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 ....

Conservative Fears : drowned under Plentitude or abandoned after Plenticide

The 1990s were filled with books about one, two or ten humans left all alone on a vast empty Earth after a too-successful effort at human Plenticide (usually an all-out nuclear war).

Nominally about issues of abandonment, they were often secret conservative 'wet dreams' about all their liberal leftie neighbours all being wiped out so that  one  (American)  heterosexual family can re-create a Right-thinking, gun-touting, Right-voting paradise.

But in the 1890s, a century earlier, the fear was all about Plenticide's opposite, Plentitude.


But if a physically empty Earth was the conservative fear of the 1990s, 1890s conservatives feared a mentally-filled , not an physically-filled, Earth.

Yes there were more people on Earth in 1890, if rather less plants and animals.

But that very real population increase went unnoticed, the human population still so small and resources-undemanding and the Earth still seeming so big.

What was much noted and more feared by conservatives were all the humans leaving rural areas (where they could be observed and contained) and heading for the overcrowded dark tenement areas of the world's biggest cities, where they live out of sight and beyond upper class control.

Worse, in those tenement areas, they were free to hear the ideas of the troublemakers of all the world's nations.

But this real Plentitude of humanity in the inner big cities wasn't the only thing noted at the time though it is all that we tend to remember of the 1890s.

But conservative observers back then were actually much more exercised about where all those new city poor had come from - and that was the newly depopulated and de-stabilized, declining farm areas : modernization had Plenticided the farm community.

All this, however, was a conscious conservative reaction to a localized (urban) form of physical Plentitude.

But I argue that the largest conservative reaction against 'drowning' under a flood of Plentitude was actually against a new virtual Plentitude of ideas and facts thrown up by modernization and this reaction was largely unconscious.

It soon emerged out the other end - quite self-consciously - as we know today as Modernity and what 1890s reformers would have called simply "Progress".

Progress would stop the parts of this plentitude the upper classes feared and channel the parts of the plentitude it wanted to encourage.

What do I mean by a "virtual", rather than a physical plentitude ?

When an educated person at the end of the 19th century looked up in the night sky, they saw no more stars than they did as children.

But Science had told them (and they fully trusted Science) that the number of stars in the sky had actually increased a billion fold and their age extended back from a few thousand or a few million years to a few billion years.

The same with the deep dark woods, deep dark seas and deep blue daylight skies : Science said that far far more plants, animals, microbes and minerals had been discovered to lurk in their depths than had been imagined, although they still looked as opaque as ever.

More human languages, more human societies, more human history than ever before imagined had been discovered by Science - though looking out your Manhattan brownstone on a bright May morning, they remained as invisible as ever to your eye or ear.

But to your mind - oh my !

How your brain ached with the fullness and the plentitude of all reality.

Progress's plenticide would drastically prune it back to an improved version of reality as you knew it as a child...

The UNWANTED plentitude of gas warfare

To many of us who see 'death as death', it has always been un-obvious why coughing to death from WWI gas clouds was so much different than being hit in the guts out in No Man's Land and coughing your life away for a half an hour while your comrades are helpless to intervene.

A similar phobia existed against openly conducting warfare with radiation clouds or clouds of fire or germs.

Germs I can at least understand - since they are self replicating, they don't fade away like even the worst gas, fire or radiation cloud eventually does, but can circle the world and kill the nation that unleashed them in some cosmic justice bite-you-in-the-rear pandemic.

So instead of cloud warfare, almost all of the military and civilian elites promoted "precision" warfare.

A few bullets, shells or bombs would be aimed directly and land directly upon the enemy military forces --- and nothing else.

It was supposedly the more moral and certainly much cheaper and quicker way to win a war.

But why it was so moral to kill a man who was conscripted against his secret wish, to fight for his government only because if he didn't he might be jailed or even shot and yet so immoral to kill his brother making rifles back home was never really explained.

Cheaper certainly was the claim of the 'precision boys' at the beginning of WWII - a few medium bombers would drop their relatively small bomb loads directly on their military targets, once, and wipe them out completely.

