Auschwitz and Penicillin put the fatal post into Modernity

Who stuck the fatal post into Modernity ?

Was the doctors of Auschwitz alone, with their horrific experiments on living human guinea pigs, with all their fatal injections and monitoring of mass gassings ?

Not on the evidence.

The agreed Allied lie in 1945 was that the Nazis were an outlier, dedicated to destroying civilization and science and returning us all to a savage and more primitive age.

It sounded good - at least it sounded good to the people so far up the top of the Allied world that they had lost touch with the greater reality below.

But the billion or so ordinary people at the deeply suffering edge of WWII weren't so sure.

No, Auschwitz helped a lot - as did Naking, Hiroshima and the Katyn Forest killings.

But they altogether still weren't enough -  all dismissed as either horrors done by non-civilized evil-doers or regrettable actions done in the course of winning a great moral crusade.

What really put the fatal post into Modernity was the contrast provided by the fact that while the best of human civilization's chemists had totally failed to produce a lick of life-saving penicillin throughout the whole war, the much despised primitive basement slime produced scads of it - effortlessly.

Advanced German medicine - the best in the civilized world - gave us Auschwitz while the despised Lovecraftian slime gave us a priceless lifesaver.

Where on Earth was real Progress then to be found ?

savior of wartime Lazarus was born in a BASEMENT, not a barn

Since there are all kinds of perfectly rational explanations as to why the 'miracle' (as even admittedly atheistic scientists described life-saving natural penicillin) emerged in the times of the darkest depths of Hitler and Stalin's terror, we know that God couldn't possibly be involved, because He is irrational, right ?

Thus, as we are all agreed that the pairing of life-granting Lovecraftian penicillium slime, the lowest of the low, and mass-death-dealing war efforts of humanity's highest civilizations was just mere, sheer, pure coincidence, let us all least enjoy what a symbolic gift to narrative non fiction that coincidence really was.

Gleaming white skyscrapers and ... Lovecraftian slime

For we all know that the view from the executive suite at the top of a gleaming white skyscraper was the favoured place of complacent Laplacian omniscience during Modernity, as countless art historian Powerpoint lectures have demonstrated.

So surely the mere thought of all that Lovecraftian fungal slime mysteriously oozing up on the dark dank basement walls of those same skyscrapers had to awake cosmic terrors (of which depths we can't never fully know... and still remain sane) in all those modernist minds.

For an entire secular - scientism - religion had arisen world wide, whose entire intellectual edifice rested upon the claim that the latest big and the complex at the top was always the source of all good and that the simple, small, stupid and ancient at the bottom was always the source of all evil and pestilence.

This religion - this claim - had already suffered existential doubts as the evidence of all the evils the top civilizations  were capable of piled like bodies at a death camp.

Now, in addition, to discover that the only good that had ever come out of this bad news war was coming from the lowest of the low - every sense .

It was all too much : the horror, the horror !!