Unmourned Funeral: Chapter 6

7,243 words

CHAPTER 6
THE FERN AND THE LATHE

The Technocratic Fallacy

Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

So, we have seen philosophy dethroned and cast out, or at least exiled to the universities to prepare for her final defenestration. In her place, science has reigned and, like any monarch, has an executive arm; technology. Technology was always present, of course, but after the 18th century it was like a comic-book hero – or villain – granted special powers by some freak accident, if that is not too harsh a description of the Industrial Revolution.

“Technology” comes from the Ancient Greek technē, a word with many nuances: to make, to do, to fashion, to craft. It is science’s handmaiden just as philosophy was once described as the handmaiden to theology. Technology is the provisional wing of science, a delivery system for its achievements. Heidegger will warn about technology being tried in its own court, but we will begin by viewing technology through the prism of art.

 

The figure of the modern sorcerer – a switchboard with levers and labels at which the workman calls mighty effects into play by the pressure of a finger without possessing the slightest notion of their essence.
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is a 1797 poem by Goethe. As this was less than a decade after the French Revolution, it is tempting to search in Der Zauberlehrling for symbolic political commentary. There is, but the hapless student of magic who uses his master’s spells with disastrous results may foreshadow a more dangerous overturning of established order than the Jacobins and the guillotine provided.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice – both in the telling of Goethe and its charming visualisation by Walt Disney in 1940 – is a tale of Faustian excessive pride, the master’s work misused by the pupil, the hubris which is now coming to haunt not technology but those who use and are enslaved by it.

The plot is simple, as the magician’s pupil waits until the master is sleeping before trying out his spells for himself. He has been attentive, a good student, but lacks his teacher’s knowledge of when to use the dark arts and when not to:

“I have watched with rigour
All he used to do,
And will now with vigour
Work my wonders too.”

Like Goethe’s more famous practitioner of magic, Faust, the apprentice uses the master’s arts for frivolous reasons. Whereas Faust asks Mephistopheles to provide him with fruits out of season (something any supermarket does now without the need for an infernal pact), to allow him to set eyes on Helen of Troy, and the power of invisibility, enabling him to play pranks, the magician’s pupil runs a bath with supernatural help. Incipit technology.

The problem is that the broom animated by the apprentice – as portrayed cinematically by Mickey Mouse, resplendent in his master’s wizard hat and outsize robe – simply continues to fetch water until the bath is overflowing. Not only that; the apprentice has forgotten the command to make this magical mischief stop:

“Ah, I see it! Woe, oh woe!
I forget the word of might.
Ah, the word whose sound can straight
Make him what he was before!
Ah, he runs with nimble gait!
Would thou were a broom once more!”

Like many a conjurer (Aleister Crowley understood this), the apprentice has forgotten that just as spirits may be summoned by words of power, so too they must be put down by others. And it is better you remember them.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is beginning to look as though it were anticipating the story of technology. And just as technology may be, today, in danger of running away like a “galloping” diesel engine, unstoppable and potentially ruinously dangerous, so too the pupil is discovering that one really must be careful what one wishes for, as he implores the broom:

“Will enough
Never please thee?”

We might ask the same of today’s data-harvesting tech companies. In desperation, the pupil takes his hatchet and splits the broom in two, only to watch in horror as two brooms form and double the workload, a scene wonderfully imagined by Disney as hundreds of brooms bearing sloshing pails of water march up the hill from the river to Mickey’s abode, Goethe’s “servants of my dreaded foe”.

But who is this foe of whom the apprentice speaks in terror? Not his master, who eventually arrives, like Prospero, to make all things well. Rather an artificially created and maintained domination over the world and its resources which appears at first to be a source of good before the apparent master realises he has called up what he cannot put down.

What a boon technology was, right up until it wasn’t. There is, creeping like morning sunlight across an empty room, a gradual dawning that technology may be what the French call un faux frère, a false brother. Perhaps Faust would have been better off sticking with philosophy, as he discovered that, if you over-reach the bounds God has set you, and if you fail to take a long spoon to dine with another, then on the other side of the bright line, that someone is waiting.