But in fact total imprecision was the real Bomber Command/AAF forte and the war ended with thousand bomber raids of heavy four engine planes still dropping thousands of tons of bombs over "factories" week after week, year after year - and still not wiping them out.

It was actually cloud warfare with hundred of thousands of tiny fire bomblets and not a few big HE bombs doing most of the real damage, with germ cloud and gas cloud bombs waiting in the wings, but the Allies would never admit it.

Just as they never admitted that Nagasaki's civilians died as much from fire clouds and radiation clouds as they did from the poorly-aimed Atomic Bomb's explosive force upon the naval base.

Reductionist ideology, the ideology of the Era of Modernity, touted selective precision as the only correct way to approach reality.

First one determined the one right and best solution to solve any particular problem (and plenticided all other possible solutions) and then one applied that solution accurately and consistently until it worked, even if that took decades.

Modernity tolerated no second thoughts, no Plan B, no re-assessments.

Modernity simply could not afford to admit that the imprecise plentitude of cloud warfare was sometimes much more effective than the selective precision of modern warfare.

Because they feared that others might feel that what was true of warfare might also be seen as true of all reality : that imprecision and contingency ruled and that Reductionism gave a seductive but erroneous explanation of Reality...

Plenticidal Revulsion (reductionism, reactionism) must always be simple - "terribly simple" - because Reality never is

The reaction thrown up by Plenticidal Revulsion (Lovecraftian Revulsion being the best known literary representation) must always and only seeks to see in its place a single, simple, pure vertical hierarchy and hegemony.

All others at the bottom, me at the top.

For the very idea that a plentitude of hegemonies and hierarchies can even exist along different planes of reality is what the revulser fears the most - not the competing ideas contained within those various hegemonies.

For "simple" and "single" (and "pure") are but different ways of saying the same thing, just as "complex" and "mixed " basically say the same thing.

The forcing all of reality into their 'terribly simple' procrustean bed by those most revulsed by the new plentitude accounts for virtually all the horrors done in the era of Plenticide (1870s-1960s).

And until late in 1942, Leni Reifenstahl's "Triumph of the Terribly Simple" seemed to lie within the revulsers' grasp....

We genuinely regret species loss - but we don't lose sleep over it

Morally, mass species extinction through plenticidal indifference is like the Nazi Hunger-Plan-in-slow-motion

If the Nazi Final Solution had been totally successful, ten million European Jews would have died violently by gas or bullet.

If the Nazi Hunger Plan had been totally successful, thirty million Eastern European Slavs and Jews would have slowly and quietly ebbed to death through hunger and cold.

If extent of intention rather than extent of execution marks the true magnitude of evil - and I believe it does, as do most people who have thought about it, then the Hunger Plan - though too little known - was the far greater Nazi evil.

There is always a market for movies made up of violence porn - and scenes of mass murders by bullet or gas chambers fills that pornographic need.

Slow starvation deaths makes for bad Hollywood

But extended scenes of slow starvation deaths are much more - not less - painful to watch --- even, or perhaps especially, for violence junkies.

Hollywood has no interest in making movies about slow quiet destructions of human lives and cultures by benign plenticidal neglect.

Slow quiet death (through inadequate land and hence food & fuel resources) to all aboriginals who refused to join modern progressive scientific industrial society was always and everywhere the implicit Hunger Plan from the 1870s to the 1970s.

Our extra special animus against relatively small numbers of powerless aboriginals requires some explaining.

It was because of their great moral power : they dared to question the unquestionable good of Progress and Modern Science and Technology, even as they themselves were clearly slowly starving to death in dismal living conditions.

They dared assault our innermost superego and awake long suppressed doubts we all had about the path of Progress- and for this they must die to let our superegos regain control.

Thirty years later - would the US Civil War have even been fought ?

In 1865, fighting and dying to defend the right of one person to buy another person for the equivalent today of a million dollar home, seemed to make great economic sense.

But that quickly changed as mechanization replaced human hand skills and as the cheap energy slaves embodied in engines and fossil fuel replaced the energy from fragile human and animal slaves. 

In the 1890s, King Leopold II of Belgium and his minions expected to extract great wealth from the Congo - but mostly from inert non-living wealth.

They saw no real economic need to keep the people of their Congo alive as forced labour, for working on future renewable resource plantations for example.

