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....

biological High Flyer stock or Diversified Portfolio ?

If there was one creature that got more dismissive pats on the head over the years than any dog or cat, it was little old ladies with dogs and cats.

For centuries, male scientists ignored claims by LOLs (little old ladies) that cats and dogs had personalities and each dog and cat had distinct personalities.

Ignored almost as much as these male scientists had been ignoring their own children's personalities.

All our children are distinctly different, said their much more observant mothers.

(Ever wonder how so many men, who can't see beyond their own nose at home, ending up directing the whole world based on - wait for it ! - their deep observations into Nature ?)

Scientists today (maybe because more scientists are women and mothers, who knows ?) are much more willing to accede that animals have personalities and individual animals all have different ones.

So perhaps now, we humans are finally reduced to differing from our fellow beings only in that we seem to worry much more about the future than they do.

Worrying about futures, really.

What will happen to me, my parents, my grandchildren, my hometown, my religion, my ethnic group, my language group, my world.

We only get to sleep at night when we finally settle in on a plan that is very much like our own retirement investment plan - because both plans in the end reflect our basic personality, as found on a wide continuum of variety.

The financial advisor basically asks us to decide if we want our pension plan to focus on a few (high yielding) high flyer stocks or should we hedge our bets and diversify our holdings over a wide variety of (lower yielding) stocks.

Similar is our own internal mental choice in deciding how best we humans should plan for an uncertain future.

Hubristic Reductionism

Some of us may be so confident in the ability of the human will to overcome great physical odds that we even quibble about the future being seen as 'uncertain'.

We feel confident we can predict the future's winners and losers now, confident we can discard the losers, certain we know the winners best suited to our efforts to make the future as happy as possible.

We are from the old school, the school of Progress and Modernity, when great effort went into dividing the world world into two mutually exclusive boxes : the useful and the useless.

We are Penicillin's Howard Florey.

We eagerly gathered up the fastest growing plant types that gave us the sweetest fruit and binned all the smaller, slower maturing, less tasty "heirloom" species --- we want to 'reduce' biodiversity to a few certain winners.

We did similarly with humans, attempting to greatly 'reduce' the gene pool and focus on a few best human types, by both positive and negative eugenics.

Progress and Modernity were indeed the Era of Reductionism, in the widest possible meaning of that term.

The Precautionary Principle

Others of us were much more cautious and skeptic by nature. We took a jaundiced view of the abilities of the human will, as evidenced by history.

And we remained unconvinced that the past, present and future were as unchanging as Sir Charles Lyell and his fans among the scientific elite always claimed.

We were content merely to survive, not to fly high in success and possibly later crash and burn on the ground, to adapt the concepts of Margaret Atwood first used by her to contrast Canadians to Americans.

We could only sleep at night if we had not just a Plan B, but a Plan C,D,E,F and onward.

The more diversified our portfolio the better --- the more biodiversity in nature and human society, the better.

We didn't think we should discard heirloom varieties of tomatoes, or mentally and physically challenged humans, or aboriginals, Jews and Negroes, or bacteria and fungus.

We are Penicillin's Henry Dawson...

unpredictable small atoms, small microbes... and small children

'Pop' reductionism was the real (underlying) ideology of the Era of Progress.

There was a confident expectation among almost all people in the West during that era - particularly among those with a little secondary school science under their belt - that the small were inherently 'simple', almost inert, and hence could be controlled, transformed and scaled infinitely upwards.


Simple meant stable and predictable, definitely either this or that.

Reductionism, the reducing of reality down to a few simple stable rules and categories, is a boon comfort, in any age, to a significant fraction of us.

All of us who are basically born with (or develop from early family circumstance) the psychological propensity to be very uncomfortable and frightful of any sort of significant ambiguity.

But reductionism was never more of a comfort historically then when the Era of Progress's process of modernization presented some unique mental conflicts to the people living in the western civilizations that created it.

If people in what we today call the Third World resented many many of the things that late nineteenth century modernization suddenly introduced into their culture and economy, they at least knew who to blame --- the West.

They had plenty of conflicts with the West but were untroubled by internal mental conflicts as to where to direct the blame and their anger.

But almost all the people in the West, while they loved much what modernization had brought them, were at least as overwhelmed by the plentitude of new objects, new experiences, new ideas, new people as were the peoples of the Third World.

But they couldn't dare directly blame Progress, their own fabulous creation.

Even though they feared the overwhelming amount of fluidity, change and transforming of traditional category barriers that their own efforts had thrown up.

Their response was to create a very manichean concept of modernity.

Within it, the whole world was divided into two simple small and absolute categories of worthiness.

In category A at the top was the modern, the normal and the civil.

In category B at the bottom was the primitive, the abnormal, and the savage.

This schema allowed Moderns to combat overwhelming feelings of too much ambiguity in day to day life, by finding powerless (aka 'small') scapegoats they could put in category B and then safely blame them for most everything.

Without fear the small could effectively fight back.

The Mods soon found plenty of scapegoats.

Were our kids different today ? Just blame it on Negro jungle music.

Were big chain stores replacing the stores of local small business elites ? Just re-conceive chain stores as the secret fungoid growth of cosmopolitan Jewish banksters plotting to sap the national economies of the civilizations.

