Hitler's Dilemma : If we liquidate all the "Primitive" how can we tell that we are the "Advanced" ?

Until the advent of fossil fuel based energy slaves, the rich and powerful needed the poor and powerless to do all the hard unpleasant jobs.

In the1860s, (interestingly parallel with the growing popular elite acclaim for Darwin's and Spencer's theories of the survival of the fittest), elites began seeing that fossil-fuel 'energy slaves' were far cheaper, far more tractable and far more moral than employing human slaves.

Perhaps, said these early utilitarian proponents of the much later Aktion T4, Eastern Hunger Plan and the Holocaust, the poor need no longer be "aways with us".

But if the Nazis and their earlier ilk all around the world had succeeded in liquidating all the weak and the poor, the defective and the asocial, how then would one be able to tell - for certain - that the healthy and the wealthy were truly so ?

For, to give but one example, the idea of 'the wealthy' can be easily shown to be a relative term, not an absolute term.

A working class European family of this the early 21st century is far far wealthier, in terms of access to (energy) slaves, money and sheer comfort, than any of the top nobility families of the 13th century.

They only seem poor, only feel poor, when they compare themselves to the families of today's top 1%.

Similarly, the most advanced human civilizations circa 1940 had so many visible shortfalls from what their members hoped and thought they were capable of, that people at this imagined top could only console themselves by saying "at least we are more civilized than X, Y, or Z" down at the bottom tiers of Life.

X, Y and Z being perhaps Australian aboriginals, slime molds and the anthrax bacteria.

Civilized and advanced are relational concepts and only make sense when matched in opposing symmetry with the uncivilized and primitive.

Destroy the bottom and where then is the top ?

But as it happens, the Nazis and other Social Darwinists never got that far.

Instead Progress's symmetry of an advanced top and a backward bottom simply collapsed when assailed from top and bottom.

In WWII, the top proved to have so many moral failings (mass bombing and gassing of the innocent) at a time when the bottom proved to have so many technical advantages (natural penicillin from the penicillium slime) that the delicate balance of the symmetry of opposites couldn't hold anymore.

So, today, it is a commonplace to say that this planet was made and sustained for the tens of thousands of ancient species of microbe and the relatively recent and single human species is but a short term parasite "just visiting" planet Earth ---- a commonplace unlike to be uttered or believed in 1940 .....

October 16 1940 : upending the team's protocol

To put it bluntly, twice-wounded Lieutenant Dr Martin Henry Dawson (MC with citation for bravery) was very far from being given to routinely performing bold, brave and lonely gestures.

This despite the fact that he performed some very brave actions indeed on at least a half dozen times during his shortened life.

Beside his wartime actions, those brave acts include his June 1928 sacrificing of the start of a wonderful research career at the then citadel of medical research - the Rockefeller Institute.

All to stand up for what this very junior pro tem researcher believed in scientifically, against his all powerful and very senior lab chief (and fellow Nova Scotian) Oswald Avery on the matter of the importance of bacteria transformed with DNA.

Or consider his December 1940 decision to sacrifice his own life, if need be, (against the wishes of his wife and doctors) to try and save the lives of others (the world's patients with deadly SBE) with his pioneering penicillin.

And his well known November 1942 decision to 'steal' (according to his hostile opponents) scarce government penicillin - during wartime ! - all to further his success in finally saving SBEs with penicillin, set against deliberate government 'indifference' to their dire fate - success with penicillin or not.

But my vote for his bravest, his boldest, his most lonely gesture was that which occurred on October 16th 1940.

Primitive lifesaving penicillium and Advanced Auschwitz lifetaking put the Post into Progress

I suggest we replace the widely used term 'Post Modernity' with 'Post Progress' because it is both much more descriptive of what is actually going on and much more easily understood by the majority of the population who live outside academia.

I hope we all can at least agree on the second point : that far more people understand the term Era of Progress, 1875-1965 than do they the term Era of Modernity 1875-1965.

Now onto the first point.

All the many and varied postmodern -isms have at least one key element in common : they involve hitherto verboten mixing.

Be it of high and low (say in art) or normal and abnormal (say in sexual cum civil rights) or central/official/dominant or local/periphery/subculture (as in imperial/hegemony relationships).

I used high and low as my first example deliberately because the Era of Modernity was also the era of Social Darwin defined Progress.

Deductive Progress : absolute universals in an absolutely closed universe yielded absolutely correct results 

Everything and everyone was slotted in one universal and eternal vertical hierarchy.

