The Frankenstein’s Monster of Science

 

Mary Shelley, the author of the gothic horror/sci-fi novel Frankenstein, could be said to have been a child of the Modern Age in more ways than one.   Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Women” (1792), one of the first modern feminists, if not the very first, as well as a defender of the ideology of the French Revolution who deliberately ended her history of this event in its first year in order to avoid talking about how the Reign of Terror had ensued from it.   Shelley’s father, William Godwin, had been trained as a Nonconformist clergyman, but seduced by the antichristian doctrines that had been brewing in the salons and cafes of eighteenth century France, turned to a career in writing, in which he enthusiastically endorsed every new philosophical idea and the most radical form of republican liberalism, while long labouring to destroy the Christian faith he was once appointed to preach.

 

Mary Wollstonecroft Godwin was truly her parents’ daughter and embraced their radicalism from her earliest childhood.   When she was seventeen, she began an affair with Percy Bysshe Shelley, a disciple of her father’s, Lord Byron’s best friend, and a Romantic poet in his own right.  Nineteenth century Romanticism was primarily a rejection of the classicism that had undergone a major revival in Europe during the Renaissance, and then again in the eighteenth century.   In the eighteenth century, classicism reached its apex, being embraced both by the orthodox, such as Dr. Johnson, and by the radicals of the Enlightenment.   Similarly, Romanticism had both its left and right wings.   The latter included those who started out with radical religious and political sympathies but who matured into Tories – the Lake Poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey and William Wordsworth come immediately to mind – as well as life-long reactionary Tory Sir Walter Scott.   Shelley, like Byron, most definitely belonged to the other side of the movement.

 

When Shelley met Mary Godwin, his first wife Harriet was pregnant with their son, but this did not prevent him from seducing Mary, using the blackmail of empty suicide threats to do so.   They would meet in secret at the grave of Mary Wollstonecraft, which most people would regard as rather morbid, until William Godwin found out about it.   Then they ran off to France together, taking Mary’s stepsister Claire along as an interpreter, and embarked upon a tour of Europe, returning home when they ran out of money, with Mary now pregnant.   Their daughter was born premature and died within two weeks.   After Mary, whose health had been weakened by the pregnancy recovered, they took off again, this time to join Lord Byron at Lake Geneva, Switzerland for the summer.   By all accounts it was a miserable, rainy, summer, but it was an incredibly productive one for the trio of writers.   Lord Byron’s Don Juan, Percy Shelley’s Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, all had their origins in that summer together, although only the second of the three was actually completed that year and none were published prior to the following year.   Upon their return to England after that trip. Mary’s older sister Fanny and Shelley’s first wife Harriet, both killed themselves, (1) and the couple celebrated by getting married.

 

What’s that?   I don’t think much of the Shelleys?  I don’t know where you would have gotten that idea. 

 

Mary Shelley’s first and most famous novel was first published in 1818, two years after the summer at Lake Geneva where she first conceived the idea.   The title was likely taken from Frankenstein Castle in Germany, which the Shelleys would have seen, if they didn’t actually visit, when travelling down the Rhine on their first trip to Europe.   In the novel Frankenstein is the last name of the protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, who belongs to a wealthy and noble family from Geneva and studies science at the University of Ingolstadt in Germany, where he becomes obsessed with the idea of artificially creating life.   Constructing an oversized human body he successfully brings it to life, but immediately rejects his creation because of its ugliness.   The monster responds to this rejection, by murdering his brother.   The monster confronts his creator, relates his experiences since awakening and his rejection by everybody due to his hideousness, and demands that Victor create for him a bride.  Victor initially agrees to do so, but at the last minute reneges and the monster responds by murdering Victor’s own bride Elizabeth on their honeymoon.  Victor then pursues the creature, seeking its destruction, all the way to the North Pole, only to succumb to the elements after being found by Captain Robert Walton to whom he relates his story.   Walton also encounters the monster, repentant over the fate of his creator, who vows to rid the world of his own existence.   The story is told in the form of a series of letters from Captain Walton to his sister.  

 

The story has been adapted numerous times.   The image we all have of what Frankenstein’s monster looks like comes from the 1931 Universal Studios film in which Boris Karloff portrayed the monster.   It is from the same film that we get the idea of Frankenstein robbing graves, stitching the parts together to form the body, and animating it using lightening.   Shelley was much more ambiguous, although the filmmakers expanded upon some hints she had dropped here and there.   My favourite “adapation” is Mel Brooks’ 1974 Young Frankenstein, featuring Gene Wilders as Frederick Frankenstein, the American grandson of Victor, initially embarrassed at the association, but who later re-creates the experiment at the family estate (relocated to Transylvania).   Marty Feldman steals the show with his performance as Frederick’s hunchbacked assistant Igor (“It’s pronounced Eye-gore”).  