Were taxes too high and incomes too low ? It was all because we were spending way too much taxpayers' hard earned money on useless mouths : way too much on adult mental (and physical) defectives with a mental age of about two.

Some medical scientists around the world openly advocated killing them at birth - many more said nothing publicly but quietly tried to kill them at birth if opportunities arose.

But when we look at actual small objects we don't necessarily find them to be at all simple, controllable inert and and reliably transformable by us.

For instance, the poster child of the small and the predictable, the atom, actually haa a habit of becoming naturally radioactive --- but we can't predict where or when.

Wait a minute, you say, what about the half lives of isotopes ? They're highly predictable.

They sure are - but the much quoted half life guesstimate is the product of the very antithesis of reductionism - they are predictable only thanks to reductionism's arch enemy holism.

So yes, over an entire holistic system of trillions upon trillions of atoms we can indeed reliably predict the average time of when half of them will have gone radioactive.

But each of those small supposed stable entities 'the atom' self transform at their own pace and in their own fashion.

This is one of the reasons why heavily overbuilt nuclear power plants must still be decommissioned after a relatively short time.

All because the free-willed atomic bits and bob fleeing the heart of the process eventually render the entire structure unsafely radioactive.

Similarly, those supposedly simplest possible bits of life, the microbes, amazingly turned out to be highly unpredictable in character and distinctly capable of doing sophisticated chemical and biological activities that human civilizations still can't do.

Microbes proved capable of unpredictably self-transforming themselves by way of HGT (horizontal gene transfer) and of self-transforming unwanted agricultural waste into the world's best antibiotics.

Finally any observant person should notice that two year olds can be surprisingly worldly and yet display such a innocent zest for life and exploring and learning that they quite wear their elders out !

Parents and grandparents of former two year olds often wish the kids could have remained that age forever.

And like the small atom and the small microbe, two year olds definitely have a mind of their own and a determination to do things at their own pace.

Parents of these little ones, and one can resume some of these medical scientists had to have been parents, know well that they are very far from being reduced to inert lumps that are easily malleable by adults.....

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....

Eugenics' biggest failure

By the start of WWII, the Nazis, guided by the best eugenic advice in the world, had unerringly separated the great Germanic civilizations into the wheat and the chaff ---- and by then either forced the chaff into exile or had had them murdered.

And in the seventy five years since, what have these former great civilizations ever produced - besides the cuckoo clock ?

The human ability to accurately predict winners and determine the universally and eternally 'right' answers is very limited.

Be the predictors being yesterday's Himmler or today's hot new geneticist.

For untutored geniuses emerging from the ranks of oppressed minorities are pretty much as common as universities having to baby sit the untalented offspring of first rate geniuses.

What the Nazis had actually exiled or murdered were all the various sorts of Germans who had shown a willingness to stir up the pot, for good or bad.

What was left behind was not just that pot - it was also seventy five million people as inert as that pot.

Luckily their postwar children and grandchildren are all over the map - smart, dumb and everything in between .

Life can resume in the new Germany with the full breath of humanity's wide diversity of beings  and so we might once again see world culture and science enriched by contributions from the Germanic lands ...

Eugenics no more a "pseudo" Science than bacteria are living "fossils"

We don't permit history profs - on their way to granting our kid an expensive university degree - to teach only the successes of the Nazis and never their failures.

So why in the name of truth and beauty do we permit science profs to do just that about science's many failures ?

Why do we let them get away with the nonsense that eugenics was only a pseudo science and never a real science - when we know it was taught in thousands of universities and colleges around the world for over half a century ?

In 1940, far more people around the world had earned their way into professional status in part by passing such eugenics courses than had by passing courses in sub pseudo-atomic physics.

Orwell would have learned much more about doublespeak by ignoring Hitler and Stalin and devoting himself to the tabletalk of any number of Nobel Prize winning scientists.

Consider the powerful if deadly poetic phrase 'living fossil' : how on earth could something be both living and lost since dead ?

The Romas were considered thus - along with any number of other 'primitive' tribes also destined for the SS bath facilities in the event of total victory.

The term 'living fossils' was actually just a clever way to evade Dr Dawson's probing question : if the bacteria actually are that stupid and weak and simple and primitively primeval - why in the name of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer are they still here ?

Or could it be that about the only thing a lab scientist won't reduce down to its basic basics in his beakers and burners is his own profession's mis-practises ??

Progressive plenticide : the Poor will no longer always be with us, just like the Smallpox Virus, Newfoundland Beothuks, Tasmanian Blacks, the Unfit and the Jewish Bacillus ...

Eugenicists around the world, in every country, once planned to do to the physically and mentally 'unfit', the 'work-shy' poor and the entire Jew and the Roma populations what civilized society had already done to many small aboriginal populations and would later do to the smallpox virus - eliminate them for all time.

And not necessarily by gas and bullet : just ensuring there was not enough food, medicine, housing, jobs and land worked wonders on what was left of the world's dwindling aboriginals in 1940....

the WHY of eugenics : enough with the 'what' already

Scientific discoveries can happen anytime anywhere and be announced  (be made public) anytime anywhere.

But scientific discoveries are only in turn "discovered" by the most powerful scientific, political, economic, media elites (ie made popular) when it suits the spirit of their particular place and time.