 

Please allow me to introduce myself.
The Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil

Machinery has been associated with the infernal. We recall Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” from the poem Milton (there is not, contrary to popular opinion, a poem called Jerusalem by Blake, but the lyrics for England’s unofficial national anthem is taken from the longer work). Zola’s extraordinary descriptions of railway engines (which he researched at length) in La Bête Humaine are devilish constructions, and consider the industrial hellscape into which Nell and her father descend in The Old Curiosity Shop:

“On mounds of ashes by the wayside, sheltered only by a few rough boards, or rotten pent-house roofs, strange engines spun and writhed like tortured creatures; clanking their iron chains, shrieking in their rapid whirl from time to time as though in torment unendurable, and making the ground tremble with their agonies.”

Machinery, mechanics, engines. All these things can be evil, disruptive and frightening, mischievous and destructive, as well as the more obvious advantages they apparently offer. Tolkien’s goblins in The Lord of the Rings worship engines as well as explosions. There is reason enough for mankind to be wary of machines as a controlling metaphor for their societies.

But mechanical devices were not born full grown during England’s Industrial Revolution. There was a somewhat sinister and Faustian connection between mechanics and the occult 150 years earlier in western Germany.

 

The appointed hour was approaching when man in his turn was to go forth into the light of day; and Prometheus, not knowing how he could devise his salvation, stole the mechanical arts of Hephaestus and Athene, and fire with them (they could neither have been acquired or used without fire), and gave them to man.
Plato, Protagoras

Frederick V was the Elector Palatine who became the King of Bohemia, and in The Politics of the Occult: The Left, the Right, and the Radically Unseen, Gary Lachman describes Frederick’s castle at Heidelberg, the German town in which, a century later, Immanuel Kant would be born:

“His castle at Heidelberg, renovated by the architect and hydraulics expert Simon de Caus, was decorated in an occult fashion and included several mechanical marvels, such as water organs and singing fountains – reminiscent of the ‘artificial songs’ found in Christian Rosenkreutz’s tomb – set in fantastic grottoes. Arranged in allegorical and mythological designs, the gardens were based on the ideas of the classical architect Vitruvius, rediscovery of whose work formed part of the Renaissance. Combining music, mathematics, and science, they were spoken of as ‘the eighth wonder of the world.’”

Mechanical devices are ideal entertainment because they are neutral and cannot actuate themselves at the pre-robotic phase. They can be made or programmed to perform specific and unswerving tasks. Their parts are replaceable and precise. If a machine ceases to function or does not function as it should, this state of affairs is apparent to the operative immediately, and the engineer is called to repair, replace and restore. It is unsurprising that the machine as a model of society is the dream and objective of the Left, with their love of control. Through technology’s veils, we are beginning to glimpse the technocratic fallacy.

 

I want to be a machine.
John Foxx

There is a historical narrative which shows the almost erotic yearning of the Left for mankind to be a machine. This is not simply human cybernetics or the latest AI theory, although these two branches grow from the same tree. This genealogy links Descartes’ descendant Offray La Mettrie’s L’Homme Machine with Mary Shelley’s (née Godwin, her father being the famous proto-Socialist William Godwin) Frankenstein with the work of B. F. Skinner and Lysenko. If man is a machine, then man can be engineered, maintained, altered and, above all, repaired. Stalin – which means “man of steel” in Russian – and Lenin knew all too well the power of this metaphor.

Michael O’Meara situates the entrance of technology and the mechanical as part of the tragedy of the vanishing of religion and its sureties. In New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Post-Modern Europe, he writes that:

“The old Aristotelean-Catholic understanding of the natural world and the sceptical nuanced one of Renaissance humanism were both forced to give way to a rationalist one in which a clock-like nature was to be measured, analyzed and rendered into the language of mathematics… it was as if a veil had lifted, revealing the actual mechanical workings of the world. Fontenelle recounts that the angels formerly inhabiting the heavens were suddenly seen as actors ‘flying’ around a stage with the aid of invisible wires. Science, in effect, allowed Europeans to go backstage and see for themselves how the wires were pulled – to see, in a word, how the natural forces operated irrespective of providential ordinance.”

The idea is far more frightening than any of the currently modish AI scenarios. Once the Left, particularly the virulent and toxic new strain, have both the idea that man can be perfected using applied technique, monitored via surveillance – essential to all engineering – and produced and maintained on the mechanical model rather than that of the organic, and given the ability to institute this, they will do so. If the Left gain control of even more of the West than they already dominate, you will cease to be a human being and will become instead a piece of potentially faulty engineering merely awaiting its repair-man should it malfunction. This is not a new concept or strategy, however, and we would do well to return to Renaissance Florence for our master metaphor.