 

Did Shelley intend any particular message by her story?  Is there any larger significance to it than what she did intend?

The subtitle of the novel would seem to suggest that the answer to the first question is yes.   That subtitle is “The Modern Prometheus.”   Prometheus was a figure in Greek mythology.   He was one of the Titans, the race that had overthrown the Elder Gods, before themselves being overthrown by the Olympians.   In the war between the Titans and the Olympians, Prometheus, foreseeing that the Olympians would win, sided with Zeus.   Later, however, he would perform a series of tricks on Zeus, each of which benefited mankind in some way.   In the last of those tricks he stole fire and gave it to man.   Zeus then chained him to a rock, where a vulture would pick away at his liver, which would regrow each day.   Hercules eventually sets him free, and he reconciles with Zeus by providing him with the information that the nymph Thetis, whom Zeus and Poseidon have been competing for, is destined to give birth to a son who will overthrow his father, as Zeus had overthrown Kronos, and Kronos had overthrown Uranus. (2)  

 

What did Mary Shelly mean by giving her novel this subtitle?   Who is the “Modern Prometheus” alluded to?

 

It seems fairly obvious that Victor Frankenstein is the character who is supposed to correspond to Prometheus.   The structure of the title certainly indicates so, and the parallels are striking.   As the original Prometheus gave fire to mankind, so Victor Frankenstein gives life.   The original Prometheus trespassed against Zeus to do so, Victor Frankenstein commits a form of blasphemy by taking upon himself the divine prerogative of giving life.   Both figures bring torture and anguish upon themselves for their hubris.   In this, Mary Shelley, despite her associations with the leading figures of the Romantic Movement, was a classicist, for her Victor Frankenstein is Aristotle’s tragic hero, brought down by his own arrogance.

 

One interpretation which seems to jump out from all of this is Frankenstein as a kind of warning against the attitude towards science on display in Sir Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis.    In this unfinished utopian novel, a scientific foundation which has as its end or purpose “the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible” by the pursuit of the same end creates an ideal society on the island of Bensalem.   Frankenstein seems to present a scenario in which someone with very much the same ideas and attitude as Salomon’s House in Bacon’s novelette, brings about his own destruction.

 

Yet it is hardly likely that Mary Shelley had any such meaning in mind when she wrote the book.   Such an interpretation would run contrary to the entire way of thinking that she had imbibed from her father and shared with her husband.      

 

Consider how Percy Shelley had himself handled the myth of Prometheus in a play he was working on when Frankenstein was first published, and which came out two years later. He took the title of Prometheus Unbound from a non-extant play of Aeschylus, one of a trilogy of tragedies of which only one, Prometheus Bound, survives.    Only fragments of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Unbound and Prometheus The Fire-bringer have come down to us, but we know more-or-less, the story they tell, including Prometheus’ eventual reconciliation with Zeus.   Shelley presents a story that is the direct inversion of this.   In his play, Jupiter (Zeus) is challenged and defeated by Demogorgon in the third Act, bringing about the release of Prometheus.   While the inversion of Aeschylus is in part a reflection of Shelley’s politics, a revolutionary radicalism as opposed to Aeschylus’ conservatism, his meaning was more than just political.   His Prometheus represents the human will and spirit, and the message of his play is that of the Modern Age – the triumph of the human will and spirit over all that would bind and confine it, especially the divine.   The same message is evident in Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, which ends in the Ragnarok of Gotterdammerung with the burning of Valhalla, as man takes the place of the gods. Even Alfred Lord Tennyson, in his poem Ulysses, takes the tale of Ulysses’ last voyage, as first recounted by Ulysses himself in the torments of hell in Canto XXVI of Dante’s Inferno, and portrays what in Dante was the hubris that brought damnation down upon Ulysses’ head in a heroic light.   What is being lionized in all of this literature, is the driving spirit of the Modern Age, the idea that knowledge serves the human will, and that man should recognize no limits in his pursuit of that knowledge and the triumph of that will.   This is the spirit of modern science, which is why Oswald Spengler correctly identified the spirit of Modern Western Civilization as Faustian, after Goethe’s version of Faust, the scholar who sold his very soul to obtain boundless knowledge (in Goethe’s nineteenth century re-telling of the story, Dr. Faust gets a happy ending, unlike Christopher Marlowe’s sixteenth century play which ends with his dismemberment and damnation). (3)

 

Since the Shelleys shared a similar, Modern, progressive, outlook, it is unthinkable that the author of Frankenstein intended a message so contrary to that of Prometheus Unbound.   Nevertheless, the message that man should beware scientific hubris because his own inventions may turn on him and destroy him, is the message that has come across to a great many readers.   Without endorsing the postmodern deconstructionist total divorce of a text from its author’s intent, this is, perhaps, a case of a story with a meaning much larger than what its author could see.

