WWII as a baseball game between Modernity and Reality (and 'Reality Bats Last' )

WWII was (and it wasn't) a battle royal between the belief that reality is a lot more simple and predictable than it looks at first glance and the belief that reality is much more complex and much less predictable than it looks at first glance.

Everyone big and powerful lined up in support of the first position during the war and if there were many holding the second position they held their tongues and kept quiet about it .

WWII : excessive group-love led to excessive groupthink

In my previous postings over the past few years, I have tried - separately - to indicate that the horrors of WWII were caused by excessive group-love and by excessive groupthink : I now realize both are bound intimately together.

The Age of Modernity (1870s to 1960s) was exemplified above all by a lack of charity and a lack of clarity.

By excessive group-love, I mean an inability to regard others others outside your nationality, ethnicity, race , class or religion as worthy of concern and compassion.

It is why most nations and most people choose to remain neutral in WWII, even as the greatest evil ever known gobbled up small nation after small nation, unless they themselves were directly attacked.

But the Allied willingness - even eagerness - to bomb and bombard a hundred thousand civilians to death in occupied Europe and Asia - people supposedly on the Allied side, does not just stem just from a group-love disregard for others.

It also stems from the Allies' prewar groupthink that touted strategic aerial bombing and naval blockading as the fastest, cheapest way to defeat Hitler, Tojo and Mussolini.

It hadn't worked in WWI - the evidence was already there if you were willing to look - and it prolonged rather than hastened the end to the misery of WWII.

But groupthink cherry-picks from a mass of conflicting evidence only that which fits their rhetorical-cum-scientific thesis.

WWII still holds powerful lessons for all of us - particularly for new emerging giants like Brazil and India where the powerful middle class still disdains their own poorer citizens as less than human.

Other people may appear simple-minded, small, weak, ill, dark, dirty, and poor but they are actually are as fully complex and interesting as we are.

In addition they hold useful gene combinations we don't have and would do well to preserve.

They definitely have different viewpoints we would do well to consider.

An unwillingness to open our hearts to other people goes hand in glove with an unwillingness to open our minds to other ideas.

Reality out there has always been and always will be highly dynamic and uncertain : a diversity of peoples and a diversity of ideas is the best way that humanity can survive life's challenges.

At least I think that is what Henry Dawson thought when he embarked upon his project to de-weaponize penicillin and other so called "war-medicines"....

Modernity: Have we got it Wrong ? Rigid not Fluid ?

The usual claim that Modernity represents an extraordinary degree of change and dynamic uncertainty must butt its head against the co-current rise of hyper-rigid nationalism in the same time and space.

This newly reified term, nationalism, was generally based upon a single ethnicity, which was usually coded at the time, incorrectly, as "race".

No longer were all citizens of France or Germany regarded as French or German by simple reason of being legal citizens.

Instead a hopelessly il-defined and yet paradoxically rigid  innate quality made you either part of The Glorious French Race or not.

Not, meant you belonged to another nationality slash ethnicity cum race.

You had no choice to say that you shared a number of different groupings varying upon your politics, religion, main language , place of birth and parentage.

Individuals effectively ceased to be individual and had to be members of , and hyper-loyal to , a particular block of humanity, the Italians or French, etc.

Contrast this to the Middle Ages's Christians who saw the Jews not as a solid group to be put to the sword, but as a group of individuals - some sinners and some saved - depending upon whether or not they individually accepted Christ and were baptized.

So WWI's vestiges of chivalry and empathy and altruism were not crowded out by old fashioned and immoral individual selfishness ( which was not any more common or any more popular than it has always been).

No, they were replaced by a new supposedly highly moral form of group selfishness.

People protested that concern for your kin had always been ruled morally legitimate - all that had changed, under Modernity, was that there were a lot more kin in your vastly enlarged German/British/Russian family.

By contrast, a pretty Russian or a handsome German was no longer a possible marriage mate for a French youth , as an attractive fellow human being who just happened to - currently - speak different and go to a different church.

Now different ethnicities might as well been different species and marriage with other ethnicities seem dangerously close to bestiality.

Not only were you rigidly placed in one ethnicity - from birth and fixed rigidly for all time - but your entire ethnic group was also rigidly and permanently set in a hierarchy of worthiness, from valued to useless.

So, regardless of the actions of individual Italians,  individual combat units or individuals battles, Italians as a group were dismissed ,in advance, as permanently bad soldiers.

In this bizarre moral universe of Modernity,two billion human beings around the world saw the big nations beat up the little nations and did nothing, but each rushed loyally into  fearsome combat the moment their own nation was itself attacked.

