Each country in the civilized West fortified
its frontiers, trained officers in special schools, mobilized young men
and women for military service, stockpiled weapons, multiplied
fire-power, making western civilization an armed camp, with guns
pointing in every direction.
Regimentation of city life, of industry and commerce, of war, of
education and public health followed one after another as the individual
human became more and more a cog in a vast social mechanism. This
regimentation dulled imagination at the same time that it deified greed,
with "gimme, gimme;" "more, more;" as its watch words.
At certain points in its development western civilization has lifted
itself temporarily above the material forces that hemmed in the life of
primitive man. The Renaissance was one such period. The Enlightenment
was another. A third was the scientific breakthrough from Darwin and
Marx to the research and experiments which split the atom and
inaugurated the space age. These gains were offset by the growing
planet-wide chasm between wealth and poverty, the plunder and pollution
of man's natural and social environment and the terrifying growth of
destructive power revealed during two prolonged general wars in one
generation.
Mechanized war demonstrated its destructivity, physically, socially,
psychologically. Prolonged war accustomed an entire generation of
mankind to unnecessary suffering and the deliberate twisting, maiming
and destroying which are characteristic features of the war-waging
civilized state.
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