What Is Light?: Uncovering a Forgotten Chapter in French Intellectual History

Pope Francis has had a lot to say about technology in recent times, most notably in Laudato Si’. In that regard he is no different from popes over the last two hundred years who, like many of their contemporaries, have noticed the effects of successive industrial revolutions and eventually said something about it. Gregory XVI, banning the railways, famously called them the roads from hell, although most papal or ecclesiastical pronouncements on technology since his time have been considerably more positive. What is rather different about Pope Francis—and arguably paradoxical for the most progressive pope of the modern period—is that he has shown himself more aware than earlier popes that technology is not only a moral issue but also a cultural one, and that because it is a cultural one, the moral issues it raises are not only the obvious ones.

One of Francis’s guides on these points is the theologian Romano Guardini (1885-1968), but Guardini was not the only religious intellectual of the middle of the twentieth century to take a critical stance on technology. In the interwar years and until the mid-1950s when the second and, subsequently, the third industrial revolution began to take hold in France, successive waves of techno-critics in French Catholic circles exhibited anxieties shared by non-native Francophone writers from elsewhere in Europe and indeed by members of other denominations. Some of the latter—such as Jacques Ellul—have become synonymous with techno-criticism, whereas others who were well known in their day—for example, the Belgian philosopher Marcel de Corte—have tended to be written out of the story. Still others, such as Georges Bernanos or Simone Weil, are normally acknowledged as important figures, but their techno-criticism is too often left in the historical shadows.

Why have such writers been largely ignored or skimmed over unceremoniously in recent major studies of Catholic engagement with modernization in France? There is no single identifiable reason for this neglect. Emmanuel Mounier, journalist and founder of the progressive Catholic review Esprit, dismissed their concerns as the “small-minded fear of the twentieth century.”[1] Perhaps recent historians have preferred more romantic narratives in French Catholic intellectual history, such as the sidelining and subsequent rehabilitation of Henri de Lubac and others. Nevertheless, the problems concerning technology are profound and only growing in importance. Accordingly, now may be the time to read over the traces of writers who, one might say, have suffered from what I will call the Cassandra effect. Cassandra, a prophetess and daughter of the better-known King Priam of Troy, foresaw the fall of Troy full well, but a curse imposed by the god Apollo made her unbelievable to her listeners. Cassandra is a crucial voice, a symbol of the impotence of those historical actors who see a thing happening and are practically powerless to stop it.

What then did these successive waves of Francophone techno-critics see in the area of technology that should be of any interest now? In my reading of the history, they appeared in four successive phases which I will call (i) the philosophical wave, (ii) the political wave (iii), the spiritual wave, and (iv) the postwar atomic shockwave.

The First and Second Waves of Techno-critics

In the first wave, we can identify the young Jacques Maritain of the 1920s, who at this point was still capable of channelling the reactionary rhetoric of his firebrand godfather Léon Bloy. Close to Maritain, at least for some time, was René Guénon, whose works are still read today in the esoteric world of eastern philosophical traditionalism. We can also count another Maritain associate, the Russian-born philosopher Nicolai Berdyaev, an exile from Lenin’s Russia and a well-known member of the Russian expat community in Paris. Maritain’s reflections on the matter of technology probed the implicit anthropology he detected in Cartesian thought where the separation of mind and body seemed to turn the latter—and by extension whatever it touched—into an instrument of pure mind. That said, Maritain showed naïve confidence in the human capacity to wield technology freely, not least in his celebrated essay Art et scholastique [Art and Scholasticism] (1920).

His friend Berdyaev was much more sceptical of that possibility. Maritain published Berdyaev’s Le Nouveau Moyen-âge [A New Middle Ages] (1924) in the Roseau d’Or collection alongside the works of Bernanos, Claudel, and Cocteau among others. The translation of an earlier essay in Russian, the work argued that the technology-induced acceleration of modernity was reaching a crisis: “The rhythm of history is changing; it is becoming catastrophic.” In his 1933 pamphlet L’Homme et la machine [Man and the Machine], in contrast, Berdyaev’s arguments become more anthropological: “The mind that creates technology and the machine cannot itself deep down be technicized and mechanized. . . . Technology wants to enslave this mind, rationalize it, and turn it into an automat.” Such hyperbole perhaps suggested to readers a reason for the zombie-like exhaustion exhibited by French factory workers who had found Fredrick Taylor’s recently imported time-and-motion managerialism hard to live with.

