Modern Technology as the Second Magic

by Guillaume Faye

Guillaume Faye contends that modern technology reawakens ancient European myths and integrates mankind more closely with nature through advancements in microphysics and space exploration.

This is the fifteenth 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, thirteen, and fourteen.

Modern technology harbours mythology and aesthetic mobilisation power to at least the same extent as earlier technology. Michel Maffesoli rightly speaks of the ‘magic of microprocessors’. Aviation, cars, space exploration, computer science, and so on have their ‘fans’, and this fanaticism, a modern version of magical raptures, drives the collective unconscious of deeply rooted European myths. In the depiction of science fiction, the fantastic realism entirely pervaded by hyper-technical ‘marvels’, the mythological elements of old Europe, especially the concept of the empire, are expressed — and this is no coincidence.

Since Jules Verne, the technical object has functioned as the crystallisation of the imaginary and reintroduces a magical mentality: the world of robots, exploratory spaceships, or fighter bombers in space, as well as the current awe of youth at the sight of a Mirage 2000 taking off from the runway, contribute to reawakening a psychological background which dominant ideology and Christianity sought to suppress: the Faustian belief in the adventurous power of man (the myth of the explorer), who, with all his sovereignty, claims the right to perform miracles, i.e. to act against the ‘laws’ of nature (to fly, to free oneself from the earth’s gravity, to dive into the world’s oceans, to postpone death, to realise the synthesis of life, etc.).

According to the old saying, one only subdues nature by obeying it, and in reality, the ‘miracles of technology’ are merely the application of natural forces; however, on a psychological and ideological level, it appears different: the Faustian European, through science and technology, transcends what all civilisations — including Judaeo-Christianity — dared not violate, namely the manifest order of nature. In this context, we do not necessarily need to lament the methods of Greek techné, which understood itself as ‘production’, as ‘letting grow’, and practised harmony or ‘obedience’ to nature. To do otherwise would be to undervalue that great revolution at the end of the Middle Ages, which saw the rise of the Faustian spirit, the true European spirit, in the French-German-Italian region, driving the European man to ‘violate’ nature, to subject it to the categorical imperative, to produce for man.

Alain de Benoist rightly points out that such a revolution naturally carries immense risks, particularly the danger of separating man from natural reality and transforming him into a robot, a self-created artificial being. These risks must, however, be borne, and therein lies the greatness of European high-tech culture. Moreover, these risks are better managed the more technology retains its characteristic drive for innovation. Through the constant de-installation it effects, the absence of an endpoint that characterises its inventive process, through the ‘world changes’ it causes, technological innovation actually performs two main movements. The first is the maintenance (or provision) of a conception of history that is completely opposed to the messianic, eschatological one of Judaeo-Christianity and progressivism. The latter views history as a segment leading to a blessed end, a happy conclusion. The chronological world of technological innovation (the ‘time of technology’), on the other hand, appears adventurous and endless, like cosmic space or the space of microparticles: infinite. Accordingly, there is a contradiction between the temporality of progressivist and ‘technological’ ideology (which also considers zero growth and the stagnation of sciences once the earth has industrially reached an optimal level of uniform prosperity) and the superhumanist view of time and history inherent to European technology. Technological progressivism strives for the end of history, whereas techno-scientific innovation implicitly means its endless continuation.

The second main movement is far from contradicting the approach of Greek techné (which the ‘first’ modern technology, that of the Industrial Revolution, actually did). The second modern technology (microphysics, genetics, astrophysics, etc.) transitions to a renewed coexistence with nature, as foreseen by Heidegger, even if he does not clearly articulate it. Today’s techno-science first rediscovers that its artificialism does not mean a separation from nature, no ‘disobedience’, but rather an imitation, thanks to the ‘forward movement’ of micro- and astrophysics: the cyclotron reproduces phenomena observed in the sun, the spaceship — like the great ship of old — re-establishes an immediate relationship with the ‘raw nature’ of the cosmos, genetics reveals the reality of life that was previously distorted by faith, radio electronics confronts us with a new dimension of nature, and so on.

