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WWI: Technology Led to “Total War”
Technology was supposed to be the servant of mankind — liberation would result from more technology. What World War One showed was how quickly this new technology could be put to use. In the end, it was the European idea of progress which became the victim of “improved technology.” The rules of warfare had changed — and with this change the 20th century plunged into what one historian has called, “the age of total war.”
.. Not outsiders but Europeans themselves invented the expression Age of Anxiety to describe what they thought was happening to them in the twentieth century. They dwelt increasingly not on the growing enlightenment of their times, as so many had done in the 18th and 19th centuries, nor on Europe’s continued greatness, but on the anxiety they felt about their existence, their culture, and their destiny. “Today,” said the Protestant theologian-philosopher Paul Tillich at mid-century, “it has become almost a truism to call our time an age of anxiety.” Tillich believed that anxiety infected even the greatest achievement of contemporary Europeans in literature, art, and philosophy. Europe, according to his account, had entered its third great period of anxiety, comparable in intensity to that of the ancient world and the Reformation.
The special form of anxiety that Tillich identified was the ANXIETY OF MEANINGLESSNESS. He traced it to the modern world’s loss of a spiritual center which could provide answers to the questions of the meaning of life.
Stanislav Petrov: The man who may have saved the world
His job was to register any missile strikes and to report them to the Soviet military and political leadership. In the political climate of 1983, a retaliatory strike would have been almost certain.
And yet, when the moment came, he says he almost froze in place.
Taylor’s bargain: The Rise of the Megacorporation
And I say that Taylor’s bargain was to present the Americans with a choice, as it were. A choice over which they could, in fact, exercise their will if they could figure out what it was to be decided and how they wanted to decide it. They were faced with a choice of accepting the new industrialization and the material wealth that it produced. And thereby sacrificing the elements of autonomy, which many of them had cherished and which many of them believed was the animating value of the American experiment in responsible self government.
… Brandeis was, in the words of one of his biographers, a Jeffersonian for the 20th century. And I think that sort of thing captures it. And I believe, in large measure, that these guys were right. That is, I think that America is now a much, much more materialistic country than it was even 120 years ago.