The UNWANTED plentitude of gas warfare

To many of us who see 'death as death', it has always been un-obvious why coughing to death from WWI gas clouds was so much different than being hit in the guts out in No Man's Land and coughing your life away for a half an hour while your comrades are helpless to intervene.

A similar phobia existed against openly conducting warfare with radiation clouds or clouds of fire or germs.

Revulsion + Reductionism = Plenticide

Plenticide (eugenics, genocide, pesticides) : human civilization of the Modern era seems determined to get rid of all of its nearest and dearest , leaving just a tiny 'saving seed' of the most perfect and the purest of humanity to exist all alone in this vast lifeless Universe.

It just didn't make sense : for the more evidence that emerged that the universe was old, vast and empty the harder humanity, circa 1930, tried to eliminate most of what little life was confirmed to exist in the universe : that of Earth itself.

A Complicated Triumph

The terrible simplicities of scientific reductionism was the very mother's milk of  all the horrible 'terrible simplifiers' of High Modernity (1875-1965): starting with Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and crossing the water to their gentler and kinder Anglo-American opponents.

For none of the big political ideologies of Modernity at all rejected reductionist science or damned it with faint praise - instead they clasped it to their bosom and then claimed it formed the spiritual foundations of their peculiar faith.

COMPLEXITY based science from SIMPLICITY based science : the post 1945 shift

Eugenics, the central science of Modernity, was a form of Reductionism and Plenticide.

Eugenics was all about reducing the existing 'impurities' it felt were present in the gene pool : like all of Modernity's sciences, it thought reality - in this case represented by the gene pool - would work much better if only it was much simpler.

"The Last are sometimes First" : confounding Modernity's Terrible Simplifiers

Reduced (one of its characteristic terms) to an aphorism, Modernity is basically about believing that, in terms of intelligence and progress ,"the First (largest,newest, most complex) were always and inevitably First ".

And as the First, destined to succeed and endure.

(Also implying that the last are always and inevitably last and doomed to fail).

A simple - and terrible - and terribly wrong - scientific thesis.

"The Last May be First." Or Last. Or anything in between. It all depends.

Unparalleled horrific cruelties befell the world immediately before, during and after WWII .

That cruelty may best be explained as the result of educated, powerful humanity everywhere sincerely regretting all the small people being squashed by the big people, but also regarding it as the result of an inevitable "Law of Nature" --- just a regrettable part of Progress's ever upward march.

In other words, Scientism made them do it : 'it' being "being a bystander to schoolyard bullying and yet doing little or nothing".

Less than 4 years separate the world's fairs at Flushing Meadows and Woodstock ...

If 1965's world's fair at Flushing Meadows NY was everything the 1940 New York's World's Fair's "World of Tomorrow" had predicted, the same could hardly be said for the world's fair at Woodstock held less than four years later.

For its design style was far less Robert Moses and far more Scott Nearing.

So much so in fact that we are forced to ask just what on earth in 1940 could ever be said to have predicted Woodstock and the rise of a counterculture so diametrically opposed to everything that the 1965 World Fair had on offer ?

When the upward causation of 'invariably fatal' SBE meets the downward causation of Dawson's agape penicillin

Let us accept - for the sake of the argument - the unproven assumption that many kids could even get SBE disease out there in the Social Darwinists' belovedly savage "Nature" that existed before Christian compassion peed on their picnic.

AKA Modernity : the era of parsimonious plenticide , 1875-1965

The art of denial is not a new 21st century thing.

Denying human caused climate disaster, denying the Holocaust, Stalin's crimes, the existence of rape culture --- they are all but a few of the sub-sets of one way 'to deal' with 'overwhelming' dynamic complexity.

While to most of us , choice is good and more choice is better, many of us direct our entire existence around dealing with feelings of being overwhelmed by plentitude.

Why they feel so excessively this way (because we all feel overwhelmed by plentitude at times) is a mystery.

It may be due to a combination of unique body chemistry that handles stress badly and their parents (with similar body chemistry) being obsessed with dirt and order.

One of the most satisfying intellectual ways for them to deal with 'overwhelming' plentitude is to deny its very existence.

Its real - substantive - existence.

'Oh yes, the surface complexity is there all right - we shan't deny that.'

'But most of it is rubbish, useless, worthless, dirty, dangerous - and to claim that all of it is valuable is a form of false consciousness.'

'Once you properly separate out what is valuable, worthy , clean and stable and discard - eliminate/liquidate - the rest , life becomes much simpler and happier.'

