The Temptation of Technophobia

by Guillaume Faye

Guillaume Faye contends that Europeans need to embrace technology as an integral part of their heritage, arguing that a pro-technology stance is essential to overcoming outdated fears and reclaiming a dynamic role that harmonises technological advancements with a revitalised European identity rooted in its pagan past.

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.

Technology is not only associated with the sin of ‘pride’ (the motif of the Tower of Babel), but it was also seen in the 20th century, objectively speaking, as dangerous. Despite the atomic bomb, which is unlikely to annihilate humanity in reality, modern technology has by no means turned humans into all-destroyers. Humanity has always perceived itself as an animal destructor, as documented by the tragedies of Aeschylus.

The fear of technological risk is a sign of the ageing European mindset, which must be countered. It is entirely normal to recognise, define, and mitigate technological risks; however, it seems pathological to condemn modern technology and its inherent risks unreservedly, as, for example, the anti-nuclear movements do. Moreover, risk is not inherent to technology; since technology, as a reflection of human activity, essentially belongs to life (to the biosphere), it reflects its fundamental characteristic, which also characterises everything that exists in the cosmos: the aleatory. The sun can explode or go out before the calculated time, the Earth’s crust can open under our cities in areas of little seismic activity, or meteors can bombard our regions without vaporising in the upper atmosphere, as is usually the case. To claim that modern technology is murderous is also a gross falsehood. On the contrary, it enabled a problematic increase in the human race today. Industrial disasters are extremely rare and claim fewer lives compared to the classic famines in agricultural societies. The greatest industrial disaster of the present, which claimed two to three thousand victims in central India, was caused by a fertiliser factory that, let us not forget, had helped save hundreds of thousands of lives from malnutrition. Regarding military technology, it is relatively less devastating than traditional wars (Rome lost 80,000 of its 200,000 adult males in the Battle of Cannae) and kills, statistically, far fewer than generally assumed.

Behind the mythology of ‘technology-as-terror’ (the ‘electro-fascism’ of nuclear power plants), behind the ideology of anti-technology, lies not only a rural, bucolic nostalgia but also one of the cornerstones of biblical thought: through highly developed technology, European man offends God; by ‘violating nature’, he appropriates something that does not belong to him.

Like Adam, he bites into the apple from the tree of knowledge and power. Adam was indeed condemned to work; however, it was not foreseen that this work, which was supposed to be a punishment, would lead to an appropriation of the world, the opposite of a punishment. This rejection of technology (a challenge of the Greek-origin rationality to divine reason) was thoroughly formulated by Max Horkheimer, one of the main theorists of the Frankfurt School and sharpest critics of the worldview founded on the will to power.

European techno-science must not be paralysed by the biblical denunciation of ‘demonic opposition to the work of the Creator’; nor should we fall into the other extreme, which would correspond to an inverted biblicism: to conceive and desire technology as absolute world domination and subjugation, according to the classical Luciferian fantasy. Since we represent a pagan worldview, nature appears to us as ‘our’ domain; the most advanced process becomes natural, and the concept of ‘artifice’ fades.

To believe that technology ‘dominates’ nature and that this is its true purpose is still to hold a naive and rationalistic view of technology, namely that of Bacon or Descartes. With technology, humans do not dominate nature. Humans invent technology because nature still has them in its power, and they want to weaken the effects of this dominion. The animal, on the other hand, is not dominated by nature: on the contrary, it dominates nature, more precisely, its particular ecosystem, the ‘section of nature’ where it is completely at home. The non-specialised human, who is thrown into nature and exposed to its domination, deals with nature through technology. In this process, we must not see a demonic, life-denying enterprise. The technological path is a vital path of the highest degree — of the same value and function as magic, which we can interpret as the first attempt of our species to rationalise and influence the world.