 

Machiavelli was the earliest writer who consistently applied the inductive or experimental method to political science.
Laurence Burd, Machiavelli

Nietzsche’s acquaintance Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, in summarising Dante Alighieri’s writings on the political state of Florence, has the following to say about the Florentine mania for political centralisation:

“The great modern fallacy that a constitution can be made, can be manufactured by a combination of existing forces and tendencies, was constantly cropping up in stormy times; even Machiavelli is not wholly free from it. Constitutional artists were never wanting who by an ingenious distribution and division of political power, by indirect elections of the most complicated kind, by the establishment of nominal offices, sought to found a lasting order of things, and to satisfy or deceive the rich and poor alike.”

Burckhardt, and Dante Alighieri himself, are addressing the flaws of a Florence of warring Guelphs (Dante’s own party) and Ghibellines, but he might for all the world be speaking to us of our own blighted age, the “stormy times” we are currently negotiating in a sea-tossed bark.

If we read Burkhardt’s paragraph again and unpack it, we will find all the requirements of the Left today to tamper with your life, all present and correct in 15th-century Florence and the yearning of its various despots for a state which could be operated like a device, a marvellous piece of clockwork. To review the elements Burkhardt presents is to regard a periodic table of doom, and were those elements to fall into the wrong hands, that is, the hands of the modern malevolent Left (into whose hands those elements have already fallen), then the machinery of oppression will be up and running.

A “made” constitution, formed from a “combination of existing forces and tendencies.” Look at the speed at which faddish and light confections, such as the myth of transgenderism, become enshrined in protective legislation, if it is “existing forces and tendencies” you seek. And here, in the lynch-pin sentence “constitutional artists were never wanting who by an ingenious distribution and division of political power, by indirect elections of the most complicated kind, by the establishment of nominal offices…”

These civic engineers, who do not mean you well, are all around us, swarming, buzzing, interfering with your life with no necessary mandate from you required. This is becoming a dangerous, Byzantine time to be alive if you are at all attracted to freedom of thought and its free expression. Mechanical devices are not, cannot be, free. That is the point of them.

So, then. See the Leftist. She would be Our Lady of the Engines. She would set and reset, calibrate, adjust, monitor your progress. And she would provide diagnostics in the event of you malfunctioning, in the event of you being a bad machine, a faulty piece of engineering. The work of the engineer is not limited to creation but encompasses also maintenance. You must be, and can be, made to work properly. Your future is not as a free human being, your future is to be part of a pleasing statistic, or a displeasing one. You will not have a life as you now understand it, merely a service record. All is the same to the dispassionate engineer.

Let us leave Renaissance Florence, and its macabre foreshadowing of our own doomed epoch, although we cannot depart without at least paying our respects to that most mysterious of Renaissance men, Niccolò Machiavelli:

“His [Machiavelli’s] most complete programme for the construction of a new political system at Florence is set forth in the memorial to Leo X, composed after the death of the younger Lorenzo Medici, Duke of Urbino (d. 1519), to whom he had dedicated his Prince. The state was by that time in extremities and utterly corrupt, and the remedies proposed are not always morally justifiable; but it is most interesting to see how he hopes to set up a republic in the form of a moderate democracy, as heiress to the Medici. A more ingenious scheme of concessions to the Pope, to the Pope’s various adherents, and to the different Florentine interests, cannot be imagined; we might fancy ourselves looking into the works of a clock.”

We will jump forward 400 years, to a literary work in which we find not a description of the mechanical present, but its possible future, should those mechanics ever fail.

 

Welcome, my son.
Welcome to the machine.

Pink Floyd, Welcome to the Machine

E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops was written in 1909 – five years before what could be called the first mechanical war – and its sub-title is A Fantastic Story of Science Fiction. This generic literary term was not Forster’s invention, but was scarcely used before this novella.

The two main characters, and more or less the only characters, are Vashti and Kuno, a mother and son. The population of earth now all live in exactly the same way, inhabiting small, hexagonal, underground pods – Forster likens them to the cells in a bee-hive – in which everything is controlled by the central animating principle, known as the Machine. And that’s it, until, as the title might suggest, the Machine stops.

