbitray and authoritarian rule and preserved and promoted the Liberties of the People.

G.G. Coulton in the late 1930s in "Medieval Panorama" described the Middle Ages as the period of a belief in "The Omnicompetence of the Church"- a belief that was replaced by "The Omnicompetence of the State".

It was a change that S.Harrison Thomson (1963) linked to the fact that the two great authorities of the Middle Ages, the Empire and the Papacy, were based upon the "electoral" principle, but that especially with the Hapsburg family and the dynastic building on which it was based- with "conquest by marriage"- the modern Age saw the "hereditary"principle become dominant with the increasing importance of "legitimacy" above all other qualities- and with the importance of legitimacy and the law, inevitably there has to be an increase in Law Enforcement and the capacity to impose the law on others.

Cass

Stone Aart

To some extent the earlier rationalisation was in many ways much the same.

Cass

ITIWBS

Regarding this universe-- and I suppose going back to Paine and what we can learn from observing "God's Creation"-

We now know that when our ancestors looked to the Heavens and saw the myriad stars at night what they saw was mostly the light from millions of years ago- even possibly millions of 'Light Years'. In other words the Night Sky reveals to us the distant Past which may or may not exist at all NOW.

Modern radio telescopes I suppose pick up different rays than light-rays. But are they 'faster than light'? I thought that Einstein postulated that the speed of light was an ultimate and that anything travellling faster than light would have to go back in time and escape the present. I suppose it is something I should take up with our daughter who did Physics and who has a good friend from uni who spent a dozen years or so after graduation on mapping the Universe- now done I believe.

But is the map actual- or deduced as maps were before the Ordnance Survey techniques.

I always recall that Monk's Geomorphology text-book (quite a weighty tome) graphically said that if the print within it stood for geological time then the time of Humankind on Earth would be just the last full-stop on the last page. I think that human or humanoid life forms now have a slightly longer Past, but there seems little reason why our little flowering of intelligent life should actually happen at the same time as anything similar elsewhere in the universe. Or should have anything like the same path of development.

In fact Victorians were fascinated by the way that Global Humanity living on the one Earth provided living examples of all of the economic-social-and political systems that rational thought could define and fit into various categorizations, and was happy to apply its cult of "Improvement" and "Progress" (which impregnated Darwin and evolution) to fit all these systems into a developmental sequence from bad to good- often linked either to Geographical Determinism or to Racism.

Humanism surely tended to grow out of the "Environmentalist" implications of the former and the great post-war Humanist experiment was to create the conditions in which healthy and good human life would flourish (as encouraged back in a previous post-war age by Robert Owen and his "New View of Society".

Cass

Re: post 93, a much overlooked Malthusian percept abundantly well borne out by 20th century demographic studies is that war is followed by a "baby boom", a marked population increase generally in excess of the population pre-existing the war.

As late as the 1st world war, many still thought that war provided a means of 'controlling excess population'. The reverse, predictedby Malthus, proved true.

War stimulates population increase.

On the Age of Charles V and the Holy Office, the Holy Office (the inquisition) served more as a secret police establishment of the HRE than an agency of the Church, without constraints of international boundaries one of many issues, along with colonial disfranchisement stimulating the Protestant revolt in northern Europe.

ITIWBS

The point that you make about Malthusianism and war in both Nineteenth and Twentieth Century History is surely a reflection of the determination of England to resist the efforts of those who saw warfare in terms of looting and spoliation. The prosecutions of Robert Clive and Warren Hastings show that the English people were not prepared to allow East India officials to act in these ways even if what they did was quite normal in current Indian Culture. And it was the prospect of total Free Trade and an exponential growth in the Atlantic Slave trade with the USA becoming one huge slave plantation based upon the unrestricted seizure of Amerindian Lands and the unrestricted import of people enslaved by the legal processes and wars of African States that persuaded the Quakers to recruit William Wilberforce to stage a campaign to persuade Great Britain to ban and then exterminate the slave trade, which the Royal Navy was deployed for about 50 years to accomplish.