Each warrior felt he or she was on some moral high road but they were not.

For if Hitler hadn't attacked Russia and declared war on America, Europe would probably still be under his descendants' heel.

Altruism was at a very low ebb between 1931 and 1946 and so all the more reason to honour it where ever and when ever it was found...

1945 : as apogee AND nadir of Modern Science

Hitler may have successfully convinced his most rabid followers that the murder of every last Jew in Europe was a fitting consolation prize for his failure to deliver up western Russia as the new frontier for the Aryan super race in 1941.

But the rest of humanity regarding Auschwitz as a particularly (and peculiarly)  modern and scientific crime made it particularly hard for modern scientists in the rest of the world to present their continuing support of eugenics as the public face of postwar biology.

Still Auschwitz in the end proved a godsend to Oswald Avery's 1944 reductionist claims that Free Will didn't really exist but was simply manipulated by the chemical workings of a simple molecule called DNA.

Thanks to DNA, the old science of eugenics, ( ie its old positive program, along with a reduced version of its old negative program (now to be limited to families agreeing, semi-voluntarily, to the abortions of genetically 'damaged' foetuses) could carry on as before, but as the new science of DNA genetics.

DNA thus joined Atom-busting and Penicillin as three of the biggest triumphs of Modern Science, the three big Plan As that had emerged during WWII, if not all  as actual products of that war.

But let us look at these claims more closely.

 Atom-busting and atomic re-arranging is a natural event, discovered, rather than invented, by Modern Scientists.

It is based upon the discovery in 1896 (the same year that Henry Dawson was born) of natural radioactivity.

This is an event that is totally random and totally anti-deterministic ; we still have no idea when and why an individual atom breaks into two or more pieces.

I would thus take natural radioactivity as anti-modern, post modern, science at its most characteristic because it refutes one of three cornerstones of  all Modern Science : strong determinism .

This holds not just that every thing has a cause as to by it happens, but also that humans can discern that cause and then manipulate it to our advantage.

Another cornerstone of modern science is reductionism.

In the weak version of genetic reductionism, the one that we virtually all hold, it was already known by everybody before 1944, that whatever a gene was, at the bottom it had to exist as some arrangement of atoms.

(By contrast, strong genetic reductionism (chemical eugenics), as held by Avery, holds that once we know how those atoms are arranged, we can predict whether or not a girl will agree to date a particular boy.)

Viewed in this light, we might do well to remember that DNA manipulation was not invented by humans, but rather was only discovered by them  ---- and discovered by medical doctors, not geneticists.

Those medical doctors, led , above all, by Henry Dawson, discovered that some bacteria (intellectually as far from the mind of the modern scientist as can be) easily manipulate DNA in ways directly contrary to the Central Dogma of Biology and Genetics that genetic inheritance in vertical forward only.

(This vertical inheritance is the view that all that we are or can ever be , came directly from our (past) parents and their parents, an inheritance that is always strictly limited to remaining within our own species.)

In fact, microbes ( bacteria, viruses,sub-viruses, together with the smallest plants and animals are happy to snip DNA from here and drop it there, willy nilly : horizontal inheritance, HGT, across species, genus and families.

This is the major source for most of the real interesting genetic variety, including why all the world's bacteria can become resistant to a new drug in just ten years.

HGT is another 'difficult-to-get-your-head-around-if-you-have-High-School-Science', postmodern scientific concept, but it was guised in 1945 as another Plan A from Modern Science.

Penicillin was not invented like the totally synthetic sulfa drugs that proceeded it but rather it is produced by incredibly tiny fungus factories smaller than the eye can see.

Henry Dawson - again - led the way in proposing and using natural penicillin today over obtaining synthetic penicillin - maybe - tomorrow.

 But the chuzpha-bound men of modern science, naturally, tried to "point-to-with-pride" to the large stainless steel human factories that (nominally) held the smaller fungus factories doing all the work, as the source of our penicillin : just another Plan A of Modern Science.

Cheek !

In fact Chemistry, the Queen of the Sciences until 1945, faded after the war as a direct result of the rise of postmodern science of microbiology ---- directly as a result of the failure of  wartime synthetic chemists to make penicillin and most other antibiotics.

So much of modern science's triumphs of 1945 can just as readily be shown to be the anti-modern triumphs of postmodern science....

Modern "Bigger is Better" vs Post-modern "Small is Beautiful"

Kiddies, don't agonize about the complex differences between modernity and postmodernity when your prof poses the question at your next final exam ( trust me on this one - they will).

