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.
This observation, however, does not answer the central question of the nature of technology and whether this technology is inherently destined to cause only this deadly logic, this abolition of human will. In other words: is it technology itself or the current, i.e. Western technology that assumes this form? Can we — which has not yet happened — control technology? And must we even? This is a preliminary question that we will discuss later.
The Western Techno-Cosmos and European Techno-Science
The ‘technomorphism’ of our civilisation, the reduction of ideologies and political choices to the inevitability of a technocratic management of people and things (an allegedly neutral management!) — does it not contradict a concept of technology that would help humans to decide freely? Alain de Benoist explains that modern technology tends to suppress any human choice by replacing will and project (design) with a mechanical fatalism. We must confirm the accuracy of this observation, at least within the current techno-economic system. But why did pre-modern technology not lead to sterilising the human will, and why does modern technology — which is the fruit of what intelligence, judgment, and human will elaborated — paradoxically succeed in robotising humans, escaping them, suppressing any symbolic thought, disenchanting the human world by depriving it of designs and dreams? This is because modern technology is under the influence of the Western-egalitarian ideology saturated with Judaeo-Christian dualism and individualism. ‘Now influenced by dualistic, rationalistic, and universalistic thinking, man makes a fundamental separation between the world and himself. He turns the world into an object, of which he himself would be the subject... The kinship between man and world disappears. Man believes he masters a now disenchanted world; in reality, he becomes a slave to the technicised world.’3 Only when the egalitarian, Christianomorphic, dualistic, universalist, and rationalist ideology can be overcome will man be able to replace the brutal and blind force of self-abandoned new technology with his own will to power, his own historical projects, which in turn will use technology.
The Judaeo-Christian and egalitarian humanitarianism, which rejects the hierarchical notion of domination and the concept of power, paradoxically leads to the worst form these two realities can take: the subjugation and destruction of humans and their environment (consumer society and Soviet society) by the uncontrolled power of technology, which is considered ‘neutral’. Only a worldview that recognises the legitimacy of the will to power of man (as being-in-the-world) and peoples will be able to control technology, historicising it as an instrument rather than an end in itself.
Let us examine the paradox further! Now that technology is disenchanted, causing neither poetisation nor wonder, it turns into a prosaic and thus blind, destructive soft technology. Man no longer ‘sees’ the technology, which is now part of his world (consider technological crutches and prosthetics like the television and the car4), perceiving it no longer with distance. Thus, technology becomes an uncontrolled force of subjugation and destruction. This happens when man, shaped by the Judaeo-Christian spirit, no longer considers technology ‘in its essence’, when he forgets that he himself is a historical subject endowed with projects. This happens when he ‘lets technology operate’, and through this naive trustfulness (typical of the liberalism inherent in the Judaeo-Christian outlook), condemns himself to become its slave and the earth to be devastated.
The pessimistic man of paganism — who should be reinstated — knows, on the other hand, that modern techno-science as an expression of the Faustian soul is extremely risky. Viewed from the perspective of danger and challenge that man posed to himself (technology and the gods are our own images, projected by us and against us), technology challenges the attitude of the will to power. The Judaeo-Christian psychism, for its part, either gives itself to an optimistic indifference regarding the nature of technology, considering it neutral and harmless, or, like the Protestant Jacques Ellul, condemns what is perceived as ‘evil’ in the biblical sense. The overly critical attitudes towards modern technology gradually appear decadence-inducing and demobilising. Under the pretext of convincing us of the evils of modern technology, they actually lead to depriving Europeans of the power of a technology that — let us not forget — culturally belongs to them more than any other people. The anti-technical discourse aims, among other things, to transform us into retrogressive, folklorised societies without means of power. Technology should belong to the Americans and the Japanese; to the Europeans, museums and folklore groups.
We must not retreat from technology. We are forced to ride the tiger — according to Evola’s famous saying. ‘We simply have to go for it’, as Julien Freund puts it. Incubators, nuclear weapons, space exploration, and the unnaturalness of data processing challenge us and disturb the calm into which an overly literary culture placed our elites. The latter are no longer fundamentally called upon in the late 20th century to discuss political abstractions but to deal with things, with risky and unsettling things, that are problematic: in the foreseeable future, children will be able to be produced in incubators5 from conception to delivery; we will be able to interrupt the genetic code and thus manipulate inheritance. All this requires answers and (election) decisions. Technology compromises us and calls on us to respond to the challenges we have posed to ourselves — through it. Due to a lack of will, the elites are currently unable to respond. They let the situation rot. If we — especially regarding biogenetic manipulation and artificial fertilisation — persist without designs and without the courage to take risks, we will be at the mercy of a technological revolution that, as it has always done, will break the taboos of a Judaeo-Christian morality (which appeals to a hypothetical preservation of the ‘natural order’) anyway.
We must engage to impose our game, i.e. accept and want the power and risk inherent in technology, so that we remain masters over it. But to find out whether the current techno-science is essentially incompatible with any form of cultural identity, with the rebirth of a world of personalised peoples, and whether it is closely linked to the homogenising logic of the planetary West, we must first ask where technology comes from.
Technology belongs to what is most human in man, insofar as man imagines the world only through the manipulations to which he subjects it. We perceive the world as a human world, not through our senses, but fundamentally through the technologies we develop to live in and control the environment. Every human worldview is primarily a technical worldview. Our relationship to matter is not strictly biological as with animals; it is rather mediated and expanded by our technology, which, as Arnold Gehlen recognised, is the replacement for an organic deficiency that prevents man from grasping the environment directly.
It is therefore wrong to claim that technology opposes the symbolic and that the ‘technical world’ is a world of pure stimuli and quantitative signs. It is rather the animal world itself that can be described as a world of signs, a reality-quantifying world, since animal behaviour patterns are mechanical and strictly programmed based on environmental stimuli. By inserting a grid between the world and perception, technology transforms reality (an ‘imperative’ for animals) into a complex web of possibilities and turns an in-itself reality into a reality-for-humans. A world imbued with symbols is thus possible because, thanks to technology, the environment and the entire reality become domains where choices and personal perceptions are at work for humans.
Technology thus possesses an inherent ability to poetise the real. This means that culture realises its essence in technology. The always-risking European man found in his technology the most cultural of all cultures. It is no wonder that all peoples wanted to drink and get intoxicated from this source, and that from the worldwide spread of this hyper-culture emerged a reverse process of deculturation, a plunge into global sub-culture. What is most highly developed in the cultural order, as observed by Konrad Lorenz, is also most prone to regression — destabilisation into chaos.
(translated by Constantin von Hoffmeister)
Jacques Ellul, Le mystère technicien, Paris 1977, p. 53
Alain de Benoist, ‘Idéologies, c’est la lutte finale’, in La fin d’un monde, crise ou déclin, Actes du VII. Colloque du GRECE, 1985.
Ibid.
In short, ‘the system of objects’ that Baudrillard criticizes.
Incubator: in vitro fertilization of human gametes, with development from ‘conception’ to ‘birth’. This stage will pose a tremendous problem for human society, one that we must start contemplating now (the ‘desocialisation’ of sexual reproduction of the species).