good things happen when everybody helps : the emergent modernity of wartime's natural penicillin

The Hunger Plan-Holocaust, The Nazi plan to rid Eastern Europe of fifty million 'useless mouths', was no abberation but in fact the logical outcome of 1885-1965 Reductive Modernity : as fossil-fueled machines did more and more of the work, why keep human and animal slaves hanging about, eating up valuable food and fuel ?

Reduce the un-needed in the refining fires of the crematorium.

If Lincoln hadn't freed the black slaves to enjoy the freedom of racially driven underemployment, American might have had to do its own Holocaust as the tractor left a whole bunch of un-needed horses and slaves in its wake.

(Of course the millions of American farm horses killed in the years after WWII for horse meat sales to hungry Europe suggests a mini holocaust of a sort was carried out upon animal slaves.)

But Reductive Modernity was scientifically wrong and by the 1960s, physicists involved in Quantum Theory could finally begin to explain, at the micro level, what people like Dr Martin Henry Dawson had always suspected at the macro level.

It turns out that simply knowing the behavior of atoms, electrons and nuclei at the most fundamental levels of existence is no help for predicting the behavior of those same tiny specks of matter and energy once put in various spacial arrangements at the macro level.

Matter actually exists in hundreds of known and possibly trillions of unknown possible phases --- far more than the three of solid, liquid and gas that our teachers lied about back in high school science.

Each phase of matter is an emergent property of matter in the mass in peculiar spatial form ( temperature being a result of subatomic particles at different states of packed-together-ness) and it is rarely predicted from theory of matter at the micro level .

Rather it is discovered, fallen upon, unpredicted.

Reality is not, as Reductionist Modernists faithfully believed, only seemingly complicated at the surface but simple, predictable and controllable at the bottom --- it is really and truly complicated and unpredictable at the top and at each new layer or level back down to the most fundamental sub-atomic particules.

Its complexity and unpredictability can only be reduced not eliminated , but it is essential for our survival that we do so --- that means all possible sets of eyes employed to see anomalies , suggest solutions, offer up second and third opinions and  to deploy as constructive critics and Devil's Advocates to the powerful and the smug.

We need then, Emergent Modernity : all the good things that can happen when all humanity and all of Nature is invited into the Big Tent to solve our problems....