The "3 Rs" of Modernist Science : Reductionism, Reification ...and Reality

Reality, in the common sense cum positivist meaning of that word, is what was usually missing from modernist science and the modernist era : its vast missing middle.

At the top, Reification and Biology had created something called "The Jewish Race" but you couldn't actually touch or taste it or definitely define it.

But if it did exist, at the bottom all its members could certainly be reduced to nothing more than the multiples of then tiniest known bits of mass and energy : protons, electrons and neutrons.

Chemistry and Physics told us so.

(Not that you could see those sub atomic objects either.)

But what was missing was something or someone you could actually see and touch.

The missing bits in the middle , in the day to day reality where we humans touch see hear and taste things.

Missing from all of modernist science was a someone you could accurately define the concrete limits of.

Say an actual individual "Jew" , as vaguely defined within the nebulous concept of "The Jewish Race".

Someone like the real Erin Green : born Aaron Green in East London, named after his father who was raised as an active member of the Jewish religious faith back in his native Poland.

But as an adult, Aaron senior became non-religious, particularly after he met an Irish-born woman raised as a church-going Catholic. She too became non-religious after she married Aaron senior.

Their son, Aaron junior changed his name, as an adult, to Erin as a sort of oral pun honouring both his mother's and father's heritage.

Now he is living in occupied France in 1941, after having met and married a French woman, of traditional French atheist background, while on holiday in Nice.

Suddenly the Germans arrest him, his wife and their children as being "members of the Jewish Race" and start sending them forward on a trip to the fatal showers.

The Nazis at least agreed with many legislatures of the American South in not knowing any arithmetic.

They lined up to defy reality and realism by claiming that far less than 1% of your genome was more potent than the other 99.99% of your genome in defining your origins.

In other words, that tails wag dogs, not the other way around.

"Just one drop of black or jewish blood defines you forever as Negro or Jewish".

Whatever if any 'race' that Erin's children belonged to,  it was the mixed up, muddled up human race : but then Reality is like that.

Modernist science is simple ;  Modernist reality is not...

Dawson's commensality supplies Modernity's "Missing Middle"

Seventy five years on, WWII (conventionally 1939-1945 but actually lasting much longer) looks like nothing more than two great grist stones, Reification and Reductionism, relentlessly grinding up all humanity between them .

For example, the Axis reified a scientific claim that humanity could be accurately divided into being either members or non-members of a concretely actual Aryan Race --- and then set out to eliminate all the non members.

The Allies, equally guilty, chose to worship at a scientific temple that claimed the reduction of all human complexity to the view we are but simple aggregates of tiny indivisible protons and electrons.

Neither claim can stand up to a probing examination - then or now.

But in fact, those claims weren't generally contested seventy five years ago.

However one scientist, Henry Dawson, while paddling in his quiet backwater of the study of human-bacterial commensality, implicitly seemed to offer up an extremely muted scientific critique of these two complementary explanations of Reality.

No wonder his view was ignored.

However he persisted because it did seem that these two complementary explanations - one encompassing the very biggest things in reality and the other covering the very small entities in reality - left out the vast middle of reality.

And that is the very place where all life (and most matter and energy) actually 'lives' .

The key concept in commensality ("the dining together of all life, big and small, at a common table") is that tiny but vital connector :  AND  .

Commensality re-unites what reductionism and reification divides.

Commensal Penicillin : the saving of the lives of 1A soldiers AND  4F civilians , on both sides of the war

But it was not until he put his ideas on commensality into practise, as he confounded the Allied plan to weaponize wartime penicillin, that commensality began to have an actual impact on the thoughts of scientists and the general population.

For in science, as in life generally, words - even peer-reviewed published words - don't always speak louder than actions....

Between PROGRESS and PROTONS : "The Missing Middle" , where we actually live

Thirties Reductionism said that once scientists knew the behavior of one of the Protons that made up Winston Churchill's body (and multiplied it by a trillion trillion trillion identical protons), they could then predict Churchill's behavior over the 1936 Abdication Crisis.

Thirties Reification said that Human Progress is real and concrete and since it was so clearly evident that Human Progress 'wants to get ever bigger and bigger',then dividing Human Progress up into the two billion individual people that existed in the world in 1939, would allow us to predict that particular individual Scott Nearing would also approve of things getting ever bigger.

But in fact he became famous for disagreeing bigger is better.

The average behavior of heterogeneous aggregates does not let us predict the behavior of an individual human being , anymore than than the behavior of  individual proton helps us predict the average behavior of  a heterogeneous aggregate.

Heterogeneous , because Churchill was not a vast crystal of trillions upon trillions of undifferentiated protons but rather a very  stratified collection of protons in a great variety of differently-sized and differently-arranged components that led each component to very unexpectedly different behavior.

And Human Progress had no protons, or even human individuals, within it, because it was simply an abstract idea rather a concrete physical object.

What most Thirties intellectual thought was desperately missing was in giving adequate attention to the vast "Missing Middle" between Protons and Progress, because inside that "Missing Middle" lies the life we actually live, including our twin delusions of reductionism and reification.

However, I believe that the prism of Commensality does allow us to re-capture that "Missing Middle" , and thus allows us to better understand Thirties intellectual thought's sad grandchild, WWII .....

Modernity : CONCRETE Dams vs ABSTRACT Delusions ...

When was Chopin born, when did he die, where did Chopin end and his brother begin ?

All concrete questions we can definitively answer.

That's the terrible thing about individuals, the thing that made modernists from all camps hate them so : if forces one to take the coke out of one's nose and actually deal with hard facts and numbers and dates.

But imagined communities - those hallucinations shared by tenured professors and certified lunatics in the 1930s , now that was their preferred cup of tea.

One man justifies murdering foreigners because he was told to by voices coming out of the radio, the other justifies because he hears voices coming out of the national volk.

What volk ? - all of them ? - did you ask all of them ?

And what nation ? - what are its boundaries ? and when was it born exactly ?

Part of the disadvantages of a free public education is that you can now think ( supposedly) in abstractions.

Before that, country people called a cape "Burnt Head" because , well, it looked like a burnt head.

Obviously too bloody concrete-minded by half.

Instead,  middle class chatterers flocked to hundreds of housing estates that were prettily named "Forest Hills" but were neither forested or hilled and these modernists don't even see the incongruity of it all.

In the 1930s these chatterers resented party politics and all its arguing over what government projects went to what specific classes and specific areas and specific industries.

"Let us have a single strong man , well supplied with  scientific experts, who will supply us with the one scientifically correct answer that will serve the 'national interest' ", they cried.

It would be nice to interview this national interest, in the way one can interview an individual person or key members of an individual industry, but one can't.

It's a virtual bogus reality, like bad acid, it doesn't exist and can't exist : a distracting abstraction.

My family can rarely agree, any more than your family can : and an entire nation of 75 million Germans are even less likely to all agree about something of supposedly common interest.

But abstract groups of differing individuals into vapourous reifications* and their Holocaust is practically done for.

* To reify is to take a bunch of heatedly bickering individuals ( all the people in the world who are in some way seen by others and themselves as Jewish or part Jewish or formerly Jewish or newly Jewish for example) , turn them into an abstraction, "The Jew", and then turn that abstraction into a solid lump of concrete "all Jews in Europe are EVIL and all must DIE this year".

All moderns didn't plan Holocausts but almost all moderns mentally divided people into abstract lumps, with such thinking  as 'The French Canadian' isn't fundamentally capable of handling modern machinery" etc, etc.

Remind yourself of that 'fact' as you board your next Bombardier-built jet or train in perfect expectation you will arrive in one piece.

Because an individual French Canadian called Joseph-Armand Bombardier set out to refute that abstract claim in 1941, at the height of the Modernists' war.

I think he has succeeded, don't you ?

Hitler and his strongest critics agree: Holocaust unique because it sought to kill an entire ethnic group

I don't agree.

 I believe Hitler and his killing crews sought to make it easy on themselves while killing ten million Jews in cold blood, by not regarding them as ten million different individuals but merely as one great big reified lump, an ethnicity.

I don't believe that Hitler and his crew could have killed more than a few dozen a day, and even then only once in a while, if they had to sit behind a desk and look at the photos in hundreds of dossiers, devoid of ethnicity/religion /politics and decide which ones of those individual faces lived and which ones died.

Even Stalin, a very hands on guy when it came to the execution of the elite of the USSR, found it tough to do this sort of work all the time.

He often avoid all that hard thinking and deciding by simply issuing an order to the NRVD directing that all POWs with the simple label, "Polish", must be killed by next week.

Then he went off ,with a bottle in hand, to relax by watching a Hollywood comedy.

Sixty million individuals were killed in WWII ,including six million Jews - smoothly and easily - by deliberately not regarding them as  sixty million highly different individuals.

We must not let WWII like thinking slip in sideways by letting historians reifying Hitler's victims into a few big lumps.

We must always seek to unbundle their lives and the lives of those 'much like them' who did not die,  back into individual stories.

We must always remember that individual killers killed individual victims and overcome the easy (bottle in hand/Hollywood comedy) solution of simply assigning collective guilt to account for collective horrors and calling it an academic day.

Only in Hitler's mind, did one reified lump called "all Aryans" want to kill another reified lump called "all Jews"......