The impact of technology on the human spirit also ran deeply in the writings of René Guénon who, with his proclivities for Islamic and Hindu culture, excoriated the industrial west for the technological exploitation of its eastern colonies, notably in Orient et Occident [East and West] (1924) and La Crise du monde moderne [The Crisis of the Modern World] (1927). Guénon spoke strongly to a growing sense of western uncertainty in the postwar years. Likewise, his belief that a mathematical spirit of quantification underpinned much of the weakening of western society—where everything seemed now to be judged in purely material, quantifiable terms—converged with Maritain’s suspicion of Cartesianism. Maritain, alarmed by Guénon’s esoteric doctrines, had ceased to support his career by the late 1920s.

These philosophically minded writers stand in contrast with their political activist successors who belong to the second wave of techno-critics. The latter were mostly associated with the French non-conformist movements who, from the late-1920s, criticised industrialization, the materialism of society, and the alienations of individualism. Much of this, incidentally, they blamed on the then-pervasive influence of American industrial capitalism. One surprising name that appeared in this context is that of Church historian Henri Daniel-Rops. A native of Savoy and at first a teacher in the provinces, Daniel-Rops at the time was a rising literary star who authored an incendiary volume called Le Monde sans âme [The World without a Soul] (1932) to denounce the encroachments of technology-driven materialistic consumerism on French society. For all its polemic, it was a prescient text. With classic Voltairean irony, Daniel-Rops gave the following command to his technology obsessed contemporaries:

Seek nothing more than the physical joy of living, of buying things, of taking pleasure in those appearances that subtle technologies overhaul every six months. That is the order that you are seeking: the perfect calibration of production to consumption, excellent stock market performance, the growth of well-being, the pleasure of being alive.

Daniel-Rops’s withering jibe seems to be an echo of his mentor Georges Duhamel, well known for his anti-American screed Scènes de la vie future [Scenes from Future Life] (1931). Chastened by a negative review from philosopher Gabriel Marcel, under whose influence he had begun to move, Daniel-Rops moderated his negativity by the mid-1930s, and later in the 1940s advocated technological modernization as the only sensible path back from the material destructions of the war.

Meanwhile in Bordeaux, some readers of Catholic journalist Emmanuel Mounier’s review Esprit, were growing unhappy with its lack of revolutionary fervor. Among them were Jacques Ellul who, together with his close friend Bernard Charbonneau, drafted an eighty-three-point manifesto that outlined many of the positions Ellul would later be known for, e.g. the idea that technology was autonomous, or that human life was becoming technologized. Similarly revolutionary but positioning herself on the far left was their contemporary Simone Weil, then gravitating between Paris and the French provinces where she balanced her career as a Classics teacher with her commitment to revolutionary journalism. Having passed several secondments working on factory shop floors, Weil brought frontline, lived experience to a debate that had arguably been too theoretical, yet her writings also echoed René Guénon’s more refined argument about the risks of quantification as the measure of all culture. Weil in her then unpublished magus opus, “Reflections on the causes of freedom and social oppression” (1934), also echoed Berdyaev in finding the roots of technology’s problems in anthropology:

The cause of this painful state of things is very clear. We live in a world where nothing is fitted to man; there is a monstrous disproportion between the body of man, the mind of man, and the things which currently constitute the elements of the life of man.

Weil was yet to embrace a religious understanding of that anthropology. Nevertheless, what she here acknowledged was what she had lived firsthand in the factories. Writing to a friend, she observed that the factory was “a miserable place where one can only obey, where one’s humanity is broken, where one can only bend and let oneself sink beneath the level of the machine.” It was an experience that captured many of the reservations that this second wave of politically activist techno-critics had expressed about technology in general.

