Forties Era 'Science Man' : anything Mother Nature can do, I can do better

Mechanical and Synthetic autarky

With extensions of his limbs and mind, with machines and beaker flasks, 1940's Civilized Man could top any physical feat that nature's most noblest creatures could ever hope to do.

And he had a fist full of recent new world records to prove it.

For in this new era of unending progress, man could now fly higher than an eagle, deeper than a whale, move faster than a cheetah.

Dig deeper than any mole, live higher up a mountain than any polar bush.

Sure a penguin lived at the edge of Antarctica, but had any penguin gone to the South Pole - or the North ?

Had he, had he ??

Smelter fires hotter than any volcano, electrical sparks bigger than any lightning strike.

On and on it went : even man-made silk finer than any mere worm could weave.

Designer meals (and soon, designer babies) better than mother could ever make.

Who needs Mother Nature consuming calories when her jobs could be done better by engines and beakers ?

So, about those plans to "kill off all the smallpox virus on the Earth, as 'life unworthy of life' "?

Just a start, buddy, just a start ....

almost capital Free Enterprise vs capital-heavy Franchise Enterprise

One of the biggest bilge streams feeding into Era of Progress's emphasis on plenticide and synthetic autarky was 'capitalism' -- which I define as making money off of your rare access to large lumps of capital in an economic culture that really needs large lumps of capital to function.

Capitalism needs two things to really flourish : scarce physical/scarcity bottlenecks controlled by 'franchises' and the necessity for capital-intensive factory processes to successfully operate those franchises.

It is not enough that that there are only a few potential sites to produce sizeable amounts of hydroelectricity in any given nation and that governments get to give them away as exclusive "franchises" --- to the people who bribe them best.

It is also necessary that these few hydro sites require billions in capital before they can deliver a single amp of energy.

One of the best forms of an exclusive franchise is a 'patent' , hopefully one that also requires licensors to pony up a billion or two to put their license to work - for then the patent practically polices itself.

(After all few potential competitors will bother to evade patent royalties if doing so still requires coming up with tons of money to get the pirated process to produce output.)

Let us see how my claims work out in a specific example.

Wool was once manufactured, cleaned and carded in hundreds of millions of tiny almost capital free enterprises quaintly called "farms".

The wool itself was actually manufactured in even smaller factories called "sheep" (or lamas etc) --- factories dirt cheap to buy and that replicated themselves so you hardly ever needed to buy another.

But if synthetic wool was ever even semi perfected, only a few people would own the right (the patent) to make it and only a few factories would actually make it worldwide, partly because of the high cost of patent royalties but even more importantly because of the inability to pony up the billion dollar cost of the huge lumbering clumsy factory set to make the synthetic wool.

I almost said "and don't forget the additional billion dollars in ad dollars needed to fool people into thinking inferior synthetic wool was better than natural wool", but I didn't.

Because that job was done, totally for free, by thousands of deluded scientists and science 'journalists' (cheerleaders), drunk on their own synthetic Kool-Aid.

Over all, this shift from millions of tiny efficient factories to a few huge inefficient factories was called "Progress".

You gotta love it !!!!!

Progress = Plenticide

In our grandparents' time (the Era of Progress), believe it or not, 'increasing biodiversity' was seen as the problem not the solution!

And their solution to this 'problem' was wholesale plenticide of all this unneeded and hence unwanted biological plentitude ------ via the chemists' synthetic autarky.

Man-made food pills would replace all the plants and animals we used to eat but now would no longer would need.

They'd all become "useless mouths" and "life unworthy of life".

And artificial wool and other synthetic fibres (remember artificial leather shoes ?!) would replace all those now useless sheep and cotton plants etc that we used to need hanging around.

Fossil fuels - and ultimately atomic fuels - would replace our need to burn trees and crop residue.

No longer would we need wind, water and sun to make mill wheels turn or to dry hay (what was hay mommy ?) - we could all move permanently indoors under plastic domes - atomic energy would split water held in rocks to provide us with oxygen and hydrogen fuel.

Progress was taught to all of us in the form of a metaphor -- viewed as a sort of arrowhead, moving forward and upward through evolutionary time and space.

This arrowhead was very wide, back in the distant past when there were lots of species hanging about but as time moved forward, evolutionary progress ensured that were fewer and fewer, bigger and bigger species - ending at the pointy end of the arrowhead with just one big - dead clever - species remaining : us.

