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 its people, they look elsewhere for moral leadership. When the so-called wise respond to their fellow citizens’ queries about morality with jargon and equivocation, others—some of them very unwise—jump in to fill people’s needs.

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

 

                                               World War I, photo 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 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. In 1914, World War I arrived, and it became a major test of the moral systems of the new “scientific” societies of the West.

                                    

                                                   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, banners flew, troops marched, bands played, and huge 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 to their neighbors that, finally, the superior armies and ideals of their way of life were going to sweep aside the barbaric, backward armies and ideals of their nation’s enemies.

                              The 48th Highland Regiment preparing 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 their allies, accepted the jingoistic stories 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.

                               

                                                   Anti-German propaganda poster

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 over. 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.