Remember World War I

November 11, 1918 was the end of a world, and the beginning of a new one.

People forget about World War I, which ended 97 years ago today. The defining event of the 20th century, no doubt, was the Second World War. It has an easy narrative, and at least one clear villain. World War I seems nonsensical, fought over abstruse questions of territory. And it killed "only" 20 million people, less than half of World War II's 50 million. And after the gas chamber, stories of mustard gas don't pack the emotional punch they used to.

And yet, we shouldn't forget about the Great War.

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First, simply because of what it was. It might not have been "as bad" as World War II, but it still shook the world and destroyed tens of millions of families and lives. If history means anything, and it does, then we should all have a holy respect for that.

Secondly, because it was nonsensical.

And that, in and of itself, is a lesson. Tens of millions of people killed, for essentially no reason. A perfect storm of everything awful in the world: The deep vendetta between France and Germany; a balance of power between the Alliance and the Entente that kept the conflict going; the progress of technology, good enough to slaughter millions of people in extravagantly new ways, but not good enough to end it decisively (as the tank and the A-bomb did).

Nobody expected World War I. After the Napoleonic Wars, Europe's conflicts had been short and gallant, relatively civilized, and used sparingly to settle international disputes. The order imposed by Napoleon's victors in 1815 had held relatively well.

The end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th had been a time of astonishing technological progress, and of astonishing globalization. Most people confidently proclaimed that with trade at such high levels, war other than small skirmishes was a thing of the past, because any country stood too much to lose — stop me if that sounds familiar.

Another very important lesson to remember: War can break out at any moment, and war can turn quickly into a world war. Today both the United States and Russia, nuclear powers, are involved in a proxy war in Syria, including with "advisers" who might get bombed or shot by the other country's military. But even without that recent development, we can all think of flashpoints — Taiwan, North Korea, the Ukraine — that could conceivably lead to a world war.

Of course, World War II cautions against overlearning the lessons of World War I — the world is complex! But this is still a very important lesson. We should have humility about our ability to predict the future. We should better understand our biases when we extend trend lines into the future, where totally unexpected things always happen.

We should also remember World War I as the end of a world and the beginning of another.

After World War I, it's hard to take patriotism seriously — and it's no coincidence that the most patriotic country in the West, the United States, was the one whose involvement in World War I was the least demanding — and hard to see it as anything but an evil.

But we should be wary of simple lessons. It is at least arguable that the decline of patriotism helped unleash the demon of totalitarianism, which gave us the much worse debacle of World War II, and the 100 million dead of communism.

We human beings are social beings, and political beings. We thrive in community, and we flourish when we are part of enterprises bigger than ourselves. This instinct can be healthy when it helps us accomplish great things. When we don't identify with a natural community like a country, we are liable to identify with an ideology, and ideologies are even more voracious monsters than states.

A higher percentage of Oxford graduates died in World War I than the percentage of the overall British population. How many U.S. Ivy League graduates signed up to fight in Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11? Some, no doubt. Patriotism can shift into nationalism, but we shouldn't confuse the two. Loving one's country is healthy; what isn't is thinking that your country is better than every other and that it ought to rule all. But there is something to be said for having a nation feel bound together in a common endeavor, a feeling that is harder to come by these days.

Before World War I, there was a more gallant era. We shouldn't overdo it, but it was an era when people believed in chivalry — and that, too, died in the trenches. War will probably always be with us in some sense or another. Today we kill people with flying robots. Before World War I, people at least tried to obey the laws of war. We claim we obey the laws of war, which is why when we want to go to war, we call it "kinetic action."

Humility before history means being able to understand the minds of other eras. In many ways, we live in the shadow of World War I, a shadow that obscures the world as it once was. But we should try to see what was lost. We should remember.