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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 as just one vast marketing ploy

At its very base base, Modernity consists of convincing other people (call 'em customers or colonies, tis the same) that you are smart (progressive/a professional scientist) and they are stupid (backward/laypeople).

Modernity and Imperialism after all grew up together and declined together: post-modernity and de-colonization being pretty much one and the same thing.

The 1920s trend to replace mom's homemade bread with  industrialized white bread and Britain's attempt to create imperialized/militarized penicillin  during WWII are two shades of the same big lie.

1939-1945 : the War of Scientism's modernist "Four Freedoms"

In the Spring of 1939, at the the New York World's Fair, Modernity or Scientism (the words are totally inter-changable) promised the deserving parts of the world a future of Four Freedoms: eventual freedom from material limitations, from catastrophes like the weather, from dependence upon lesser breeds and beings and, above all , from uncertainty.

"Triumph of the SCIENTIFIC Will" : WWII scientists as 'swimmers into technical sweetness leaping'..

Sure, sure: Hitler, Mussolini ,Tojo and Stalin and all that lot started the war, but it took the collective will of the world's best scientists and engineers to build their visions up into History's bloodiest, most heart-less war.

It was the scientists' war, the only truly Modernist war, the war of their big shiny machines . Scientism's big moment under the Klieg Lights.