Part #273: Over the Rainbow
“White Gate, this is Gold Dolphin. PRIORITY ABBEY ONE ABBEY. Barking Barking Six reports positive result repeat POSITIVE Pimlico Orpington Zetland result. Foe propagation confirmed. Recommend Southwark-Uxbridge-Ealing implementation. Awaiting confirmation. Gold Dolphin out.”
–part of a transmission to or from the English Security Directorate base at Snowdrop House, Croydon, intercepted and decrypted by Thande Institute personnel
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From: Motext Pages EX524B-H [retrieved 22/11/19].
Remarks: These pages are listed under “SAAX Political Studies Revision: Syllabus C”.
Extraneous advertising has been left intact.
Historiographic analyses of the twentieth century typically portray it as a grand contest between the two opposing ideologies of Societism and Diversitarianism: the Eye Against the Prism. Indeed, this view, mainstream for good reasons both old and new, is frequently forced upon the century so rigidly that any aspects of it which do not fit the pattern are quietly sliced away and forgotten. For now, rather than critique the artificiality of this viewpoint, let us instead embrace it in all its flawed glory.
If we are to view the ten decades between 1900 and 2000 through the lens of this ideological contest, then our first port of call should be to define when and where these ideologies originated. In the case of Societism this feels rather superfluous. Far more ink has been expended on telling the story of Pablo Sanchez and his disciples, both by his supporters and detractors, than of any man outside the context of religious figures. Diversitarianism, however, is more mysterious, in part precisely because it became so embraced by the nations arrayed against the Societist world. In an Iversonian era, we are keen to lay bare all the secrets of our enemies for all and sundry to see and criticise; but the secret foundations of our own beliefs? That is another matter.
A common view is simply to regard Diversitarianism as the opposite of Societism, and an ideology which arose precisely in challenge to it, from the early critiques known as ‘Contrasanchezismo’. Such a view would date the origins of Diversitarianism as naturally arising after the Societist Revolution in South America, as prior to this point Societism existed only as a rather obscure parlour-book ideology mostly embraced by the lazy rich. Leaving aside whether this is a fair description in itself, this simplistic but mainstream interpretation of Diversitarianism is easy to critique. The name ‘Diversitarianism’ and the writings of the most prominent Diversitarian thinkers, the classic university reading list, may indeed all date from the years following 1900; but those thinkers themselves drew upon older writings, building on an existing foundation.
Some take the slightly more refined view that Diversitarianism dates specifically from the monogramme “The Death of Diversity” by the Belgian ethnologist Wim Vanderheyden in 1915. In this he blasted the then-ongoing Societist destruction of linguistic and cultural diversity in the Nusantara, at a time when most Europeans, Americans and Chinese would shrug and turn the page. He did not coin the term ‘Diversitarianism’, but it arose from his choice of words. The term is recorded in 1922, shortly before what is generally accepted as the beginning of the Black Twenties period with the Russian intervention following the Tartar Revolt. Vanderheyden certainly defined many of the key talking points and priorities which later Diversitarians would emphasise, but he was scarcely some anti-Sanchez, a sole founder of an ideology, as some have contended.
Then there is the view expressed by the Soviet philosopher Ivan Yegorov, who wrote in 1984 that “There is no ‘Diversitarianism’ and there never has been such a thing…it has become the fashion to append a fancy name to practices which…merely describe the way in which the world has worked for centuries before Sanchez blackened it. It is normality, it is sensibility, it is not…something radical and new.” This is easy to dismiss as propaganda, especially given the crude reactionary policies of the Soviet government, which frequently was certainly not merely enforcing pre-Sanchez values. Nonetheless, Yegorov was no fool, making his assertion all the more puzzling. Later interviews suggest that he was not writing what his paymasters wanted to hear, but genuinely believed in his own definition—which, perhaps, is symptomatic of the national trauma induced by the Sunrise War.
