Gabriel Marcel and Overcoming Technocracy

 
Gabriel Marcel and Overcoing Technocracy

by

Rev. David A. Fisher

 
Introduction

Gabriel Marcel was born in Paris on the seventh of December, 1889 and died in Paris, France in 1973.  His father was a French diplomat and therefore Marcel traveled throughout most of Europe during his youth. thus giving him the use of other languages  which would be important in his later life.  

His childhood because of his father and stepmother was void of any immediate role models of faith.  “The agnostic atmosphere in which he grew up, however, was not a happy one for this extremely sensitive and very intellectual boy.” In 1929 Marcel converted to Catholicism after first rejecting an inquiry into the Protestant belief.  His embracing of the Catholic Faith would from then onward influence his work and his positive attitude toward the potential of the human person.

 
 He himself calls his philosophy neo-Socratism.  Just as Socrates in Athens would start a conversation in order to help a person discover some truth already present in his own consciousness, Marcel, likewise, tries by his work to come into discussion with us and to throw a new clarifying light on our existential experiences.  He is present in his philosophy as a person in when we cannot recognize and understand ourselves and the events that take place around us.

 
His thought is not systematic but is rather a presentation of lived experience and therefore scattered at times.  “The beauty of his intellect, his veracity and his lack of frivolity are well known.  A religious man dominated by respect for reality, he makes a worthy and profound use of his intellectual gifts.” He uses this gifts to study existence while at the same time rejecting the label of Existentialist or Christian Existentialist.

Marcel begins from the existential fulcrum, a viewpoint which is the human person. The human person has a body and this body links him or her to the world, (The Mystery of Being).  Therefore the human person is incarnate, present and in participation with the world and with other humans and with the sacred.  This is the human persons ‘being-in-the-world’. It should be noted that this term associated with Martin Heidegger was probably used by Marcel before Heidegger’s use of it.  

 
Being is the site of fidelity, who signifies an enormous compromise and hope as an infallible credit; these ideas, along with faith in personal immortality, are closely linked with love, and are admirably expressed in a 

line spoken by one of Marcel’s characters:  “You whom I love, you shall not die.”

 
It should be mentioned that Marcel’s ontology has implications for theology. First of all his description of the world today in which we live and the possibilities of self-destruction that the world holds, are a challenge also to theology and the mission of the Church in the modern world as a whole.  Where it was once thought that the arms race had come to an end in the late twentieth century.  We find yet a new and more dangerous one perhaps in the twenty-first century, with the ability to weaponize outer space.  

Secondly, his ontology holds possibilities for a theological anthropology and a sacramental theology.  It would be possible to draw many more suggestions than these concerning his thought as an aid and foundation to theology.  

Marcel’s major works, translated from the original French into English are the following: 

The Broken World

The human person is in need, in need of rediscovering the ‘sense of being’.  This need has come about because of the age in which we find ourselves; the age of technocracy, of technology and machine before human beings.

 
Don’t you feel sometimes that we are living…if you you can call it living in a broken world?   Yes, broken like a broken watch.  the main spring has stopped working.  Just to look at it, nothing has changed.  Everything is in place, but put the watch to your ear, and you don’t hear any ticking.  You know what I am talking about, the world, what we call the world, the world of human creatures…it seems to me it must have had a heart at one time, but today you would say the heart had stopped beating.

 
The world of illusion, that resembles a real world that once was, but has stopped ‘being’.  The image of the broken watch is a very clear image of Marcel’s presentation of the modern world; the world is broken because humanity is broken, indeed the world has broken humanity and broken humanity continues to break the created world around it. 

A Unified World?

Marcel points out that we stand on the brink of world suicide.  “Suicide, until our times, was a an individual possibility, ….  It seems now to apply to the case of the whole human race.” How can this be possible in such an advanced and seemingly unified world?  “The world today is, in a sense, at once whole and single in a way which, even quite recently, it was not.” “Yet scientific knowledge has not been able to do anything to change what has come about.”

The context in which we live is one of such rapid growth in technology and a seemingly forward movement toward unity.  Why is it that in this seemingly better world of today we experience such ‘anguish’?  On the exterior one thing is perceived, the movements of unification, better communication, technological advancements, etc., but on the inside of ourselves, in our reflections, in our being something else is perceived, that all is not right, in fact that the world is becoming less and less human and more and more something other than human.  “What is the substance of that anguish? And in the first place, have we any grounds for attributing a general relevance to such personal experience?”

