WWII : began with "Bigger is Better - Inevitably" and ended up in "Global Commensality"

At the 1939 New York's World Fair , it seemed only common sense that life started out as tiny simple-minded microbes and inevitably ended up both bigger and smarter, with beings like us being the prime example.

After all, we all know that tiny embryos become babies then children before growing ever smarter and ever bigger as full grown adults.

True the big dinosaurs had disappeared while the tiny bacteria hadn't, but had not the dinosaurs been quickly replaced by mammals - not just as big as dinosaurs but also much smarter ?

Wasn't evolution, no matter how slowly and and how twistingly, inevitably progressing towards the reality that Bigger was not just Better (an idea that hardly needed proposing, it was so self evident to the 1930s mind) but Inevitable as well ?

These ideas were hardly the plot of conspiratory 1930s corporate elites, trying to hold down the working man , because everybody held these notions,  even if they only accepted them resignedly.

Bigger was Better and inevitable because Science had shown it to be natural and so man's efforts inevitably had to be but a mere echo of what was happening and had always had happened, everywhere, in Nature.

So instead every different ideology of the 1930s was content, or resigned, to merely contesting different 'Bigger Betters' : Big Fascism, Big Communism, Big Capitalism, Big Christianity and on and on.

But a few biologists in the Thirties - mostly microbiologists -  didn't find Bigger to be inevitably Better, at least in the natural interactions they were studying.

The brilliant if taciturn (Martin) Henry Dawson was in their forefront - certainly not as a verbal spokesman, but in his advanced concepts.

The 'little horse to big horse' dioramas beloved by every  local museum wall made it seem that small beings were just wayposts on the path to ever bigger-ness.

But instead of being just something to be eaten up or stomped on during the charge to Bigness , true natural reality, these handful of microbiologists claimed, showed small continuing to co-exist with the big, now as in the distant past.

And not just co-existing in widely separated niches either .

For trillions upon trillions of bacteria co-exist in and upon every one of us, along with endless numbers of viruses, fungi, protozoa, worms and mites.

With  all our medical science and with the best immune system in Life, it might see an easy task for us Biggies to dispose of such smallies but that hardly has proved the case .

As any infectious hospital ward in the Thirties would unhappily attest.

But Science, as always, had a ready answer whenever messy Reality clashed with the glib (Cartwright Machine) assumptions it shared with the non-scientific mind.

Science claimed that whenever a new small being invaded the human space, there was a tense period of ecological mismatch between the parasites' need for time to see to their continued survival versus their ability to make us (and thus them) instantly dead.

Dead human hosts meant dead microbe freeloaders.

So, gradually ,over time, the invading small beings reduced their virulency,the human host lived and reproduced and so did its parasites who also lived long enough reproduce their own kind.

Soon parasites became helpless and harmless commensals, merely tagging along with us for the ride.

Never again, once rendered a-virulent , would invading microbes bother the big and clever humans.

The 1930s Central Dogma of the Biology religion (one of many such Central Dogmas over the years) was that it was always a one way journey from high virulency to a-virtulency.

But Dawson , particularly in his studies between 1926 and 1940 ,
saw a much different picture.

To put it in modern day biological language, he was the first, or among the first, to explore Horizontal Gene Transfer, Quorum Sensing, Molecular Mimicry, L-forms, and Biofilms.

Just a few of the truly amazing and highly sophisticated ways bacteria survive in a hostile human body cum planet.

Because an individual bacteria is about the same size relationship to an adult human as a human individual is to the entire planet Earth.

Bacteria did not 'sense' they were invading and killing a fellow being when they land on and in us,  (as they might regard a competing fungi cell).

Instead each human body seemed an entire rich lush dangerous planet to them - one well worth learning to survive in , despite the risks.

because our human immune systems and human medicine are indeed big, rich and sophisticatedly complex.

But they proved to be, ironically, too big, too complex, too ponderous to beat back the microbes for very long.

Just too damned bureaucratical,  just like every big organization you and I have ever worked for.

The microbes' vast numbers (trillions) and short period between new generations (minutes), combined with their controllable ability to encourage new mutations to emerge and even travel from species to species,  ensured they could throw up a trillion new survival ideas in the time we got one new drug to stage three clinical trials.