If we are instead to take the view that the roots of Diversitarianism lie far earlier than the turn of the twentieth century, before Contrasanchezismo had any need to exist, then we must look at the earlier influences of the architects of the ideology. Although Societism and Diversitarianism are naturally portrayed as opponents, it is possible to regard both as having their roots in a shared social criticism of the Long Peace era. While Sanchez himself was writing about earlier eras (his view shaped in particular by the 1840s elections in the UPSA and the Great American War), the Societism that eventually materialised under men like Alfarus owed as much to the years after Sanchez’s death as to the man himself. In this time, Raul Caraibas and others shifted Societism’s focus, in part due to the changing nature of the world. Societism’s chief attacks on the status quo of civilisation had always been firstly against war, secondly against Racism and thirdly against poverty. In the Long Peace era, at least as far as the average European or Novamundine was concerned, the first and biggest of these attacks became irrelevant. It was an era in which it seemed as though the Carltonist forces of pseudopuissant corporations had dismissed war as bad for business. The second and third factors of Racism and poverty remained, however, and it was frequently these which were emphasised in that period—even though stereotypically many Societists of the 1880s and 90s were wealthy men. Caraibas himself, of course, was from a much humbler background.
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The first ideological glimmerings of what became Diversitarianism, what we might call proto-Diversitarianism, represent a different critique against the global civilisation of the Long Peace. We must remember that while this period was frequently regarded as a golden age in hindsight from the perspective of later global conflicts (and as an era before the Combine), at the time it was often portrayed as a time of malaise and concern by many contemporary writers. The problems highlighted by these writers include the activities of the pseudopuissant corporations acting without restraint by ineffective governments (e.g. chemical plants poisoning villages’ water supplies), political corruption, and the state of the youth. While the latter has always been a concern for every generation since the world began, specific factors were highlighted concerning the idea that urbanisation, industrialisation and pollution were stunting the growth and health of young people. This was often tied to ideas of Superhumanism and contempt for the urban poor, but not always.
Proto-Diversitarians, if we can use the term, represent a slightly artificially-defined subset of such contemporary critics of the Long Peace society. They were non-Societist but rarely anti-Societist, if only because Societism scarcely seemed worthy of having polemics directed against it at this point of history. If Societists had their specific points of attack against the culture of this era, the proto-Diversitarians had different ones. Principally they attacked capital ecumenism, crossing over with the aforementioned general criticism of the abuses of pseudopuissant corporations. The idea of such corporations crossing borders, and drawing more loyalty from their multi-national workforce than those workers felt to their homelands, was a repeated point of criticism. This frequently tied in with the paranoia of invasion literature, popular in the late nineteenth century (most often portraying a phantom Franco-German war)[1] and which underwent a rather more prophetic Russophobic revival in the 1910s. Everyone was looking for a cryptic reserve, the rumoured enemy within that would betray the patriotic fighters of the country to their enemies.
Though it is something little acknowledged by modern Diversitarianism, many of these proto-Diversitarian writers were also anti-Semites. Jews were often portrayed as an archetypal example of a cross-borders culture who owed more loyalty to one another than to the country of which they were citizens. Anti-Semitism is a complex and ancient form of Racism, which may be directed against urban poor ghetto Jews (particularly with the Ashkenazim in Eastern Europe) as ‘the other’ and scapegoats, against wealthy financiers out of jealousy and envy, or indeed both without distinction drawn. Jewish financiers were often regarded as the shadowy engineers of the Long Peace malaise, becoming wealthy off its culture of corporate abuse.
This vague anti-Semitic background feeling of the Long Peace was (paradoxically) amplified after the Pandoric War. The same Jewish financiers who had been accused of profiting from the era of peace were now accused of starting the war to profit off that. They were sometimes linked to the French government’s ‘vulture’-like policies, in part because of the better civil rights Jews enjoyed in France compared to many other countries. Indeed, some conspiracy theorists claimed that the Jews controlled the French government and were the real orchestrators of Napoleon Leclerc’s Marseilles Protocol policy of armed neutrality.
