The Last Act: Rise and End of the Machine Culture

The “Culture” of the armed hand had a long breath and seized the whole genus man. The “Cultures of speech and enterprise” — there are already several, which can be clearly distinguished — these Cultures of the beginning soul-opposition between personality and mass, of the “spirit” become domineering and of the life violated by it, seize now only a part of the man-world, and are today, after a few millennia, all long since extinguished and decomposed. What we call “nature-peoples” and “primitives” are only the remnants of the living material, ruins of one-time soul-filled forms, slag out of which the glow of coming-to-be and passing-away has vanished.

Out of this soil there grow up, since 3000 B.C., here and there, the high Cultures, Cultures in the narrowest and greatest sense, each filling now only a very small space of the earth’s surface and of a duration of scarcely a millennium. It is the tempo of the last catastrophes. Every decade signifies something; almost every single year “has a face.” It is world-history in the most proper, most exacting sense. This group of passionate life-courses has invented, as its symbol and its “world,” the city, over against the village of the preceding stage — the stone city as the housing of the wholly artificial life, severed from the motherly earth, become completely counter-natural; the city of rootless thinking, which draws to itself the streams of life from the land and consumes them.

There arises “society,” with its rank-order of estates — nobles, priests, burghers — over against the “coarse peasantry,” as the artificial gradation of life (the natural one is that into strong and weak, clever and stupid), and as the seat of a completely spiritualized Culture-development. There “luxury” and “wealth” rule. These are concepts that are enviously misunderstood by those who do not belong to them. But luxury is nothing other than Culture in its most exacting form. Think of the Athens of Pericles, the Baghdad of Harun al-Rashid, and the Rococo. This Culture of the cities is through and through luxury, in all strata and callings, the richer and riper the later the times become, through and through artificial, whether it is a question of arts of diplomacy, of conduct of life, of adorning, writing and thinking, or of economic life. Without economic wealth that gathers itself in a few hands, “wealth” too in the plastic arts, in spirit, in noble manners, is impossible, not to speak of the luxury of world-outlooks, of theoretical instead of practical thinking. Economic impoverishment immediately draws after it the spiritual and the artistic. And in this sense the technical procedures too, which ripen in the group of these Cultures, are spiritual luxury, late, sweet, easily wounded fruits of a growing artificiality and spiritualization. They begin with the building of the tomb-pyramids of Egypt and the Sumerian temple-towers of Babylonia, which arise in the third millennium B.C. deep in the south and signify merely the victory over heavy masses, and pass through the enterprises of the Chinese, Indian, Classical, Arabian and Mexican Culture to those of the Faustian in the second millennium A.D. in the high north, which represent the victory over heavy problems of pure technical thinking.

For these Cultures grow up independently of one another, and in a succession that points from south to north. The Faustian, West-European Culture is perhaps not the last, but certainly the mightiest, the most passionate; through its inner opposition between comprehensive spiritualization and deepest soul-disruption, the most tragic of all. It is possible that a faint straggler may yet come, somewhere perhaps in the plain between Vistula and Amur and in the next millennium; but here the struggle between Nature and man, who has risen up against her through his historical existence, has been practically fought to its end.

The northern landscape has forged the breed of men in it, through the heaviness of the life-conditions, the cold, the constant want of life, into hard races, with a spirit sharpened to the utmost, with the cold glow of an unruly passion in fighting, daring, pressing-forward — that which I have called the pathos of the third dimension.¹¹ They are once again genuine beasts of prey, whose soul-force wrestles with the impossibility of breaking the over-power of thinking, of the organized artificial life, over the blood, and of transforming it into a serving, of raising the destiny of the free personality to the meaning of the world. A will-to-power that mocks at all bounds of time and space, that has the boundless, the infinite as its proper goal, subjects to itself whole continents, embraces at last the globe with the forms of its traffic and its news-system, and transforms it through the violence of its practical energy and the monstrousness of its technical procedures.