Just remind yourself that great-grandpa back in the 1930s was as unlikely to say "small is beautiful" as today's intellectuals on public broadcasting would ever proclaim "bigger is better" ....

Modernity dies in an Adorno Moment : 1939-1945

Between  April 30th 1939 (when the New York's World Fair opened) and the November 20th 1945 (when the Nuremberg Trials opened) a lot of water (together with a lot of blood and brains) flowed under one of Modern civilization's few remaining un-bombed bridges :  call it WWII.

If  to the bemused Theodor Adorno, New York's fair was Modernity's bizarre apogee , he also saw Nuremberg's trials as Modernity's appalling nadir.

But I doubt that even Adorno and his co-conspirator Max Horkheimer had really expected Modernity to soar , burn and crash just that quickly.

Yet it clearly happened. Few people doubt that our new Age of post-Modernity can not be precisely dated to very late in the year of 1945.

Just as very few people deny that the opening of New York's World Fair of 1939 captured the absolute peak of Modernist optimism and hubris.

Now WWI also resulted in dramatic change all around the world.

But I would argue that while the surface of Modernity in 1919 was readily and intensely cracked all over, the deep superstructure actually held stronger than ever.

People often see WWI's dramatic results as the results of long standing tensions, buried below the surface, suddenly precipitating in a crisis situation.

Perhaps : tensions buried under the surface, but not that deeply buried.

By contrast, the surface of immediately post WWII Modernity didn't crack at all but actually burnished all the brighter ("Better Science won the War"), but deep down inside , the moral core of Modernity had lost its appeal to the young.

Modernist elders simply didn't seen their own self-inflicted wounds and so did nothing to reduce its shock upon their young.

As a result, the assault on their children's and grandchildren's moral certitudes was all the more stunning due to their elders' failure to genuinely reflect upon the meaning of the events of 1945.

But demographically, the rot had truly set in and it was now only a matter of time ------ and of baby booms ----  and of funerals....

WWII:began optimistically as Science, ended tragically as Engineering..

WWII, in other words, began in Modernism and ended in post-Modernism.

It should be understood at the onset that Science's task is strictly pedagogical and that it doesn't have to provide answers that are true, in any realistic sense, merely ones that are correct.

In other words, an excellent science experiment also is an excellent exam question.

I am speaking here of course only of the physical sciences, those sciences that form a subset of human psychology.

Their main function in life is to boost the students' self esteem and make them willing and - God Bless 'Em ! - even eager to take on the world outside the High School or University as a non-physical science grad.

These science experiments are meant to give non-scientists and non-engineers, and probably a lot of engineers and scientists as well , the confidence-building illusion that the world outside the lab is as controlled and predictable as it is inside the university's "sheltered workshop".

As I have said before, philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright's key insight (aka the "Cartwright machine")  is that the crucial component that Science, along with its machines, experiments and laboratories, requires to be a successful human activity is a metaphorical ROOF , to shelter those activities from messy Reality's wind, rain and dust.

And Frederick Christiansen argues that successful engineering often means adding yet more roofs to the designs-with-roofs coming out of the science labs, to make them robust enough to endure daily Reality.

So, for example, Newtonian ballistic equation solving (classical science at its purest) can take on a very different cast in actual battles of war.

Now our young university physics graduate is behind a gunnery rangefinder, high up on a heaving battleship in the dark of night, himself just barely awake.

 His battleship is making a desperate turn, in high wind and waves, and at top speed, to dodge a possible incoming torpedo.

Meanwhile our young officer is trying his absolute best to get his 12 inch gun turret to score at least on hit on an heavily armoured (and armed) enemy battleship.

The enemy is also is bobbing up and down and turning left and right at high speed in equally heavy seas a dozen or so miles away in the dark.

The enemy ship is trying just as hard to land one or two shots on the superstructure of his own battleship - which if it happens, will likely kill him and render moot any success at getting his battleship's guns to hit the enemy.

This, despite the fact that both his battleship's hull and its gun turrets, both heavily armoured, remain totally undamaged.

He has been taught to use Newtonian ballastics to hit and destroy 60,000 ton ships, only to discover that what he is really aiming for with his massive one ton armouring piercing shell is the 150 fragile pounds of his counterpart gunnery officer.

Neither officer will ever hit what they were aiming for, but both are likely to end up dead --- when their ships make the wrong turn and run into an enemy shell equally off target.

Ballastics has descended in to a good old fashioned low tech infantry fire fight: fire as many shots as quickly as you can in the general direction of the enemy and hope some by mischance actually hit him.