Political anti-Semitism surged in many countries that had been involved in the war, with the notable exception of Germany, whose people had become wearily cynical about such matters during Bundeskaiser Johann Georg’s controversial ‘Kulturkrieg’ against minorities some years earlier. Jews were particularly attacked in the formerly tolerant Poland under its new Russian masters, with many being deported to either Germany or Crimea. Over the decades, the latter had effectively become a continuous rebel zone, with the Russians eventually giving up and not attempting to enforce their rule outside the military base at Akhtiar. Israel existed in a “de facto” sense long before it was a nation on the map. Belgium also pursued anti-Semitic policies, which is sometimes misunderstood as being the result of her joining the Vitebsk Union, but these in fact preceded Maximilian’s alignment with Petrograd. The Jews were simply a useful scapegoat for why Belgium had come out of the war with such petty and transient gains to show for the blood of her soldiers.
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Many countries had single-issue anti-Jewish political parties which existed in a minor sense in this period, boosted again by the upheavals of the Panic of 1917. Less than predictably, the most politically successful of these was in Ireland, which had barely been involved in the war compared to other Hanoverian powers, though it was more economically affected by the Panic. The Anti-Semitic Party was briefly the official opposition, and then junior governing coalition partner, in the particularly divided Parliament elected in 1918. Ironically, after having absorbed many fair-weather friend defectors in a period of popularity, the party’s old guard found themselves diluted out; the ASP in power barely passed anything more than the most token discriminatory policies against Ireland’s rather small number of Jews. Nonetheless, this did give the country a popular reputation for anti-Semitism long after the ASP had ceased to be relevant in any form.
While anti-Semitism certainly played a part in some proto-Diversitarian writings, many other social critics preferred to emphasise the breakdown of traditional cultures driven by capital ecumenism and government centralisation. Sometimes these were motivated by social traditionalism and hostility to innovation (such as a defence of arranged marriages). Others are much more familiar to our modern eyes, focusing on the defence of languages, literature and unique but harmless cultural peculiarities. Here we see the ultimate origins of many common Diversitarian talking points. While Diversitarianism today is frequently associated with nationalism, many of these proto-Diversitarians were critics of nineteenth-century nationalism as producing artificial quests for centralisation and homogeneity. Examples of this included the German Kulturkrieg, France’s attempted suppression of the Provencal [i.e. Occitanian] and Breton languages under the Bouchez Diamantine administration, and the Italian government’s futile attempts to create a standardised ‘Italian’ language from its many dialects.
The crucial difference between what Franciscus Estoras described as ‘the blind patriotism of nooks and corners’, and true Diversitarianism, is that the latter is self-aware. This crucial factor dates, not from the post-Societist Revolution era of the twentieth century, but from a sociological treatise by Scottish nationalist Edgar Ross in 1895. He argued that ‘Every boy believes his father to be the strongest and greatest man in the world…who will stand up and tell him no, don’t be silly, there are many men stronger and greater than your father, you are living an unhealthy fantasy…if we regard such a view by the child as being a natural and even healthy one, then why can we not extend the analogy to a higher level? … My king can beat up your king, my language is more elegant than yours…these are not [an] impetus for conflict, but rather…the friendly brinksmanship that makes us secure in our own identities.”
Ross is an important figure because he lived to write further following the Societist Revolution (having achieved his dream of citizenship of an independent Scotland), and became specifically critical of Societist thought. His writings therefore make a bridge between proto- and true Diversitarians. In 1908 he argued that: “The [Societists] claim that it is self-evident that all men are not only equal, but interchangeable, and that to draw lines between them is anathema…would they, then, criticise a man who finds two drowning children and dives to save his own son first before he tries to save his neighbour’s? Are the bonds of flesh and blood so repugnant to them?” (It would appear that Ross was not aware of the Garderistas at the time he made this statement, but was using a hypothetical example).
The success of Scottish independence emboldened many separatist groups throughout Europe and beyond, although we should not dismiss the counter-example of the settlement reached for Wales within England following disputes in the 1910s. This too was influential upon Diversitarianism, as it emphasised cultural recognition in itself over pure political autonomy. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that Ross’ writings are regarded as so significant. However, there are also additional factors influencing early Diversitarianism, which we must now consider.
