the long AND the short AND the tall : the eternal commensality of the big and the small (and God blesses 'em all)

It is typical of the hubris of us individual humans and our individual human societies to always imagine that we alone are big and mighty and wise and that all other beings are small, weak and foolish.

A further human hubris of ours is to imagine how better our imagined Utopia would be when all the other, lesser/weaker/smaller forms of life have been liquidated, if need be with with extreme prejudice.

But germicides won't ever remove all the germs anymore than insecticides will ever remove all insects or eugenicides will ever remove all the weak, frail and elderly.

The various forces of Nature combine to interact upon all beings in various ways depending on scale, because each individual scale works over a particular - limited - spatial and energy scale.

Reality , the Reality of matter and energy , is thus permanently stratified into different layers or scale levels.

From the point of view of possible lifeforms, that means a variety of scale-defined niches that are permanently ("eternally") available for the lifeform best sized to excel in them.

Translation : kill off all bacteria sized life and some new life the same size will emerge to fill in that hole of opportunity.

Humans are currently the "fittest" for our big niche but we are not "fit" for all niches, though we continue to delude ourselves into thinking so.

Niches change constantly at the margins so all successful lifeforms display a variety of members, some who appear to be weak and useless, but in fact this merely an evolutionary way to ensure enough variety in the lifeform's generic material to surmount unexpected changes in their chosen niche.

For example , people with a moderate form of the disease of sickle cell anemia survive some insect-vectored diseases better than supposedly healthier people, at least in the many large regions of the world where these insects and diseases are endemic.

The big and the small lifeforms may never grow to like each other or cooperate with each other, but they might as well resign themselves that the big and the small, like the rich and the poor, will always be with us.

Henry Dawson grew to understand the profoundness of the concept of "eternal commensality of the big and the small" in his studies of human-oral commensal strep bacteria interactions.

That is why he was so damn adamant that even winning WWII couldn't come at the cost of tromping all over the weak and the small....

WWII : Science finds, Man applies, Nature confounds ...

Yes indeed, the Universe is just like some giant man-made clockworks, albeit one taken out of its 'shielding' case and left out in Nature's harsh elements, exposed years in years out to blazing sun, wind, rain, snow, dust and mould.

How much our vaunted Civilization rests upon the thin security provided by the shielding roofs over our man-made "Cartwright Machines" is made particularly clear during war.

Then those carefully hand-washed machines, the ones we normally baby and only take for a spin in good weather on a summer's afternoon , are worked to death in all times of year and in all kinds of weather.

As a result, they, their human operators and the civilizations behind them usually crack up pretty quickly.

We have all seen those terribly despondent photos of the soldiers of some Great Power or other, desperately trying to get all their vehicles out of the mud of Russia's winter or Guadalcanal's summer ; Civilization spinning its wheels hard and going nowhere fast.

The Aryan Man's Burden.... and others

At least six modernist Utopias (White Man's Burden , Aryan Man's Burden , Proletarian Man's Burden , Norden Precision , Synthetic Autarky and Eugenic Breeding) all quickly fell apart when taken out of their protective boxes and were left exposed to Nature's harsh elements between 1939 and 1945.

Just like clockwork......

Scientism's powerful ability to unite the polar opposites of CUT and RUN

     Scientism is the unbreakable faith belief that human mindpower will inevitably triumph over anything mere Nature can throw up.
     While its days of unquestioned total hegemony was only between 1875 and 1965, it still dominates the political and economic classes and is successfully winning back intellectual hegemony among the environmentalist classes, through the back door of hard core SF films and books.

   Scientism currently posed the gravest threat to the survival of intelligent life* on this planet.
   Much of Scientism's (aka High Modernity) power lies in its awesome ability to combine chalk and cheese / water and oil.
   Technological autarky is a static or vertical activity.
    It claims that inside the 1939 borders of The Third Reich ( or of any nation on earth) lies all the elements needed for an utopia to make its people powerful and prosperous.
    Just let the chemists and atomic physicists loose with their powers of fundamental transformation upon the atoms of rock, water and air and they will create synthetic food, metals and even life itself.
   By contrast, Technological imperialism offers up a horizontal and dynamic utopia ---- this, the current Earth 1.0, and all the other Earths in the universe allow us to go on consuming and depleting and destroying local resources and natural habitat willy nilly, without fear of ever killing the Golden Geese that lays these golden eggs.
   One advocates CUT : consuming not just all the biomass but even the rocks of a particular place to satisfy humanity's whims.
   But it hasn't always worked out in practise.
   So the RUN option (after first DENYING) comes to the fore: abandon the failed autarky to try it again in a different virgin frontier - say the wheat and oil lands of the Ukraine and Russia.
  The history of the Third Reich, 1933-1945, shows the Nazis did in fact follow this two step approach of High Modernity - carrying out home-grown autarky and imperial expansion into others lands.
   What united their efforts, without the Nazis suffering from the strain of intellectual inconsistency, was the over-riding Scientism belief in the dynamic and infinitely flexible ability of the human will to triumph against mere Matter by either using CUT techniques or RUN techniques.
   In the winter of 1940-1941, I'd say that the 'Matter' of a Russian Winter settled that hash pretty quickly !
   But unfortunately, the newest denier movement, birthed in that 'Mayberry sort of town', Wichita Kansas, has learned nothing and is repeating all the old Scientism mistakes and disasters that the Nazis inflicted on the world in 1939-1945....

* Admittedly, like the Higgs boson, there is still no actual proof that there  IS  intelligent life on Earth....