George Bernanos (1888–1948) was a French novelist, essayist, and patriot, whose Catholic faith inspired in him a deep concern for the condition of man in modern society. When younger, Bernanos was drawn to the idealism of modern political movements whose promises of reform he later disavowed, expressing his disillusionment with these movements in a collection of "Last Essays" assembled in the final years of his life. These essays express Bernanos' conviction that revolutionary politics was just as much animated by the anti-humanist spirit that had contributed to the decomposition of European civilization. For Bernanos, the hallmark of this decay was the displacement of man by technology, whose threat was not simply its potential to destroy, but also and more disturbingly for the "machine" to become the paradigm through which human beings would come to understand and define themselves. In this excerpt of his essay, "The European Spirit and the World of Machines," Bernanos argues that human beings transcend the technological order and are not predestined to a life governed by ostensible progress, efficiency, and necessity. Drawing upon his Catholic faith, Bernanos instead argues that we are free individuals incapable of being reduced to mass politics and mechanization.
The following excerpt is taken from Georges Bernanos, “The European Spirit and the World of Machines,” in The Last Essays of Georges Bernanos, trans. Joan and Barry Ulanov (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968): 198–201.
We readily repeat that this modern world denounced by Péguy is in reality the world of machines; in denouncing it in my turn, I seem to be yielding to the same impulse of blind hate that once made the workers of Lyon hurl themselves at the first weaving-machine. You must pardon me: “blind hate” is too easily said. But if we fear, as we may be permitted to fear along with Einstein or Joliot-Curie, that this time there may be an experiment in destruction more thorough than the others, making the whole planet blow up, can we say that the instinct of the works of Lyon was so wrong? It is useless to object that no force in the world would have been capable of impeding the development of the physical sciences and the inventions that were its consequence, as if machines multiplied themselves like beasts in an atmosphere which had suddenly become favorable to them. It is more important to say that man’s spirit has never known how to control the products of his hands. What I have said about what I call anti-civilization may be interpreted as a condemnation of science and scientists. I should like to make myself clearer about this. I do not despair of science or scientists, as, for example, just a little while ago another man did who had believed blindly in science, scientists and the paradise of machines. Neither science nor scientists accelerated the mechanical evolution to the point of absurdity, but the cupidity unleashed across the world by the new and unexpected forms of speculation did.
Science did not lay the foundation for the modern world, but rather science in the service of speculation. The modern world isn’t simply the modern world—which would be enough to justify it—but only the present-day world, one modern world among a great many others that might have existed if science hadn’t broken with conscience and indifferently served any master that came along. Certainly it is true that no force is capable of arresting or even slowing down the progress of the human spirit. But the human spirit doesn’t necessarily always move in the same direction and toward the same goal. It moves in several directions at once, and if it slows down in one to hurtle forward in another, the balance of civilization is broken. Men begin to die.
Man made the machine and the machine became man, by a kind of diabolical inversion of the mystery of the Incarnation.
If science had not made such gigantic leaps forward, under the lashing of all the greed which burns to make use of science, the discovery of the atomic fission of plutonium would certainly have come a good deal later and would not have surprised humanity in the full crisis of the moral nihilism that makes any madness possible, and above all that of self-destruction. If the Egyptians or the Greeks had been guided in their works by a concept of man and life just like—or in any way comparable with—ours, we should undoubtedly never have known the dialogues of Plato, and the planetary catastrophe that threatens us now would have occurred a long time ago.
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[I]f it is true that a tiny machine is capable of annihilating a city in seven-tenths of a second, we know very well that we’ll never catch up with the advance made by the atomic bomb, we know very well that we are nowhere near discovering the machine that will replace the annihilated city in seven-tenths of a second. … That is a very simple remark, but all the more startling because of its simplicity. No doubt, humanity doesn’t need cities; it can become nomad again and find traveling shelter in the machine that demolishes cities. The mistake, however, is to believe that machinery won’t succeed, come what may, in changing the setting, that is to say the conditions of life, for it is not one of these conditions to which man cannot ultimately adapt himself. These are, after all, over-simplified attitudes by which the security of fools is assured and strengthened. Humanity doesn’t live inside its machinery as an inert object in a box whose forms and colors are forever changed without any danger. The snail is in his shell, but the shell is also the snail. The mechanization of the world—one could say its totalitarianization, it’s the same thing—is in answer to a wish of modern man, a secret and unconfessable wish, a desire to resign and renounce. Machines multiply in the world in proportion to man’s self-renunciation; it is as if he renounces himself in them. Sooner or later history will say—if a thinking being remains to write history—that machinery transformed the planet less than it changed the master of the planet. Man made the machine and the machine became man, by a kind of diabolical inversion of the mystery of the Incarnation.
George Bernanos (1888–1948) was a French novelist, essayist, and patriot, whose Catholic faith inspired in him a deep concern for the condition of man in modern society.
