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.).