Big Tents always welcome in the small - don't they ?

After 1945, western democracies couldn't extend civil rights and a greater share of the economic pie to well fed and well educated affluent anglo saxon white men - those lucky guys already had it all and more.

No, it seems prima facie evident that increasing human and biological diversity inside a Big Tent always means inviting the small inside.

Or does it ?

This blog is about a wartime Manhattan-based project, from the small side of life, that aimed to create a Big Tent to fight not just WWII but the causes of WWII, and to invite everybody in - small, big and the in-betweeners ...

Winning a total war : its about building a Big Tent of all possible talent, not in draining down your gene pool

Early to mid September 1940 were undoubtably the darkest weeks of WWII.

Britain awaited an air assault followed by a sea invasion by a all-powerful German war machine that was backed by Russia, Italy and Japan along with a host of quasi fascist fellow travellers among the nominally neutral nations.

There was no Big Tent of all possible talents assembled to help Britain, or any of the dozen or so smaller nations who had already fallen, equally alone and isolated, to the Axis powers.

Britain was as guilty in all of this as any nation - for it too failed to build itself a Big Tent internally, to take advantage of its empire's overwhelming demographic superiority over all the Axis powers combined.

That would have meant a quick successful invasion of Germany by a British army made up mostly of the "inferior" darkies of India and Africa and Asia.

No way was that about to happen : Churchill would rather have lost to Hitler first.

It was same around the world : populations transfixed more over issues of who they shouldn't let into their war efforts against Hitler, than in widening the scope of just who they should invite in.

All of them seemingly more intent on shrinking their gene portfolios of possible new talent and ideas than on diversifying their gene portfolios to include anyone who could possibly help.

In Dr Henry Dawson's own America, he had already had almost a decade of his nation repeatedly rejecting requests to help the small peoples of the world against naked aggression.

Now, in September, he learned his medical colleagues had a new excuse to reject requests to help the small people at home while other scientific colleagues were rejecting requests to enlist some of the smallest (and most despised) small organisms to aid the Allied medical cause.

We can all fantasize about turning a big ocean liner clean around - and the stated Allied war aims was a very big ocean liner indeed.

Or we can do what we can, with the tools at hand.

This is what Dawson chose to do.

Acting perhaps only semi-consciously, Dr Dawson gradually molded his colleague Karl Meyer's own penicillium juice synthesizing project into becoming Dawson's personal response to the lack of any 'Big Tent' thinking he saw all around him.

I doubted much if Dawson ever had any illusions about what he could achieve.

But then the kindly fates intervened and Dawson's project did indeed ultimately turn the Allied war aims around in some very important areas.

And their consequences live on to this day....

a "Big Tent" coalition was needed to defeat Hitler + Stalin + Mussolini + Tojo : just how badly did the western democracies fail ?

In mid 1940, the Axis's Big Tent still included fellow traveller Joseph Stalin*, along with a whole host of quasi fascist governments in the nominally Neutral nations. (Franco and Petain's governments were among the most prominent).

The British Empire alone, still had a huge demographic advantage over the Axis nations it was formally at war with, if Whitehall choose to include the colored populations of the Far East, Africa and the West indies, along with the French-speaking Canadians.

By and large it did not.

If the army forces placed in Britain as a potential invasion force against Germany's home territory had to be too small to do the job as a price for remaining basically all-white and all Protestant, so be it.


Because if Britain's infantry was boosted by six million Indian "colored" volunteers that then led the successful invasion into Germany (at the cost of the de facto recognition of the postwar independence of India) then Churchill and ninety percent of the English elite wanted no part in it.

The lessons of The Great War for the world's elites : modern all-out war unleashed social changes almost worse than abject military defeat...

Over and over, all the Allied nations (along with the Axis, by the by) chose to be at a military disadvantage, in a total war situation, rather than risk the unleashing of the social consequences of a Big Tent coalition, because it would result in a too wide a sharing of the moral success of victory.

One almost feels that if the elites had believed that the war could have been successfully conducted a small elite force of middle class volunteers in metal machines of submarines, airplanes and tanks, waging war from far above the fray, they would have done so.

Foregoing the conscripting of mass infantry armies of working class men, all demanding postwar pensions and political and moral rights that come from having personally defeated the enemy in old fashioned face to face combat.

It was the united effort to avoid sharing the wartime responsibilities, if it also meant sharing postwar power, that Dr Henry Dawson set out to combat with his personal Manhattan Project ....

 * Who can forget Stalin's northern naval base that he provided for Nazi u-boats - who besides the apologist historians for the Allied cause ?

