Is Oscar Schindler proof that God has a sense of humour ?

The fact that the scoundrel Schindler personally rescued more Jews than did almost any canonized or beatified "Prince of the Church" is a particular vivid example of an ancient Bible claim.

The Bible repeatedly contends that God deliberately chooses to use the most weak, foolish and the broken of individuals to confound the Wise and Mighty, whenever these powerful beings fail to live up to their advance moral billing.

Almost all of the Princes of almost all the Faiths proved to be desk bureaucrats , rather than martyrs,  at this extreme junction of Good confronting Absolute Evil.

They were determined that their church structure survive as an institution, even if it had to be at the cost of emptying out all their church's ethical teachings.

Another example, perhaps, of God's sense of humour : the fact that some publicly avowed anti-semetics became leaders in the efforts to save Jews from Hitler !

Despite disliking these people individually and collectively, they still struggled to save them as fellow ( if "useless") beings.

Schindler, along with tens of thousands of others, broke Nazi laws and would have been executed if caught, because he operated inside occupied Nazi Europe.

In the rest of the world, probably only a few hundred in total risked, at most, their careers and social reputations when they broke or bent their country's immigration laws to bring out Jews ( or other refugees) from the fires of Hell.

One wants to ask two questions ; why so few when the risks were so much lower AND what personality features led them to become the rare exception ?

Despite death staring them in the face, many in Europe paradoxically had an easier opportunity to save Jews , for the potentially saveable Jewish family just lived next door.

Only a few in the rest of the world had the money, time and connections to be effective 'rescue operators' in the remaining Neutral nations that bordered Occupied Europe.

Today, millions worldwide can easily take to the nearest street to protest , before TV cameras, about an remote injustice - all doing their small bit to achieve an enormous result.

But in the 1930s and 19940s, street protests seemed something only Communists and Fascist-Nazis did : mostly  being deliberately staged street brawls between the two .

If potential protesters from any nations could have done it, culturally, even in wartime, it was Americans, yet even there any street marches on anything were extremely rare.

Street protests were not yet, culturally, a 'middle class' thing to do (and didn't become so until the mass European and North American protests against nuclear war in the mid-1980s , forty years later.)

The answer to the second question is that the people who put in extraordinary efforts to rescue all kinds of refugees in the 1930s and 1940s, operating in the free world, are usually described by the academics who have studied their biographies as already being 'outsiders' , thanks to their ongoing resistance to some institution or other in their own countries.

This seems to have made it easier for them to contemplate breaking the national laws to get the refugees in.

This makes one wonder if Dr Henry Dawson's outsider status revolved around scientific differences he had over the validity of American  War medicine replacing American Social medicine in a time of crisis.

(Dawson rescued 'The 4Fs of the 4Fs', patients dying from SBE, from death by deliberate medical establishment neglect, during WWII : de-weaponizing penicillin in the process.)

War medicine's underlying scientific assumption was that Nature had shown that the Bigger were better than the small and the weak, so that the big replacing the small was not just inevitable, it was also beneficial overall.

War medicine just hastened a process that was not just inevitable anyway but was better for all.

Dawson, through his study of R,S,M,L and V forms of oral commensal strep bacteria, had perhaps grown to see that the most ancient form of life, the bacteria, hadn't died out over billions of years, despite being small and weak and simple.

They were surviving, nay flourishing , and it just might be because they did not evolve the ability to kill-off their chronically weakened and weirdly mutated mates.

In this horizontally-oriented Evolution, the avirulent and the weak bacteria were not second-rate, but rather were just another(equal) part of a vast potential genetic pool, to help bacteria instantly response to changes in an ever dynamic world via Horizontal Gene Transfer.

Somehow, he might have mentally transferred this sense of the value of retaining a bigger genetic pool over to the worthiness of keeping even SBE 4Fs alive inside a Total War.

Sickle cell humans are a mutation that has remained in the human genetic pool, because while it causes one weakening disease, it also reduces the possibility of another life-ending disease.

But in addition,we should, but usually don't, recognize that every human offers up not just more variety to the human gene pool, they also contribute more variety to the human culture and happiness pool.

Every male scientist in 1941 who claimed that severely retarded children with a permanent mental age of only one were suffering and caused their parents to suffer and so deserved a merciful death by lethal injection , had obviously never played with their own one year old children.

( In fact, many a normal parent happens to wish their kids remained forever at age one when they were at their most loveable and obedient behavior ! )

Dawson with his own new infant, might have been struck anew by the absurdity of this old chestnut and became determined to confound the Dr Foster Kennedys of this world.

At least, this is all food for thought....

What a difference one little substitute word can make...

My partner Rebecca said some very nice things about this, my new blog.

But I am afraid I misled her a little in describing my take on Postmodernity.

I meant to say that Modernity was a particular and peculiar form of  'Aesthetics masquerading as Science' ---- and functioning as an entire worldview and ideology.

And that Postmodernity was more than 'just' the aesthetics of contemporary painting, pop music and architecture - it was another particular form of Aesthetics and also functioning as an entire worldview and ideology.

I think I have now found a succinct way to describe the difference between Modernity and Postmodernity and it is in the new subtitle of this blog .

Taking the widest view of the term Postmodernity : converting it - but only very slightly -  from my emphasis on ethics and morality to one of aesthetics - it can be phrased as a difference in  the sort of people we find aesthetically attractive.

Today we are far more willing to see attractiveness in many more body shapes,  skin colors and lifestyles - or at least to let other people see beauty in people we don't find  that particularly attractive.

It is typical of this Postmodernity era to learn of a recent poll saying that most of us find a person of mixed color ( the tawny or coffee colored flesh tone so common in places like Brazil) as the most attractive physical type.

(Just as it is a hangover from our grandparents' Modernity era to learn that most high fashion models continue to be the icy blue-eyed blonds of  1930s Aryan wet dreams.)

My take is that between 1939 and 1945 (and in the immediate postwar period), many - but by no means all - of the middle class educated people in the most modern countries in the world changed their minds.

They decided, albeit in a subdued and inchoate fashion, that  all  life was in some sense
worthy of life and dignity and worth.

When they repudiated Eugenics (and again not everybody did) they repudiated the core tenets of Modernity --- just as Professors Adorno and Horkheimer had insisted they had to do in 1944, in their famous little mimeo-book ( Dialetic of the Enlightenment), circulating throughout the campus of Columbia University in New York City.

Currently, there is no record of what Professor Martin Henry Dawson, also at the same university at the same time, thought about Adorno and Horkheimer's claim - or in fact about virtually anything - we have no personal papers.

But in his public 'biography of deeds', he certainly acted in a postmodern fashion - giving up his life to save the life of someone (Charlie Aronson) who many American doctors considered a prime example of the fact that only 'some life is worthy of life'.

In one of those improbable coincidences that make up reality,Dr Foster Kennedy advocated that only some lives are worthy of life and that all others should be killed (at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association) on the same day as Dawson first announced (at the annual meeting of the American Clinical Society) that he was trying to save the lives of the unfit, with some penicillin he had brewed up himself.

In a sense, to Kennedy's statement, Dawson merely substituted the little word "all" for "some" and then forcibly acted upon that statement, against the greatest of obstacles.

Mo only truly goes Po when somebody actually does something concrete.

 And it was Martin Henry Dawson putting PoMo thought into PoMo action that made all the difference - for Charlie and then ultimately, for all of us .....

@MichaelMarshallMogoesPo