The great tendencies of the modern age have been reductionism and objectification. The result has been a drive to find the simplest explanations of everything.
We can see this in economics, where the tendency has long been to convert everything to monetary value, regardless of the violence this does to society and to humanity. We can see it in religion, where fundamentalisms of various sorts represent simplified and increasingly materialist paradises of odder beliefs. The nuclear age reduced strategy to the very material idea of Mutual Assured Destruction.
In the earliest phases of modernity, medieval ideas of witches as individuals deluded by the the illusions of the devil were turned into beliefs among the most educated in satanic pacts, cults, night flights, and the most incredible rites and blasphemies. Perhaps 50,000 were killed in the resulting persecutions.
In our own times, we have seen Satanic panics, the creation of false memories that can be documented as impossible, the introduction of Satan and his followers into a wide variety of conspiracy beliefs and even into mainstream political discourse, and even becoming justifications for voting against candidates.
The basic principles on which the modern world is supposed to operate are the closely linked Occam's Razor and Saving the Appearances. In modern times, the former is usually phrased in terms of the simplest explanation being the correct one, while the latter reminds us that our explanations must account for (save) all of the apparent aspects of an event or phenomenon. In theory, and in some formulations, Saving the Appearances is included in Occam's Razor, as in Ernst Mach's: "Scientists must use the simplest means of arriving at their results and exclude everything not perceived by the senses." Of course, we must also explain everything that is perceived by the senses, all of the data, associated with the phenomenon in question.
One of our main problems is that we have followed the principle of reduction, but have excluded much of the data. Humans (at least modern Western humans) tend to focus on one thing, or a narrow range of things, at a time, excluding all else. Thus Adam Smith could exclude all of the domestic labor that was necessary to support those making pins or any other product. (For more on that, see Katrine Marçal, Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner? A Study in Women and Economics, Pegasus: 2016.) In other words, half or more of economic activity was excluded even in the early days of the discipline, creating conditions in which abstraction (both in the sense of reducing an object to its fundamental form, but also of removing it from the context which gives it meaning, and that allows it to impart meaning to other things) has long dominated economic thought.
Protestant Fundamentalism (and to different extents and in different ways other kinds of religious fundamentalism) have followed a similar path. The specific event that gave the Protestant movement its name was the publication of a collection of pamphlets called The Fundamentals at the behest of California brothers and oil men Lyman and Milton Stewart. Even at the very beginning, the authors, editors, and publishers defining what they believed to be vital to Christianity were already picking and choosing, selecting what suited their particular worldview in the Bible, and what did not. (Malise Ruthven, Fundamentalism: The Search for Meaning, Oxford: 2004, 17-18.) Of equal import, the struggle to prove the inerrancy of scripture has led to trying to smooth over conflicting passages, view obvious errors in chronology as multiple instances of similar events, and even downgrade miracles to God simply manipulating natural phenomena. Fundamentalists have transformed the supernatural and the mythic elements of Christianity into a material and history lie. It is religion devoid of both imagination and understanding in danger of becoming an empty shell devoted to Christian fascism.
Strategy has followed a similar path over the past two centuries. In the military sphere, Napoleon in his heyday, particularly in the period from Austerlitz to Frieldand (1805-1807), is seen as the epitome of strategy. (That he was not so good at grand strategy is also realized but since that failure is most evident after Friedland, it is easy to miss the view expressed by Kipling in his "St. Helena Lullaby," where he wrote: "'How far is St. Helena from the field of Austerlitz.' / You couldn't hear me if I told - so loud the cannons roar. / But not so far for people who are living by their wits.") After his fall, he became very much a cult figure and attempts were made to codify strategy in his image, both by Jomini and Clausewitz. While there have been brilliant strategists since, such as Grant, the elder Moltke, and Nimitz, the realm of grand strategy has essentially turned into a set of rules. Perhaps the last great grand strategist in America was Lincoln. Since then there has been little but improvisation alternating with sets of rules founded in either Clausewitz or game theory. We have tried to reduce a very complex and dynamic discipline to rules and algorithms. Who can have any faith in military and foreign policy strategies that can conceive of nothing, nor produce anything, but chaos and war without end?
These all seem very different things, but they have common causes, an over-dependence on reductionism, and an unwise filtering out of unwanted facts and events. We have become ever so good at doing just that. This is not something that just happened in the present century, in fact it is largely what happened to Jefferson Davis' Confederacy and Adolf Hitler's Germany. Everything was reduced to race. In both cases, the leaders had convinced themselves of the scientific basis of racial superiority and inferiority, and of the righteousness of their cause. This is readily evident in the latter case, but it was already present at the founding of the Confederacy as well. In his infamous Cornerstone Speech, delivered three weeks before the firing on Fort Sumter, Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens effortlessly combined both early scientific racism with the religious variety to present racial inequality as the "great truth" on which his government was founded, unaware of how much of both scientific data and Biblical texts he was excluding. Both states were undermined by their founding principle.
We cannot continue to reduce and objectify the world around us while excluding anything that is inconvenient or does not suit our felt needs. We have founded our present world system too much in economics and realpolitik while the reaction against it has been founded too much in religion or spiritualities with equally limited fields of vision. We have to break out of it all.