Forget even that it is nighttime and in heavy seas, with two ships very far apart, moving at top speed in irregular weaving patterns while bobbing up and down in the water irregularly.

And that the eye on the rangefinder is hindered by all the bright flashes and dense smoke of real battles.

Or that in the minute or two it takes to set range and elevation, the gun to be fired and for the shell to travels to its target, the other ship will have irregularly altered what ever semi-predictable course,speed and elevation it was following at the time of 'set'.

Think about the intermittent winds across the path of that dozen or so miles - winds with different temperatures and density of air - all which affect how a shell deviates from its Newtonian path.

The gun barrel, its wearing-out with repeated shooting and even its changing temperature from shot to shot, all effect the accuracy of our departing shell.

Each new shell is never been machined as true to its designed shape as one would like - just as the bags of propellant each display a random slightly difference in the amount of force they provide.

Many of these factors, but not all, can be accounted on the naval battleship range and after a number of shots, gunnery officers do hit a target and retire to the wardroom.

But even the most lifelike gunnery range practise, far more real-world than the university lab, does not prepare the gunnery crews for a real-world battle.

In a real battle, it is far more likely that three battleships and heavy cruisers on each side are all trying to hit each other at the same time : what fans of Newton like to call "many-bodied problems" , the kind they'd rather not talk about in the physics classroom.

Yet battleship gunnery crews in WWII were the best trained, best equipped, most scientifically up to date gunners of all the war effort : none of the six nations that had modern battleships spared any expense or scientific effort to make their gunners topnotch.

But equally, all the odds against the various gunners hitting their targets had been equally up-gunned.

Faster and more agile opposing ships, heavier armour, longer and bigger guns, extreme firing ranges, night fighting, heavy weather fighting, submarines and dive bombers coming at them as well as big shells : it just never stopped.

Most of the (hugely expensive, manned by thousands of highly trained men) aptly named "capital" ships that were sunk in WWII, did not fall before the big guns, but rather to much smaller,cheaper, simpler weapons : sea mines, torpedoes, dive bombers, kamikazes.

Ballastics and science hardly entered into most of those losses : instead very brave men got within pointblank range and then eyeballed their way to success.

Engineers can understand that 'can-do' attitude perfectly well....

A hybrid between a billiard ball and a bowl of jelly : Modernity's 'the horror, the horror'

Hard to imagine Modernity ever being really comfortable at the Seaside : hard to ever imagine it capable of being relaxed and comfortable that close to such an un-modernist miscegenation of land and water.

This is because, starting with Newton, then Dalton and onto Darwin , Modernity's chief metaphor to describe Reality (both physical and mental) was as something built-up upon a collection of a few dozen different-sized and different-weighted hard, indestructible, impenetrable billiard-ball-like atoms.

So, too, Truth was one billiard ball and the non-truth another, life worthy of life was one billiard ball, life unworthy of life another and so on for ever more.

Living things (once formed into species) did not mix their genes ever again with members from other species said Darwin, adapting Newton's and Dalton's metaphor fruitfully to his re-casting of Biology.

By the 1930s, Modernity Science was under attack from people like Dirac and Pauling ,but only in the pages of Public  (scientifically published) Science .

They had demonstrated that that those supposedly so hard, so dense and so impenetrable billiard ball atoms of classical physics and chemistry were actually mere flashing smears of probability roaming around a lot of wasted space.

Molecules, the real basis of differentiated physical reality,  were formed of wildly shaped, ever-changing, ever-moving three dimensional collections of these smears of probability.

In biology, Martin Henry Dawson and others were demonstrating that species were also not billiard ball like but that gene material could freely cross the barriers supposedly separating species via activities like bacterial transformation.

Again, this was in the Public (scientifically peer-reviewed /published) Science media.

By contrast, in Popular Science, the science of High School and undergraduate courses, reality was still all about little billiard balls.

And more than a century later, still is.

In the last 80 pages of most current 900 page science textbooks, quantum reality is introduced furtively like the Church teaching 'sex for mature catholics' .

Over a century after quantum theory dislodged Newton from academic science HE (sic) still reigns supreme, whenever underpaid adjunct professors must teach massive undergraduate intro courses while the tenured mighty & wise ponder the Higgs particle.

Modernity long ago died away in mainstream culture and in academic science.

 But as long as it reigns unchallenged in Popular Science and in applied science, engineering and technology departments, we will continue to have these supposedly ' educated ' people out there blithely denying any limits on Man's ability to control the few billiard balls they see as lying at the base of all Reality.

