WWII as apogee AND nadir of Modern Science....

The night 'the music died' began when the young pilot of the small plane that Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens were in, misread an instrument and thought he was climbing above a storm when he was really going full blast down into the ground.

Various Modern scientists (and their shills the science 'journalists' , ie editors) might be considered to have done something very similar to that unfortunate pilot.

They mis-read the Atomic Energy fire-bombing of civilians, the mass production of cheap Natural Penicillin and Auschwitz's gas chambers and frugal use of the resulting dead humans as furnace fuel and for soap as triumphs - rather than failures - of Physics, Chemistry and Biology.

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.

WWII's sins of uncaring omission as War Crimes

Even animals would be discomforted at the audible and visual pain as millions of Indians starved to death during the Bengali Famine of 1943.

It is a pity that so many of us,supposedly more sophisticated, humans have been less discomforted about the event ever since.

Most of us - at least in the Allied West - would strongly reject the  idea that this totally unnecessary mass famine was a war crime and and a sin of uncaring omission.

Resetting the Allied moral compass so that it diverged from the Nazis, not merely followed a muted parallel course

It remains unknown whether Henry Dawson expected his quixotic wartime efforts (to "waste" weaponized penicillin on 'useless' SBEs ) to go as far as they ultimately did.

He certainly was extremely unhappy that America was treating its wartime 'SBE lives unworthy of life' in almost as bad a fashion as Nazi Germany was known to be doing to its SBEs and others seen as "useless mouths".

But did he suspect his assault on weaponizing penicillin would extend beyond the Allies' horrific wartime neglect of the poorer chronically ill ?

The Cure for Auschwitz Disease : "Dawson's Crude" : .56% penicillin ...and 99 and 44/100ths pure love

Pray there comes a day when most premature deaths really are 'Acts of God', when even the best of money and the best of medical care could not result in a happy ending.

But until that happier day, most premature deaths in the world - in peace as in war - are 'Acts of Humanity' , or rather 'Acts of Lack of Humanity'.

Sins of Omission : premature death caused because the people dying are not judged (by others more fortunate) as worthy of devoting much money or effort towards saving.

Medical ethics - not medical techniques - are probably the leading way to decrease or increase deaths due to war

How doctors and nurses morally regard all of their fellow human beings, rather than how they medically treat their actual, relatively few, patients, is probably the number one determinate in whether wars are relatively bloodless or particularly bloody.

The entire culture takes many of its moral cues from the medical professionals and when they (as in WWII Germany and America )  sanction or even advocate neglecting or killing those judged lesser than others, this attitude bleeds across the whole country and into the actions of its troops --with horrendous consequences.

The battle over wartime penicillin, EUGENICALLY speaking : who makes it and who gets it ?

Eugenics dominated ALLIED war aims

Wartime America was consumed by "popular-eugenic" emotions, (as was the rest of the world of the early 1940s.)

These emotions lay just below conscious thought, but were often behind conscious deed.

Aktion 47% : saving the 4Fs in a time of the 1As , putting them back to work and paying taxes : the OTHER Manhattan project

Romneycare DEATH PANELS for the 47%

In 1941, penicillin was lying about in the gutter, part of the medical world's unfit 47%.

1943 : Schindler's list versus America's non-list

wartime HOLOCAUST reports ignored by public

1993 : Fifty years after adult America first learned about the killing of millions of  European Jews - and did nothing about it - a new adult America was ready to turn a film about efforts to save some of those Jews into a massive movie hit.

The high school teachers of WWII's leaders, got THEIR high school education back in the Early Victorian era

MY high school teachers ran WWII !

It is striking how just old the leaders of WWII were: not just politicians, but also the generals, bureaucrats, CEOs, professors and editors. Anyone who was anybody was usually far older than today's leaders is in equivalent positions.

DAWSON & RADIOACTIVITY : conceived on the same day (Nov 8 1895) ?

   Dr Martin Henry Dawson was born on August 6th 1896 and was conceived about 9 months earlier.
    Early November 1895, in all likelihood.
    About the very same time ,in fact, when Wilhelm Roentgen accidentally discovered X-Rays (November 8th 1895).
    This event, in turn, led almost immediately (less than three months later) to the discovery of spontaneous radioactivity - perhaps the single most astounding discovery in science in the 19th century.

