Chapter 3            Where Moral Emptiness Leads

 

 

 

                  World War I, young German soldier (credit: Wikimedia Commons)  

 

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 by this new way of seeing the world. “What is Science telling us about what’s right?” people asked. Answers on every side were contradictory and confusing. Then, following too soon, in a bitter, perhaps inevitable irony, real-world events broke out of control. In 1914, World War I arrived; it became the major test of the moral systems of the vigorous, new, Science-driven societies of the West.

 

When World War I began, in the cities and towns of Europe and of all the other countries attached to the main belligerents, banners flew, troops marched, bands played, and 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, even in ordinary conversation, variations of this: “the armies and ideals of our decent way of life are finally going to sweep aside the barbaric armies and ideals of our nation’s enemies”.

 

Exhorted in speeches by their leaders and in articles by writers in the media to stand up for their homelands, the men of Germany, Turkey, Austro-Hungary, Russia, France, Britain, and Italy, and all their allies, absorbed the jingoistic stories being told in their theaters and newspapers. Men signed up to fight. Competing “narratives” about Europe and its history had brought European nations into head-on confrontation. "They" had their view of how the future should go. "We" had a different, incompatible one. Scientists said, "You're both right.", or more often, "Don't look at us. We don’t get involved in debates about morality." The only way left to resolve the dispute was to fight it out.

 

                                              

                      

           

                 Anti-German propaganda poster (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

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 done. 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. “Right” in that time, beyond any dispute, meant doing your “duty” to your country. Period. If you disagreed, you just shut up.

 

Long before the casualties began to mount, historians knew World War I was going to be huge 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 factories. Scientifically tested technologies, arranged in efficient sequences, supervised by experts, would be set up to kill men. (“To end war”, the leaders said!) Now we would see what Science could do.

 

We saw.

 

Consider just one telling statistic: the British Army casualties on the first day of the Battle of the Somme were 60,000 – 20,000 of whom were killed. Actually, in about five hours. France, Russia, Germany, Austria, Italy, the U.S., and all other countries involved eventually suffered similar losses, 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 600,000 Canadians (from a population of 8,000,000) enlisted in the armed forces, and out of the 420,000 who actually got into the fighting in Europe, 66,000 died.

 

Commentators writing in newspapers and magazines in the last months leading up to WWI had 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 – and the horrors they’d cause! No. No one would really use them.

 

                       

 

                         Early 20th-century French postcard depicting the year 2000

                                               (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

 

Other writers a few years before, more hopeful about how Science would affect society, had even been speaking of a coming Golden Age. Science wasn’t just showing us how to build weapons. It was also curing diseases, creating labor-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.