The Adventures Of Lost People

One thing that must be understood about religion is that people are designed to believe in something and if they don't believe in God then they will just replace Him with something else. In the late Nineteenth Century secularism became widespread in the western countries. At the same time great technological advances were making economics more complicated. 

Nationalism was also becoming more important. The modern concept of the nation state is a relatively recent development. Around the beginning of the Twentieth Century there were people in remote areas who were not sure which nation they belonged to, and it didn't really matter much because the tribe or religion was more important. When people went to war in centuries past they were usually fighting for their god, not for their country. 

One of the reasons for the new importance of nationalism was that it was a convenient replacement for religion, it gave people something to believe in. How many people have you known whose country was their "religion"? I remember one person saying "Your country is always right. Don't even think about your country being wrong. There is no such thing as your country being wrong". 

Along with nationalism different political-economic ideologies arose that were convenient substitutes for religion. Raw capitalism was generally the way of the Nineteenth Century. But it made a few people very rich while the vast majority remained poor and exploited. Most people were one step above slavery. The modern concept of socialism and Communism, as a reaction against this exploitation, is generally considered as having began with the writings of Karl Marx. There were proto-Communist events, such as the Communard seizure of Paris in 1871 and what could be called the Second Mexican Revolution of 1910, but global Communism is generally considered to have began with the October Revolution of 1917. The best thing that ever happened to Communism was the market crash of 1929. This is what made Communism into a major world system. Without this crash of capitalism, Communism might never have spread beyond the Soviet Union.

The last third of the Nineteenth Century, and up to 1914, had generally been a very good time in the western countries. There was much technical progress and an absence of major conflict. It was known as the Victorian Age. In America it was sometimes called the Gilded Age. In France it was known as the Belle Epoque. But secularism was ever increasing. Can you believe that there were people predicting that the upcoming Twentieth Century should be very peaceful, because most past conflict had been over religion?

The world exploded into war in 1914, and the good times came to an abrupt end. The First World War was a war like the world had never seen before. All of the great technological progress of previous decades was turned against humanity, making possible killing on an industrial scale. What is so striking and disturbing about the First World War was that it wasn't really over anything. People were just getting bored with the long period of peace. There were actually crowds of people in European capitals cheering the declaration of war, apparently under the delusion that the war would only last a short time.

Afterward the tremendous industrial production from the war was turned to production of civilian consumer goods. This brought the good times back in the form of the "Roaring Twenties". But there was trouble on the horizon, in the form of economics. Some people got fantastically rich but the average worker was not being paid enough to be able to afford to buy the goods that they were producing. Goods were just piling up in warehouses. Factories began cutting back on production, meaning that workers had even less money, and it spiralled into a devastating economic crash in October 1929.

This crash of capitalism is what made the previously obscure Communism into a major world system. Make-work projects were implemented in western countries to get the economy moving again. In Germany, the Weimar Republic had been devastated by the crash. A party, called the Nazis, emerged and adopted the make-work idea of building the Autobahn and military production in factories, while absorbing unemployment by drastically increasing the armed forces. The Nazis' economic ideology, of which their name was a contraction, was National Socialism. It was between capitalism and Communism in that there would be private enterprise but it would work with the government. 

With religion having been on the decline for decades, and many fewer people believing in God, these political-economic ideologies made an ideal substitute for religion. There was also the nationalism and racism that was associated in particular with Nazism. The useful thing about focusing on an evil "other" group is that, not only does it give us something to focus our hatred on but nothing is ever our fault. Unlike traditional Christianity, where the believer must repent of their own sinfulness, everything that is wrong with the world is always "their" fault.

People that, for the most part, no longer believed in God chose one or another of these substitutes for God and the resulting Second World War was the greatest war that the world had ever seen, far greater than the First World War, as they killed millions of each other that had made different choices.

After the Second World War came the Cold War. About a third of the world was Communist and proxy wars were fought all around the world. Have you ever stopped to think about how secular the western world must have become for nations to have nuclear missiles pointed at each other, and to come to the brink of nuclear war, over competing economic systems? That's right, over competing economic systems. 

