Technology and Responsibility (Part 4 of 4)
Romano Guardini on the challenges and opportunities of our strange age.
In the last two essays, we saw Romano Guardini’s analysis of two aspects of technology that render the very concept of moral responsibility problematic. For Guardini, this is a problem with no easy answer. Despite his forceful critique of the System of technological production (which has now reached a level of political-industrial-social integration that merits the capitalized word), he is not “anti-system;” on the contrary, he believes the System has an immense potential for good. It was originally constructed to provide for genuine human needs — albeit merely material ones — and has achieved remarkable success in this endeavor. Even if it often appears as an agent of mindless destruction, it still provides a myriad of real services that we all depend on. The amorality of the System is a challenge to be met head-on — a challenge capable of calling forth the greatest manifestations of human excellence and heroism that history has ever witnessed.
Guardini describes the core of this challenge in terms of truth.1 The mediation of machinery and abstractions easily obscures the truth about the consequences of one’s actions, and the way of being of the “mass man” discourages active thinking about the ends to which they should be directed. This results in the sad spectacle of countless good people dedicating their best energies to pointless and destructive projects with a totally clear conscience. To overcome this tendency, a particular kind of human excellence is required, one capable of arriving at the truth in spite of every obstacle. Guardini distinguishes three interrelated virtues that make this possible.
First of all, the passion for truth itself:
The fundamental virtue [for the authentic development of culture in the coming age] will be above all a passion for the truth. […] A drive to know what is really at stake, cutting through all the rhetoric of progress and development, ready to take on the responsibility that the new situation imposes.2
In the new System, ordinary honesty is no longer sufficient. Living in the truth requires a special effort to seek it out, aware of the bewildering frequency with which “shams and delusions” are “esteemed for soundest truths.”3 At the same time, it means accepting responsibility for the implications of the truth. It is much easier to simply condemn the universal mendacity of the System, “othering” it with terms like “Military-Industrial Complex” or “Globalist American Empire.”4 The virtue Guardini is calling for goes much deeper. It requires maintaining one’s identity as a member of the System while acknowledging the unvarnished truth about its pathologies. This is the virtue that makes one capable of saying: “I am the System. I have sinned. The injustice is mine. From now on, I will seek what is good, no matter the cost. I accept the full cost in advance, as an act of atonement.”
And the cost will not be slow in coming. To bear it, another virtue is required:
The second virtue will be courage. An unsentimental, spiritual, personal courage, which opposes the menacing chaos. It must be purer and stronger than courage against atom bombs and anthrax, because it has to confront the universal enemy: the chaos rising from technical progress itself. And like all truly great courage, it must face the opposition of the many, of public opinion, of falsehood condensed into slogans and procedures.5
The opposition of the many presents an especially terrifying obstacle to the “mass man.” The radical may enjoy this opposition and thrive on it, but the man Guardini has in mind is a loyal member of society. The last thing he wants to do is stand out, but he is forced to do so by his very love for society — and for the System that is hurtling towards self-destruction. For this, he is looked upon with scorn, treated like a lunatic, condemned as a traitor or a conspiracy theorist. To maintain one’s composure in this situation — to remain amiable, reasonable, even joyful — demands the virtue of courage in a heroic degree.
But courage alone is not sufficient to guarantee the full range of action necessary for taming and directing the System. Sooner or later, one runs afoul of the intricate mechanism of physical and psychological violence that provides the backstop for its stability. To face this situation,
…a third virtue must be added: freedom. Interior freedom, immune to the threat of violence in all its forms, and to the powers of suggestion in propaganda, press, radio and cinema. Freedom from the desire for power, from its intoxication and its demons, which remain at work even in spiritual realms. Such freedom can be attained only through real education, external and internal. And through ascesis.6
Without this radical interior freedom, every man has his price. At a certain point, even the most calm, rational calculation results in the conclusion that commitment to justice and truth is no longer worth the sacrifice. When governmental and industrial structures command practically infinite resources, they can easily tilt the scales whenever a sufficiently grave threat arises against the status quo. To bring about real change from the inside, one needs to arrive at the point of prioritizing genuine love and service, “living in the truth,” above everything else. The capacity to accept poverty, obscurity, exile and death produces a quasi-divine freedom, which nothing in the world can restrain.
To live these three virtues in the heroic degree proposed by Guardini is a superhuman task. Seen through the lens of political science, anthropology, sociology or psychology, the proposal is absurd. But it has happened before, and can happen again. Everything Guardini describes is perfectly exemplified in the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. Loyal to the “system” of his time and place in all its dimensions — the Temple, the Synagogue and Rome — he nevertheless persisted in teaching the truth, even when it contradicted deeply-held axioms of these institutions. As the “lamb of God,” he took upon himself the responsibility for all the crimes whose true horror was revealed in the light of this truth. His courage gave him profound peace and total control in the darkest moments, making him capable of addressing Judas as a friend even as he hands him over to his enemies, and of begging God’s forgiveness for those who are executing him. And his interior freedom enabled him to embrace the poverty and homelessness of his years of teaching, as well as the torture and death inflicted on the cross. The first Christians felt themselves united to their Master like branches on a vine, with his own power coursing through their veins. And their work and witness — as loyal subjects of the Empire — radically transformed a whole civilization.7
Presaging the work of Vaclav Havel, subject of a future essay.
Die tragende Tugend wird vor allem der Ernst sein, der die Wahrheit will. [...] Dieser Ernst will wissen, worum es wirklich geht, durch alles Gerede von Fortschritt und Naturerschließung hindurch und übernimmt die Verantwortung, welche die neue Situation ihm auferlegt. (p. 104-5)
Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
Not that such condemnations have no value. They are often true, necessary and important, but are insufficient on their own to deal with the core of the problem.
Die zweite Tugend wird die Tapferkeit sein. Eine unpathetische, geistige, personale Tapferkeit, welche sich dem heraufdrohenden Chaos entgegenstellt. Sie muß reiner und stärker sein, als die vor Atombomben und Bakterienstreuern, denn sie hat den universellen Feind, das im Menschenwerk selbst aufsteigende Chaos zu bestehen -- und hat, wie alle wirklich große Tapferkeit, die Vielen gegen sich, die Öffentlichkeit, die in Parolen und Organisationen verdichtete Unwahrheit. (p. 105)
Und ein Drittes muß hinzukommen: die Freiheit. Die innere Freiheit, vom Bann der Gewalt in all ihren Formen; von den Mächten der Suggestion in Propaganda, Presse, Rundfunk und Kino; vom Verlangen nach der Macht, ihrem Rausch und ihrer Dämonie, die bis in die geistigen Bereiche wirken. Sie kann nur durch wirkliche Erziehung errungen werden, äußere und innere. Und durch Askese. (p. 105)
For a lively and rigorously researched narrative of this process of transformation, see Tom Holland’s 2019 book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World.