In this series on Old Books, I’m choosing books with these questions in mind:
What questions do they answer?
What problems do they correctly diagnose?
What wisdom do they provide that is lacking in today’s discourse?
What metaphysics do they propose or expose?
Every book I’m examining may not necessarily answer each of those questions, but they generally raise questions and propose arguments that I think we need to consider today. (At the risk of being cheeky, I’m considering an “old book” to be any one that was written before I was born —or around that time.) For the sake of orientation: I begin with a short introduction to the work, then list a number of important quotes from it, and conclude with my response to the work.
Romano Guardini (1885–1968) lived and worked as a professor of Christian philosophy in Germany. In this series of letters to a friend, written while visiting Lake Como in his homeland, Italy, Guardini explores his intuitive and intellectual sense of the emerging challenges to humanity and culture in an increasingly technocratic world. Keep in mind as you read the following quotes that Guardini wrote this in the early to mid-1920s.
In the first chapters, he attempts to describe a human, organic, and ancient way of life and culture that is in harmony with nature, that is fitted to it and to particular regions, climes, and peoples, and that is human in size, scale, and form. He invites his reader to be present imaginatively where he is, seeing what he sees: the beauty and order of a long and vital culture in its artifacts, tools, architecture, music, and close relationship with nature. Then he abruptly breaks the image with a description of an ugly factory desecrating the scene. He describes the effect on him:
Here was form closer to humanity. Here was nature indwelt by humanity. And now I saw it breaking apart. . . . The world of natural humanity, of nature in which humanity dwells, was perishing. I cannot tell you how sad this made me. It was as though we had found something we knew as a precious life and now we were seeing it go under.
All the way through these letters, Guardini is concerned with a technological mindset that embraces change and technical “progress” without asking key questions, such as “how their construction and use affect humanity as a living totality.”
Quotes from the Book
“…I felt as though a great process of dying had set in around me.”
“I saw machines invading the land that had previously been the home of culture. I saw death overtaking a life of infinite beauty, and I felt that this was not just an external loss that we could accept and remain who we were.”
“I have a plain sense that a world is developing in which human beings . . . can no longer live—a world that is in some way nonhuman.”
“The manifestation of culture has gone, the link with nature has been lost, a totally artificial situation has been created.”
“Everything is becoming impersonal. A strange unreality is coming over human beings and things.”
“We become inwardly devoid of form, proportion, and direction.”
“Everywhere we see true culture vanishing.”
Re: true culture that emerged over organic time: “…all these things had roots. They grew out of the soil, the country, this or that particular country. They grew out of history.”
“Nothing has time to ripen.”
“The objects of consumption are slowly being reduced to a few very practical types, whether it be . . . automobiles, homes, clothes, words, schools, or, finally, people. Yes, people too! Look at the world around you. When the Taylor system is perfected, manufacturing will be able to throw unlimited quantities on the market, and everything that has a personal soul, all individually developed creativity, will basically end.”
“A dreadful confusion of forms has emerged. These forms no longer have roots in life and its essential content.”
“We think we are justified in whatever we do. We are no longer tied to the essence of content or the historical or social dignity of form . . . How vulgar life has become in every sphere. . .”
“How we long for an arcane discipline that will protect what is sacred from the marketplace, including the marketplace within.”
“To me it is as if a terrible machine were crushing our inheritance between the stones. We are becoming poor, very poor.”
“It has often seemed to me that the walls and paths [of the Lake Como region] are simply music. I have felt this in all my members even to the very blood. What is this?”
“This new force is governed by an attitude that no longer feels itself tied by living human unity and its organic compass and that regards as petty and narrow the limitation on which the earlier time found supreme fulfillment, wisdom, beauty, or well-rounded fullness of life.”
“On the older plane the battle for living culture has been lost, and we feel the profound helplessness of those who are old.”
“Our age has been given to us as the soil on which to stand and the task to master.”
“A yearning is there for the inward, for quiet, for leaving the mad rush and refocusing.”
“When we do something it is impossible that the effect should remain outside us. We ourselves, in doing it, come under its backlash. Moreover, if I take possession of something and have it, that thing has me, too.”
“. . . machines spur us to go into areas where personal restraint would forbid us to intrude.”
“. . . [technological] power is impinging on something that ought not to be challenged if the very essence of our humanity is to remain unthreatened.”
“The urge for power and control, the infamous urge to know, and the uncovering of things are going ahead constantly with new instruments and are now coming close to the borders of evil. . . . If they increase, what will such violations mean? The power that ought to liberate us will do the very opposite and rob us of our freedom.”
“What will be the effect of this constant weakening of the natural factor that still remains in human existence?”
My Response
What I love about this book is how Guardini is literally thinking things out on the page; you get the sense that he doesn’t know exactly how to say what he wants to say or where he’ll end up. But he’s following a thread that he senses is vital, not just for his own life, but for all of civilization. His words and questions are prophetic, deep, sorrowful, and wondering. He’s reckoning with profound loss he feels all around him.
