Deus Ex Machina

In a time of alienation, groupthink, and a countervailing search for new authorities and horizons, Ernst Jünger’s recent resurgence is only fitting. The author’s vitality, most famously captured in his memoir of the Great War, Storm of Steel, together with his vision of steadfastness against totalitarianism in such works as The Forest Passage, make him a natural guide to those, especially on the right, who anticipate a new Dark Age and wish to prepare accordingly. But Ernst’s brother, the novelist, poet, soldier, and lawyer Friedrich Georg Jünger, remains far more obscure, despite sharing many of the same interests and concerns. The release of new editions of works from both brothers thus offers a welcome opportunity to discover the Jüngers’ insights into their times and their premonitions of our own. Together, their disquieting books consider modern civilization’s unknowing vulnerability to threats it scarcely understands.

The subtitle captures both parts of Friedrich’s critique. The essence, the “leitmotiv” of technology, is its “striving for perfection”—for exactness, precision, calculation, regularity, systematicity. To what end does this technical perfection aim? In one sense, the end is obvious: nothing other than itself. Neat, clinical perfection is the purpose. But in another sense, this is the very question that the technician must not ask. For to look for a purpose beyond technical perfection is to recognize the possibility of a conflict between technology and other goods. And technique, given its demand for systematic unity and coordination, cannot allow there to be such goods. Other values might be amenable to disputes over their relative priority, even if those disputes result in the tragic recognition that not all goods are compatible. But technique is different: because it is necessarily totalizing, the technical mindset cannot tolerate even lesser values. All other goods become obstacles to be removed. 

Technique is thus a jealous god—a literal deus ex machina—who demands that there be no other gods before it. Much of The Failure of Technology is devoted to showing how technique proceeds in toppling the statues of the other gods, and reworking them in its own image. In everything from health to sports to even our perception of time, Friedrich argues that each domain of human affairs bears the mark of mechanism.

Now, it may seem obvious that education, for example, will be tainted if it is treated as a technological problem and the school is transformed into a factory. But Friedrich compellingly argues that technique’s empire seeks to conquer even those territories that seem to be its allies, such as the economic. We tend to see technology’s constant tinkering and innovation as motivated by the worship of mammon, but this, Friedrich avers, is an illusion. What does the technician care for mere money? “The fact that an installation is profitable is no reason for the technician to give up his striving for technical perfection. He will ruin even a profitable enterprise if it refuses to give in to his demands for technical rationalization.”

The result of this sprawling expansion of the technical is a growing dependence on the system and a learned helplessness. In a premonition of today’s ‘smart device’-filled homes, for example, Friedrich warns of the house “that has become a ‘machine for living,’” in which “the inhabitants live in complete dependence upon technical organization” and “must suffer the ill effects of each single disturbance which may occur in its functioning.” What appears as convenience thus ultimately proves a trap.

A similar conflict and eventual subsumption will occur each time technique encounters a foreign value, meaning that any attempted alliance or détente between technique and other human values will be unstable. For example, while we might say that technology has raised living standards, shortened the work week, expanded our choices, and so on, Friedrich argues that these, even if true (and he says they are not true), are merely ancillary, contingent facts. Perhaps at times technology has promoted human goals; that does not mean such goals are its purpose. The end of technique is its own perfection, not human flourishing of any sort. And therefore any other conceivable human value risks finding itself dropped in the incinerator as soon as it runs up against efficiency. Indeed, humans might wind up in the incinerator themselves; consider today’s growing taste for euthanasia, which Friedrich anticipates when he writes, “If there were such a thing as rationalizing for the sake of rationalizing, there would be no reason why the helpless, the sick, and the aged should not be killed off.”

Technology’s final outcome, Friedrich concludes, would be a new kind of tyranny, a vast “sequence of mechanical motions” in which man becomes a mere widget in a complex machine, and thus utterly dependent on every step that precedes and follows him. His vision here resembles Max Weber’s description of the “iron cage” of rationalization, but if Friedrich is correct, perhaps a better image for our situation would be the perpetual motion machine: we are not trapped in place, but “set in motion” by our dependence. Strangely, this would an apolitical tyranny, as politics, like so much else, is incompatible with the machine. Perhaps this is why Friedrich warns that “The technician is no statesman”: whereas the statesman reconciles competing goods, the technician eliminates them.

Friedrich’s observations and warnings have the insight that comes from experience: as a veteran of the Great War, he experienced firsthand the new realities made possible by industrial warfare. He recounts his experience at Flanders Fields, where he was “shocked, not so much by the spectacle of death and destruction, as by the man-made transformations of whole landscapes.” It might seem that an essay on technology, like its subject, would quickly grow obsolete; but here, Junger’s abstraction and breadth are a strength. Because his concern is not any particular manifestation of technology, but technology as such, his past warnings and diagnosis cannot help but educate us now.

Ernst Jünger’s short novel On the Marble Cliffs, meanwhile, considers the dangers posed to civilization by another modern phenomenon: mass movement-driven anarchy. The novel, newly translated by Tess Lewis, is a strange cross between George Macdonald and Vaclav Havel—a myth or fairy tale that asks how a moral order can endure against threats from without and decline within.