They quickly killed off half the entire population - ten million - the world's greatest mass murder ever.

King Leopold's plenticidal indifference

Some they deliberately murdered - but most died through plenticidal indifference.

For to their modern minds, the Congo seemed to have a plentitude of people-to-be-fed-and-clothed - far more than needed to exploit it successful with machinery and fossil fuels.

Best to let the excess 'useless mouths' died quietly from hunger - off stage.

They almost got away with it - perhaps if they had laid off those public capitations of heads and hands - they might well have.

Today, similarly, we can't really get away with the roundup and deliberate killing of a few hundred wolves or feral ponies without a huge hue and cry.

But if 95% of all the frogs in the world die because of a fungus disease spread worldwide as a consequence of a 1950s human pregnancy test, we will all purse our lips for a moment, sigh and then get about with our lives.

Our consciences almost clear.

The world is filled with a plentitude of frogs and frog species - how many do we really need anyway - won't one or two species be more than enough ?

The Sixth Extinction by plenticidal indifference and the Aboriginal (and other) Hunger Plans --- you tell me the moral difference...

All superweapons are plenticidal, even if they never kill anyone

1945's American-only atomic bomb was truly plenticidal (plentitude-reducing), but not because a full-out nuclear war would kill off thousands of the world's species in a few months.

It would have been just as plenticidal if it had never ever been used, but only threatened to be used.

Because its real target was not the Axis or even erstwhile allies like Russia - but rather Washington's favoured peace'n'wartime Allies !

Yes its real target were all the other bothersome friendly nations that Washington had to waste some much time mollifying all throughout the war.

But holding the world's only super-weapon puts an end to all that back and forth diplomacy and compromising and debating.

Conducting external affairs gets much simpler when you hold all the cards, make all the rules.

The Manhattan atomic Project was pursued at all speed and all costs, not because it would end the Axis coalition - but rather because it would end the Allied coalition.

Bet you don't find that fact in any of your professors' favourite books ....

PLENTICIDE - not Ecocide or Mundicide

Plenticide is the deliberate 'pruning back' of 'excessive' anything (and everything) - simply because some/many/all people feel totally overwhelmed by abundance, either some of the time or all of the time.

Abundance of choice, abundance of complexity, abundance of competitors, abundance of debate and of decisions, the list goes on ---- plenticide happens because of primal fear from one or all of these reasons.

It needn't involve killing humans or even living beings - killing ideas and choices will do just as well in providing these plenticiders with their sought for relief.

A nuclear war or a big comet might destroy all life on it and even destroy its atmosphere forever - but this mundicide - death of a planet's life - because it was not a selective pruning back but rather a total loss of life and choice.

A tiny bit more deliberate is the incidental killing of lifeforms as human activity expands - ecocide - because we have been warned repeatedly that expanding these activities will lead to these deaths.

Criminal neglect or culpable negligence seems to be the terms we are looking for to describe these planet-wide crimes.

Fear of overwhelming abundance

But plenticide refers to deliberate plans to kill lifeforms to deliberately reduce variety, debate, competition, complexity.

So the Holocaust system took up a well known insecticide Zyklon-B  and used it to kill off human 'competitors' (Jews , Romas, Slavs) as well as farm bugs - because they felt both made life much more chaotic and  complex for the German nation during WWII.

We fail ourselves if we only call such killing a genocide, because that says only what/who was killed and not really why.

That 'why' comes down to plenticide...

Plenticidal Extinction

It is catchier, but less informative, to say we are living in the time of The Sixth Extinction than to use a ten cent word like The Anthropocene Extinction.

But I argue that even using a word like Anthropocene doesn't really begin to scratch the surface about what is truly unique about this latest - deliberately plenticidal - extinction.

But first, let us agree that there is an even bigger danger in simply giving this current extinction a number instead of a fully descriptive name.

Because humans couldn't be around for the first five major extinctions here on Earth - events we could only read about in the past tense in school - we risk turning a global tragedy into a form of global Reality TV.

'Now you too can be an eyewitness to a major historical event - sixth time lucky !'