The Machine is real, it exists in the material world. Towards the end, when malfunction threatens global disaster, it is said to be “dying in France.” But it is also metaphorical. The two characters – and by extension everyone else on the planet – are linked by a belief in the sanctity of mechanics. “You are beginning to worship the Machine”, says Kuno to his mother. Later, he gives his own reasons for a reluctance to risk his life by walking along a railway line:

“It is not the proper thing, it is not mechanical, it is not decent to walk along a railway tunnel. I did not fear that I might tread upon a live rail and be killed. I feared something far more intangible – doing what was not contemplated by the Machine.”

Later, Kuno will talk about incorrect speech consisting of giving things “unmechanical names”. So, the Machine has two roles. Firstly, it is the supplier of all human needs, which do not now include going above ground unless absolutely necessary, personal contact, or physical strength (babies who show the first signs of potential physical prowess later in life “were destroyed”). Everything that a person living in a pod might need for comfortable survival is automatically supplied and regulated, and Vashti explains the change in the supply chain that came with the Machine via her own historical pursuits:

“And of course she had studied the civilization that immediately preceded her own – the civilization that had mistaken the functions of the systems and had used it for bringing people to things, instead of bringing things to people.”

This reversal of the consumer cycle here in the West started with florists and pizza parlours decades ago, but is now dominated by companies such as Amazon and Uber. Forster’s novel contains no consumer transactions in the way we might still understand them. There is no money and no direct commercial or personal contact. This is one of the reasons – and there are more – that the novel begins to feel eerily familiar.

 

Don’t let me stay, don’t let me stay.
My logic says burn, so send me away.
Your minds are too green, I despise all I’ve seen.
You can’t stake your lives on a saviour machine.
David Bowie, Saviour Machine

The Machine produces mechanical responses. People in the novel have almost no personal contact at all, and are ‘seized with the terrors of direct experience’. Life moves with a virtual slickness. There is not even the attraction of travel because the world has been reduced to one existential plane. “What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury?” Places that used to differ along cultural lines now resemble uniform machine parts.

Forster predicts the Internet to a nicety. People communicate by a sort of global Zoom call, and work is lecturing and conversing rather than being physical. The Machine obviates the need for labour. The world has become ascetic and produces nothing but ideas:

“I was surrounded by artificial light, artificial space, artificial peace, and my friends were calling to me through speaking-tubes to know whether I had come across any new ideas lately.”

The production of ideas has replaced the current obsession with the body. Throughout the hive of cells, in each one, “there sat a human being, eating, sleeping, or producing ideas.” But there is a sterility to Vashti’s thought, lecturer though she is (and concerning which her son reprimands her) and one line of hers shows a psychological sub-text to the book. Vashti is reluctantly travelling to see her son Kuno, and can see mountains from the window of one of the air-ships that ferry the few passengers who still require travel. She is perturbed:

“Cover the window please. These mountains give me no ideas.”

Ideas are central to life as tended by the Machine, but only a certain type of idea, one which has been neutered by transmission:

“Beware of first-hand ideas… [which] do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear… Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element – direct observation.”

This is the mechanics of ideology. You must disavow empiricism and trust the Machine of the State to curate and prepare your experience of the world.

The Internet and social media are also prefigured. Contact is made via a screen, and as Vashti “knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.” A social credit system is in place, with homelessness being the dreaded penalty for dissent. Kuno fears homelessness for his outspokenness, but “could not tell you such a thing through the Machine”, hence the need for a personal meeting between mother and son. To continue the Pink Floyd quote earlier, and which itself prefigures our current machine-based surveillance state:

“Where have you been?
It’s alright, we know where you’ve been.”

As for the Cassandras predicting the malevolent rise of AI, they must heed the warning of one of Forster’s characters:

“The Machine develops – but not on our lines. The Machine proceeds – but not to our goal.”

And the Machine develops not just in its mechanical quiddity, its cogs and levers and pistons, but as a metaphor, a displaced philosophy which haunts and dominates our age.

 

The philosophy of cranes, presses and pumps, is as perfect and clear as a compass-drawn circle. Is your philosophy less compass-drawn?
Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

It is an insight of Jacques Derrida’s that metaphor is or can be more than mere textual ornamentation, but can have an epistemological influence on thinking and the outcomes of that thinking. Once the mechanical metaphor becomes dominant, it becomes an ur-metaphor, the capo di tutti capi of tropes, commanding and dictating what it is possible to think. Mark Steyn gives an example of this in After America:

“[W]e assume that social progress is like technological progress: one cannot uninvent the internal combustion engine, so how could one uninvent liberty?”