The notion that modern technology is cut off and alienated from nature, or that it views nature merely as an object of change and destruction, while traditional techniques were ‘in tune’ with nature, seems historically false, however appealing it may be. Probably, the opposite is true. For example, farmers had little reverence for this ‘nature’, of which the pre-modern human probably had no clear concept. The blind and radical changes that traditional agriculture subjected the environment to testify to this. That these changes have less impact than those of modern technology, which indeed appropriates nature on a global scale, is merely a matter of quantity, of technological scope. The traditional, pre-industrial human was much more likely to see himself as a subject and master in opposition to an object-nature.

The modern human, living in an urban-industrial world, paradoxically believes himself to be closer to ‘nature’, whose concept he has completely lost and over which he becomes ecstatic; he feels a certain guilt for objectifying, dominating, and separating himself from nature. Although his technical means are more potent (and for this reason), the modern human regrets this power and believes it will turn against him (Spengler’s standpoint); he longs for those times when the modest traditional techniques — in his view — left people in ‘harmony’ with Mother Nature.

If we want to return to this harmony and this balance (set between humans and the cosmos by Greek techné), as Heidegger demands, we must abandon the instrumentalist view of ‘technology-as-tool’ (which shapes the biblical and Western worldview) and return to technology an ontological status: we must become aware of the metamorphic nature of current techno-science, of the essential challenge it presents to us. If we want to stay in ‘harmony’ with nature, we must no longer view it in a fixist way. The essence of harmony itself, its purpose, must change, just as technology and its implications have changed. Once, harmony with nature presupposed a harmony with what was understood as ‘nature' at the time. It is precisely technology that forces us today to change our concept of nature, now extended to mass-energy, cosmic space, and general relativity. In European mentalities, the dialectical overcoming of progressivism, economism, and the Western view of technology must therefore become a concept. This overcoming should help to rediscover, on a different level, the harmony that ancient and traditional societies enjoyed in relation to ‘their’ technology. In this sense, this qualitative ‘leap’ of historical essence, which the European peoples have had to make several times, is a transformation.

Thus, we will not be inclined to a regression before technology, not to a linear return to a pre-technological era, not to an expulsion of the industrial world, which, whether we like it or not, belongs to our values, but to an overcoming from above of the current technomorphic world. We are called to become ‘post-progressists’, even ‘post-moderns’ (despite all the devaluations that the latter term has suffered from misuse).

The most difficult argument to refute in the clash of modern technology with the identity of peoples concerns the planetary nature of lifestyles and production methods that the former leads to.

A crucial point that undermines both liberal and Marxist analyses of the techno-economic essence of the base of civilisations (which are of an ideological nature): the planetary character of modern technology, like the planetary character of this civilisation, is not derived from technology, which, according to some, especially the liberals, is inherently universalist; rather, it stems from a movement, an impulse to dominate the Earth, which gripped Europe in the late Middle Ages. Incidentally, Portugal was the first country to be seized by this ‘planetary’ impulse. It should be noted, in passing, that Christian universalism and its missionary spirit, although they paired excellently with this planetaryism, do not merge with it, as it goes back to a European psychic foundation that is distinct from Christianity.

This movement, therefore, turns against us today. An additional reason for us to reclaim technology so that the contradiction ceases: being deculturalised by a phenomenon that originated from our own culture and over which we no longer have control. We are not called to realise a different technology but finally to grasp technology in its revealed essence.

Precisely because it so accurately and intensively expresses what the European human is, this technology has, as if blinded by a strong image of itself, destroyed and deranged him; and again, other peoples, such as the Japanese, who distanced themselves more from it, could keep it at bay and thus preserve their culture. Why did technology in our case turn out to be culture-destroying? Because we were unable to distinguish or mark a separation between technology and its world and our other culture. Why? Because modern technology originated from our culture, because it was the true expression of our psyche.

Moreover, it was so much so that it emerged against Christianity and the will of the Church, as the history of anti-scientific censorship documents. In this respect, modern technology is perhaps the expression of our pagan unconscious: just as a too intense breath of pure oxygen can strike down someone poisoned by foul air, so the Europeans (who had to come to terms with a foreign mentality, Judeo-Christianity, with cultural amalgamations for a long time) may not have been up to the sudden outburst of modern technology, the purified expression of paganism in the 20th century.

(translated by Constantin von Hoffmeister)