Harry Lime : the man who watered the babies' "P"

The Third Man is a very well made, very well cast and very well acted movie.

But that alone is not enough to put it into everybody's top ten movies of all time.

For it also has gravitas, in spades.

It deals, quite seriously, with possibly the ultimate form of evil in our post-Auschwitz world : cold-bloodedly killing innocent little children.

The course of WWII : from fungophobia to fungomania ?

Hitler's Nazis described all the Jews as being a fungoid growth, a poisoned mushroom, and said the next war would see either the death of all the Jews or the death of all human civilization.

And Zyklon B was to be their fungicide of choice.

The Nazi's use of metaphors about fungoid growths spreading their invisible threads through national bodies, of slimy smelly molds found only in dark dank decaying places, and evil and deadly 'devil's fruit' mushrooming up everywhere overnight was not at all unusual for that inter-war era.

HP Lovecraft, as well as a host of otherwise ordinary writers, easily outdid the Nazis in their vivid descriptions of the ultimate evil as being fungoid in character.

And in 1945, when atomic bomb explosion clouds first emerged looking at least as much like cauliflowers as mushrooms - guess what species got overwhelmingly picked to describe this horrible new weapon of war ?

There was no doubt that fungophobia was the in-house mental illness for of all western civilization, be it Allied, Axis or Neutral.

All the more paradoxical then --- in the full G K Chesterton sense of that term --- that WWII also ended with much of the world in the throes of fungomania.

All over a small, smelly, slimy, blue green smear, a common household pest, that gave suffering humanity its best ever lifesaver : penicillin.

Ironic, isn't it ?

What if penicillin was a Paradox, rather than a miracle ?

Google penicillin + miracle together and you get over a third of a million references, in English alone.

So wartime penicillin was clearly one of God's miracles, n'est c'est pas ?

But what if it was one of God's paradoxes instead ?

We all recall how much GK Chesterton loved to talk about God's paradoxes and how freely he added many of his own.

Adolf Hitler love to 'talk' too - rants usually.

All too often about how Jews were fungoid growths and fungus ferments.

Adolf and German right wing culture of his era generally all had a real mania for seeing Jews as literally being cultural fungus pathogens bent dissolving the German organic society.

During WWII, the Nazis saw the entire war as being about a fungoid growth taking the world by storm ---- with the Aryan race resisting it all the way, in a case of it being either them or us.

That proved to be the case, because in 1945, the Nazi Aryan vision was totally defeated and penicillin did indeed take the entire world by storm....

"Isn't it ironic," sings Alanis M.....

Hitler's "Symmetry of Progress" : good Aryans at the top triumph only if evil Jews baccilli at bottom are defeated

One wonders if Hitler's Nazis had succeeded and had eliminated every last Jewish-communist-international banker on Earth, just who then would they blame for their problems ?

The Nazis would have kept on killing the 'unfit' until the end of time, but they never credited any of the 'unfit' with being the invisible and super-smart enemy that so hobbled the Aryan Race.

The defectives were just inept and so life unworthy of life --- the Jews were only life unworthy of life because they were so adept at exercising pure evil.

Like Man-oriented Progress in general, with its real life microbes at the bottom of life, Hitler's Hyped-up idea of Progress desperately needed something totally bad and useless at the bottom to contrast with (and hence confirm) the relative good and useless humans at the top.

This ultra high valuation of math-based concepts of symmetry over the joyous yet messy diversity of actual reality is yet another evil sin Hitler got from the theoretical physicists ---- the reason why he and Einstein had much more in common than either was willing to admit...

Hitler & Einstein Agreeing

Einstein, like most theoretical physicists throughout history, wanted everything in the Universe to 'fit in', their utopia being a simple unalterable Theory of Everything.

Much more modest, but inspired by the physicists, Hitler saw Germany - and perhaps eventually the world - as a sort of utopian High School where everybody 'fit in'.

Their shared world had no place for the uncool and awkward datum or being .....

Hitler searched for "THE" human genome

Remember the delusion behind the search for the essence of the human genome ?

The delusion that there was in fact just ONE human genome ?