So we have Eugenics (controlling the gene pool) - universally popular in 1928 and universally denigrated in 1998 --- while the anti-eugentics of uncontrollable HGT (horizontal gene transfer) was universally ignored in 1928 and universally supported in 1998.

Eugenics did not emerge into the popular domain simply because Galton announced it, but only when the elites of his time and place took it up with enthusiasm instead of ignoring it - as they later did HGT.

Galton's scientific discovery soothed their deepest emotional fear about all the intermingling thrown up by the same Modernization processes they were leading (and cheering on).

But the later scientific discovery of HGT ( promoted most ardently by Martin Henry Dawson) only fuelled that deep fear and revulsion.

For Modernity/Eugenics ( the two basically mean the same thing) was the shiny public - daytime - face of their deepest darkest nighttime fears.

It was their way of trying to control the processes they had unwittingly unleashed --- their attempt to put the modernization genie back in the bottle while still enjoying all the fruits of its successes.

If I were as scared and revulsed by the loss of hegemonic control as these elites were, I'd ignore HGT too....

Revulsion + Reductionism = Plenticide

Plenticide (eugenics, genocide, pesticides) : human civilization of the Modern era seems determined to get rid of all of its nearest and dearest , leaving just a tiny 'saving seed' of the most perfect and the purest of humanity to exist all alone in this vast lifeless Universe.

It just didn't make sense : for the more evidence that emerged that the universe was old, vast and empty the harder humanity, circa 1930, tried to eliminate most of what little life was confirmed to exist in the universe : that of Earth itself.

Perhaps, you might argue, they hoped to find lots of new companions from among the little green people kitted out in metallic scales and bearing two heads that would surely be found on places like Mars.

But does that wash ?

In a culture consumed with fears that "black" men, black because one drop of black blood was enough to define them as negro and not because they looked in anyway black, might marry their daughters and then perform unspeakable crimes of miscegenation ?

Could a species that regarded it as a serious crime for its members to marry other members of that same species if they looked at all different (the felony of miscegenation) and trying to kill off all other of the familiar lifeforms on planet Earth, ever find something in common with the unfamiliar lifeforms from planets with physical conditions so different from that of Earth ?

Not the ray guns would be blasting all those seductive little green women to death faster than you can say Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon.

Flash Gordon, a Yale educated WASP, didn't even truck with consorting with alien women from this planet (ie recent Catholic or Jewish immigrants to America) - so why expect him to indulge in miscegenation with aliens from other planets ?

No we can only account for this new emphasis on plenticide in the modern era by seeing it as the result of two simultaneous reactions combining.

One was a near universal 'revulsion inwards' reaction among educated humanity to science's 'natural history' revelations that the totality of reality and lifeforms was far far greater than ever imagined and far far more entangled together in complicated ways.

A revulsion against miscegenation in every sphere and in every dimension.

Living and marrying only within one's ethnicity and class seemed far more simple and predictable.

But this inwardness and sense of go-it-alone autarky seemed only realistically possible because other branches of science were, at the same time, claiming that below the surface complexity of reality, it was actually extremely simple and predictable and even controllable.

Scientific reductionism promised that all that now existed or could ever exist, Man could easily synthesize from the atoms of useless rocks, with the limitless energy of the splitting atom.

Not only did WASP males of circa 1930 now feel revulsed at the thought of having sex with their black female slaves, they also no longer needed the strong backs of black male slaves either, as machines had replaced them.

Neither was wanted or needed on this pure voyage into the progressive future.

Hence :  Revulsion + Reductionism = Plenticide.

LIFE is rarest thing in Universe, not some obscure precious metal

So why was Thirties humanity so eager to destroy 99.99% of it, in an act of collective plenticide that would have dwarfed the Nazi genocide of Jews and Romas ?

For in virtually all the illustrated fantasies about future life spawned by a raft of interwar era popular science magazines, humanity is seen as living inside an man-made plastic bubble on stark rock planets.

Inside the bubble, we humans are using some futuristic form of atomic energy to turn the bare rock into synthetic versions of all the things humans need to survive.

LIFE (other life anyway) was clearly 'not wanted on this future voyage'.

Today's children might innocently think 1930s humanity would instead cherish every last example of LIFE, from invisible bacteria to blue whale, if only as companions to share humans' otherwise incredibly lonely existence on a vast totally empty and hostile Universe.

But instead educated humanity during the Great Depression sought, via Eugenics, to eliminate every example of humanity that didn't fit their concepts of perfection and normality.

And the educated's casual acceptance of over-fishing and over-hunting, combined with scientific humanity's enormous research into various lethal forms of pesticides, suggested that the 1930s thought they could get along, quite nicely thank you, without other lifeforms competing for Earth's supposedly limited non-biological resources.

But LIFE is actually far more unstable than even the most unstable metallic element.

And no, lifeforms can't really survive by taking in each other's laundry.

Lifeforms can only flourish and reproduce by recycling each other's poop, because LIFE actually makes use of very little of the rock that makes up almost all of this planet.

Instead, we earthlings live out our entire lives on the Earth's surface , surviving off of and in the debris LIFE itself has created over four billion years.

We living beings ceaselessly recycle each other's waste products or decaying dead bodies, constantly re-creating the humus of LIFE.

