European Identity in the Shadow of Modern Technology

by Guillaume Faye

Guillaume Faye highlights that modern techno-science, a product of European origin, is at a crossroads where it offers unprecedented opportunities but also poses the dual dangers of uncontrollability and the homogenisation of identities into an artificial global order.

This is the fourteenth part of Guillaume Faye’s essay ‘The New Ideological Challenges’, published in 1988. Also read parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, and thirteen.

At the crossroads of the Faustian soul and European identity lies the unsettling reality of modern techno-science — this ‘indeterminate’ reality, whose double danger consists of being uncontrollable and surpassing human will, while also immersing identities into the world order of homogeneous artificiality. ‘The demand for absolute equality is nothing but the ideological product of the unlimited application of technology’, writes Jacques Ellul¹. The question raised is clear: does modern techno-science, like the West with which it runs in tandem, largely contribute to the destruction of European identity, despite originating in Europe? Or, contrary to Ellul’s assessment, can one argue that it neither converges with nor created egalitarianism, but rather that egalitarianism, the expression of Western ideology, endowed technology with its homogenising nature, its power to dehumanise the world? ‘Technology’, writes Ellul further, ‘was traditionally contained within a civilisation of which it was a part; now everything depends on technology; it dominates all other factors; it is now an assimilating element within which everything resides’.

Alain de Benoist² emphasised that the global ‘techno-cosmos’ gradually supplanted the human will in determining — through the species — its own destiny. Today, more than during the first Industrial Revolution, ‘technological innovations’, especially in cutting-edge industries, steer the development of the economic and financial system, which in turn dictates political ambitions. We can thus assert that the human political will is alienated by a technological and financial system that evades any expression of will. We are indeed in the midst of nihilism, an implosion of meaning.