In the Fall of 1940, Dr Henry Dawson felt the Allies needed to enlist the widest possible diversity of humans and nature, if they were going to win the ideological and military war against the then very attractive* ideologies and very formidable armies of the Fascists + Nazis + Communists and their fellow travelling ilk.
(* See Anne Morrow Lindbergh's October 1940 bestseller, Wave of the Future, for proof of that claim.)
For in late 1940, the German-led coalition really included not just Germany itself together with Italy, Japan and Russia but also had silent supporters and fellow travellers in many nominally neutral fascist-leaning countries in Europe, South America and elsewhere.
Showing posts with label fascist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fascist. Show all posts
Monday, September 7, 2015
Saturday, April 11, 2015
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.
To the extent that any of us know of Dawson's wartime efforts or recall Lindbergh's horrible book, we would all universally applaud him and disdain her.
That is because 'we are all Dawsonites nowadays', to adapt future King Edward VIII's famous 1895 quip.
Lindbergh argued that the entire 1940 world was at truly 'at war' , but intellectually, not militarily.
At war intellectually but not in the expected sense of capitalism versus nazism and communism.
No, it was a war between the ancient (small) staid past and a bold dynamic new (big) future ---- with the future to inevitably win.
Overlook, Lindbergh urged readers, overlook the small temporary horrors currently being inflicted on small countries like Belgium, Denmark and Latvia as they were overrun by their giant neighbours while neutrals like America just watched.
See the big picture, instead, as from Laplacian heights.
All this mere temporary pain and horror was but the inevitable consequence of rigid jaw flesh was being broken through for the first time by emerging baby teeth.
WWII reduced to a baby's temporary teething problem.
The bigger and the newer was always better - evolutionary progress was on the side of the ever bigger battalions : the dogma of Lindbergh's Edwardian era high school science teachers.
But Dawson had uncovered evidence that reality didn't always work that way.
Yes, on some measures, the last were last - but on others they were first - and everything in between, depending on the attribute being measured.
Dawson's compassion having been given wings by his new science, he resolved to use the wisdom of the microbial last to give history's first life-saving injections of penicillin - to save some members of the last in human society.
A gentle, but firm, rebuke to the Anne Morrow Lindberghs of his world.
The unofficial Allied plan had been to first synthesize penicillin 100% pure and then patent it, to make it so expensive that only the peacetime rich could afford it.
But meanwhile, during wartime, to underproduce it and thus justify the giving of it to only the moderately infected among the Allied frontline troops - so as they may more quickly return to battle, instead of their stay-at-home neighbours.
Dawson thought that naturally grown, semi-purified, penicillin would cure just as well and was available much quicker and much much cheaper --- available for all in need of it.
He wanted all in that heartless unforgiving wartime world - the last as well as the first, the 'unfit' as well as the 'fit', enemy as well as friend - to have cheap abundant penicillin, if it alone could save them from needless death from the infections it could stop.
And so it was thus - his small wave of the future, rather than Lindbergh's big wave, became our present : Obamacare is hardly what the President and medicine-for-all advocates wanted, but it is a good start ...
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.
To the extent that any of us know of Dawson's wartime efforts or recall Lindbergh's horrible book, we would all universally applaud him and disdain her.
That is because 'we are all Dawsonites nowadays', to adapt future King Edward VIII's famous 1895 quip.
Anne Lindbergh writes off the small and the weak
Lindbergh argued that the entire 1940 world was at truly 'at war' , but intellectually, not militarily.
At war intellectually but not in the expected sense of capitalism versus nazism and communism.
No, it was a war between the ancient (small) staid past and a bold dynamic new (big) future ---- with the future to inevitably win.
Overlook, Lindbergh urged readers, overlook the small temporary horrors currently being inflicted on small countries like Belgium, Denmark and Latvia as they were overrun by their giant neighbours while neutrals like America just watched.
See the big picture, instead, as from Laplacian heights.
All this mere temporary pain and horror was but the inevitable consequence of rigid jaw flesh was being broken through for the first time by emerging baby teeth.
WWII reduced to a baby's temporary teething problem.
The bigger and the newer was always better - evolutionary progress was on the side of the ever bigger battalions : the dogma of Lindbergh's Edwardian era high school science teachers.
In the long run, more accurate science chases out less accurate science
But Dawson had uncovered evidence that reality didn't always work that way.
Yes, on some measures, the last were last - but on others they were first - and everything in between, depending on the attribute being measured.
Dawson's compassion having been given wings by his new science, he resolved to use the wisdom of the microbial last to give history's first life-saving injections of penicillin - to save some members of the last in human society.
A gentle, but firm, rebuke to the Anne Morrow Lindberghs of his world.
Originally, Allied wartime penicillin intended only for the first, not the last
The unofficial Allied plan had been to first synthesize penicillin 100% pure and then patent it, to make it so expensive that only the peacetime rich could afford it.
But meanwhile, during wartime, to underproduce it and thus justify the giving of it to only the moderately infected among the Allied frontline troops - so as they may more quickly return to battle, instead of their stay-at-home neighbours.
Dawson thought that naturally grown, semi-purified, penicillin would cure just as well and was available much quicker and much much cheaper --- available for all in need of it.
He wanted all in that heartless unforgiving wartime world - the last as well as the first, the 'unfit' as well as the 'fit', enemy as well as friend - to have cheap abundant penicillin, if it alone could save them from needless death from the infections it could stop.
And so it was thus - his small wave of the future, rather than Lindbergh's big wave, became our present : Obamacare is hardly what the President and medicine-for-all advocates wanted, but it is a good start ...
Thursday, November 13, 2014
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....
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....
Thursday, July 3, 2014
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 ....
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 ....
Friday, March 29, 2013
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 ...
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 ...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)