
Technology After the Great War - DyslexicAtheist
https://thefrailestthing.com/2018/11/11/technology-after-the-great-war/
======
m-i-l
The central point of this thesis is that technological progress was almost
universally abhorred in the immediate aftermath of the Great War due to its
perceived role in the industrialisation of death and destruction on a hitherto
unseen scale, although this became less pronounced over time. The problem is
that it wasn't almost universally abhorred. The fascist movement, for example,
celebrated technology and embraced Futurism[0], and in their glorification of
war they didn't believe that "one is spared or obliterated by chance alone"
but saw the deaths as purifying and a necessary part of Social Darwinism. (Not
views I subscribe to BTW, just making the point that there certainly wasn't a
single common interpretation of the Great War in its immediate aftermath, and
that perhaps the left tended to be more anti-technology and the right pro-
technology.)

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifesto_of_Futurism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifesto_of_Futurism)

~~~
gattilorenz
The situation with Italian futurism is not so simple.

Most of the futurist ideas on the positivity of the war are from _before_ WWI.
After the war, when fascism started to rise, the "second futurism" came to
life, a new generation of futurists (although some "old" artists were still
futurists, like Depero), much less involved in politics:
[https://h2g2.com/entry/A723764](https://h2g2.com/entry/A723764)

They were still promoting technology and speed and the future, but the
experience of WWI did change the overall attitude.

------
zeteo
> The failure of most Europeans to fathom the potential for devastation of the
> new weapons they were constantly devising owed much to their conviction that
> no matter how rapid the advances, Western men were in control of the
> machines they were creating

While the technology was different, I'm not convinced that WW1 was truly more
devastating than previous wars. The wars following the French Revolution
lasted much longer and devastated Europe from Lisbon to Moscow. The Wars of
Religion before that were probably even worse.

The fate of civilians, at least, was actually better in WW1 than in previous
wars, as the armies were generally well supplied and disciplined and tried to
behave in a "civilized" manner. As for the impact on soldiers, an Englishman
fighting in Flanders in 1685 was just as likely to experience trench warfare
[1], high explosives [2] and even chemical warfare [3] as his counterpart in
1915 - with far fewer comforts (medical care, consistent supply, news from
home etc.).

The real question is not how the war became so devastating (it was like many
other wars in this regard) but why it was expected _not_ to be.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Antwerp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Antwerp)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellburners](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellburners)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_warfare#Early_modern_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_warfare#Early_modern_era)

~~~
scottlocklin
WW-1 at the front was particularly brutal in comparison to the past in that
millions died in a mechanical meat grinder and not a heck of a lot of
territory changed hands.

It also made the rest of the world look at Europeans (who until then were
undisputed masters of virtually the entire world) as being, well, kind of
stupid; ultimately unraveling the various political systems that had run the
West since post-Roman days. Western civilization more or less died in 1917.
We've been dealing with the consequences of this ever since then.

~~~
maxerickson
The United States economic empire is the most dominant global empire that has
existed. Whole cultures are vanishing into the maw. Western civilization isn't
dead.

~~~
scottlocklin
It ain't Western civilization any more.

------
bjt2n3904
> We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early
> successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after, when it has
> become apparent that what triumphant science has done hitherto is to improve
> the means for achieving unimproved or actually deteriorated ends.

> Huxley

~~~
discoball
Sarcastically speaking, it all started with the division of labor between
hunters and gatherers. If hunters had to gather too they wouldn't have had
developed a specialization for killing other beings, and many of them would
have preferred gathering to hunting due to the risk involved in the latter, so
hunting would have been a fringe activity, not an institutionalized part of
society (aka armies) Also, women and men who are not so driven by testosterone
most likely gravitated toward gathering rather than killing, and so there we
have the roots of sexism and machoism, with the assholes doing the killing and
normal human beings relegated to "less strong" gatherers. And I believe
natural hormones in meat affected the hunters own hormonal balance and pushed
them toward more aggression, and the act of killing became normalized. Then we
have technology being developed to increase the efficiency of killing other
beings and eventually to increase the efficiency of killing other people. The
tribes that engaged less in killing and more in gathering got wiped out by the
ones that engaged more in killing than gathering. The End.

~~~
setr
If you’re going to look to the “primitives”, then it should be assumed that
killing was always “normalized”: as with any solution, if the conditions are
right, and its not _that_ difficult to find such conditions in a primitive
society, an expediated exit can be the best and safest solution to a problem.

Combined with the fact that resources are limited, self-preservation and
tribal-preservation is embedded, populations want to expand (as part of
tribal-preservation) and we actually have some capacity to harm one another,
combat is pretty much inevitable. Given a pacifist vegetarian clan, and a non-
aggressive predatory one, in trying times, the pacifist must build up their
defenses or perish. If they’ve built up their defenses, they will undoubtedly
be capable of waging war, (humans are quite versatile in that) and in trying
times, they likely _must_ wage war, or perish.

A purely pacifist stance is only viable if no one does anything; that is, a
standstill. The possibility of killing is always there: I’m sure you could
convince rabbits to murder one-another if you take enough from them. It is
normal, because death, by any means, is normal.