But Athropocene isn't much better : it simply means an extinction caused by human activities - as opposed to earlier extinctions caused by climate changes or huge balls of flaming rock hitting the Earth.

That flaming hunk of molten destruction was not a living thinking being - it couldn't have changed course to avoid hitting the Earth no matter how many poignant messages it received from the Pope, Bono and Bill Gates.

But we have been told, told for centuries, that our hunting behavior is killing the larger creatures (megafauna) species wholesale.

 Now, in the last few decades we've been warned we soon won't be able to count the species of all sizes we are driving into extinction each and every year.

We have slowed up - reluctantly - in a few small areas - sped up in many bigger areas.

We are thinking , moral, beings and we aren't really stopping this killing.

At some point we must ask if this killing spree is not simply a tragedy incidental to human activities but in fact deliberate on our part.

We humans annually kill far more creatures because they are 'pests' or 'weeds' than we do out of greed ( the classic case of greed leading to extinction being the passenger pigeon.)

Here in Atlantic Canada many fisherman openly advocate killing off all the seals - not for their pelts or for use as food - but simply because they compete with us humans for something we truly value - the cod.

Its the old 'loaf of labour' theory modified.

The environment is just a mine of dead-like valuable resources in this view of reality.

Every pound of biological food energy that goes to the seal is a pound that doesn't go to Man.

Any thought that the seal and Man both do their small part in ensuring the ever constant global re-cycling of scarce carbon, oxygen,nitrogen, etc simply hasn't penetrated these thick skulls.

This view wants to see a world (that for now) that is one big level plowed field, stretching off past the horizon, totally sterile of any plant or animal or microbe we don't want there.

In the near future, this view won't even want that - no living beings will exist beyond humans (and even there ,only the healthy right-thinking humans will be allowed to survive) -- all our food will be made synthetically, out of rocks sublimated into steaks thanks to the energy of fusion fuel 'too cheap to meter'.

The chaos and competition of life is too much about for this mindset --- a clearing away of this vegetative undergrowth, this plentitude of life - is far overdue.

Plenticide the Plentitude of Life

Drain the gene pool as deep as it can go - human hubris has all the answers - plenticide off all our competitors and lets lie back and enjoy the non-living bounty of this Used-to-be-Green Earth...

Po, Po Pitiful Mo : too many Boomers praising plentitude & practising plenticide ...

Modernity's great sin was not its assumption that all our God-given diversity was actually, at its core, very simple, predictable and controllable.

Rather the sin lay in the fact that when Modernity's scientists discovered this not to be the case, they and it did not desist.

Instead human Hubris set about trying to create an alternative artificial simplicity that was predictable and controllable by Man alone : the Triumph of the Will over the Wind.

It was war on two fronts : plenticiding all of Mother Nature's complex unpredictable chaos out of existence and substituting a Man-made synthetic order and simplicity in its place.

From a forever labile thermo-plastic natural reality, it tried to impose an eternally thermo-set artificial reality.

Putting plenticide in writing

Most modernists never had any objections to using Zyklon-B to kill billions of bugs, but they did not want to see it used to kill millions of 'human germs'.

They generally preferred to let 'primitive lives judged unworthy of civilized life', like aboriginals around the world in peacetime and Slavs in wartime, to quietly wither on the vine -- from lack of land resources to feed, clothe, house and heat themselves.

The Nazis could have simply extracted most of the food, fuel and clothing from occupied Poland and Russia for themselves as 'a matter of wartime necessity'.

Then six million Jews in Eastern Europe - or maybe more - might have quietly died in the mix, from hunger-related diseases, along with 30 million of their Slavic neighbours.

After WWII, would have the world have not simply sighed and then speak softly of the cruel necessities of total war ?

But the Nazis killed Modernity stone dead (as well as six million Jews) when they chose to put their plenticidal-genocidal plans in writing.

For they at last made Modernity's always implicit plenticide fully explicit - indicating in writing that they deliberately planned to murder all the world's Jews with Zyklon-B, in an effort to remove a chaos-causing ethnicity from the Earth forever.

Plenticide & the Sixth Extinction

As a result, I don't see today's Sixth Extinction and yesterday's Holocaust as being all that different in their intentions, despite the wide difference in their methods and targets.

