What a wonderful thought for troubled people to hold tight to during the darkness of WWII .
And what a wonderfully multi-dimensional metaphor !
Plenty of food, plenty of warm fires and warm clothes, plenty of hugs, plenty of peace.
Plenty of wartime penicillin : plenty of penicillin for all those in the world who would otherwise die without it.
And the plentiful peace that could at long last descent on world at vicious war precisely because of denial of human plenitude.
For it was not just German nazis, Japanese racists and Russian communists who sought to reduce the gene pool by killing off all those human beings they saw as unfit.
All humanity seemed to determine to kill off as many species and make their genes extinct as quick as we possibly could.
Plenitudes , Ancient and Modern
In the era of Modernity, supposedly the era of Evolution, all of humanity - led by the scientists - denied Evolution's need for as big a gene pool as possible for natural selection to work effectively - both in the human world and in the non-human world.
Science even worked to reduce the plenitude of the non-living world - seeking always to remove the endless variety of natural fibres with reliably consistent (man-made) rayon and nylon etc.
Ethically, the moral consequences from accepting (or not accepting) Evolution's need for plenitude (a science based plenitude) were not all that different from accepting (or not accepting) the traditional religious reasons to support the plenitude of The Great Chain of Being.
Accepting human plenitude (old or new) means welcoming The Universal Declaration of Human Rights into your heart , means accepting as equal and worthy all people - people of every possible colour, religion, gender, class - means accepting all those no matter how physically and mentally challenged.
Not accepting human plenitude means accepting a religious or scientific claim that a particular ethnicity (the-Jews-that-killed-Christ) , class (rich peasant kulaks) or physical condition (all the handicapped) can indeed be "life unworthy of life" and then standing about as a cold-blooded bystander, when they are killed off.
Henry Dawson's vision of scientific and ethical plenitude
Henry Dawson made no such grand claims for his efforts, as I have done in this article.
He had always been a humanitarian, always committed to valuing human plenitude , but no more than many.
But his scientific studies had slowly led him to a profound acceptance of the evolutionary need for plenitude.
These scientific underpinnings seemed to have stiffened his moral convictions and made this normally meek man a tiger in opposing his wartime government and his own profession - even at the cost of his own life.
This ethical and scientific commitment to plenitude made him a truly unique individual during WWII -- the reason I am writing this book.
Dawson believed that one easy way to demonstrate that the Atlantic Charter's support for universal human values was truly sincere was to mass produce penicillin during WWII.
And to do so, precisely because it was a Total War centring on conflicting views of the worth of all human life.
And then the Allies should openly and publicly distribute that wartime penicillin to all those in the world who would die without it, to show a doubting world that the Atlantic Charter's rhetoric was for real.
"Penicillin for all" could do as much to win the war as it could do to burnish the peace.
For two years (August 1943-August 1945) from saving Baby Patty Malone in Harlem till the burning of hundreds of Japanese Baby Patty Malones at Hiroshima , the Pax Penicillia suggested to the world what a Pax Plenitudo could look like.
Then the curtain dropped with the Pax Urania and it was as if the United States had never declared the Atlantic Charter....
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