Most of those new survival ideas would be harmful or useless, but with those numbers of ideas, it became like Monkeys typing Literature : something good was bound to come out eventually.

The small and nimble beat the big and ponderous often enough in our human corporate world to make Dawson's claim seem equally credible in the natural world.

Or so it might seem self evident , today, in our post-Modern world.

But that is getting well ahead of ourselves ---- because Dawson's 1930s notions of commensality are not just the object of our postwar post-modern gaze but one of the 1930s originating subject-creator of our postwar post-modernity.

Together with WWII itself.

Because until WWII came along and demonstrated over and over how often the very big fell before the very little , Dawson's notions gained no traction what so ever in the scientific or popular mind.

His scientific ideas did not change during WWII , but ours sure did .....

Civilization, regarded as a "Cartwright Machine"

A "Cartwright Machine" is a powerful and unique way, created by famed philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright,  of looking again at all of Humanity's machines , mental as well as physical.

Cartwright's central insight is to realize that the real beauty of a machine is literally 'only skin deep'.

This is in very sharp contrast to received opinion on machines up until now.

The surface of machines, like all 'black box' marvels was always dismissed as a mere banal matte black nothingness, while the divine spark and mystery of the machine was felt to be buried deep inside.

Not so, said Cartwright and her followers, among them myself.

For example:

The number and condition of a nation's "machine tools" ( big machines that make other machines) , in peace or in wartime, is universally taken as the best single guide to the economic health and medium term potential of that nation.

Naturally as a result , during WWII , both Axis and Allied regarded the destruction of the other side's machine tools by aerial bombs as perhaps the quickest and most certain way to win the war without a too big a loss in human lives.

The factory buildings that house these machine tools were big but lightly built boxes of thin steel and wood.

Acting like big sails, they easily fell over when hit by the 'wind forces' generated by even a near miss by a high explosive bomb.

But unless the bomb actually fell right beside the rows of squat, very heavy and extremely dense, steel-built machine tools, even a very heavy blast force only caused them to rock briefly on their base and then settle back unharmed.

Round One to Civilization.

But unless a building was very quickly assembled back around the machine tools, they quickly became useless, rendered inert by the most banal forces imaginable : gently falling rain.

Gentle rain on machine tools (and even damp air generally)  quickly makes them rusty and useless, despite the fact that they could brush off the blast of a 500 pound high explosive bomb with casual aplomb.

Because machine tools are actually a bundle of diverse characteristics : mightly big (basically three metres cubed of steel) and yet also needing to operate within extremely small tolerances (measured in microns or millionths of one metre) to work as intended.

An apt metaphor for them might be a huge elephant rendered helpless by a tiny mouse !

The small tractor without an engine cover is a machine that seems to work well without appearing to be very shielded from the elements of Nature but that is because we forget it spends most of its life inside the sheltering roof and walls and floor of the farmer's barn.

A main battle tank is the war equivalent of the tractor, but it spends all of its combat time stuck in mud and dust and rain and snow and wind and mould ---- and as a result it tends to have a short service life, even if it doesn't first get hit by enemy fire.

More of WWII's tanks were 'put out of action' by mechanical
troubles than by their human foes.

(That is unless you choose, as I do, to regard Mother Nature as the general and admirals' real foes.)

But a Cartwright Machine was far more than an insight into just physical machines : it was also a way of looking at all of Mankind's much vaunted accomplishments.

Just as our tractors and machine tools (mechanical triumphs of Mankind's rational willpower) look far more fragile without their necessary shielding, so too do the intangible mental assets of Humanity's rationality.

A Great Power like Hitler's Germany seemed to be so truly mighty powerful in both industry and in science that it seemed obvious it could well make both guns and butter.

But in a real war, it quickly became apparent that peacetime Germany could only afford to survive off German-grown food (butter) because it didn't actually use  all the guns it made.

(And even this just barely : reduced rations for Germans came into effect even before the formal declaration of war in September 1939.)

Actually using guns in war quickly revealed the need to replace all the shells the guns fired, along with the guns themselves when they were worn out from use or destroyed by enemy fire.

Ditto for the need to replace the former farm hands converted to gunners , when they also were worn out or killed.