Allowing, of course, for a few deviants and defectives and deficients ---that advanced (eu) genetic engineering would quickly excise away, once and for all time.

(Another delusion by the way.)

The fact is, just as ancient religious texts always proclaimed and mothers have always noted, we are all different, all unique individuals.

Even in vastness of the three billion year old world of the bacteria, there has never been two exact clones.

We are all different - albeit often in too subtle ways to be noted by very important men (James Watson ?) cursively glancing at us from the Olympian heights of Vienna's Riesenrad Ferris Wheel, as if we were just a lot of similar 'dots' on the ground.

Even Dr Mengele's identical twins were different, unique, in spite of having the exact same genome in theory.

Now even James Watson easily accepts that highly civilized 'Man' makes many mistakes, down at the bank with his mortgage or at the government office with his new passport.

Why then is it so very hard to accept that 'primitive' Mother Nature makes mistakes too ?

That the supposedly "iron" laws of Nature frequently bend ?

Routinely Nature makes mistakes while copying both the protein-making genes and the turn-on-and-off-tap control genes from the original genome - too many of this, too little of that.

Not just a base here and there but also many, many huge chunks, each thousands of bases long, known as CNVs, copy number variants.

Experienced ward doctors would hardly be surprised to learn all of this as the scientific explanation for their routine experiences of every work day.

An explanation just why so often that two patients, of the same age and weight and at the same stage of the same disease, can react so differently to a drug dosage supposedly standardized to all these factors.

The answer just could be that one patient has three copies of a particular gene segment targeted by this drug and hence almost overdoses.

Meanwhile the other (because of an unusual 'tap' gene) has effectively less than one copy and so the course of their disease remains unchecked.

Because sub atomic particles, atoms and molecules spend all their time bouncing off of each other in an asymmetric fashion, everything in the Universe "jitters" all the time.

We average this out, over trillions of such objects, as a particular heat temperature --- think of it as the supposedly routine temperature for a given pheonomon.

But, in fact, that smoothly analog average that is a given temperature actually disguises huge variants in local energy levels from nanosecond to nanosecond - meaning 'heat' is better described in digital terms --- as 'thermal' zippering, noise and distortion.

All that wide variance in the energy of 'routine' particle jostling means that 'routine' chemical bond making and breaking don't always occur at all, or don't occur in the right order, or takes much more or less time that they 'routinely' should.

Mistakes and asymmetric results are a routine fact of the Universe and even the best error correcting system (itself subject to the same mistake-making environment) doesn't always fully correct them all.

Hard to think of Hitler going along with Einstein and millions of other intellectuals in eagerly advancing The Enlightenment Project's efforts to find all the right answers to all the questions of Reality.

But he did - in spades.

Because he and Einstein and most scientists and philosophers of his day believed, often unconsciously, in "Limited Essentialism".

That is the idea that everything (of substantial size) had a definable list of attributes that uniquely and permanently identified it.

'Close' was not good enough -  that was a defective deviant deficient copy.

But Reality is actually an example of "Unlimited Essentialism" - the fact that every single being and object in the Universe is unique and has an (ever changing) definable list of attributes that positively identify it, albeit from moment to moment.

Defined that way, Essentialism is emptied of all of its traditional restraining abilities.

The search for Reality's "right" answers left all lot of shot, gassed and burned wrong answers in its wake

The Enlightenment Project led inevitably up to the selection platform at Auschwitz in late 1944, where the incoming Hungarian Jews were separated into right answers and wrong answers.

While the whole world knew about it, by that date, (YES WE DID) - and still did nothing.

Only a world that had stopped believing in "right answers" would have moved to save them - move to save them all, as uniquely beautiful bits of the human kaleidoscope.

Now Hitler, Einstein and Watson have all been hoisted on their own petard - because their own search for the one right answer about the human genome has instead resulted in revealing billion and billions of unique human genomes.

Nothing that Momma and Jesus - and Martin Henry Dawson - didn't already know ....

'Hitler treats white folks in Europe worse than a bunch of darkies in our overseas colonies' --- Allied world

The nerve of that man !

'There is a time and place for mistreating people ---- but today's Europe is not it - the Atlantic Charter is Britain and America's commitment that Europe will no longer be so mistreated....'