Blithely denying the possibility of uncontrollable man-made climate change .....

Modernity : "Might is Correct"

Modernity's claim that "Might was Right" (and correct) is a significant expansion from the Bible's mere temporary linking together of the two separate entities, the Mighty and the Wise, for the purpose of  warning of hubris.

Now, under Modernity, the Mighty were (and invariably were) the Wise, by definition, simply for being mighty.

"Hubris will write the definitions from here on in, thank you very much."  (!!!)

To be wise is not to be the truth, but to be able to seek it out and successfully separate it out from the non-truth and thus to be worthy.

The wise could triage truth from non-truth, could put truth and non-truth in a clearcut, eternal and universal vertical hierarchy of worthiness.

In addition, by definition, to be weak and small (beings) was to be foolish, unwise , unable to discern truth from non-truth, unworthy.

Under Modernity, big nations would indeed have more Nobel price winners, per capita, than small nations.

But for Modernity, small physical nonliving objects like atoms were the core of The Truth, seen as something able to be reduced to a few simple explanations about the motions of a very small number of very small, very simple, very stable, objects.

Truth was seen as eventually being contained in a short simple all-encompassing "Theory of Everything" : a few laws of physics would explain and predict everything in the past, present and future Universe, up to and including the workings of the human mind.

Modernity's Universe of Worthiness saw a tiny number of very big objects (the Great Powers nations : perhaps only Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia) and a tiny number of very small objects (perhaps only the atoms of the most usually elements : oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and iron, because the others could be atomically transmutated upon request.)

First those humans and nations unworthy of life were dispatched, then plants, animals and microbes regarded as weeds and pathogens.

Finally all plants, animals and microorganisms were dispatched, defined as useless competitors, competing over limited space and valuable atoms.

Now, working on a surface as sterile and as wide-open as the surface of Mars, Modernity could really start with a clean slate.....

Commensal thoughts were parents to the Humanitarian penicillin deed ...

Before 1945 and the rise of post-Modernity, it was rare for scientific doubts to turn into humanitarian actions, but Martin Henry Dawson's wartime efforts against the weaponizing of penicillin was an important exception.

From 1926 till 1940 , Dr Dawson had intensely studied how Nature's smallest beings ( the bacteria) managed to survive upon and co-exist with the smartest and most successful of Nature's largest beings (Man) .

His fourteen years of intense research in Commensality was dismissed by most of his colleagues as a sad mis-directed use of his considerable talents.

As with his colleagues, no one today really doubts that humanity is  a large being and very intelligent( ie is wise as well as mighty) while most of us still regard bacteria as barely living, incredibly small, blobs of jelly : as dumb as they are weak.

But as Dawson discovered, as fast as Man's sophisticated internal immune system and his equally sophisticated external medical system came up with ways to remove these commensal bacteria, the bacteria equally found ways to claw their way back.

Just as he knew that any forthright and honest look at the current and past workings of Nature would show that the tiny and the big are co-existing today and have been doing so for a very long time -----with no sign at all that the small were on their way out.

If anything, the fossil record showed how vulnerable the big could be to mass extinction in times of trouble.

Despite this rather bleak record for the bigger beings of  Nature, it was precisely to Nature ( rather than to the traditional arbiter, God) that Dawson's Era of Modernity appealed to.

All to back its central claim that 'only the strong survive', 'might is right' , 'law of the jungle', 'survival of the fit', 'Nature is on the side of the bigger battalions' and many other similar phrases.

Dawson was a dutiful fully paid-up member of Modernity.

But the more he investigated the many varied and ingenious ways his oral commensal strep bacteria hung in against Man's best efforts, the less willing he was to endure this constant claim of Nature's support for the self-centred and ruthless actions of the world's biggest human societies.

Once, (younger, unmarried, childless and without any old war wounds), he had been able to show his support for the smaller human societies by enlisting in WWI to fight for poor, pitiful Belgium and for the memory of Edith Carvell.

Now in October 1940, as an even more squalid WWII slid into its second year, he still hadn't found an equivalent way to do something in support of the small and the weak in this war.

Then echoes of the Nazi war on the weak reached his own American medical school and gave him the emotional opening he needed.

Suddenly "Social" medicine (the 1930s efforts to reduce sickness among the poorest and most vulnerable) , something he had much a part of through his advocacy on behalf of the neglected chronically ill poor, was to be downplayed in the school's curriculum.

Instead now all possible attention was to be directed to teaching "War" medicine and maximizing the health of America's most fit young men.

