The less you knew of The Bomb and Penicillin the better you understood them

Call it "The Chris Mooney Effect".

Remember when he reported that well informed and well educated Republicans were less, not more, likely to believe the scientific consensus about coming dire climate change ?

I see a similar result among people in 1945 who had too much media-mediated knowledge about WWII's Atomic Bomb and Penicillin.

By contrast, those with little information accurately saw the Bomb as a very horrific weapon, produced by a very big organization in a far off and secret desert location, intuitively connecting the concept 'horrific' with the concepts of 'big' and 'secret'.

And they saw Penicillin as a dramatic new big lifesaver produced by the same hitherto useless and hated but very ordinary & common moldy slime they were always cleaning off the food, clothing and basement walls in their homes.

They intuited that it was a very big and the very badly wanted medical breakthrough produced by the very small and the very unwanted.

Even a kid could get a kick out of such a rebuff to the big and powerful !

We all know how much effort was put into making atomic bombs and atomic energy seem friendly and cuddly - an argument, in the end, most bought by the highly educated.

But we forget about all the effort to hide the fact that most of WWII's penicillin was actually made by women using small bottles of the moldly slime - an operation as low tech and domestic in scale as the Atom Bomb effort was massive mean and secretive.

Instead we saw that the visual imagery released to (and used by) the mass media on wartime penicillin production showed only the high tech deep tank method, done in buildings that looked exactly like ultra modern moderate sized oil refineries circa 1944.

Again, the highly educated bought this hook line and sinker even as they grew exasperated every time an ordinary Joe and Josephine opined 'isn't it marvelous that penicillin could be made in your own kitchen using ordinary bread mold ?!'

For indeed the modern science of the Bomb and the postmodern science of natural penicillin were as un alike as chalk and cheese - and the uneducated instantly sensed that fact --- only the well read were fooled ...

Would today's schooling even be around - if teachers acted as if Quantum physics really exists ?

The big three of Modernity (the Nazis, Communism and Imperial Capitalism) were all given a helping hand up ... when the pedagogy of Reductionism muddled into pedagogical reductionism.

So if I were a high school teacher, I would stop all that pedagogical reductionism and stop lying to my students.

Pedagogical Reductionism : plenticiding inconvenient scientific truths ...

I would stop pretending that our real world is accurately conveyed by the theories of Newton, Lyell, Dalton and Darwin.

Stopping doing so, simply because this outdated set of science theories makes reality pedagogically simple for teachers to teach and grade students.

Stop doing so, simply because this outdated simple stable (Classic)(Modern) scientific view of reality remains very ideologically attractive to the powerful blocs of 'experts' and 'professionals', that ultimately determine the level of teachers' salaries and pensions.

Teachers who themselves view themselves as fellow 'experts' and 'professionals'.

If I were a teacher, I would freely tell pupils it is often good enough (even for grownup paid professional engineers) to simply subtract 30 from a temperature in Fahrenheit and then divide that result by two to get an approximate value in Celsius.

However, I would also add, that for true scientific accuracy, they must actually subtract 32 and divide by 1.8.

I would tell them that an adult paid professional engineer is usually safe in assuming the approximate atomic weight of an unknown sample of oxygen to be 16.

I would add that a true, scientifically accurate, atomic weight could only be determined by a painstaking chemical analysis of the actual percentages of the various oxygen isotopes contained in that sample, because each isotope has a different atomic weight.

I would tell my students that I would accept either answer on my upcoming exam - as long as the students explained what figure they are using and for what purpose.

I would stop lying to students in exchange for what seems to me, working at minimum wages, big pay ...

Neutrality, not Brutality, WWII hallmark

Only the (postwar : postmodern) grandchildren and possibly the children of the modern adults of WWII have always seen Hitler and WWII as symbols of the ultimate evil and brutality.

But relatively few of the modern world's adults saw it that way during the six long years of the war : even fewer forcefully proclaimed it that way during the war and did so from beginning to end.

If their initial wartime actions speak much louder than their later verbal recollections, almost all of the modern world's adults choose to stand around as bystanders while schoolyard bully Hitler beat up on little primary pupil Poland.

Very few neutral nations (and the neutral individuals within them) changed their minds about fighting Hitler and his Axis over the course of those six years of the war - unless they themselves were directly attacked by Hitler or his Axis.

Even then, few thought that Hitler was the ultimate symbol of evil.

Rather the adults still saw Hitler as just another invader who must be repelled, albeit an highly effective invader and hence a highly dangerous invader, one who must be stopped dead in his tracks.

The modern elites at the top of both the West and in Russia thought it quite possible that either the West or Russia might sue for a separate peace with Hitler at any point during the war - as France had already done.

