The "3 Rs" of Modernist Science : Reductionism, Reification ...and Reality

Reality, in the common sense cum positivist meaning of that word, is what was usually missing from modernist science and the modernist era : its vast missing middle.

At the top, Reification and Biology had created something called "The Jewish Race" but you couldn't actually touch or taste it or definitely define it.

But if it did exist, at the bottom all its members could certainly be reduced to nothing more than the multiples of then tiniest known bits of mass and energy : protons, electrons and neutrons.

Chemistry and Physics told us so.

(Not that you could see those sub atomic objects either.)

But what was missing was something or someone you could actually see and touch.

The missing bits in the middle , in the day to day reality where we humans touch see hear and taste things.

Missing from all of modernist science was a someone you could accurately define the concrete limits of.

Say an actual individual "Jew" , as vaguely defined within the nebulous concept of "The Jewish Race".

Someone like the real Erin Green : born Aaron Green in East London, named after his father who was raised as an active member of the Jewish religious faith back in his native Poland.

But as an adult, Aaron senior became non-religious, particularly after he met an Irish-born woman raised as a church-going Catholic. She too became non-religious after she married Aaron senior.

Their son, Aaron junior changed his name, as an adult, to Erin as a sort of oral pun honouring both his mother's and father's heritage.

Now he is living in occupied France in 1941, after having met and married a French woman, of traditional French atheist background, while on holiday in Nice.

Suddenly the Germans arrest him, his wife and their children as being "members of the Jewish Race" and start sending them forward on a trip to the fatal showers.

The Nazis at least agreed with many legislatures of the American South in not knowing any arithmetic.

They lined up to defy reality and realism by claiming that far less than 1% of your genome was more potent than the other 99.99% of your genome in defining your origins.

In other words, that tails wag dogs, not the other way around.

"Just one drop of black or jewish blood defines you forever as Negro or Jewish".

Whatever if any 'race' that Erin's children belonged to,  it was the mixed up, muddled up human race : but then Reality is like that.

Modernist science is simple ;  Modernist reality is not...

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....

Between PROGRESS and PROTONS : "The Missing Middle" , where we actually live

Thirties Reductionism said that once scientists knew the behavior of one of the Protons that made up Winston Churchill's body (and multiplied it by a trillion trillion trillion identical protons), they could then predict Churchill's behavior over the 1936 Abdication Crisis.

Thirties Reification said that Human Progress is real and concrete and since it was so clearly evident that Human Progress 'wants to get ever bigger and bigger',then dividing Human Progress up into the two billion individual people that existed in the world in 1939, would allow us to predict that particular individual Scott Nearing would also approve of things getting ever bigger.

But in fact he became famous for disagreeing bigger is better.

The average behavior of heterogeneous aggregates does not let us predict the behavior of an individual human being , anymore than than the behavior of  individual proton helps us predict the average behavior of  a heterogeneous aggregate.

Heterogeneous , because Churchill was not a vast crystal of trillions upon trillions of undifferentiated protons but rather a very  stratified collection of protons in a great variety of differently-sized and differently-arranged components that led each component to very unexpectedly different behavior.

And Human Progress had no protons, or even human individuals, within it, because it was simply an abstract idea rather a concrete physical object.

What most Thirties intellectual thought was desperately missing was in giving adequate attention to the vast "Missing Middle" between Protons and Progress, because inside that "Missing Middle" lies the life we actually live, including our twin delusions of reductionism and reification.

However, I believe that the prism of Commensality does allow us to re-capture that "Missing Middle" , and thus allows us to better understand Thirties intellectual thought's sad grandchild, WWII .....

Must Progress inevitably get mightier and wiser ?

During the truly horrible and nasty 1930s and early 1940s, at the apogee of Reductionist Modernity, this idea was the overall global "meta-ideology".

So powerful a meta-ideology that it actually dominated all the ideologies we then took to be widely apart in their worldviews.

Minor variant ideologies we still call fascist/nazi style nationalism , communism, and mixed socialist/capitalist liberal democracy.

Hydro dams and buildings of all sorts, from all ideology zones, got bigger, wider, taller, heavier --- planes and ships and land vehicles got steadily bigger, faster, longer, more long-lunged : mightier.

Streamlined, smooth,sleek, aerodynamic : more athlete-like, more bullet-like.

Fit, very fit.

Business, government and military bureaucracies, from all ideology zones, got bigger and more complex with a lot more specialized and professional subsections : wiser.

During the Great Depression, the idea that Big is Good and Bigger is even Better temporarily replaced even the claim that Greed is Good.

Was this true ?

At least one prominent scientist didn't think so and wrote a popular-styled essay to demonstrate the limits to the idea that bigger was always and inevitably better.

Google "haldane" and "size" and there it pops up, as truly profound and as eye-opening as ever : a still-useful essay on science that was written more than 85 years ago !