At the beginning of every high Culture the two prime-estates, nobility and priesthood, form themselves, as the beginnings of “society,” over the peasant life of the flat land.¹² They embody ideas, and indeed ideas that exclude each other. The noble, the warrior, the adventurer lives in the world of facts; the priest, the scholar, the philosopher in his world of truths. The one suffers or is a destiny; the other thinks in causalities. The former wants to set the spirit in the service of a strong life; the latter his life in the service of the spirit. Nowhere has the opposition taken on more irreconcilable forms than in the Faustian Culture, in which the proud blood of the beasts of prey rebels for the last time against the tyranny of pure thinking. From the struggle between the ideas of Empire and Papacy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries down to the struggle between the powers of a noble race-tradition — kingship, nobility, army — and the theories of a plebeian rationalism, liberalism, socialism — from the French to the German Revolution — the decision was sought again and again.

This difference subsists in full magnitude between the Vikings of the blood and the Vikings of the spirit in the rise of the Faustian Culture. The former reach, in an unstillable urge toward infinite distances, from the high north: in 796 Spain, in 859 the interior of Russia, in 861 Iceland and at the same time Morocco, from there Provence and the neighbourhood of Rome, in 865 over Kiev (Kaenugard) the Black Sea and Byzantium, in 880 the Caspian Sea, in 909 Persia. They settle around 900 Normandy and Iceland, around 980 Greenland, discover around 1000 North America. In 1029 they are, from Normandy, in southern Italy and Sicily; in 1034, from Byzantium, in Greece and Asia Minor; in 1066 they conquer, from Normandy, England.

With the same boldness and the same hunger for spiritual power and prey, northern monks of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries press into the world of technical-physical problems. Here is nothing of the deedless idle curiosity of Chinese, Indian, Classical and Arabian scholars. Here there is no speculation with the aim of obtaining a mere “theory,” a picture of what one cannot know. To be sure, every natural-scientific theory is a myth of the understanding about the powers of Nature, and every one is through and through dependent on the religion that belongs to it. But here, and here alone, theory is from the outset a working hypothesis.¹³ A working hypothesis need not be “correct”; it must only be practically usable. It seeks not to unveil the secrets of the world about us, but to make them serviceable to definite ends. Hence the demand for the mathematical method, raised by the Englishmen Grosseteste (born 1175) and Roger Bacon (born about 1210), the Germans Albertus Magnus (born 1193) and Witelo (born 1220). Hence the experiment, Bacon’s scientia experimentalis, the questioning of Nature with the rack, with levers and screws. Experimentum enim solum certificat, as Albertus Magnus wrote. It is the war-cunning of spiritual beasts of prey. They believed that they wanted to “know God,” and yet wanted only to isolate the forces of inorganic Nature, the invisible energy in all that happens, to make it graspable, usable. The Faustian natural science, and this alone, is dynamics, over against the statics of the Greeks and the alchemy of the Arabs. It is not a matter of substances, but of forces. Mass itself is a function of energy. Grosseteste develops a theory of space as a function of light, Petrus Peregrinus a theory of magnetism. In a manuscript of 1322 the Copernican theory of the movement of the earth around the sun is intimated, whereupon fifty years later Nicolaus of Oresme, in De coelo et mundo, grounds this theory more clearly and deeply than Copernicus himself, and in De differentia qualitatum anticipates Galileo’s laws of falling bodies and the coordinate-geometry of Descartes. One no longer beholds in God the Lord who governs the world from his throne, but an infinite, scarcely-still-personally-conceived force that is present everywhere in the world. It was a strange divine service, this experimental investigation of the secret forces by pious monks. And, as an old German mystic said: in serving God, God serves thee.

Men had had enough of contenting themselves with the service of plants, animals and slaves, of robbing Nature of her treasures — the metals, stones, woods, fibre-stuffs, the water in canals and wells — of conquering her resistances through navigation, roads, bridges, tunnels and dikes. She was no longer to be plundered in her substances, but yoked in her forces themselves and made to do slave-service, in order to multiply the strength of man. This monstrous thought, so foreign to all others, is as old as the Faustian Culture. Already in the tenth century we meet with technical constructions of a quite new kind. Already Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus thought about steam-engines, steamships and aircraft. And many brooded in their cloister-cells over the idea of the perpetuum mobile.