 
There is one preliminary point that must occur to all of us; we live today in a world at war with itself, and this state of world-war is being pushed so far that it runs the risk of ending in something that could properly described as world-suicide.  This is something one cannot be overemphatic about.

 
We see here the first manifestation of the false face of a unified world, that is unified due to technological advancements.  This false unity has brought about the possibility that suicide is no longer a individual reality only, but also could be applied to the world as a whole.  Marcel says so directly, “It is from this very unity and totality that it draws its sinister new power self-destruction.”

It is paradoxical and ironic that this new unity is the catalyst of self-destruction.  Marcel is so important for the theologian and philosopher here, less hero she too be fooled into believing that all is good in this new age of unreal unity.

1) Nostalgia

“A broke world?  Can we really endorse these words?  And are we being the dupes of a myth when we imagine that there was a time when the world has a heart?” Here enters the point of nostalgia so much used by the philosophers of this period of existentialism.  The nostalgic point here, ‘imagine that there was a time,’ opens up the reflection opens up the person to reflect not actually upon the past but on the present.

The point is not that there was a time when things were perfect but that possibly that there was a time when things were more human and above all that we should start to see that they are not right in our technocratic world.  “I will not say the memory of such a united world but at least the nostalgia of it.”

Our nostalgia, our reflections on the reality that something is present here that wan not before leads us to discover the ‘new unity’ and its relations to the ‘new power’.  They are working together to produce not harmony but destruction, they are the ever present forces behind the possibility of world-suicide.  

2) Apathy

 
There is every reason to suppose that the kind of unity which makes the self-destruction of our world possible (and by possible, I mean perfectly conceivable) cannot be other than bad in itself, and it is easy to perceive where the badness lies.  It is linked to the existence of a will to power which occurs under aspects that cannot be reconciled with each other, and which assume opposite ideological characters.

 
This leads us to the point of what shall be called apathy.  The will to power becomes, like a continuous process that eventually, because of its seemingly smooth unified workings becomes a reality which puts everyone into a trance.  The world becomes a world ‘deprived of passion’. On both the part of the workers and the owners, the slaves and the masters, those that have and those that have not, all will have become like passionless machines.  

At this stage humanity becomes lost, nature is lost and the sense of being is lost.  At this stage not only is everything moral but there is no such thing as morality, everything has the same value because there is no value, everything is grey because beauty is gone.  When the objective starting point has gone, which is humanity, there is nothing else to move toward.  Men and women have become machines and a machine has no sense of ‘being-in-the-world’.

The world which I have just been sketching for you, and which is tending to become the world we live in, which is already the world we live in, in so far as that world is exposed to the possibility of self-destruction, rests wholly on an immense refusal, into whose nature we shall have to search much more deeply, but which seems to be above all the refusal to reflect and at the same time the refusal to imagine…”

 
The characteristic of our age is the refusal to reflect and imagine, this refusal keeps the flames of self-destruction going.  It is done out of fear and out of apathy, not reverential fear but the fear of facing the truth and an apathy caused by the technocratic society.  

The Power of the State

We must admit that today the powers of the State, be they in the Developed World of the Developing World, have and exercise a type of power which surpasses anything comparable to it before.  They are the driving forces behind the ‘will to power’ which is encroaching upon every aspect of life.  The powers of the State are linked very closely to this seemingly fast movement toward a false social unification.

 
Each one of us is being treated today more and more as an agent whose behavior ought to contribute towards the progress of a certain social whole, a something rather distinct, rather oppressive, let us even frankly say rather tyrannical.  This presupposes a registration, an enrollment, not once and for all like that of the newborn child in the registrar’s office, but again and again, repeatedly while life lasts.

 
The State in whatever part of the world, demands of the human being total obedience to it and therefore rather than the State being an organ of the community, people become an organ to serve the needs of government and the State.  The person is required over and over again to re-register allegiance in all the various aspects of his or her life.  In submission to the State there becomes no possibility for fidelity, hope, and love, and the sense of true being is lost.