Pacifism is the normalization, not aggression. That we can, through research
and technology, better resolve resource contention through more efficient
production, than seizing the resource from one another. That, and the
realization that we’ve long reached a point where it’s near impossible to wage
war without heavy (or even heavier) repercussion from challenging even a weak
opponent. The world wars were to an extent a result of failing to make that
realization. The cold wars was a direct result of making it.

(Outright) War is no longer as viable an option because peace is intrinsically
better, but because its become difficult to successfully do. War was not
engaged because it was “ingrained” upon us, but because it was viable strategy
(or even defense against passive invasion).

Hunters and gatherers merely allowed us to better engage in war; it did not
open the possibility (it was always there), and its absence would not have
closed it. Rabbits simply don’t have the intelligence to realize the option
(or coordinate it, or even the tools to effectively engage), even when it's
clearly their best option. But they would have reached the same conclusion as
we did, were they capable enough toolmakers to resolve those weaknesses.

Also notably, almost every given collection of humans spends far more time at
relative peace than engaging in war (the US today is capable of engaging
continously in small wars, but it rarely engages in significant ones). It’s
difficult to ascribe a “tendency” for war to such a species, except by
skipping over the peaceful periods.

~~~
discoball
That’s what happens when you think with your brain as opposed to feel with
your heart.

------
tribune
I disagree with the author's conclusion that we have failed to reject the
"myth of technological progress". The progress itself has not slowed - but
people are certainly wary of it. We've kept the pin in the nuclear
annihilation grenade for over 70 years, and have moved away from that doomsday
in the last 30. Look at our science fiction: it's overwhelmingly filled with
technology-fueled dystopias and post-apocalyptic worlds created by fictional
but familiar human folly. We know what could happen if the world goes mad as
it did in 1914, and it's not entirely accidental that this hasn't happened.

The recently-growing doubt about the ethics of Silicon Valley and the tech it
produces is part of this overall techno-skeptic view. The pace of change
brought on by the Internet is blistering, but in the latter half of this
decade it's started receiving some well-deserved backlash. The lessons on the
destructive potential for blind technological progress were hard fought, but
they weren't for nothing. I see reason to be optimistic.

------
40acres
In reading the WW1 series of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast (highly
recommended by the way) it seems part of what led to the scale of destruction
caused by WW1 was the relative peace between the end of the Napoleanoic Wars
and 1914. There were smaller wars here and there but the great powers had not
faced off in a generation, no one truly understood how the new technologies
would affect warfare and tactics.

It makes me concerned about the possibility of the next war between great
powers, we've only seen nuclear weapons used twice, no one knows how
satellites and cyber attacks can affect war on a grand scale, new biological
weapons also have not been deployed at scale. There's a lot of theory out
there about what the next great war will look like but without any tactile
examples we really have no idea.

~~~
Spooky23
The US Civil War marked the end of the Napoleonic era. The European powers
ignored those lessons for various reasons, mostly because the US and
Confederate armies were levies of non-professional soldiers. They also didn't
really have an alternative as technology was advanced enough for advanced
industrial killing, but not enough for WW2 style engagement.

The key advance was the broad availability of the rifle vs. the musket. (Which
was an advantage Britain held over Napoleon as well) With a musket, the
killing field was about 50-100 yards. The early rifles like the British baker
rifle extended that to 200-250 years. Civil War rifles were 500+ yards.

Military doctrine for WW1 armies was all about fast maneuver warfare like what
was happening in 1914. Mobilization speed, elan and discipline would win. This
was true until the other side mobilized, at which point the modern rifle
(800-1000 yard killing range), machine gun, and explosive artillery equated to
stagnation.

What you're seeing today is the future. Nobody can afford to lose large
standing army engagements, so limited warfare rules the day. Even the US
military has been forced to strip alot of resources from things like armored
divisions and artillery, and doesn't have a good public strategy for air
power. Limited warfare is cheap, and even the US focuses alot of attention on
it -- there are like 50-80k special forces type soldiers.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
There was more than the US Civil War to tip Europe off to what it had been
like had they been looking. The Russo-Japanese war, the Franco Prussian war,
various colonial wars where the effectiveness of the machine gun against
infantry was made obvious, etc, Europe could have learned from these had they
wanted to, and indeed some people did but they weren't the people making the
decisions.

~~~
Spooky23
Great point, thanks for reminding of that.

I remember finding it so depressing how rigid thinking killed so many in
college.

------
pnathan
If you stroll through an art museum with a decent stock of art that runs
between 1870 and, say 1950, you can mark off the WW1 artists generation
without bothering to look at the date. The works scream in horror, constantly.

Another commentator remarked that Western civilization died then; I would
hesitate to say _that_ , as I live in a very well appointed state, in the
West. But the entire apparatus of moral philosophy imploded in that time, and
a theodicy appropriate to the explanation of the Great War has never caught
the public mind. Most of modern neo-fascisms, paleoconservatives, and so forth
are caught up in this rift - we lost the power to explain evil in a materially
useful way, and resolve it in a socially cohesive way. Or, to put in another
way, the Great War sliced the social fabric and it's all been unravelling ever
since.

I don't think that will last forever, we _are_ adapting. But we have to look
forward: what can we build _new_ , not haul out JS Mill, Ayn Rand, or Dewey to
situate them in a time and place that they don't really belong.

