Uniformitarian Authoritarianism : yep ! , they're closely related

So there it is then : Sir Charles Lyell and Adolf Hitler joined at the intellectual hip.

Both responded uneasily to the plenitude of plenitudes that scientific and economic advances brought to people living in the Victorian Era.

Their personal responses certainly differed, but both their ill-ease and their solution shared much in common.

Their plentiphobia was eased by greatly reducing and ordering the apparent plenitude of objects and actions flying about 'out there' in the new freedom that the Victorian Age - pace Charles Darwin - seemed to have thrown up (God is Dead).

Ironically, Lyell by metaphorically removing Nature and Nature's catastrophes as a potent sort of explanation for human failures only increased the freedom-from that Hitler and his followers found so mentally threatening.

Disbelieve in God means disbelieving in the Devil - and disbelief in natural disasters simply removed yet another scapegoat for human failings.

That pretty well only leaves the Jews, the Romas, the Slavs and the Handicapped to carry the can to the gas chamber ....

"Unfit valour" : They defied Allied & Axis eugenics (and their own physical failings) to bring us "Penicillin-for-All"

What would penicillin look like today if Hitler, Stalin or Churchill had delivered it - instead of Dawson ?

In 1943 , Hitler, Stalin or Anglo-American Big Pharma could have delivered penicillin to us - delivered us penicillin either as expensive as Avastin or only to be given to the truly deserving Proletarian or Aryan.

But against the eugenic-mad world of 1943 , perhaps only a bunch of misfits and unfits could have delivered us inexpensive, abundant ,un-patented, un-encumbered Penicillin-for-All...

WWII : the warlords as scientists ...

Nature Resists, 1939-1945 : science proposes, nature disposes

The Allied-Axis started out fighting one enemy and ended up fighting a totally unexpected enemy.

Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, Mussolini and Tojo were all well known for having a strong personal interest in science and technology.

FDR had none, but he was astute enough to know that he needs lots of science and technology and astute enough to give it a free hand.

Willing indeed to risk public ridicule by requesting 50,000 planes a year from the 1940 American economy.

Planes, planes and planes enough to tell the world America was going to fight, if it had to, with high tech machines not low tech doughboys.

So a science war, even a scientism war ; a war exclusively fought between the world's top high tech manpower.

And Nature ?

Yawn !

An inert, passive backdrop.

Or was it ......?

1939-1945 : scenery chewing actors ...

1939-1945 : 'civilized men' battle each other to divide the natural world - but then , totally unexpectedly , it resists...

"1939 -1945 : Scenery Chewing Actors" is a wonderful ambiguous title.

Does it mean ham actors like Hitler, Mussolini and Churchill tore up the natural world, in passing,  as they struggled to lead all humanity ?

Or does it mean does it mean the best laid plans of mousy prime ministers and ratty war lords are blunted and broken when the neutral seeming natural backdrop to their human-only drama turns out to be very much alive around and willing to bite back ?


Or perhaps, that a lot of both can be found in the actual events of that six year long war.

A 'civilized men' upon 'civilized men' military conflict,  mixed in with the natural world exhibiting unexpected 'push back'  against the pretensions of those 'civilized men' , right across the globe....