Or so the plenticidial modernists claimed.

Modernity then was a great era for classification & then binning.

To its proponents, parsimonious plenticide was the best intellectual way to deal with the abundant scientific evidence that reality was much much more complex, older, wider, deeper than anyone had ever previously thought.

This fact was materially thrust in their faces every day by the effects of co-current globalization cum modernization - seemingly the planet and all its beings were daily arriving at the customs and immigration gates of their country.

So : normal vs deviant , normal vs degenerated, normal vs deformed, normal vs unfit , normal vs dirty - on and on the classifying and destruction went.

No gene pool was ever shallow enough for them - any and every gene pool could always do with a little more draining.

The surface rubbish was complex but the solution wasn't : a little quick painless culling by some super heroes (and super nations) dressed up in capes and tights and it would all be resolved.

One might think evolution and progress as having been invented expressly to allow a moral mechanism for killing off one's new neighbours with a clear conscience.

Yes the world is a plentitude , but of mostly also rans and a few winners and the also rans will be quietly liquidated after the results of the marathon have been announced.

Reductionism as parsimonious plenticide

In the physical sciences , reductionism was the parsimonious plenticide equivalent : claiming all reality could be reduced to the reliable and predictable assembling and re-assembling of a handful of atoms of a handful of elements , all obeying a handful of  knowable, simple, eternal and universal laws.

For this was the great age of Erector and Meccano sets - vividly expressing how parents and grandparents thought their young should view the world.

But Modernity's big problem would not go away - because reality is really and truly complex and dynamic - and everything science has discovered since 1875 renders this more not less so.

In our new era of global commensality we (most of we , anyhow) see the interconnectedness of everything on Earth : many ,many things and events all interacting with each other is some direct, some distantly indirect ways.

But many of us don't, still in denial that the era of modernity was wrong or that it has ended.

And this attitude is fueling - petro fueling - the destruction of this planet.

For on all of the world's Wall Streets, the Alpha Male 'Masters of the Universe' lead the way in denying that we can't really master the universe ....

Pace Schnaiberg : simplifying science vs complicating science

Canadian-born sociologist of Science Allan Schnailberg , in a seminal article from more than 40 years ago, explained-in-advance today's Science Wars , with his proposed division of scientists into those oriented to production and those oriented to studying the impact of that production.

So some scientists are content to merely dig up millions of tons of tar sands to produce oil and never ask what for , while other scientists spend their lives exploring the impact on the world of all that additional air carbon and waste water.

I want to modify his suggestion when I look into 19th century science and technology's paradoxical effects upon modernization and its evil counterpart, modernity.

Because I want to suggest that the random working-out, in all directions, of the collective effect of individual science and technology efforts, was to do two wildly different things at the same time.

One was to greatly advance humanity's simple control over apparent reality.

The other was to greatly reduce humanity's simple control over actual (complex) reality.

Steam ships, lighthouses, radio, radar (works of technology basically : production science) all seemed to make our  predictive control over ocean weather conditions far more assured.

But further weather research (basic science research, impact science) revealed just how complex ocean weather actually was and how unlikely it was that we could ever 100% predict the ocean weather , even three days ahead. 

Nineteenth Century science claimed it was well on the way to finding the one 'Theory of Everything', and soon science would be able to show (reduce) all reality to the effects that a few basic forces have on a few basic particles.

But even if you don't give a tinker's damn about science, ask yourself if there has been a news headline that suggests that science has newly discovered less, rather than more ?

Never, never never : trust me.

The earth is older than thought, as is the universe - which is also much bigger than expected and rapidly expanding. More and more species are always being found, living in more and more extreme environs and Life's start is constantly is being pushed back.

More elements, more isotopes , more basic sub- atomic particles.

More interactions, more complexity, more chaos theory.

Very, very, rarely is ever revealed  that only one faulty gene can cause a disease - it always seems to be the interacting of thirty genes that may or may not give us a statistical greater chance of having that disease.

Ever better instrumentation and more serious research projects focussed on highly particular questions has revealed ,again and again ,that the surface simplicity of reality is false.

So our incomplete knowledge of reality is indeed a dangerous thing ---- as it always seems to feed our ready tendency to technological hubris.

Let us get concrete for a minute : and think about what 19th century fingerprinting was really doing for us.

Yes, it offered us simple control over reality by determining which criminal was actually at the crime scene (hurrah !) but only by suggesting this unexpected complexity about reality : that every human that ever existed has unique fingerprints.