WWII's other manhattan project : 'expanding diversity' at war against 'reductive eugenics'

'Expanding diversity' was always as much a dog whistle concept to its supporters as 'eugenic reduction' was to its supporters.

Diversity supporters knew exactly what it meant.

It meant fairly sharing society's pie with coloreds, cripples, kikes, queers and gals as well as with the preppy jockie boys from the WASP side of life.

Just as reductionists knew their concept meant keeping almost the whole pie to themselves, with only the crumbs falling ("trickling down") to the small side of life.

Let the war drag on for years, rather than let Indian colonial soldiers win the war by being the bulk of our infantry

As a result, more than the course of the military war per say, the real fear among elites on all sides was that winning and surviving a total war would require a 'coalition of all the talents', fatally exalting expansive diversity for other 'lessers' over their own restrictive eugenics.


As Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Henry Stimson and Charles De Gaulle made abundantly clear, they'd rather lose the war or greatly delay its victory, than see their front lines dominated by those they regarded as genetically unfit.

The French military concept of "blanchiment" is a good start to describe their basic beliefs - though their phobia hardly started and stopped with men of color.

If anything, they feared the possible advance of women much more sharply.

Henry Dawson, in his own small way, decided to contest these views.

First by enlisting the most despised of the small in Nature - the penicillium fungoid growths (to use a term much favoured by A. Hitler and H.P. Lovecraft) - to save the lives of 'the least of these' in humanity.

These were "the 4Fs of the 4Fs", the SBE patients whom 'Republican Death Panels' had condemned to death by deliberately withholding their life-saving medicine.

The payoff for ten billion of us, since 1940, from Henry Dawson's wartime 'coalition of all talents' was a form of herd immunity from the endemic infectious diseases now contested by the vast penicillin (beta lactam) family of antibiotics.

Even more importantly, eugenics' strength is much reduced while embracing diversity is in favour with most of us.

This, rather than his boon of penicillin-for-all (or HGT et al), is the true legacy of Dr Dawson....

Eggs in a basket : too many or too few?

On a continuum of human personality types, there will always be those of us who uncomfortable about the numbers of eggs in the basket - even there are just two eggs, one black and one white, they'd still like them in separate, non touching, baskets.

And there will be others, like Martin Henry Dawson, who feel you can never have too many different eggs in the basket - never have too much diversity in your portfolio or too much biodiversity or too big a gene pool.


But what these varying opinions really reflect, in my opinion, is something that might come as a surprise to most of us.

They reflect different confidence levels in the human ability to safely predict and prepare for the future.

The first group is only comfortable if the complexity of the future is reduced to a few firm categories of 100% bad and 100% good.

It does not really matter if the future can be so reduced - it only matters if we can imagine that it can be so reduced.

Thanks to a bit of "pop" Reductionism, the problem is solved - at least in their own mind - they then relax.

They feel a few basic categories of good and bad can be easily controlled and that being so, we can face the future upbeat and optimistic.

(There might be baneful climate change in the future, but even if so, we can easily solve it with a few high tech schemes.)

The second group is cautious (think the Precautionary Principle) about most things - particularly human claims that smell of hubris.

They see a future so complex and unpredictable and the human capability to accurately predict and control as being so limited than they feel we need friends to get by.

Lots of friends.

So we need to retain all the species and varieties of species in the world, we need all the mis-shaped and disliked bits and bob of human society.

One can never have too many friends.

Or the unlikely but useful tools they might possess.

Think of that much loathed common household pest, penicillium slime all over our fruit and our basement walls.

And of the penicillin it produced....

Valuing biodiversity implies we think the Reality they must survive is also diversely dangerous ....

I have based my claim that the world of Science was totally upended during WWII by pointing out that Science circa 1940 valued purity above all else while today's science values diversity above all else and that these two values oppose each other in every possible way.

I am not limiting myself to shallow definitions either : not just to yesterday's eugenic notions of racial purity versus today's natural biodiversity and civil rights supported human social diversity.

I mean that the scientific theories that won near universal support before 1940, regardless of the often tiny amount of physical evidence supporting them, all tended to exalt the pure --- ie the simple, the linear, the stable, the symmetrical and systems in equilibrium in their visions of Reality.

So if Reality was really as simple, stable, consistent, understandable and predictable as these theories claimed, then we could indeed see into the Future and pick the one simple 'right' answer to solve all possible of today's and tomorrow's problems.

We could thus safely and sharply purify and reduce the world's gene pool - by picking the single best corn species and discarding all the second best, for example - confident that nothing could ever go wrong.

Simply pure and definite certitudes for a purely simple certain world.