‘Biological Diversitarianism’ or ‘Scientific Diversitarianism’ is nowadays considered something of a dirty phrase, tainted by many of the more histrionic pronouncements that came out of Novgorod in the 1960s. Furthermore, to modern eyes it also evokes many of the positions taken by the Combine, particularly in that same era, and perhaps even ancestral memories of the excesses of Burdenism in Carolina or Jacobinism in republican France. But, of course, no one nation or ideology has a monopoly on appealing to alleged cold rationalism in order to justify bright-eyed fanaticism. Furthermore, not all political appeals to scientific principles are necessarily flawed or misguided. The American philosopher of science Archibald Armstrong suggested in 1997 that the appropriate ‘sceptical, criterial view’ of such appeals should focus on one point in particular: does the appellant understand and recognise the inductive principle of scientific research?
Armstrong argued that any political move based on scientific theory is at least worthy of consideration if this criterion is met. However, in most cases it is not. Most scientists generally support the descriptions of scientific research independently published in 1972 by the New Russian physicist Arkady Semyonov and the French philosopher Antoine Jouland.[2] They argue that science advances empirically via the falsification of past theories, or at most, past theories being relegated to a special case of a new and improved theory, only valid in specific circumstances. Perhaps the best-known example of this is that Newtonian mechanics was ‘disproven’ by Webb-Popham Isoluminal Relativity in the 1920s. However, even modern space missions frequently use Newtonian calculations, as they are simpler to make and the divergence from WPIR is too tiny to notice over the speeds and scales involved.[3] WPIR is therefore defined as a greater theory which “reduces” to Newtonianism over a specific scale of distances and masses, which corresponds to the everyday world in which we live in, but breaks down on much smaller or larger scales.
To cut a long story short, Armstrong’s argument is therefore that any political scheme which appeals to science must be made and implemented with the understanding that there is no such thing as ‘scientific truth’, and that any theory must by definition be flawed or incomplete. Lives may depend on this; for example, a scientific opinion based on limited experiment (e.g. due to time constraints) may suggest that a vaccine or treatment for one disease may also work on another, but the reality may be that it is ineffective or even has an adverse effect. Scientific knowledge is achieved by inductive means, and inductive inference by definition can never possess all the evidence about a situation to make a decision as unimpeachable as that of mathematical logic. Inductive inference is the logic that, because the sun has risen every day of one’s life, one can conclude it will rise tomorrow. So far, so good; but the same logic can be applied to a volcano not erupting on the village at its feet, and one day the assumption will be wrong, with disastrous consequences. Real examples abound throughout history. For example, European nations once had the aphorism that something was ‘as impossible as a black swan’, but then explorers discovered that apparently impossible bird living in Antipodea—in fact, it gave its name to Cygnia. There are many more serious examples of unforeseen black swans which can upset scientific theories.
Such an understanding is usually incompatible with the business of governance, which even in democratic nations typically comes with the position that it is always better to stick defiantly to one’s guns than ever admit error—not least because it is this position of perceived strength which is often the one rewarded by the electorate. Few leaders, elected or no, are willing to admit error, even if the error could not possibly have been foreseen. So it is true to say that most political appeals to science assume it is possible to build policy on an unimpeachable truth, and thus must be flawed by Armstrong’s definition. With this caveat in mind, let us return to Scientific Diversitarianism.
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This form of, or proto-influence on, Diversitarianism dates from the period approximately 1880-1910, which saw the widespread acceptance of the germ theory of disease for the first time. Superior microscopes and influence from scientific (or natural-philosophical) disciplines from formerly unknown or closed nations (such as China and the Indian states) both dealt death blows to the formerly persistent Galenic theory that diseases were caused by miasmas. The notion that germs could be spontaneously generated was also disproven, although it required understanding of the distinction between infectious diseases and those such as cancer and lupus which can arise with apparent spontaneity and no disease vector such as an animalcule or virus.[4]
The story of how this biological understanding changed medicine, and banished many diseases from former prevalence to the dusty pages of history, is a long, complex and worthy one, but not one we have time or space to cover here. Instead, let us focus on how studies of cells and disease vectors at this time influenced the philosophies of sociology and governance. The Hermetic[5] principle of ‘as above, so below’ has long been at the heart of many of the more flawed attempts to apply abstract principles (scientific or otherwise) to hard everyday concerns. Just as astrologers claimed parallels between the movement of heavenly bodies and the fortunes of human life on Earth, the same has frequently been applied to new breakthroughs in science. For example, WPIR led to a ‘moral relativism’ movement in twentieth philosophy, rather vaguely motivated by the ill-understood notion that if ‘everything was [now] relative’ in the world of physics, then so too must it be in the realm of ethics.[6] This was also historically influential on Diversitarianism, though its proponents later suffered a backlash in the 1980s and today it has largely faded to a footnote of history.