Remember, all the oxygen we humans need to survive is just a waste product to the plants and microbes that need to throw it off if they too are to survive.

Meanwhile many of the microbes, in turn, only survive by consuming the dead bodies of other life - humans among that number.

LIFE only comes as one complete - indivisible - package and this package currently seems to be unique to this single tiny little planet in all the vast Universe.

So, no The Sixth Extinction and Plenticide isn't murder : its murder-suicide ....

COMPLEXITY based science from SIMPLICITY based science : the post 1945 shift

Eugenics, the central science of Modernity, was a form of Reductionism and Plenticide.

Eugenics was all about reducing the existing 'impurities' it felt were present in the gene pool : like all of Modernity's sciences, it thought reality - in this case represented by the gene pool - would work much better if only it was much simpler.

But today's scientists generally seek to increase, enlarge, deepen, diversify the gene pool : they fear keeping all of our survival eggs in one small, shallow, inbreed, genetic basket.

Today's scientists have come to see that reality is inherently and permanently complex rather than being something that seems (temporarily) to be complex but really is fundamentally simple and simplifiable.

Now they see that human and planetary survival depends on having many, many possible solutions readily available to meet many, many possible problems.

So plentitude - 'the more the merrier' is their cry - not reductionist plenticide, genocide and euthanasia.

"The Last are sometimes First" : confounding Modernity's Terrible Simplifiers

Reduced (one of its characteristic terms) to an aphorism, Modernity is basically about believing that, in terms of intelligence and progress ,"the First (largest,newest, most complex) were always and inevitably First ".

And as the First, destined to succeed and endure.

(Also implying that the last are always and inevitably last and doomed to fail).

A simple - and terrible - and terribly wrong - scientific thesis.

Seeing under his microscope that some of the supposed last (bacteria) were in some ways the First (in abilities to do genetic manipulation) led scientist Martin Henry Dawson to conclude the results of this sort of backwater microbial research would have a profound effect on the whole wide science of biology.

And as the key intellect memes in the Era of Modernity were all really just 'applied biology' , the impact could, in theory, go much, much wider.

It didn't, not then at least : for Dawson wasn't the one to lead any sort revolution of words and ideas - only perform a quiet revolution of deeds.

But today the idea that a deep wide genetic pool, well stocked with the intelligence from all possible sizes, complexity and types of beings, is Humanity and the Earth's best insurance against destruction is a commonplace.

It is the meme that holds up the entire intellectual structure that we call postmodernity ...

"All Quiet on the Home Front, WWII" --- Why?

Historians, as a group, are beginning to reverse themselves over their earlier contention that the postwar civil rights, feminism, gay rights movements (et al) were born during the social protests and social advances of WWII.

They did so because a closer look at the hard evidence for this earlier claim reveals the actual reverse : the war period, as a time for civil protest, was as deathly quiet as the early Cold War period of roughly 1946-1956  ----- and far quieter than the activist years of the Great Depression and of course during the civil rights era of 1956 -1966.

Why this Wartime Quietism ?

One doesn't need only to think of the many, many protests that occurred in parallel to the Vietnam War.

For in 1917-1918, Alice Pal and her tiny band of determined supporters successfully kept the issue of votes for women alive - she and her followers willingly enduring repeated jail time, for daring to continue civil protests during a war crisis, to forward that cause.

Alice Paul proclaimed, in a sense, a need for a Double V victory over Kaiserism - at home as well as abroad.

Fumbling the Shoah response

A pity then that no single individual with a handful of dedicated followers like Alice Paul emerged among American Jewry to lead as prolonged and as determined a protest on behalf of Europe's Jews.

The efforts of Peter Bergson come closest - including a mass march on the White House.

But no arrests for Bergson and his band for repeatedly silently picketing the White House as Paul did in another war situation - certainly no chaining for self to the fence to awake America to six million Jews being killed.

Black organized protests : where ?

Similarly, the famous plan to march on Washington on behalf of fair job opportunities for black Americans never went ahead as much because there were no sign the promised numbers were actually going to come as because of the sop FDR promised if the march was stopped.

And the only civil protests I could find over women's rights and black rights during WWII that I could find were made by white men, desperate that if women and blacks got jobs in factories they would lose their occupational deferment and actually have to fight Hitler with their bodies --- and not just win their mouths.

For once, no need to 'round up the usual suspects'

Peaceful civil protests are usually led by people on the left or progressive side.

And they were decidedly cross-pressured during the war against Hitler.

Yes, they saw that the unfairnesses they had protested during peacetime only worsened in WWII, but they knew if Hitler's Germany won, they and the people they hoped to help would be the first on his list to face the bullet or the gas.

It is too hard for us young ones today to understand the exalted amounts of faith in Germany's technological superiority held by the middle-aged  to old people of the 1940s.

For seventy five years, Germany had seemed to be on a roll - though in fact it was being increasingly challenged, from the 1920s onwards, by America, Russia, Japan and even Britain.

Many people during WWII - right up to the bitter end, thought Germany could actually pull off a belated victory, based solely upon some fabulous war-winning weapon.

'Nazis ruling the Americas' did not seem far fetched to them --- though it always was so, based on the current actual facts, not upon half remembered news stories from the past half century about Germany's technological triumphs.

