1932 Put Magazine, an excerpt on Technology
Technology has ceased to be neutral. The question about technology has become for us a spiritual question, a question about the fate of man, about his relationship to God. Technology has immeasurably deeper a significance, than ordinarily is thought. It possesses a cosmogonic significance, it creates a completely new actuality. It is a mistake to think, that the actuality, engendered by technology, is the old actuality of the physical world, a reality, studied by mechanics, physics and chemistry. This is an actuality, which did not exist in the history of the world until the discoveries and inventions, made by man. Man has succeeded in creating a new world. Within the machine is present the reasoning power of man, within it operates a teleological principle. Technology creates an atmosphere, saturated with energies, which earlier were hidden within the depths of nature. And man has no assurance, that he is in a condition to breathe in the new atmosphere. He was in the past accustomed to breathe a different air than this. It is still inexplicable, what this electric atmosphere, into which he is cast, will produce for the human organism. Into the hands of man technology puts a terrible and unprecedented power, a power which can be to the destroying of mankind. The first tools, found in the hands of man, were relatively playthings. And it would be possible to regard them still as neutral. But when such a terrible power is given into the hands of man, then the fate of mankind depends upon the spiritual condition of man. One already destructive aspect of technology is war, threatening almost cosmic a catastrophe, and it posits the spiritual problem of technology quite acutely. Technology is not only the power of man over nature, but also the power of man over man, power over the life of people. Technology can be converted into service to the devil. But therein especially it is not neutral. And especially in our materialistic times everything acquires a spiritual significance, everything is set beneathe the standard of the spirit. Technology, begotten by spirit, materialises life, but it can also indeed assist in the liberating of spirit, of liberation from the bounds of materio-organic life. It can enable also an in-spiriting.
Technology signifies the transfer of the whole of human existence from the organism to the organisation. Man no longer lives in an organic order. Man is accustomed to live in an organic connection with the soil, with plants and animals. The great cultures of the past were still surrounded by nature, they loved their gardens, flowers and animals, they had not yet broken asunder from the rhythm of nature. The sense of the land begat a tellurgic mysticism (Bachofen has remarkable thoughts about this). Man came from the soil and he returns to the soil. With this is connected a profound religious symbolism. The vegetative cults have played a tremendous role. The organic life of man and of human societies presented itself as a life similar to that of plants. Organic was the life of the family, of the corporation, the state, the church. Society had resemblance to an organism. The romantics at the beginning of the XIX Century ascribed an especial significance to the organism and the organic. From them comes the idealisation of everything organic and hostility towards the mechanical. The organism is born, and not made by man, it is begotten by nature, by cosmic life, in it the whole is not composed merely of parts, but rather precedes the parts and determines their life. Technology tears man apart from the soil, carries him across the expanses of the world, and gives man the sensation of earth as a mere planet. Technology radically alters the attitude of man to space and to time. It is hostile to any organic embodiment. In the technological period of civilisation man ceases to live amidst animals and plants, he is flung into a coldly-metallic medium, in which there is no longer any animal warmth, no warm-bloodedness. The might of technology bears with it an enfeebling of cordiality within human life, of cordial warmth, coziness, lyricism, sorrows, always connected with the emotion of soul, and not with spirit. Technology kills everything organic in life and sets it under the standard of the organisation of the whole of human existence. The inevitability of the transition from organism to organisation is one of the sources of the contemporary crisis of the world. It is not so easy to be torn asunder from the organic
Each soul needs to choose. Each generation. Men make this world