Chapter 3            Where Moral Emptiness Leads

      

   

           World War I, young German soldier (credit: Wikimedia Commons)  

By the early twentieth century, the impacts of the ideas of Darwin and Freud, and of Science generally, had arrived. Social scientists and philosophers were left scrambling to understand what new moral code, if any, was implied by this new way of seeing the world. “What is Science telling us about what’s right?” people asked. Answers on every side were contradictory and confusing. Then, following too soon, in a bitter, perhaps inevitable irony, real-world events broke out of control. In 1914, World War I arrived; it became the major test of the moral systems of the vigorous, new, Science-driven societies of the West.

                                   

                                  

                    World War I recruitment poster (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

When World War I began, in the cities and towns of Europe and of all the other countries attached to the main belligerents, banners flew, troops marched, bands played, and crowds of men, women, and children all shouted for joy. A few sober people raised objections for one set of reasons or another, but they were drowned out in the din. In every nation involved, people fell easily into viewing the human race as being made up of "us" and "them", as people tend to do in wartime, and people easily began to say, even in ordinary conversation, that the “decent armies and ideals of our way of life are finally going to sweep aside the barbaric armies and ideals of our nation’s enemies”.

Exhorted in speeches by their leaders and in articles by writers in the media to stand up for their homelands, the men of Germany, Turkey, Austro-Hungary, Russia, France, Britain, and Italy, and all their allies, absorbed the jingoistic stories being told in their theaters and newspapers. Men signed up to fight. Competing “narratives” about Europe and its history had brought European nations into head-on confrontation. "They" had their view of how the future should go. "We" had a different, incompatible one. Scientists said, "You're both right.", or more often, "Don't look at us. We don’t get involved in debates about morality." The only way left to resolve the dispute was to fight it out.

                          

                                              

                 Anti-German propaganda poster (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

My country, Canada, was part of the British Empire in 1914, and Canadians were just as eager as any of the loyal subjects in London, England. Young men leaped out of the crowds lining the streets to march in step with the parades of soldiers going by. Many of them were worried that by the time they got through their training and over to Europe, the fighting would be done. Girls clustered around men in uniform who came back to visit their workplaces or colleges or even high schools before shipping out. Old ladies out shopping, by 1916, would spit on any young man of military age who was not in uniform. Right, in that time, beyond any dispute, meant doing your “duty” to your country. Period.

Long before the horrible casualties began to mount, World War I was huge in the views of the historians even from its very beginning because, for the first time in history, modern scientific weapons and technologies were going to be used to kill men in assembly-line style. The process was going to be made as efficient as the new factories. Scientifically tested technologies, arranged in efficient sequences, supervised by experts, would be set up to kill men. (“To end war”, the leaders said!) Now we would see what Science could do.

We saw.

Consider just one telling statistic: the British Army casualties on the first day of the Battle of the Somme were 60,000 – 20,000 of whom were killed. Actually, in about five hours. France, Russia, Germany, Austria, Italy, the U.S., and all other countries involved eventually suffered similar losses, for four long years.

In the end, nine million combatants were dead, with three times that many permanently scarred. And those were just the combatants. How many civilians? No one really knows. Every country on Earth was touched, or, we should say, wrenched, either directly or indirectly. Over 600,000 Canadians (from a population of 8,000,000) enlisted in the armed forces, and out of the 420,000 who actually got into the fighting in Europe, 66,000 died.

Commentators writing in newspapers and magazines in the last months leading up to WWI had discussed in total seriousness the very likely possibility that the new modern weapons would be useless because men would simply refuse to use them on other men. Modern torpedoes, flame throwers, machine guns, poison gas, airplanes – and the horrors they’d cause! No. No one would really use them.

                       

         

                         Early 20th-century French postcard depicting the year 2000

                                               (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Other writers a few years before, more hopeful about how Science would affect society, had even been speaking of a coming Golden Age. Science wasn’t just showing us how to build horrible weapons. It was also curing diseases, creating labor-saving machines, improving agriculture, and even inventing new forms of entertainment. Progress was steadily reaching into the lives of even the humblest citizens. Surely, goodness and mercy would follow close behind.

The First World War shattered the optimism of the Golden Age prophets, but it also shattered much more deeply the confidence of the nations of the West, which had begun to believe that they had found the answers to life’s riddles. Pre-WWI, people in the West had come to believe that their wise men were in control: the ways of the West, with Science to lead them, were taking over the world, and thus the sufferings of the past would be gradually reduced until they became only dim memories recorded in books.

There had been wars and famines and depressions before, but the traditional ideas of God and right and wrong, based on the Bible, had retained the loyalties of people in the West because: first, the damage had been minor compared to that caused by WWI; second, the ways of the West had, for the most part, seemed to work; and third, there hadn’t been a serious alternative set of beliefs to consider.

But now, with the rise of Science, all was changing. As we gained physical power, our ideas about how to handle all that power began to seem increasingly inadequate. Then, in the horrors of WWI, the moral systems of the Western societies seemed not just to fail but to unravel; people’s worst fears came true. The “guys at the top” were fools. Science was a monster and it was on the loose.

Science was providing new communications technologies that were giving the xenophobic, tribalistic forces and leaders in Western societies more power to mold people’s minds. It was also arming these forces and leaders with ever bigger and more terrible weapons – while the moral philosophers and social scientists dithered about what “right” was and what we “should” be doing. The outcome had a feeling of inevitability to it. An arms race became normal. Bigger warships, cannons. Weapons ever more effective. Poison gas. Flame throwers. The odds of the war starting kept rising. Sooner or later, it had to happen.

