Discuss the intellectual aftermath of World War I. What were the changes that came about in the arts, and attitudes towards science and religion...

The
intellectual aftermath ofwas a fundamental "shift" in how human beings saw the world
and their place in it.  In 1924, Virginia Woolf articulated this condition of being in the
world: All human relations shifted...and when human relations change there is at the same time
a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature.  Many of the attitudes articulated in
the wake of World War I centered on this shift and the alienated condition of the individual.
 The horrors of World War I resulted in a human consciousness that was fundamentally removed
from any notion of solidarity and unity.  Forces such as capitalism and nationalism had
conspired to move individuals into the most savage of conditions and commit the most brutal of
actions towards one another.  Elements that were seen as constituting order and unity were shown
to be filled with disunity and fragmentation.  This realization becomes one of the most
significant intellectual aftermaths of World War I.  The "shift" of which Woolf speaks
fundamentally transformed the individual and their world. There was a stunning lack of trust
within the individual about the world and their place in it.

The attitudes
towards science and religion was reflective of this sense of disarray.  Ezra Pound once wrote
his views of society as an old [b] gone in the teeth . . . a botched civilization . . . two
gross of broken statues . . . [and] a few thousand battered books.  The unity and coherence that
was advocated in expressions like science and religion were not devoid of meaning as a result of
World War I.  Religious notions that advocated young man making the ultimate sacrifice in World
War I rang hollow once the war had ended.  Modernist thinkers could not embrace a notion of the
divine that would so readily sacrifice young and old alike in the worst of conflicts.  Science
also no longer enjoyed a privileged position of unity and totality.  The science that was
coopted by the governments in World War I with its use of poison gas and advanced notions of
destruction demonstrated the lack of meaning in science.  It was seen as a branch of
destruction, something that Modernist thinkers articulated with their own sense of mistrust and
alienation. The attitudes of women and men emerging from World War I was a sense of mistrust
about the "advances" of science and the "meaning" of religion.

James Joyce writes that  history is a nightmare from which I am trying to
awake."  This becomes the predominant belief that comes about in the intellectual aftermath
of World War I.  There is little in way of hope and redemption in such a condition.  There might
exist some notion of hope, but it certainly did not exist in socially sanctioned modes of
thought as seen in science and religion.  This becomes the intellectual legacy and aftermath
after World War I, a world as intellectually scarred as any battlefield.