    Spontaneous (and random and unpredictable) radioactivity, it was determined after much effort, was merely the visible sign of an even more astounding natural event: atoms of one element in the process of becoming atoms of another element.
   Alchemy's magic of transmutation, brought to life.
   Think of it : what can that familiar chemist's word - elemental - possibly mean if not 'fundamental' and 'indivisible' and 'stable' ?
   Now all that had seemed universal and eternal and stable was revealed to be but a passing fancy.
   And it happened, not as Science said all Reality happened, IE in a deterministic way, but rather merely upon Mother Nature's whim !
   The certitudes of two thousand years of science, philosophy and mathematics trembled.
   Most people successfully ignored radioactivity's strange implications for how all Mankind understood Reality to focus instead on its superficial charms.
 Until that morning in Hiroshima, on August 6th 1945, (which would have been - strange coincidence - Dawson's 49th birthday) when 'all this strange radioactivity stuff'  reared up and destroyed an entire metropolitan city,  with but a single bomb.
   Now the entire world sat up and finally paid full notice - almost 50 years to the day from the original discovery.
    A few - too few - even sat down that summer day to really ponder the philosophic implications of radioactivity's spontaneity and thus ipon its ability to destroy our sense of how we had thought the Universe worked.
  Pity that : because this was an ability far beyond even its now proven powers to destroy life and matter.
   Dr Dawson's lifework was not  at allabout radioactivity - but as it happened his life spanned radioactivity's critical first years almost exactly : something that makes things much easier for the biographer of Dawson or of Radioactivity.
    Yet Dawson was involved in 'transmutation', as it happens, in fact involved in a fundamentally critical way.
   But not radioactivity's transmutation of matter and energy (the stuff of Physics and Chemistry) but rather in DNA's transmutation of life and organization (the stuff of Biology).
   The only beings that can as yet (humanity is working on it) transmutate DNA and hence Life are the microbes - and the lives of microbes was Dawson's lifework.
   The research that led to the discovery of what Dawson called  'bacterial transformation' (of DNA) began like the story of radioactivity in the mid-1890s.
 Questions began to be asked about cases of bacterial variations so extreme as to sound more like the spontaneous creation of new species and a mere variation on a given theme.
   But in orthodox biology circles that was a big no-no:  had not Darwin himself said the creation of a new species would take millions of years to emerge, not an hour or two ?
   The most unsettling implications of Dawson's work - like radioactivity's most profound implications - were successfully ignored then - in fact, still are.
   If 1945 was the year of Auschwitz , the A-bomb and of Penicillin, it was also the year of transformative DNA as well  : annus mirabilis indeed ...

MODERNITY FALLS 1945

   There is no consensus on the name for the Era we are presently living - the era after the Era of Modernity. But all agree that it began in 1945.

   That means that every single one of us has has spent the majority of our lives living in this "Era-Without-A-Name".

  Rather embarrassing that : perhaps it will be left to our ancestors to name this era retrospectively.

   Then billions will perhaps know us as Commensalities, when we never heard the word while alive, let alone ever thought of ourselves that way.

   A child whose birthday everyone knows , but who no one is willing to christen, is an unusual child indeed.

  Why then the nigh-universal consensus that this post modernity era we are living in all began in 1945?

   It was not as if nothing else happened in 1945, so it had some plenty of time on its hands to dream up post-modernity.

  1945 was the year the world finally ending its worst conflict : WWII.

   With the occupation of enemy lands long hidden from the world, reports of horrible things were finally confirmed by the Allied armies : the concentration camps and death camps.

  Soon the upcoming Nuremberg Trials would reveal that death camps like Auschwitz also held plenty of evidence of unbelievably cruel medical experiments on innocent human children.

  Gas Chambers or Doctor Mengele, all worked together to advance the ultimate intentions of Galtonian Genetic Biology.

   All worked to create the perfect Master Race, even if that meant that those judged non-master races had to pay the ultimate penalty to make it all happen. 

  Meanwhile in August 1945, the Americans dropped single bombs, from single planes,  yet big enough to wiped out big cities - cities like Hiroshima.
   Hitherto, thousands of planes and hundreds of thousands of bombs ( and a perfect storm of weather) had been needed to wipe out a city.

  Since the Americans alone had thousands of these big planes ,B-29s, (planes able as well to fly half way around the world) that meant we suddenly faced a world where the next big war might mean all cities everywhere facing annihilation.

   Meanwhile the ineffectiveness of any defense against the German V-2 rockets reminded us that while we might be able to shoot down the B-29s before they reached our cities, soon even that option would be closed off.

   So Newtonian Physics was also in its final phase : no longer content on measuring the transit of planets, it had moved up to destroying planets instead.