So technocracy, the offspring of science and technology, is not all gleaming machinery which can be repaired, adapted, improved upon, creations which serve with silent efficiency. The entire social program to introduce anarcho-tyranny into the West has always been run along technocratic lines. You see it all around you and yet it is never fully visible. Like most engines, it produces its range of effects from a general invisibility to any but the engineer, and then only when in need of repair. Watch the social machine in action, see the gears interlock, cogs align, power convert to greater power. Watch the metaphorical machine, which has yet to stop.

Every time a once-prestigious American university relaxes or scraps its entrance requirements in order to admit more non-whites, every time a Muslim becomes mayor of a European or British town or city, every time a new hate speech law is passed, every time a statue is toppled, every time a Facebook page is banned for its conservative leanings, every time an old pop song or TV program or book is cancelled for “offensive” lyrics, every time a transgender lesson is taught in a classroom by a transvestite, every time someone is fired for their political opinion, every time a funeral is unattended due to pandemic rules, every time a police officer kneels in front of a black activist, every time someone fails a job interview because of a tweet in his past, every time a criminal is released early to reoffend, every time a church or a pub closes, every time an illegal immigrant is granted amnesty, you are watching – and you should be aware that you are watching – the cogs and wheels of the great reset in motion. ‘Reset’ is something you are supposed to do to machines, not people. For Bloom, the response to this machination is to attack science from the position of those who are affected most; ordinary people:

“Philosophy, despised and rejected by positive science, has its revenge when it is vulgarised into coarse public opinion and intimidates that science.”

Here is an imperative which has formed the plot of many science fiction tales and movies: resist the machines.

 

And here I must needs observe, that as reason is the substance and origin of the mathematics, so by stating and squaring everything by reason, and by making the most rational judgment of things, every man may be, in time, master of every mechanic art.
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

A flagship of the new, post-modern technocratic armada is ‘the Great Reset’. A reset is what happens to machinery, either mechanical or solid-state. It is the controlling metaphor of the globalist era for an inescapable and inevitable – because quasi-mechanical – fate. Whether it is real or political theatrics is not important. What is important is that it is not being hidden. Like the purloined letter in the Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name, the great reset is being hidden in plain sight. Napoleon and Sekyunovitch, the dissident writers behind the critique of the New World Order and its proponents, A Look Inside the Playbook, note the following:

“Back in mother USSR we used to play a game called ‘hide the thimble’. The interesting thing about that game involved the requirement that the player hide the thimble in plain sight for all to see.”

The World Economic Forum – hardly an immodest exercise in branding – have been absolutely explicit about their aims to remake and remodel the world. Director and founder Klaus Schwab seems a strange choice as a figurehead, dressing as he does occasionally like a Starfleet commander from low-rent 1970s sci-fi TV series Blakes 7. Perhaps a black woman, or a transgender activist might have pushed the case better. But the new world order doesn’t quite work like that. Dysfunction for thee, but not for me.

“The Great Reset” is an inevitable product of the machinery metaphor which obsesses the Left. The two great metaphors which sustain the genuine political Right and their now deadly opponents on the Left are those of the organic and the mechanical, what I call the fern and the lathe. To what extent does the Great Reset rely on control of technology?

As well as providing the master metaphor of the machine to the great reset, technology and its manipulation are also at the heart of the project. It is simply taken as given by the elites that technology is a good thing per se, surveillance, data mining and Hiroshima notwithstanding.

And so biometric IDs, social credit systems and surveillance will all be a part of the brave new world, not because they are good in and of themselves, but because they are the products of technology, and so must be beneficial. Technology, as noted, is not the same thing as science, but more like its provisional wing. Is technology what happens when philosophy is asleep?

 

Intoxicated by the success of industrial organisation, the founders of mass movements, and their admirers and imitators, sought to reduce political action to pure mechanics.
Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public

Nature has a horror vacui, and what has rushed in to replace theocracy in the Western belief system is technocracy, the machine as master metaphor, not the sun or the cross or the forest or a lamb, the lathe over the fern. And this where the elites sense their opportunity. If the next phase of mankind is not left to theological and metaphysical chance, then it can be directed, constructed, engineered and maintained by the new order of technocrats.