 

The view that science was the path to a man-made Paradise on earth was strong in the nineteenth century and even up until World War I.   This optimistic view was shattered by the atomic bombs which brought the Second World War to an end.   At that point, the message which Mary Shelley had not intended, but which many have derived from her best-known novel, began to resonate with people, and the concept of a world devastated by man’s scientific and technological hubris, became a standard feature of dystopian literature.  

Today, all those who want us to obey every draconian and totalitarian “public health” order issued in the name of saving us from the Bogeyman of COVID-19, which orders are turning our countries more and more into something that resembles Orwell’s 1984, tell us to “follow the science”.  

 

What if the science they are telling us to follow turns out to be Frankenstein’s monster?

(1)  Harriet Shelley was found drowned.   The inquest ruled suicide and that is the most likely explanation, considering that she left a suicide note, although there is some slight evidence of foul play on the part of William Godwin.   In the case of Fanny Imlay, Mary’s older sister from an affair Wollstonecraft had with an American diplomat before meeting Godwin, there is no doubt that it was suicide by laudanum overdose, although her motivation for doing so has been the subject of endless speculation.

(2)  This is the beginning of the background story of the Trojan War.   Zeus and Poseidon, based upon Prometheus’ information, agree to give Thetis up and marry her off to Peleus, king of Thessaly.   This is the wedding, to which all the gods except the goddess of discord are invited.   She shows up anyway, and tosses the apple of discord between Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena which starts the chain of events that eventually leads to the Trojan War.   Thetis does indeed give birth to a son destined to be greater than his father – Achilles, the greatest of the Greek heroes of said conflict.

(3)   The legend is based on an actual person, a German parlour magician, alchemist, and astrologer who lived in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and whose end, at least in terms of how he departed this earth, without speculating as to where he went after, corresponds more closely with Marlowe’s account rather than Goethe’s.

A Lesson From Leroux

 

Gaston Leroux, after pursuing a career in journalism, which involved everything from theatrical criticism to international correspondence, turned to writing fiction in the early 1900s. In his native France, he is remembered as an author of detective fiction, as being more-or-less the French equivalent of his English contemporary Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes. His first detective novel, The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1908), featured his amateur sleuth Joseph Rouletabille, who, as is often the case with fictional detectives, had a number of biographical similarities to his creator. In this novel, Rouletabille solved the mystery of how a scientist’s daughter ended up beaten unconscious in a room in her father’s castle that was locked from the inside. (1) 

Outside of France, however, he is best known as the author of one of the classics of Gothic horror, ranking right up there with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Drawing upon the many rumours surrounding the Palais Garnier opera house that had been completed in his childhood, an actual incident featuring a falling chandelier that took place there in 1896, and the entire spectrum of his journalistic experiences, he created the famous story that features a deformed and criminally insane polymath with the mononym Erik, who lives on the lake in the basement of the opera house – this lake actually exists – pretending to be a ghost to terrorize the cast of the opera and extort money from its managers, and an angel in order to transform a chorus girl into a diva. The Phantom of the Opera was, as was customary at that time, originally serialized, before being bound and published in French in 1910. The first English translation appeared the following year. 

The story has been re-told many times ever since. The first movie version – and by far the most faithful to Leroux’s novel – was a silent film that appeared in 1925, featuring Lon Chaney Sr., the legendary “Man of a Thousand Faces”, as Erik. There have been many more. It has also been adapted for stage more than once, the most well-known version being, of course, the musical that debuted in 1986, with music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe, originally starring Michael Crawford as the Phantom and Lloyd Webber’s wife-at-the-time, Sarah Brightman as Christine Daaé, the chorus girl turned diva soprano, and is now the longest running musical on Broadway, and the second longest in London’s West End. (2) It was in this version that I first became familiar with the story when a production of the musical came to Winnipeg’s Centennial Concert Hall in 1993 and I went to see it with my high school friends Cynthia and Tamara, although I read Leroux’s novel shortly thereafter. 

My title may, in fact, be slightly misleading, as the lesson I wish to draw from the story is, in fact, best illustrated in Lloyd Webber’s adaptation, which presents the most sympathetic version of Leroux’s Erik.