Evolution's progress all made it inevitable --- but still it never hurt for the fit among us to 'speed the plow' by tugging gently at the ankles of the 'unfit' at the end of their rope.

Here cue Eugenics, Euthanasia, Aktion T4, the Hunger Plan Est and the Holocaust.

Progress consisted in draining much of the gene pool as possible, as fast as possible, by dividing the world into normal and deviant or into successful 'progressive' species and living fossils.

Deviant homosexual Romas would be converted to normality - or jailed.

Other Romas - a sort of living fossil among humanity - would fade away in time, it was certain.

Though some, like the Nazis, very much wanted to 'gas up' the process .

It was a great tale, a Man-flattering tale, but was any of it true ?

Nope !

The fossil record instead showed that the arrowhead was totally the wrong scientific metaphor (and trust me - truly successful scientists don't need to be good accountants but they all need to be great poets.)

The more accurate metaphor to express the movement of Life through Time from its tiny beginnings was a radiation outwards.

Still the arrowhead shape, yes, but with the tiny pointy end now at the beginning of Life on Earth with one tiny microbe, The Mother of Us All, and the broad end of the arrowhead at our present day - with our millions of discovered and undiscovered separate unique species.

Within that broad width of Life, species constantly came and went and some new species were bigger and more complex than their forebears while others were smaller and less complex than their forebears.

Biodiversity was abundant in all directions but there was no trend to a linear progress in any direction forward or backwards.

Worse ---- the whole social value theory of evolutionary linear Progress actually hung on a fragile intellectual claim.

For it wasn't enough for the proponents of Progress to show the original many many small species gradually reducing over time to a few big species, not if they were very big but not really any smarter than their tiny forebears.

Ever upward evolutionary Progress had to be ever upward progress in intelligence, however difficult it was to define intelligence across the species.

Ever upward linear Progress required that the tiny, ancient, simple microbes to be very stupid in intelligence - just as it required the newest species at the pointy end of Progress (Civilized Man) to be very smart in intelligence.

In 1945, two Manhattan-based scientific events (science being seen as the top intellectual activity) hit this theory so hard that it never really recovered.

Progress then quietly died away, circa 1965.

In August 1945, a whole bunch of the good guys of science dropped a bomb that they had just invented, a bomb that was seen as capable of destroying all human life on Earth.

That alone made it awfully hard to square this sort of high scientific intelligence with the other meaning of intelligence that we are always lecturing our errant teenagers about - intelligence as the ability to recognize the right choice and then to do it.

The other Manhattan based scientific event was actually a non-event : the failure of the the smartest (human) chemists in the universe , centred at Cornell University's Manhattan medical campus, to make commercial synthetic penicillin.

Far too difficult a scientific feat for the smartest beings in the universe to pull off - but something tossed off easily by some of the oldest, simplest , stupidest beings around --- tiny penicillium cells.

Progress's solar plexus : meet the fatal punch ......

Synthetic Horses

We have not traditionally regarded 'horsepower' that has been provided by steam, gasoline or electrical motors rather than by actual horses as coming from objects that are man-made, artificial and synthetic.

This is unfortunate because it reduces our ability to understand the causes for WWII's atrocities.

We are all well aware that humanity in the Age of Progress had an unstoppable mania for replacing as much of inanimate Nature as possible with synthetic man-made equivalents ---with artificial food and artificial leather being among the many low points in the process.

But none of this synthetic autarky in inanimate objects can be said to lay a very direct trail to the WWII horrors of Aktion T4, the Hunger Plan or the Holocaust (with their planned killing of tens of millions of 'useless mouths') over on the bad guys' side of the Atlantic.

Or to the post-war planned killings of tens of millions of work horses for horsemeat, over here on the good guys' side of the Atlantic.

That is because if newlyweds ever decide to replace expensive imperfect natural diamonds with cheap perfect synthetic diamonds, natural diamonds will merely become "useless" but not "useless mouths".

They will now be be useless to humanity but they won't cost tightfisted humanity a dime if left lying there in the ground forever more.

Disposing of living ex-machines

Not so with formerly very valuable animal and human slaves gradually rendered useless and worthless in the Age of the Machine.