The immediate future will fetishise technology – and its shadow technocracy – in a way even technocrats have yet to understand. The ambient mood will be immersivity, in which individuals are incorporated into virtual worlds where they can interact socially. The body begins to become even more purely functional than it was before, only now among its roles is the equivalent of a lampstand or bookcase, has been exposed to gain of function, there to support something else in which it has no interest itself.

The training of a system to behave mechanically rather than organically simply does not suit every system. Locke’s assessment of metaphysics in the Notes on Education both allocates that name to one of the two parts of natural philosophy he finds there to be, and also to allow metaphysics the privilege of evading the technocratic. Metaphysics should, Locke continues, be treated:

“…not as a science that can be methodized into a system, and treated of upon principles of knowledge; but as an enlargement of our minds towards a truer and fuller comprehension of the intellectual world to which we are led both by reason and revelation.”

But metaphysics is no longer the marque; technology is. We must hope that metaphysics is still vital enough to warn against overdosing on technology and, by extension, technocracy. Spengler sounds a warning:

“The more historically men tried to think, the more they forgot that in this domain they ought not to think. In forcing the rigid scheme of a spatial and anti-temporal relation of cause and effect upon something alive, they disfigured the visible face of becoming with the construction lines of a physical nature picture, and habituated to their own late, megalopolitan and causally thinking milieu, they were unconscious of the fundamental absurdity of a science that sought to understand and organic becoming by methodically misunderstanding it as the machinery of the thing-become.”

What happens when technology becomes master? We will turn to perhaps its greatest critic, or at least one who lit the warning beacons.

 

[T]hey lose sight of heaven while they are employed in measuring the earth.
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Martin Heidegger asks, in the essays Modern Science, Metaphysics and Mathematics (MSMM) and The Question Concerning Technology (QCT) not simply “what is science?”, but rather “what has science become?” MSMM is an attempt to question the mathematical as a dominant calibration of experience.

Heidegger plots the rise of mathematics as a result of the “detachment from revelation” to a state in which knowledge is quantised, made measurable, composed of a network of calibrated relations and no longer in touch with the things themselves. Back to the things themselves! Heidegger’s tutor Edmund Husserl would cry. And Heidegger echoes the call:

“What remains questionable… is a closer determination of the relation of the mathematical in the sense of mathematics to the intuitive experience of the given things and to these things themselves.”

Heidegger’s historical analysis of mathematics includes Newton, Galileo and Descartes. And the mathematical is also mathēsis, deriving from the Greek for “to transmit knowledge”. Mathematics becomes the agent of what Heidegger, in QCT, will call the “enframing”, the theoretical environment within which questions are to be posed, even questions about that very enframing.

Technology as a project of mathēsis requires the philosophical course that has evolved from technē – the Greek word for production in general – to present-day technology, the practice of calibration and the ‘standing reserve’ of resources – including mankind – we will find in QCT.

As for the Cartesian cogito, the role of doubting as a central methodology is questioned, and the central role of mathematics leads Heidegger to talk of Descartes’ last published work, the Regulae ad directionem ingenii, essentially the rules of mathematics. “In it”, says Heidegger, “the modern concept of science is coined.” Can we therefore explain the essence of science? Not yet:

“With these three characteristics of modern science, that it is a factual, experimental, measuring science, we still miss the characteristic of modern science. The fundamental feature must consist in what rules and determines the basic movement of science itself. This characteristic is the manner of working with the things and the metaphysical projection of the thingness of the things. How are we to conceive this fundamental feature?”

The answer is technology.

 

The problem of science cannot be recognised in the context of science…
Friedrich Nietzsche, An Attempt at Self-Criticism

Heidegger opens QCT by claiming that the question of the essence of technology is not itself technological. Already we have grounds for both a genealogy and cartography of the history of technology.

These would show, Heidegger implies, that we are heirs to a technology incremental in advance which, when that advance is tracked backwards, leads to an over-arching technē:

“Everything depends on our manipulating technology in the proper manner as a means.”

As “the will to mastery” lies behind man’s current position with regard to technology, Heidegger seems to be heading for a moral decision, an arbitration over the best way for mankind to re-think the technological.

In QCT, Heidegger invokes Aristotle’s four categories of cause: silver – for example – being the causa materia for the making of a chalice, the causa efficiens being the efficient cause, in this case the silversmith, the causa forma being the shape and structure into which the chalice should be moulded, and the final or teleological cause being the ultimate purpose of the final object, a sacrificial rite, say.