This thought never let us go again. That would have been the final victory over God or Nature — deus sive natura: a little self-created world that moves itself, like the great one, out of its own force, and obeys only the finger of man. To build a world oneself, oneself to be God — that was the Faustian inventor’s dream, out of which from then on there proceeded all designs of machines that approached as nearly as possible the unreachable goal of the perpetuum mobile. The concept of the prey of the beast of prey is thought to its end. Not this and that, like the fire that Prometheus stole, but the world itself, with the secret of its force, is dragged off as prey, into the building of this Culture. Whoever was not himself possessed by this will to omnipotence over Nature had to feel it as devilish, and men have always felt and feared the machine as the invention of the Devil. With Roger Bacon begins the long series of those who went to ruin as sorcerers and heretics.

But the history of West-European technics strode forward. Around 1500 there begins, with Vasco da Gama and Columbus, a new series of Viking-voyages. New empires are created or conquered in West and East India, and a stream of men of northern blood pours over to America, where once the Iceland-voyagers had vainly landed. And at the same time the Viking-voyages of the spirit are carried on at a mighty scale. Gunpowder and printing are invented. Since Copernicus and Galileo, countless technical procedures follow upon one another, all of which had the sense of isolating inorganic force from the world-around and letting it perform work in the place of animals and men.

Technics has, with the growing cities, become bourgeois. The successor of those Gothic monks was the worldly-learned inventor, the knowing priest of the machine. With Rationalism, finally, the “faith in technics” becomes almost a materialistic religion: technics is eternal and imperishable like God the Father; it redeems humanity like the Son; it enlightens us like the Holy Ghost. And its worshipper is the progress-philistine of modern times, from La Mettrie to Lenin.

In reality the passion of the inventor has nothing whatever to do with its consequences. It is his personal life-urge, his personal happiness and suffering. He wants for himself the triumph over difficult problems, the wealth and fame that success brings him. Whether his invention is useful or fateful, creating or destroying, that does not trouble him, even if any man were able to know it from the start. But the effect of a “technical achievement of humanity” no one foresees — apart from the fact that “humanity” has never invented anything. Chemical inventions like the synthesis of indigo, and probably in a short time that of artificial rubber, destroy the life-conditions of whole lands; the electrical transmission of force and the opening-up of water-power have devalued the old coal-districts of Europe, together with their population. Have such considerations ever brought an inventor to destroy his work? Then one knows ill the beast-of-prey nature of man. All great inventions and enterprises stem from the joy of strong men in victory. They are the expression of personality and not of the utility-thinking of the masses, who only look on, but have to take the consequences, be they what they may.

And these consequences are monstrous. The little band of born leaders, of entrepreneurs and inventors, forces Nature to perform a work that is measured by millions and billions of horse-powers, beside which the quantum of human bodily strength means nothing any more. One understands the secrets of Nature as little as ever, but one knows the working hypothesis, which is not “true” but only suitable, with whose help one forces her to obey the human command, the slightest pressure on a button or lever. The tempo of inventions grows into the fantastic, and nevertheless — it must be said again and again — nothing of human labour is thereby spared. The number of necessary hands grows with the number of machines, because the technical luxury heightens every other kind of luxury,¹⁴ and because the artificial life becomes ever more artificial.

Since the invention of the machine, the most cunning of all weapons against Nature that is at all possible, entrepreneurs and inventors have applied the number of hands they require essentially to its making. The work of the machine is performed by inorganic force, the tension-force of steam or gas, of electricity and of heat, which are freed out of or through coal, petroleum and water. But with that the soul-tension between leaders and led has dangerously grown. One no longer understands the other. The earliest “enterprises” of the pre-Christian millennia demanded the understanding collaboration of all who knew and felt what was at stake. There was a kind of comradeship in it, as today on the battue and in sport. Already at the great buildings in early Egypt and Babylonia this can no longer have been the case. The single worker grasped neither the goal nor the purpose of the whole procedure. They were, moreover, indifferent to him, perhaps hateful. “Work” was a curse, as the Paradise-tale at the beginning of the Bible presents it. But now, since the eighteenth century, the countless “hands” work at things of whose actual role in life, even in their own, they know nothing any more, and in whose success they take no inner part at all. A soul-desolation spreads, a comfortless uniformity without heights and depths, which awakens bitterness — against the life of the gifted, who are born creative. One will not see it, one no longer understands it, that leader-work is the harder work, that one’s own life depends on its success. One feels only that this work makes happy, that it gives wings to the soul and enriches it, and therefore one hates it.