That hardly sounds like people who saw Hitler as the symbol of the ultimate evil who must be stopped even if it cost all their lives to do so.

The great majority of the people murdered by Germany were killed by its armed forces rather than by the SS.

(I can repeat that sentence slowly and calmly, once you're sitting down, if its all been too great a shock to you.)

Despite that, almost all of the military and political elite in the West still thought of those German armed forces as basically like their own Allied armed forces and treated them accordingly - right up to the end of the war.

And well beyond : for many, that remains a belief until this very day.

From day one, the Allied governments' propaganda insisted that Hitler's Germany was evil but then didn't act like it was evil and so failed to convince themselves, their publics or the peoples in the neutral majority around the world.

They failed to do wartime things differently enough from the Axis to convince most that its actions were truly beyond the civilized ken.

Instead they said it was perfectly okay to go on denying Jews jobs and housing - but it was not okay to mass murder them - but we won't do much to stop that mass murder - beyond defeating Hitler - because he was also attacking us - the non-Jews.

If was as if all the modern world's adults during WWII were nothing more than modern objective W5 journalists, carefully reporting that he says "he wasn't mass killing the Jews", while she says "Hitler was too".

If WWII had in fact been anything like what W5 reporter Tom Brokaw* imagined it to have been (the ultimate battle between good and evil), I doubt whether we'd still be writing and reading about it 75 years later.

We are still fascinated by it, like white mice bait before a cobra, because WWII was in fact so filled with neutral hypocrisy that it almost crowds out all the brutality.

An endlessly multi-layered onion of a melodrama, far more Noirish than anything Hollywood could ever dream up ...
__________

* Tom Brokaw was born in early February 1940 and was five and two thirds years old when Japan formally surrendered.

Born just early enough to still bathe deep in the postwar modernist triumphant glow.

I strongly question whether, if he had been born even just three or four years later, he would have ever written his infamous book, "The Greatest Generation".

1936 vs 1941 : modern and postmodern kids' birth dates mere 5 years apart

This shaggy shaggy dog story is really - eventually - about climate change, but for now lie back and try to imagine two senior citizens, raised in the same small North American city.

They share roughly the same social class, religion and ethnicity - are even almost identical in age, one will be 80 in presidential election year 2016, the other will be 75.

But their views on such issues as the reality of human-caused global climate change (or the failure of most corporation boards to reflect the fact that the majority of humanity are women) could not be more different.

The child born in 1936 is the climate change denier, a member of the pre-war generation (The Greater Generation) and still a very firm believer in modernity and scientism.

But the child born in 1941 is the first of the post-war generation, the Boomers, a postmodern believer that we are collectively much better off with more diversity of opportunity for all.

Why should this particular and highly peculiar gap of a mere five years so separate these two kids --- even today ?

After all ,why does the child born in 1936 share more social views with her parents born in 1912 , 24 years earlier, than she does with the boy born in 1941 born only five years after her ?

And why does the boy born in 1941 share more social views with his great-grandson born in 2003, that is someone born 62 years later, than he does with the girl born only 5 years earlier ?

Let us go to the city hall of that small city and look there at the several dozen photographs of the young men killed in WWII, hanging along an honored wall.

One name in particular sticks out : a aircrew member killed in a tragic late wartime bomber crash landing in the UK, caused by wintertime bad weather over the North Sea.

Because while this particular teenager's story is known to both our formerly small kids , it is also known immensely differently by each : making one modern and the other postmodern.

Intellectually, the boy born in 1941 can stare at the face of this dead teenager from his own hometown and intellectually feel the tragedy for the boy, his home town sweetheart , his family, friends and neighbours.

But that is it - no real emotion link to this dead teenager : being born in late 1941 left our 75 year old with no personal memory whatsoever that he can tag as distinctly WWII-ish.

Yes, he does remember some events as far back as when he was three (in 1944) but nothing about them says they were wartime events of childhood.

But the little girl born in 1936 was one of the next door neighbours of the teenager killed in the bomber crash landing.

He was part of her earliest memories and when he went away to war, he became her one personal link to an immense social event that otherwise remained so distant and foreign to her.

His tragic accidental death, two months before the European war's end, hit her very very hard and it took years for her to make some sense of this seemingly meaningless death.

For his bomber was taking part in one of the very last mass bomber raids. Flak and fighter resistance from the Germans was very low and the raid was seemingly ordered only 'to move rubble about'.

So combat casualties on this raid had been unusually low and almost all would have returned safely but for a few bombers being so hardly affected by a patch of North Sea winter weather that they arrived over their home airfield almost out of fuel and with some of their instruments frozen up.

His bomber had made a pretty messy crash landing.