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.

One Manhattan Project - the nuclear one - was very much of this ilk --- barefacedly claiming we'd soon see atomic electricity too cheap to meter and atomic planes and cars filling our skies and streets.

We're still waiting, because all three claims were based on a Big Lie (or two or three) and deep down these nuclear complexity over-simplifiers knew it .

WWII's Terrible Simplifiers rebuked by the Terrible Complicatedness of Reality

By contrast, the other Manhattan Project - the one based on natural penicillin for the wartime all - rejected the scientific simplicity that spoke of a single trajectory of life.

A simple single inclined pole of progress, with the smallest and oldest at the bottom left always the stupidest while the newest and the biggest life forms -  scientists from the biggest civilizations - invariably the smartest at the top right.

Instead Dr Martin Henry Dawson and his team suggested, that depending on the capability being measured, all life forms variously fell at the top, bottom and middle of literally hundreds of scales.

Theories of simplicity had to give way - once again - to the strong evidence of the sheer confounded complicatedness of reality.

So - and unexpectedly - when it came to making pure, cheap, abundant penicillin, the tiny slime fungi did a far better job than assembled thousands of the world's best synthetic chemists.

And if the microbial smallest and weakest showed such unexpected abilities, Dawson argued maybe, too, the smallest and weakest among humanity were also smarter and stronger than the best educated and healthiest of humanity - at least on some unexpected measures.

And so modernity shouldn't be so quick to write off either the fungal slime or the wartime 4Fs.

In a surprise reversal, one branch of the highly competitive Washington DC wartime bureaucracy (the New Dealish WPB) bought Dawson's arguments and bested another branch in Washington (the Republican-dominated OSRD/NAS) who fiercely opposed giving any wartime penicillin to the 'unfit' of the world.

And like Washington, neither the Axis or Allied worlds were in fact as single-minded as wartime Home Front bompf and piddle would have you believe.

And as a result, any accurate account of almost any WWII event need be a very complicated one.

So the tale of the unexpected wartime triumph of natural penicillin-for-all is a complicated one - with many an unexpected twist and turn.

But then so is Reality itself - reductionist claims to the contrary...

"The Last sometimes are First" : confounding Modernity's 'terrible simplifiers'

Unfortunately for the rest of us, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Tojo all had a first rate science education at their gymnasiums (the advanced sort of high school common outside of North America) .

One that in their generation was reserved only for the elites destined to run the world in all fields of endeavour.

If these four became Jacob Burkhardt's much feared 'terrible simplifiers', we should lay much of the blame at the feet of their gymnasium science teachers who taught them everything there was to know about seeing reality through the terrible scientific lenses of simplicity.

But the steps from this sort of scientific education to becoming 'mass murderers in the name of science' is not inevitable.

Because Canadian Dr Martin Henry Dawson had a similar science education.

However, during in the lead up to WWII, he chose instead to become one of science's first complexifiers.

He announced over and over to a collective scientific yawn, that when it comes to modifying genetics, sometimes (and totally unexpectedly) the Last (the bacteria) came First, besting the efforts of science's smartest men in the universe....

Sentiment follows the Science : the world as a bystander, as Bullies Hitler & Stalin beat up the small

We can't hope to explain the moral inactions of the modern world during WWII by simply referring to the postmodern sentiments of  seventy five years later or the premodern sentiments of seventy five years earlier.

That Hitler, Stalin and Tojo invaded small country after small country after small country while the world's peoples did basically nothing, unless and until their own nation was under direct attack, is a fact.

A fact as known to the people of 1940 as it is to us in 2015.

But a fact must first fit into a generally accepted system of explanation to be fully 'understood' : call that system of explanation a global worldview, hegemony, ideology, ethos, sentiment --- what have you.

Modern sentiment (or lack thereof) followed upon Modern Science

I believe most of the educated middle class during the Modern Era did greatly 'regret' that the small and the weak were nothing but road kill beneath the advancing wheels of the biggest civilizations.

But they regretted the small and the weak's demise with a faint shrug of their shoulders --- they firmly believed that the 'Laws of Nature', as demonstrated by modern Science, simply meant the demise of the small was inevitable and could, at best, be only delayed but never stopped.