In/out, normal/abnormal etc were really just variants of the all important high/low distinction in worth.

Lindbergh's "Wave of the Future" and Prell's "Underdogma" : plus ca change, plus c'est meme chose ...

As 'literature', there isn't much in common between Anne Morrow Lindbergh's airy if wooly personal essay style 1940 "Wave of the Future" and Michael Prell's 2013 dense cut-and-paste thesis "Underdogma".

But in terms of actual intent, there is surprisingly little difference between the pair.

WWII : diverse Ideologies of "Ends" but a single Methodology of "Means"

Traditionally, immense philosophical differences between three "clusterings of ideologies" are said to be the reason for the intensity of violence that was WWII.

So one clustering group, for example, claimed to be benevolent-to-their-own-race racists.

The Germans claimed to be protecting the white race and the Japanese claiming to protect the yellow (or even all colored races).

Perhaps fortunately for the entire world, this was doubletalk.

The two were actually only nationalists cum imperialists : the Germans treated most other whites almost as badly as they hoped to mistreat the coloreds, just as the Japanese treated fellow yellow races at least as badly as they mistreated whites.

This narrow nationalism destroyed both nations' ability to unite the wide and strong coalitions needed to defeat their many opponents.

The various kinds of Marxists and Communists all started out claiming they intended to take everything from the world's middle class and give it all to the world's working class.

And after an initial violent overthrow of the existing system, they promised to end state executions.

And indeed they did start out by taking from the rich and giving to the poor - if the poor is defined as the upwardly mobile urban industrial working class.

But soon they all began to take from everybody and give it mostly to massive military buildups against imaginary enemies, so somewhat continuing to benefit the industrial worker, but also ensuring that the working class didn't get too much of the nation's new wealth and start feeling frisky.

In addition, a very generous share went to an entirely new middle class cum ruling-forever class made up from some of the smarter, more ambitious and more ruthless children of the working class.

Even more depressingly, the communists in all the various nations in which they seized power soon acted exactly the same way against their minorities and neighbouring nations as the previous aristocratic and capitalist rulers had done.

And to do so, they secretly murdered millions of all sorts of people over the decades, all the while publicly claiming to have ended capital punishment, except in cases of treason.

Once again deep rooted narrow nationalism cum imperialism seemed to have trumped the nominal world-wide official ideology.

And yes, doubletalk once again - though in this case, there seemed a widespread and genuine surprise among marxist & communist intellectuals that it all ended up this way.

The third clustering gathered the rest of the world's nations, be they dictatorships, monarchies or liberal democracies , united only around just one thing : the all out defence of well-off people's private property (and the nominal defence of the 'individual').

Once again doubletalk.

The defence of ill-gotten capital accumulation was sincere enough, but in practise most of the rewards and the protection of the law that was supposed to go to all individuals, instead went to native-born, educated, upper middle class, straight males of the dominant religious and ethnic group.

These nations might never declare formal military war against each other but they were always secretly at war against each other over matters of money.

In the form of nationalist trade wars, together with nationalist wars over intellectual property rights and nationalist wars over the flow of capital, labour and goods.

So once again, behind the smokescreen doubletalk of universal brotherhood of individual rights, nationalism trumps all.

One can only point to the immense secret efforts by both America and Britain, at the very depths of their Allied war against Hitler and Tojo, to beggar the other in postwar trade matters, to show how much greed is the real underlying ideology of many of our rulers.

And all three clusterings were united in giving unearned wealth to members of their privileged subgroups by taking from the weak.

The weak might be an internal group - their own majority ethnicity's poorest . Or it might be the more traditional form of imperialism - taking the natural resources and labour from ethnic and religious minorities inside the borders of their empire cum nation or from overseas 'colonies'.

So imperialism and nationalism actually united all three supposedly different ideological clusters.

But they then had to morally justify why it was so very morally wrong to steal private property of the strong but quite alright to steal the private and public property of the weak.

The traditional way was to claim that their nation-empire-civilization was the sole, best, bearer of the one true religion and that they weren't stealing at all - merely extracting a university tuition sized fee from the heathens in exchange for teaching them of this priceless boon.

But there were quite a number of one true and universal religions in the nineteenth century and this led to wars among them ---- as long as people still believed in religions.

But when people stopped believing that there was any real difference between Catholics and Protestants, indeed between Christians, Moslems and heathens, a new moral justification was required.

Now the true civilizations, those worthy enough to enslave other lesser beings and feel morally good about it, were the most scientific ones.

