World War I led to significant changes in society. It was the greatest war the world had yet witnessed, and it destroyed the heroic ideals that had accompanied wars in the past. The horrors of the war led to disquiet among many types of people. Individuals began to question the foundations of society, morality, and their conception of the world. People also began to break away from old societal traditions, leading to a looser, freer society. Wartime technology led to advances in transportation and communication at home and abroad. Literature, such as Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt, reflected the disillusionment with society.
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Einstein’s theory of relativity or Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis influenced the postwar era.
The horrors of war contributed to an atmosphere of anxiety and uncertainty about the world.
Wartime technology contributed to increased mobility and communication.
<span>Answer: Far smaller and far slower social changes in earlier periods triggered civil wars, rebellions, and violent intellectual and spiritual crises. The extreme social transformations of this century have caused hardly any stir. They have proceeded with a minimum of friction, with a minimum of upheavals, and, indeed, with a minimum of attention from scholars, politicians, the press, and the public. To be sure, this century of ours may well have been the cruelest and most violent in history, with its world and civil wars, its mass tortures, ethnic cleansings, genocides, and holocausts. But all these killings, all these horrors inflicted on the human race by this century's murderous "charismatics," hindsight clearly shows, were just that: senseless killings, senseless horrors, "sound and fury, signifying nothing." Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, the three evil geniuses of this century, destroyed. They created nothing.</span>