Their demonstrated lack of 'sentiment' towards WWII's weak and the small was at least consistent with their existing scientific beliefs.

Postmodern sentiment followed postmodern science

By contrast, in the Fall of 1940, Dr Martin Henry Dawson felt his own scientific research indicated precisely the reverse view of the 'Laws of Nature'.

He felt that in History's long run, the small and the weak tended to vanquish the big and the complex.

The tiny bacteria, for instance, surviving all over the world for four billion years and counting versus the huge dinosaurs : where are they today ?

Dawson's willingness to give up his own life, that Fall of 1940, to see that wartime penicillin was extended to all those dying for lack of it, is usually explained as the result of his great sentiment towards 'the plight' of the weak and the small.

But it could also be argued - it is so argued, at least by me - that his sentiment towards the weak and the small followed precisely his growing (postmodern) scientific understanding of the resilience of the weak and the small ...

Deniers : Triumph of the Will (over the weather)

Hard to imagine - looking over the current crop of harmful climate change deniers - that they are all neo-Idealist determinists.

Most look like they have barely ever seen the inside of a book, let alone a university philosophy class.

But then like the characters in Moliere's play who suddenly discovered they'd been speaking "Prose" all their life, we needn't pass formal academic philosophy courses to be allowed to fitfully espouse a distinct philosophical point of view.

And so it proves so with our deniers cum hubrists : for they don't really deny the possible of harmful human actions.

Merely they deny that we can't fix any problems we might create, quickly, easily and cheaply : like Superman.

Mind, to them, will always master over mere Matter.

Hitler and Einstein, in fact all educated Germans from about 1830 to 1980 , were this sort of Idealist --- it being breed into the very bones of German high school and university education for a century and a half.

Only the working class Germans missed its full baneful effects - getting it only watered down second hand , via tons of popular German culture.

Leni Riefenstahl's popular mountain climbing film epics for example - possibly far more influential internally than her rather better known overt propaganda film , The Triumph of the Will ...

Henry Dawson's Social Medicine vs The Holocaust

Sometimes anonymous online commentators glibly refer to Canada's Medicare (a system of taxpayer-supported medical care for all) as a holocaust.

It has plenty of problems but it is not a holocaust - in particular it is not The Holocaust.

That because Social Medicine , to use that term in its 1930s popular political sense rather than in today's restricted academic sense , was in fact the very antithesis of all the medical holocausts that WWII threw up.


The Holocaust , the Hunger Plan , Aktion T4 and certain German and Japanese medical experiments are merely the most infamous of those moral disasters.

Canadian Medicare is a good 21st century example of 1930s Social Medicine.

In theory (and hopefully in practise too) it says that a guilty war criminal with a life threatening infection is triaged to greater and earlier medical care than his innocent victim who has a broken finger - though both will be treated as promptly as we can , to the best extent we can.

Regardless whether or not that they can pay , regardless of whether they are criminal , regardless of whether they brought the illness upon themselves, regardless of their future economic contribution (or burden) to society.

It says all life has an intrinsic absolute right to life and the best health humanly possible and -crucially - it says this right is not contingent but is permanent.

All other medicines can also value any individual life as highly as Social Medicine does but when circumstances change against their own criteria, they are then inclined to view that same life as a 'life unworthy of life-saving medical care'.

Medicine for Profit has no inherent bias against any sexual orientation, race, gender, social class etc : their skin color may vary but the color of their money remains the same.

But if an injury causes someone to lose work and to be no longer able to afford medical care that could get them back to work , Medicine for Profit no longer want to treat them.

At a turn of a dime, an individual goes from "most favoured nation 1A" to "4F outlaw state".

Even in wartime, Medicine for Profit will continue to give the best possible care to people who can't or won't contribute anything to the war effort, - regardless of their race or gender - as long as they can pay handsomely.

But uniquely during wartime , War Medicine emerges and it is equally unbiased as Medicine for Profit seemingly is.

It is willing to give the best possible medical care - free or cheaply - as long as the person will be, after treatment , able to return to combat or can continue to provide a scarce skill vital to the war effort.