A peculiar form of science. mind you - one much beloved by Conservatives and Republicans of the day - because it said that Evolutionary success inevitably went to the big and ruthless over the small and weak.

Better science meant both better guns to put down the scientifically backward darkies and in feeling a warm moral glow while doing so.

Because if the darkies had fought back successfully, that would mean that they too are scientifically advanced and hence a worthy civilization, in evolutionary terms.

A clear example of this was how the West responded when Japan beat the Russians in the 1905 war.

But science is truly universal, at least in the big picture, so how then to justify why it was right for scientifically advanced England to invade backward China but not for scientifically advanced Japan to do the same ?

I have often thought the sudden rise of many new ideologies at the same time as the sudden rise of Scientism was somehow intimately connected.

I don't mean the people who founded these various -isms were insincere.

The Magnification of Small Differences

I just mean the success of these many brand new ideologies can be laid to the fact that they allowed 'moral' wars against each other among the world's powerful and ruthless, elites who were otherwise united in all worshipping at one new and universal religion - scientism and its offshoots : the new nationalism, the new imperialism, the new racism and the new social darwinism...

Dawson: I've treated pneumonia in the richest AND the poorest

Nothing made Dr Henry Dawson more angry than hearing his more 'progressive' colleagues pontificate on about how the poor were only kept alive because a misguidedly kindly society persisted in giving them the best possible medical care for their bloody pneumonias.

"Out there in Nature, the poor would all be dead".

The famed medical science research centre known as the Rockefeller Institute had a very tiny hospital attached and most of its patients were friends of the Rockefeller family, the equivalent of today's New York City billionaires.

It was Henry Dawson's job for his two years at the Rockefeller Institute hospital to treat the pneumonias of the city's rich and famous with the world's best medical care.

Now he was a clinical researcher at Columbia Presbyterian teaching hospital where many of the patients were among the city's poorest and he treated their pneumonias as well.

So Dawson well knew - contrary to Social Darwinism theories from the medical progressives - that the survival of the people regarded as humanity's 'fittest' was just as dependent on good medical care as were the lives of the poor.

"Out there in Nature, the rich would all be dead as well..."

WWII's clash of arms ended in 1945 but clash of its ideals continues

In September 1939, Britain (and France) did reluctantly go to war against Germany when it invaded Poland --- but hardly to protect this smaller, weaker nation from being being swallowed up by a bigger neighbour.

They basically sat on their hands while Germany, Slovakia and Russia invaded it and then divided it up.

Right to the end of the war and beyond, Britain (and now America) secretly horse-traded away the freedom of small nations; yes including the soon to be liberated Poland.
Traded then away without ever consulting their governments, let alone their populations.

The spirit of charity to weaker strangers (regardless of their economic or political value to the charity-giver) certainly did not animate any government during WWII.

The clash of arms of WWII did indeed happen between nations and as such, has been examined past the point of exhaustion by too many authors.

Examined but without however providing an unifying explanation to account for WWII's global indifference towards the lives of weaker strangers displayed by all three sides - Axis, Allies and Neutrals.

So to examine WWII's clash of ideals (because this disregard for the lives of weaker strangers was never universal at the individual level) we need to look well before and after 1945 and get down to the level of individuals .

Down right to the micro level , to examine over time the changing and differing opinions within families and between spouses.

For why was it so that a majority in every nation on earth in those years was so self confident that their indifference to the fate of weak strangers was scientifically (and hence morally) justified ?

I think we need to seek the origins for the universally brutal nature of WWII in the 1920s' changing attitudes towards the idea of charity, as displayed first at the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and hundreds of former 'charity' hospitals like it all over the world.

It has long been noted (and then ignored) that during the Era of Modernity the leading explanations for how reality worked were biological and even medical --- rather than theological, philosophical or based upon the hard sciences of physics and chemistry.

Social Darwinism is thus mis-named : it really is Medical Darwinism.

For it was the medical examinations conducted during national universal conscription selection processes that provided the data for so many peacetime, non-military, social decisions.

So medicine did not sit on the sidelines on WWII , merely patching up the wounded ---- then current medical value systems began WWII's clash of ideals and only a change in today's medical value systems can finally end it.....

'Riding the Tiger of Progress' - not Liberalism - was key meme of Modernity

For liberals to state that all people are born equal and that this is a condition that can neither be gained or lost, is to describe a static -  even tranquil - condition.