For short periods of time, humans and work horses can exhibit amazingly good pulling powers but for sustained work a good quality work horse can only provide 1 horsepower of work output and a healthy adult only about .1 of a horsepower.

It is true that mechanical pulling engines need fuel just as humans and animals need food, but mechanical engines can work full out for 24 hours, 365 days a week.

In practise, horses and humans eventually work at less than full sustained capacity, if not given sufficient hours of rest daily and days off weekly to rest up.

So over a week of 168 hours, an unceasing two horsepower engine (a very small engine even in 1800) could replace a team of maybe ten horses, each working as well as the mechanical engine for bursts of time and feed just as cheaply, but only able to work full out for about 35 hours a week.

Discarded as a consequence to save money and increase profits, these ex-machines still had to be feed and cared for.

At least as long as upper class humanity still retained vestiges of old fashioned charitable concerns towards the smaller, older, slower weaker beings among them.

Now cue --- not Charles Darwin, or even his 1859 theory ---but rather the popular elite response to his theory.

As if well known, Darwin developed his theory well before 1859 but planned not to release it until he felt elite opinion would accept it.

1859 was not that time he felt - he was probably right - but Wallace's plans to release his very similar version of the same theory forced Darwin's hand.

I am tempted to say that any time in the 1870s was the right time for Darwin's theory to win elite approval but I may be 110% wrong.

Instead it just could be that the 1870s were the epoch changing decade that they became only because of the impact that Darwin's earlier theory had had upon elite humanity.

For its talk of an universal and eternal battle for survival providing elites the intellectual justification for some long sought after changes settling the post-slavery fates of once valuable animate man and beast, replaced by mechanical machines.

The poor were no longer to be 'always with us' but rather, as losers in the evolutionary race, to be assisted off the coil of life with a 'gentle kindly tug at their ankles'.

(To describe a way of thinking that Moscow Show Trial defender George Bernard Shaw made infamous.)

Just as it was long believed that the decline and disappearance of Canada's natives was evolutionary inevitable, so it couldn't possibly be morally wrong to kindly haste Nature's cruel ways with a little man-made starvation and terrible housing.

Synthetic autarky - the belief that 'fit humanity' didn't need imperfect inanimate nature ultimately extended to not needing imperfect animate humanity either.

For Darwin's cousin Galton had quickly picked up Darwin's ball and invented Eugenics.

And it was his negative eugenics that made it possible for ordinarily decent people, during WWII, to solve the longstanding 'problem' of disposing of 'useless' living, breathing, eating machines once they had been replaced by new synthetic models, without losing any sleep.

'Evolution really did all the killing, not us', said Germany's population, in justification after the fact ...

As a bullied kid I cheered the small & the weak that gave us antibiotics - but I also cheered on 'abundant safe Atomic Energy too cheap to meter'

Okay, so I couldn't sense the total conflict between being in open commensality with Nature and supporting the closed-in synthetic autarky of atom-smashing research until much later in life.

But I don't think I was alone in my postwar generation of children - not by a long shot.

In the late summer of '65 I was newly in Grade Nine in a school system that seemed unchanged from the 1930s while the NY World's Fair was still celebrating the 1930s synthetic autarky of living better chemically, atomically and as far away from Nature as possible.

But by June '67, while I was still in Grade Ten, the Monterey Pop Festival with its musicians , hair  styles and above all its colourful offbeat clothing  were the talk of my High School, a long 3000 cultural miles from the counter culture Bay area.

For this was what had become of the buttoned down shirt of 1965, now on the lam and back to the land : the famous summer of (open commensal) love.

Still, it was only as an adult that I seriously wondered how on earth I and my generation got that way---- going from modernity to postmodernity in what seemed at the time (and still does) a historical mere blink of the eye : MO goes PO.

That lead, ultimately, to the researching of my book on the very Janus-headed legacy left to us postwar kids by two wildly different groups of grey-haired fathers and grandfathers of 1940 Manhattan ...

1945: 380 years of the Synthetic Autarky Project vs 3.8 billion years of the microbial synthesis project...

In 1945, Modern Scientism (1875-1965 , long may it rest in peace) was always convinced it was the smartest bunch of guys in the universe : it could do anything and everything Mother Nature could do, only better, faster, cheaper, cleaner.