   Hiroshima, Hamburg, Toyko, Dresden, London, Rotterdam, Warsaw - city after city shattered  with depressing ease.

   Equal depressing was the thought that Auschwitz was merely the culmination of six years of killing in the name of Genetics.

  But also in 1945, World War II was credited (wrongly) for bringing at least a bit of good news.
   In a race against time, tiny simple stupid Microbes had beaten the best of the world's chemists (The1940s Masters of the Universe) to produce natural penicillin when Mankind failed to make synthetic penicillin.
    What today is an enormous industry, bio or micro technology, never looked back.

 By contrast, Daltonian Chemistry, hitherto the Queen of Science particularly in Industry, started a long slow slide into invisibility.  

   The jewels of  the Era of Modernity were these three: Newtonian Physics, Daltonian Chemistry and Galtonian Genetic Biology.

   With all three in ruins by the end of 1945, Modernity 's Fall was all but available....

Earthlings versus the Sky Gods : 1945 and "THE FALL OF MODERNITY"

   Everyone agrees that Post-Modernity began after 1945 and that thus, in some muted --- pastel --- fashion, Modernity must also have began its slow decline in that same momentous year.
   Most writers just dial in some reference to Auschwitz and Hiroshima and leave the rest unsaid and assumed
- a few might add a bit more references to the bombing of Hamburg and Dresden and the revelations of the Nuremberg Trials, particularly the so-called Doctors' Trials.
   So 1945, Year of Revolution.
   Could any other "Year of Revolution" have happened in such an un-dramatic fashion?
  No leaders' fiery speeches, no burning Manifestos, no mass  protests or barricaded streets.
   For 1945 was a Revolution from within, a collapse, a revolution of failure,defeat, negation.
  Modernity defeated itself, Modernity simply self-destructed.
   In 1939 it set itself the highest possible goals - this would be history's first fully modern war, its first fully scientific war (or at least first fully scientism war).
  Of course, nothing in WWII worked out as its various protagonists planned.
  Its seers and futurists were equally naft in their predictions.
   At the cost of 60 million dead , billions emotionally scarred and trillions in waste and destruction, Modernity laid an egg.
   Or a mushroom - your taste......

BIOLOGISTS' "commensalism" births horrors of AUSCHWITZ & AKTION T4

   Make no mistake about it: the horrors of Hitler's AUSCHWITZ and AKTION T4 and der HUNGERPLAN were all birthed about the same time as Hitler himself: in the 1870s and 1880s as Social Darwinism captured the new science of BIOLOGY.

   Nothing better captures how Hitler's gang regarded the small and weak, the useless mouths he sought to kill off to free up resources to defend the worthy from the evil, than the biological abortion-of-a-term, commensal.
   The Communists and the Jews Hitler called germs, pathogens, parasites.
   Notice the biological term used : parasite. Bad guys: fear.
   Hitler called forth his Ayran race of Germans to be the hosts of  New Order Europe. Good Guys, admire.
   Another biological term.
   But Romas, Poles, the handicapped : useless, neither helpful or harmful.
   Useless one way or other: eliminate.
   He did : tens of millions of them......

DENYING humans need other life for our survival

Michael Marshall

Taking on those who denying global warming is small change - they are hardly worth refuting.

The source of their specific example of denial ---  the ultimate DENIAL --- "the father of all denial" , is denying that we humans are totally dependent on other life for our continuing survival.

This highly popular, highly respectable,  form of DENIALISM is found everywhere.

For but one example --- it is found among the leading elements of our new economy --- the executives of the  biggest firms of the internet.

Top executives from corporations like Google, Amazon, Microsoft are leading the non-government charge into space --- and away from all the Earth's messy problems.

The latest delusion is that we can continue to consume (but not recycle) the world's limited surface supplies of minerals, because a new source will open up when we mine asteroids.

Success will look like all those pre-war sci fi covers, with all of us living inside plastic domes, on the barren poisoned surface of some planet ( maybe even our own) and surviving by converting minerals into food and air and water and all else a civilization needs.

In fact, we here on Earth lack no resources - not even energy - if we learn to recycle what we already have.

Sorry, I meant we lack no natural resources , because of course we lack lots of common sense.

Particularly among the ranks of science, among the people we should be trusting to expose quasi-scientific nonsense.

Oh, and they do -- if the object of their public scorn is somebody powerless touting non-science oriented nonsense -- ie someone, above all, who could not be seen as a fellow scientist.

But they are very reluctant to lower the tone of science debate by
publicly taking on science-oriented nonsense.