As a result of growing up in an transitional Era, we conflicted boomers are both Mo and Po --- practising plenticide semi-consciously on Nature with our actions --- all the while praising diversity and variety with our mouths.

But if we boomers don't start soon walking our talk, the earth & climate is surely doomed ..

Synthetics & Plenticide : All Mod (ernity) Cons

First:
you synthesize an artificial, man-made, *Ur-topia of static reduction and perfection - the way it supposedly was before Nature's plentitude of chaos took over.

Then :
(Sixth time unlucky) you plenticide the life out of all the species that your Ur-topia's manifest says are no longer 'needed on voyage' ...

----------

*Ur-topias, (I say), unlike u-topias, look backwards to a supposed Golden Age rather than forward to a new Golden Age

Reality : 'parsimony' or 'plentitude' ? ---- Modernity and Commensality's choices

Both parsimony and plentitude are well worn terms (with relatively precise meanings) within the world of science ---- but buttressing each scientific term are two long standing but wildly varying philosophies of life that we all must chose between.

The two philosophies agree just once : in both accepting that current - readily observable - reality does appear to be very dynamic and complex.

But only one philosophy accepts that this vision of ever-dynamic complexity is probably as about as accurate a version of reality that we humans are ever likely to get.

The other philosophy derides that view as a 'false consciousness' and craves to find a much simpler , more predictable, stable and controllable reality buried somewhere deep in that heaving surface morass.

I think it is fair to say that the Era of Modernity (1875-1965) chose the philosophy of parsimony and the Era of Commensality (1965- ?) has chosen the philosophy of plentitude.

For parsimony sees reality as akin to thermoset polymers and says that there are always winners and always single best solutions.

And that moreover we can readily determine them and congeal them for all time.

While plentitude sees reality as rather like thermoplastic polymers and says there are no winners or losers - just ever-plastic life in all its complexities.

It says that history has shown we haven't had much happiness when we set out to exalt the winners and to holocaust the losers....

Two Tier Internet the Johnson-Reed Bill of its day : plenticiding "digital plentitude"

Modernity (1875-1965), the mean-spirited ideology that was a panicky response to all the plentitudes that global modernization and advances in science had thrown up , has a lot of faults to its credit.

One of the most infamous was the 1924 Johnson-Reed Bill, an Act that shut New York City's Golden Door for over 40 years.

Republican Albert Johnson ,along with fellow Republican David Reed, had foundationed that Bill's restrictions upon their racist cum social Darwinist cum eugenic cum anti-black, anti-Jewish, anti-catholic philosophy.

Why did they fear the new plentitude so much ?

Perhaps because an expanded plentitude of choices and voices and decisions seems to overwhelm as many people (something about their brain chemicals ?) as it inspires many others.

As a result, they seek artificial ways to restrict Natural Plentitude.

Immigration restrictions and eugenic measures in general was one of them.

Rejecting ballot box and work place democracy because it gave everyone a voice to argue and debate the actions that past elites were used to have simply obeyed, was another.

Today, digital has many many things once so expensive and difficult , easy and cheap - even free.

Today the democracy of digital plentitude has made writing an e-book, blog ,web petition , even a science or academic article, much easier than ever.

More importantly, waving the results in front of people all over the entire world - thanks to the digital internet - is instant , easy, free  and effective.

Because already 40% plus of the entire world has some access to the internet.

That figure will soon rise to become near universal.

It will even be higher in the poorest most rural parts of the world than it is in the richest precincts of Manhattan .

If we can judge by the history of radio and TV , poorer rural people will crave mobile phone internet , even over cars or better homes, as the substitute for all the big city music concerts and first run movies they will never see.

The same sort of moral panic that led to 1924's Johnson-Reed Bill is already underway, fermented by the same sort of people : once-comfortably powerful white middle class professional males.

Who are they ?

Editors - like Johnson - this time fearful that anyone can write a better piece of journalism than their journal-degreed selves can , amateurs writing news reports from on the spot locations and with local on the spot insight.

Only by demanding that the only accurate news is that coming from the limited page output of our traditional print media can we Old Guard create a gatekeeper to hold the voice of journalistic democracy at bay.