But Heidegger uses Aristotle’s categories in a new way. Rather than showing that cause can be broken down into constituent and self-serving parts, rather causality, viewed in its four aspects, is that which reverences the interdependency of the four Aristotelean causes.

This is part of a thematic in Heidegger’s two essays, that of the danger of the dominance of technology not in and of itself but as it stands.

 

Technology has become a force of nature. We can’t control it. It comes blowing over the planet and there’s nowhere for us to hide.
Don DeLillo, Zero K

Technology, then, is shown via the four categories of Aristotle to be a type of revealing, but not of a kind which unites the creator of technology with the environment – the world, or at least Dasein. Heidegger is suggesting, not that there is good and bad science within its own structural framework, but there are applications of science expressed through technology which are being misapplied to the detriment of humanity. We have arrived at an inevitable question concerning science and technology: where did it go wrong?

We might contend that, for Heidegger, technology lost its way somewhere between the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution. At this point in history, and at this point in QCT, we expect the ground-plans for a de-technologised society. The quantising we saw in MSMM has now become equipment, standing reserve, a network of references which seem little concerned with the soil and more concerned with the practice of technology as its own end. Everything, including humans, Dasein, has become the zuhanden of Being and Time, standing ready-at-hand if required.

There is something else, however, beyond the charge that Heidegger wishes for a world in which production is held at the level of non-mechanised Dasein, an idyllic world of hand-carved sickles and seed-tills and windmills. This in itself alerts us to the modern world’s confused obsession with the earth itself seen in the “Green” movement. But there is something other than this concern contained within Heidegger’s apparent bucolic turn.

If technology really did take a wrong turn between the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, then it did so at a time when thought was changing from a partly Hermetic, partly neo-classical process to a “regulated and secure” set of practices, as Heidegger calls it. That which lives on reason, wrote the great Hermetic thinker Paracelsus, lives against the spirit. What is it about science and its offspring technology that is seductive and dangerous, the province of Faust? Possibly we are approaching what Heidegger would describe as a clearing in our thinking.

 

Look out honey ‘cos I’m using technology.
Ain’t got time to make no apology.
Iggy Pop and the Stooges, Search and Destroy

Technology, writes Heidegger in his own specialist terminology, is “a mode of revealing”. Technology “comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealedness take place”, where aletheia, truth happens. He continues:

“In opposition to this definition of the essential domain of technology, one can indeed say that it holds for Greek thought and that at best it might apply to the techniques of the handicraftsman, but that it simply does not fit modern high-powered technology.”

The earth as coalmine is now the subject of an elegy as “the work of the peasant does not challenge the soil of the field.”

The exposure of mathēsis as an over-arching dominator of science (an archon), and by extension technology, has led Heidegger to a reappraisal of how technology should be used. And, just so, we now legitimately marvel at the technology required to make a smartphone while at the same time questioning the need for new models and systems. So, is Heidegger an existential Luddite? He calls what is happening to technology ‘monstrous’, as it fails to make sacred – religious terminology can never be far from Heidegger’s writing – the soil and the earth. It would take a wholly different, political reading to examine the relation between the soil the peasant leaves unchallenged, and the soil of Heidegger’s other speech, in which it is linked with blood and a darker destiny.

 

Technology and comfort – having those, people speak of culture, but do not have it.
Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus

Technology, for Heidegger, has also turned man into a “standing reserve”, a few places up from a cog or a lever, but this is merely a question of degree and not of essence. Technology has also, of course, enabled the population of the planet to soar as it has since the Industrial Revolution. This would certainly require more space, or at least the adaptation of the space available. Heidegger’s language is rich in spatial metaphor: widening out, enframing, unconcealment. Heidegger’s one-time boss, Adolf Hitler, also had dreams of space, of widening out, of lebensraum.

This is not the place to discuss Heidegger’s political career. His rejection of the Nazi Party was for reasons precisely to do with his ominous warnings concerning technology and the technological mindset – what we now know as technocracy. One Heidegger biographer, Rudiger Safranski, in Between Good and Evil, encapsulates Heidegger’s apostasy in philosophical terms:

“[Heidegger’s] focus shifted until he regarded National Socialism no longer as a breakout from the modern age, but as its especially consistent expression. He discovered that National Socialism was itself the problem whose solution he had once thought it was. He saw the furore of the new age rampant in National Socialism: technological frenzy, government and organization – in other words, inauthenticity as total mobilization.”

In the end, authenticity was everything for Heidegger. This is not to say we must judge history and its moral chiaroscuro using a Heideggerian litmus test which deems Hitler just not authentic enough for Heidegger. Rather we see that, revealed (there is always revelation in Heidegger) via technology and the turn it has taken, history is judging us, and rigorously testing us. Technology is becoming history’s wrong turn. Heidegger shows that it is not technology in and of itself which threatens, it is the technological frame, the enframing, within which technocrats think and operate. And, as we shall see, part of that enframing involves casting the thinking man as a machine, in need of maintenance and observation. Above all, social engineering needs its engineer.

 

[Wyndham Lewis] fought at the Battle of Passchendaele. Lewis regarded the First World War as a revolution in the soul of man. He didn’t think it was a war. He thought it was a climactic moment whereby machine technology invasively entered the human space.
Jonathan Bowden, Elitism, British Modernism and Wyndham Lewis

Guillaume Faye warns of the over-optimistic social engineer in The Convergence of Catastrophes:

“Today’s little Jules Vernes are mistaken. Optimistic and short-sighted mechanics, they are only making the situation worse. More than that, they are not in control of the machine and have no idea where it is heading.”

The sorcerer’s apprentice faced the same dilemma, as did Faust, and the characters in The Machine Stops, the fact that they did not create the Machine notwithstanding. Faye reminds us of the parable of the Golem, according to which a man-made figure attains life – this myth will also fund Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – and its maker loses control of the violent monster. And so:

“Humanity has lost control of the forward rush of the technological and globalised civilisation born in the nineteenth century.”

But if technology has escaped the stable, philosophy should be aware that it was she who unbolted the door and handed over the reins.

 

[Goethe] hated mathematics. For him, the world-as-mechanism stood opposed to the world-as-organism, dead nature to living nature, law to form.
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West

Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West has many subtexts, many tributaries to swell the river, and one of them is mechanics. But the mechanical is reliant on a cause, and Spengler outlines the relationship between the fern and the lathe:

“It must not be forgotten that the mechanical necessity that rules in what our intellects comprehend as Nature is founded upon another necessity which is organic and fateful in Life itself. The latter creates, the former restricts.”

A properly symbiotic relationship exists between philosophy and natural science, and Spengler grounds the latter in the technical in such a way that it can do nothing but serve and function as a technological extension of philosophy:

“[A]ssuredly it [natural science] must have been from its beginnings, not a ‘handmaid of theology’, but the servant of the technical Will-to-Power, oriented to that end both mathematically and experimentally – from its very foundation a practical mechanics. And as it is firstly technique and only secondly theory, it must be as old as Faustian man himself.”

The dynamic is of the machine pushing against and away from the quietude of philosophical contemplation until the tension is too much to contain the unity of technology, technique, and philosophy:

“Pure contemplative philosophy could have dispensed with experiment forever, but not so the Faustian symbol of the machine, which urged us to mechanical constructions even in the twelfth century.”

Spengler finds in Goethe’s Faust a psychological premonition of “the whole future of West Europe. He is Civilization in the place of Culture, external mechanism in place of internal organism, intellect as the petrifact of extinct soul.”

The lathe owes its existence to the fern, structure, purpose, system. But the lathe is purpose-directed, controlled, machine-tooled. Looked at the from the perspective of the technological (and technocratic) classes, there is no point to the fern. The forest believes otherwise but, as we saw in Heidegger’s “standing reserve” argument, the forest has now become a potential lumberyard.

Spengler notes the relations between the organic and the mechanical, the fern and the lathe, and finds a fault-line apparent:

“…the fundamental absurdity of a science that sought to understand an organic becoming by methodically misunderstanding it as the machinery of the thing-become.”

And so Spengler stakes his claim to a primordial division:

“With all rigour I distinguish… the organic from the mechanical world-impression, the content of images from that of laws, the picture and symbol from the formula and the system, the instantly actual from the constantly possible…”

Spengler’s masterpiece is titled The Decline of the West. From where did it decline? We must visit philosophy’s traditional birthplace, Athens, and a man whose friend was put to death by the machinery of state: Plato.