Bakhtin's Carnivalesque : 'Slime Piss' still saving more kiddies annually than Advanced Civilization ever killed

Without today's antibiotics, the dangerous bacterial infections that currently afflict only a child here and a child there would rage freely as epidemics or pandemics, killing millions upon millions of kids.

And when we say 'antibiotics' we basically mean the beta lactams antibiotics - the huge and highly effective family of the penicillin-like antibiotics.

The human use of penicillin (Penicillin G) to save lives is almost ninety years old and yet it is still in every hospital's pharmacy, albeit relatively rarely used.

However, as the starting base to make most all of our other antibiotics, penicillin g is still produced in the tens of thousands of tons.

And still made as it always was - made in incredibly tiny ---natural--- fungus factories invisible to the naked eye.

It is a mere 'secondary' metabolite of the penicillium slime - and for long time the secondary metabolites were considered to be just 'metabolic waste', a fancy grown-up's word for poo and pee.

Considering its liquid nature and its bright yellow color (leaving aside its strong acrid smell for a moment) , the scientists of yesteryear considered it to be nothing more than 'slime piss'.

It took a brave doctor indeed (Martin Henry Dawson) to first inject that foul stuff - raw - into a the bloodstream of a young male, in an attempt to save his life.

But the patient (Charles Aronson) lived and so our Age of Antibiotics began, on Ward G-East, at NYC's Columbia Presbyterian Medical Centre ----- seventy five years ago this October 16th 2015.

In WWII's brutal war of high tech science, this was low tech life saving at its very finest.

A stinging rebuke then, to Scientism at its very apogee of hubris, delivered by the lowest of the low, delivered by slime piss.

So be sure to tell Mikhail Bakhtin (wherever he might be) that it just can't get anymore carnivalesque than that...

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 ??

WWII : diverse Ideologies of "Ends" but a single Methodology of "Means"

Traditionally, immense philosophical differences between three "clusterings of ideologies" are said to be the reason for the intensity of violence that was WWII.

So one clustering group, for example, claimed to be benevolent-to-their-own-race racists.

The Germans claimed to be protecting the white race and the Japanese claiming to protect the yellow (or even all colored races).

Perhaps fortunately for the entire world, this was doubletalk.

The two were actually only nationalists cum imperialists : the Germans treated most other whites almost as badly as they hoped to mistreat the coloreds, just as the Japanese treated fellow yellow races at least as badly as they mistreated whites.

This narrow nationalism destroyed both nations' ability to unite the wide and strong coalitions needed to defeat their many opponents.

The various kinds of Marxists and Communists all started out claiming they intended to take everything from the world's middle class and give it all to the world's working class.

And after an initial violent overthrow of the existing system, they promised to end state executions.

And indeed they did start out by taking from the rich and giving to the poor - if the poor is defined as the upwardly mobile urban industrial working class.

But soon they all began to take from everybody and give it mostly to massive military buildups against imaginary enemies, so somewhat continuing to benefit the industrial worker, but also ensuring that the working class didn't get too much of the nation's new wealth and start feeling frisky.

In addition, a very generous share went to an entirely new middle class cum ruling-forever class made up from some of the smarter, more ambitious and more ruthless children of the working class.

Even more depressingly, the communists in all the various nations in which they seized power soon acted exactly the same way against their minorities and neighbouring nations as the previous aristocratic and capitalist rulers had done.

And to do so, they secretly murdered millions of all sorts of people over the decades, all the while publicly claiming to have ended capital punishment, except in cases of treason.

Once again deep rooted narrow nationalism cum imperialism seemed to have trumped the nominal world-wide official ideology.

And yes, doubletalk once again - though in this case, there seemed a widespread and genuine surprise among marxist & communist intellectuals that it all ended up this way.

The third clustering gathered the rest of the world's nations, be they dictatorships, monarchies or liberal democracies , united only around just one thing : the all out defence of well-off people's private property (and the nominal defence of the 'individual').

Once again doubletalk.

The defence of ill-gotten capital accumulation was sincere enough, but in practise most of the rewards and the protection of the law that was supposed to go to all individuals, instead went to native-born, educated, upper middle class, straight males of the dominant religious and ethnic group.

These nations might never declare formal military war against each other but they were always secretly at war against each other over matters of money.

In the form of nationalist trade wars, together with nationalist wars over intellectual property rights and nationalist wars over the flow of capital, labour and goods.

So once again, behind the smokescreen doubletalk of universal brotherhood of individual rights, nationalism trumps all.

One can only point to the immense secret efforts by both America and Britain, at the very depths of their Allied war against Hitler and Tojo, to beggar the other in postwar trade matters, to show how much greed is the real underlying ideology of many of our rulers.

And all three clusterings were united in giving unearned wealth to members of their privileged subgroups by taking from the weak.

The weak might be an internal group - their own majority ethnicity's poorest . Or it might be the more traditional form of imperialism - taking the natural resources and labour from ethnic and religious minorities inside the borders of their empire cum nation or from overseas 'colonies'.

So imperialism and nationalism actually united all three supposedly different ideological clusters.

But they then had to morally justify why it was so very morally wrong to steal private property of the strong but quite alright to steal the private and public property of the weak.

