Chapter 2.                     Part D 

         Commentators writing in newspapers and magazines in the last months leading up to World War I had been discussing 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. Repeating rifles, torpedoes, poison gas, machine guns, airplanes, flame throwers ...the horrors they’d cause. No. No one would be able to use them.

                                    early French postcard depicting the year 2000

   

Other writers a few years before, more sanguine 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 point is that 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 general in the West had come to believe that the wise men of the West were in control now: the ways of the West, with Science in the vanguard, were taking over the world, and therefore the sufferings of the past were going to gradually be reduced until they became only rare anomalies or dim memories recorded in books.

There had been wars and famines and depressions before, but the traditional ideas of God and of right and wrong, based on the Bible, had held onto the loyalties of people in the West because, firstly, the damage had been minor compared to that caused by WWI, secondly, the ways of the West, mostly, had seemed to work, and thirdly, there really 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 that power began to seem more and more 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. Science was a monster and it was on the loose.

As Science, with its new media of communication, was giving the jingoistic, xenophobic, tribalistic forces and leaders in modern societies more power to mold people’s minds, Science was also arming these forces and leaders with ever bigger and more terrible weapons ...while the moral philosophers and social scientists dithered. The outcome had a feeling of inevitably to it. A global arms race had become normal. Sooner or later a war of monstrous proportions had to happen.  

                           German soldier's belt buckle (standard issue) WWI 

    

Descartes’ compromise way of Christian morals being used to control scientific technologies was not working. Not only were Christians of the West performing previously unthinkable horrors, they were doing them mostly to each other. 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 every German soldier’s belt buckle. “Onward Christian Soldiers” was being sung at Sunday services in every English-speaking country in the world.   

There was no doubt about it; the old beliefs and values just weren’t up to the hard tests that the new, scientific age was posing for them. In fact, the sages that many people had been looking to, namely the scientists, in all of the branches of Science, asserted that, on the subject of morality, they had nothing to say.