But in fact neither the heads nor the hands are able to alter anything in the destiny of machine-technics, which has developed out of an inner, soul-like necessity and now ripens toward fulfilment, toward the end. We stand today on the summit, there where the fifth act begins. The last decisions fall. The tragedy closes.

Every high Culture is a tragedy; the history of man as a whole is tragic. But the sacrilege and the fall of the Faustian man is greater than anything that Aeschylus and Shakespeare ever beheld. The creation rises up against the creator: as once the microcosm man against Nature, so now the microcosm machine rebels against the northern man. The lord of the world becomes the slave of the machine. It forces him, us, and indeed all without exception, whether we know and will it or not, into the direction of its course. The fallen victor is dragged to death by the racing team.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the “world” on this little planet looks thus: a group of nations of northern blood, under the leadership of Englishmen, Germans, Frenchmen and Yankees, masters the situation. Their political power rests on their wealth, and their wealth consists in the strength of their industry. But this is bound to the existence of coal. The situation of the opened coal-districts secures above all to the Germanic peoples almost the monopoly, and leads to an increase of population that is without example in all history. On the back of coal, and at the nodal points of the traffic-ways radiating from it, there gathers a man-mass of monstrous extent, which is bred by machine-technics, works for it and lives by it. The remaining peoples are kept, whether in the form of colonies or as apparently independent States, in the role of raw-material-producers and purchasers. This distribution is secured by armies and fleets, whose upkeep presupposes the wealth of industrial lands, and which, in consequence of their technical training, have themselves become machines and “work” at the press of a finger. Again there shows itself the deep kinship, indeed almost identity, of politics, war and economic life. The degree of military power is dependent on the rank of industry. Lands poor in industry are poor altogether; they can therefore pay for no army and no war; they are therefore politically powerless; and therefore the workers in them, leaders as well as led, are objects of the economic policy of their opponents.

Over against the masses of executing hands, which the grudging “glance of the small” alone sees, the rising worth of the leader-work of fewer creative heads — the entrepreneurs, organizers, inventors, engineers — is no longer grasped and valued,¹⁵ most of all still in practical America, least of all in the Germany of “poets and thinkers.” The silly sentence “All wheels stand still when your strong arm wills it” befogs the brains of chatterers and scribblers. That a billy-goat too can do, getting into the gears. But to invent these wheels and to keep them employed, so that that “strong arm” can feed itself — that only a few can do, who are born to it.

These misunderstood and hated ones, the pack of strong personalities, have another psychology. They still know the triumph-feeling of the beast of prey that holds the twitching prey under its claws, the feeling of Columbus when the land appeared on the horizon, the feeling of Moltke at Sedan when, in the afternoon, from the height of Frénois, he observed how the ring of his artillery closed at Illy and so completed the victory. Such moments, the summit of what a man can experience, are those in which a great ship leaves the slipway before the eyes of its builder, a newly invented machine begins to work faultlessly, or the first Zeppelin rose from the ground.

But it belongs to the tragedy of this age that the unfettered human thinking is no longer able to grasp its own consequences. Technics has become esoteric, like the higher mathematics it makes use of, like the physical theory which, in its thinking-to-pieces of the abstractions of appearance, has pressed forward to the pure ground-forms of human knowing, without rightly remarking it.¹⁵ The mechanization of the world has entered upon a stage of most dangerous over-tension. The picture of the earth, with its plants, animals and men, has altered. In a few decades most of the great forests have vanished, been turned into newspaper, and with that there have entered alterations of climate that threaten the agriculture of whole populations; countless animal-species, like the buffalo, have been wholly or almost wholly exterminated; whole races of men, like the North American Indians and the Australians, have been brought almost to vanishing.

Everything organic succumbs to the encroaching organization. An artificial world penetrates and poisons the natural. Civilization has itself become a machine that does, or wants to do, everything machine-wise. One thinks now only in horse-powers. One no longer beholds a waterfall without transposing it in thought into electrical force. One sees no land full of grazing herds without thinking of the exploitation of their meat-stock, no beautiful old handicraft of a native population without the wish to replace it by a modern technical procedure. Whether it has a meaning or not, the technical thinking wills realization. The luxury of the machine is the consequence of a compulsion to think. The machine is, in the last analysis, a symbol, like its secret ideal, the perpetuum mobile, a soul-spiritual but no vital necessity.

