As science, with the help of its new communication media, was giving the jingoistic, xenophobic, tribalistic forces and leaders in modern societies more power to mould 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. The outcome had a feeling of inevitability to it. A global arms race was becoming normal. Sooner or later a war of monstrous proportions had to happen.

 

                                 German soldier’s belt buckle (standard issue), WWI

Descartes’s method, based on compromise, of using Christian morals to control scientific technologies was not working. Not only were Christians of the West carrying out previously unthinkable horrors, they were doing so 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 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, there was nothing that science could say.

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. They continued spouting the platitudes that had got their nations into the horror to begin with. Their moral systems seemed to be 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. Darwin’s model of the living world had portrayed “nature red in tooth and claw.” Survival of the fittest—that seemed to be the only credible model left. Mere anarchy was loosed upon the world.

Before the scientific revolution began to erode God out of the thinking of the majority of 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 of others, people could still believe God had his reasons and the code of right and wrong still held. God was watching. Matters would be sorted out in time. The liars, manipulators, 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, more and more people began to suspect and fear that, just as science had said, there was no God, the Bible was a collection of myths, their leaders were a bunch of deluded incompetents, and the old moral system was a sham. And then, things got worse. 

                               demonstration against the Treaty of Versailles, Berlin, 1919