Dawson's commensality supplies Modernity's "Missing Middle"

Seventy five years on, WWII (conventionally 1939-1945 but actually lasting much longer) looks like nothing more than two great grist stones, Reification and Reductionism, relentlessly grinding up all humanity between them .

For example, the Axis reified a scientific claim that humanity could be accurately divided into being either members or non-members of a concretely actual Aryan Race --- and then set out to eliminate all the non members.

The Allies, equally guilty, chose to worship at a scientific temple that claimed the reduction of all human complexity to the view we are but simple aggregates of tiny indivisible protons and electrons.

Neither claim can stand up to a probing examination - then or now.

But in fact, those claims weren't generally contested seventy five years ago.

However one scientist, Henry Dawson, while paddling in his quiet backwater of the study of human-bacterial commensality, implicitly seemed to offer up an extremely muted scientific critique of these two complementary explanations of Reality.

No wonder his view was ignored.

However he persisted because it did seem that these two complementary explanations - one encompassing the very biggest things in reality and the other covering the very small entities in reality - left out the vast middle of reality.

And that is the very place where all life (and most matter and energy) actually 'lives' .

The key concept in commensality ("the dining together of all life, big and small, at a common table") is that tiny but vital connector :  AND  .

Commensality re-unites what reductionism and reification divides.

Commensal Penicillin : the saving of the lives of 1A soldiers AND  4F civilians , on both sides of the war

But it was not until he put his ideas on commensality into practise, as he confounded the Allied plan to weaponize wartime penicillin, that commensality began to have an actual impact on the thoughts of scientists and the general population.

For in science, as in life generally, words - even peer-reviewed published words - don't always speak louder than actions....

Allies gave penicillin only to 1A soldiers for same reason they gave Czechoslovakia only to Hitler

The Allies weaponizing penicillin was as morally wrong as appeasing Hitler by giving him Czechoslovakia on a platter , and for exactly the same reasons.

The Allies totally failed to see that giving everything to the mighty and nothing to the weak was exactly what caused the war in the first place: weaponizing penicillin was not going to win the war but rather cause Allies to lose the moral peace.

'Eugenicide with an English accent' was not a moral counterweight to Hitler's values, but merely an Anglo-Saxon cousin of his.

Henry Dawson realized, very early on in the Fall of 1940, that any cause willing to save the lives of its very weakest, such as the SBEs, even during a Total War, would be a cause worthy of dying for.

By contrast, any cause that was only a weak 'me too' of its enemy's morality wasn't going to get 20 year old infantrymen up and out of their foxholes with any alacrity when the whistle blew.

Justice is only truly just when it is as fair to the weak as it is to the mighty, as fair to the foolish as it is to the wise : but God knows it isn't easy to make each new generation of humanity realize this.

The Germans, Japanese, Soviets did have a cause they believed was worthy of dying for, perverted as it was ---- one reason why as individuals and in small groups, they were usually much better troops than any of their opposing Allied troops.

Interestingly, the free Polish troops were also considered to be braver than the other Allied troops : they knew they were going to have to fight very hard to secure the postwar fate of Poland - to keep it out of Allied Russian as well as Axis German hands.

They lost, thanks to FDR - but Dawson didn't.

Penicillin was de-weaponized , albeit only by loud public demand and against government wishes,  and the Allies narrowly escaped being accused, postwar, having having caused a war crime of omission....

Commensal thoughts were parents to the Humanitarian penicillin deed ...

Before 1945 and the rise of post-Modernity, it was rare for scientific doubts to turn into humanitarian actions, but Martin Henry Dawson's wartime efforts against the weaponizing of penicillin was an important exception.

From 1926 till 1940 , Dr Dawson had intensely studied how Nature's smallest beings ( the bacteria) managed to survive upon and co-exist with the smartest and most successful of Nature's largest beings (Man) .

His fourteen years of intense research in Commensality was dismissed by most of his colleagues as a sad mis-directed use of his considerable talents.

As with his colleagues, no one today really doubts that humanity is  a large being and very intelligent( ie is wise as well as mighty) while most of us still regard bacteria as barely living, incredibly small, blobs of jelly : as dumb as they are weak.

But as Dawson discovered, as fast as Man's sophisticated internal immune system and his equally sophisticated external medical system came up with ways to remove these commensal bacteria, the bacteria equally found ways to claw their way back.

Just as he knew that any forthright and honest look at the current and past workings of Nature would show that the tiny and the big are co-existing today and have been doing so for a very long time -----with no sign at all that the small were on their way out.

If anything, the fossil record showed how vulnerable the big could be to mass extinction in times of trouble.

Despite this rather bleak record for the bigger beings of  Nature, it was precisely to Nature ( rather than to the traditional arbiter, God) that Dawson's Era of Modernity appealed to.

All to back its central claim that 'only the strong survive', 'might is right' , 'law of the jungle', 'survival of the fit', 'Nature is on the side of the bigger battalions' and many other similar phrases.

Dawson was a dutiful fully paid-up member of Modernity.

But the more he investigated the many varied and ingenious ways his oral commensal strep bacteria hung in against Man's best efforts, the less willing he was to endure this constant claim of Nature's support for the self-centred and ruthless actions of the world's biggest human societies.

Once, (younger, unmarried, childless and without any old war wounds), he had been able to show his support for the smaller human societies by enlisting in WWI to fight for poor, pitiful Belgium and for the memory of Edith Carvell.

Now in October 1940, as an even more squalid WWII slid into its second year, he still hadn't found an equivalent way to do something in support of the small and the weak in this war.

Then echoes of the Nazi war on the weak reached his own American medical school and gave him the emotional opening he needed.

Suddenly "Social" medicine (the 1930s efforts to reduce sickness among the poorest and most vulnerable) , something he had much a part of through his advocacy on behalf of the neglected chronically ill poor, was to be downplayed in the school's curriculum.

Instead now all possible attention was to be directed to teaching "War" medicine and maximizing the health of America's most fit young men.

So the majority of his colleagues cheerfully clumped off , on the first day of America's first ever peacetime draft registration, (October 16th 1940), to help with medical examinations.

But while America's doctors attended to seeking out the most 1A men possible among America's youth, Dawson heard the beat of a different drummer.

He instead deliberately sought out the 4Fs of the 4Fs, young men dying of SBE (subacute bacterial endocarditis), an invariably fatal progressive disease that mostly afflicted the poor, immigrants and minorities.

His team hadn't planned to start their first clinical trials till next year, 1941, but he changed all that with one sudden decision.

He chose to make Draft Day, October 16th 1940, the first day of his new Age of Humanitarian Antibiotics, picking that day to give History's first ever shots of penicillin.

 Two young men (black man Aaron Alston and a young Jewish boy named Charles Aronson) couldn't be part of that historical first day of peacetime draft registration because, as clearly terminal patients, it didn't seem worth the bother of the draft officials.

 But as the first ever patients of the Age of Antibiotics, they still ended up living on forever in the memory of anyone ever saved by this overdue (humanitarian-driven) advent of antibiotics....