Civilizations Change

Those changes have always not been for the better. Kim du Toit at Splendid Isolation: Bare Ruin’d Choirs

Did civilization end after WWI?

The Western Front saw a generation of young men (nearly) eliminated. Both the lower and middle class, as well as the upper class.

The result was the disappearance of an entire generation of young men, a decimation or worse of lower- or middle-class youth, and the virtual disappearance of the upper class, doomed by their class and upbringing to lead their men into the hot mouths of the machine guns, and to suffer disproportionately.

At a stroke, the old ruling class disappeared, whether by slaughter on the Western Front, or by revolution in Russia. In its place came the modern government bureaucracy: more faceless than before, more powerful than before. The post-Great War government was to rule not by divine dogma, nor even by royal whim, but by cold, impersonal philosophy.

Did it end? Technology didn't disappear, and we didn't get a dark ages, but in Europe it changed so as to not be recognizable. Literature and the arts changed. Modernism - Bauhaus, Dada, etc. came in, and more. Architecture stopped being beautiful. A lot of things stopped being beautiful.

Things changed again with WWII, and the reaction to the horrors we unleashed.

What the Second World War enabled was the growth of the Leviathan state, with its impersonal bureaucracy (like mass destruction) brought to its ultimate conclusion. Instead of the post-Great War Dadaism, post-Second World War literature was defined by bleak dystopian visions like George Orwell’s 1984 and absurdist plays like Samuel Becket’s Waiting For Godot.

It will change again. Will it be better or worse this time?

There is more. Click thru and read the whole thing.