Top line tenured professors ,used to having their names and university's status get their articles into the higher cited journals , now fearful that OPEN ACCESS will destroy all that.

They eagerly resist the OPEN ACCESS threat offered up by more junior, more productive, colleagues by demanding tenure still requires publishing hardcover books in the humanities and pre-publication peer view in prestige print journals for the physical sciences.

Why 300 very expensive copies (the usual print run today) of a scholarly book is better value to scholarship than an OPEN ACCESS e-book available in endless numbers world wide is left unsaid.

After all 300 copies does not go very far when the world has 300,000 libraries of higher learning !

But enough about the restrictive practises from cartels of old university professors and even older newspaper editors.

Business CEOs , old pros at cartels restricting trade to raises prices and profits, also fear new digital rivals destroying their comfortable lives.

They eagerly support the big telecoms who seek a two tiered internet - where money talks once again and the poor and foreign voices will once again be free to sleep under the digital highways's bridge ---- that is once again shut out.

Once again ,locking the digital Golden Door ....

Modern Science : offering both Plentitude and Plenticide

New raw data is rarely important to scientists : far more important is what is the most currently socially profitable spin to put on this new raw data.

In their individual activities in their own small personal areas of interest,the collectivity of scientists were adding greatly to the Modern Era's overwhelming sense of sensory overload from a plentitude of new facts and sensations.

Life on Earth and Earth itself was much older than thought - from thousands of years to billions.

Ditto the Universe - billions of years old, trillions upon trillions of other suns like ours, other planets like ours.

An outwardly expanding and growing Universe - perhaps expanding and growing forever.

Ever more species being discovered, every more elements, compounds - ever more and more.

With no end in sight.

If scientists kept up with this, they'd soon be as popular as lions at a lambing.

And this was the first generation of  wannabe professional scientists - a generation hoping to be well paid and well pensioned for a lifetime of scientific work.

No more amateurs scientists free to say and do as they pleased.

Professional scientists sang to the public for their supper - what they the public wanted , the scientists gave them.

So plentitude of new facts , beings and objects on one hand.

But on the other - the meat cleaver of plenticide.

It took many forms (Social Darwinism being only the best known) but the bottom line was most of this plenticide was living mistakes, living fossils - early tentative working outs on the way to a few pure perfect forms.

Plato would rescue us from Aristotle .....

This Era of Plentudism : the post modern welcoming of plenitude vs modern plenticide

We are - deniers aside - all plentudists these days.

We actually welcome and cherish the chaos and complexity of a multilayered world - welcome and cherish communities composed of  many wildly different little neighbourhoods.

'The more the merrier' is today our motto.

We are all Jane Jacobs and not Robert Moses today - we are all Henry Dawson and not Howard Florey these days.

We no longer have a an almost physical phobia against the mere thought of anything that is all mixed together.

Be that a bunch of different New York City ethnicities,  New York City neighbourhoods or various unknown compounds in New York City crude penicillin juice.

We no longer seek to replicate the chemists' process of separation and purification outside the beaker and flask.

We no longer practise it on human cities ( via the doctrine of widely separated uses and strict zoning) or on so called human 'races' ( with white separated and superior to blacks and Jews).

Adolf Hitler, Robert Moses and Howard Florey all tried that during WWII , and all failed and all were eventually discredited .....

The Axis/Allied plenticides of life and compassion

I see strong links between WWII and our current (human-driven) "Sixth Extinction" laying waste to the plenitude of Nature.

 The eugenic Nazis believed that the plenitude of humanity needed drastic pruning - starting with the Jews and Slavs.

 Their plenticidal crime was against the right of all humans to exist. 

The eugenic Allies/Neutrals told us to stifle our plenitude of compassion for the weak and the unfit - to limit our compassion to the fate of our own 'fit' .

 Their plenticidal crime was against compassion for strangers. 

My biographical subject ,Martin Henry Dawson ,("Manhattan Misfits") rebuked all three. His Manhattan Project ("Penicillin-for-All") originally hoped to save just a few strangers from an eugenic and heartless Allied medical establishment. 

It ended up rousing a nation and changed our whole world for the better -- forever.