So they met this apparently serious existential challenge to their own lives, by putting domestic inequality on the back burner to become hyper loyal to the Allied war cause : Jews, blacks and other visible minorities, feminists, gays, socialists and communists, unionists -- even the handicapped, knowing their eugenic fate if Hitler won.

Dr Dawson bucks the trend to Quietism

A bit of a low keyed Alice Paul himself, Dr Martin Henry Dawson led a rare individual wartime protest on behalf of those handicapped.

In that process, he successfully gave us a rare bit of good news from WWII's bad news war :  for his desire to see wartime penicillin available to all in need actually became a reality - just months before he died in April 1945.

Himself dying throughout the war, Dawson was much too sick to once again pick up a gun to help defeat the Kaiser  abroad,  so he sought to defeat Hitler's American eugenic mentors at home instead - and succeeded, at least on this issue.

An early and crucial, if quiet, victory for post-modernity's science.

But we all know : from acorns, oaks grow....

"The Last May be First." Or Last. Or anything in between. It all depends.

Unparalleled horrific cruelties befell the world immediately before, during and after WWII .

That cruelty may best be explained as the result of educated, powerful humanity everywhere sincerely regretting all the small people being squashed by the big people, but also regarding it as the result of an inevitable "Law of Nature" --- just a regrettable part of Progress's ever upward march.

In other words, Scientism made them do it : 'it' being "being a bystander to schoolyard bullying and yet doing little or nothing".

Scientism made them do it

Scientism can be best defined as science, at least as half remembered by middle aged, educated, powerful people ---- based on memories of their High School science education decades earlier.

High School science, unfortunately has always been and will always be a simplified, glorified, triumphantist, Whig account of Science with all of its real world complexities and unsolved issues swept under the carpet.

And the governing axiom of that pre-war scientism, and to some extent the entire science of Modernity, was "Hard Reductionism".

Hard Reductionism

This was the faith - as yet unsupported by sufficient evidence - that all of reality can be explained, predicted and altered/improved by understanding the few simple universal and eternal laws that explained the physical motion of the smallest basic units of reality : atoms.

They (and their biological equivalent, the basic cell) occupied the lower left hand corner of the upward arrow of progress : being small, unchangingly simple and incredibly ancient.

By contrast, at the top right hand corner of that arrow of progress, everything was very new, very big and and incredibly and dynamically complex.

A complex bigness, but based simply upon being assembled from modules made up of multiple modules from the level of complexity just below them. And so on and so on back down to the original basic atoms.

So Life began when a few atoms attached around a single carbon atom becoming the small basic molecules of organic chemistry which then became, in turn, parts of much bigger biological molecules which became part of cells which became ever bigger multi-celled beings.

If re-defined as Soft Reductionism, the belief that much in reality can be explained this way, most of us still hold this view.

But in humanity's postwar view of science  and in the scientists' Post-Modernity Science, we have decidedly rejected Hard Reductionism, explicitly or implicitly.

Post-modernity Science

Scientists explicitly no longer see reality as a linear arrow ever upwards , but talk instead of non linear systems, non equilibrium physics, complexity science, chaos theory.

Basically they mean that after creating a modules of say 1000 atoms, it simply fails to display the known behavior of one atom multiplied 1000 times over - its actions are novel but unpredicted.

Further, even a handful of tiny different modules interact in extremely unpredictable fashion (unpredictable given the limited amount of world resources we can devote to computing) - let alone much bigger systems of interacting modules - such as the weather or the stock market.

Scientists say such things explicitly - we mere civilians tend to to more feel this sort of reasoning in our bones - believing less and less big things will turn out anything like the way experts, professionals and the powerful say they will.

So, back to WWII and its cruelties.

In a world believed to be totally predictable, things can be said to happen totally inevitably,  with us unable to change them, even if we wanted to.

Determinism

This belief is called Determinism, a higher level axiom in educated humanity's thought system, circa WWII.

It followed upon Reductionism, and it meant that while we might want to (our moral sentiment) save the Indian tribes in Canada, science had proven that the laws of nature had determined that these small ancient and simple societies would inevitably be replaced by the bigger and more modern structures of western civilization.

Regrettable to be sure, but one simply can't stand in the way of the bulldozers of progress : the 1940s Mosaic law of Robert Moses.

The arrow of progress is noticeably titled at a 45 degree angle - hard to square, at first glance, with another axiom of modernity : Darwin's claim of vertical only inheritance .

Darwin - wrongly - claimed we only inherit genes from our parents and they from their parents - vertically and linearly right on down to the tiny cells that first began life on Earth (this being the biological version of Reductionism).

Darwin claimed that we never get genes from our uncles or from total strangers - total strangers like viruses etc.

What he never claimed ,but that people assumed he claimed, was that each smaller module of life was, in the medium term, gradually replaced entirely by a slightly larger module and so on and so.

So horses started out small and then over time mutated slowly into ever bigger horses while the smaller older horse versions all died away.

This is the way that the world's best natural museums (I am not making thus up - God Help us !) illustrated the arrow of progress in the world of horses.

But it wasn't true and Darwin had never said it would be - success for any species, new or old, was in seeing its offspring survive because they were well suited to the niche they lived in.

So, in fact, in cold climates, horses are small, stout and well covered in fur - in deserts they are tall and thin.

