Plentiphobia : fear of being overwhelmed by plenitude

"Too much information".

Humans are easily overwhelmed - temporarily - by too much.

Too much choice, too many people on a crowded street, too much choice of new clothes in a story - on and on.

They recover by retreating into places with much less choices and decisions - usually their own home.

But , starting in the 1870s , almost all of us in the educated urbanized middle class western world - all the time  and everywhere - felt overwhelmed by too many new scientific discoveries  , too many new immigrants, too many new imports, too much too much.

The un-coordinated activities of modernization/ globalization  had produced the mother of all plenitudes and humanity reacted with a strong case of plentiphobia.


This phobia - given that humanity also supposedly welcomed modernization and wanted it to go faster and bigger - manifested itself in a complex way.

Western civilization now semi-consciously used the processes of modernization to reduce this plenitude - tidy and clean it up - perfect it and then freeze the result in place forever.

A few perfect chemical synthetics and plastics were to replace the vast variety of natural and imperfect materials we had traditionally used.

Against germs - a greatly hightened gospel of cleanliness.

Against plant and animal and insect pests - ditto.

Against immigrants - immigration controls and wholesale efforts to socialize those few that were admitted.

Against humans as imperfect as wood and wool and rock could be - culling out and purebreed breeding.

Plentiphobia in people who failed to graduate from university is called Fascism and Nazism.

While formal eugenics is just plentiphobia with a PhD ....

Acting Up : sometimes you must , even if you can't

An provocative way to look at WWII is to say that its deep structure , beneath and beyond all its confusing surface variety of activities, could be boiled down to a Tyranny of the Fit against the Unfit.

'Fitness' was a coat of many colours : to the Russian Communists, coming from working class stock rendered you automatically much more fit than if your parents were upper middle class.

In the capitalist West, of course the reverse was true.


And to the stocky dark-skinned Japanese, the notions of physical fitness and of beauty as defined by their allies the tall, blond and blue eyed Aryan German Nazis did not match their own in almost any way.

But almost all of the science-minded in that era of scientism felt comfortable in casually using the terms fit and unfit to divide up a world of plenitude that they saw as needlessly and excessively cluttered and messy.

And to then to use the tools of plenticide to 'clean it up' so that only the fit remained in a orderly, clean, pure 100% productive world.

We don't feel the horror and disgust about variety and plenitude that as our grandparents of the era of streamlined modernity once did - far from it - in fact we now cherish which they so disdained.

But how and when did we start to move from their era to our era of post-modern questing after diversity ?

I say it all began when The Seven first "Acted Up" to protest what the Allied 'fit' had planned for some they defined as 'unfit' ....

Martin Henry Dawson : The Agape Naturalist

In WWI , Philip Bent VC and Henry Dawson MC displayed great physical courage under enemy fire when they put themselves in lethal danger to rally their men to close a dangerous break in the Allied lines.

This was 'agape' valour in that they did not risk their lives simply for the men in their battalion whom they knew well (kith and kin) but rather they selflessly risked their lives for the entire overall Allied cause.

In WWII , Dawson displayed agape physical courage and moral courage .

Agape physical courage in the sense of selflessly sacrificing his health (and hence his life) to help total strangers.

Agape moral courage in the sense that his opponents were no longer the Hun but rather his own subculture of Allied doctors and scientists who were strongly opposed to his 'wasting' his (agape) penicillin on young people judged to be useless militarily.

But what did Dawson do in the 1920s and 1930s, between these two wars ?

I argue he was an agape naturalist in those years .

Perhaps because he was educated during the years of Alexander MacKay's regime as Superintendent of Education for Nova Scotia , Dawson displayed a wide catholicism of interest in the microbe world compared to other medical scientists and doctors of his era.

They tended to see microbes only as as bad germs to be ruthlessly eliminated or harmless avirilulent germs to be totally ignored.

Superintendent MacKay had gotten all Nova Scotia's rural and small town school children to regularly catalogue the start and end of seasons as marked by the first bloomings or first arrivals etc  of the various flora and fauna.

MacKay wanted to show how the life cycle of all life was affected by variations in the non-living world - the timing of the various seasons affecting directly when the first mayflower of the season appeared for example.

Perhaps this unique 'phenological' effort mentally rubbed off on the young Dawson - leading him to see life on Earth as sharing in a basic global commensality together.

Because during the 1920s and 1930s , Dr Dawson didn't just selflessly help those chronically ill humans dismissed as basically useless and worthless by most other people. He also regarded them as worthy in and of themselves , as they were.

He showed the same evenhanded regard for all when it came to all the 'odd' , 'useless' , 'unworthy of study', 'avirulent' microbes he chose to study at great cost to his career.

For just as he valued the great plenitude of human types, so he felt the same about the great variety and plenitude of non -human life not matter how useless they appeared to be to the rest of humanity.

Simply put,  I am saying that plenticide and selfishness and narrow group-love are much the same, just as support of plenitude  and commensality and agape love are basically the same.

With the sixth mass extinction - happening now - we are practising plenticide on a huge scale - and once again only the agape love of the agape naturalist will halt this madness .....

WWII plenticide and agape penicillin were made for each other : chalk and cheese, matter and antimatter , oil and water

WWII saw an unusually high number of civilians and POWS die in a war supposedly fought between modern civilizations : why ?

Out of thousands of possible drug choices, penicillin , dramatically emerging late in WWII , remains our best loved and best known medicine : why ?

I think these two unusual events are in fact closely linked : (behavior on both sides in) WWII being the disease and Agape penicillin being the cure.

Agape penicillin's plenitude curing plenticide against life and of compassion....