If plenticidal pruning is always better than plentitude's chaos , then bigger is always better

Medicalizing Modernity

The  real reason why so many humans  can confidently proclaim that 'bigger is always better' without knowing in advance how 'bigger' will actually turn out , is because bigger always means fewer --- in any given biological, social or economic niche.

AKA Modernity : the era of parsimonious plenticide , 1875-1965

The art of denial is not a new 21st century thing.

Denying human caused climate disaster, denying the Holocaust, Stalin's crimes, the existence of rape culture --- they are all but a few of the sub-sets of one way 'to deal' with 'overwhelming' dynamic complexity.

While to most of us , choice is good and more choice is better, many of us direct our entire existence around dealing with feelings of being overwhelmed by plentitude.

Two Tier Internet the Johnson-Reed Bill of its day : plenticiding "digital plentitude"

Modernity (1875-1965), the mean-spirited ideology that was a panicky response to all the plentitudes that global modernization and advances in science had thrown up , has a lot of faults to its credit.

One of the most infamous was the 1924 Johnson-Reed Bill, an Act that shut New York City's Golden Door for over 40 years.

Republican Albert Johnson ,along with fellow Republican David Reed, had foundationed that Bill's restrictions upon their racist cum social Darwinist cum eugenic cum anti-black, anti-Jewish, anti-catholic philosophy.

Why did they fear the new plentitude so much ?

Picking winners and losers, triage, genocide,eugenics, artificial breeding : all plenticide by other names

When punters down at the casino continue to believe that they can beat the odds , we call them gamblers.

But when PhDs believed they can beat the odds, we called them modern scientists.

And modern planners and modern statesmen and modern leaders of industry.

Efforts to 'drain the gene pool'* to just a few types is a form of scientific gambling.

Why, after 4 billion years, most bacteria STILL can't swim

Back in the Modern Era (1870s -1960s , gone but hardly lamented) a strong proof for Darwin devotees' claims that bacteria were incredibly primitive was the established fact that after 4 billion years of existence, most bacteria still couldn't swim.

Couldn't move at all in fact , most of them.

Modern Science : offering both Plentitude and Plenticide

New raw data is rarely important to scientists : far more important is what is the most currently socially profitable spin to put on this new raw data.

In their individual activities in their own small personal areas of interest,the collectivity of scientists were adding greatly to the Modern Era's overwhelming sense of sensory overload from a plentitude of new facts and sensations.

Life on Earth and Earth itself was much older than thought - from thousands of years to billions.

Ditto the Universe - billions of years old, trillions upon trillions of other suns like ours, other planets like ours.

An outwardly expanding and growing Universe - perhaps expanding and growing forever.

Ever more species being discovered, every more elements, compounds - ever more and more.

With no end in sight.

If scientists kept up with this, they'd soon be as popular as lions at a lambing.

And this was the first generation of  wannabe professional scientists - a generation hoping to be well paid and well pensioned for a lifetime of scientific work.

No more amateurs scientists free to say and do as they pleased.

Professional scientists sang to the public for their supper - what they the public wanted , the scientists gave them.

So plentitude of new facts , beings and objects on one hand.

But on the other - the meat cleaver of plenticide.

It took many forms (Social Darwinism being only the best known) but the bottom line was most of this plenticide was living mistakes, living fossils - early tentative working outs on the way to a few pure perfect forms.

Plato would rescue us from Aristotle .....

This Era of Plentudism : the post modern welcoming of plenitude vs modern plenticide

We are - deniers aside - all plentudists these days.

We actually welcome and cherish the chaos and complexity of a multilayered world - welcome and cherish communities composed of  many wildly different little neighbourhoods.

'The more the merrier' is today our motto.

We are all Jane Jacobs and not Robert Moses today - we are all Henry Dawson and not Howard Florey these days.

The Axis/Allied plenticides of life and compassion

I see strong links between WWII and our current (human-driven) "Sixth Extinction" laying waste to the plenitude of Nature.

 The eugenic Nazis believed that the plenitude of humanity needed drastic pruning - starting with the Jews and Slavs.

 Their plenticidal crime was against the right of all humans to exist. 

The eugenic Allies/Neutrals told us to stifle our plenitude of compassion for the weak and the unfit - to limit our compassion to the fate of our own 'fit' .

 Their plenticidal crime was against compassion for strangers. 

My biographical subject ,Martin Henry Dawson ,("Manhattan Misfits") rebuked all three. His Manhattan Project ("Penicillin-for-All") originally hoped to save just a few strangers from an eugenic and heartless Allied medical establishment. 

It ended up rousing a nation and changed our whole world for the better -- forever.

Misfits Acting Up : despite the Allies , Penicillin-for-All

What many call Eugenicide I call Plenticide.

That is because I think the same mass impulse among the educated of past years to cleanse the world of misfits (culminating in the mass murder of Slavs, Jews and Romas) also sought at the same time to rid it of all types of non-human "pests".

It was all part of the complex and unconscious reaction formed by a truly unfortunate coincidence thrown up in the late Victorian Era.

The 1870s' arrival of the machine cum chemical age seemed to negate the age-old need for human, plant and animal slaves - the sort of slaves the US Civil War had just been fought over.

Particularly as new strides in public health was greatly reducing death rates and thus visibly making the world an increasingly overcrowded place : lots of both 'first-rate' (masters) and 'second-rate' (slaves) people.

