Technology After the Great War | Hacker News Reader

Technology After the Great War

thefrailestthing.com

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

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

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

> 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

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

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

Perhaps people were expecting something more like the Franco-Prussian war (1870) than the American civil war.

The Thirty Years' War[0] lead to the deaths of around one third of the populations of some of the belligerent countries. But that wasn't within living memory for anyone at the time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War

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.

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.

It ain't Western civilization any more.

The difference is in scale. English Armies in the 80 Years War rarely got above 10k, and even the largest armies of the Napoleonic Wars would be 200k, and the British maxed out at roughly 100k. The BEF had an average strength of 2 million men, over 5.5 million were part of it at one point or another. Even though overall the British population increased by 4x (~8 million to ~32 million) they are deploying 20x more troops in WW1 than in the Wars of the Revolution. That's the difference between 'nasty to be there' and 'our civilization is a wreck.'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties#Casualt... was interesting, sorting by 'Deaths as % of population'. About 5% of the total population of the central powers was killed, compared to a bit more than 1% of the allied powers.

About 2-3% of the total US population died during the American Civil War.

> 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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Alternatively, I've heard opposing viewpoints that experiences from the US Civil War clearly foreshadowed what would happen in WW1.

Similarly, the experiences of the Russo-Japanese War foreshadowed much of what would later occur in 1915-1918. However, in opposition to these instances stood the Franco-Prussian War, which was the kind of quick, decisive maneuver conflict that informed much of the initial planning for war, particularly the infamous Schlieffen Plan.

The campaign on the Western Front in 1914 was really a closely run thing. If the dice had fallen slightly differently, and a few decisions had been made differently, then von Kluk's First Army might have been parading down the Champs-Élysées and the war really would have been over before Christmas.

Something felt very horrible about reading "what the next great war WILL look like". Would have definitely preferred to read "what the next great war COULD look like" :).

I would have preferred to read "there will never be war again, and everyone gets free ice cream", but that doesn't change the likelihood that there will almost certainly be one at some point in humanity's future.

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.

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.

Great point, thanks for reminding of that.

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

The franco-prussian war was just a few decades prior and had a lot of lessons for those who were willing to learn. Sounds like the biggest lessons learned were more at the strategic / organizational level. I'd argue that the Germans learned those lessons VERY well and came within a hairs-breadth of winning WW1 in the first month or two. Largely on the basis of their impeccably planned and well-prepared invasion of france.

Even closer in time was the russo-japanese war. The fighting around port arthur and Liaoyang should have showed the european forces what modern infantry assaults were and were not capable of doing.

Actually - I suspect the lessons of the naval fighting in the russo-japanese war WERE learned. In that war, the eastern russian fleet was sunk at anchor in a suprise attack, and the reinforcing fleet, assembled at incredible cost, was sunk and destroyed in a single battle. I wouldn't be surprised if those stories had a lot to do with the German fleet staying bottled up so tightly for the majority of the war.

That said - I do agree with you that no one really knows what a great power war would look like in 2019, and that the wars we have been fighting don't shed much light, either on the tactical or strategic scale.

How long would the US fleet last once they get within cruise missile range of the Chinese coast? A day? Indefinitely?

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.

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