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 they had found the answers to life’s riddles. Pre-WWI, people in the West had come to believe that their wise men were in control: the ways of the West, with Science in the vanguard, were taking over the world, and thus the sufferings of the past would gradually be reduced until they became only 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 retained the loyalties of people in the West because: first, the damage had been minor compared to that caused by WWI; second, the ways of the West had for the most part seemed to work; and third, there 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 all that power began to seem increasingly inadequate. Then, in the horrors of WWI, the moral systems of 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 the help of its new communication media, was giving the jingoistic, xenophobic, tribalistic forces and leaders in European societies more power to mold 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. The probability kept rising. Sooner or later a war of monstrous proportions had to happen.

   

              German soldier’s belt buckle (standard issue), WWI (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

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 church 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.