This, despite the best possible definition of a professional scientist being 'someone who wouldn't be caught dead reading a science article in their field that is more than eight and half months old' .

Nevertheless, you and I are not science "pros" and we'll read anything useful : J B S Haldane , "On Being The Right Size".

If you are worried at all that our globe is hurling towards an environmental disaster that will make WWII look like pikers, then please, please read this essay.

You'll need it as you fight the DENIERS, who deny there are any limits on the size of a problem that Man's mental powers can beat.....

WWII : Constructionists vs Commensalists

Reductionism, still the philosophy of today's Popular Science, has admittedly had a lot of glass-half-filled success in the last few centuries.

It has totally succeeded in burrowing down below the surface of reality to the tiny objects at the base of all energy and matter ; reducing big macro objects that we can directly see and touch down to zillions of incredibly tiny objects we can only assume exists by way of indirect evidence.

But while Reductionism can explain how these tiny objects interact, more or less, it has totally failed to fulfill the real purpose behind all of its efforts : to construct new , better-built, versions of macro reality based on what we have learned about the tiny building blocks that make it up.

It turns out, to use today's Net jargon, that the so called laws of physics do not actually 'scale up' ( or 'scale down') all that well.

What we know about tiny quarks does not help us at all to account for the unexpected behavior of slightly bigger objects like the atoms in various phases of condensed matter, such as in solids and liquids for example.

To use a life-sized example of another scientific failure to scale up, this one from WWII logistics, we need only to look at the total failure of the German fuel truck on the Russian Front, after doing so well in Poland and France.

A sturdy army truck like the famous American deuce and a half can go pretty well everywhere a railway can't and so is the best means to get fuel to a fast moving invading armoured army.

But it burns a whole lot of fuel itself to get its few tons of fuel to the front.

But over distances of about one hundred miles from end of rail, it still is the best single way to get fuel to tracked armoured vehicles well out ahead of the slower ,wider, line of rail-supported advance.

But move the distance required to be travelled up to 800 miles out (and remember 800 more miles back in to get more tank and truck fuel) and the truck is a flop and a disaster.

Any truck trying to move up behind an aggressively invading armoured army that has been fighting an equally determined enemy , one who leaves nothing but scorched earth behind, is sure to be travelling over miles of badly damaged, badly overcrowded, muddy or dusty potholed roads and bridges.

The truck's gas and oil consumption soars as its miles per hour slows to a crawl. It can expect major damages from bad roads at least a few times on its 800 mile trek out and back - requiring the services of equally gas-guzzling repair vehicles.

Effectively, the truck is soon consuming more petro products on its two way trek than it can deliver to the tanks. (Remember, it must haul all of its own fuel and oil on itself, for the trip out and back, leaving ever less room for tank fuel.)

This wouldn't happen in peacetime, where the roads between Berlin and Moscow would be in excellent, fuel efficient, shape and where fuel and oil can be picked up at filling stations on route as required.

Once the cargo was delivered to Moscow, a return cargo is picked up to take back, to cover costs.

But war trucks 'dead-head' back, unless they can be used to safely carry lightly wounded men back to rear base hospitals.

Hitler's gambit to take over the world failed in 1941 when his physics of truck transport failed to 'scale up' to the world of real life.

Similarly the fact that chemistry had constructed totally new molecules of dyes and plastics out of little atoms didn't mean human chemists could construct molecules of penicillin just because the fungi could do so naturally.

Penicillin's formula was not the formula for nylon, 'scaled up'.

In biology, the ham-fisted efforts of human-sized geneticists to construct genes they wanted by massive doses of x-rays failed to work as well as the elegant way the tiny bacteria transformed each other with tiny but efficient HGT (horizontal gene transfers).

I am not dismissing the value of human railways and human chemical plants nor do I expect to see skyscrapers made by bacteria : I just insist along with (Martin) Henry Dawson, that there is a niche for everyone and we all are best at activities scaled to our own size and niche.

Reality can not be reduced to tenured human particle physicists at the top and quarks at the bottom (Reality reduced to Professors and Plasma),  with all of the rest of the stuff in between just useless feeders, not wanted on the voyage, yesterday's booster stages, enroute in Man's journey to the stars.....

Ironic convergent property of Modernity : collectivist thrust from reductionism !

Politically, Modernity (1873-1973 RIP) , had a strong collectivist thrust, exalting the collective nation, race and planet over the individual being.

At the same time, and in a typical reductionist fashion that at least had the virtue of consistency, this collectivist superstructure was fully explained as simply the consequence of many trillions of highly individual actions at the basement fundamental level of Reality.

The harder modernity scientists tried to deny the existence of convergent behavior , the more it poked its ironic little head up, even in their reductionist of moments.......