Unlike motion picture adaptations other than the 1925 original, Lloyd Webber followed Leroux in making Erik’s hideously deformed face something he was born with, rather than the result of acid being thrown in his face, as in the 1943 remake starring Claude Rains and many subsequent versions or a deal with the devil, as in the unfortunate 1989 version starring Robert “Freddy Krueger” Englund. Consequently, he has had to wear a mask for any social interaction all of his life. Even more so in the musical than in Leroux’s novel, although it can be found there as well, this is offered as a partial explanation of his cruel and sadistic behaviour. Granted, the mask requirement was only one part of the whole situation of society having rejected him in disgust at his appearance, but consider how he is made to express it in one notable scene towards the end of the musical. He has just abducted Christine from the stage of the opera in the middle of a production of his own “Don Juan Triumphant”. Raoul, the Vicomte de Chagny and his rival for Christine’s affections, is hot on his trail, but for a brief time he has Christine alone with him again in his lair. The following interaction takes place. 

Christine: Have you gorged yourself at last in your lust for blood? Am I now to be prey to your lust for flesh? 

The Phantom: That fate that condemned me to wallow in blood, has also denied me the joys of the flesh. This face, the infection, which poisons our love. This face which earned a mother’s fear and loathing, a mask my first unfeeling scrap of clothing. 

The words which Lloyd Webber et al., place in the mouth of the Phantom here, echo those which Leroux had placed in the mouth of Erik at a much earlier point in the story in his novel. In chapter XII,  Christine and Raoul have escaped to the roof of the opera, where Christine tells Raoul about her experiences with Erik in his subterranean home the first time he had spirited her away.  After she had snatched away his mask, Erik had entered into a spiel of self-pity, which ended with: 

Why did you want to see me? Oh, mad Christine, who wanted to see me! ... When my own father never saw me and when my mother, so as not to see me, made me a present of my first mask! 

Returning to Lloyd Webber’s version, Christine at this point treats his self-pity with scorn, informing him that “this haunted face holds no horror for me now, it’s in your soul that the true distortion lies”, at which point the scene shifts gears with the arrival of Raoul. What I wish to draw your attention to, however, is the sharp contrast between the way Erik talks about his fated and trademark mask in the above quoted lines, and the way all of the other characters talk about their masks in an earlier scene in which everyone appears masked. 

The scene is the first in the second Act, and is based upon chapter IX in Leroux’s novel. In the musical it is set six months after the events of the first Act. The Phantom has not been heard from in the meantime, and the Opera is hosting a gala event in the form of a masquerade ball to kick off their return to production. The entire cast joins in on a number entitled “Masquerade”, the chorus of which goes:

Masquerade! Paper faces on parade. 

Masquerade! Hide your face so the world will never find you. 

Masquerade! Every face a different shade. 

Masquerade! Look around, there’s another mask behind you. 

Everybody at this ball is having a grand old time and enjoying the fun of their self-chosen masks. At least until Erik shows up dressed as Edgar Allan Poe’s Red Death. (3) 

Now let us consider what lesson we might draw from this striking contrast. Masks can be a source of great fun and enjoyment when they are voluntarily put on in circumstances like that of a masquerade ball. Yet they can be a source of incredible trauma if they are forced upon a person, especially in childhood. 

There are a lot of people today who are in need of this lesson. This month will end, as October always ends, on the eve of All Saints Day, for which reason the last day of October is known as All Hallows’ Eve or Halloween for short. It is traditionally a day in which people voluntarily put on costumes, including masks, for purposes of fun. Kids traditionally dress up in their costumes and go from house to house, ringing the doorbell or knocking, and saying “trick or treat” when the door opens. The person in the house then either gives them candy – or, if they are a health nut, something more nutritious – or risks having a trick pulled on him. This year, a bunch of adult party-poopers, who have been acting like paranoid lunatics since March, all because a virus that poses next to no threat to anybody under sixty-five and without multiple pre-existing medical conditions, has been spreading around the world, have demanded that Halloween and trick-or-treating be cancelled for this year. It is not “safe” they say. 

These same people, who give every impression of having had their brains sucked out by a zombie, are responsible for the fact that the kids who are being forbidden the fun mask-wearing experience of Halloween this year, have been forced to wear masks every day in school since it resumed last month. They are often required to wear them even when outside at recess – assuming the school allows them out at recess. 

 As Christian fantasy novelist and Chalcedon Foundation editor Lee Duigon put it a few weeks ago, “Good grief, they’ve made school even worse than it has always been.” 

Am I saying that all of these kids forced to wear masks all day, every day, are going to end up hiding out in the basements of theatres, dropping chandeliers on people, abducting beautiful singers, murdering people with nooses, and threatening to blow up their cities (4)? 

Perhaps not, but they are likely to be incredibly traumatized by it. This mandatory mask policy at schools amounts to one gigantic case of child abuse. 