But then, just for an example, in 1970 America's most important industrial material (their corn crop) was almost all wiped out by a fungus that was finely tuned into killing only this high yielding monoculture crop.

Panic !

Suddenly even the Koch Brothers of this world could see the virtues in gathering and protecting all the bio-diversity found in the many ancient and hitherto 'useless' variants of corn, just to cover all bets in what was suddenly looking to be a world of highly diverse dangers....

Upending Science after '45 : Purity into Diversity

They touted protecting the gene pool before WWII, yes they did, but they really meant just protecting and purifying the white European subset of the human subset of the overall global gene pool.

Purifying as in reducing, reducing human gene diversity down to the few genes they thought had rightly made white protestant middle class European males the top of the ladder of Life.

Putting all your eggs in one very small basket, because you know - you just know - that these few are all the right eggs needed to face and surmount all future crisis.

It displayed a confidence, an arrogance, a hubris that post 1945 humanity didn't have as much of.

Before WWII, Dr Martin Henry Dawson had researched and celebrated the neglected diversity that was the non-pathogenic bacteria world and the world of the shut-out-of-sight chronically ill physically handicapped.

So for him, in wartime, to suggest that the chemists that are the lowly penicillium slime could probably make penicillin better than all the smartest human chemists in the universe was probably no great leap.

Just as it was for him to say that the 4Fs of the 4Fs, the lowest of the low, young patients dying from invariably fatal SBE, were worthy of penicillin - even in wartime and should be be sentenced to dead from wilful neglect by Allied medical death panels.

In fact, they should be saved, particularly in wartime, if our claims of being morally different from the Nazis were to have any weight.

Small and weak he said, was bountiful and beautiful and worthy of respect and attention.

He saw protecting the gene pool meant leaving it as big as possible - because we all need each other's talents in a global Ministry of all the Talents, if we are to continue to survive all the human and natural menaces on this Earth...

WWII but a significant 'blip' in the eternal war between natural historians and natural philosophers

From their lofty olympian heights in front of their chalkboards and computer screens, or up in their labs, the coin of the realm for the natural philosopher is always plenticide .

These scientists secure their fame within their tribe by reducing the plentitude of say the 150,000 very diverse species of beetles (God's favourite being) down to a few neat columns in a textbook.

So the tiger beetle : Domain Eukarya. Kingdom Animalia. Phylum Arthropoda. Class Insecta. Order Coleoptera. Family Carabidae. Genus Cicindela. Species tranquebarica.

The natural historian out in the field or down on the ward floor as a frontline clinician has their own coin of the realm, their own passport to fame within their tribe.

But it is the directly opposite objective.

Fame comes to them when they bring home a new and highly unusual beetle specimen that seems to burst through these rigid categories and fit exactly no pigeonhole : something that only adds to, rather than diminishes Nature's plentitude.

To the reductionist oriented theoretical or lab scientist, in some very real sense, the one billion Chinese literally do look "all alike".

While to the ever more plentitude seeking naturalist, even their own children all look and act totally different.

It would be very nice to report that the natural philosopher, as a result of their tendency to see the commonalities in diverse beings, are leaders in seeing the common humanity in all nations of the world.

But on the evidence, that doesn't seem to have been the case very often.

They put everything on separate boxes - and then too easily chose to arrange those boxes in a vertical and unequal hierarchy of worthiness.

On the evidence, the natural historian's tendency to see the diversity of life has had a better record at seeing the hidden qualities in beings too often overlooked in a vertical hierarchy of life.

"Love your neighbour - no matter how scary or slimy or smelly - as you love yourself" - the naturalists' credo

During WWII, too many scientists saw all life as but consisting of nothing more than a common collection of a handful of elements that civilized man hoped to make and re-make artificially in his own labs, far above and away from the rest of Nature.

Very few WWII scientists were like Dr Martin Henry Dawson, who was always popping up from the eyepiece of his microscope to tell his bored colleagues about newly discovered amazing and under-appreciated qualities he had just found in the easily overlooked tiny microbes.

They were probably just as bored when he returned from his rounds as the Goldwater Hospital for the chronically ill poor of New York, to report much the same about these overlooked and under-appreciated segments of our common humanity.

I don't think his colleagues ever really 'got it', but later in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as postwar "Penicillium Kids", my fellow boomers and I fully got it ....

Why deny something (extinction of others) you secretly HOPE is happening ?

It is generally agreed that no climate denier publicly denies the Sixth Extinction because they never ever regret other species disappearing - only if their own specie* is vanishing.

(*Specie = old fashioned term for money)

Truth be told, they yearn to see the world get drastically simplified - down to its basic mineral groups.