It begins in many ways to contradict economic practice. The disintegration announces itself already on all sides. The machine, by its number and its refinement, in the end cancels its own purpose. The automobile has, in the great cities, through its mass-character, deprived itself of its effect, and one gets forward faster on foot. In Argentina, Java and elsewhere the simple horse-plough of the small holders proves itself economically superior to the great motors, and drives them out again. Already, in many tropical regions, the coloured peasant with his primitive way of working has become a dangerous competitor of the modern technical plantation-enterprise of the whites. And the white industrial worker in old Europe and North America begins to become questionable with his work.

It is folly, as was the fashion in the nineteenth century, to speak of the threatening exhaustion of the coal-deposits in a few centuries and its consequences. That too was materialistically thought. Apart from the fact that already today petroleum and water-power are drawn in as inorganic force-reserves of the greatest extent, technical thinking would very soon discover and open up still quite other sources. But it is not at all a question of such spans of time. The West-European-American technics will be at its end earlier. No flat circumstance like the want of substances would be able to hold up this mighty development. So long as the thought working in it is at its height, it will always know how to create the means to its ends.

But how long will it be at its height? In order even merely to keep the present stock of technical procedures and installations at the same level, there are necessary, let us say, 100,000 outstanding heads, organizers, inventors and engineers. They must be strong, even creative gifts, enthusiastic for their cause and trained to it through years with iron diligence and at great cost. In fact, for fifty years the most strong gifts among the youth of the white peoples have felt a predominant inclination precisely for this calling. The boys already played with technical things. In the urban strata and families whose sons here chiefly come into account, there were present prosperity, a tradition of spiritual callings and a refined Culture — the normal presuppositions for the training of this ripe and late product, technical thinking.

That turns, for decades now, ever more clearly, in all lands with a great and old industry. The Faustian thinking begins to grow sick of technics. A weariness spreads, a kind of pacifism in the struggle against Nature. One turns to simpler, more Nature-near forms of life; one drives sport instead of technical experiments; one hates the great cities; one would be out of the compulsion of soulless activities, out of the slavery of the machine, out of the clear and cold atmosphere of technical organization. Precisely the strong and creative gifts turn away from practical problems and sciences and toward pure speculation. Occultism and spiritism, Indian philosophies, metaphysical broodings of Christian or pagan colouring, which one despised at the time of Darwinism, emerge again. It is the mood of Rome at the time of Augustus. Out of life-weariness one flees out of Civilization into more primitive continents, into vagabondage, into suicide. The flight of the born leaders from the machine begins. Soon only talents of the second rank, stragglers of a great age, will be available. Every great entrepreneur establishes the decline of the spiritual qualities of the rising generation. But the grandiose technical development of the nineteenth century had been possible only on the ground of the constantly rising spiritual level. Not the decline alone — already the standstill is dangerous and points to an end, however many well-schooled hands may yet be ready for the work.

But how stands it with that? The tension between leader-work and executing work has reached the degree of a catastrophe. The significance of the former, and the economic worth of every genuine personality in it, has become so great that it is no longer visible and comprehensible to most from below. In the other, the work of the hands, the individual is now quite without significance. Only the number still has worth. The knowledge of this unalterable situation, which is irritated, poisoned and financially exploited by egoistic orators and writers, is so comfortless that a rising-up against the role which the machine — not its owner — assigns to most is human enough. There begins, in countless forms, from assassination through the strike to suicide, the mutiny of the hands against their destiny, against the machine, against the organized life, in the end against everything and everyone. The organization of work, as it lies for millennia in the concept of the doing-in-numbers, and which has the difference of leaders and led, of heads and hands, as its foundation, is dissolved from below. But “mass” is only a negation — namely, of the concept of organization — nothing that would be capable of life for itself. An army without officers is only a superfluous and lost human heap. A tangle of brick-rubble and iron-fragments is no longer a building. This mutiny round about the earth threatens to cancel the very possibility of technical-economic work. The leaders can flee, but the led, become superfluous, are lost. Their number means their death.