Everybody who is in favour of it deserves to be horsewhipped. 

(1) There is an entire subgenre of mystery fiction featuring just this sort of dilemma. It is called the “locked-room mystery” subgenre. Edgar Allan Poe is usually regarded as the founder of the subgenre. The acknowledged master of it, John Dickson Carr, considered Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room to be his favourite. An early and excellent example, and my personal favourite, is Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas. 

(2) Lloyd Webber also composed a sequel musical entitled Love Never Dies which opened in 2010. He had started working on it years earlier with journalist-novelist Frederick Forsyth. Forsyth had developed their ideas into The Phantom of Manhattan, a 1999 novel which, like Love Never Dies, is a sequel, not so much to Leroux’s novel, the ending of which hardly leaves room for a follow up, as to Lloyd Webber’s adaptation. While Love Never Dies and The Phantom of Manhattan are versions of the same story, the genesis of both is such that it would be a gross oversimplification to say the former is an adaptation of the latter. 

(3) The Red Death is a character from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death (1842). The parallel Leroux originally intended by having Erik show up in this costume is that in both stories the character was a very unwanted party-crasher at a similar event. Considering the nature of the lesson I have been drawing from Leroux’s story, it will be worth our while to briefly summarize Poe’s story here. The Red Death, in Poe’s story, is a plague which Prince Prospero, the main character, attempts to avoid, by putting himself and all of his friends in lockdown behind the castle walls of his abbey. After six months – the ironic parallels just continue to pile up – he throws a masquerade ball, much like the one in Leroux’s novel. He takes his guests through seven rooms, each decorated in a different colour, the final room of which is all in black, with blood-red illumination. When the spooky clock in the room chimes midnight, Prospero and his guests notice someone dressed in a blood red shroud, with a skull for a face. Angry that someone would show up dressed as the very plague he had been hiding from, he corners the man with a dagger but drops dead when the man turns to look at him. When all of his guests then mob the Red Death and force him to remove his mask, there is nothing beneath, for it was the actual plague personified. Their attempts to lock themselves away from him had failed completely. 

(4) This part of the story was really watered down by Lloyd Webber. In his version, the Phantom offers Christine the choice of staying with him or seeing Raoul, whom he had trapped in his Punjab lasso, die. In Leroux’s novel, Raoul and his guide the Persian, a character eliminated from most adaptations except the first, get themselves trapped in Erik’s torture chamber. Christine is a given a choice – signal that she is willing to live with him forever by turning a switch shaped like a scorpion on his mantelpiece, or signal her rejecting him by turning the switch shaped like a grasshopper The grasshopper switch would have detonated a cache of gunpowder beneath the torture chamber large enough to blow up the opera house and much of the surrounding section of Paris.

Man and Machine: Part Three

They Have Brains, and They Think Not; Hearts Have They, and They Feel Not

Their idols are silver and gold, even the work of men's hands.
They have mouths, and speak not: eyes have they, and see not.
They have ears, and hear not: noses have they, and smell not.
They have hands, and handle not; feet have they, and walk not: neither speak they through their throat.
They that make them are like unto them; and so are all such as put their trust in them. (Psalm 115: 4-8,from the Great Bible Psalter in the Book of Common Prayer)

Man began to measure time, by noting the position of the sun in the sky. He improved his time-telling technique with the invention of tools such as sundials and hourglasses. In the Middle Ages he invented a device that would not just assist him in measuring time, but would actually keep track of time for him through its own internal workings. It would, as long as it was maintained properly, operate on its own. This device is the clock. As man’s technology advanced in the Modern Age, he developed more machines that could be turned on and would then proceed to do what they were designed to do with little-to-no further input from man. Their function is built into them and, apart from a breakdown of some sort, will be fulfilled each time they run.

These machines accomplish their function without thinking about it. Rational thought is still a property of living human beings, and not of machines. Future situations where this is no longer the case is one of the staples of the dystopic side of the science fiction genre. Usually, the scenario involves the machine gaining sentience and turning against its maker. Since science fiction is a pop culture expression of the modern spirit, the spirit of the age in which man turns his back on his Creator and attempts through his conquest of nature to build a new world in accordance with the values he has chosen, it is fitting that it would express such fears that man’s creation would in turn do the same, much as the Titan king Saturn in ancient mythology feared that his son would rise up to depose him, the way he had deposed his father Uranus. Perhaps the first example of the expression of this fear is Mary Shelley’s early nineteenth century science-horror novel Frankenstein, although it is not a machine, but life in a monstrous creature, that Dr. Victor Frankenstein creates. The idea of robots with artificial intelligence, rebelling against mankind was such a popular theme in early robot fiction, that Isaac Asimov deliberately set out to do the opposite, to depict robots incapable of turning against a mankind and the popular fear of the robotic as irrational. Probably the best known example of the sci-fi meme of machines that turn against man is to be found in director James Cameron’s 1984 film The Terminator and its various sequels and spinoffs. This film depicted an assassin cyborg, sent back in time from a future where a military computer system Skynet had gained consciousness and declared war on humanity.

