Many of the thoughts and actions of pre-war environmental icons tend to leave us feeling very uncomfortable today.
Heroes - with feet of clay.
They, after all, were creature of their era as we are of ours.
That era, Alchemic Modernity, was at its very apogee in August 1945.
Baldly put, the consensus of thought for about 500 years was that beneath the chaotic seeming surface of Nature, deep Nature was actually pretty simple & regular and totally controllable by humanity, once a handful of keys had been unlocked.
But ironically Alchemic Modernity’s greatest successes were also the cause of its eventual downfall, as many around the world began a long, slow, deep soul-searching reassessment of their era’s presumed values.
1945, most of it anyway, was then seen as the the triumph of ‘Big and Strong’ Science.
The number one centuries-old dream of alchemists and their latter day acolytes, the chemists and physicists, was for humanity to be able to control the conversion of small amounts of worthless matter into endless amounts of pure powerful energy.
Another, younger, dream was for humanity to be able to speedily rocket to untold numbers of barren planets after they had plundered and destroyed Earth, to start afresh again, over and over.
After so successfully controlling matter and distance, another dream was for humanity to control humanity itself, rather like entries in a business ledger.
All three dreams had come true, in the form of the Atomic Bomb, the V2 rocket and in the detailed record-keeping behind Auschwitz.
Dreams coming depressingly true.
The riposte came from a small remote corner of biology, a science then better known for offering intellectual support for social darwinism and eugenics than for taking on the towering titans of Chemistry and Physics.
It lay in the unexpected - and unremarked upon - triumph of Natural penicillin.
If penicillin had arrived in synthetic form it would have improved the world, on this we all can agree.
But only Natural, microbe-made, penicillin could have save our world from the era - and its errors - that was consuming it.
This was science microscopically small and weak and yet it had bested the best of big and strong science.
Bested, in fact, an international all out government-backed effort to harness the free world’s smartest chemists into synthesizing penicillin that was purer, cheaper, better than what the slimy penicillium factories could come up with.
It failed - we still have tiny microbes making our penicillin and bulk natural penicillin forms the starting material for most all of the many antibiotics we use today.
Such was the triumph of Nature over Man scientifically that today on university campuses the pre-war Queen of the Sciences, Chemistry, has been surmounted by today’s Queen, Micro-Biology.
I often wonder if Natural penicillin hadn’t come along at the same time as Auschwitz, Atomic Bombs and V2 rockets, how humanity would have responded ?
It is one thing to be unhappy with the logical conclusions of your own collectivity world-view, but it is another thing to see the glimmers of another thesis offering up an alternative way of viewing the world.
The outre Romantic Period idea that humanity should work with and learn from Nature, rather than to simply conquer. destroy and replace it, was suddenly salient.
Moreover, the idea that even the smallest and weakest can be smarter than the biggest and strongest was a meme with real legs : for it could be applied to humanity’s relationships with humanity.
Perhaps people of color, women, jews, the handicapped, gays, aboriginals, children, the poor also deserve to be looked in a new, post- natural penicillin, light.
And gradually , they were —- and are.
Popular Eugenics, the intellectual backstop for the middle class around the globe before the war, in its search for an ever more purer and refined race, was not just part of Alchemic Modernity : it was its very essence refined.
And it is not for nothing that two of purity-seeking Popular Eugenics’ most notable figures, Adolf Hitler and HP Lovecraft, saw the ‘half solid/ half-liquid’ fungal slime as the most horrific image of all they objected to and sought to replace.
Natural-penicillin-making fungal slime.
But popular Eugenics could only remain aloft if Scientists and scientists backed it up : pre and post 1945, the middle class still takes its cues on reality from science, that hasnt changed.
But scientists have.
So while the Alchemic Modernists are still around they are diminished.
Because if before the war they dominated 60:40, today they are in a rearguard action at 40:60.
Today’s shakily dominant post-war, post-natural penicillin, Modernity in pointed contrast to pre-war eugenics, positively seeks out and welcomes diversity of all sorts.
So : an world-wide turn towards the small, in Nature and in Humanity, and appropriately enough, starting from the smallest of efforts.
Because, intellectually, today’s “Turn to the Small and the Weak” all began with nothing more than ‘40 Gallons and a Mule’.....
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