After all, it had 380 years of experience behind it in the science of chemical synthesis - and almost 50 years experience in atomic synthesis.

It was certain it could make wartime penicillin purer, cheaper, quicker, above all cleaner than the tiny, primitive, slimy basement molds making it now.

But it couldn't----- and it still hasn't.

It has only had 380 years at the task ---- but the tiny, primitive and above all ancient microbes had had 3.8 billion years at their craft.

If my hasty arithmetic is accurate (I'm being called to stop blogging and take baby Samantha to daycare) that's a billion percent longer...

Replacing Mother Nature : Synthetic Autarky and other male fantasies

Making clone babies in test tubes without any woman being involved is not a lot different than making silk in a test tube without Mother Nature being involved.

Investigate a tiny little bit and you soon see that Males/Men/Guys are almost always the push behind these schemes and one always wonders if their overt reasons for pursuing these aims are the actual and full truth.

For even those men most opposed to feminism never speak of Father Nature or Father Earth -- their unconscious speech betrays that they still see the fecund plentitude of the Earth's natural world being somewhat more female than male in orientation.

But a future new human colony set up on the sterile stone surface of Mars - powered totally by nucleosynthesis (fusion power) and totally fed and clothed by the products of chemical synthesis (itself powered by fusion energy) -  could run quite well without Mother Nature, maybe even without women.

Synthetic Autarky : bye bye women 

Autarky means self sufficiency -- in this case, a male self sufficiency, brought about by Man's ability to synthesis everything and anything Mother Nature can do by the manipulating of the smallest known bits of matter and energy into existing and new materials.

This vaseline and tissue powered male scientific fantasy is quite accurately ? amusingly ? known as Hard Science Fiction --- and emerged not long after Rutherford and Soddy atomically 'transformed' some elements in Montreal back in the first decade of the last century.

Like racism , it is far more hidden under post war post modernity but it has never really gone away.

Mars colonies, Fusion, Geo-engineering, Terraforming - they are all examples of grownup men putting youthful male fantasies into reality with the help of fawning male newspaper journalists and male politicians offering up lots of female taxpayers' money...

Researchers - not data - change

The historical ("primary") documents that fuel this blog don't change - can't change - frozen in time from the Manhattan of 75 years ago.

But my contemporary understanding of them continues to change, evolve, regress, whatever.

For a long time I saw today's bad climate change deniers as the best single contemporary example of the once widespread pre-war belief that denied any limits to Man's ability to control Mother Nature.

But these sort of deniers were actually the weak case.

They were the negative option : these deniers weren't actually actively claiming to control Nature, merely weakly claiming that they were sure another Manhattan nuclear Project, done by others, could quickly clear up any weather issues arising from normal human activity.

It all starts with an unrealistic faith in Synthetic Autarky

But all this fitted uneasily with my main contentions - that the overwhelming pre-war faith in "synthetic autarky" lead to "plenticidal indifference" and hence ethnicities and species extinction.

I eventually realized that nucleosynthesis ("fusion power"), geo-engineering/terra-forming and the active efforts to start human society again on a sterile Mars were the more active contemporary expressions of this pre-war fantasy.

And that the horrific fallout from our tolerance of all these bizarre efforts was a collective plenticidal indifference that has led us to today's runaway (Sixth) Mass Extinctions.

I am not sure there are even a handful of "Extinction Denier" bloggers lurking about  --- rather there are about seven billion of us Extinction Tolerators reading about another beetle species gone extinct, sighing for a moment then resuming our daily lives.

After all, pace J B S Haldane , who - besides God - really wants 150,000 distinctly odd species of beetles anyway ???/

Sixth Extinction not a mere 'bycatch' of Modernity

Plenticide, along with Synthetic Autarky, is Modernity's main product, how it measures success, what Modernity does for a living.

The Sixth Extinction, if not exactly planned by Modernity , is hardly lamented by Modernity.

Synthetic Autarky is the immodest side of Modernity --- 'we humans can create anything and everything out of nothing, we needn't rely on anything or any being'.

Plenticide is the other, less pretty, side of Modernity.

'We don't need to shed tears if useless mouths and parasites consuming resources that better belong to humans happen to starve to death on our watch and as a result of our decisions'.

Modernity is the contemporary ultimate in closed commensality : even exceeding the ancient Pharisees' closed commensality efforts...