The same for all the former farm horses diverted to pull these guns.

The former farm tractor factories have been converted to make gun carriages, while the farm fertilizer and pesticide plants are on short shifts, with most of their raw materials diverted to make gun powder and high explosives.

Soon, the women and old men left behind on German farms are doing a very poor job of feeding civilian Germany and all of its idle but high daily calorie consuming military, holidaying abroad in the occupied lands.

Without fertilizers, pesticides, tractors, horses and muscular young farm hands, who can blame these women and old men ?

Now the normal cycle of good and bad weather/good and bad harvests, a cycle that Germany has always experienced,  kicks in on top.

A bad weather harvest now is truly a food disaster for civilization, as Adam Tooze has so brilliantly detailed.

Not a disaster for German civilization, except morally.

But a disaster for European civilization generally, because it means Germans ate well only by stealing food from their neighbours.

In the Western part of European Civilization, it means that the French and Dutch are at least left with just barely enough to get by.

But in the Eastern part of European Civilization , food was obtained by deliberately starving to death millions of Russians and Jews.

Ultimately, when starvation proved too slow a way to free up sufficient food, the Germans turned to mass killing of  Jews and anyone else they considered 'useless eaters'.

Lack of food in Germany drove the Holocaust along, which was speeded up with every bad harvest year back home in Germany.

Lack of food in Germany led Germany to alienate its potential allies in New Order Europe by stealing the food off their plates.

This in term ensured that these hungry and embittered potential allies ended up resisting Germany, not fighting along side of it, dooming it for certain in June 1944.

And all too soon cannibalism - usually considered the very anti-matter to Civilization's matter - was being engaged in by desperate Russian civilians and POWs.

German Civilization's much vaunted ability to produce butter as well as guns was really a Cartwright Machine, its universal and eternal "law-like" appearance actually hedged by all sorts of restrictive "ceteris paribus" clauses.

This is always the way with Modern Science, its 'dirty little secret'.

None - none - of the famous science experiments we all have been taught to admire in High School and as undergrads actually works as described, at least not out in the real world.

They are really mind experiments , so for example in physics we mentally remove from consideration all the various real world forces working on an object , so we can focus on the main force influencing its motion.

The ceteris paribus clauses explain all that we must remove to get our supposedly universal and eternal laws of nature to work.

It is indeed true, just as our High School Science teacher claimed,  that if the USA aims a truly ballastic missile at Tokyo to the west, it is very unlikely to hit Berlin in the east.

The main force at work, our rocket propellant, will  accurately ensure it ends up somewhere west of  Hawaii.

But lab-ignored factors like real world wind and air temperature and air density could very well work to move our ballistic missile slightly off course enough to hit Korea instead of Japan.

Diplomatically , even a High School Science teacher might realize that this could be very bad news indeed.

(The astute might notice that today's H-bombs are to be delivered by a very muddled, but also very real world, mixture of semi-ballistic and semi-guided techniques. But don't hold your breath waiting for any scientist to tell you that.)

The ceteris paribus clauses behind Nazi Germany's amazing ability to offer full employment, full food larders and full gun lockers was that it only worked if Germany didn't have too many guns and promised never to fire them .

In other words, it only really worked if Germany had a Cold War era military budget and not a Hot War era military budget.

WWII was a real disaster for Humanity and Civilization.

This is because, for the first time ever, the Civilization given us by Modern Science had all of its Cartwright Machines, minus their protective ceteris paribus shielding , left lying around in the wind and rain and mud and snow and heat and dust and mould of six long years of  Total War .....

WWII:began optimistically as Science, ended tragically as Engineering..

WWII, in other words, began in Modernism and ended in post-Modernism.

It should be understood at the onset that Science's task is strictly pedagogical and that it doesn't have to provide answers that are true, in any realistic sense, merely ones that are correct.

In other words, an excellent science experiment also is an excellent exam question.

I am speaking here of course only of the physical sciences, those sciences that form a subset of human psychology.

Their main function in life is to boost the students' self esteem and make them willing and - God Bless 'Em ! - even eager to take on the world outside the High School or University as a non-physical science grad.

