Chapter 2.                     Part C 

This has been the scariest of the consequences of the rise of Science: moral confusion and indecision among our elites. It began to become serious in the West in the nineteenth century, but here we are in the twenty-first, and, if anything, the crisis of moral confidence appears to be getting worse.    

Now all of this still may sound academic and far removed from the experience of ordinary folk. But the truth is otherwise. When a society’s sages can't guide the people, then the people look elsewhere for moral leadership. When the “wise” respond to their fellow citizens’ queries about morality with jargon and equivocation, others – some very “unwise” – jump in to fill the people’s needs.

So we ask: how did the eroding of the moral systems of the West that followed the rise of Science affect people living through real events? Let’s consider one harsh example.

        

                                            World War I (photos from the Western Front) 

         

            By the early twentieth century, the impacts of the ideas of Darwin and Freud, and of Science more generally, had arrived. Social scientists and philosophers were left scrambling to understand what new moral code, if any, was being implied for humanity by these new ways of seeing the world. Answers on every side were contradictory and confusing. Then, following too soon, in a bitter or perhaps inevitable irony, real world political events broke out of control. 1914. World War I. A major test of the moral systems of the new “scientific” societies of the West arrived.

                        

                                       World War I recruitment poster 

   

When World War I began, in the cities and towns of Europe, and in the cities of all other countries that were attached even remotely to the main belligerents, there were banners flying, troops marching, bands playing, and huge crowds of men, women, and kids all shouting for joy. A few sober people raised objections for one set of reasons or another, but they were drowned out in the din. Finally, the superior armies and ideals of “our way of life” were going to sweep aside the barbaric armies and ideals of our nation’s enemies.

                             48th Highland Regiment getting ready to leave Toronto 

Exhorted in speeches by their leaders and by writers in the media to stand up for their homelands, the men of Italy, Germany, France, Britain, Austro-Hungary, and Russia, along with all of their allies, accepted the jingoistic stories that were being told in their newspapers and signed up to fight. Competing “narratives” about Europe and its history had finally brought the European tribes into head-on confrontation.

                        

                                          Canadian World War I recruitment poster 

                                 

                                 

                              German poster (depicting Britain as a global spider) 

                                                 

            My country, Canada, in 1914, was part of the British Empire, and Canadians were just as gung-ho as any of the loyal subjects in London, England. Young men leapt 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 over. Girls clustered around guys 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.

               

        Long before the horrible casualties began to mount, World War I was huge in the historians’ terms 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 ways. The whole process was going to be made as efficient as the new, scientifically-designed factories: scientific technologies, arranged in efficient sequences and supervised by experts. Now we would see what Science could do.

               

            We saw.

Consider just one telling statistic: the British Army lost more casualties –  60,000 wounded, missing, and killed – in the first six days of the Battle of the Somme than the British Army had lost in all of its recorded history, all over the world, up until that week. France, Russia, Germany, Austria, Italy, the U.S., and all of the others got hit with similar experiences, over and over, for four long years.

            In the end, nine million combatants were dead, 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 should we say "wrenched"?), either directly or indirectly. Of the 600,000+ Canadians (from a population of eight million) who went over to Europe to fight, one in nine died there. (65,000+)