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....

A Complicated Triumph

The terrible simplicities of scientific reductionism was the very mother's milk of  all the horrible 'terrible simplifiers' of High Modernity (1875-1965): starting with Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and crossing the water to their gentler and kinder Anglo-American opponents.

For none of the big political ideologies of Modernity at all rejected reductionist science or damned it with faint praise - instead they clasped it to their bosom and then claimed it formed the spiritual foundations of their peculiar faith.

One Manhattan Project - the nuclear one - was very much of this ilk --- barefacedly claiming we'd soon see atomic electricity too cheap to meter and atomic planes and cars filling our skies and streets.

We're still waiting, because all three claims were based on a Big Lie (or two or three) and deep down these nuclear complexity over-simplifiers knew it .

WWII's Terrible Simplifiers rebuked by the Terrible Complicatedness of Reality

By contrast, the other Manhattan Project - the one based on natural penicillin for the wartime all - rejected the scientific simplicity that spoke of a single trajectory of life.

A simple single inclined pole of progress, with the smallest and oldest at the bottom left always the stupidest while the newest and the biggest life forms -  scientists from the biggest civilizations - invariably the smartest at the top right.

Instead Dr Martin Henry Dawson and his team suggested, that depending on the capability being measured, all life forms variously fell at the top, bottom and middle of literally hundreds of scales.

Theories of simplicity had to give way - once again - to the strong evidence of the sheer confounded complicatedness of reality.

So - and unexpectedly - when it came to making pure, cheap, abundant penicillin, the tiny slime fungi did a far better job than assembled thousands of the world's best synthetic chemists.

And if the microbial smallest and weakest showed such unexpected abilities, Dawson argued maybe, too, the smallest and weakest among humanity were also smarter and stronger than the best educated and healthiest of humanity - at least on some unexpected measures.

And so modernity shouldn't be so quick to write off either the fungal slime or the wartime 4Fs.

In a surprise reversal, one branch of the highly competitive Washington DC wartime bureaucracy (the New Dealish WPB) bought Dawson's arguments and bested another branch in Washington (the Republican-dominated OSRD/NAS) who fiercely opposed giving any wartime penicillin to the 'unfit' of the world.

And like Washington, neither the Axis or Allied worlds were in fact as single-minded as wartime Home Front bompf and piddle would have you believe.

And as a result, any accurate account of almost any WWII event need be a very complicated one.

So the tale of the unexpected wartime triumph of natural penicillin-for-all is a complicated one - with many an unexpected twist and turn.

But then so is Reality itself - reductionist claims to the contrary...

"The Last sometimes are First" : confounding Modernity's 'terrible simplifiers'

Unfortunately for the rest of us, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Tojo all had a first rate science education at their gymnasiums (the advanced sort of high school common outside of North America) .

One that in their generation was reserved only for the elites destined to run the world in all fields of endeavour.

If these four became Jacob Burkhardt's much feared 'terrible simplifiers', we should lay much of the blame at the feet of their gymnasium science teachers who taught them everything there was to know about seeing reality through the terrible scientific lenses of simplicity.

But the steps from this sort of scientific education to becoming 'mass murderers in the name of science' is not inevitable.

Because Canadian Dr Martin Henry Dawson had a similar science education.

However, during in the lead up to WWII, he chose instead to become one of science's first complexifiers.

He announced over and over to a collective scientific yawn, that when it comes to modifying genetics, sometimes (and totally unexpectedly) the Last (the bacteria) came First, besting the efforts of science's smartest men in the universe....

Their revolutions WERE rhetoricized : Jacob Burckhardt's "terrible simplifiers"

Just as the famous Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt had earlier predicted, the Age of Modernity (1865-1965) was a time when 'terrible simplifiers' made that century the most violent and horrific on record.

A time of Grand - simple - Narratives, of soaring rhetoric , when all of life's problems and solutions seemed 'clearcut' , to use a word greatly overused by Sir Howard Florey, a much honored doyen of Modernity.

To his great penicillin rival, Martin Henry Dawson, nothing was ever simple or clearcut - a viewpoint that naturally won him no honours at all during the Era of Modernity.

And Dawson died in 1945, years away from being honoured under the very different value system of our current post-modern Era of Global Commensality....