As Eric Hobsbawm has explained the French Revolution went to war (a) to spread the benefits of revolution,and (b) to reward itself for its great revolutionary leap forward achieved by removing the 'ancient regime' and creating a new French Republican one by looting the wealth of Europe- in the tradition of the Thirty Years War, when a huge proportion of the lives lost was due to the deliberate (and traditional- since at least "The Harrying of the North" by William the Conqueror) tactic of wasting, despoiling and looting the land of the enemy- a tactic that caused a public outcry in the UK when it was used during the Boer War, having brought the non-combatant Boer population into "concentration camps" where they should have been saved the Malthusian Horrors.

It is true, of course, that the British Government in 1918 refused to accept Winston Churchill's suggestion that the honourable thing to do once the Germans had agreed to an Armistice was to lift the blockade that had starved the German people into surrender, so that the war was followed by "The Turnip Winter" and a war-ravaged Europe lost more lives in the next couple of years from the Flu epidemic than had been actually killed during the fighting.

But the principle that of Humanitarian Aid was still strong and became a fundamental part of the post 1945 era- our family's hstory being very much bound up in the work of the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief that aimed to help all sorts of refugees and victims of war in Europe.

Others like the Axis Powers and even our Soviet Allies were quite happy to use extermination and genocidical policies.
Cass

On Post 96,




If 'the 'present' includes all that one can immediately observe, its remoteness in time increases with increasing distance, but the conditions producing that observation must have evolved over the local time elapsed since the origin of that observed phenomenon in its own locale.

Einstein's relativity doesn't make the speed of light a universal invariant, but instead a constant mediating relationships like that between frequency and wavelength, or matter and energy.

He noted and remarked on many variations on the speed of light limitation and conditions in which it does not obtain, for example remarking in his book on special relativity on the Fizeau effect and stipulating that his special relativity was only valid in a vacuum far removed from local gravitational sources.

He won his second Nobel Prize for what amounted to a proof that the speed of light varies with local gravitational flux densities (Though people like Sir Arthur Eddington did the actual observational work required for the proof), going one step beyond the findings of Fizeau.

Of the fundamental forces, neutrinos travel minutely faster than photons because they are less impeded by local mass and gravitational flux densities, while gravitons travel significantly slower, though no one has yet succeeded in directly measuring the speed of gravitational propagation.

It is known, though, that the speed of light is lower in conditions of high gravitational flux densities and mass densities, which means in turn, given its application as a constant, that in conditions like stellar interiors, with a speed of light lower than in a vacuum, nuclear reactions, for example, produce less energy than they would in a vacuum.

(Clark Maxwell unified electromagnetic theory and physical optics back in the 19th century, was among the first to demonstrate the importance of the speed of light as a fundamental constant mediating other physical relationships and was one of those people whose work Einstein drew on very heavily formulating the special and general theories of relativity.)

Other Einsteinian qualifications of the Speed of light limitation include the Einstein-Podowlsky-Rosen effect confirmed by Bell with his experiments with polarization coordination, though Einstein's momentum coordination model failed.




On paragraph five, I agree.




Darwin got the seed kernel of his evolutionary concept from his grandfather who'd suggested it in context of his own botanical hobby.




Darwinism, as later happened with the rhetoric of the newly emerging psychological sciences, was seized upon by social determinists to justify their own social and political conceits, finding that an appeal to 'religion' wasn't going over so well as it used to.

Darwin himself never endorsed social determinism.

The social determinist applications of psychology were used to justify some of the worst horrors of the 20th century, for example treatment of dissidents under Hitler and Himmler, or Stalin and Lysenko.




On environment in context of 'nature versus nurture', its only with the greatest reluctance, given compelling material proofs, I'll even consider a 'nature' hypothesis.

I'm personally convinced the overwhelming preponderance of human personality originates in 'nurture', though I will consider a Jungian appeal to universal archetypes a possible counterexample to a 'nurture model' and have to recognize that there are real issues of instinct.




On post WW II social experiments, I have serious misgivings about some aspects of the 'new education', taking the Bertrand Russell model for example as excessively permissive and insufficiently authoritative.