The traditional way was to claim that their nation-empire-civilization was the sole, best, bearer of the one true religion and that they weren't stealing at all - merely extracting a university tuition sized fee from the heathens in exchange for teaching them of this priceless boon.

But there were quite a number of one true and universal religions in the nineteenth century and this led to wars among them ---- as long as people still believed in religions.

But when people stopped believing that there was any real difference between Catholics and Protestants, indeed between Christians, Moslems and heathens, a new moral justification was required.

Now the true civilizations, those worthy enough to enslave other lesser beings and feel morally good about it, were the most scientific ones.

A peculiar form of science. mind you - one much beloved by Conservatives and Republicans of the day - because it said that Evolutionary success inevitably went to the big and ruthless over the small and weak.

Better science meant both better guns to put down the scientifically backward darkies and in feeling a warm moral glow while doing so.

Because if the darkies had fought back successfully, that would mean that they too are scientifically advanced and hence a worthy civilization, in evolutionary terms.

A clear example of this was how the West responded when Japan beat the Russians in the 1905 war.

But science is truly universal, at least in the big picture, so how then to justify why it was right for scientifically advanced England to invade backward China but not for scientifically advanced Japan to do the same ?

I have often thought the sudden rise of many new ideologies at the same time as the sudden rise of Scientism was somehow intimately connected.

I don't mean the people who founded these various -isms were insincere.

The Magnification of Small Differences

I just mean the success of these many brand new ideologies can be laid to the fact that they allowed 'moral' wars against each other among the world's powerful and ruthless, elites who were otherwise united in all worshipping at one new and universal religion - scientism and its offshoots : the new nationalism, the new imperialism, the new racism and the new social darwinism...

WWII : a diversity of ideological rhetorics but a striking uniformity of methodology

There were only 2 billion people on Earth in 1940 but seemingly at least that many ideologies - every kind of -ism under the sun.

An -ism or ideology can be thought of as the governing presumptions of a Great Civilization or a potential Great Civilization.

(That last sentence was perhaps full of redundancies because as anyone ever heard of a small civilization ?)

In 1940, the most powerful of these -isms were actually scientism, nationalism, capitalism, racism, and imperialism.

But the most rhetorically warring ones , the ones with the most acknowledged supporters, were not them at all.

Rather they were ones called something like Liberalism,Conservatism, Communism, Nazism, Fascism, Democratic Socialism orJapanese Yamato-ism.

In rhetoric, this lot all seemed as different from each other as could possibly be.

However all these the ideologically warring Great Civilizations also saw that the same common international language (advanced modern era science) was the real key to achieving their rhetorically different aims.

So much so that the -ism of scientism ended up ensuring that the tails of these very different ideological dogs all wagged in the same direction.

Now early Modern Era science was not really very 'open-mindedly scientific'.

Scientists back then frequently set out to prove up unstated and largely unconscious assumptions that the scientists had already made about the basics of Reality : philosophy first, empiricism second.

At a time when the number of publishing research-oriented scientists were comparatively few and the history of such activity only a few decades old, it was easy for these pioneering scientists to unconsciously select various tiny aspects of the vast array that is Reality and present them as typical - and so 'proving up' their philosophic thesis.

Today we having millions of publishing scientists and a hundred and fifty years of scientists doing such activity. And now we have the Internet conveying all of this published research instantly and cheaply to all other scientists.

As a result, much more of the complexity of Reality has come to light and this very diversity and complexity, in of itself, has destroyed the belief that human science can quickly and confidently uncover the secrets of Nature.

But none of this was terribly evident in 1940 --- the ism of Scientism ruled , warmly supported by the Left or the Right, across the entire world of Civilizations.

In fact to be a Civilization was to be scientific and to be scientific was to be part of a Civilization.

Since Modern Era Civilization always consisted of imperial dominion over other ("lesser") human beings and since Modern Era Science always consisted of imperial dominion over ("lesser") Nature, the two provided a complete continuum of dominance over other beings and other things.

All the Great Civilizations agreed on the right and need to dominate lesser beings and things - they only differed in who this imperialism was supposed to benefit.

The middle class and deserving working class in democratic imperial civilizations, the working class in socialist and communist imperial civilizations, the Aryans, Romans or Yamato races in the German, Italian and Japanese imperial civilizations.

In all cases, a tiny elite at the top of each great Civilization benefitted the most and suffered the least under any reversals.

One billion people in the world during WWII experienced longterm severe shortages of food - but no member of any ruling class, regardless of the -ism they espoused - anywhere ever went to bed hungry.

Call this a young child's (profound) understanding of what all the -Isms and Great Civilizations and Scientism really meant ...

Pushing & Pulling Modernity's Terrible Simplifiers

In the 1880s, the competing successes of both branches of science --- the real world oriented applied and natural history folks and the lab-bound experimental theory-oriented natural philosophy folks - gave Modernity a doubly fierce intensity of purpose.

Fear complemented Hubris inside their minds.


Applied science and technology had produced the better microscopes and telescopes that forced humanity to see the very small and the very big worlds co-existing with the long familiar medium sized human world.

The age of the beginnings of Life, of the Earth and of the Universe were pushed back into unbelievably distant times.

The scale of Universe was revealed to be as big as the scale of the world of microbes, atoms and molecules was revealed to be small.

Modern steamships and trains and electric telegraphs allowed explorers to more easily visit distant cultures ( distant in remote place or distant back in time) and spread that news worldwide instantly.