A scenario in which machines gain consciousness and turn against their creators is not the only way in which a future different from the present status quo of thinking human beings and unthinking machines can be depicted. The other alternative is to present a future in which mankind has lost the capacity for rational thought. To a limited extent, this scenario is used in stories which depict a general populace that is oppressed by being prevented from perceiving the world as it is, whether through the brainwashing of a police state as in George Orwell’s 1984, or living out their lives in a simulated reality generated by now dominant machines, as in the Wachowski Brothers’ popular The Matrix trilogy. This scenario is more fully utilized by Pixar Studio’s 2008 computer animated film WALL-E, in which, the earth having become a giant garbage dump, mankind has gone on an interstellar cruise, leaving robots such as the title character to clean up his mess. The cruise spaceships take care of all their passengers needs and schedule their daily routine so that they live out their lives in a kind of pleasure-induced trance.

Fanciful, as the scenarios depicted in these works of fiction are, the ideas contained in their general themes, the idea of machinery taking over the world and the idea of man himself becoming more like an unthinking, unfeeling machine, are worth reflecting upon. Do these represent valid concerns about the direction in which modern technology is taking us?

The question is a legitimate one. Originally tools were invented by man to assist him in doing his work, to lighten his load. In the Modern Age man began to develop machines that would not so much assist him as do his work for him. Initially, the work machines were invented to take over from men was mostly physical labour. As far back as the Renaissance, however, Blaise Pascal had invented a functioning calculator that could perform simple arithmetic. In the twentieth century, this branch of technology, that of machines that do mathematics, solve problems, and otherwise take over tasks for which man used his brain instead of his hands, really took off. Computers began as large machines, used for military purposes and by scientists for calculation in their research, but within decades of their invention smaller, personal models for use in the home were invented, and by the end of the century portable “laptop” models were available. As the size of computers shrank, the number of functions they could perform increased, and in the last few decades computer technology has been incorporated into all other kinds of technology and into every aspect of our lives. Telephone communication is now mostly done through small, mobile, telephones with built-in computer functions allowing access to the internet and all sorts of other functions. Automobiles now have built-in computers that remind you of things you may have forgotten, that inform you when your car needs maintenance, that help mechanics diagnose problems, and which in some cases help you plan your route and even park your car for you. Everything from agriculture to medicine is computerized these days.

The incorporation of the computer into so many different aspects of our lives has inevitably and radically altered the way we live them and the societies in which we live them. While these changes have enriched our lives in many ways, there are also many ways in which they are cause for concern. The more we build machines to do our work for us, the more we become dependent upon those machines. The more dependent upon machines we are, the more serious is the difficulty we will find ourselves in if those machines break down or if for some other reason they are not available to us and we must again do the work for ourselves. This is a danger that gets progressively worse because the more collectively dependent upon machines we become, the less likely we are to pass on to future generations the skills and know how necessary to do the tasks that machines do for us. When we start to rely upon machines to do tasks that are part of rational thought, like making calculations, solving logical problems, or even making decisions, we run the risk of allowing our very thought processes to atrophy. If you doubt that is the case, then observe what happens at the till of a coffee shop or grocery store when the computer system crashes and the person behind the till is required to calculate your change manually.

If through the development of robotic and computer technology which performs an ever increasing number of man’s mental tasks for him man is creating machinery after his own image, the surrender of these tasks to the machine and allowing of our own mental powers to atrophy would seem to be making man ever more like a machine. This is not the only way in which this is true. As we develop our technology through modern science, we increasingly organize our societies according to the principles of technology, and human existence becomes more and more mechanical.

As Jacques Ellul put it about sixty years ago “No social, human, or spiritual fact is so important as the fact of technique in the modern world.” (1) While Ellul meant something more than just the mechanical by “technique” – he meant every application of reason towards the goal of efficiency – the mechanical is certainly included and in explaining why technique is more than machine, he wrote “the machine is the most obvious, massive, and impressive example of technique, and historically the first…Technique certainly began with the machine. It is quite true that all the rest developed out of mechanics; it is quite true also that without the machine the world of technique would not exist.” (2) As a principle of social organization, the technical is radically different from anything that had preceded it. It meant that all of society would now be directed, not towards a vision of the Good, such as that represented in the culture of the countryside and organic community or that represented in the laws and civilization of the city, but towards maximum efficiency to be achieved by knowledge and reason harnessed in the service of the will to dominate.