   
                 

  

    Standard German soldier’s belt buckle (WWI (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Descartes’ method, using Christian morals to control scientific technologies, wasn’t working. Not only were Christians doing unthinkable horrors, they were doing those horrors mostly to one another. Worst of all, in every one of the warring nations, these acts were being done expressly in the name of their God. Gott mit uns was embossed on nearly every German soldier’s belt buckle. “Onward Christian Soldiers” was sung at church services in nearly every English-speaking country in the world.

In the meantime, by the end of the fighting, the political, religious, and business leaders in every sector of society appeared to be out of answers. Most of the victors continued to spout the platitudes that had got their nations into the horror to begin with. To thoughtful observers, Western moral systems looked bankrupt. Paralyzing doubt began to haunt people in every level of society, from the rich and powerful to the middle classes to the poor.

If the morals of the West had led to this, people could not help but think maybe Science was right about the Bible. Maybe the moral beliefs that it recommended had all been a fraud. Maybe there were no moral rules at all. Disputes must always be settled by violence. Darwin’s model of the living world had portrayed “nature red in tooth and claw.” It seemed to be the final word. Survival of the fittest: wolves kill deer, spiders kill flies, big fish kill little fish. This seemed to be the only credible model left. Mere anarchy was loosed upon the world. 

For millions, the old moral code was done. Obsolete. It didn't work. It had led the world to "this". The only viable alternative people had to look to – Science – flatly refused to say anything about what right and wrong were. 

Before the scientific revolution began to erode God out of the thinking of the citizens in the West, even if people hadn’t been able to grasp why bad things sometimes happened in the world or why bad people sometimes got ahead in spite of, and even because of, the suffering they inflicted on others, people could still believe God had reasons and the code of right and wrong still held. God was watching. Matters would be sorted out in time. The liars, thieves, bullies, and killers would get their just deserts in time. We just had to be patient and have faith. The people, in large majority, believed the authorities’ official spiel.

But World War I was just too big. With the scale of the destruction, the pathetic reasons given to justify it, and the amorality of Science gnawing at their belief systems, people began to suspect and fear that, just as Science had said, there was no God, the Bible was a set of myths, their leaders were a bunch of deluded incompetents, and the old moral system was a sham. And then things got worse.

       

   

        British bulldozer burying bodies at Belsen (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

                                

          

   

   

      British soldiers forcing German concentration camp guards to load bodies

                                           (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Following the First World War, to exacerbate the moral confusion and despair, the man-made horrors of the twentieth century began to mount. They are many and ugly. The Russian Revolution and Civil War. Many other smaller wars. The worldwide Depression. World War II, six times as destructive as World War I. Hitler’s camps. Stalin’s camps. But we don’t need to describe any more.

The point is that these were the actions of a species that, by its science, had gained great physical power at the same time as it lost its moral compass.

The big question, “What is right?” keeps echoing, and the big fears that go with it keep growing. Where will the code that we need to guide our behavior in business, international affairs, or even everyday life come from now?

Of course, there are the cynics, the ones who say that they don’t know or care whether we’ll ever find a way to set up universal standards of right and wrong. They see the pursuit of a universal moral code as a futile waste of time.

But whether they focus on daily human lives or on History’s big trends, or their focus is somewhere in between those limits, I tell these cynics, “If you really thought that way, we wouldn’t be having this debate. You wouldn’t be here.”

                       

                                           

                              Albert Camus, French philosopher (1913–1960)                           

                                                 (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

As Albert Camus sees it, suicide is the sincerest of all acts.¹ Its only equal in sincerity is the living of a genuine life. A genuine person stays on in this world by conscious choice, not by inertia. A genuine person has created a vision of the world and how she/he can live with purpose and meaning in it, and so is still here because she chooses to be, even when, especially when, she knows the life she will live will be full of hardship. The sincere have guts. 

Insincere people may claim to be alienated from this world and the other people in it, but that simply can’t be the case if they are still alive and talking. These people are only partitioning up their minds, for the time being, into manageable compartments of cynicism. But the disillusionment they feel now – on any issue, personal to global – is going to seem minor compared with that which they will one day feel for themselves, one day when their mental partitions begin to give way. And it doesn’t have to be that way, as we shall see.

So, to sum up our case so far, what have we shown?

First, that Science has severely eroded the old beliefs in God and, thus, the old moral codes. And it continues to do so.

Second, that Science has refused, and continues to refuse, to take responsibility for the muddle it has made. It has insisted adamantly for decades that it has nothing to tell us about which of our actions are right or wrong.

But, thirdly, due to our ongoing need just to manage our lives – and, more importantly, the power Science has put into our hands – we must replace the moral code we no longer believe in with one we do believe in. Perhaps then we will have a chance to get past our present peril.

In short, Science’s refusal to tell us anything about what our moral code ought to say is not good enough. Period. We have to find a code of behavior that will give us a way of life, one that makes our morals consistent with our Science, or in simpler terms, makes “right” consistent with “real”.

As promised, I will deal with the Supreme Being question in the last chapters of this book. But for now, let us try to confront and, then try to quell,  “the worst” around us. And in us.

Notes

1. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien 

    (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1975), p. 11.