Disturbing and upsetting products of the revolution in science and technology—­the harnessing of steam, the internal combustion engine, the air plane, electronics, plastics, and the release of atomic energy—­were used to mutilate, destroy and kill.  During the half century that began in 1910, tens of millions were mobilized, fed, taught, armed, and led to the slaughter fields by the masters of western civilization in two long orgies of wholesale destruction and mass murder—­1914-18 and 1936-1945.  Energies and techniques that might have brought peace and plenty to the human family were used to set fire storms that incinerated property while it degraded humanity to the horrors of mass suicide.

In a very real sense these ghoulish results were the logical outcome of competitive nationalism armed and equipped with the technology produced during the two centuries of the great revolution.  War is the most carefully planned, most elaborate and most intensive form of competition—­the decisive climax of a life and death struggle for survival.

The great revolution had put into human hands almost infinite possibilities for utilizing nature and improving the social environment.  With foresight, careful planning and skillful manipulation of forces and trends the cultivatable portions of the planetary land mass might have been turned into a garden of unending plenty dotted with marvelous city centers of light and learning.

In order to achieve such results it would have been necessary for the human family to coordinate its efforts around an agreed division of labor, share the goods and services produced and move from one level of affluence to a level of abundance.

Instead of joint efforts to achieve abundance and security, the most prosperous and most highly developed centers of western civilization consolidated their authority in sovereign states, surrounded by forbidding frontiers, armed them with the most destructive agencies that human imagination and ingenuity could devise, schooled the citizens of each nation in the suicidal formula:  “might makes right; every nation for itself and woe betide the laggard and the loser.”

The logical ideology of such a formula was egomania, suspicion, fear and hatred.  Its outcome was a competitive life and death struggle for wealth and power, with the nation or a bloc of nations as the units of competition.  The struggle at its highest level involved occasional local wars and periodical general wars like those of 1914-18 and 1936-45.

Before the great revolution such struggles were waged chiefly with weapons wielded by human muscle power, supplemented with whatever animal power was available.  Equipped with the products of the technological revolution, the struggle became a war of machines, powered by the energies of nature.  Retail killing and destruction was replaced by mass murder and wholesale annihilation.

Given the assumptions, the practices and the institutions of civilization, the catastrophic losses of the present century could have been foretold and, with competent leadership and disciplined followership, could have been averted.  But leadership was self-serving, shortsighted and for the most part untrained, while followership was split up into national and local segments, each following the suicidal doctrine of every nation for itself and the devil take the laggards.