The plot is simple enough, though marked by an arresting atmosphere, which creates a dreamlike sense of dread throughout the work. Two members of a monastic order have devoted themselves to the peaceful and secluded study of nature in a vaguely Mediterranean arcadia. They find their work interrupted, however, by the looming threat of roving brigands—marauders who, led by the mysterious Head Forester, gradually usher in a kind of anarcho-tyranny. The story culminates in a battle between the bandit mobs and the forces of an older, nobler race striving to defend the villagers. 

One might read On the Marble Cliffs as an allegory for the rise of National Socialism—indeed, that’s how the Gestapo read it, when they censored it in 1942. But its warnings and questions are shadowy and mysterious enough not to be confined to any particular historical event; as Ernst notes in an accompanying author’s note, “this shoe fit several feet.” The main theme of the novel—the slow decay of the old moral order—is hardly one limited to Nazi Germany. The brothers’ province is not a sunny idyllic pastureland, but a place exhibiting “manifest decline,” a decline that the villagers no longer have the will to forestall. As the forces of anarchy spread, few can bother to maintain law and order, which naturally only compounds the brigands’ energy. As with the ceaseless technological encroachment of the new diagnosed in The Failure of Technology, the villagers here exhibit a learned helplessness in the face of an all-encompassing threat, and it seems far easier to acquiesce to a gradually growing rot than to attempt to uphold the old order—easier, that is, until the final battle proves it impossible.

Though On the Marble Cliffs includes many of the features that one might expect in any fantastical myth—mysterious forests, magical mirrors, ancient ruins—it clearly bears Ernst’s imprint in its vision of how one should act in the face of destruction. Even as the narrator laments the internal decay corrupting his society, he remains equivocal at best about the worth of such external, political goals as restoring a declining civilization or even defending it from its foes. The narrator and his fellow monk, veterans of past wars, wish simply to devote themselves to their studies and leave human conflict behind them. (In this respect the narrator resembles Ernst himself, who, following the success of Storm of Steel, showed little desire to engage directly in politics, even rejecting Hitler’s own request that he run for office.) 

Both books are too meditative and abstruse to offer anything like discrete solutions to the problems they reveal. Indeed, the mystery almost seems to be the point: through the very form of their writing, the Jüngers show their wariness with the pursuit of clean, bright certainties that suggest that all riddles have been solved—or that they ever can be. But they do at least warn against attempting to use the enemy’s weapons against it. Friedrich notes how easily workers who are threatened by technological innovation adopt the technical attitude in their very attempts at resistance: “As the workers unite, however, they unwillingly fulfill a condition of technical progress, the condition that everything must be organized.” On the Marble Cliffs similarly does nothing to suggest the plausibility of a counter-mass movement for the right cause. As the brothers’ botanical explorations illustrate, the worth of the old order is manifested in its particularity, and it is thus clearly incompatible with any mass movement—even one intended to defend particularity.

Instead, the Jüngers offer a meditative detachment from the world that devotes itself to the preservation of the truth. Resistance is a matter, not so much of outward opposition, as of an inward commitment to apperceiving the true order of things. Towards On the Marble Cliffs’s end, the narrator discovers that “there were still noble beings among us in whose hearts knowledge of the higher order was preserved and perpetuated.” Resisting tyranny, technical or martial, calls for an interior understanding of the good, not an external defense of it. Friedrich’s suggestions on this point are more limited, but he appears to have something similar in mind when he writes that “every man of spirit who wants to go on feeling that he is more than a mere cog in a gigantic machine” must practice a “comprehensive and penetrating” “watchfulness.”

One must always be careful of extrapolating the author’s beliefs from his characters’; in Ernst’s case, though, we have his own quietist behavior under the Nazi regime to confirm the symmetry between writer and narrator. Notoriously subdued in his opposition to the Nazis while living under their rule, Ernst gives clear expression to his conviction in the author’s note: “A man can harmonize with the powers of his time or he can stand against them. This is secondary. … How he will remain true to himself: that is his problem.” One can imagine Ernst today sympathizing with the ‘Benedict Option,’ admonishing us to protect our knowledge of the true and the beautiful, the outside world be damned.

Is this sufficient? The Jüngers are wise to caution against attempting to hoist the enemy by his own petard. Their warnings, of the same form as Michael Oakeshott’s criticism of Hayek—that planning not to plan is still … planning—are as apposite today as when they were written. One form of sterile rationalism will hardly counteract the problems created by another, just as we will not mobilize our way into ending mass movements. But though praying for a crisis to offer its very solution—a figurative deus ex machina, as it were—is a fool’s errand, is adopting a Heideggerian wish for some other god to save us any better? If we cannot find a surer approach to curing these maladies of the modern age, perhaps a different sort of self-correction will occur, one prophesied by the narrator of another of Ernst’s novels, the science-fiction fable The Glass Bees: “pride … will be humbled not by insight but only by catastrophe.”