If technique became the primary principle of social organization in a kind of technical revolution and if technique began with the machine which remains the most impressive example of technique, it follows that a society completely touched by and organized by technique could to some degree or another be described as mechanical. Owen Barfield, in a book we will shortly take a closer look at, said of the machine “The whole point of a machine is, that, for as long as it goes on moving, it ‘goes on by itself’ without mans’ participation.” (3) While obviously a human society in which man does not participate is a contradiction in terms, when Barfield says that a machine moves without man’s participation he is speaking of man as someone external to the machine. The men in a society that has become mechanical are not analogous to the man who owns a clock but to the gears and cogs within it. In saying that a society has become mechanical we are saying that the society has been organized so that to a certain degree the motion within it men within it, including that of the men who live within it, has become automatic, determined by routines and patterns established by planners with technical efficiency as their end. That human activity ought to be in harmony with the natural rhythms of life, which are instead interrupted and trampled upon by technical efficiency is a theme that runs throughout the writings of poet, novelist, essayist and farmer Wendell Berry. Surely the best word to describe activity that is out of sync with life and driven by ends to which such harmony is irrelevant, is mechanical.

That the more man becomes dependent upon the machine the more like the machine he becomes himself and that the more dependent upon technology human society becomes the more mechanical it becomes itself is something that was predictable long before the modern experiment. The basis of the prediction is right there in the eighth verse of the one hundred and fifteenth Psalm quoted in the epigram to this essay. “They that make them [idols] are like unto them; and so are all such as put their trust in them.” Modern man has made idols out of his machines and technology, and having put his trust in these idols, has come to resemble them.

The idols of which the Psalmist wrote, were images made of stone or metal that represented the various deities the pagan nations worshipped. The making and worship of idols was a practice forbidden to the Israelites in the second of the Ten Commandments. The point of the psalmist’s mockery of pagan idolatry is that man-made idols, rather than being the hosts of powerful deities, are just lifeless images. The craftsmen who built them gave them the appearance of having mouths, eyes, ears, noses, hands and feet, but these were merely appearances. The idols were dead stone, dead metal, and by making and putting their faith in them, men became like them, killing their spirits by focusing on these idols the attention and worship due to the true and living God, thus cutting themselves off from the Source of life.

The idols men build today are in one sense more impressive than statues of Chemosh, Ba’al, Moloch, Dagon and Astarte. They are designed to actually do things, from moving goods and people to calculating complex equations. It is not just hands and mouths, modern man has given his idols, but brains and hearts as well, in the computers that direct their functions, and the sources from which the power that keeps the machines in motion circulates. Yet despite this greater resemblance to living beings, it is still just an artificial imitation. To paraphrase the psalmist, they have brains and they think not, hearts have they, and they feel not. Unlike Dr. Frankenstein, modern man has been unable to give life to his creation and in transferring his faith from God to the machines his science has enabled him to build and the techniques his reason has enabled him to devise, he has again broken his connection with the Source of his life, and come to resemble his moving but lifeless creation.

There is another aspect to the idolatry in modern science and technology that is worth contemplation. Earlier I had quoted Owen Barfield’s remark that the point of a machine is that it moves by itself without man’s participation. This remark was made in the context of a paragraph in which Barfield was arguing that the machine is the model by which the modern mind conceives the universe. In the next paragraph he explained that this is not how science itself conceives of nature, but rather the conception that science has created in the minds of ordinary people. This is part of a larger argument that modern man, by confusing his conception of the world with the world as it is in itself, is committing a form of idolatry.

This argument is part of a book entitled Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, which out of all of Barfield’s books is the one most likely to be remembered today. (4) The book begins with a discussion of the Kantian difference between things as they appear and things as they are in themselves. The difference, of course, is that the way things appear always involves the interpretations of our senses and minds. What is called “post-modern” thought has taken this difference and run with it in a most unhealthy direction, but the argument Barfield made is very different. Noting that the appearances involve a collective interpretation – whether an individual perceives things correctly or wrongly is generally judged by holding his interpretation up to the standard of the collective perception – Barfield argued against the positivist belief that ancient man and modern man live in the same world but that modern man’s perception, understanding, and explanation of that world is better, more in line with the world as it actually is, than the ancients. Instead, he argued, it would be more accurate to say that ancient and modern man do not live in the same world, because the world they live in is the ever changing world of appearances. Man’s role in generating this world of appearances, he called participation, and the way man participates in the world of appearances and even his recognition of his own participation, changes with his thoughts through time. In earlier eras man recognized that the world they saw, was something in which they participated themselves, as did the unseen that lay beyond the appearances. In the modern, scientific era, recognition of man’s participation has been pushed back to a second and even third degree of awareness, whereas recognition of the reality of anything beyond the appearances other than that which appears in scientific hypotheses is mostly absent.