However, the distinction made by Heidegger and other authors — including Spengler, Jünger, and Ellul — between the ‘classical’ technology of non-industrial societies and ‘modern technology’ (to which they ascribe immense or diabolical power, presenting it as an ‘extraordinary fact’) is, in reality, not operative. The difference between classical and modern technology is quantitative, not qualitative. As anthropologists and ethologists (Adolf Portmann, Jacob von Uexküll, and Konrad Lorenz) have often pointed out, technology itself has nothing anti-human in its enterprise to domesticate ‘naturalness’. Man has always been driven by this biological predisposition to dominate his environment and replace it with a human one. It is precisely the same mental process that once drove the Neolithic farmer to free the land around the clearing, which today compels us to dominate the entire earth. Due to limited technological means, it was previously not possible to ‘see’ and perceive that human technology, with its immense power, related to the entire earthly ecosystem, while today we must recognise it. Paradoxically, and contrary to widespread prejudices, the current holders of such powerful modern technology, intellectually and emotionally, are far more concerned about ‘nature’ and much more restrained in the face of the destructive effects inherent to all technology than were the contemporaries of pre-industrial society.

Thus, the real transformation does not concern the technical process itself but the object to which the dominion of technology now applies. In the first phase, technical mastery concerned man himself and the world as a perceptible environment (medicine, agriculture, industry, Newtonian natural sciences). Since the quantum revolution and the formulation of general relativity, the techno-scientific mastery of the (astro- and microphysical) world has approached mass-energy. In other words, the object of technology is no longer the perceptible and comprehensible environment (from the human body to the planet), the macrocosm, but the microcosm, i.e. the very essence of matter and the reality that cannot be immediately grasped. This represents an extraordinary leap, the consequences of which we are only just beginning to perceive.

To claim that technology is not outside of us, not outside of our cultural psyche, is to take a huge step towards understanding what Heidegger called ‘the mystery of its essence’. The essence of technology is mysterious precisely because this essence is too close to us for us to properly uncover, because this essence is within us, because it originates from us, because it is, in a sense, ‘us’, and this has certainly been so since the beginning of the Indo-European adventure. An example: what characterises technology, among other things, is — as discussed earlier — an adventurous conception of time as a construction of will, no longer as a repetitive cycle of eternally accepted traditions. But this conception of time (lost in the fabricated linear-eschatological Christian view, which first took shape in Europe, where the cyclical and traditional view was least entrenched) was present in earlier European cultures, as Dodds, Vernant, and many others have shown. In other words, technology was born from a latent worldview. More precisely, it was not technology, suddenly appearing as an external object, that changed our worldview, but our (already pre-technological) worldview that eventually caused ‘technology’ and realised itself in it.

We Europeans have always carried ‘modern’ technology within us; possibly, this is the essence of our culture, but this would be the subject of another investigation. Under these conditions, it is incumbent upon us to reclaim technology as tradition. Technology would then be the realisation of a potentiality we carry within us. It would no longer be implicitly perceived as alien and thus as culturally destructive. Besides its deculturising effect, technology, especially modern technology, is often criticised for leading nations into a levelling and unifying massification. In reality, technology is essentially more inegalitarian, as it selects those capable of meeting its challenges from those who are not. Incidentally, has the gap between nations not widened since the ‘technologisation’ of civilisation? The massification and levelling produced by the prevailing ideology (which uses technology for this purpose) exclusively affect sociological lifestyles within each nation and would have occurred even without the help of modern technology, albeit more slowly.

Technology is even particularly inegalitarian, as it appears as the fruit of human cunning against the world. Julien Freund pointed out that cunning produces inequality. In its indifference, nature can level or not; in any case, its approach cannot be understood as inegalitarian. In some respects, one can even argue that nature equalises mankind, as it leads all people to become equal before death, as it strives to abolish and render insignificant all inequalities created by technology.

Technology — understood as a pact, i.e. as human rebellion against chance, the aleatory and the blindness of life — replaces the inherent indistinctness of mankind with an inegalitarian project. Initially, it did not allow the equality that prevailed between animals and humans in the face of nature’s whims to persist. A second fundamental inequality emerged when human groups with advanced technology became superior to those without it. When condemning the dangers of technology and its destructive consequences, one often confuses (precisely because of this interpretation of technology as foreign to and external to European culture) the effects of an ideology with technology. The techno-cosmos is a ‘system’ (machines, economic networks, and behaviours) that arose from technology, in our view, in a misappropriated manner, while technology is essentially a worldview: a conception of time and space, the structure of the imaginary and the sacred. According to this assumption, technology is an extremely rich structure whose possibilities we have not even begun to fathom. The misappropriated application of technology by ideologies originating from Christianity (rationalism, progressivism) and the liberal-capitalist West has not only neutralised and disenchanted technology, as mentioned above, but it also (unconsciously) happened because technology was potentially and above all a ‘poeticisation’, a ‘deification’ of the world: a typical trait of paganism.

In what sense? As a worldview, technology seemingly encompasses not only that inquisitive and adventurous behaviour which, according to Lorenz and Morin, represents the very ‘pinnacle’ of the nature of life, not only that latent Faustianism that expresses the soul of European man but also an irrational and aesthetic view of the cosmos: two aspects that Judaeo-Christianity has continuously fought against. Technology is not only hierarchical, it is also ‘enchanting’ — again contrary to a widespread prejudice that technology caused what Max Weber called the disenchantment of the world in modern times. Technology is disenchanted, and not disenchantment in its essence. The disenchantment of the world, which the uniformity, atheism, massification, and materialism of this civilisation reveal, is the fruit of an ideology (the egalitarianism stemming from Christianity), not of technology itself.

If it is true, as Heidegger says, that the navigated and dammed Rhine is only the Rhine ‘for’ technology and loses its mystery, its depth, its ‘natural’ charm, it is equally evident that with modern technology, nature and that lost charm are found again on the level of the cosmos and the infinitely small. Nature thereby gains a new depth, and technology returns to that ‘revelation effect’ which was inherent in Greek techné. Nature no longer refers only to the plants and hills that were mysterious to our ancestors and are less enigmatic to us. Continuing its forward flight and condensing its mystery even further, it now refers to the world of elementary particles, mass-energy, and the cosmos: a new reality that appears at least as mysterious and infinite as the ‘immediate’ nature presented to our ancestors.

Thus, European technology and science have by no means disenchanted the world: they have ‘extended’ this enchantment; the immediate earthly nature became the environment as it was dominated and de-poetised by technology, and a new nature emerged, discovered, as it were, through the movement of science and technology. It is the nature of astro- and microphysics, that of the conquest of space and mass-energy, that of the ‘thinking particles’ Jean Charon speaks of. Therefore, it is important, especially since our gods are now in the cosmos, to continue this European techno-scientific culture with the conquest of space, which also forms the key to European strategic and military independence. We should not naively try to erase the ‘disadvantages of technology’ to keep only its ‘advantages’ — in the simplistic, naive manner of those who want to ‘domesticate’ technology by retaining only its ‘good sides’. This view of things stems from a biblical and eudaemonistic standpoint that imagines that one can separate the ‘good’ from the ‘bad’ and fails to understand that technology is an organic symbiosis of the ‘positive’ and the ‘negative’, which must be dialectically overcome from above.

Through the challenges it contains, technology is historicising: it forces people to accept it; it encourages a forward flight. We can even argue that without the challenges of modern technology, history and movement would have completely disappeared from our civilisation. What underlies the worldwide status quo, the ‘end of history’ condemned by several authors, is the Western ideology itself and its planetarily materialistic and unifying aim. Technology simultaneously acts as an accelerator of this uniformity (through the means it provides, e.g. in the field of media and communication) and as a brake on this process by constantly raising unexpected (nuclear, biological, etc.) questions, which must be overcome with a reinjection of political and military elements, of historical decisions, in a world dedicated to the bland management of the economy.

(translated by Constantin von Hoffmeister)