Our age’s “advances” come with tremendous costs to our humanity, to our organic relationship with nature, and to real culture and craft (as opposed to mass culture and homogenization). A partial list of some of these costs and losses:
- craft and artifacts that have attended and submitted to nature’s substances and essences and limits (a human-scale environment and culture)
- loss of self-unconsciousness (we’re conscious of everything now; a strange way to live)
- living in accord with reality
- human-to-human understanding
As this Old Books series focuses on books that ask neglected questions, I’m fascinated by the questions that Guardini asks in this book, questions that very few intellectually and spiritually astute thinkers were even beginning to entertain. He was feeling them out, trusting in his own soul’s instinctual reactions to technocracy, but also asking himself if he is missing something. He asks questions he couldn’t then answer.
We’ve neglected these questions and their potential answers for a century. Now they’re being forced on us, especially by the development of A.I.
A sampling of the questions Guardini asks throughout the book:
- Re: how each new machine or technological advancement “frees” us from something that “we previously mastered with the help of our organic intellectual equipment: this means “we have lost a possibility of creating, of experiencing the world, and of self-development. . . . Relative to existence as a whole, is that a gain or a loss?”
- We must not just ask “freedom from what?” We must also ask “freedom for what?”
- “Are the supreme, truly human values in good hands if they are in the hands of [the technocrats]?”
- “Will we be able to absorb emotionally [and I would add, spiritually] our constantly increasing power?”
- “Is our shattered sensibility seeking some justification?
- “Is a life supported by human nature and fully human work possible [anymore]?”
- Re: the need for “the emergence of a new, free, strong, and well-formed humanity . . . that will be a match for those forces” . . . “Is it not fantasy to hope for anything of that kind?”
In these letters, Guardini counts the losses, but he also tries, in the penultimate chapter called “The Task,” to imagine what new and creative possibilities there could be for humanity in a technological age, particularly if humans could find a way to remain masters of technology and not become its slaves. As someone for whom hope is a virtue, he doesn’t want to give in to complete doom and gloom. This is the book’s most tug-of-war chapter, and parts of it felt strange—at odds with the rest of the book. He seems to be trying to convince himself that a new kind of humanity can arise to meet the challenge and somehow stay human. We need “more human technology,” he writes. He challenges us to say “yes” to the challenge of our time. “I know what this yes costs,” he says with conviction.
Ultimately, though, I’m more convinced by his elegies to what he saw was passing away than by his hopes. And I think he was too. Near the end of that “The Task” he writes that we are “homeless in the midst of barbarism.”
We’re now in the time of the apocalypse—the “revealing” of the culmination of what Guardini foresaw and feared.
In his last chapter, he cautions that technocratic values and belief in “progress” have placed a premium on efficiency, practicality, and utilitarian functions, such that “we can no longer pay attention to that other dimension of our existence”: our interior life—indeed, our innermost life.
Who are the writers who are picking up the mantle from Romano Guardini today? I can think of several thinkers who are doing good and deep analysis on several levels—cultural, spiritual, intellectual: Michael Hanby, D. C. Schindler, Felicia Wu Song, Brad East, Talbot Brewer, Antón Barba-Kay, Craig Gay. And these prescient voices from the recent past: Neil Postman, George Parkin Grant, C. S. Lewis, Albert Borgmann.
The voice that just might be our century’s Guardini, though, is Paul Kingsnorth. His writing is similar to Guardini’s in that you can see him exploring, interrogating, intuiting, and naming things that he sees, even before it’s all fully formed. He isn’t afraid to ask questions for which he doesn’t yet have the answers. He refuses to be pigeon-holed and speaks bravely and humbly about what is coming. I am among many who are eagerly (and soberly) awaiting the publication this fall of his book Against the Machine. Its tagline is “How a force that’s hard to name, but which we all feel, is reshaping what it means to be human.”
On a very different line, Freya India is a Gen Z writer who has her finger on the pulse of her generation—but who implicates all of us—and writes searingly about all that’s been lost that her generation will never know. Read her piece, “A Time We Never Knew,” on the After Babel Substack, and check out more of her writing on her GIRLS Substack.
Finally, I highly encourage anyone who shares Guardini’s concerns to read the following three articles on AI, in ascending order of alarm/doomsaying. (You’ve been forewarned.)
“AI Chatbots Are Evil” by Marc Barnes (New Polity)
“Are You Ready for the AI Apocalypse?” by Chris Watkin (The Gospel Coalition; also linked above)
“The AI Doomers Are Getting Doomier” by Matteo Wong (The Atlantic; this one actually turned my stomach)
But let me give the final word to Romano Guardini:
Will we come to God from the depths of our being, link ourselves to him, and in his freedom and power master chaos in this coming age? Will there be people who place themselves totally at God’s disposal and alone with him and before him make the true decisions?