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C.S. Lewis was wrong, then.
Technology has devalued a man’s labor. Handcrafting loses out to machine tooling. Conscript armies lose out to professionals with air support. Local farmers lose out to plantations in the third world.
There was and is no war. Liberalism’s love affair with the profit motive made it quicker to incorporate these changes in value. Our more authoritarian competitors either got with the program or, again, lost out.
The motives for war are largely orthogonal to how it is fought.
Your desire to paint everything in purely materialist terms is simply another example of how the liberal mindset seeks to undermine and destroy traditional Western notions of virtue.
Okay, but what if the terms actually are materialist?
What you're seeing as war goals are more or less incidental, because liberalism does not particularly care about virtue. It will sometimes go to bat for a short list of inalienable rights. Outside of that, it is a materialist ideology, and competition is not war.
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Machine tooling in no way devalued a man's labor, because the machines were built and run by men. Amusingly, this held into the computer era (except during WWII, for obvious reasons), which was a point in the culture war.
It quite directly did. Factories started to close the gap between men, women and children when it came to economic value.
That relative loss was completely outweighed by the explosion in total economic value that came from labor-saving machines. It still moved enormous numbers of people out of the house and into the factory. It still put any society which relied on unassisted manual labor at a massive disadvantage.
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In theory, a situation can arise where men's labor is just as vital as ever but still devalued because a small number of men can do the work of many. I mean, people would starve to death without grocery stores but they still can't charge you $500 for a loaf of bread. There are just too many competitors ready to step in and sell for less.
Is that what's going on with male labor? I tend to think so. I find it telling that the Japanese character for a man combines "strength" and "field." And that traditional cultures strongly preferred male children regardless of whether it was a dowry culture or a brideprice culture. I think that before the industrial revolution, having an able-bodied man in your family could easily mean the difference between life and death.
Theory or no, that is not the story of the Industrial Revolution.
Just means Japan's language is old.
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