Call them modernists or plenticiders --- same thing : reduce, eliminate, destroy.

They really resent the way evolution has put humanity as the top dog, but not the only dog, on the planet.

Diversity - in the workforce or in the workforest - is their bete noir - if extinction can remove unpredictable diversity and replace it with predictable simplicity , the Inofes from the netherworld say 'bring it on' ...

Oh Oh , Diversity & WWII : have I said a bad word ?

My claim that Martin Henry Dawson championed diversity in both microbiology and in humanity during WWII strikes many as simply incredible and non-credible.

They see concern for promoting 'diversity as a good thing' not arising until the mid 1970s , thirty years later.

It is true that a wide public concern for the rights of all sorts of minorities did not become general until the 1970s and is still being harshly contested even today.

But this does not prevent early pioneering concerns for protecting diversity such as the one that led Dawson and his small band of fellow 'unfits' to champion "Penicillin-for-All"  thirty years earlier.

Above all, everyone agrees that 1945 marks the year that postmodernity first started emerging.

And nothing separates postmodernity from the preceding modernity more decisively than the former's welcoming of wide diversity set against modernity's obsession for creating a smothering normalcy based only on hetrosexuality, WASP values and skin color.

So what on earth was it that led to 1945's sudden upswing in postmodernity ?

We do know that contrasted with the revelations about the Nazis' Holocaust (and the results of the A-Bomb), the hopeful possibilities offered up by penicillin and its kin was easily the brightest news story of that year.

And why not ?

What people saw was , one hand, a postmodern-like effort to provide life-saving penicillin for 'unfit' and 'fit' alike and on the other hand a fully modern program designed to kill all the unfit so that the fit could rule a 'perfected' world.

People who had always accepted modernity's promises look again at them - hard - and blinked....

Penicillin-for-All : Postmodernity's "Manhattan Project"

We know far too well Modernity's "Manhattan Project" - Big Science's  Atom Bomb - it sometimes seems that middle-aged male non-fiction writers write about nothing else than those heady - now long gone -days of Modernity and Male dominance.

(Yes it is almost always middle-aged men who write the books and articles about Manhattan's atomic bomb .

And perhaps it is also almost always middle-aged men who read them , despite the fact that ordinarily most readers are women of all ages.

This publishing fixation on the past glories of long gone Modernity may hurt publishing firms' bottom line but it is unlikely to change as long as most publishing bosses are also middle-aged males with a strong taste of nostalgia for when men like themselves ruled the roust unchallenged.)

Few middle-aged male writers , however , write about the simultaneous (in time and space) Post Modern Manhattan Project --- Penicillin-for-All.


P-F-A was an unexpected triumph -- because all-powerful wartime Big Government (and Big Pharma) definitely had other plans.

It was the unexpected triumph of a tiny band of unfits (with no government grants to aid them by the way) successfully defying both Allied and Axis eugenicism (and their own physical failings) to bring us Penicillin-for-All.

Call it a triumph of the unfit, weak, small - above all call it the triumph of DIY small science, since key to the unfits' success was their ability to create their own tiny life-saving penicillin factory , regardless of how Big Pharma and Big Government wanted to play out wartime penicillin.

So if WWII definitely began in 1939 at the height of the Era of Eugenic Modernity , equally it ended in 1945 at the beginnings of our present Era of Welcoming Diversity & Postmodernity and it is time male non-fiction writers accept this historical reality...

Acting Up : sometimes you must , even if you can't

An provocative way to look at WWII is to say that its deep structure , beneath and beyond all its confusing surface variety of activities, could be boiled down to a Tyranny of the Fit against the Unfit.

'Fitness' was a coat of many colours : to the Russian Communists, coming from working class stock rendered you automatically much more fit than if your parents were upper middle class.

In the capitalist West, of course the reverse was true.


And to the stocky dark-skinned Japanese, the notions of physical fitness and of beauty as defined by their allies the tall, blond and blue eyed Aryan German Nazis did not match their own in almost any way.

But almost all of the science-minded in that era of scientism felt comfortable in casually using the terms fit and unfit to divide up a world of plenitude that they saw as needlessly and excessively cluttered and messy.

And to then to use the tools of plenticide to 'clean it up' so that only the fit remained in a orderly, clean, pure 100% productive world.

We don't feel the horror and disgust about variety and plenitude that as our grandparents of the era of streamlined modernity once did - far from it - in fact we now cherish which they so disdained.

But how and when did we start to move from their era to our era of post-modern questing after diversity ?

I say it all began when The Seven first "Acted Up" to protest what the Allied 'fit' had planned for some they defined as 'unfit' ....