Now incredibly more cultures, languages, religions, ideas, foods were shown to exist than were imagined just a few years earlier.

That matched the new vast numbers of animal, plant and microbial species being added years to the relatively static total known a few decades earlier.

This plentitude of plentitudes overwhelmed everybody, none more than the elites who has secured their position at the top of each society's foodchain by creating a hegemony of thought.

Even new foods and new musics, let alone new immigrants or new scientific ideas, presented alternative to that hegemony.

Much worse, the mere idea that alternative visions existed, undercut decisively the claim that any one hegemony could be truly hegemonic.

Fortunately, at the very same time, lab scientists were convincing themselves that all the newly apparent surface variety of reality could be reduced to the simple motions of a few fundamental elemental atoms.

And that man could easily rearrange the abundant - boring - atoms of rock, air and water into anything man could imagine as well as thinks as yet undreamed up.

Reductionism would plenticide all the newly discovered plentitude and restore a simple static vertically oriented heirarchy to the elites' unsettled societies....

Non-Aryans under Modernity : from ally to enemy to input

One can't imagine youthful (second generation) Nazi scientists being content with merely removing the hair, teeth and skin from all the world's 'unfit', before burning their bodies for fuel, in the manner it was done way back in papa's day.

Instead these 'impure' bodies would be burned in high tech, high temperature atomic refineries.

There second generation Nazi physicists would ensure that these 'unfit' bodies would be reduced down (again that quintessential Modernity concept) to pure simple atoms.

Then each element's atoms would be collected separately, using the same technique that separated and gathered the fissionable uranium for the Bomb.

These pure atoms could then be be reassembled by second generation Nazi chemists into any synthetic material their blond beastly minds could imagine : artificial foodstuffs, in the form of 'Fuhrer Burgers', even.

What the Nazis and their kin would be so willing to do with all the humans that failed 'out of the medals' in The Race of Progress, other youthful modern elites would be even more eager to do to Nature.

For let us look at the visual material that helped formed the intellectual world of these second generation modernity elites : the futuristic illustrations from all the world's Science fiction magazines and Popular Science non-fiction magazines.

Near universally they display future human existence as consisting of living under vast glass domes on barren planets devoid of anything green or of any animal and insect.

(And certainly no microbes either).

No shade trees because shade is now better provided for by artificial means. And besides shade trees were potential enemies competing for the valuable trace elements in the rocky soil of this planet that are better converted into the substances that humans really want.

So any new planet invaded by Aryan Man would be quickly stripped of anything biological that might form a threat or be a competitor for the planet's valuable minerals and energy sources.

Modernity's Aryan Man is just so smart, the Future's gotta get out of his way or at least hide in the shadows and wear Shades.

No need anymore for humanity (what's left of it, after the Great Winnowing of the unfit) to modestly live commensal-style within Nature.

No need to supplicant oneself and gracefully accept good ideas coming from anywhere and everywhere, be it Jewish science, Roma music or microbial antibiotics.

For Hubris and Scientism be the only gods now ...

How HGT helped end Modernity

It is too frequently claimed, by tenured people well schooled in the logical and analytical skills of philosophy and who thus really shown know better , that postmodernity is all about relativism and modernity is all about absolutes.

But is this in anyway accurate ?

Postmodernism's Absolutes

True, postmodernist thought does typically say things like this : "the matriarch of an extended aboriginal family is as smart in her own way as is the boss of a New York brokerage firm".

But is this nothing more the evoking two forms of one absolute, 'smartness' ?

Modernity's Continuum of relative Progress

Contrast this with a typical modernity claim, that that 'the bigger and more complex are inevitably smarter than the small and the less complex, just as the newer is always smarter than the ancient'.

So : the header of a current brokerage firm is inevitably smarter than the head of an ancient aboriginal family.

Further : that a modern civilization is far smarter (because it is so big/complex and created so recently) than a tiny simple bacteria that first existed billions of years ago.

This is the Continuum of relative Progress that formed the base for all the towering modernist-scientism thought that lay above it.

A straight arrow of progress and smartness, ever upward towards today's biggest and the newest.

Anchored - in the minds of modern scientism at least - by the obvious smartness of today's biggest and newest human civilizations versus the obvious stupidity of the shapeless, immobile tiny bacteria first born billions of years earlier.

The real target of this line of thinking was not the bacteria, so very far beneath the pale, but humans in the middle of this continuum : the natives of the many overseas colonies held captive by western nations claiming to be their 'moral stewards' using this scientific argument.

Muller vs Dawson on Evolution and Progress

Now as it happens, one of the smartest beings in the Modernity universe, an American scientist named Herman J Muller, had been busy at work studying genetic mutations beginning at Columbia University in 1918 , trying to alter the genetic makeup of living beings.

He zapped the multitudes of these assembled beings with overdoses of deadly radiation.

Now most died right away but some lived a little while longer while being deformed into useless mutations as the radiation altered their genes.

By once in a while a being survived into old age but with a mutation that was either harmless or even possibly helpful.

He became famous overnight when he gleefully telegraphed his results at the end of 1927.

The Swedes, belatedly impressed by the mis-shaped mutations that the wartime A-Bombs had coughed up amid all the dead and dying, gave Muller a Nobel Prize in 1946.