By contrast, the same liberals' idea of Progress sees all humanity as being born 'involuntary participants' in a series of life-or-death gladiator competitions ; Progress merely being Social Darwinism in its political correct dress-coat.

Life or death competitions where even the 'happy' winners are always looking back over their shoulders and where the losers believe they will lose their lives, in the long term if not in the short term.

So in the 1930s let's say, it was currently felt that the White race was winning over the Yellow race but that could change, if the Whites ever let down their guard for even a minute.

And within the White race of the 1930s, the Anglo Saxons were winning but the Jews were gaining, and so the Anglo Saxons must ever keep up their guard and even consider new counter measures.

While within the Jews, physically and mentally defectives were losing the intellectual race but winning the demographic race.

The idea of Progress is what allowed - is what allows - liberals to have their cake and eat it too : talk of equality but encourage a tigers' den of winners and losers.

But 'riding the tiger of progress' was uneasy work - and hence the Era of Modernity was noteworthy for its frequent communal pogroms of violence, fear and hatred against other 'gladiators' --WWII being merely the worst and best known....

When the upward causation of 'invariably fatal' SBE meets the downward causation of Dawson's agape penicillin

Let us accept - for the sake of the argument - the unproven assumption that many kids could even get SBE disease out there in the Social Darwinists' belovedly savage "Nature" that existed before Christian compassion peed on their picnic.

Then, yes, the SBEs' premature death out there in early Nature does seem assured - even 'invariable'.

A clear case of what philosophic reductionists (such as Adolf Hitler) liked to call "upward causation", mandated from the virile little bacteria at the bottom to the big - damaged - heart valves at the top.

Seemingly, end of story.

But remember, even when the evolutionary upward causation of tiny mutating genes throw ups three headed horses, the varying reproductive odds out there in the big eternal environment also get to have their say.

And to date, those reproductive odds has shown a decided preference for horses with only one head.

A clear example of Evolution's "downward causation" (from the top big to the bottom small) having its two cent say on the final results.

In September 1940, the upward causation of Aaron (Leroy) Alston's inevitably death from SBE (subacute bacterial endocarditis - the disease that made Rheumatic Fever the number one killer of kids for 50 years) hit a speed bump.

Inspired by Alston's black activist spunk, a middle aged doctor (Martin Henry Dawson) decided to strike his own personal blow for freedom during WWII by trying to stop Social Darwinists in America from doing to SBE patients what Hitler was already doing to their counterparts in Germany under the Aktion T4 program.

Despite Dawson's best efforts with his historic home-brewed antibiotic injections, Alston did not survive in the end, but Dawson's efforts ultimately ensured that ten billion of us - so far - have led longer happier healthier years.

Seventy five years later, the downward causation of Dawson's agape penicillin is still working itself out in all its complex manifestations, all over our world.

Try and reduce that .....

Social Darwinism turns Peace into Undeclared War...

The attributes of the Age of the Big (Social Darwinism Mk I) makes the idea of contrasting it with the concept of the War of the Big (Social Darwinism Mk II) a moot point.

This is because the Social Darwin idea of reducing all Life to an unceasing, total, struggle for life or death means that only a formal declaration on paper could separate Darwinian War from Darwinian Peace.

It was always assumed , without much proof, that in this struggle the big would  inevitably triumph over the small and then the ever bigger would do likewise over the merely 'big' .

By contrast ,Henry Dawson championed the small all his life - it must have come almost naturally to him, with his coming from a Canadian province that was increasingly viewed as too small to be relevant to Canadian values.

But he also noticed in his scientific investigations that while the big did thrive in stable circumstances, the small could still at least survive in hidden niches.

But in non-stable times, the big (over-extended) broke up,  while the small (insured against normal hard times) took it all in stride.

Rather than modern science quickly dismissing Life's small as just part of evolution's dusty, distant beginnings, he felt they should give the small a second glance - and a second chance.

He extended this in the 1930s to those judged chronically ill and second rate and then, in the war years , to those American young people with SBE who were judged to be 'life unworthy of expensive medical care during a military crisis' .

Modern science had no time for his theory - his championing  of the small was viewed as a damning folly from a medical scientist with an otherwise worthy medical career.

But post modernity science is largely shaped around the concept of reality's inherent complexity and diversity : admitting that reality will always consist of the mixing together of large and small phenomena and large and small beings.

In this long view, Dawson's folly begins to look quite prescient ...

Tortoise vs Hare : predicting our world in 1945....

On September 2nd 1939, when the British Empire declared war on the German Empire (thus ensuring we would have another world war), there were two main scientific theories predicting the shape of our world at the war's end.

The far more popular theory at the time was called Modernity, Social Darwinism or simply 'Might is Right'.

 It said Evolution was a vertical affair, with wiser and more mighty entities inevitably and naturally replacing entities that were weaker and more foolish.

The other, far less popular theory, saw Evolution as a horizontal activity, with the weaker and simple-minded entities continuing to co-exist for ever and ever, in global commensality, with the bigger and more complex entities.

It even went further than that.

It claimed that on not-infrequent occasion, the smaller and more simple would even triumph over the larger, more complex and more sophisticated entities in the fundamental effort to survive.

Now it is obviously that these diametrically opposed theories could not both be right.

"the hyssop and The Cedars" will look closely at the course of  WWII to see how accurate each scientific theory was in predicting the twisting course of that awful - and unexpectedly awfully long - war.....

All Optimists - without exception - are Social Darwinists ; all Pessimists are Altruists

Always the OPTIMIST

Its a Fact. Its a Dogma, a Law, a Commandment you can carve in stone - by definition, all 'blue sky' optimists must be Social Darwinists. Just as, again by definition, all cautious, skeptic, 'grounded' pessimists must be altruists.


An optimist believes that there is only one simple, perfect, permanent solution to each of Life's relatively few difficulties.

Someone more skeptical and cautious sees many possible solutions  to each of Life's many and complex problems: all imperfect, impermanent and all highly contingent.

Yesterday's wild-eyed optimistic science - that of Newton, Dalton & Darwin - is still worshipped in High Schools around the world

And right now , wild-eyed cock-eyed optimism ,(aka Yesterday's Science - the science of Newton, Dalton and Darwin still worshipped in High School laboratory chapels around the world) , is killing this planet - destroying tomorrow's world for our kids and grandkids.

And we're just letting it all happen.

When there is only one possible - simple - certain - permanent - solution to every problem, what do you do with the rest - the imperfect solutions ?

Those mouchers, those useless mouths, those "unfit" ideas, those takers not makers , those 47% type ideas ?

You eliminate those ideas like an eugenicist eliminates the unfit.

But when you doubt that this or any solution will work perfectly and permanently in each and every set of circumstances, what do you do with today's less than perfect solutions ?

Like a pack rat, you preserve them for another day and another situation - you redeem them - see if they can serve the community with pride under different circumstances.

You don't write them off forever - you don't toss them aside like a used condom - you treat them them like those people who are down today, but not out - because, with a little help and sympathy, they might be up and about tomorrow.

Mitt Romney says his action plan actually consists of nothing more than free floating optimism.

Should we really be surprised then about his secret speech writing off the 47% as 'useless mouths' ?

I don't think so....

As a EUGENICIST, Romney exceeds even Hitler , who never thought 47% of Germans were 'unfit'

the UNFIT vote democrat

Social Darwinism - the Ayn Rand variety - has dominated the world's headlines this week as the GOP president-in-waiting, Mitt Romney, defined his take on the world in a secret video : half of us pay federal income taxes and are the makers, Nature's 'fit'.

The other half of us pay no federal taxes and are the takers, the moochers, the dependents,the self-defined victims, Nature's 'unfit.'

Victorian 'culture wars' re-emerge into 21st century presidential election

Out in the real world, before Victorians brought in sentimental campaigns to protect children, slaves, women and animals, these 'unfit' would die a short and natural death.

But now soft-headed (Democrat) governments have kept this half of us alive artificially   --- under Romney all this would change.

But some years, perhaps even Romney fits into these 'unfit'  ---as in some years he too may have paid no taxes.

I don't know this for a fact admittably, but I am hardly alone in strongly suspecting it, if only from his most electorally costly decision: the decision NOT to reveal his past income tax returns.

But there is another view of Darwin and Herbert Spencer that doesn't throw out their baby with the bathwater: it is this that "the fittest will survive".

OOOOOOH !!! Did I say a bad thing ?

I don't think so and here is why:

'Fit' or 'fittest' : what's the difference ?

A tiny jockey doesn't seem particularly 'fit' versus a football quarterback but try to 'fit' that quarterback on the backside of a horse in a horserace and we begin to see that while the term 'fit' (and hence un-fit) is static, permanent and eternal, the term 'fittest' is highly contingent and varies from time to time and place to place.

In a world of the First Law (of thermodynamics), the fit will survive : it is stable and permanent and static.