What the arrow of progress really measured

Humanity's prewar arrow of 'evolutionary' progress, unwittingly I believed, was really based on a scale that measured only the progress of human type book learning and record keeping.

On this scale, yes, it seemed the first (the biggest, newest) were always first and the last (the smallest,oldest) were always last.

But evolution should really be measured by survival success, full stop.

Here the record is more clouded for big creatures like humans.

Microbes, thanks to the ability to exchange genes between themselves operate more as a single super organism, somewhat the way we humans are made up of trillions of co-operating cells.

Yet, on the surface, they seem so weak : a usually immobile tiny sac of mostly water : the smallest, oldest and weakest form of life.

But in terms of survival, they are the champions bar none.

Post 1945 : we realize this world is really made for microbes, not humans

The microbes as a collectivity have existed for 4 billion years when most single species, like humanity, survive for a million years at best.

They live everywhere imaginable on Earth - extremities of cold, heat, drought, acidity, starvation, radiation they toss off with ease.

In numbers of different individuals (because yes, like all forms of life and contrary to the tenets of reductionism, each individual of life ever born has always been uniquely different in subtle but important ways), they far outnumber all the rest of life put together.

They may represent the largest mass/weight of life in terms of biomass, though the term biomass is very hard to define (do dead tree trunks count ?)

These small and the last, may survive when the first and the big die, precisely because they are small - when niches get small and thin - only the small and thin get enough to eat to survive and reproduce.

And because, again contrary to Hard Reductionism, they are small but dynamically complex .

(Just as modernity's scientists soon discovered of the not-indivisible after all atoms. For each  is made up instead of a complex seething soup of matters dark and anti, of spin and top and color. So much so that if anyone claims they truly understands the sub-atomic world, they're lying.)

Simply put, if mutations are needed if a species is to survive rapidly changing conditions, a small being that produces a new generation every twenty minutes instead of every twenty years that big beings need to reproduce, works its evolutionary magic more than 500,000 times faster.

Particularly when microbes are not biological racists like humanity circa 1940, instead being perfectly willing to take genes, horizontally, from anyone and anything.

Open commensality versus closed racism

The openness of commensality rather than the exclusivity of racism so that their gene pool gets ever deeper and they don't try to constantly drain it via eugenic murder.

In terms of reading a newspaper, yes the first (educated humans) are first and the last (bacteria) are last.

But in terms of making penicillin, WWII discovered - to its horror and surprise - the last ( the tiny slimy penicillium fungi) shall be first and the first (the world's best chemists) shall be last.

In terms of speed, neither the last (rare bacteria with limbs) nor the first ( obese urban university employed humans) are particularly fast in terms of body lengths travelled per second - that goes to the medium (cheetah and such).

Today instead of a single simple scale of worthiness with the new big and complex at the top inevitably, we accept that all forms of life excel at some things and do poorly in others.

We no longer believe that some life - inevitably, by laws of nature - must be life unworthy of life and so can be legitimately burned up in smoke at Auschwitz....

Modernity simply faded when its Old Believers stopped breathing and its Young Initiates stopped believing

Despite all the commentary to the contrary, there is actually no hard evidence that the western world really changed its views on racism and eugenics after the revelations of Auschwitz.

It just could be that the people who had always opposed it got much more vocal and those who had always espoused it learned to curb their tongues ----- at least in public and in public opinion surveys.

(But do let me know when you have developed time travel and God-like powers to see into the darkest truest corners of humanity's soul, and can better firm up all this windy commentary.)

Until then, the view I espouse is that late 1950s and early 1960s civil right protests were as successful as they were, when earlier (bigger) efforts had mostly failed, was because the chief scientific opponent of universally shared human rights (Modernity) was itself fading fast.

I argue one had to come of age as a young adult before WWI's modernity-driven disasters to remain a fully Modernity believer ---- that places the cutoff birthdate date for such fervent believers around 1895.

So the last people in this age group were all out of the work force by 1965.

Yes, they could still be politicians, preachers, authors, control great wealth, but they didn't command army divisions or run police forces, run government civil services, be editors of big newspapers.

And the most truly fervent (oldest) believers in reductionism, racism, eugenics, what have you - the teenagers of the Victorian era - were all in nursing homes or had simply stopped breathing, by 1965.

None of this would have really mattered if 1965 Modernity's young new Initiates, born during the war years and now about twenty to twenty five, had panned out as they were expected to in 1940 .

That was the time of the first Futurama, which set about to predict and then bring about the kind of world it wanted its grandchildren to enjoy in 1965.

But the grandkids weren't buying Modernity's new game plan - as best presented in the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair and its Futurama II exhibit.

I mean some were (insert a big shout out here to Dick Cheney) - but decidedly sotto voce - while a larger number opposed its visions, some quite vocally.

The vast mushy middle of this youthful vanguard went along - as always - in the direction of the biggest noise.

Now as to why so many of the young Initiates stopped believing , I think one possible answer is that while Modernity actually delivered on most of its promises, a majority of the new young buyers (along with a lot of the oldsters) didn't actually like what was on offer.

I say this as a student of political science, where it will never do to simply imagine that all governments that lose elections, do so because they failed to deliver on their promises.

Many,many times they do deliver ('we will cut government services to lower taxes') and the voters then don't like the results....

What if God was an architect ?