So the majority of his colleagues cheerfully clumped off , on the first day of America's first ever peacetime draft registration, (October 16th 1940), to help with medical examinations.

But while America's doctors attended to seeking out the most 1A men possible among America's youth, Dawson heard the beat of a different drummer.

He instead deliberately sought out the 4Fs of the 4Fs, young men dying of SBE (subacute bacterial endocarditis), an invariably fatal progressive disease that mostly afflicted the poor, immigrants and minorities.

His team hadn't planned to start their first clinical trials till next year, 1941, but he changed all that with one sudden decision.

He chose to make Draft Day, October 16th 1940, the first day of his new Age of Humanitarian Antibiotics, picking that day to give History's first ever shots of penicillin.

 Two young men (black man Aaron Alston and a young Jewish boy named Charles Aronson) couldn't be part of that historical first day of peacetime draft registration because, as clearly terminal patients, it didn't seem worth the bother of the draft officials.

 But as the first ever patients of the Age of Antibiotics, they still ended up living on forever in the memory of anyone ever saved by this overdue (humanitarian-driven) advent of antibiotics....

WWII : was Nature REALLY on the side of the bigger battalions ?

The distinguishing claim of the Age of Modernity was that Nature was on the side of the bigger battalions : a claim that finally received a definitive physical (rather than verbal) response from Nature, in the years between 1939 and 1945.

This is why we mark 1945 as the start of the new Age of post-Modernity, because unlike Chesterton's Christianity, Modernity has been tried - and failed.....

"Failure to stop Famines invariably dooms Dynasties" say Chinese-influenced cultures

If so - and I happen to agree with the Chinese - than nothing doomed the British, French and Nationalist Chinese Empires like their failure to prevent or solve the man-made famines of 1943-1945 in Bengal, Tonkin and Honan.

Most educated people are starting to know of the famine in Bengal of 1943-1944 , just as others learn more of the Hunger Winter famine in 1944-1945 in the west of the Netherlands.

We have long known hunger was widespread in the Axis world from all the 1945 photographs of skin and bone prisoners released from hundreds of  POW and concentration camps around the world.

We've heard about starving Jews in ghettos and the starvation death of most of the enormous city of Leningrad.

But few know of the huge famine in Greece in 1940-1941 , with blame starting with the Axis and ending with Britain's coalition cabinet (the other Allies didn't really deserve much if any of the blame).

Even less is known about the huge famine in Vietnam (Tonkin) in 1944-1945 under the French and Japanese watch.

A few, older, people know of the horrible famine in Honan Province, under Nationalist Chinese control  in 1943-1944 because an eyewitness, American writer Theodore White, wrote about it at the time.

But because the mechanized battles of tanks and guns and bombs seem so exciting to read about from a comfy armchair (rather than to actually live and die through), few writers write best sellers on the biggest human battle of WWII : just getting enough to eat to go on living .

Modernity's horde of tame writers do up Modernity's mechanical successes a real treat : but they avoid its biggest failure : its inability to do something as basic as keeping granddaughter feed and grandmother warm.

Maybe post-modernist writers can handle that WWII story much better.....

Tortoise vs Hare : predicting our world in 1945....

On September 2nd 1939, when the British Empire declared war on the German Empire (thus ensuring we would have another world war), there were two main scientific theories predicting the shape of our world at the war's end.

The far more popular theory at the time was called Modernity, Social Darwinism or simply 'Might is Right'.

 It said Evolution was a vertical affair, with wiser and more mighty entities inevitably and naturally replacing entities that were weaker and more foolish.

The other, far less popular theory, saw Evolution as a horizontal activity, with the weaker and simple-minded entities continuing to co-exist for ever and ever, in global commensality, with the bigger and more complex entities.

It even went further than that.

It claimed that on not-infrequent occasion, the smaller and more simple would even triumph over the larger, more complex and more sophisticated entities in the fundamental effort to survive.

Now it is obviously that these diametrically opposed theories could not both be right.

"the hyssop and The Cedars" will look closely at the course of  WWII to see how accurate each scientific theory was in predicting the twisting course of that awful - and unexpectedly awfully long - war.....

Modernity: the 500 Year Reich

In retrospect, all of the promise of the New York's World Fair (1939-1940) turned out to be just the sad brief apogee of Late Modernity, indeed of all Modernity itself.

It hardly started out that way.

Five Hundred Years of Modernity was to be celebrated as part of the Fair's second year , marking the 500 years supposedly since Gutenberg invented the printing press --- and began the onset of cheap, mass produced, printed knowledge.