Although Marcel feels that the ‘western democracies’ as we would say, are less of an example of this then the ‘police states,’ the “police dictatorship is merely the extreme limit towards which a bureaucracy that has attained a certain degree of power inevitable tends.” 

The ultimate danger is that the person will identify himself in the end totally with the State and what he is told he ‘is’ by the State shall be the  only identity.

 
This is all exemplified in a book called The Twenty-Fifth Hour (La Vingt-cinquième Heure, Paris 1949) by a young Romanian called C. Virgil Georgiu.  In this extraordinary novel, we see a young man who has been falsely denounced to the Germans by his father-in-law and is sent to a deportation camp as being a Jew; he has no means of proving that he is not a Jew.  He is labeled as such.  Later on, in another camp in Germany he attracts the attention of a prominent Nazi leader, who discovers in him the pure Aryan type; he is taken out of the camp and has to join the S.S..  He is now docketed as ‘Pure Aryan, member of the S.S.’.  He contrives to escape from this other sort of camp with a few French prisoners and joins the Americans; he is at first hailed as a friend, and stuffed wirth rich food; but a few days later he is put into prison; according to his passport, he is a Romanian subject, Romania’s are enemies; ergo…Not the least account is taken of what the young man himself thinks and feels.  This is all simply and fundamentally discounted.  At the end of the book, he has managed to get back to his wife, who has meanwhile been raped by the Russians; there is a child, not his, of course; still, the family hope to enjoy a happy reunion.  Then the curtain rises for the Third World War, and husband, wife, and child are all put into a camp again by the Americans, as belonging to a nation beyond the Iron Curtain.  But the small family group appeals to American sentimentality, and a photograph is taken.  ‘Keep smiling’, in fact, are the last words of this interesting novel, which summarizes graphically almost everything I have tied to explain in this lecture.   

 
From what Marcel has said, we can say something about this those who have little possibility of really ever registering into the State.  There are those who because of race, color, creed, age, gender, politics, unborn or undereducated, etc., who will always remain on the tolerated or often un-tolerated roles of the State.  Maybe however it is the people who cannot register, that will stand out as the symbols of humanity in the world.  

So far e have traced different currents within the ‘broke world’, the world playing with it’s own self-destruction.  We have seen the falseness that it shows in the mask of a unified world.  We have seen that with reflection and nostalgia there is a possibility of seeing that the world was once and could still be something else other than broken.  The unified world has put many people to sleep, many people no longer reflect upon their existence or ‘non-existence’ but have become comings in the greater machine.  We have also seen the growing power of the State, sparked by the global ‘Will to Power’, where ‘might equals right’.  In this powerful State the person is required over and over again to pledge allegiance and give over himself or herself to this prevailing power.

C. Technocratic Society

To uncover the motivating factor behind our broken world we must look no further than the realm of ‘technocracy’.  Technocracy, whose domain has spread from the northern countries of the first industrial revolution, to now its claim of control over all the world.

 
Developing industrial might needs the cast offs, and if they are not available they have to be created, as was the expereince of the Industrial Revolution in Britain which transformed its labour from the land to improvised slums where life lost most of its humanity.   

 
There os a great difference between technology and technocracy.  Technocracy is the result of a type of technological revolution, where technology not longer serves humanity but is served by humanity.  

For Marcel this technocracy was possibly the greatest problem facing the existence of humanity; such that in almost all his writings where he speaks do the brokenness and that pain human life endures today, in tieback of his mind he is seeking of technocracy.  

 
If we are willing to eschew the narrowly religious perspective and recognize the problem in its rightful proportions, it looms as what might week be the most crucial problem facing man today - the believer and non-believer alike.  For in effect it poses the question: What are we to make of ourselves in face of the fact that we are gradually being thoroughly manipulated by a technology that we ourselves have devised?

 
Marcel is quick to point out that we ourselves have devised this technology.  He states it in the form of a question to drive home further the ethical question that if we have made it, we are responsible for its proper use, are we not?  It seems however, that we have not lived up to our responsibility over technology and now it controls us.  We could almost produce a litany of those larger events when this lack of responsibility becomes very clear, where technology rules men and women; and the fear only heightens each day.  