But if the world is better described by the Second Law (of thermodynamics) and is is in constant and dynamic and chaotic change, then sometimes and somewhere , the small and the small eaters (those frequently judged unfit) will actually often do much better than the big and big eater.

Fantasy says that "God is on the side of the battalions of the biggest eaters", but the Earth's long history, grounded in ancient dead giant dinosaur bones and huge healthy present day populations of tiny bacteria, suggests otherwise.

Blue Sky fantasy or Grounded reality : no guess as to which world Mr Romney drinks the Kool-Aid in.....

K-selection dominates history, First Law of Thermodynamics claims

Triumph of the K-selected ?

Nothing buttressed Victorian England's famous optimism and self-confidence more than that the fact that they understood the First Law of Thermodynamics far too well (and didn't understand or accept the Second Law of Thermodynamics at all !)

That First Law implies just one thing : that Reality is, on the whole and in the long term, simple, predictable and stable.

In other words, Reality is generally at or approaching Equilibrium.

In such conditions it seemed only natural that "the K-selected of all the K-selected", Man, would totally dominate "the niche of all niches",the Universe, a niche so vast that growth and expansion of man's domain was effectively infinite.

The K or the r : who has dominated history ?

Victorians didn't use the term "K-selected" but they knew, used and believed in the concept.

Bigger is better, might is right, law of the jungle, God is on the side of the bigger battalions.

 Never ending -ever upward - progress of ever bigger and more complex beings.

Bigger cities, bigger empires, bigger companies, bigger profits : ever onward and upwards : a tumour with "room to grow" (as if cancer chose to mate with Ontario premier Bill Davis).

But some Victorians - more sentimentalists than social darwinians, chose (consciously or unconsciously) to focus on the more fundamental of the two laws of thermodynamics : the Second Law.

And it portrayed a Universe of constant, but uncertain, change : progress yes, but downwards.

A niche that steadily was getting smaller over time, with beings constantly forced to adjust to less and less incoming "useful" resources of matter and energy.

Who was right ?

Have K-selected giants dominated the world's history of life over the last 4 billion years ?

Or have tiny nimble r-selected survivors successfully endured whatever reality has thrown at them , for the last 4 billion years ?

Dinosaurs or bacteria : who has been around the longest, dominated more habitats, had more individual unique members, had the greater biomass .

The K or the r ?

Put it like that to the libertarian think tanks of Washington and even they, they of the intellect a mile wide and an inch deep, even they squirm in embarrassed silence ....

Forgotten by design : Victorians loved Sentimentality as much as Social Darwinism

Victorian Values ???

Thanks to libertarians like Thatcher, Reagan and their rich friends who own big media , most people today regard the Victorians as being obsessed with the values of social darwinism : law of the jungle, might is right, god-on-side-of-big-battalions, survival of the fit, red in tooth and claw , things they claim we have forgotten.

But there is no sign, in fact, that these values are not at least as popular today, as in the good Queen's day.

But what has been forgotten, in fact, is that Victorians (or at least many Victorian women) were opposed to social darwinism and took a "Sentimentalist" view of the value of life, human and non-human.

After all, it was the age of Uncle Tom's Cabin, of Little Nell and of Beautiful Joe ( to use an example particularly close to my home.)

Thomas Moore, the Sentimentalist, was at least as popular as Charles Darwin, the Utilitarian, in their day.

Victorian values ( both set of Victorian values) hung on in the late autumn of Victorianism : those years between the death of Victoria in 1901 and the early 1970s, when Victorian Modernity aka Scientism, still held full sway.

It is often forgotten that Victoria herself was raised as a pre-Victorian and that in fact , the truest Victorians were those who knew no other age (say those born between about 1840 and 1900).

People who were fully grown young people when Victoria died did not die with her as if in some immense funeral pyre, but instead lived on  as full-Victorians, until their own deaths in the 1960s.

Jazz Age kids fought & died in WWII ,yes, but Victorians ran it..

Henry Dawson (1896) and Howard Florey (1898) were both fully Victorian figures: the first representing pre-Great War sentimentality to its fullest, the latter a Social Darwinian from birth till death.

Their monumental clash between 1940 till 1945 was thus a clash of differing Victorian values ---- during the years of WWII --- a time that is incorrectly thought to be well past the Victorian Age.

Florey the Skygod ; Dawson the earthling.

I - on the other hand -will argue with my dying breath that the Victorian Age died with the death of the last Victorian , not at all with the death of the Queen herself....