World War Two as an "Auto Immune" disease ...

Two examples readily at hand can give an 21st century insight into the faith-based/man-oriented science of 20th century Modernity.


One is that tenet of classical (cum current) economics that one can have perfect knowledge, potentially, of markets and prices.

 (Itself a spin off of that wider tenet of modernity's faith --- that ultimately Man will obtain perfect knowledge of Nature and Reality).

In fact, the real reason why over half our current economy is knowledge-based rather than involved in making physical things is because even obtaining a little knowledge is an expensive, complicated and imperfect life-long effort.

Another insight into the failings of modernity is a well known quote from Paul Ehrlich , the famous creator of chemo-therapy's first "magic bullet" and a founder of immunology.

Ehrlich claimed that horror autotoxicus was the norm for the human body, that pinnacle of evolutionary progress :  ie that the human immune response, like humanity in general, was so advanced  that it was totally incapable of ever mounting an immune attack - by mistake - against its own cells.

In fact, the list of diseases with a component of damage caused by our mis-firing immune system beating us up, (aka auto immune diseases) goes up day by day.

During WWII, the world's most modern civilizations, the nations that claimed to have finally put an end to centuries of magic, superstitions, hunger, poverty, misery and war, proceeded to tear modernity and civilization apart.

It was auto immune disease gone mad.

 The un-civilizied nations could only look upon it and wonder.

The post-colonial winds of change (and of doubt) began blowing in early 1942, in my opinion....