Commensal Modernization vs Pure Modernity

The Second Industrial Revolution in steel, concrete, electricity, chemicals ,which lasted from about the 1870s to the 1960s ,led to a worldwide process called modernization.

Its key characteristic was a greatly increased intermingling of foreign human beings and their cultural objects (tangible and intangible) into every country on earth , with vast numbers of everything coming in and over supposedly sacrosanct national borders with greatly increased velocity.

Another word for the intimate co-mingling of small and big, willy nilly, is commensality (in the controversial sense in which biologists use this ancient concept).

Tourists, immigrants, ideas, ideologies, artists, manufactured goods - they poured in and out , at such a great speed and in such great numbers , that everyone felt at least a little overwhelmed.

More, faster and deeply intermingled : that was the impression the effects of modernization had on the first generations impacted by its initial stirrings.

Others felt a great deal overwhelmed indeed and not a little threatened : they were usually each nation's traditional elites, using to having their say pass unquestioned.

Now new competitors were threatening their hegemony and the national elites had both time, money and control of the key academic and media centres of influence to successfully fight back : fight back ideologically.

Today we call their counter attack on the commensality of modernization "Modernity", but they themselves never did.

They probably tended to regard their ideas as simply matter-of-fact ideas about Progress , Science and Modern times.

They certainly went to their graves not aware that their supposedly up-to-the-minute modern ideas were really a rearguard reaction against modern reality.

Because they claimed to be truly modern was to see stability, gradualism, simplicity, purity, the few and the big as what was found in Nature.

And moderns should seek and desire the same in Human culture to be truly happy and prosperous.

All this - and more in their ideological repertoire - could be reduced (itself a favourite modern term !) to the claim that reality is basically stable and simple.

A pure substance has fewer ingredients - it is simple.

For a given amount of anything - say the potential biomass on Earth - the bigger the portions it is made up of, the fewer there are of them - fewer is also simpler to keep an eye on.

And big things, by their size and complexity are less likely to move easily or move quickly.

If they move, they move gradually and slowly. Slow change is also simpler to keep an eye on.

And big things are hardly invisible and hardly capable of sneaking in below the radar are they ?

Reductionism, another core value of Modernity, is the claim that matter is all made up of a very few fixed building blocks and with them you can build up everything from a simple molecule to an entire Universe , just like Lego by simply adding more and more and more blocks.

Purity meant no co-mingling of human loins either : being called a half breed was about the worst epithet in the modernist lexicon.

They liked things big, clearly visible, few, simple, pure, slow moving , unchanging ; they hated things that were tiny (and thus "many") , fast moving, invisible, fast changing, flexible, mixed and complex, things mixing in other people's space without their permission or even them being aware of it.

What they disliked sounds like a textbook description of germs , particularly commensal germs, and Germ Theory.

No wonder then that everything human the Moderns tended to hate and fear and demonize they choose to call human germs or an equivalent words like human virus, bacilli or pathogen.

WWII, Modernity's own war , was all about the big picking upon and fearing, the small.

This war upon the small was not incidental to the main action of WWII --- it was the main action.

Now you know what Henry Dawson was up against in his wartime penicillin efforts to defend the small against the big......

From the sublime to the subliminal : from fearing panthers to fearing pathogens

If you are an economic, scientific and military superpower as  American, British , Germany and Japanese imagined themselves to be in the 1930s, who could you realistically fear and blame for all your problems ?

And how can you turn tiny neighbouring nations into fearsome enemies, so as to morally justify your invasion and enslavement of their lands and people in the name of pious self-defense ?

You couldn't seriously fear any nation, even one as big as 1930s Russia surely ?

Is to laugh !

But Communism ? Yes, oh yes : directed by the Russians but operating within every modern nation- invisibly - "Die Morder sind unter uns" indeed.

Equally small, mobile and invisible invisible were the Jews found in every modern country as well.

The peoples of modern superpowers no longer feared any awesomely sublime enemies : no longer feared big panthers, wolves, tigers.

Didn't fear big hurricanes, droughts, famines.

Didn't fear big earthquakes and volcanoes.

Didn't fear big God or his alter ego , the big Devil.

Feared no Deity or Nation; feared not Sublime (large) Nature.

This lack of fear of anything awesome and sublime, this lack of credible eternal enemies and internal scapegoats had become  a widespread problem in the decades between 1870 and 1890.

Conveniently then, when that old warhorse ,The Germ Theory, was offered up for the umpteenth time it was not instantly rejected as was the norm.

Instead, grateful elites worldwide fell upon it like onto a life raft after a shipwreck.

No longer was the Russian wolf pack at the Aryan gate : no longer was the feared enemy big and thus highly visible and intent on a clearly signalled frontal attack.

Now the new enemy was so small and weak as to be virtually invisible.