1) Limitations

The following reflections are taken primarily from the book The Decline of Wisdom by Marcel, in which he speaks of the limitations of the society we have just described.  He begins by saying:

 
Industrial civilization: the meaning of the words seems obvious, but I think only because they evoke a set of images and ready - made ideas.  The moment we say ‘industrial civilzation’ we see factories, smoke, slums, suburbs, what have you, and all the common places about mechanization springs into our minds; ‘Mechanization means progress’, or mechanization is a scourge and so on.  But none of it is enough to enable us to form even a preliminary concept. 

 
In the first instance the term civilization has not always been described in the same manner as we describe it now.  Marcel points out that “in the nineteenth century, … the West, fascinated by the progress of science and technics, seized on the idea of civilization as the reward of the fullest development of humanity’s rational faculties.” We have lived in the presupposition that what the Enlightenment classified as civilization is the valid definition.

“It became more evident,…that those whom the civilized had presumptuously labelled savages had their one civilization with its perfectly recognizable structure an cohesion.” Therefore, we see that civilization can be greater than the European Enlightenment definition, to the point where we see that there is not one civilization but many civilizations.  Possibly now it is better to say with a little reflection that there can be many civilizations existing in our one world; but here we must ask ourselves does the technological society allow for that type of plurality?

Marcel of course will answer no to this question, for technocracy to remain in control it cannot allow for plurality or even true humanity.  The ‘technical environment’ is not the natural environment which would allow for such plurality.   

 
The natural environment as such is a climate of presence and sympathy.  In it ‘a life rich in direct understanding, in presence, is combined with the spread of craftsmanship and the beginnings of industry.’

Nothing more different from this could be found than the technical environment which, as such, is artificial and inhuman in the strongest sense, even where everything has been done to improve the material conditions of work.

 
There is still a possibility of recapturing the natural environment within our world, Marcel would say; wherever a sense of brotherhood or sisterhood, or friendship can happen.  Technology will fight this natural bonding of human beings to one another and to the ‘created’ things around them, by employing propaganda.  

The late Carlos Gonzales, s.j. in L’Uomo Nel Mistero Di Dio: LaFilosofia di Gabriel Marcel (Man the Mystery of God: The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel) an unpublished lecture series, gave a brief description of the idea propaganda in Marcel’s thought.  First of all there is the dictator who controls the party or group of private members who use their power to falsify truth.  Secondly, there is the movement which is to take all reason from the individual so that technocracy may manipulate the individual’s conscience and consciousness.  Thirdly, is the criteria, which is not the truth but the relativization of truth and value, so that totally materialism will be the most important value.  Fourthly, this propaganda is totally materialistic, ‘rationalized materialism’ whose total understanding is given to the few ‘illuminated’.  Lastly, education is totally concerned with technology, the spiritual is disqualified and culture is reduced to technical culture. 

This very sophisticated propaganda poses a serious threat to humanity and to nature.  Its goal is to replace religion, humanity, value, nature, with materialism, a false self-gratifying materialism.  Gabriel Marcel saw this during his lifetime as the Communist world clearly creating the deification of the State and in the Western Democracies the deification of Capitalism.  

This propaganda seeks to enter into all the aspects of our lives, so that it may destroy the family, faith (organized and individual) and natural human exchange.  It manipulates the individual away from religion to embrace the pursuit of wealth, the glorification of political power and the will to power.

 
…it is in the nature of techniques to lead the mind into temptation….

My view is that it is invariably bound up with power.  The moment that we are endowed with power of whatever sort we are exposed to the temptation of abusing it.   

 
We fail to exercise control over technology, in fact by the use of propaganda we explain away the reasons why we should.  The next step is to cease to reflect and now with the death of reflection we can see how technocracy is the archetype of the broken world we described earlier.

 
But let us not forget that the activity among all others which can most truly be described as power at one remove is reflection.  And in fact, everything goes to show that in a civilization of this sort the importance of reflection will be minimized if not denied….the idea of a philosophy of reflection is utterly alien, they almost put it aside as a sort of mysticism.

 
Now we begin to see that the greatest limitation of the technological society is that it destroys that which is most apart of ‘being’ by not allowing for humanity to be what it is.  When reflection is taken away then the person very easily loses the sense of being.