Talk of a 1000 Year Reich in places like Hitler's Germany, at this point, was just that : talk .

But Modernity's first 500 years was already safely in the record books and tangibly real, real for all to see and applaud.

In 1939, there seemed no reason why there shouldn't be at least another 500 years of triumph ahead for Modernity.

Yet it is now generally agreed that by the post-Auschwitz, post-Hiroshima, post-Katyn autumn of 1945 , Granddad's Modernity was well and truly broken.

And out of that wreckage gradually crawled a very different and very new era, our own Era of Post-Modernity.

What could have gone so terribly wrong, for Modernity to soar way to its apogee and then plunge way down to its nadir, in just six short years ?

Clearly it was World War Two (Modernity's own war, Modernity with its thrusters fully engaged) that was what had gone so badly wrong ....

"This key is fit". Bad grammar but good modernity.

This key is 'fit'.

One could, and probably should, write a long learned essay on the wrongs created over the last 150 years under the delusion this sentence makes grammatical and real world sense.

When, however, we modify the sentence so it reads: "The key will fit this lock but not that lock" , most of us agree it now does make grammatical and real world sense.

The entire phrase "will fit this lock but not that lock" can be thought of a one long adjective modifying ,and accurately limiting, the noun key.

The outstanding aspect of that long adjective phrase is its tentative nature -- which, in turn, accounts for its windy lengthiness.

 "Will" could be replaced by words like "used to" ,"once", "may", "no longer" and the words "this lock" and "that lock" replaced by other modifying and limiting nouns.

 But the phrase "the key is fit",  with the word "fit" being totally unmodified and unlimited by adjectives, together with the fact it is set in a tense of eternal and universal is-ness , strikes us as very odd indeed.

Unless we modify the sentence to say "John is fit", then most of us accept this sentence as seemingly making perfect grammatical and real world sense (and tense).

But it does not.

That broad shouldered six foot tall 175 pounds hunk of svelte eye candy might be "fit" in all of our eyes, but is he actually "fit" for being a race jockey or "fit" to crawl into a narrow tube to weld a joint ?

The Darwin of 1859 said that in a real world of 'the survival of the fittest', strong but lithe men would become horse jockeys but not Rugby forwards while huge chunky men would become Rugby forwards but not race jockeys.

In our actual world, the reality we must live with, "Fittest" is always found modified by an adjective phrase , indicating the particular time and space limitations that allows this particular being or object to be temporarily the fittest for that situation.

It accepts that the world is filled with millions of possible niches and that they change all the time.

I don't think there is any possible moral or scientific objection to this Darwin.

But the later Darwin of 1871 seemed to imply that reality is really about the survival of the "fit", an unmodified, absolute and universal/eternal noun : European males being "the fit" and no one else - and nothing else - being in that category.

It sees the world (and eventually the universe) as potentially one great vast niche, with European-origined humans as the only species needed to be able to fill it completely and permanently.

Modernity science fiction saw future human worlds as living under glass bubbles on planets of bare rock, devoid of atmosphere, generating all we need by chemical synthesis, with no need for plant or animal or microbe.

No need for Jew, Gypsy , Slav or 'defective' either.

Those authors and illustrators only said in print and pictures what our grandparents (and the Darwin of 1871) were just thinking.

Until 1939-1945, when they got a chance to play it all out in a world-war sized sandbox ---- and ended up with sand in their Pampers .....

1945 : Triumph of the Weak ; Mite is Right

If the triumph of post-1945 postmodernity over pre-1945 modernity means anything , it means the unexpected triumph of the mite-y over the mighty and the triumph of the weak over the wise.

And yes, the survival of the fittest (to a particular place and point in time) over those all-weather, all-terrain, all-the-time "fit" so beloved by modernists.

Ain't life grand ? And ironic ...

Ironic convergent property of Modernity : collectivist thrust from reductionism !

Politically, Modernity (1873-1973 RIP) , had a strong collectivist thrust, exalting the collective nation, race and planet over the individual being.

At the same time, and in a typical reductionist fashion that at least had the virtue of consistency, this collectivist superstructure was fully explained as simply the consequence of many trillions of highly individual actions at the basement fundamental level of Reality.

The harder modernity scientists tried to deny the existence of convergent behavior , the more it poked its ironic little head up, even in their reductionist of moments.......

Modernists unite over fear of "the mob"

The authors and artists we think of as "The Modernists" did have their divisions.