In fact, precisely because they were so invisible and appeared to be so weak and harmless, they were all the more effective as a secretive Fifth Column inside our walls - a commensal enemy, living ! here ! among ! us !

Throughout history it is clear that it has always been extremely safe for people to blame everything on very big powerful but also very external enemies (gods, earthquakes) : enemies that usefully don't own powerful big local businesses or form massive voting blocs.

Even more popular - because this time you actually get to publicly execute those you wish to blame for everything  - are minorities among you of the poor, powerless and disliked (minorities of the rich, powerful and disliked needn't apply).

While it is easy to blame somebody obviously big and powerful , like a god, for big disasters , it gets much harder to blame the small and the weak ,particularly when they are also few in number.

You must convert the weak into local agents of someone external and powerful : so elderly impoverished spinsters, with no powerful human local friends, are burned alive as witch-agents of the external Big Ole Devil.

Tiny poor minorities of Jews are converted into agents of Wall Street capital or (and or) (and) Moscow communism.

As they were earlier persecuted for being agents of the Devil.

Now the awesome power of the Devil and his witches was a fact proven by the Church's greatest Doctors back in the days when Theology ruled .

They had just been unproved.

Now Pasteur and Koch had recently proved , as a scientific fact in a scientific age, that it was instead invisible germs that killed working class people - rather than them dying because of witches or because they were worn down by doing too much work with too poor amounts of food , heat and shelter.

So it was once again credible that beings small and weak and few could overcome the big and mighty and many.

Now impoverished rural Polish Jews couldn't be realistically be presented as a military or economic threat.

But if they married or even just had close prolonged contact with Aryans, it was claimed that these few Jews could spread their poisonous racial values like a highly contagious germ into the Aryan bloodstream, just as a few original germs can bring down a mighty nation in an epidemic.

Germs do really exist - and witches really do fly on a broomstick   in fairy tales.

But it is a unproven metaphorical leap to claim as a fact that some humans are not merely like germs or witches but actually are germs and are witches.

But this was not a error made only by Nazis and Germans : most of the smartest  people in the world in the Modern Era made this leap from metaphor of rhetoric to quasi-scientific fact....
<

Birth of Modernity ?

Modernity was born the moment most of the educated West replaced a belief in the Theory of the Sublime with a belief in the Theory of the Germ , ie an event that occurred in the broadly defined '1880s'.


The Theory of the Sublime explains why humans fear - and should fear - only the awesomely big : God, the devil, earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, lions, tigers, et al.

But after the advent of Darwin, Lyell, steam power, high explosives and the Higher Criticism, who could fear any of these ?

Still, when things go wrong - as they often do - who then to blame ?

Can't blame ourselves, could we ?

Conveniently, a bizarre theory emerged from Pasteur in France about the same time, suggesting that an invisible Fifth Column of tiny, weak creatures, most even incapable of basic movement , could nevertheless fell the biggest and smartest of beings with ease.

Think of Germs being a sort of Anti-Sublimity and you're on the right track.

No longer were our enemies big, external and highly visible, (first declaring war forthrightly, then pouring over the border to line up en masse in their bright red uniforms on a sunny daytime battlefield).

Instead germs , like biological franc-tireurs, shot their toxin bullets, - in our backs - at night, out of uniform, from behind fences.

Bacteria are nothing but tiny, weak, poor beings you sentimentalists say ?

No, no, a thousand times no !

They are unsporting guerillas and biological bomb-throwing anarchist terrorists.

War without mercy then upon our minorities of the weak and the small - for they are humanity's one true remaining enemy .....

Eugenics vs the Germ of Genius

What Popular eugenics in practise what its chief proponents consciously said it was ?

Or was its popularity due to its ability to address subconscious concerns its fans could not admit to consciously ?

It takes very little knowledge to realize that Popular eugenics presents a very oddly conflicted front face indeed.


Its most avid proponents were not among those at the very top of western society, nor those in the bottom either. It can't really be said they were found evenly scattered among those people in the middle either.

Instead its chief supporters were found those mostly highly educated - those highly educated judged in the formal sense, ie those certified so by those authorities conventionally accepted as being capable of doing so.

(Its support among autodidacts was never notably strong.)

So here we have the best educated members of society: well paid, well feed, healthy, socially powerful, etc --- terrified.

Terrified, beyond measure, by those were are uneducated, often deemed un-able to be educated (intellectually challenged as we say today) , in congenital ill health, poor, powerless.

Why would the powerful, a large majority in their society, be so fearful of those so powerless, a small minority in that same society.

The imbalance between the potency of the alleged threat and the fear it generated is hard for us to fathom today, particularly as this
irrational fear was strongest - not weakest - among those in society judged the most rational because they were most educated.

Ah - educated : the key to this puzzle.

