Ain't no use in wondering why babe

No money, no honey so go along and git along

Well. Ok sure I need to see my hearing doc. I mean since the outset I did not find clear communication by anyone in the arena. My bias set in stone. !ABAS

(I checked my notes but do not see the source. )

Regarding the ultimate outcome of modern humanity's misuse of science and technical applications, especially in the Holocaust, I am reminded of Elie Wiesel's ascription of the "Kingdom of Night" to the Holocaust event. Berdyaev has a statement, which from our retrospective viewpoint today, strikes us as particularly insightful. He says, in his book, The Realm of Spirit and the Realm of Caesar, that with technics warfare ceased to be localized and became a matter of nations against nations, states against states, moving the world into a state of "rationalized darkness." Berdyaev avers that such a world will lead either to a "new day of creation or a new night" (italics mine). Obviously, as Wiesel's works so eloquently remind us, the path taken by modern humanity thus far has been Berdyaev's "new night." This path involves a novel approach to killing humans on a massive, unprecedented scale. Society rationalizes this mass murder by thinking humans are mere "vermin" to be eliminated with poison gas and other devices available to modern technology.

Although the arrival of technics does not fully explain this attitude toward human beings as vermin or a disease (and other factors should also be considered), its arrival helps explain how the negative preconditions were set which made it possible for a Holocaust to occur; that racist, nationalist, totalitarian, political, economic, and religious factors conspired with technics to cause the evils of Nazism. Berdyaev's critique is especially insightful in demonstrating how technics was involved in more than just the provision of means for massive murder and dehumanization. Technics also constitutes a major form of modern idolatry from which humans seek to find totally adequate ends for life and happiness, and by which they establish a false relationship to the cosmos. The mass organization of modern Western life had a spiritual root in the misplaced human longing for integrality of being and happiness, which led to collectivist means of enslavement, dehumanization, impersonalism, apathy, and indifference (as illustrated in the Holocaust with masses of indifferent people contributing to the death of millions of human beings, and immoral brutes with PH.D's using advanced technical skills to dispose of human beings).22

For those readers aware of the role of ideology in contributing to the Holocaust, Berdyaev's insights are particularly relevant. He avers that modern humanity transferred its loyalties from God and its organic sense of self, to collectivist entities and to ego. This process evolved from the telleurgic period to modernity, as seen in the subjective selfhood of Kant, then in the panlogism of Hegel, then especially with the Ego in Fichte, and finally in Nazism. German idealist philosophy tried to provide a compensation for the loss of a cosmic framework for individuals that had existed in the Medieval worldview. But German idealist philosophy also inevitably produced an ideological framework conducive to the Promethean instincts of a will to power (as can be seen in Nietzshe, Rosenberg, and then in Nazism). Eventually this will to power built the idol of a state power, replacing the ego (and integral self) asserted by Fichte and others, and this issued in a statism inimical to personal and human values Thus the technical epoch culminates in a subordination of spirit to collectivism, to rationalized scientism, and to a resulting dehumanization and depersonalization of modern humanity. Into such an objectivized, enslaved world, humans enter the modern period. Instead of expressing an active spiritual protest against such a demeaning plight, humans opt for conformity and display indifference in the face of radical evil (as Wiesel never tires of saying, "the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference"

Conclusion

Does Berdyaev's critique leave us on a note of despair regarding the ultimate outcome of Western civilization? Those readers familiar with Berdyaev's writings will know that he is a person of persistent hope, grounded in a Christian conviction of the anticipated victory of good over evil. Thus Berdyaev does not arrive at a totally negative assessment of modern humanity and its use of technics. Although Berdyaev offers hope, he makes a positive outcome for Western humanity contingent upon thoughtful and responsible human action and decision-making, specifically in subordinating technical interests to spiritual ends and values. Only realistic "intensification of spirit" he says will adequately subordinate the goals of technology to the ends of spirit and humanity; will appreciate science but reject idolatrous scientism. The arrival of technics presents humanity with an unprecedented challenge and opportunity for spiritual awakening and intensification. The whole positive relationship of humans to nature, and of God to the cosmos, has to be reconceptualized. Thus the final significance of the technical epoch is its opening up of a new spiritual reckoning with reality itself, especially considering the failure of previous ideologies to sustain humankind.26

Writing after the Holocaust and his personal, wartime endurance of hardships in France, Berdyaev was still able to maintain hope for the future. Such hope entails nothing less than the total spiritualization of life. Thus Berdyaev anticipated a transformation of the technical ethos into a spiritual epoch that uses science only for constructive human ends. The Holocaust reminds us constantly of the ominous implications of the issue regarding the role of technics in human history, an issue we can appreciate was earlier addressed by Berdyaev, but one which still awaits a successful resolution at the close of the twentieth century.

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