October 1940's Waves of the Future : Henry Dawson's vs Anne Lindbergh's

No book - not even Hitler's Mein Kampf or Stalin's Foundations of Leninism - so outraged Dr Martin Henry Dawson as early October 1940's The Wave of the Future by the quasi Christian author Anne Morrow Lindbergh.

Perhaps even enraged him enough to advance his team's planned first injections of  penicillin into human patients by three months - so his own 'wave of the future' would compete with her 'wave of the future'.

And in the end, he won.

When middle class eugenicists saw Democracy itself as 'unfit' , so did the pulp and comic books

From about the 1890s onwards, a whole generation of people who proudly thought of themselves as progressive - indeed Progressives - saw Democracy itself as evolutionary 'unfit'.

At least officially , they were opposed to despots --- as being far too redolent of the bad old (Catholic) medieval times and Eastern cultures.

But modern progressive bureaucratic expert dictators were much more their cuppa.

In their moments of despair , they longed for a reign of 'experts', who would objectively look at all the 'facts' and dispassionately render the best decision for all concerned, to replace corrupt politicians bribing the uneducated unwashed with middle class tax dollars.

More often, the middle class reformers around the world simply wanted these all-powerful unelected experts to forcefully restrain the corrupt politicians and their working class electorate.

A national or international version of the 'strong City manager and weak Mayor and Council' system gaining converts all over North America.

Who bought into this idea ?

Who didn't ? At least until the late 1960s .

The fascists , communists and Nazis all took this idea up.

Academics in the Humanities who really should have known better, aped the rhetorical claims of the physical scientists around them , espoused this ideal of self-evident facts,  experts, dispassion and objectivity.

The once grubby, argumentative, partisan journalists,  now seeking respectability's higher wages, stopped thinking for themselves and became stenographers, seeking only scientific objectivity based on observing the W5.

The university (half) educated , increasing dominating all aspects of life, also backed the professors, scientists, journalists (and intellectuals generally) in supporting the reign of experts.

Technocracy Inc , a once very popular North American political movement of the between the wars period, tried to resemble the newly fashionable business corporation in name but then proposed that politicians and corporate businessmen both be replaced by teams of experts : thinking scientists and doing engineers.

The best studied example of such bureaucratic expert dictators in action is that of the corrupt Robert Moses regime in power over New York for half a century.

He was put into his position of almost unlimited powers and no democratic checks upon his behavior by the politicians and the voters themselves !

All the thousands of objective journalists in that 'media capital of the world' never once cottoned onto Moses' corrupt system because he was always issuing press releases proclaiming his purity - and a press release is a fact,  is it not ? - and so should be reported as is/ where is, dispassionately.

And so it was - for fifty dark dirty years.

So this belief in expert dictators pushing weak democratic practises out of the way was so strongly 'in the air' in New York City in the first half of the 20th Century.

Little wonder then that it strongly , if unconsciously , influenced the writers of pulp fiction and comic books who never wrote directly about bureaucrats.

Instead they wrote about Zorro, the Lone Ranger, the Green Hornet and Batman --- instead.

And about nominally democratic community after community that was besot by some complex-seeming evil that the community members were unable to democratically and collectively resolve.

In comes a masked lone ranger , an expert --- with the gun or the fist.

Shazam ! A quick  stern-but-fair bit of extreme violence and the evil doers are dead and the problem solved - forever.

The solution and the problem were both actually quite simple, weren't they ?

The lone ranger super hero moves on , to clean up the mess in other democracies.

So let us revise Dr Henry Dawson's tiny team seeking penicillin-for-all , as seen by his Republican Party-leaning scientific opponents : unfit doctors, unfit black and Jewish patients, unfit natural penicillin in an unfit democracy....

Plentiphobia : fear of being overwhelmed by plenitude

"Too much information".

Humans are easily overwhelmed - temporarily - by too much.

Too much choice, too many people on a crowded street, too much choice of new clothes in a story - on and on.

They recover by retreating into places with much less choices and decisions - usually their own home.

But , starting in the 1870s , almost all of us in the educated urbanized middle class western world - all the time  and everywhere - felt overwhelmed by too many new scientific discoveries  , too many new immigrants, too many new imports, too much too much.

The un-coordinated activities of modernization/ globalization  had produced the mother of all plenitudes and humanity reacted with a strong case of plentiphobia.


This phobia - given that humanity also supposedly welcomed modernization and wanted it to go faster and bigger - manifested itself in a complex way.

Western civilization now semi-consciously used the processes of modernization to reduce this plenitude - tidy and clean it up - perfect it and then freeze the result in place forever.

A few perfect chemical synthetics and plastics were to replace the vast variety of natural and imperfect materials we had traditionally used.

Against germs - a greatly hightened gospel of cleanliness.

Against plant and animal and insect pests - ditto.

Against immigrants - immigration controls and wholesale efforts to socialize those few that were admitted.

Against humans as imperfect as wood and wool and rock could be - culling out and purebreed breeding.

Plentiphobia in people who failed to graduate from university is called Fascism and Nazism.

While formal eugenics is just plentiphobia with a PhD ....

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 ...