In fact, like snowflakes, fingerprints should have reminded us that universal random thermal noise ensures that everything in reality - from living clones to pure mineral crystals  - is , and must be, subtly different ... if only we look close enough.

Linear and reality live on separate universes : because everything in our universe vibrates randomly and constantly and so zig-zags itself to every new chemical combination at its own unique pace.

Identical twins start off life with the exact same instructions of growth, but within seconds are subtly different as the carefully timed iterations when genes get turned off and on are subtly smeared by the random effects of thermal noise speeding or delaying each competing process.

May I suggest that the Enlightenment Project made a simple but fundamental error in thinking that knowing more about reality was the same as offering up more control over reality ?

Because what really had to be decided was this : was reality simpler than it looked or was it more complex than it looked?

A truly open mind, a mind agape - like that of Henry Dawson - would look to see what the evidence revealed before deciding.

But the utopian (unconsciously fearful of loss of control ?) minds of most Modernist scientists (I am thinking here particularly of the progressive scientist Einstein and fascist scientist Hitler) went into the question already convinced, in advance of any evidence, that reality was simpler than it looked.

Knowing that a person is utopian (ie, believes it is even possible to attempt to plan and micromanage social and economic reality) really tells us very little about their politics, but it tells us a great deal about their physics .

Because they must believe that physical (and above it social) reality is so fundamentally simple and predictable that it is possible to set forth an economic Five Year Plan for an entire nation without worrying that we might fail to foresee a possible earthquake, volcano, hurricane or meter crash .

Let alone considering that a possible war, drought, epidemic or social revolution might make their five year planning goals unobtainable.

Most utopians in fact seek a 'one world government' so confident are they that a few skilled technicians can successfully micro-manage an entire world for years in advance.

So 'simplifying science' is fundamentally utopian while 'complicating science' is fundamentally anti-utopian : hard to avoid a 'science war' with those opposing world-views facing off.

This is why I propose to 'prism' the WWII Florey-Dawson conflict over wartime penicillin development as an early example of a battle in a 'science war' between simplifying and complicating views on ultimate reality.

An enormous 'science war' happening beneath the better known but much smaller military war...

"Family" just means you can't divorce your mother or brother like you can your spouse or business partner...

I don't want to imply some lovey-dovey view of reality when I say all life is family.

After all, us humans and the lions both want to kill and eat baby lambies, not lie down together with them.

I mean instead, for example,  that we can't divorce the trillions of microbes that live in and on each of us and are in a very real sense, a muddled-up part of us.

Reductionism ,that shared intellectual bond between Hitler and Einstein, simply fails to work as a metaphor of how the world is built up ---- as opposed as to how it looks when we tear it down...

The "3 Rs" of Modernist Science : Reductionism, Reification ...and Reality

Reality, in the common sense cum positivist meaning of that word, is what was usually missing from modernist science and the modernist era : its vast missing middle.

At the top, Reification and Biology had created something called "The Jewish Race" but you couldn't actually touch or taste it or definitely define it.

But if it did exist, at the bottom all its members could certainly be reduced to nothing more than the multiples of then tiniest known bits of mass and energy : protons, electrons and neutrons.

Chemistry and Physics told us so.

(Not that you could see those sub atomic objects either.)

But what was missing was something or someone you could actually see and touch.

The missing bits in the middle , in the day to day reality where we humans touch see hear and taste things.

Missing from all of modernist science was a someone you could accurately define the concrete limits of.

Say an actual individual "Jew" , as vaguely defined within the nebulous concept of "The Jewish Race".

Someone like the real Erin Green : born Aaron Green in East London, named after his father who was raised as an active member of the Jewish religious faith back in his native Poland.

But as an adult, Aaron senior became non-religious, particularly after he met an Irish-born woman raised as a church-going Catholic. She too became non-religious after she married Aaron senior.

Their son, Aaron junior changed his name, as an adult, to Erin as a sort of oral pun honouring both his mother's and father's heritage.

Now he is living in occupied France in 1941, after having met and married a French woman, of traditional French atheist background, while on holiday in Nice.

Suddenly the Germans arrest him, his wife and their children as being "members of the Jewish Race" and start sending them forward on a trip to the fatal showers.

The Nazis at least agreed with many legislatures of the American South in not knowing any arithmetic.

They lined up to defy reality and realism by claiming that far less than 1% of your genome was more potent than the other 99.99% of your genome in defining your origins.

In other words, that tails wag dogs, not the other way around.