Enter Griffith and Dawson

Now that same month as Muller announced his attempts at gene modification, a British scientist named Frederick Griffith very reluctantly submitted a paper on his discovery (made in 1923, just as Muller had done his first radiation experiments) that primitive, ancient, tiny, simple bacteria could also affect gene change.

Albeit without millions of bystanders being killed in the process.

His news was totally ignored - first by scientists and thus by their syncopants*, the so called science 'journalists', and then by ordinary journalists and their readers.

(*I have always wondered why football team cheerleaders are not similarly called sports 'journalists'.)

Unlike Muller, Griffith did not expand upon his research and nor did anyone else , except a Canadian-born scientist named Martin Henry Dawson.

His work too got little attention.

No wonder !

The Moderns has replace their parents' belief in a personal God with a belief in an Impersonal Science but that did not mean an end to needing to believe in dogmas.

They needed more of them - now more than ever.

We all know them - as historical relics, albit still taught to innocent high school kids by the old Faithfuls.

Such as "One gene = One protein", the famous central dogma of biology.

In Dawson's own skill areas, bacteriology and immunology, 'Strain-Typing' was the operating philosophy.

It was based on another famous dogma, Koch's First Postulate, that a specific disease-causing strain of bacteria will always be found in a person suffering such a specific disease but never in a healthy person.

Simply examine the various bodily fluids of a sick person possibly suffering from an unknown-for-certain disease, find within it lots of strain x of bacteria Y that always causes a particular disease Z and you are done.

Possibly a cure is known and the patient lives --- or possibly the disease hasn't yet a cure and they die - but your job, as a typing bacteriologist at the hospital lab is all done , 'where's my pay cheque ?'

Let the frontline doctors on the wards deal with the emotional fallout from this definitive diagnosis.

HGT

What Dawson boldly dared suggest - unlike the timid and disbelieving Griffith - was that the harmless strains of bacteria carried by almost all of us in our throats and noses at sometime in our lives - could be changed into dangerous strains by HGT.

This meant that simply typing a patient as having only non-pathogen bacteria in them wouldn't ensure they couldn't get a new pathogen disease when thus harmless strains took up harmful genes from other bacteria.

The professions of Bacteriology and Immunology were less than a generation old but now Dawson's suggestion of infinite bacteria genetic plasticity threatened their members' only recently attained job security and new high status within medicine and science.

He actually called his process by the plain-spoken term "bacterial transformation", but today we use the more descriptive term "horizontal gene transfer", hence HGT.

For - contrary to the God-disbelieving Charles Darwin's own personal dogma- Evolution isn't all about vertical descent from parent to child.

Non-vertical Evolution

Sometimes Evolution actually arrives horizontally, when bits of DNA from one strain of microorganism are incorporated into the "adult" DNA of another strain or even another species of microorganism - and possibly even into the DNA of complex beings like us .

The ancient stupid/simple microorganisms have evolved ways to painlessly insert foreign DNA into their own DNA - and the new clever/ complex human civilization hadn't .

True, we eventually wised up and borrowed the tools of the bacteria to do the job for us - we call it recombinant DNA and PCR.

We then have the sheer nerve to give Nobel Prizes to their mere human discovers rather than their true inventors, the bacteria !

But if HGT demonstrated the bottom end of an upward-oriented continuum of relative 'smarterness' was actually smarter in the area of recombinant DNA than the very top, could that continuum be said to actually exist ?

However remaining stands of Scientism - tenured up to the hilt and marxist cum modernist to the core - doesn't like facing up the the fact that their own central dogma, the Continuum of Progress, has no basis in fact.

Instead, modern big complex human civilization is just as smart - in its own way - as is that of ancient as ancient simple small microorganisms.

Just as the postmodernists claim ...

Synthesize anything, perfectly

The goal of modern scientism era synthesists was not to synthesize everything : in their minds 'everything' already existed : way too much of 'everything' ---- and none of it perfect.

They hoped instead, for example, to synthesize just one - perfect - species of the beetle and then plenticide all of God's 150,000 (imperfect) beetle species, now rendered totally redundant.

The 1940s era synthesists simply could not conceive of a universe so physically diverse, so dynamic and so suddenly changeable that only a great variety of species and life forms would be ensure that the Earth's life-sustaining nutrient cycles could keep going.

For an atmosphere of a sort might survive if every single life form on Earth perished -- but it would eventually not contain enough oxygen to keep humans alive, assuming we suddenly decided to drift back here from our wonderful new underground homes on Mars.

Modern scientism's synthetic autarky was really a form of unconscious and collective human suicide.

We humans can only survive if we accept - like it or not - that we are bound together in involuntary but open commensality with all other lifeforms on Lifeboat Earth ...

October 1940 closing of the New York World's Fair & 'The World of Yesterday'

One can only imagine that after reading about or witnessing the exuberant optimism still omnipresent at the October 27th 1940 closing of the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair, many mommies and daddies apparently went straight to bed ... and made babies.

Lots and lots of babies.

How else to account for the world's near simultaneous Boom in Baby births a few months later in 1941---- this,  after a decade of steady decline ?

All the men in their fifties and sixties designing the Fair had billed it as predicting and revealing the leading aspects of "The World of Tomorrow", the near future of the 1960s decade - a world a generation away that they didn't expect to be taking an active part in  - maybe not even be alive to witness.