These science experiments are meant to give non-scientists and non-engineers, and probably a lot of engineers and scientists as well , the confidence-building illusion that the world outside the lab is as controlled and predictable as it is inside the university's "sheltered workshop".

As I have said before, philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright's key insight (aka the "Cartwright machine")  is that the crucial component that Science, along with its machines, experiments and laboratories, requires to be a successful human activity is a metaphorical ROOF , to shelter those activities from messy Reality's wind, rain and dust.

And Frederick Christiansen argues that successful engineering often means adding yet more roofs to the designs-with-roofs coming out of the science labs, to make them robust enough to endure daily Reality.

So, for example, Newtonian ballistic equation solving (classical science at its purest) can take on a very different cast in actual battles of war.

Now our young university physics graduate is behind a gunnery rangefinder, high up on a heaving battleship in the dark of night, himself just barely awake.

 His battleship is making a desperate turn, in high wind and waves, and at top speed, to dodge a possible incoming torpedo.

Meanwhile our young officer is trying his absolute best to get his 12 inch gun turret to score at least on hit on an heavily armoured (and armed) enemy battleship.

The enemy is also is bobbing up and down and turning left and right at high speed in equally heavy seas a dozen or so miles away in the dark.

The enemy ship is trying just as hard to land one or two shots on the superstructure of his own battleship - which if it happens, will likely kill him and render moot any success at getting his battleship's guns to hit the enemy.

This, despite the fact that both his battleship's hull and its gun turrets, both heavily armoured, remain totally undamaged.

He has been taught to use Newtonian ballastics to hit and destroy 60,000 ton ships, only to discover that what he is really aiming for with his massive one ton armouring piercing shell is the 150 fragile pounds of his counterpart gunnery officer.

Neither officer will ever hit what they were aiming for, but both are likely to end up dead --- when their ships make the wrong turn and run into an enemy shell equally off target.

Ballastics has descended in to a good old fashioned low tech infantry fire fight: fire as many shots as quickly as you can in the general direction of the enemy and hope some by mischance actually hit him.

Forget even that it is nighttime and in heavy seas, with two ships very far apart, moving at top speed in irregular weaving patterns while bobbing up and down in the water irregularly.

And that the eye on the rangefinder is hindered by all the bright flashes and dense smoke of real battles.

Or that in the minute or two it takes to set range and elevation, the gun to be fired and for the shell to travels to its target, the other ship will have irregularly altered what ever semi-predictable course,speed and elevation it was following at the time of 'set'.

Think about the intermittent winds across the path of that dozen or so miles - winds with different temperatures and density of air - all which affect how a shell deviates from its Newtonian path.

The gun barrel, its wearing-out with repeated shooting and even its changing temperature from shot to shot, all effect the accuracy of our departing shell.

Each new shell is never been machined as true to its designed shape as one would like - just as the bags of propellant each display a random slightly difference in the amount of force they provide.

Many of these factors, but not all, can be accounted on the naval battleship range and after a number of shots, gunnery officers do hit a target and retire to the wardroom.

But even the most lifelike gunnery range practise, far more real-world than the university lab, does not prepare the gunnery crews for a real-world battle.

In a real battle, it is far more likely that three battleships and heavy cruisers on each side are all trying to hit each other at the same time : what fans of Newton like to call "many-bodied problems" , the kind they'd rather not talk about in the physics classroom.

Yet battleship gunnery crews in WWII were the best trained, best equipped, most scientifically up to date gunners of all the war effort : none of the six nations that had modern battleships spared any expense or scientific effort to make their gunners topnotch.

But equally, all the odds against the various gunners hitting their targets had been equally up-gunned.

Faster and more agile opposing ships, heavier armour, longer and bigger guns, extreme firing ranges, night fighting, heavy weather fighting, submarines and dive bombers coming at them as well as big shells : it just never stopped.

Most of the (hugely expensive, manned by thousands of highly trained men) aptly named "capital" ships that were sunk in WWII, did not fall before the big guns, but rather to much smaller,cheaper, simpler weapons : sea mines, torpedoes, dive bombers, kamikazes.

Ballastics and science hardly entered into most of those losses : instead very brave men got within pointblank range and then eyeballed their way to success.

Engineers can understand that 'can-do' attitude perfectly well....