Yet in the same period, new advances in global transportation and communications also overwhelmed the affluent and educated with a vivid new sense of the plenitude of the world's cultures, languages, species, strains , habitats --- too too much way too too soon.

The machine world suddenly seemed to have far too many species and cultures - most of them seemingly inefficient as compared to the new Scientism Man.

Too many people at the same times the world seemingly could get by on a lot less - thanks to machines powered by the energy of fossil plants and animal 'slaves'.

Eugenics was thus born - at this exact time, in this exact place - as a result of this unconscious reaction among the affluent.

As was born the Gospel of Germs and the Gospel of Soap/Cleanliness, and new interest in Scientific Pest Control.

Immigration controls, culturalization campaigns against minorities and immigrants in schools, campaigns for greater purity in food and chemicals, synthetic replacements for everything natural - starting with food.

I could pile up the connected list of reactions for days at a time - but not today !

But note that they all started up right after the 1870s to blend together to produce what we now call the streamlined* age of Modernity.

*Streamlined = Eugenics = Plenticide = tidy up = clean up  = purify, all basically meaning the same thing in this context ...

Acting Up : sometimes you must , even if you can't

An provocative way to look at WWII is to say that its deep structure , beneath and beyond all its confusing surface variety of activities, could be boiled down to a Tyranny of the Fit against the Unfit.

'Fitness' was a coat of many colours : to the Russian Communists, coming from working class stock rendered you automatically much more fit than if your parents were upper middle class.

In the capitalist West, of course the reverse was true.


And to the stocky dark-skinned Japanese, the notions of physical fitness and of beauty as defined by their allies the tall, blond and blue eyed Aryan German Nazis did not match their own in almost any way.

But almost all of the science-minded in that era of scientism felt comfortable in casually using the terms fit and unfit to divide up a world of plenitude that they saw as needlessly and excessively cluttered and messy.

And to then to use the tools of plenticide to 'clean it up' so that only the fit remained in a orderly, clean, pure 100% productive world.

We don't feel the horror and disgust about variety and plenitude that as our grandparents of the era of streamlined modernity once did - far from it - in fact we now cherish which they so disdained.

But how and when did we start to move from their era to our era of post-modern questing after diversity ?

I say it all began when The Seven first "Acted Up" to protest what the Allied 'fit' had planned for some they defined as 'unfit' ....

Martin Henry Dawson : The Agape Naturalist

In WWI , Philip Bent VC and Henry Dawson MC displayed great physical courage under enemy fire when they put themselves in lethal danger to rally their men to close a dangerous break in the Allied lines.

This was 'agape' valour in that they did not risk their lives simply for the men in their battalion whom they knew well (kith and kin) but rather they selflessly risked their lives for the entire overall Allied cause.

In WWII , Dawson displayed agape physical courage and moral courage .

Agape physical courage in the sense of selflessly sacrificing his health (and hence his life) to help total strangers.

Agape moral courage in the sense that his opponents were no longer the Hun but rather his own subculture of Allied doctors and scientists who were strongly opposed to his 'wasting' his (agape) penicillin on young people judged to be useless militarily.

But what did Dawson do in the 1920s and 1930s, between these two wars ?

I argue he was an agape naturalist in those years .

Perhaps because he was educated during the years of Alexander MacKay's regime as Superintendent of Education for Nova Scotia , Dawson displayed a wide catholicism of interest in the microbe world compared to other medical scientists and doctors of his era.

They tended to see microbes only as as bad germs to be ruthlessly eliminated or harmless avirilulent germs to be totally ignored.

Superintendent MacKay had gotten all Nova Scotia's rural and small town school children to regularly catalogue the start and end of seasons as marked by the first bloomings or first arrivals etc  of the various flora and fauna.

MacKay wanted to show how the life cycle of all life was affected by variations in the non-living world - the timing of the various seasons affecting directly when the first mayflower of the season appeared for example.

Perhaps this unique 'phenological' effort mentally rubbed off on the young Dawson - leading him to see life on Earth as sharing in a basic global commensality together.

Because during the 1920s and 1930s , Dr Dawson didn't just selflessly help those chronically ill humans dismissed as basically useless and worthless by most other people. He also regarded them as worthy in and of themselves , as they were.

He showed the same evenhanded regard for all when it came to all the 'odd' , 'useless' , 'unworthy of study', 'avirulent' microbes he chose to study at great cost to his career.

For just as he valued the great plenitude of human types, so he felt the same about the great variety and plenitude of non -human life not matter how useless they appeared to be to the rest of humanity.

Simply put,  I am saying that plenticide and selfishness and narrow group-love are much the same, just as support of plenitude  and commensality and agape love are basically the same.

With the sixth mass extinction - happening now - we are practising plenticide on a huge scale - and once again only the agape love of the agape naturalist will halt this madness .....

WWII plenticide and agape penicillin were made for each other : chalk and cheese, matter and antimatter , oil and water

WWII saw an unusually high number of civilians and POWS die in a war supposedly fought between modern civilizations : why ?

Out of thousands of possible drug choices, penicillin , dramatically emerging late in WWII , remains our best loved and best known medicine : why ?

I think these two unusual events are in fact closely linked : (behavior on both sides in) WWII being the disease and Agape penicillin being the cure.

Agape penicillin's plenitude curing plenticide against life and of compassion....