WWII : an old way of thinking busy dying, a new way of thinking busy being born

My WWII book isn't really about the big highly visible military conflict, a conflict that ended in a century old way of thinking tearing itself apart.

A zillion books have already been written (almost all by men) on that military conflict, with some giving a nod to an old way of life dying but almost none seeing a new way being born during the war.

My interest instead is in a tiny, almost invisible, new way of thinking that was busy being born upon the moral ruins of the old.

I fully expect my book to be far more popular among women than among men.

That's the male gender's loss.

Progress, Modernity, The Enlightenment - what ever ! - was hit during WWII by a moral double whammy - boxed in from both sides.

Civilization never acted so despicable, never was more fully devoted to life-taking among the innocent, as it did during WWII.

A huge world war, yet a war where most people who died, died non-combat deaths - either as civilians or as military personnel dying like civilians.

The millions of Soviet prisoners murdered by bullet or starvation in Nazi POW camps, alone, all by themselves outnumber the combat deaths of any combatant nation but the Russians themselves.

And the primitive and simple, supposedly only fit to kill and decay life, to do evil, never acted more admirably than when the penicillium naturally produced all the war's lifesaving penicillin (and is still naturally producing the base of almost all our antibiotics).

Its a dramatic story, a heart warming story, a three hankie story - a Good News Story.

From the truly awful Bad News War....

Hitler searched for "THE" human genome

Remember the delusion behind the search for the essence of the human genome ?

The delusion that there was in fact just ONE human genome ?

Allowing, of course, for a few deviants and defectives and deficients ---that advanced (eu) genetic engineering would quickly excise away, once and for all time.

(Another delusion by the way.)

The fact is, just as ancient religious texts always proclaimed and mothers have always noted, we are all different, all unique individuals.

Even in vastness of the three billion year old world of the bacteria, there has never been two exact clones.

We are all different - albeit often in too subtle ways to be noted by very important men (James Watson ?) cursively glancing at us from the Olympian heights of Vienna's Riesenrad Ferris Wheel, as if we were just a lot of similar 'dots' on the ground.

Even Dr Mengele's identical twins were different, unique, in spite of having the exact same genome in theory.

Now even James Watson easily accepts that highly civilized 'Man' makes many mistakes, down at the bank with his mortgage or at the government office with his new passport.

Why then is it so very hard to accept that 'primitive' Mother Nature makes mistakes too ?

That the supposedly "iron" laws of Nature frequently bend ?

Routinely Nature makes mistakes while copying both the protein-making genes and the turn-on-and-off-tap control genes from the original genome - too many of this, too little of that.

Not just a base here and there but also many, many huge chunks, each thousands of bases long, known as CNVs, copy number variants.

Experienced ward doctors would hardly be surprised to learn all of this as the scientific explanation for their routine experiences of every work day.

An explanation just why so often that two patients, of the same age and weight and at the same stage of the same disease, can react so differently to a drug dosage supposedly standardized to all these factors.

The answer just could be that one patient has three copies of a particular gene segment targeted by this drug and hence almost overdoses.

Meanwhile the other (because of an unusual 'tap' gene) has effectively less than one copy and so the course of their disease remains unchecked.

Because sub atomic particles, atoms and molecules spend all their time bouncing off of each other in an asymmetric fashion, everything in the Universe "jitters" all the time.

We average this out, over trillions of such objects, as a particular heat temperature --- think of it as the supposedly routine temperature for a given pheonomon.

But, in fact, that smoothly analog average that is a given temperature actually disguises huge variants in local energy levels from nanosecond to nanosecond - meaning 'heat' is better described in digital terms --- as 'thermal' zippering, noise and distortion.

All that wide variance in the energy of 'routine' particle jostling means that 'routine' chemical bond making and breaking don't always occur at all, or don't occur in the right order, or takes much more or less time that they 'routinely' should.

Mistakes and asymmetric results are a routine fact of the Universe and even the best error correcting system (itself subject to the same mistake-making environment) doesn't always fully correct them all.

Hard to think of Hitler going along with Einstein and millions of other intellectuals in eagerly advancing The Enlightenment Project's efforts to find all the right answers to all the questions of Reality.

But he did - in spades.

Because he and Einstein and most scientists and philosophers of his day believed, often unconsciously, in "Limited Essentialism".

That is the idea that everything (of substantial size) had a definable list of attributes that uniquely and permanently identified it.

'Close' was not good enough -  that was a defective deviant deficient copy.

But Reality is actually an example of "Unlimited Essentialism" - the fact that every single being and object in the Universe is unique and has an (ever changing) definable list of attributes that positively identify it, albeit from moment to moment.

Defined that way, Essentialism is emptied of all of its traditional restraining abilities.

The search for Reality's "right" answers left all lot of shot, gassed and burned wrong answers in its wake

The Enlightenment Project led inevitably up to the selection platform at Auschwitz in late 1944, where the incoming Hungarian Jews were separated into right answers and wrong answers.

While the whole world knew about it, by that date, (YES WE DID) - and still did nothing.

Only a world that had stopped believing in "right answers" would have moved to save them - move to save them all, as uniquely beautiful bits of the human kaleidoscope.

Now Hitler, Einstein and Watson have all been hoisted on their own petard - because their own search for the one right answer about the human genome has instead resulted in revealing billion and billions of unique human genomes.

Nothing that Momma and Jesus - and Martin Henry Dawson - didn't already know ....

Murderous Enlightenment Project sought to reduce all Reality to a 'clearcut' list of the things worthy and unworthy of continued existence

If we ever did succeed in 'cleansing' the ocean of all of its germs (either by a deliberate Mikrobefrei Aktion or simply by continuing our limitless consumption of most of the world's resources) the atmosphere would fairly quickly lose half of its oxygen and humanity would rapidly die out.

This fact still isn't widely known by laypeople today - nor was it known by many scientists back in 1940.

I mention this only because the world in 1940 was as consumed with killing off all the germs in general, including those found in sea water, as the Nazis were about killing of all the Jewish 'germs' in particular.

The civilized world in 1940 widely supported the effort to greatly reduce biological diversity by ridding the world of all kinds of "pests", an idea that spilled over into the minds of the ordinary Nazi (and their ordinary/silent tolerators) when thinking about a possible solution for the 'problem' of the Jews.

The Sixth Extinction linked to the Sixth Genocide

Among the most annoying pests in 1940 was household mold - particularly the blue green penicillium slime found on fruit, leather goods and basement walls.

It seemed clear - in early 1940 - that the penicillium slime "would not be missed", to recall the words of the Lord High Executioner.

But by late 1944, it all wasn't at all so clear that the penicillium won't be missed.

During the Enlightenment Project, we assumed that via reductionism we would actually eventually fully know Nature and upon knowing it, evaluate its worth, bit by bit.

What bits to keep and what bits to dispose of.

To judge by the number of beetle species, God never put all the eggs in just one basket - so why should we ?

But we didn't really know Nature and we never will - the 1940 world thinking that it 'knew' the useless penicillium slime and the ocean's useless germs being but two sobering examples from the recent past....