It is almost as bizarre as if a fact-finding group of  well-respected
Jewish scientists had visited Doctor Mengele at Auschwitz in 1943 and now had to release a public report, but were torn between being horrified and yet reluctant to publicly scorn a fellow scientist in public.

Bigger than the fate of any one ethnic group are now at stake --- the 'DENIERS of LIMITS' are threatening the fate of all the human race --- yet they fail to face public criticism from the those scientists who claim that they believe humanity must learn to live within limits.

This is where I feel this blog must come in.

I will try not to attack the DENIERS too much - they are the broad side of the barn on this issue.

Instead I will focus on "outing" those scientists who privately scorn the DENIERS, but are reluctant to say so clearly in public.....

Contra Chris Mooney , SCIENCE & REPUBLICANS once exchanged bodily fluids quite happily ...

Michael Marshall

In the 1930s, when FDR and the Democrats were racking up their impressive majorities ,about the only place the twosome couldn't catch flies was in college towns ---- they voted Republican.

Yep.

Science - conservative Modernist/Progressive Science - was very popular with the not-yet-angry-wealthy-white-guys back then.

For it had demonstrated, from the example of Nature, that it was natural and inevitable for the big and the powerful to vanquish the small and the weak - and those red letter passages in the New Testament be damned.

(I mean had this Jesus guy ever even so much as run a single lab experiment ??)

Conservatism is the business of relishing certitudes in an uncertain world and Science, Modernist Science, sure delivered some beauts.

But after 1945, Auschwitz and Hiroshima, scientists - the younger ones particularly - started having their doubts and by the late 1970s they were coming on to replace the dying and retiring modernists in science's positions of power.

The certitudes of modernist science had actually been proven wrong almost as soon as they were publicly uttered but these failings were downplayed and buried--- until the post war post modern generation found the courage to speak up.

As scientists showed the world to be even more uncertain than any lay person imagined possible, the conservative personality left the ship of science in droves.

What college town today votes Republican? - the idea seems absurd.

In which case, Chris Mooney is right and I am wrong.

But look it up - they did once.

In spades....

Invasion of the SKY GODS : 1939-1945

Michael Marshall

"Earthlings versus the invasion of the SKY GODS" sounds like a 1950s Sci Fi movie made out of some Robert Heinlein story.

Suitable only for the teen fare at the make-out pit at the local drive-in.

It certainly doesn't sound like any useful way to sum up WWII.

But recall how the Nazis dug up and revived the old myths about the Sky Gods and made the Swastika, often a symbol of sky gods like Thor, the master symbol of their belief system.

Remember that both Japan and Germany clearly thought of themselves as overmen, ruling the undermen.

(Ubermensch and untermensch.)

The communist parties, all over the world, also thought of themselves as a group of ubermensch SKY GODS, guiding with a bloody-firm hand the working class untermensch ,as they set about together to liquidate the middle and upper classes to bring about a new utopia.

Recollect that both the Germans and the Japanese went to war on a little petro and a whole lot of faith : their non-logistics systems can only be described as 'pie in the sky' or 'blue sky' thinking.

And even a cursory memory of WWII newsreel type imagery should remind us how often both chose to portray themselves as eagles on high swooping down on their enemy in Stukas or Zeros.

Earthlings ?

Well I admit the word, in its current meaning, wasn't even used till 1949 - by the very un-earthling sci fi writer Robert Heinlein - mostly because it was a word describing a concept not yet invented until after WWII, Auschwitz and Hiroshima .

All of us modern/civilized/urban humans suddenly seeing ourselves as small ,weak and vulnerable.

In other words, suddenly feeling post-modern and commensal with the rest of Earth.

But clearly the values Martin Henry Dawson fought for and the way he chose to fight for them, is a forerunner of Heilein's earthlings.

A 4F sized factory, run by 4F doctors with 4F fungi to save 4F patients against the efforts of A1 world interested in only saving the genetic A1s of the world .

Because there were as many SKY GODS in Manhattan as in Berlin or Toyko or Moscow....

The healthiest, most terrified Generation in history

michael marshall

If you were a child between July 1945 and October 1963, you were literally part of the "BOOM" generation.

"BOOM" as in the large loud bang made when an above-ground atomic bomb test went off somewhere and yet more fallout drifted down in your morning glass of milk.

(And studies have now confirmed that the more of that life-giving, much-advertised, fresh milk you drank in the 1950s, the better your chances become to die of cancer today.)