Some exalted Modernity's materialism and rationalism while others opposed rationalism (so they said) and sought to go back to an golden age of myths and rituals, a sort of anti-Modernity.

But virtually all of them happily re-united around an abiding fear of democracy and of being ruled by a "mob" of the lower middle class, working class and the defectives.

And an astonishing number wrote of "exterminating" these "lesser" classes.

We can say this for certain of many of the best known Modernists because they left plenty of private papers and have had enough interest from scholars to see that all of their private and public writing has had a through going over with a fine tooth comb.

But I suspect the lack of evidence that the lesser studied Modernists also held these quasi fascist beliefs indicates only a lack of evidence or a lack of scholarly interest, not a lack of such beliefs among them.

Ordinary middle to upper middle class people from the period 1910 to 1945 are even less likely to get studied in the detail that prominent people of that period have been.

But I suspect that a through sampling of what personal writings and newspaper reports from that period that do remain would reveal an amazing amount of quasi-fascist talk from ordinary well-to-do individuals all over the world.

Emphasizing once again that what separated hard core Nazi from soft core Yeats or Elliot was more an matter of degree,  not kind ...

1939-1945 : Big MO goes Postal instead of going Monumental

Big MO is an appropriate nickname for The Age of Modernity because there was always something inhumanly massive about almost everything and anything that that age and the people within it turned their hands to.

Very hard indeed to imagine the people of the early 1940s not going Postal, and not going to deadly war with each other.

But if they hadn't been building bunkers and had been building monuments and buildings instead, this ponderous essence in their inner character might still be visible.

Hitler and Stalin, not wanting to be outdone by the Hoover Dam and the Maginot Line, were planning to leave their own marks in concrete and rebar steel, massive and tedious beyond all belief.

Modernity was all about regarding Reality as being thermo-settable : plastic until cured and then rigid forever more.

Concrete is the thermoset plastic par excellent : broken up, it is useless to re-melt into new concrete.

Rebar steel, while appearing to be plastic only when red hot and rigid at normal temperatures ( ie thermoset plastic in character) , is actually also somewhat thermosoft plastic in character as well.

Because used steel can be remelted and molded into a new shape as scrap, as part of the normal steel-making process.

Armour steel is thermoset plastic in its character, and became the wartime symbol of Modernity's massive and rigid nature.

Armour plate is plastic when red hot but at normal temperatures, it resists all change : even when change is coming at it in the form of a dense tungsten core of an anti-tank round moving in at 2500 miles an hour !

Bombers, bombs, bomber fleets - perhaps the most typical expression of Modernity at war, got steadily bigger and more armoured as the war progressed.

As did tanks, tank guns and tank fleets.

Ditto naval Taskforces : bigger battleships, bigger guns, bigger aircraft carriers, more armour, more speed, more aircraft and escort vessels.

More, more, more : every war machine just got steadily bigger, heavier, faster, higher, lower : extremes of any and all sorts.

Notably as the world got more war machines and the machines got bigger and fatter, the world's population growth shrank and people got thinner and thinner.

In WWII, (Modernity gone Postal), Modernity showed its true colors : placing machines before people even in the face of near universal malnutrition.

MO goes po : K goes r : thermo-setable Reality becomes eternally thermo-softenable

Modernity optimistically and fervently believed that all of Reality , the entire chemical, biological and physical world, was plastic of a definite sort : thermo-set-able.

Everything - even human beings - was malleable but once set  perfectly and 'cured'  would remain thus - perfect - forever.

It was, in a sense, a view of reality as all K-selectable ; round rods for every round hole : every niche perfectly matched to an activity or being - forever.

Modernity feared, a fear never far away from this optimistic view of Reality, that Reality could also be plastic of the thermo-softening sort, if left in the wrong human hands : infinitely re-meltable in new shapes, most of them horrible mutations far far from beauty and utility.

Only a firm - tough - brutal - hand could keep the human forces of r-select from ruining Paradise.

Today we tend to more see Reality as r-selecting and thermo-softening : infinitely and eternally unpredictable.

But as post-Modernists, we tend to lay the credit or blame for this less at the feet of humans and more at the feet of Nature itself.

Humans can still create any chemical we can imagine, for example, but we no longer claim that we know, in advance , how it will interact with the world outside the lab.

This is because all of the hyperreal claims made by WWII authorities on both sides all fell flat on their face-----making us survivors eternally suspicious of extravagant claims about the human ability to precisely control Reality's plasticity.

Man manipulate the plasticity of Nature : yes.

But precisely manipulate that plasticity : no, no a thousand times no....