"Just one drop of black or jewish blood defines you forever as Negro or Jewish".

Whatever if any 'race' that Erin's children belonged to,  it was the mixed up, muddled up human race : but then Reality is like that.

Modernist science is simple ;  Modernist reality is not...

Dawson's commensality supplies Modernity's "Missing Middle"

Seventy five years on, WWII (conventionally 1939-1945 but actually lasting much longer) looks like nothing more than two great grist stones, Reification and Reductionism, relentlessly grinding up all humanity between them .

For example, the Axis reified a scientific claim that humanity could be accurately divided into being either members or non-members of a concretely actual Aryan Race --- and then set out to eliminate all the non members.

The Allies, equally guilty, chose to worship at a scientific temple that claimed the reduction of all human complexity to the view we are but simple aggregates of tiny indivisible protons and electrons.

Neither claim can stand up to a probing examination - then or now.

But in fact, those claims weren't generally contested seventy five years ago.

However one scientist, Henry Dawson, while paddling in his quiet backwater of the study of human-bacterial commensality, implicitly seemed to offer up an extremely muted scientific critique of these two complementary explanations of Reality.

No wonder his view was ignored.

However he persisted because it did seem that these two complementary explanations - one encompassing the very biggest things in reality and the other covering the very small entities in reality - left out the vast middle of reality.

And that is the very place where all life (and most matter and energy) actually 'lives' .

The key concept in commensality ("the dining together of all life, big and small, at a common table") is that tiny but vital connector :  AND  .

Commensality re-unites what reductionism and reification divides.

Commensal Penicillin : the saving of the lives of 1A soldiers AND  4F civilians , on both sides of the war

But it was not until he put his ideas on commensality into practise, as he confounded the Allied plan to weaponize wartime penicillin, that commensality began to have an actual impact on the thoughts of scientists and the general population.

For in science, as in life generally, words - even peer-reviewed published words - don't always speak louder than actions....

Between PROGRESS and PROTONS : "The Missing Middle" , where we actually live

Thirties Reductionism said that once scientists knew the behavior of one of the Protons that made up Winston Churchill's body (and multiplied it by a trillion trillion trillion identical protons), they could then predict Churchill's behavior over the 1936 Abdication Crisis.

Thirties Reification said that Human Progress is real and concrete and since it was so clearly evident that Human Progress 'wants to get ever bigger and bigger',then dividing Human Progress up into the two billion individual people that existed in the world in 1939, would allow us to predict that particular individual Scott Nearing would also approve of things getting ever bigger.

But in fact he became famous for disagreeing bigger is better.

The average behavior of heterogeneous aggregates does not let us predict the behavior of an individual human being , anymore than than the behavior of  individual proton helps us predict the average behavior of  a heterogeneous aggregate.

Heterogeneous , because Churchill was not a vast crystal of trillions upon trillions of undifferentiated protons but rather a very  stratified collection of protons in a great variety of differently-sized and differently-arranged components that led each component to very unexpectedly different behavior.

And Human Progress had no protons, or even human individuals, within it, because it was simply an abstract idea rather a concrete physical object.

What most Thirties intellectual thought was desperately missing was in giving adequate attention to the vast "Missing Middle" between Protons and Progress, because inside that "Missing Middle" lies the life we actually live, including our twin delusions of reductionism and reification.

However, I believe that the prism of Commensality does allow us to re-capture that "Missing Middle" , and thus allows us to better understand Thirties intellectual thought's sad grandchild, WWII .....

Must Progress inevitably get mightier and wiser ?

During the truly horrible and nasty 1930s and early 1940s, at the apogee of Reductionist Modernity, this idea was the overall global "meta-ideology".

So powerful a meta-ideology that it actually dominated all the ideologies we then took to be widely apart in their worldviews.

Minor variant ideologies we still call fascist/nazi style nationalism , communism, and mixed socialist/capitalist liberal democracy.

Hydro dams and buildings of all sorts, from all ideology zones, got bigger, wider, taller, heavier --- planes and ships and land vehicles got steadily bigger, faster, longer, more long-lunged : mightier.

Streamlined, smooth,sleek, aerodynamic : more athlete-like, more bullet-like.

Fit, very fit.

Business, government and military bureaucracies, from all ideology zones, got bigger and more complex with a lot more specialized and professional subsections : wiser.

During the Great Depression, the idea that Big is Good and Bigger is even Better temporarily replaced even the claim that Greed is Good.

Was this true ?