All the crew were more or less 'battered but alright', except for two badly injured members. One of the injured, him, died out his injuries two weeks later.

The details of his death arrived about the same time as VE Day.

Now scholars have mostly focused on researching WWI's wartime and post-war emotional response to tragic - useless seeming - deaths such as this teenager's.

What they have showed is that families and friends can only become reconciled to the tragic deaths of war youth if these deaths can be shown to have been useful, as well as heroic.

Invariably, the personnel at the scene of any wartime combat or accident death conspire successfully to ensure that the family learns only that the youth died bravely, stoically, heroically.

No one but them ever learns about the rear gunner hopelessly trapped in the crashed bomber, crying and balling for his mother like a baby in the horrible moments before the flames engulfed him.

But was his death useful ?

The usefulness of any and all war deaths is much more public - lies much more in areas we all free to debate.

Now the teenager's plane had taken part in two earlier bombing raids .

They had encountered heavy flak and fearsome jet fighter attacks - bomber casualties had been high and it took immense bravery for the teenager to go back a second and third time.

These raids had at least been aimed at important and as yet un-targeted war factories, even if the bombs as usual had mostly fallen on near by civilian streets.

In the mind of  the young girl born in 1936, if the Allied Strategic Bombing Campaign (including the A-Bomb) can be believed to have both won and shortened the war, then the death of her teenager next door neighbour helped to both win and shorten the war.

He died - yes : but not in vain.

So her criticism of the Allied operations of WWII must be limited, to limit her emotional costs, to what military types call the areas of tactics and operations, not strategy.

Let us switch to WWI because this sort of limited modernist criticism is much better known there.

So a grieving mother in 1924 can explain : 'my son died - bravely - in the mud of Passchendaele - yes the stupid generals should have stopped it much earlier - but this offensive was very a necessity, to give the badly weakened French army time to regroup'.

The British strategy goes unquestioned but operationally - it is okay, even in right wing circles, to ask, 'did it really need to go on and on and on?'

So conservatives historians still share this British mother's viewpoint about 1917's Passchendaele debacle.

But it is possible to accept at least part of the contrasting French view.

After the failure of the Nivelle offensive led to a widespread French Army mutiny/trade action, most of the French leadership preferred to at long last to take up the usual German response to setbacks : go on the defensive and wait for a more opportune moment to attack.

In this case, to wait for millions of fresh (white) American troops and thousands of highly effective Renault FT tanks (the world's first modern tank).

A third view point (mine !) is to say that the French and English empire could have quickly defeated the German Empire on the Western Front, if only they had introduced much more of their colored colonial troops there - from India in particular.

WWI went on and on, in truth, because London and Paris would rather lose to (white) Germans than to win thanks only to efforts of millions of their dark subjects.

We only dare publish such heretical viewpoints about the total strategic uselessness of Passchendaele today because almost no one is left alive with enough energy to get highly emotional about besmirching the sacred memory of a remembered uncle killed in that battle.

Note well my exact words : very few today personally knew the dead of WWII.

After all, to be twelve in 1917 and have a crush on a twenty year old killed at Vimy one must be 110 in 2015.

One day such will be true also about WWII - but for now it is not.

To claim that old fashioned 'Willy and Joe' boots on the ground, not high tech big science Captian America planes in the air, actually won WWII will never be popular with hundreds of millions emotionally invested in seeing their friends and relatives as heroes in a war that Allied scientism won.

And it is WWII era scientism (denying any inability of Man to quickly fix any climate change problem that Mother Nature might throw up) not an inner denial of possible climate change happening today, is what is stalling real efforts to reduce CO2 output...

Climate Debate's "Included Middle" and excluded edges

When I claim you can't simultaneously be an environmentalist and a supporter of Mars colonies, I really mean you shouldn't be both.

Because obviously many of us - perhaps most of us - feel we can have our environmental cake and eat a little Mars bar as well.

We like to be both Modern and Post-Modern : we just feel richer by settling for both, without letting our sense of consistency keep us up nights.

In that sense, what is excluded from the Climate Change debate is the 'excluded ends' - those hard core earthlings-only and  the hardcore skygods-only   - because right now the included middle holds the wishy-washy, foot in both camps, majority.

Its not a situation that Aristotle would have predicted when he developed his system of Logic , but hey - it happens.

My job is to 'lift and separate' that included middle until it splits and divides into its two polar opposite positions.

Then both sides conduct their appeal to reason and their appeal to emotion and then they collectively do a headcount.

Heads the Earth lives ! We work together to save it. Tails the Earth dies ! Then a few of us (a few rich "us") move on to Mars, the new Earth 2.0, while the rest boils up, like the rest of the planet  .....