It is not surprising that the least educated people also had the least power and income.

But it did not in fact follow that the wealthiest and most powerful people in the Modern Era (1885-1965) were also the most educated.

The best educated often held middle high positions : being doctors, scientists and professors rather than being the captains of industry and the prime ministers.

They were the highly educated and the competent rather than the inspired : few 'self made men' were among the leading proponents of Eugenics and popular eugenics.

Few famous entrepreneurs or inventors, few acclaimed writers,artists, performers and athletes, few untutored geniuses.

Few geniuses indeed.

For sheer genius : raw and untutored , able to arise anywhere among any family, was what these expensively educated but highly ordinary children and grandchildren of extraordinary fathers/grandfathers feared most.

Genius always threatens those in comfortable sinecures , secured through a long and expensive education and family connections rather than through sheer merit and talent.

Genius is just another word for the general principle of social mobility and advancement based on talent and merit.

After the first British Reform Bill's stormy passage in the 1830s, few in western society could openly support the idea that the job of a top ranking civil servant or general was the actual legal property of his family forever, regardless of whether his children and grandchildren was up for the job.

The idea of the nominal aristocracy lived on - one's children could go on being called Earl this or Viscount that, but the real power in the idea of an aristocracy was gone with this loss of an automatic right to dad's job as well as his mere title.

New aristocrats are , at the moment of their creation, always creatures of the merit principle : even the ability to buy a title for two million 1918 circa pounds speaks to an extraordinary ability to make an awful lot of money.

But often their children and grandchildren a very mixed bag.

Despite all the advantages that great wealth and privilege, together with a good education and good health, can bring , a few children are useless drones, most are merely well educated competents and a few are extraordinarily brilliant.

It is the same in all families rich or poor, at least potentially at date of birth: genius is born, at random, and not created through expensive education.

Popular eugenics denied this, claimed that the children of geniuses are geniuses and the children of village idiots were themselves idiots.

Forever and ever : it was fixed eternally in their genes.

But why then were Popular eugenics proponents so stuck on enforcing quotas to keep negroes, jews, women, catholics and immigrants out of universities like Harvard ?

Surely, by the eugenicists' own gene-fixated take on reality, these 'unfit' races of people shouldn't be able to get out of elementary school, let alone crowd the admission channels into top universities like Harvard .

But I claim, that at least unconsciously, these eugenicists really knew that talent and genius flourished anywhere and everywhere, essentially randoml.

Thus the poor negroes and poor South Boston catholics who did manage to make it into Harvard based on their marks and hard work were probably very formidable competitors indeed for those cushy sinecures these 'merely competent' Protestant scions had along taken to belong to them alone.

For professional jobs in the public service, and at non profit agencies like hospitals and teaching jobs in universities and high schools were the natural home of the 'merely competent' , 'merely ordinary', the base of the eugenicist movement.

But native born skilled tradesmen feeling threatened by hard working, more highly skilled , foreign tradesmen also filled the ranks.

Even unskilled anglo american 'white trash' might feel threatened that they would lose their dangerous, low paying jobs to negroes willing to do it for even lower wages and under even less safe conditions.

Those who realize that they are only ordinarily competent (and thus seek only the certainty of a comfortable work environment and a slow but steady career advancement) are always fearful of competitors who are more talented and more hard working .

But in the Modern Era, with its public ethos of a meritocracy, it was no longer possible to publicly say so.

Here the brand new Germ Theory came to the rescue.

Because if God was dead, so was the Devil. And Charles Lyell had proven that the formerly awesome natural catastrophes were but  local ,temporary and infrequent, ie manageable disasters.

High powered, accurately rifled, rapid repeater guns had put even the largest wild beasts on the endangered species list.

The sublime had been vanquished by Modernity - so where did evil and danger now exist in the world, to blame and thus explain away our own mistakes ?

The Germ Theory usefully claimed that things that were invisible, in fact invisibly tiny and weak, were like an internal Fifth Column able to easily destroy our health from within.

This metaphor allowed the biggest and strongest elephant tribe to credibly claim that a single baby mouse, weak  and thin from hunger, could nevertheless destroy them all.

People like the American Foster Kennedy or the German Adolf Hitler used the new Germ Theory to credibly claim that even a single handicapped baby must be killed because of the sheer threat it posed to the strongest of nations and races .

Potential competitors - geniuses or just merely extraordinary individuals rising far up the social scale on sheer merit could be usefully kept down, by the process of claiming that all the poorer classes were totally incapable of having talent - based on their genes, while all the well off had to have talent - based upon their genes.

Seeing the new theory of popular eugenics  as a lateral counter-attack on the equally new meritocracy principle can be a useful prism to explain the entire thrust of Modernity as a counter-attack on the processes of the Modern Era ....