At least one prominent scientist didn't think so and wrote a popular-styled essay to demonstrate the limits to the idea that bigger was always and inevitably better.

Google "haldane" and "size" and there it pops up, as truly profound and as eye-opening as ever : a still-useful essay on science that was written more than 85 years ago !

This, despite the best possible definition of a professional scientist being 'someone who wouldn't be caught dead reading a science article in their field that is more than eight and half months old' .

Nevertheless, you and I are not science "pros" and we'll read anything useful : J B S Haldane , "On Being The Right Size".

If you are worried at all that our globe is hurling towards an environmental disaster that will make WWII look like pikers, then please, please read this essay.

You'll need it as you fight the DENIERS, who deny there are any limits on the size of a problem that Man's mental powers can beat.....

WWII : Constructionists vs Commensalists

Reductionism, still the philosophy of today's Popular Science, has admittedly had a lot of glass-half-filled success in the last few centuries.

It has totally succeeded in burrowing down below the surface of reality to the tiny objects at the base of all energy and matter ; reducing big macro objects that we can directly see and touch down to zillions of incredibly tiny objects we can only assume exists by way of indirect evidence.

But while Reductionism can explain how these tiny objects interact, more or less, it has totally failed to fulfill the real purpose behind all of its efforts : to construct new , better-built, versions of macro reality based on what we have learned about the tiny building blocks that make it up.

It turns out, to use today's Net jargon, that the so called laws of physics do not actually 'scale up' ( or 'scale down') all that well.

What we know about tiny quarks does not help us at all to account for the unexpected behavior of slightly bigger objects like the atoms in various phases of condensed matter, such as in solids and liquids for example.

To use a life-sized example of another scientific failure to scale up, this one from WWII logistics, we need only to look at the total failure of the German fuel truck on the Russian Front, after doing so well in Poland and France.

A sturdy army truck like the famous American deuce and a half can go pretty well everywhere a railway can't and so is the best means to get fuel to a fast moving invading armoured army.

But it burns a whole lot of fuel itself to get its few tons of fuel to the front.

But over distances of about one hundred miles from end of rail, it still is the best single way to get fuel to tracked armoured vehicles well out ahead of the slower ,wider, line of rail-supported advance.

But move the distance required to be travelled up to 800 miles out (and remember 800 more miles back in to get more tank and truck fuel) and the truck is a flop and a disaster.

Any truck trying to move up behind an aggressively invading armoured army that has been fighting an equally determined enemy , one who leaves nothing but scorched earth behind, is sure to be travelling over miles of badly damaged, badly overcrowded, muddy or dusty potholed roads and bridges.

The truck's gas and oil consumption soars as its miles per hour slows to a crawl. It can expect major damages from bad roads at least a few times on its 800 mile trek out and back - requiring the services of equally gas-guzzling repair vehicles.

Effectively, the truck is soon consuming more petro products on its two way trek than it can deliver to the tanks. (Remember, it must haul all of its own fuel and oil on itself, for the trip out and back, leaving ever less room for tank fuel.)

This wouldn't happen in peacetime, where the roads between Berlin and Moscow would be in excellent, fuel efficient, shape and where fuel and oil can be picked up at filling stations on route as required.

Once the cargo was delivered to Moscow, a return cargo is picked up to take back, to cover costs.

But war trucks 'dead-head' back, unless they can be used to safely carry lightly wounded men back to rear base hospitals.

Hitler's gambit to take over the world failed in 1941 when his physics of truck transport failed to 'scale up' to the world of real life.

Similarly the fact that chemistry had constructed totally new molecules of dyes and plastics out of little atoms didn't mean human chemists could construct molecules of penicillin just because the fungi could do so naturally.

Penicillin's formula was not the formula for nylon, 'scaled up'.

In biology, the ham-fisted efforts of human-sized geneticists to construct genes they wanted by massive doses of x-rays failed to work as well as the elegant way the tiny bacteria transformed each other with tiny but efficient HGT (horizontal gene transfers).

I am not dismissing the value of human railways and human chemical plants nor do I expect to see skyscrapers made by bacteria : I just insist along with (Martin) Henry Dawson, that there is a niche for everyone and we all are best at activities scaled to our own size and niche.

Reality can not be reduced to tenured human particle physicists at the top and quarks at the bottom (Reality reduced to Professors and Plasma),  with all of the rest of the stuff in between just useless feeders, not wanted on the voyage, yesterday's booster stages, enroute in Man's journey to the stars.....

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.......