But the third and heaviest symptom of the beginning collapse lies in what I should like to call the betrayal of technics. It is a question of things that everyone knows, but which are never seen in the connection that first reveals their fateful meaning. The monstrous superiority of West Europe and North America in the latter half of the last century, in power of every kind — economic, political, military, financial power — rests on an undisputed monopoly of industry. Great industries there were only in connection with coal-deposits in these northern lands. The rest of the world was a sales-territory, and colonial policy worked always in the direction of opening up new sales- and raw-material-, not production-territories. Coal there was elsewhere too, but only the “white” engineer could have opened it up. We were in sole possession not of the substances, but of the methods and of the brains schooled to their application. On this rests the luxurious standard of living of the white worker, who, compared with the coloured, possesses princely incomes — a circumstance that Marxism, to its undoing, has suppressed. That avenges itself today, when from here the problem of unemployment is thrown into the development. The wage of the white worker, today a danger to his life, rests in its height exclusively on the monopoly that the leaders of industry had set up around him.

Then, at the end of the century, the blind will-to-power begins to commit decisive errors. Instead of keeping the technical knowledge secret — the greatest treasure the “white” peoples possessed — it was, in all the colleges, in word and writing, boastfully offered to all the world, and one was proud of the admiration of Indians and Japanese. The well-known “industrial dispersion” sets in, also out of the consideration that one must bring the production nearer to the purchaser in order to attain greater profits. There begins, instead of the export exclusively of products, the export of secrets, of procedures, methods, engineers and organizers. Even inventors emigrate. Socialism, which would yoke them, drives them out. All the “coloured” peoples looked into the secret of our strength, grasped it and used it. The Japanese became within thirty years technical experts of the first rank, and proved in the war against Russia a war-technical superiority from which their teachers could learn. Today, on all sides — in East Asia, India, South America, South Africa — industrial regions have arisen or are in formation which, in consequence of their low wages, represent a deadly competition. The irreplaceable prerogatives of the white peoples have been squandered, frittered away, betrayed. The opponents have reached their models, perhaps surpassed them with the cunning of coloured races and the over-ripe intelligence of age-old Civilizations. Where there is coal, petroleum and water-power, a new weapon can be forged against the heart of the Faustian Culture. Here begins the revenge of the exploited world against its lords. With the countless hands of the coloured, who work just as skilfully and far more modestly, the foundation of the white economic organization is shaken. The accustomed luxury of the white worker, over against the coolie, becomes his doom. The white work itself becomes superfluous. The mighty masses on the northern coal, the industrial installations, the invested capital, whole cities and stretches of land threaten to succumb to the competition. The centre of gravity of production shifts unstoppably, now that the World-War has also made an end of the coloured man’s respect for the white. That is the last ground of the unemployment in the white lands, which is no crisis, but the beginning of a catastrophe.

For the coloured, however — the Russians are here always included — the Faustian technics is no inner need. Only the Faustian man thinks, feels and lives in its form. It is for him a soul-necessity — not its economic consequences, but its victories: navigare necesse est, vivere non est necesse. For the “coloured” it is only a weapon in the struggle against the Faustian Civilization, a weapon like a tree-branch in the forest, which one throws away when it has served its purpose. This machine-technics is at its end with the Faustian man, and will one day be smashed to pieces and forgotten — railways and steamships as much as once the Roman roads and the Chinese Wall, our giant cities with their skyscrapers as much as the palaces of old Memphis and Babylon. The history of this technics nears swiftly its inescapable end. It will be consumed from within, like all the great forms of any Culture. When and in what manner, we do not know.

In the face of this destiny there is only one world-outlook worthy of us, the already-named one of Achilles: better a short life full of deeds and fame than a long one without content. The danger has become so great, for every individual, every stratum, every people, that it is pitiable to lie something to oneself. Time cannot be held back; there is no wise turning-back, no clever renunciation. Only dreamers believe in ways-out. Optimism is cowardice.

We are born into this time and must bravely walk to the end the road that is destined for us. There is no other. To hold out at the lost post, without hope, without rescue, is duty. To hold out like that Roman soldier whose bones were found before a gate of Pompeii, who died because, at the eruption of Vesuvius, they had forgotten to relieve him. That is greatness, that is to have race. This honourable end is the one thing that cannot be taken from man.