Chapter 2.               (continued) 

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, photos from the Western Front.

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 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; it became the 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, absorbed 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 on 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.

Long before the horrible casualties began to mount, World War I was huge in the historians’ views 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, 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—sixty thousand wounded, missing, and killed—in the first six days of the Battle of the Somme than it had lost in all of its recorded history, all over the world, up until that week. France, Russia, Germany, Austria, Italy, the United States, and all of the other countries involved were hit with similar losses, over and over, 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 six hundred thousand Canadians (from a population of eight million) enlisted in the armed forces, and out of the four hundred twenty thousand who actually got into the fighting in Europe, over sixty-five thousand died. 

Commentators writing in newspapers and magazines in the last months leading up to the war 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. Repeating rifles, modern torpedoes, poison gas, machine guns, airplanes, flame throwers—the horrors they’d cause were unimaginable. No. No one would be willing to use them.

   

                                  Early 20th-century 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 labour-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.