The Third and Fourth Waves

Whereas the second wave of French religious techno-critics seemed to go outward in their observations on the technological, engaging with social and political issues, the third wave—in which I include Gustave Thibon, Marcel de Corte, and Georges Bernanos—seemed to go inwards. It is tempting to ascribe this phenomenon to the catastrophe of the Second World War, but its tendencies are apparent even before the war, especially in the case of Bernanos, who left Europe in disgust at the radical de-spiritualization of the Old World. This is the predominant critique in his 1944 essay La France contre les robots [France against the robots], but of course it also characterizes much of his better-known literary work (notably, Under Satan’s Sun and Diary of a Country Priest). It was a repeated preoccupation of his last talks and essays until his premature death from liver cancer in 1948.

Although a man of the hard right, Bernanos’s wartime stance distinguished him markedly from Gustave Thibon. While Bernanos, writing from Brazil, was a member of the external resistance to the German occupation of France—well before there even was a recognized resistance—Thibon was known as the philosopher of the Vichy regime with his advocacy of a “return to the soil.” Other intellectuals published clandestine attacks on the government and German occupiers, but Thibon’s stance can best be described as attentisme—waiting to see what happened, as did most Frenchmen and women—even if we have him to thank for saving Simone Weil’s papers and publishing them in the first edition of Gravity and Grace in 1947. Thibon’s hostility to technology arose from his convictions about the organic nature of life that he borrowed from German vitalist philosopher Ludwig Klages.

His 1940 collection Diagnostics, prefaced by Christian existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel and published on the eve of the German invasion, identified the “artificial excitations” of urban living that delivered the human being up to a network of “machines, films, printed paper and false sexuality.” This analysis was continued in a collection of wartime aphorisms Le Destin de l’homme (1941) in which emerged his Klagesian-inspired view of the material world not as inert matter to be reshaped by human hand but as an already vital force that needed human cooperation. For Thibon, technology urged the disordered human heart to give in to its perennial temptation of making itself like God. Borrowing from the same Carmelite mystical tradition that inspired Bernanos, Thibon had the sense that humanity must choose between aping God like the devil, or becoming divine through sharing God’s life. There was no third option.

Le Destin de l’homme was compiled by Belgian philosopher Marcel de Corte, a sometime acquaintance of Jacques Maritain with whom he broke over the Spanish Civil War and Maritain’s theological defence of Germany’s persecuted Jewish population. Casually antisemitic like many European intellectuals before the Second World War, De Corte was no intellectual slouch, analyzing fascism and communism in a sparkling essay published by Mounier’s Esprit in 1936. Like Maritain, Guénon, Berdyaev, and Weil, De Corte believed modernity was sustained by a serious anthropological mistake coupled with idealism and rationalist reductionism. Far from being the technophobe that Mounier later labelled him, De Corte in his two-part wartime essay Philosophie des moeurs contemporaines set out a nuanced evaluation of technology and its ills, blaming most of them not on technology but on epistemological and cultural errors—abstractionism, loss of transcendence, and instrumentalism—by which western civilisation had crafted a Faustian bargain devitalizing all human life. Thus, De Corte pointed a finger at the existential nausea produced by a relentless focus on the utility of things ten years before Heidegger’s essay on technology identified the “standing reserve” by which the world is always assumed to be a raw material for exploitation.

The fourth wave of techno-critics saw contributions again from Guénon in Le Règne de la quantité [The Reign of Quantity] (1946), Berdyaev’s Autobiographie spirituelle (1948), De Corte’s Fin d’une civilisation [End of a Civilization] (1947), Bernanos’s posthumous La liberté, pour quoi faire [Freedom—for what?] (1953), Thibon’s Vous serez comme des dieux [You will be as gods] (1954) and Ellul’s La Technique ou l’enjeu du siècle ­(1954)—known in English as The Technological Society but expressed more literally Technology—the gamble of the twentieth century. The war was over, the horror of atomic weapons loomed large, and yet technology was the only route to the salvation offered by rebuilding. What was humanity to do next?

