Berdyaev, like his contemporaries Martin Heidegger and Rudolf Steiner, warned about the rise of technology and its impact on human flourishing. Though he died in 1948, before the advent of television and well before the totalization of the technological and technocratic which has become the information revolution and the dominance of social media, his words are startlingly (and to some degree terrifyingly) poignant:
The greatest victories of man in the realms of science, as in that of the technical mastery over nature, have become the principal cause of man’s dehumanization. Man is no longer master of the machines which he has invented. Our contemporary mechanized civilization is fatal to man’s inner life, for it destroys his integrity, disfigures his emotional life, makes him the instrument of inhuman processes, and takes away from him all possibility of contemplation by a rapid increase in the tempo of life.
Berdyaev wrote some thirty books that speak of a God who is incarnate within his creation. In Spirit and Reality, he wrote what seemed to me a sort of culminating statement: “Spirit—the Holy Spirit—is incarnated in human life, but it assumes the form of a whole humanity rather than of authority....God is like a whole humanity rather than like nature, society, or concept.”
This statement of Berdyaev’s, so clearly panentheistic, seems to provide a perfect contrast with the theistic idea that God is the “almighty,” an all-knowing and all-powerful supreme being who is external to humanity, a being who called the world into existence and who still presides over it. “Whole humanity” evidently includes all creation, the earth, and universe, since humanity could certainly not exist without this physical setting, this space. Similarly, “whole humanity” includes all time, since we are not whole unless we include our beginnings and our end. And “whole” also points to what makes us whole; in religious terms, the Spirit.
If God is like a whole humanity, then he or she is not aloof from our suffering. This God is involved in the experience of war and revolution, such as we’ve had over the last century. As Bonhoeffer wrote, “only a suffering God can help.” Heidegger-https://www.thecollector.com/heidegger-technology/
Perhaps we could even say that God only knows himself in us, only enjoys himself in us, and has no other “being” than his life in us. Berdyaev liked to quote a challenging line from Angelus Silesius (1624-1677): “Without me God cannot live for a second.”
Discourse on Colonialism
A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization.
A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization.
A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization.
The fact is that the so-called European civilization – "Western" civilization - as it has been shaped by two centuries of bourgeois rule, is incapable of solving the two major problems to which its existence has given rise: the problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem; that Europe is unable to justify itself either before the bar of "reason" or before the bar of "conscience"; and that, increasingly, it takes refuge in a hypocrisy which is all the more odious because it is less and less likely to deceive.
Europe is indefensible.
Apparently that is what the American strategists are whispering to each other.
That in itself is not serious.
What is serious is that "Europe" is morally, spiritually indefensible.
And today the indictment is brought against it not by the European masses alone,
but on a world scale, by tens and tens of millions of men who, from the depths of slavery, set themselves up as judges.
The colonialists may kill in Indochina, torture in Madagascar, imprison in Black Africa, crackdown in the West Indies. Henceforth, the colonized know that they have an advantage over them. They know that their temporary, "masters" are lying.
Therefore, that their masters are weak.
And since I have been asked to speak about colonization and civilization, let us go straight to the principal lie which is the source of all the others.
Colonization and civilization? Aimee Cesaire
https://ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity