“There can be no doubt that the personality and the equilibrium of the individual are gravely threatened by technological civilization. Must we conclude that the only solution is to return to the life of pre-industrial society?
But such a return presupposes that these societies produced a relatively happy and free humanity; and history, with its record of individual misery, of religious, civil, and foreign wars, shows us that this is not so. Those who make technology directly responsible for the alienation of modern man forget that man has always been more or less alienated, that he has never been the autonomous individual in harmony with the world that he ought to be. A humanity composed of free men, related creatively to each other and to the world, has still to be achieved; the development of technology gives a special cast to alienation in the present, but technology is not directly responsible for it.
In truth, technological man is not, as is often supposed, a new species, regarded as superior by some, and as inferior by others. In actuality, man, who conceived this technology, has remained the same as he was before. Today as yesterday, man passes the greater part of his life in pursuing illusory absolutes, dreams of paradise, prestige, and power; in worshiping idols and leaders; in venerating some men and despising others; in loving only to hate afterward; in escaping from real freedom and its risks, as Erich Fromm has shown, in order to find the warm security of conforming with the ways of the herd.
Certainly, technology has freed many workers from exhausting tasks and has lightened their sufferings; but their souls have remained enslaved. Technology has not, therefore, “depersonalized” man; it has only made his alienation more blatant. Technology is neither a beneficent divinity nor a maleficent fiend. It is not an absolute to worship, or an antiabsolute to fight. Such absolutism is the cause of all fanaticism, including technological fanaticism.”
(Mathilde Niel)
“Actual, existing man has always been ready, through ignorance, to sacrifice himself and to suffer for future man, and to live in the illusion of a celestial or terrestrial paradise. Technology has become today the new support for this old absolutist and emotional mentality. Thus, instead of being the means of liberation which it could be, technology has become a new means of enslavement.
Technology would be harmless, or even beneficial, if used by men liberated from their passions; but used by alienated man, it threatens the existence of the individual, of civilization, and of the human race itself. The real problem is to know whether the possibilities of liberty, creativity, and generosity, which are dormant in everyone, will one day be able to express themselves fully, and whether man can finally become himself. The fundamental problem of man is therefore independent of the problem of technology.”
(Mathilde Niel)
“It is necessary, as Jacques Ellul has observed, to demystify technology and to stop worshiping it as a divinity. But this is not enough. Man himself must be freed from alienation. … Technology is not simply the expression of an alienated consciousness. It is also the expression of a free and creative consciousness which exists in a more or less stifled way alongside the alienated consciousness. The desire to provide a decent material existence for all, to free men from tedious or exhausting jobs, to prolong human life, to create new objects — all these are sensible aspirations. If technology becomes a means instead of an end, if it served existing man, it would promote a harmonious synthesis between individuals and their milieu, would become human again, and would create a human universe. “If respect for man is established in the hearts of men,” wrote Saint-Exupéry, “then men will eventually succeed in constructing a political, social and economic system which consecrates this respect.””
(Mathilde Niel)
You might have heard that @christine.bingham.art’s showing pieces from The Saints Project at @northwesttastings from now through the end of the year, but if you didn’t know, now you know.
Here are a couple of captures from the set-up yesterday. Thank you Parker for all your help!
“Although he connects the reign of alienation with the capitalistic-industrial world, Marx is also opposed to the romantic tendency encountered in the sociological meaning of that term. He does not relate the overcoming of alienation to the ideal of a return to small, closed communities, in which the individual character of interhuman relations and the internal harmony of the individual are paid for by the impoverishment of the individual and by the constraint of individuality through authorities and institutions. The overcoming of alienation cannot mean the impoverishment of man—either of the individual or of collective activity. Marx accepts the world of industrial civilization as a fact and a value, as a world that enriches human possibilities and provides opportunities for the development of the “plenitude of needs.” The alienated character of industrial civilization gives rise to a longing for a return to—as Marx described it—the unnatural simplicity of the poor,” a longing for the pre-individualistic stages of human development.
An alienated situation, for Marx, is not an ontological determinant of the human condition, rather it is a socio-historical problem created by men in history. … Marx underscored the possibility of a humanization of the process of work itself, both through the overcoming of the division of labor, and through the humanization of the technical-productive and institutional forms of work by the maximum approximation of the process of work to instinctive, spontaneous creative work. (It appears, therefore, that the young Marx, by placing a particular accent on the general philosophical aspect of the emancipation of work, was inclined to identify the realization of the idea of the universality of man with the possibility of a complete identification of all work with spontaneous creative activity, on the model of artistic creativity.)”
(Bronislaw Baczko)
Christine will be hanging out at @northwesttastings on Saturday, December 6, if you want to pass by and say hello.
You can find the wine bar by taking the first entrance north of the Pike Place pig then down the ramp leading to the miniature car store.