But, as usual in America, they did it 'all for the kiddies' .

Did it for kiddies already born and (as it turned out) zillions upon zillions of little kiddies about to be born, thanks in no small part to these planners' uplifting display of faith in the world-bending wonders of Modern Scientism.

Today we (we outside of the late night warm bathwater of all-man Fox TV) no longer display such a wide-eyed naive faith in the mind and matter altering powers of science-off-its-leash.

We see the Fair instead as the last gasp of Modernity, Modernity at its peacetime Apogee, just moments before Modernity finally got a war all of its own to play with.

The Fair displayed fully the sense that the human Will could triumph over anything the World could offer - that civilized Man could best primitive Mother Nature at anything and everything --- do it better, faster, cheaper.

But today we see lurking behind the 1940 New York Fair's massive ceramic Fountain of the Atom, promising future energy from the "atom-smashers" at NY's Columbia University that would be 'too cheap to meter', the Manhattan nuclear Project and Hiroshima and the Cuban Crisis.

Behind the synthetic autarky of Du Pont's fabulous new 'nylon' stockings and its boast that it could make anything and everything out of water air and coal ,today  we see the synthetic autarky of the Nazi war machine revving up, fueled by hopes they could fight forever thanks to their synthetic petroleum made out of the same three bog-common ingredients.

And yes 1940 did also reveal yet more variants of the amazing life-saving synthetic sulfa medicines --- one of the most cherished fruits of 'living better through chemistry'.

The Nazi synthetic autarky went much further : they even saw chemistry's energy powering machines  could replace  the need to keep alive millions with human energy and skills.

That faith motivated their Hunger Plan East, to starve thirty million 'useless mouths' to death in western Russia, so all of her mechanized farm product could go to feed Germany and her armies instead.

 (And it was the reason they felt comfortable diverting military resources to kill all nine million European Jews,  even as that same war machine was starved for lack of extra civilian manpower.)

Behind the Fair's infamous rocketgun propelling passengers non-stop from New York to Europe, today we see WWII's V-2 rockets and their postwar kin, propelling nuclear mega-death 'too cheap to meter' half way around the world.

Non-stop.

But yes, we also see some of the Fair's actual predictions carried out in the 1960s.

Plastic and synthetic fabrics everywhere, near-artificial food like Wonder Bread and Tang, mechanized farms, rockets to the moon, super-highways and cars everywhere.

But that wasn't all of the Sixties - not by a long shot.

For every baby boomer enthralled with a high tech trip to the moon, another boomer was taking a low tech trek 'back to the land' , to cotton shirts, brown bread, organic farming and renewable non-polluting energy.

Could October 1940 New York  have seen this - did October 1940 New York foresee this ?

I argue yes - yes it did.

For Columbia University is 'A House of Many Mansions' and on its uptown medical campus, a medical scientist was becoming less and less convinced that civilized Man had all the answers and that primitive Mother Nature had only the blank stares.

Martin Henry Dawson had first developed this idea in the 1920s and 1930s, while seeing how defensively the entire scientific world had instinctively rejected the very idea that tiny ancient primitive strep pneumonia bacteria could unerringly slice and dice genes to create new variants of itself - something that modern civilized Man could not dream of doing back then (and even now can't do unaided by bacteria).

Dawson took up the cause of what he called "bacteria transformation" and what we more generally today call HGT (horizontal gene transfer), becoming the first ever to set DNA to work in a test tube and to observe quorum sensing.

If biology rather than chemistry is the central science of the sciences today, much of the credit has to go to Dawson, because without his pioneering cheerleading efforts, HGT and DNA, along with the massive microbiology and microtechnology industries they spawned, might have died stillborn.

But now,  in October 1940, Dawson sensed that some of the tiny and primitive beings of Mother Nature had more new - all natural - tricks up their sleeve that even the smartest synthetic scientist couldn't best.

He sensed that raw crude un-purified (natural) penicillin might cure diseases as well as or even better than human synthetic penicillin whenever or if ever (it never has) came along.

The analogy is how a glass of impure natural orange juice delivers a dose of vitamin C as well (and much tastier) than Tang (or a little white pill of the pure stuff) ever does.

He had a young black and a young Jewish patient before him , dying needlessly because their rheumatic heart disease (the polio of the poor) was judged unworthy of much medical research while American medicine prepared for war.

He was convinced that only penicillin and penicillin alone could save their lives (he was right).

So on October 16th 1940, just days before the Fair of the World of Tomorrow closed, Dawson opened our Age of Antibiotics, by being the first ever to inject penicillin-the-antibiotic, injected into the arms of his two patients, Aaron (Leroy) Alston and Charles Aronson.

I remember much more about my school yard bullying than about my school work as a young school kid.

But naturally, as a small kid much bullied by the big and the powerful, I remember well the takeaway lesson about small children's lives saved by antibiotics .

That lesson was that antibiotics were not made by scientific Man in some vast chemical lab, but came from tiny primitive creatures living in Mother Nature's dirtiest and most overlooked spots : basement wall slime fungus, jungle dirt and sewage outflows.

If future historians wish to look for the headwaters of postmodernity's belief in the value of the diversity of life, I suggest they look at naturally made antibiotics as a good place to start.