But if in wartime, one is both too poor and too permanently disabled to continue to do vital war work, one falls between two harsh cracks and becomes the 4Fs of the 4Fs, now becomes a life judged 'life unworthy of life-saving medicine'.

Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson successfully cured many such 4Fs of the 4Fs, public ward SBE patients regarded as having an invariably fatal disease , despite the wish of the Anglo American medical establishment that they be quietly Slow Coded to death.

They were to be denied the only medicine that could save them - penicillin - and instead deliberately given medical treatments that had always proven useless to stop their disease.

They were passively put to death because they judged - morally - as having no permanent inherent instrinsic value - only one contingent on their continuing to have lots of money or lots of health and scarce skills.

Others were actively put to death during wartime in America to aid the war effort.

Poor , confined, powerless people , 4Fs of the 4Fs, who were manipulated into contracting a potentially fatal disease that the scientists experimenting on them sometimes then proved unable to cure, despite their best medical efforts.

Prisoners, GIs, orphans, people in mental institutions or poorhouses, blacks, aboriginals, the rural poor and uneducated in foreign lands.

All varieties of the powerless, with families unlike to bite back effectively even when they awoke to what was happening to their relatives.

These poor subjects - not patients , because they did not start out with the disease that the experimenters were examining - were reduced to mere tools - on the moral level of the 100 million animals we kill annually for medical science or the countless disposable hand wipes we throw into the landfill.

All this Anglo American wartime abuse of inherently worthy life is a long way from today's Canadian Medicare.

But what it is morally very close to is the sort of values the Allies claimed they were willing to die to defeat - the medical values of Hitler and Tojo ....

Wartime Oxford : the planned capital of a racially pure Nazi Britain ---- and of chemically pure penicillin

Hitler never seriously tried to bomb Oxford England , despite its very militarily important engineering works.

The often made claim that Howard Florey had to give penicillin away to America because he was bombed out of Oxford by the Blitz is made only by his American fans - even his most ardent British fans weren't ever that thick.

After all , they had survived life in British cities enduring the various Nazi bombing efforts and at the time had greatly envied Oxford's well known gilded wartime immunity.

The story is that Hitler saw Oxford as having successfully taught the Anglo-Saxon cum Aryan elite racial truths for almost a millennium (it may in fact be the world's oldest surviving university) and so it seemed to him to be the one place in Britain that most held aloft his biological political values.

Britain's elite vigorously resented Hitler's high opinion of Oxford University in his vision of the world back then - and continue to do ever since.

(Rarely do they ask why working class Britons also view Oxford as the very essence of pure Anglo Saxon privilege.)

Florey and purity - racial and chemical

Howard Florey won't have taken even a top job at NYC's Columbia University - no matter how big the salary and how big the size of his lab.

He hated Manhattan with a passion - he saw its concrete jungle as dirty, noisy, crowded and filled with Jews, catholic Italians and blacks.

By contrast, he clearly viewed becoming a full Oxford Professor of a named chair and director of an Oxford institute as meaning he had reached the near top of the Anglo Saxon intellectual ladder.

This is indicated by the fact that as soon as his position was secure, he felt he could finally return with his head held high to the Australia he had fled 15 years earlier - after his father had disgraced the family name.

So, on an ancient site where students had been taught for almost a millennium , his dreams of a chemical penicillin tomorrow first soared.

And it was here - amidst Oxford University's fabled green splendor - that his visions of the man-made, the artificial and of the synthetic pure flourished the most extravagantly.

Oxford Refined - clearly for Florey - and for Hitler - more than just an accent ...

Wartime penicillin only cures one NEW disease , until the Allied medical elite put a stop to its efforts...

Allied doctors "Code Slow" minorities, immigrants and poor to certain death 

Sometimes true facts are far stranger than anything that bad acid and bad Hollywood writing could dream up.

Fact is, wartime penicillin's so called 'miracles' usually consisted in curing many diseases than earlier medicines also cured --- albeit very fitfully.

This earlier medications - basically the various biological serums , heavy metal based drugs and the sulfa pills - had dangerous side effects, took a lot longer, were more painful , cost more , required more skill.

