"If you own a machine, you are in turn owned by it, and spend your time serving it..."

(Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Forbidden Tower)

--| THE NATURE OF TECHNOLOGY |----------------
--| Rudolf Steiner, 1914 |--------------------------------------

Let us start by looking quite superficially at what happens in modern
technology. In the first place this is just work carried out in two
stages. The first consists of destroying the interrelationships of
nature: we blast out quarries and take the stone away, maltreat the
forests and take the wood away, and the list could go on- in short, we
get our raw materials in the first instance by smashing and breaking
down the interrelationships in nature. And the second stage consists of
taking what we have extracted from nature and putting it together again
as a machine, according to the laws we know as natural laws. These are
the two stages, if we look at the matter on the surface.

Looking at it from the inside, the matter is like this: When we take
things from nature, mineral nature to begin with, this is linked with a
certain feeling of well-being belonging to the elemental spiritual
beings that are within it. This, however, does not concern us so much
now. What is important here is that we cast out of nature the elemental
spirits holding nature together, who belong to the sphere of the regular
progressive hierarchies. In all natural existence there are elemental
spiritual beings. When we plunder nature we squeeze out the nature
spirits into the spheres of the spirit, and thus release these nature
spirits, driving them from the sphere allotted them by the Jehovah gods
into a realm where they can flit about freely and are no longer bound to
their allotted dwelling places. Thus we can call the first stage the
casting out of the nature spirits.

The second stage is one where we put together what we have plundered
from nature according to our knowledge of natural laws. Now when we
construct a machine or complex of machines out of raw material, we put
certain spiritual beings into the things we construct. The structure we
make is by no means spiritless. We make a habitation for other spiritual
beings, but these beings that we conjure into our machines belong to the
Ahrimanic hierarchy. This means that by living in this technological
milieu of modern times, we create an Ahrimanic setting for everything
that goes on in us in a sleeping state, by night or day. So it is no
wonder that a person at the first stages of initiation, bringing back
into his waking life all that he has experienced outside in the way of
noise and confusion, feels its destructive character. For he is bringing
back into his organism the results of having been in the company of
Ahrimanic spirits. Thus we could say that at the third stage, at the
cultural level, we have technology around us, stuffed full of Ahrimanic
spirits which we have put there. This is what things look like from
inside...

Only by penetrating into the depths of his own being will man find the
connection with the divine spiritual beings who are beneficial and
healing for him. This living connection in spirit, for which we were
actually born, is made difficult to the highest degree by the increasing
saturation of the world by modern technology. Man is being torn away, as
it were, from his spiritual-cosmic connections, and the forces he should
be developing within him to maintain his link with the spiritual-soul
being of the cosmos are being weakened.

A person who has already taken the first steps in initiation therefore
notices how the mechanical things of life penetrate his spiritual-soul
nature to such an extent that much of it is deadened and destroyed,
making it particularly diffficult for him really to develop those inner
forces which unite him with the 'rightful' spiritual beings of the
hierarchies. When such a person tries to meditate in a train or on board
ship, he notices the Ahrimanic world filling him with the kind of thing
that opposes his devotion, and the struggle is enormous. You could call
it an inner struggle experienced in the etheric body, which wears you
out and crushes you. Other people also of course go through this
struggle, the only difference is that the student of initiation
experiences it consciously.

It would be the worst possible mistake to say that we should resist what
technology has brought into modern life, that we should protect
ourselves from Ahriman, even cut ourselves off from modern life. In a
certain sense this would be spiritual cowardice. The real remedy is to
make the forces of the soul strong so that they can stand up to modern
life. A courageous approach is necessitated by world karma, and that is
why true spiritual science requires a really hard effort of soul. You so
often hear people saying 'These books of spiritual science are
difficult; they make you exert yourself in order to develop your soul
forces so as really to penetrate into spiritual science'. They want to
smooth out diffcult passages into something as trivial as can be.
However it belongs to the essence of spiritual science that you do not
accept spiritual-scientific truths lightly, as it were, for it is not
just a matter of taking it in, but of how you take it in. You should
take it in by dint of effort and soul activity. To make spiritual
science your own you must work at it in the sweat of your soul-please
forgive me for not being very polite. That belongs to the business of
spiritual science.

-- 
From Rudolf Steiner's last published communication:

In the age of natural science, since about the middle of the nineteenth
century, the civilized activities of mankind are gradually sliding
downward, not only into the lowest regions of nature, but even beneath
nature. Technical science and industry become sub-nature.

This makes it urgent for man to find in conscious experience a knowledge
of the spirit, wherein he will rise as high above nature as in his
sub-natural technical activities he sinks beneath her. He will thus
create within him the inner strength not to go under.


--| References |----------------

(Exerpted from: Art as Seen in the Light of Mystery Wisdom,
 Lecture 1, Dornach, December 28, 1914, GA 275).

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this page last updated: april 29, 1999