Long before the horrible casualties began to mount, World War I was huge in the views of the historians 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. Modern torpedoes, flame throwers, machine guns, poison gas, airplanes—the horrors they’d cause! No. No one would be willing to use them.

   

      Early 20th-century French postcard depicting the year 2000 (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

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.

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 to lead them, were taking over the world, and thus the sufferings of the past would be gradually reduced until they became only 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. The “guys at the top” didn’t know what they were doing. Science was a monster, and it was on the loose.

As Science, with the help of its new communication media, was giving the xenophobic, tribalistic forces and leaders in modern 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. An arms race became normal. The probability of “the war” kept rising. Sooner or later that war of horrific 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 once unthinkable horrors, they were doing those horrors 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 sung at church services in every English-speaking country in the world.

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. 

For millions, the old moral code was finished. It didn't work. It had led the world to "this". And the only alternative people could look to - Science - flatly refused to say anything about what right and wrong were.