For there is no doubt that the technical environment is the poorest possible in life, the furthest possible removed from nature.  While in the natural environment, as Friedmann writes, ‘the whole of human life and in particular the whole life of work is woven through and through by those rhythms which, flowing from generation to generation, have been gradually formed and established in the society to which they so intimately belong’.

 
If this process is allowed to have total control, this technocracy is allowed to permeate everything then those aspects of propaganda as mentioned before will become the lived reality or better put, unreality.  Human beings no longer are masters of nature or their destiny and the participation in life which is a result of reflection and produces brotherhood, sisterhood and true love, all this becomes lost and is no longer possible.

If we have reached a certain conclusion that technocracy destroys the human person, that it does not allow for a sense of being and a sense of communion among humans, then the next logical question which we have hinted at already is where is the sacred and the spiritual in this type of society, in this type of world.

2) Loss of the Sacred

 
To maintain as I do that man is being misled to understand the world and himself in reference to technology, postulates that man is under the impression he can modify the world methodically by his own industry in such a way as to satisfy his needs in a increasingly perfect manner.  Some time ago I called attention to the fact that this kind of thinking gives rise to a genuine anthropocentrism.

 
We could do a rather simple charting of the movement toward anthropocentrism since the dawning of the modern era.  The art of the Renaissance which in many ways changed its focus from the religious to the human, the philosophy of René Descartes, the philosophy of David Hume, skepticism, etc., to the present age of technocracy, where we have humanity gazing endlessly inward upon the self, even be it a false self and its mechanical and technological creations.  Anything that is sacred, holy, spiritual, of God, is relegated to a meaningless question or an absurdity left over from the Middle Ages.  The question of God its never raised in this environment.

In our world today human beings have come to look upon themselves as creator, rather than as an agent of God’s creative power.  This has all been rationally thought out by those who lead the system of technocracy. Marcel gives an example of the widespread use of contraception to back up this point.

 
Doubtless others will think we are foolish. (To attack contraception) After all, as they see it, it means swimming against the inexorable tide of progress.  In other words we are being asked to reject our rather “theocentric” explanation of reproduction and be courageous enough to acknowledge that the reproductive act is no one’s business but man’s.

 
Everything, even men and women lose the sacred, therefore life, human life is to be manipulated as we manipulate our technology.  The technocracy produces a valueless world because the point of departure for value, humanity in relation to the Other is not an option in this world.

 
If we proceed from a completely desacralized, pessimistic view of life we tend to treat life simply as a power we have to control if we are going to minimize its baneful effects. But in effect this pessimistic outlook is a definite component of the technological notion of the world.  It leads us to arrogate to itself the right to manipulate life - simply because it has none of those sacral qualities we discover through a theocentric perspective.  

 
Humanity of course under these circumstances feels its own imperfection, but cannot label it as imperfection because the human person has become the master of his destiny in the wrong sense and also the ruler of the destiny of his or her offspring.  Therefore, since as creator now instead of agent, to react to those imperfections, these weaknesses, humanity must destroy itself (as in abortion and nuclear war) because it cannot live with its imperfections and ambiguity.  

 
I am almost tempted to speak in stock market jargon about a devastating “drop” in the price of life.  Here as anywhere else in business life numbers have an important function.  But the number factor operates in absolute opposition to the sacral.  

 
The world of technocracy is a desacralizing world for if it were not it would lose its sway over humanity.  In it there can be no talk or reflection upon transcendence or holiness.  The technocracy alone wishes to be seen as sacred and by this very posture the sacred is closed out.  

 
All these considerations lead to a single conclusion: in the technical era the sacral can only reveal itself on condition we are converted.  It seems unreasonable to presume the sacral will ever reveal itself all of a sudden in the sweep of development that we constantly have before our eyes.  On the contrary, the development itself is aimed at a general and fundamental rejection of the sacral, nd this to the degree it encourages ever more explicitly a Promethean attitude - with its attendant hubris, or pride. 

 
The way to conversion in its fullest sense is to step out of the desacralized.  We cannot believe that the development of technocracy will make the sacred appear.  Rather, we have seen it runs counter to it.  To recapture the sacred is to be a contemporary saint (to participate in the life of the Holy) to stand apart from the prevailing society in a positive manner and thereby through reflection and participation to be a witness to the sacred.