Whereas WPIR mostly dealt with the universe on a very large scale, the same approach has been applied to research into the fundamentals of the very small. Of late we frequently hear pronouncements on our behaviour which are clearly influenced by the language of inversion theory and corpuscular mechanics.[7] But we need not dig down to quite that level of scale. The Scientific Diversitarians of a century ago were, as noted above, more concerned with the behaviour of cells and disease vectors. Although Jacobinism and Burdenism had done a lot to discredit social ideas based on an imperfect understanding of evolution and Paleian environmental breeding, these factors inevitably also intruded into the debate due to the interest in blastic acid [DNA] and the basis of inheritance at that time. To be clear, it must be understood that much of the science described below dates from later in the twentieth century, and was incorporated into Scientific Diversitarianism over time. The advocates of this view were fortunate that those discoveries happened to reinforce their positions rather than undermine them (for the most part), unlike many such political pronouncements made boldly on the basis of fluxional and incomplete science.
Scientific Diversitarianism, in its most classical sense, focuses on the cell as an analogy for the nation. (It should be noted that in the early days it was much more common to portray the cells comprising the human body as the citizens of a nation, which arguably dates back to Hobbes’ “Leviathan” in some ways). Any kind of cell requires a cell membrane, made up of phosphor-fats [phospholipids] which naturally form double layers in order to hide away the parts of their structure which repel water. Simple cells, such as animalcules, may only have a single membrane ‘pocket’, perhaps reinforced with a rigid cell wall. Other more complex cells, as with those found in the human body, may have additional ‘pockets’ made of more double layers within the space enclosed by the main membrane. These typically include specialised parts of the cell for particular roles, which are dubbed ‘organinos’ by analogy to the large-scale specialised organs within a body.[8] The cytoblast [nucleus] which houses the blastic information to build and replicate the cell, is one of these, as are the granulos [mitochondria] and many others.
Importantly, only the smallest molecules (such as water) and ‘fatty’ or hydrophobic ones can cross a double membrane made of phosphor-fats. Larger and electrically charged molecules cannot penetrate the barrier on their own. However, specialised megalins [proteins] can act as ‘gateways in the wall’, whose design functions like a watchful gatekeeper who only lets in certain molecules. Among many other biological processes, this is used to control muscular contraction: certain megalins allow deficoms, such as electride, natrium and kalium,[9] to flow through cell membranes at the right time in order to set up electrical pressure differentials which cause pieces of megalin machinery to move. A similar process is responsible for how our nerves (and brains) work. The human cell is described by Augustus Gordon as a ‘ wondrous little chemical factory’; whereas a chemist in his or her lab must painstakingly purify a chemical before transferring it to a new flask with different conditions to do the next reaction step, in a cell it merely has to be passed between different double-membrane pockets. One might contain elluftic-water [hydrogen peroxide] in order to add elluftium atoms to a chemical, while another might be acidic or caustic.
The important point is that the phosphor-fat double membranes neatly separate a cell from the outside world, and specialised parts of a cell away from the rest. If the membrane is disrupted, the cell dies, its molecular machinery spilling out into the outside world and invaded by the liquid medium outside. Indeed, this is how many culicides [antibiotics] kill animalcules.