The difference between the ancient and the modern perception of the world is not, Barfield therefore argued, that primitive man sought the same kind of understanding that modern science seeks but through a less developed mythology that “peopled the world” with spirits. Rather the modern perception has come about through a change in thought about the nature and purpose of science.

Plato, Barfield reminded us, recognized three levels of knowledge – the first and lowest being sensory observation, the third and highest being intellectual perception of the divine ideas, with geometry or mathematics as the intermediate level. What we call science today corresponds with the second level. The purpose of scientific hypotheses was to “save the appearances” (5), i.e., to provide a working explanation of what is observed in the first level of knowledge. This working explanation was understood to be man’s own creation and not to be confused with the truth, or the world as it is.

This understanding has largely been lost. The knowledge obtainable by science, Barfield explains by analogy, is “dashboard knowledge” rather than “engine knowledge”, i.e., a knowledge of how to drive a car rather than knowledge of its internal workings. (6) Sir Francis Bacon understood this when he declared knowledge to be power. There may still be an understanding of this among scientists themselves. Plato and Aristotle, however, believed that a knowledge of truth, of the permanent, unchanging, reality beyond the world of appearances was also accessible to man and with the evaporation of this belief, the idea that scientific hypotheses themselves can explain the reality beyond the appearances became the vogue among scientists and among the general public this became the idea that the explanations of scientific hypotheses are the reality beyond appearances. Since scientific hypotheses are themselves part of the world of appearances, the confusion of scientific hypotheses with the world as it is, the idea that nothing other than scientific explanations lie beyond the appearances, is a form of idolatry, Barfield reasoned, because it is an attribution of ultimate reality to what is merely an image.

On a somewhat similar note Simone Weil wrote:

Idolatry comes from the fact that, while thirsting for absolute good, we do not possess the power of supernatural attention and we have not the patience to allow it to develop. Lacking idols, it often happens that we have to labour every day, or nearly every day, in the void. We cannot do so without supernatural bread. Idolatry is thus a vital necessity in the cave. Even with the best of us it is inevitable that it should set narrow limits for mind and heart. (7)

The cave she refers to is Plato’s, i.e., Plato’s allegory illustrating the difference between the realm of appearances as opposed to the realm of true Forms. Those who see only things as they appear in the physical realm, Plato said, were like prisoners chained in a cave, who see nothing but shadows cast from a fire behind them upon a wall, and mistake that for reality. Surely nobody in the history of the world could be better described as “in the cave” than modern man who in his positivism has rejected the metaphysical and theological, and sees nothing beyond the appearances than the scientific explanations he devises for them, who mistakes what Barfield’s most famous student and friend, borrowing from the same Platonic allegory, called “the Shadowlands” for the ultimate reality.

If we consider this alongside what we have already discussed about modern man’s having made idols out of his machines it would appear that modern man is engaged in multiple, related, layers of idolatry. First he made idols out his images of the world and his scientific explanations of them, then, with the power over nature his science obtained for him, he created machines, to do his will and to do his work for him, upon which he became dependent and in which he placed his faith, turning his machines into idols too.

The more man’s technology advances, the more of an idol he makes it. The more of a technolator he becomes, the more mechanical his life and society becomes, and the more he begins to resemble his own soulless, lifeless, creations.


(1) Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), p. 3. This is a translation by John Wilkinson of La Technique ou l’enjeu du siècle, completed in 1950 and published in Paris by Librairie Armand Colin in 1954.

(2) Ibid.

(3) Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (New York and London: Hartcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957, 1965), p. 51.

(4) Barfield himself is probably more likely to be remembered today for his association with C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams than for his own writings.

(5) This phrase, translating the Greek sozein ta phainomena (σῴζειν τὰ φαινόμενα), was borrowed by Barfield from the commentary by Simplicius of Cilicia on Aristotle. It is more frequently rendered “saving the phenomena”. Barfield preferred the translation appearances because the transliteration phenomena has taken on weaker connotations.

(6) Barfield, p. 55.

(7) Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1952), p. 109, a translation by Arthur Wills of La Pesanteur et la grâce, first published in Paris by Librairie Plon in 1947. Weil died in 1943. This book is not something she wrote for publication, but was posthumously compiled from her notebooks by her friend Gustave Thibon.