Modern Thought and the First World War.?

Question

Was World War I a reflection and consequence of new ideas and beliefs, or did it itself produce major changes in modern thought?

Answer 1

World War I was a reflection and consequences of old beliefs and ideas. Warfare at the begininng of the war was waged as it had been in the past century where young men and officers thought they could gain glory in sweeping calvary charges and heoric actions. Because of the style of warfare and the increased deadliness of weapons including the machine gun, the tank, increased range of artillery, and the use of chemical warfare many soldiers involved in trench warfare never saw the enemy face to face and in turn never saw who or what killed them. The scope of war drastically changed at the battle of the Marne more deaths occured in a day than had resulted from entire wars in the past.

Many authors and intellectuals emerged from World War I with ideas that had been produced from their experiences during the war. Some of these authors include F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby) and J.R.R. Tolkien (Lord of the Rings Series). A whole generation of young men never returned to the United States, England, and Germany those that did were often horribly maimed. The ammount of death caused those in their early 20's at the time to be known as the "Lost Generation"

One of the greatest books ever written of warfare that gives the senetiment of emotion and expression of new ideas and modern thought, though fictional is "All Quiet on the Western Front"

Another great non-fiction examination of thoughts and feelings of the soldiers and how the war effects later conflicts especially WW2 is by Samuel Hynes called "The Soldier's Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern Warfare" it is full of first hand accounts and excellent observations and opinions.

Answer 2

Both. For the first time in history, battle fatalities reached the millions. War became an entirely new species -- it went from being the chivalric, romanticized version from Greek epics to being brutal and more animalistic than the more "civilized" wars people were familiar with.

More than that, though, it definitely was a major catalyst in changing how people regarded the world around them. The Georgian poets and philosophers in the years leading up to the war were all concerned with higher ideals like rational thought and the beauty of nature and, above all, the innate goodness of people. When the war came along, all of that was irreversibly changed. How could poets keep writing about the "greatness" of the human mind when it was humans who had just caused this catastrophic war that destroyed almost an entire generation of young men? As a result, in the years following the war you see reactionary movements all through the arts -- in literature, the Modernists rose to prominence (T. S. Eliot, Hemingway, etc), while in visual arts the Dada movement became popular -- dada, as described by its founders, meant "nothing," just like all art and life in general after the war. It was a very bleak, pessimistic world that WWI created.

Answer 3

My view is that it eventually produced fundamental changes in thought. The War can be seen as a watershed after which modern egalitarian views of woman, the class structure etc. slowly began to decline. It led to the first, unsuccessful attempt at a world body to regulate relationships between nation-states - The League of Nations. Many of these ideas didn't come to full fruition until after WW2 which, in my view, can be seen in many ways as just a continuation of WWI.