What if the God with an inordinate fondness for beetles (400,000 species and counting, so far) was an architect of domestic buildings : what would those homes look like ?

I suggest that they would look very much like the intensely polychromed and extremely variegated exuberant homes of the Victorian Era.

What Americans tend to call "the Painted Ladies" and we here in Nova Scotia know as "Gingerbread Houses".

And if Hitler was an actual architect and not just an architect manque, what would his homes all look like ?

I suggest they would be the concrete,steel and glass equivalents of Leni Riefenstahl's all-lookalike photographs of the ideal human figure.

Figures all alike in their perfect prime of youth : tall and fit with symmetrical features :  rendered in concrete as eternally perfect , frozen in their vigorous youth thanks to either Riefenstahl's stills camera or Speer's massive concrete.

Very 'Thirties' indeed : smooth, seamless, streamlined, moderne.

Function following form - no 'useless' decorations or 'flawed 'gargoyles.

No Romas, no Jews, no Handicapped or Gays : biological synthesis would render a perfect human species and eugenic plenticide would eliminate any mistakes.

In a word : modernist, brutalist architecture : smooth, hard, cold : the ideals of eugenics captured forever in grey grey concrete, glass and steel.

It is not at all a coincidence that when architect Le Corbusier was born in 1887, so was the Age of Modern Scientism and that when he died in 1965, so did it.

For it was his eugenic architectural ideas that can be seen dominating both the 1939-1940 and 1964-1965 New York World's Fairs, sites where his vision of a smooth, grey, perfect World of the Future was most widely propagated .

For there was no sign of 400,000 different kinds of beetles - and no God either - at either of these two Fairs ....

Streamlining Plentitude : 1939-1940 World's Fair's ominous legacy for postwar generation

For years now, I have been cheered when recalling how eagerly so many in my generation (the postwar boomers) marched in the streets to promote human diversity and variety.

But for just as many years, I have been mystified why they then remain so silent - like bystanders at a schoolyard bully beating -  as Nature's diversity and variety faces mass extinction by human actions ... and inactions.
It is not that they don't regret the lessening of diversity and variety as human actions result in the loss of species and habitats - they do ; but it is a shoulder shrugging ,'what can one do ?!' sort of regret.

It is as if they have all internalized the visual motif of the 1939-1940 new York World's Fair : Eugenic Progress consists of evermore streamlining of human artifacts (skyscrapers, airliners, cars) , humans and Nature itself.

Less is more : plenticide is good.

Streamlining moderne medicine for war : jettisoning Alston and Aronson September 1940

Whatever strength the movement for Social Medicine (medical care for the small and the weak, even when they can't pay much) might ever had have had in the Anglo Saxon democracies, pretty well died with the Fall of France in June 1940.

By September 1940, medical isolationists, who had earlier so disagreed with medical interventionists over whether it was morally essential to go to the aid of small and weak nations under attack by big aggressors, had come around to at least agreeing that their own nations might be next.

The isolationist doctors even saw this this crisis as the perfect wedge to separate their interventionist colleagues's concerns for weak and small nations from their concern over weak and small patients.

"We simply can't afford to expand Social Medicine for 4Fs in a time of Total War, not when we need ever more resources devoted to maintaining our frontline A1 troops from sickness and injuries."

Dr Martin Henry Dawson was one such colleague isolationists might well have had in mind --- a decorated war hero who wanted medical America to both intervene to protect the small and the weak at home as well as abroad.

Partially for the 4Fs' own sake ----- and partially to show the neutral world the much touted moral gap between the Nazis and the Allies actually had real meaning.

The medical isolationists wanted - by contrast - to abandon the weak and small of America as readily has they had already abandoned the weak and the small of Europe and Asia.

They visualized an eugenically sleek streamlined moderne medicine, as being co-currently promoted at the New York World's Fair, has having no room for the chronically sick poor and minorities : ugly protrusions on their sleek 'average citizen'..

And poor minority patients with invariably fatal SBE, like Aaron Leroy Alston and Charles Aronson , fitted that bill to a T.

When Dawson choose, on October 16th 1940, to buck his colleagues' consensus with the first ever injections of penicillin in history for this pair he ushered in our Era of Antibiotics .

It, in turn, has done more for achieving the goals of Social Medicine than anything else besides the raising of real wages for the poor and minorities.

An unexpected result from the moral ferment thrown up by the World's Fair streamlined new World of Tomorrow....

Synthetic Autarky : Patenting the Bomb

For centuries, nominal democracies like America and Britain have yearned to control a war-stopping super-weapon that will give them a patent monopoly against others' aggression.

A super-weapon that they alone control because they have (a) kept it top secret and (b) hold all the patents on it.

Gosh, we might just as well be talking about the actual A-Bomb !

Now the 'top secret' bit we get - totally.

But why then also seek patents over the atomic bomb's components and production as well ?

One might argue that as capitalistically minded people, the American elites knew that even in free market economies, patent holders were totally free to deny licenses to some firms or nations while offering them to others.

This would allow the iron fist of the new American totalitarian political cum military monopoly on this world-destroying atomic bomb to appear softened by the velvet glove of the traditional free market patent monopoly process.

This is part of the picture - true - but only part of it.