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It was this analogy that had the most influence on Diversitarianism: that according to ‘As Below, So Above’ (an inversion of the original Hermetic principle!) the bio-chemistry of life as we know it depends fundamentally on the idea of BORDERS. Not borders that are never crossed, as then life would also be impossible, but borders which are only opened in a controlled way to those outside influences which are desired. (This would eventually be combined with the later Paleian theory that granulos began as animalcules which were incorporated into the animal cell as ‘model immigrants’).[10] This was used both to critique the free trade and capital ecumenism of the Long Peace, but was also frequently hijacked by Racists as a means to attack immigrants and refugees—in particular those displaced by the Pandoric War and the Societist Revolution. Microscope images of cells bursting open after invasion by viruses became the basis of propaganda illustrations (usually in the iconic minimalistic style of the 1910s) attacking the ‘enemy within’.
Nowadays, of course, where such influences are acknowledged at all, they are presented in a much less confrontational manner. Racism and anti-refugee feeling will sadly always be with us, as we saw more recently with the aftermath of the Last War of Supremacy; yet it is telling that the old ‘Cell Border’ justifications were rarely used in that later period. Cell-based analogies have tended towards the more positive interpretation that, just as a cell can benefit from taking in selected external chemicals (such as medicines administered to defeat a disease) so too can a nation do the same towards refugees. Some draw parallels between the Paleian granulo theories and how many cities now have specific districts for immigrants—not the shunned ghettoes of the past, but rather places in which the preserved cultures of other lands may be presented and acknowledged, without dissolving into the majority culture of that city. Such attitudes exemplify that Diversitarianism that takes inspiration from quite a different area of science—that of the seven-sided prism splitting white light into all the wondrous colours of the rainbow, rejecting homogeneity in favour of the embrace of difference.
Joseph Robertson (2005) went back to the original writings of Edgar Ross when he noted that ‘If we are in this only to preserve our “own” culture, it matters not that the Combine is in the grave—it shall return on the backs of our own selfishness. If we cannot celebrate the preservation of the cultures of “all”, then we are no better than those we spent our blood to defeat.’ Few quotes better summarise modern Diversitarianism, yet the path between the early writings we have discussed here, and that familiar ideology, was a long and difficult one. It is a journey, nonetheless, that we must take, if we are to truly understand how our world became seen as one defined by the struggle of the Eye Against the Prism...
[1] See Part #210 in Volume V.
[2] This philosophical description of empiricism is similar to that made by Karl Popper in OTL.
[3] This is true in OTL as well.
[4] In TTL the term ‘animalcule’, often abbreviated to ‘cule’, has survived as a term for bacteria. The word ‘virus’, derived from a Latin word for poison, was recorded as a vague name for disease-causing agent as early as 1728, the year after this timeline’s POD. Viruses themselves were not discovered in OTL until the end of the 19th century, but in both timelines the old word has effectively been purloined to mean ‘a disease vector that isn’t a bacterium/animalcule’ and later the more specific definition we know today.
[5] I.e. derived from the mystical writings attributed to the Egyptian alchemist Hermes Trismegistus and his imitators.
[6] This happened in OTL as well (e.g. with Gilbert Harman, and Sapir and Whorf in linguistics), much to Einstein’s bemusement—because while concepts such as simultaneity are relative to frames of reference rather than absolute in his theory, conversely it also holds that physical laws are
absolute and unchanging, quite the opposite of these thinkers’ interpretations!
[7] I.e. quantum theory and particle physics.
[8] Called ‘organelles’ in OTL for the same reason.
[9] The term ‘ion’ does not exist in TTL, as it only dates from Faraday in the 1830s. Due to a more monist theory of electricity (emphasising surfeit and deficit rather than positive and negative) positive ions (cations) are instead called ‘deficoms’ (‘deficit atoms’) and negative ions are dubbed ‘surfons’. These terms later influenced the TTL names for protons and electrons, ‘definos’ and ‘surfinos’ respectively, being subatomic charged particles. The –ino ending, from Italian (and Spanish) to signify a diminutive, was used in OTL particle physics for the neutrino particle (i.e. neutral but smaller than a neutron). Electride, natrium and kalium are the TTL scientific terms for calcium, sodium and potassium.
[10] This theory is also currently accepted in OTL; there is evidence that mitochondria and chloroplasts share genetic history with free-roaming bacteria, and the theory states that eukaryotic cells engulfed their ancestors in the distant past and they became internal organelles.