Economics is just about how society is arranged. It is not supposed to be a religion. People in centuries past would be in utter disbelief if they were told that humans would one day be on the verge of wiping themselves out because of competing economic systems. It would be just incomprehensible. In my view it was the Iranian Revolution that turned the tide back toward religion, as we saw in "The Great Revolution Of Our Time", January 2017.

We have seen how the secular mindset of the Twentieth Century has led to so much trouble in "How Secularism Leads Us Astray", April 2020.

Even when the west became secular the wars tended to be along the traditional religious lines. Napoleon's invasion of Russia and the Eastern Fronts in both world wars, as well as the Cold War and the present war in Ukraine can be traced to the great split between the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches in 1054. The wars in the 1990s following the breakup of Yugoslavia were not overtly about religion but the Serbs were traditionally Orthodox, the Croatians Catholic and the Bosnians Moslem. The traditional enmity between Poland and Russia began when the Eastern Orthodox Church split away from the Catholics but Poland remained Catholic. 

The modern political-economic ideologies that became substitutes for religion were actually secularizations of the traditional religions. The initial structure of Communism, revolving around local councils called Soviets, reflected the structure of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Capitalism, where anyone can set up their own business enterprise, is very much a reflection of the individualistic philosophy of Protestantism, where anyone could set up their own church. The "Age of Dictators" in Europe, Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain, and Salazar in Portugal, was centered in traditionally Catholic countries that had become secular so that a dictator had replaced the pope. Fascism could be described as following a dictator combined with extremist nationalism.

Hitler was from a Catholic family, in Catholic Austria and his initial power base was in Catholic southern Germany. The relationship between Mussolini and Hitler was very much a reenactment of that between Pope Leo III and Charlemagne, who he crowned as the first Holy Roman Emperor, with the objective of reining in the Christians of the east, who would later split away to form the Eastern Orthodox Church. Hitler considered himself as leader of the Third Reich, with Charlemagne being the First and the Kaisers the Second Reich, and his ultimate objective was to fulfill Charlemagne's mission, in modern secular form, by conquering the Soviet Union. 

The end of the Second World War would bring the west to a time of general prosperity and progress. But all was not quite well. First there was there the utter absurdity of the world being the touch of a button away from destroying itself over competing economic systems. The times were still quite secular and God was replaced with hedonism and the large-scale use of drugs. The late Sixties were referred to as the "Permissive Society", and the catchphrase was "Anything Goes". Nowhere is the secularization of traditional religion more striking than in rock music. A rock song is very much in the form of a psalm in the Bible, except that it is usually about romance, rather than God. 

People have always killed each other, whether individually or in some organized capacity. But what the more godless postwar world brought, despite it's relative prosperity, was widespread senseless killings. Virtually every few days there is a mass killing that makes no sense whatsoever to anyone but the killer. Sometimes the killing is done one-by-one, usually targeting a certain type of victim, by a serial killer. 

In recent years the use of drugs has taken a particularly ominous turn. The use of dangerous and illegal drugs has been widespread since the 1960s. But those drugs, such as heroin, cocaine and, hashish, were made from plants that had to be grown, then processed, and then successfully exported. Now drugs are increasingly made from chemicals, which can be done anywhere with no need for the plants. The opioid epidemic is everywhere, with addiction often beginning with legitimate medications. The most ominous new name regarding these synthetic drugs is Fentanyl.

While all of these developments in technology were going on, particularly the idea that every adult should have their own car, no one seems to have been giving much thought to what it was doing to the environment. Global warming is now perhaps the most pressing crisis in the world. We are destroying this planet. The worst thing in my lifetime is what we have done to the animals. There is now believed to be only about a third as many animals alive in the wild that there were fifty years ago. 

But these adventures of lost people will not go on forever. We have seen how it will conclude in the posting "The End Of The World As We Know It".