One new techno-critical name that emerged in this period is that of Gabriel Marcel who had earlier played a role in boosting the careers of Daniel-Rops, Marcel de Corte, and Gustave Thibon (a farmer and vineyard keeper whom he enduringly dubbed the “self-taught philosopher”). While Marcel’s critique of Daniel-Rops in 1932 had tempered the latter’s anti-technological discourse, the postwar Marcel felt no compunction at all in issuing his techno-hostile 1951 essay Les hommes contre l’humain—literally Men against the Human, though usually rendered as Man against Mass Society. Compiling various analyses of technology in the wake of the war and its devastating effects, he found in the concentration camps of the Nazi war machine a perfect embodiment of the logical end of factory production that had taught humans to package and process human life, leaving nothing but waste behind. Like so many of the writers noted above, Marcel staged his protest finally on the grounds of philosophical anthropology:

When man seeks to understand his condition by using as his model the products of his own technical skill, he infinitely degrades himself and condemns himself to deny, that is, in the end to destroy, those deep and basic sentiments which for thousands of years have guided his conduct.

To the accusation that such analyses evinced hostility to technology, Marcel, like other techno-critical writers, insisted on nuance in the face of the technophilia of the age:

Techniques, as I have repeatedly said, cannot be considered as evil in themselves, quite the opposite . . . Yet unless we make a truly ascetic effort to master techniques and put them in their proper subordinate place, they tend to assemble themselves, to organize themselves around the man who rejects . . . Nihilism is tending to take on a technocratic character, while technocracy is inevitably nihilist.

This essay was published in the early 1950s when Ellul was about to launch his own heavyweight analysis of the technological problem. While Marcel did not go as far as Ellul, they shared the sense that humans are poor at managing the unintended consequences of their technological brilliance; that technical foresight never anticipates what hindsight sometimes comes to lament heartily.

Conclusion

Had we included other techno-critical voices in this essay—for example, Denis de Rougement or Lanza del Vasto—the case of the techno-critical writers (whom for ten years or longer I have thought of as counter-technologists) would not have looked any different. Postwar France saw such a wave of technological innovation that voices criticizing technology were easily caricatured as backward-facing Luddites (although what the Luddites really were is material for another article). If these writers had struggled to make their voices heard during the interwar, their task became even more complex from 1945 when almost all reactionary voices smacked of the disgusting compromises of Vichy France.

Maritain, then French ambassador to the Vatican, refused to receive Thibon in Rome in 1947 which must have delivered a caustic shock to the dreamy philosopher of the Rhone Valley, now paying for his myopic failure to distance himself from Pétain’s betrayals. Also in 1947, Paris’s Cardinal Suhard—perhaps seeking to purge himself of the suspicions that saw him banned from the Te Deum in Notre Dame at the liberation of Paris in 1944—issued a ringing defense of technological modernity in his pastoral letter Essor ou déclin de l’Eglise [Rise or decline of the Church], seen by some as a model for Vatican II’s agenda. Notes in the Archives of the Archdiocese of Paris show much of its analysis to be drawn from articles in the Jesuit journal Études and Mounier’s Esprit. During this period, Mounier also reserved his sharpest barbs for the techno-critics before his tragic and premature death in 1950. No wonder the techno-critics or their arguments faded from the historical record.

Whether rereading this history can help us practically today depends very much on how one regards technology. If we are happy with the techno-optimistic embrace of all innovation, then, their analyses will remain a historic curiosity. If we share Ellul’s convictions about technology’s propensity to drag along humans in its wake, would it be wise to ignore his calls for humans to ensure they liberate themselves from its shackles? Conversely, many of those who accept the need for human resilience in the face of uncontrolled technological innovation, may not take seriously the proposition that humanity is a species whose horizons are above all transcendent. To know what technological future really befits us, we must consider what we as a species really are.

We read history like we read literature—to know we are not alone. Only in such a light can we decide whether to reread the history of these techno-critics. In making this conclusion, I am reminded of the lamppost story used by English techno-critic G.K. Chesterton in The Ball and the Cross (1905). A clamoring crowd of pragmatic know-it-alls rip down an old-fashioned lamppost (outdated technology, of course), driven on by their short-sighted prejudices and self-interested violence. It is only afterwards, however, that they realize the wisdom of a monk who, in the beginning, had merely asked the scandalous question, “What is light?” Only, now, they had to discuss the question in the dark.

Church Life Journal | Articles

Tags: Chapter Forgotten French History Intellectual Light Uncovering