And that postmodern opening to the diversity of life began in October 1940, just as the prewar World of Yesterday, Modernity's Last Hurrah , was closing ..

Scientism wins (and loses) WWII's victory legacy

Despite the many, many high tech weapons of death first used (and first perfected) in WWI, we still tend to recall it as a war of "elan" and of long lines of terribly brave doomed men charging machine gun posts with only their bayonets or horses.

By contrast, one can almost forget that there were any foot soldiers involved in the various famous victories of WWII, particularly among the victories of the western Allies and the Axis.

Instead, according to the omnipresent newsreels, their WWII seemingly only featured  white middle class men driving (or designing) modern day mechanical steeds such as aircraft, tanks, battleships, aircraft carriers, submarines or firing (and designing) ever-longer range guns, torpedoes and rockets.

Now a quick look at the demographic data of 1940 confirms that the British empire had by far the world's biggest pool of manpower .

Far greater than the empires of Germany, Japan, America, Russia or any of the three contesting chunks of the Chinese empire, let alone the French, Italian and Dutch empires.

But instead the British left and right elites melted together as one in claiming they ('they' in their mind seemingly reduced to the Home Counties of England) simply didn't have the manpower to have a foot soldier army anywhere near the size of Poland or France let alone match those of Russia, Japan, Germany and America.

By contrast, the Great Russians ruling the Russian empire, faced by the prospect of losing to Germany and then being put to the sword en masse by murderous Nazis, swallowed their racial prejudice and conscripted endless numbers of soldiers from all of the dozens and dozens of sub ethnicities in their vast empire.

They also embraced the idea - albeit reluctantly - of women in combat roles.

True, Stalin and his generals then needlessly killed millions of their resulting vast armies of ordinary soldiers in crude frontal attacks against the Germans but they did redeem themselves by their unwillingness to invent new high tech weapons during the war.

Instead they selected the cheapest and most reliable of their existing conventional weapons and then set about making them even more cheaply, more quickly and in truly mountainous numbers.

All the other empires very reluctantly recruited from minorities (aka 'coloreds') within their existing empires and newly conquered territories (in some cases such as British India, the 'minorities' vastly outnumbered the majority !)

They tended to mistrust these colonial troops even more than the enemy, to give them second rate weapons and third rate leadership and then denied them meaningful combat roles.

The clearest example is the unspeakable French, who would rather delay the liberation of metropolitan France and the defeat of Germany than let their own well tested colonial (aka 'colored') troops lead the attack.

Letting the coloreds lead the final attack would recall all too vividly how quickly their abject white European masters had surrendered France and the Empire in 1940 and 1941.

Churchill felt likewise about letting his six million man volunteer Indian army ( still the biggest volunteer army in history) anywhere near North Western Europe.

He'd rather Russia swallowed up half of Europe and the Americans the other half than left Indians led the British empire to victory over his fellow white Europeans.

Colored minorities weren't the only groups that the various upper middle class imperial elites were reluctant to see granted the entry card into full citizenship : being a veteran of combat.

They denied it to women as well of course.

But this is all relatively well known : the Americans, for example, being desperately short of ground troops during the critical Battle of the Bulge in late 1944 , all because they had resisted letting women do war factory jobs and resisted letting black, latino and native men serve in combat.

Not so accepted is the claim that the elites of the Democracies (so called) grew tired of the idea of mass national armies marching as one being a symbol and creator of mass united nationalities.

Conscripting vast numbers of working class soldiers turned them into vast armies of of 'our noble veterans' all demanding redress and entitlements , to be paid mostly by the older richer part of the tax paying body, the part that generally got to stay home and had only full bank accounts instead of full chests of medals to show for it.

Substituting middle class driven war machines for working class foot soldiers would ensure that veterans' pensions and veterans' moral power would at least remain among the well off taxpayers' children and keep the bolshie workers out beyond the Pale.

So, at various times, military America had more aircraft in its Tables or Organization than it had MOS 475s (bog ordinary riflemen) in its combat frontlines.

We all know the resulting war-ending victory scripts.

For WWI , it is of images of infantry assault troops during the famous Hundred Days, breaking the German lines and ensuring Germany's defeat a few months later.

For WWII, it is of the backroom boffins and scientists who designed the war-winning radars, aircraft, rockets, proximity fuses and A-Bombs that alone enabled the hard pressed Allies to defeat the top quality German and Japanese infantry forces.

A famous victory for modernity, the enlightenment project and for science - but it soon proved to be a famous pyhrric victory.

True, it was bog ordinary infantrymen who bayonetted all the innocent at Nanking and all through South East Asia or shot hundreds of thousands of Jews in cold blood at close range.

But strangely we barely remember such horrors - we choose to recall the high tech scientific deaths of Coventry, Hamburg, Dresden, Auschwitz, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Putting entire cities to the sword was old news in Jesus's time but a single bomb killing an entire city in a single instance seemed new (which it was) and extraordinarily barbaric (which it was not - morally, murder is murder).

Growing up as a boomer or transitional generation kid I heard  both takes on WWII and Science.

It left me well and truly conflicted - did science try to keep humanity alive or did it try its darndest to kill it --- or both ??

Scientism's victory in WWII gave Modernity's thirty years of glory - but it also sunk a postmodernist-promoting shaft in its chest nothing could pull out..

Environmentalism : HOPE, as well as fear ...

It is easy - too too easy - to credit fear, fear of Fifties nuclear war and fallout in particular, as the main reason for the Early Seventies worldwide rise of the Environmental Movement.

As one of those young 1950s Boomers who did join the formally organized environmental movement early in the 1970s and who now has a great interest in the history of the early days of the Environmental Movement,  may I beg to differ?

Not seeking tenure, I offer up only my memories as the primary archival source for my historical thesis.

I was an unusually small and skinny kid, very nearsighted, hated formal sports and loved books.

This might have been alright - I boldly loved to physically explore my neighbourhood and was a bit of a wiseapple in class,  but for the fact that we moved frequently, or so it seemed.

( I attended three different schools in both Grade Three and Grade Eight.)

I got bullied as a result.

My dislike of the big and the strong and my sympathy for the weak and the small developed right there on the playground.

I enjoyed the stories my teachers told of how the antibiotic medicines that had saved the lives of kids like me that had come (could only come) from small and primitive weak microbes living in sewer water, basement slime and the jungle mud of primitive lands.

microbial davids vs Chemist Goliaths

I really enjoyed this unlikely triumph of these microbial davids over the Chemist Goliaths of smug modern science.

For while the salad days of the Chemist and Chemical Synthesis had faded by time I first went to school, their unaltered hubris has merely transferred out to another school - that of the physicist.

So while our Fifties collective motivation was rather shallow and utilitarian (we valued Mother Nature's other beings only from the fear that their extinction might rob us of our rightful access to something useful and profitable) I joined in to the general view that we must treasure - not destroy - even the smallest and most slimy of beings.

I hope I went beyond that .

Beyond that to a belief that the smart aren't always as smart as they seem nor the dumb as dumb as they seem and that all life has a form of high intelligence merely by being able to survive and flourish so long and had a right to exist on its own terms.

WWII as a study in the smart humbled and the humble exalted 

 I know for a fact this was the reason I so enjoyed all the franker, more revisionist, books about WWII that had been coming out in a flood by the mid 1960s - books I dearly loved as a pre-teen.

Mostly by accident, they were much less 'rah rah' than the first wave of postwar military histories.

They still thought they were celebrating bravery but , unconsciously, by providing many new details, they tended to reveal the unflattering sides of military operations the propaganda  ministries had earlier successfully concealed.

I saw WWII revealed as six long years of the supposedly smart nations and leaders humbled and the supposedly dumb nations and leaders exalted.

In 2004, I stumbled upon the little known WWII tale of the supposedly smart chemists' synthesized penicillin humbled and the supposedly dumb natural penicillium exalted ---so given my history,  how could I resist making it much better known ??

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...

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 ....

why focus on Allied FAILURES of WWII ?

Why not focus on the Axis failures of WWII ?

Why not, you say, use a sawed-off shotgun at short range on a big fish in a small barrel ?

Hum, tempting  - too tempting obviously for all the world's Rogue Boomers - people like Stephen Harper and Tony Abbott : 'we won the war, did nothing wrong, so no need to change nothing, carry on, business  as usual.'

Rogue Boomers with short noses are more than usually handicapped by nature - being so unable to see beyond the end of it.

All three sides* in WWII expected a short cheap war - and all sides were wrong : that is the real lesson of WWII : the naivete easy optimism of pre-war Modernity and Scientism was revealed to all - or rather should have been.

(*Because remember, for a shamefully long time, the majority of the world's population was not at Germany or Britain's side but rather was Neutral.)

We don't have to wait till the current climate change crisis plays out to drawn the needed lesson that there is no pointing denying that there are limits to human abilities to control unpleasant change.

We already had the lesson - and the exam - during the six bloody and long and disappointing years of WWII : when time and time again all sides were told that a technology breakthrough, a new superweapon, would end the war quickly, cheaply and painlessly.

The truth be known, the WWII traffic in super hero instant solutions between children's comic books and senior leaders' Minute books are unceasing ....

1939-1945, as a cure for overweening science ...

"The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly." - Abraham Lincoln 

In the end, it turned out that the only way to clip modernist science's wings were to let it fly : WWII was modernist science's first and thankfully, only, world war it fully commanded.

If  'commanded' is the right word for what actually transpired.

What an unholy, immoral, mess it was, too.

Six years later, even the partisans of modernist science cum scientism must have felt a bit more humble (though they never really recanted, not even on their deathbeds).

But fortunately, even they must eventually all die out and the generation after them, born 1940 or later, never really bought into modernist science's hubris-filled visions.

The period 1945 - 2015 marks a period of transition : the men of scientism gradually aging and gradually tiring of the game while the new generation gets bolder and bolder in denouncing the earlier generation's utopian visions.

What comes after , Heaven alone only knows....

1945 : annus mirabilis or annus horribilis for Scientism ?

I have always been fascinated by the Janus-like nature of the year 1945 in its relationship to Science and the undue worship thereof.

1945 was the year that it was widely admitted that it was only the Allies' mild-mannered/white-coated men of modern science who had bested the superior combat skills of the jackbooted henchmen of the Axis and so won the war for humanity.

A good year for Scientism.

But 1945 was also the year that we now conventionally mark the start of post-modern science... and hence marks the end of modern science.