But we thought then, not of a slow death by cancer when we were old, but of our entire world all expiring one sunny day, whenever the West and the East chose to go CODE RED.

Terrified we were, yes - but also very healthy - thanks to all those "antibiotics-before-bacterial-resistance".

O Manhattan ! , island home of  both the manhattan project and natural penicillin, you sure have a lot to answer for....

FALLOUT means all Life dies at a COmmon table

Michael Marshall

"The fallout from the volcano Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 led to "The Year without Summer" across the Northern Hemisphere in 1816, in which hundreds of thousands died on the diseases of hunger."

"The fallout from the last Soviet H-Bomb test series led to increases in cancers all around the world."

"The fallout from the brutalities of the Germans upon ' just a bunch of Polacks' (culminating in the horrors of AUSCHWITZ), ultimately led to the deaths of the sons of many of those same  Isolationist parents, years later and half a non-isolated world away....

Few of us are likely to misunderstand these three sentences, even though the word fallout was first used, in its modern sense, only in 1949.

We now accept that a volcano or pandemic half a world away can reach out and bite us anywhere in the world - even in the heart of Isolationism - the American Heartland of the Mid-West.

We learned this first in 1945 at HIROSHIMA, when it became clear that either a rocket or a large bomber could travel half way around the world and drop a city leveling bomb on us.

We learned it even better by 1954, than none of us could live 'safe' in the countryside --- death would just come to us a little later - from radioactive dust drifting down from the sky from bombs a continent away.

And over and over, if a war happens in a part of the world judged vital by some superpower or other, we know sooner or later our kids will be called upon to get in there and die.

We now accept what Modernist Man did not -- that the world is just one big 'common table' and that we can dine together around it --- or all die together around it.

So people - which side are you on ?

Still believing in MOdernity, that Man is far above nature and we can do nothing to it - or it to us - that a little High Tech Science can't solve ?

Or do you now accept that we live , fully embedded ,inside Nature and Nature's limits, that we now live in "The Age of Commensality" ?

This is this century's global ideological divide ......

AUSCHWITZ & HIROSHIMA : the PLAN "B"s of MOdernity

Michael Marshall

Give credit where credit is due : MARTIN HENRY DAWSON planned, at the start of his war, to prove up his concept  that SBE can be permanently cured by the systemic (internal) use of naturally grown penicillin .

He fully accomplished this goal and in the process kick-started the wartime production of the world's best known, best loved, medicine.

He worked closely with some of the weakest members of the Family of Life, tiny unicelled fungi , to save the lives of some of the weakest members of the Family of Man : COmmensality at it its pioneering 1940s best.

But neither the Axis nor the Allied planned at the start of their wars to bring forth the delights of Auschwitz or Hiroshima.

Hitler had always wanted all the Jews out of Europe,yes, but expelled rather than all being killed in German factories of death.

But gassing them all became Job #1 for him when his PLAN A, Operation Barbarossa, failed in the winter of 1941-1942 because Russian mud proved a better soldier than German automotive skills.

 Killing all the Jews he could get his hands on became a sort of consolation prize, a PLAN B, when Hitler failed totally in his main, his real, objective --- taking and holding European Russia.

Similarly for FDR - he of the famous proclamation decrying the killing and burning to death of civilians in the comparatively small bombing raids of early WWII.

He and his scientists had a much better idea :
careful, precise, humane aiming via the top secret NORDEN BOMB SIGHT, accurate enough to "drop a bomb in a pickle barrel from 15,000 feet", it was said.

Designed precisely to destroy just the military target and  ensure no collateral damages among the nearby civilians.

But his Plan A was a total belly flop disaster.

Soon America was onto PLAN B.

Soon American bombers were trying very hard to burn out entire metropolitan cities , burning up everyone from granddaughter to grandmother, in the hopes the flames might also lick at the contents of the factories hidden somewhere inside that metropole.

Toyko, Dresden, Hiroshima --- a 100,000 dead and burnt, "just like that", in each city, in just one raid.

Hiroshima and Auschwitz were MOdernity's failures alright - morally - nearly everyone agrees on that.

But may I propose they were also MOdernity's technological
failures ---Plan B consolation prizes exalted by wartime propaganda as if they had been Plan A all along.

But we,we historians seventy years on, know better - don't we ?

With Hiroshima and Auschwitz as MOdernity's tarnished PLAN B consolation prizes and the unexpected triumph of natural penicillin's  PLAN A over MOdernity's failure to produce the much promised  synthetic penicillin, little wonder that COmmensality's star was on the rise in late1945.....