Auschwitz AND Penicillin created Post-Modernity

No matter how many scholars say it while dancing on the sharp point of a pin, it simply isn't true.

The horrors that Auschwitz came to represent simply weren't enough to break through human civilization's enormous hubris in the heady post-victory days of 1945.

In fact, the journalists had already all been squared and the agreed story was to be that the Nazis had long been openly at war, well before 1939, against the modern world.

That they were a throwback to our barbaric past, trying to destroy civilization.

But Modern Civilization had been stronger, with better, more modern science, and had so cast out this one bad apple from the European basket.

Primitive barbaric Nazi science had been bested.

And soon all would be once again bright and cheery in the broad uplands of this best of all possible current worlds.

(And please put your sunglasses on and hold onto your hats, because the Future's going to be so Bright, you gonna wanna wear shades !)

Yes, Modern Civilization had had one bad outlier, its tame apologists boldly admitted, but the structure itself was sound.

But in fact it was 'the best of Allied science' that had been bested - and not by some yet more advanced civilization - but rather by the most primitive and despicable creature imaginable : stinky smelly basement fungal slime.

All the Smartest Chemists in the Universe, from all civilizations in the world, working full out with unlimited funds, had failed to make penicillin - something the despised slime tossed off with the ease and grace of Nijinsky.

The 'primitive' slime was supposed to remain securely at the very bottom of the Ladder of Progress - with 'advanced' civilizations like Germany and America supposed to be secure at the very top.

When suffering humanity needed advanced civilization the most, it let them down - instead a despised being, a broken vessel, a stone all builders rejected, gave them life...

Now human hubris had a tough contrast to reconcile : all civilization (not just a nasty outlier of it) had failed to produce the priceless lifesaver penicillin - instead that was done - and worse, done easily and effortlessly - by the supposedly most primitive life form imaginable - a lower fungus.

What on Earth then was truly Progressive and what was truly Primitive ?

1945 : annus mirabilis or annus horribilis for Scientism ?

I have always been fascinated by the Janus-like nature of the year 1945 in its relationship to Science and the undue worship thereof.

1945 was the year that it was widely admitted that it was only the Allies' mild-mannered/white-coated men of modern science who had bested the superior combat skills of the jackbooted henchmen of the Axis and so won the war for humanity.

A good year for Scientism.

But 1945 was also the year that we now conventionally mark the start of post-modern science... and hence marks the end of modern science.

Surely then a bad year for Scientism.

Clearly we have two views on the alleged success of modern science in 1945 - one made at the time and still held firmly by elderly academics and citizens and another made forty years later and just as firmly held by young academics.

One credits it for ending the war on behalf of the morally right side and the other blames it for starting the war and behaving so beastly during it.

All Life is Family , part one and two, explores why it was possible for most of the modernist audience of 1945 not to see the many failings of wartime science on both sides, technical as well as moral, running from 1939 through to war's end.

And why historians ever since have repeated this initial error.

The war is simply never broken out of its narrative mode to present the predictions that each and every participant had made at a particular point in time together with an assessment of whether those predictions came to pass.

Who, for example, predicted that Hitler won't conquer Moscow within four months after June 1941 ?

No one that I am aware of, as Stalin himself soon had his doubts about this capitol's survival - some military 'experts' even publicly ventured that Moscow would fall in mere weeks not months !

Predictions proved about as inaccurate during WWII as they had all throughout history - only this time they were pressed forward with the strong claim that they were backed by the best science.

If so, the best science was wrong, over and over and over for six long years.

And if "All Life is Family" is the first to say so, so be it .....