Surely then a bad year for Scientism.

Clearly we have two views on the alleged success of modern science in 1945 - one made at the time and still held firmly by elderly academics and citizens and another made forty years later and just as firmly held by young academics.

One credits it for ending the war on behalf of the morally right side and the other blames it for starting the war and behaving so beastly during it.

All Life is Family , part one and two, explores why it was possible for most of the modernist audience of 1945 not to see the many failings of wartime science on both sides, technical as well as moral, running from 1939 through to war's end.

And why historians ever since have repeated this initial error.

The war is simply never broken out of its narrative mode to present the predictions that each and every participant had made at a particular point in time together with an assessment of whether those predictions came to pass.

Who, for example, predicted that Hitler won't conquer Moscow within four months after June 1941 ?

No one that I am aware of, as Stalin himself soon had his doubts about this capitol's survival - some military 'experts' even publicly ventured that Moscow would fall in mere weeks not months !

Predictions proved about as inaccurate during WWII as they had all throughout history - only this time they were pressed forward with the strong claim that they were backed by the best science.

If so, the best science was wrong, over and over and over for six long years.

And if "All Life is Family" is the first to say so, so be it .....

Technology makes planes that fly ; Science merely makes claims that MIGHT fly

The DC-3 , a plane that technologists designed 80 years ago, is still flying in commercial airlines around the world despite the fact that the last civilian units were built over 70 years ago.

Made of the claims that Scientists made 80 years ago about the world and reality have failed to stand the test of time  ---but the DC-3s built back then still fly as good as they always did !

This is why I have the highest possible regard for small "s" science , as broadly defined as possible - and that definition includes all of us who have ever tinkered, by trial and error and careful observation of existing actions , to make something better.

But I regard  the exalted claims of the successes of capital "S" Science,Scientists and Scientism with the attitude of a critic from Missouri : "Show Me !" ....

the last VICTORIAN war : 1939-1945

Looking over today's crop of leaders in politics, business and culture and comparing them with the world leaders of the 1940s, one is struck by today's leaders' comparative youth.

By contrast, the world of WWII was run by the white-haired teenagers of the Victorian Age.


Normally war is said to be an event for young men and young men's energy, but between1939-1945 the young men silently and glumly marched off to fight, while back home - in charge - the old men postponed their retirements and found a second wind.

They would replay WWI all over and this time, run it their way - not the way of their fathers.

Today's teenagers view the reforming (thermosetting) promises of  Scientism through the cynical and disappointed eyes of 125 years of broken promises, but the eternal teenagers who ran WWII were born in the first flush of the Age of Scientism and never stopped believing.

They still remained as hopeful that Scientism's reforming promises would finally deliver when the last of them died in the early 1970s as when they were still the naively optimistic teenagers of the years of good Queen Victoria's reign.

WWII was not uniquely a war between scientists and technologists - one could make the case that the Napoleonic wars and last year's war were also wars between scientists and technologists.

the last war of unalloyed SCIENTISM : 1939-1945

But it was uniquely the only big war fought between true believers in reform Scientism on all sides : Allies, Axis and Neutrals.

But reform Scientism delivered its first big disappointments in that war , signally failed to do what it had long pledged it could do, if only it was given its head and released from the shackles of old outdated sentiments.

As a permanent reminder of that failure, reform Scientism's seventy years on Earth by 1945 were marked by that war's seventy million dead : a million for each year of Scientism's existence....

1939-1945 : the War of Scientism's modernist "Four Freedoms"

In the Spring of 1939, at the the New York World's Fair, Modernity or Scientism (the words are totally inter-changable) promised the deserving parts of the world a future of Four Freedoms: eventual freedom from material limitations, from catastrophes like the weather, from dependence upon lesser breeds and beings and, above all , from uncertainty.

In Fall of 1945, another set of Four Freedoms - originating from a speech given by  FDR in January 1941 - seemed to offer all the world's human beings a more credible and attractive life --- if equally set at some distant date in the future.

But also in the Fall of 1945, a few people, on the way to becoming post-modernist, were beginning to ask whether even those Four Freedoms were an adequate or accurate rebuttal to Modernism's Four Freedoms.

Today, to be fully post-Modernist  and to be fully post-Scientism , to be fully in the Twenty First Century , is to totally accept the permanent existence of material limitations, catastrophes, uncertainty and the right of existence for lesser breeds and lesser beings.

So there we have it : the rise and the fall of Scientism, from apogee to nadir ....

"Triumph of the SCIENTIFIC Will" : WWII scientists as 'swimmers into technical sweetness leaping'..

Sure, sure: Hitler, Mussolini ,Tojo and Stalin and all that lot started the war, but it took the collective will of the world's best scientists and engineers to build their visions up into History's bloodiest, most heart-less war.

It was the scientists' war, the only truly Modernist war, the war of their big shiny machines . Scientism's big moment under the Klieg Lights.

It was Science's incautious pre-war claims that moved the politicians and the generals and the industrialists and - above all - the ordinary public of all nations to fund the killing machines --- in preference to returning  to the foot soldier led wars of earlier times.

Of course in the end, we never saw the scientists in the box in Nuremberg in 1945 : because many many more of us, back then, saw 1945 as the apogee of Modernist science rather than its death knell and the birth of post-modernity.....