Above all, their cure rates were much lower than early penicillin - of the total number of patients both type of medicines treated, penicillin saw far more lives saved.

Only one new disease - SBE - subacute bacterial endocarditis ( the disease that made Rheumatic Fever (RF) so terrifying) was converted from nearly 100% fatal to nearly 100% curable , by penicillin and penicillin alone.

(Thank you Dr Dawson on behalf of my brother Bruce, who got heart valve damage from RF but never got SBE.)

Unbelievably , the Anglo-American medical establishment, taking a page from Hitler's eugenic playbook , used 'military necessity' as an excuse not to give life-saving penicillin to militarily-useless SBE patients.

Unlike Polio research - which was never curtailed during the war and mostly afflicted the middle class (can you say 'doctors', boy and girls ?) , SBE mostly afflicted the minorities, immigrants and the poor.

But perhaps I am telling you something you may have already suspected, bless your cynical little souls ...

Uniformitarian Authoritarianism : yep ! , they're closely related

So there it is then : Sir Charles Lyell and Adolf Hitler joined at the intellectual hip.

Both responded uneasily to the plenitude of plenitudes that scientific and economic advances brought to people living in the Victorian Era.

Their personal responses certainly differed, but both their ill-ease and their solution shared much in common.

Their plentiphobia was eased by greatly reducing and ordering the apparent plenitude of objects and actions flying about 'out there' in the new freedom that the Victorian Age - pace Charles Darwin - seemed to have thrown up (God is Dead).

Ironically, Lyell by metaphorically removing Nature and Nature's catastrophes as a potent sort of explanation for human failures only increased the freedom-from that Hitler and his followers found so mentally threatening.

Disbelieve in God means disbelieving in the Devil - and disbelief in natural disasters simply removed yet another scapegoat for human failings.

That pretty well only leaves the Jews, the Romas, the Slavs and the Handicapped to carry the can to the gas chamber ....

"Unfit valour" : They defied Allied & Axis eugenics (and their own physical failings) to bring us "Penicillin-for-All"

What would penicillin look like today if Hitler, Stalin or Churchill had delivered it - instead of Dawson ?

In 1943 , Hitler, Stalin or Anglo-American Big Pharma could have delivered penicillin to us - delivered us penicillin either as expensive as Avastin or only to be given to the truly deserving Proletarian or Aryan.

But against the eugenic-mad world of 1943 , perhaps only a bunch of misfits and unfits could have delivered us inexpensive, abundant ,un-patented, un-encumbered Penicillin-for-All...

WWII : the warlords as scientists ...

Nature Resists, 1939-1945 : science proposes, nature disposes

The Allied-Axis started out fighting one enemy and ended up fighting a totally unexpected enemy.

Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, Mussolini and Tojo were all well known for having a strong personal interest in science and technology.

FDR had none, but he was astute enough to know that he needs lots of science and technology and astute enough to give it a free hand.

Willing indeed to risk public ridicule by requesting 50,000 planes a year from the 1940 American economy.

Planes, planes and planes enough to tell the world America was going to fight, if it had to, with high tech machines not low tech doughboys.

So a science war, even a scientism war ; a war exclusively fought between the world's top high tech manpower.

And Nature ?

Yawn !

An inert, passive backdrop.

Or was it ......?

1939-1945 : scenery chewing actors ...

1939-1945 : 'civilized men' battle each other to divide the natural world - but then , totally unexpectedly , it resists...

"1939 -1945 : Scenery Chewing Actors" is a wonderful ambiguous title.

Does it mean ham actors like Hitler, Mussolini and Churchill tore up the natural world, in passing,  as they struggled to lead all humanity ?

Or does it mean does it mean the best laid plans of mousy prime ministers and ratty war lords are blunted and broken when the neutral seeming natural backdrop to their human-only drama turns out to be very much alive around and willing to bite back ?


Or perhaps, that a lot of both can be found in the actual events of that six year long war.

A 'civilized men' upon 'civilized men' military conflict,  mixed in with the natural world exhibiting unexpected 'push back'  against the pretensions of those 'civilized men' , right across the globe....

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...