We might ask ourselves why were entrepreneurs, businesses and governments around the world so interested in all three forms of synthesis (chemical, physical and biological) in the heyday of the Modernity period ?

Philosophically, I might argue that we can't really invent anything physical that isn't also fully natural - we can only copyright ideas inside our heads that defy natural laws.

So if everything we synthesis is really a variant on already existing natural materials or processes - why bother ?

The publicly stated reason is that the newly synthesized variant has been made better, cheaper, faster.

The real - private - reason is that Mother Nature, is by definition, all PD (Public Domain).

Anyone and all nations can turn rubber tree sap into some sort of tire.

There is no way to create a cartel or monopoly on rubber plants for very long, because someone always ends up slipping out a few seeds or stems out past the national border guards and then starts growing rubber plants a continent away.

But Man-made synthesis allows firms (and above all nations) to erect patentable synthetic autarkical monopolies against other firms and nations and even against Mother Nature herself.

So, on the chemical front, German chemists avoided having to rely on overseas suppliers' natural guano to make fertilizer or explosives during WWI - inventing a synthetic way to fix nitrogen instead.

During the interwar years, these same chemists hoped to perfect methods to turn abundant German coal, water and air into synthetic rubber, petroleum, wood and steel substituting plastics, fabrics and medicines - the list of possibilities went on and on.

Equally hard at work on the biological front, German eugenic experts (and murderous dysgenic experts) were trying to convert the raw natural population of Germany into a synthetic Aryan race - pure, perfect, tough, resistant, resilient.

In the area of physics, German atom-smashers hoped to bust atoms of raw natural elements common in Germany into the atoms of scarce and precious elements not common in Germany.

If we forget the traditional view of a man-made patent as something that is invariantly made public when confirmed, and drill down deeper, we see it is just an inherent monopoly that needn't be made public at all.

Because when Mother Nature made rubber tree sap strong enough to work as tires, she did so world-wide : no monopoly is possible in her world as long as seeds exist along with the winds to blow them hither and yon.

But man-made objects can be synthesized inside tightly guarded buildings and kept under wraps far longer than wild rubber plants springing up here there and everywhere in tropical forests.

Man-made synthetics needn't make all the natural variants of natural materials : why bother to synthesize the body excretions of 149,999 species of beetles when only one beetle species actually produces a life-saving drug in those excretions ?

In fact, why bother keeping any of the 150,000 species of beetle alive, period, when they are only a competitor for raw materials human chemists need to synthesis some more scientific wonders ?

Why bother to live in open commensality with all the messy plentitude of Mother Nature's beings as they compete with us human synthesizers over the earth's scarce natural raw elements ?

Patentable synthetic autarkic monopoly (Modernity in a long phrase) is thus inherently plenticidal : it sees no real need for keeping anything around in the natural world beyond a few raw basic elements.

Above all, it will seek the single simple raw element required for atom-smashing-together nuclear fusion synthesis to work : basically just hydrogen.

Easy then to imagine some future modernity-oriented new human colony on some vast hydrogen gas planet.

Outside is nothing but this vast ball of natural hydrogen gas but inside the plastic bubble is a world of gaudy artificially coloured materials recreating a simulacrum of whatever the human mind and the human chemist can invent.

Too bad about the pesky gravity three times as strong as on Earth - but the DNA boffins are onto it - soon they will perfect a synthetic new body for all these former earthlings....

9.5 Theses about climate DENIERS

It is hard to nail something up , on the internet , but here it goes anyway :

(1) I believe - as a percentage - more Protestants than Catholics deny human climate change and that they do so more vehemently.

(2) I believe - as a percentage - more people of Anglo-Saxon (sic) origins deny human climate change than do people of other ethnic origins.

(3) I believe - as a percentage - more males than females strongly deny human climate change.

(4) I believe - as a percentage - more better off people than poorer people vehemently deny human climate change.

(5) I believe - as a percentage - that more native born citizens than immigrants , strongly deny human climate change.

(6) I believe - as a percentage - more people with some post secondary education deny strongly human climate change than do people with either high school or less education or those with post-graduate education.

(7) I believe - as a percentage - people who deny human climate change dislike immigration, minorities, disabled, women and gay rights, more so than do non-deniers.

(8) I believe - as a percentage - more deniers than non-deniers believe super powers should 'go it alone' rather than first helping to assemble a coalition of allies bound by a common goal.

That instead they prefer to use their nationally-exclusive super weapons against the enemy, like some WWII comic book super hero, sailing above community, democracy and the rule of law.

Which is to say, far more adult deniers than non-deniers still believe it was Captain America and not Joe and Willie that actually won WWII.

(9) I believe - that as a percentage - more whites, than non-white , deny human climate change.

(9.5) I believe - as a percentage - that more climate change deniers prefer the Fifties to the Sixties than do non-deniers.

 And that the more widely read among the deniers secretly yearn for the halcyon days of pre-1939, when Anglo Saxon empires and Anglo Saxon eugenics and Anglo-Saxon scientism still ruled the world.

Which is to say that human climate change isn't really the issue for them.

It is but a 'rally around the wagons' symbol.

A last ditch battle to decide whether anyone or anything (be it a minority group, a gender or Mother Nature herself) can ever impose any limits on a traditional ruling group to do what ever it wants, where ever it wants, when ever it wants, for as much as it wants ....