Günther Anders’s Bleak Picture of the Tech-Perfected Society
Some years ago, a friend was invited to a two-day summit of tech bros, religious leaders, and moral philosophers to discuss the impact of modern technology on the nature of humanity. On the first day, the tech bros made their presentations as the religious leaders and philosophers listened. On the second day, it was the turn of the religious leaders and the philosophers to speak. But by that point, the tech bros had all departed. My friend’s conclusion? Those driving the technological revolution of the modern world have no interest in allowing broader religious, moral, or metaphysical considerations to limit or even to shape their projects in any way. They have no idea where they are going, but they are going there full steam ahead.
This incident captures the question humanity now faces: who are we and what will we be ten, twenty, fifty years from now? This is already a world where we can, for example, order food, travel in a taxi, form friendships, and even indulge in sexual relationships without ever having to encounter another human being. In such a world, to use the phrase of the Psalmist, what is man?
In this context, the appearance in English of The Obsolescence of the Human, Günther Anders’s reflection on the role of technology for the human condition in modernity, is most welcome. Anders, perhaps best known in the English-speaking world as the first husband of Hannah Arendt, was an astute thinker in his own right. The essays collected here cover themes from nuclear weapons to women’s makeup to Waiting for Godot.
Writing in the 1950s, Anders’s major concern was the rise of nuclear weapons. Such weapons raised for the first time in history the existential possibility of humanity’s complete self-destruction. After Hiroshima, humanity was faced with a novel existential decision: whether to continue as a species. The advent of the atom bomb changed the human condition in a fundamental way. Today the threat of nuclear destruction is still there, but the question whether we humans should continue to exist has expanded, as the challenges of artificial intelligence and of transhumanism indicate. To paraphrase Anders’s contemporary, Martin Heidegger, the threat to our humanity comes not so much from weapons of mass destruction but from the way technological developments are reshaping what it means to be human. Anders’s reflections on the nuclear threat thus continue to be relevant today.
Anders’s focus is not exclusively on the bomb. He also addresses radio and television, claiming that both have created a situation in which life is delivered to individuals as consumers, not lived by active participants. In a memorable turn of phrase, he speaks of radio and screen becoming “the family table in reverse”; they offer the appearance of a family’s being together while actually separating its members. The broadcasts are consumed by individuals, even as they sit in proximity to each other. The dining table, by contrast, involves both physical proximity and the need for active engagement.
Again, the specific examples may be dated, but Anders’s point is sound, perhaps even sounder today than when he first wrote. Now, thanks to the cell phone, this reversal of the family table has been intensified because each individual can consume a different product. The old television or radio at least meant that everyone in the room was experiencing the same movie, newscast, or soap opera. And the reversal has also been exported to public places that used to be marked by significant social interaction, such as cafés and restaurants. The sight of families going out for a meal and then sitting at the table staring at handheld screens is emblematic of our day: passive consumption of mindless entertainment is prioritized over the truly humanizing activity of eating food while delighting in the presence of others.
A further aspect of radio and television is the sense of omnipresence they grant to their consumers, cultivating a sense of homelessness. For Anders, the significance of this lies in driving a preoccupation with the here and now and with instantaneity. One might add to this an implication at which he hints: it undermines the individual’s moral register and the ability to discern what is most urgent and most pressing. That is why we have riots in London triggered by events in Minneapolis or Gaza. And it reduces everything to a spectacle, the importance of which is (to put it crudely) determined by its therapeutic value. Again, this has only become stronger in our day, when performative outrage online about events on the other side of the world grants us a sense of righteousness and excuses us from the harder works of sacrificial charity in our own communities, neighborhoods, or workplaces.
Perhaps Anders’s most important concept for our current moment, however, is that of the “Promethean gradient.” He uses this term to refer to the disproportionality between human faculties: we can achieve things in the sphere of technology that far outstrip the ability of our moral imagination to comprehend them.
An example would be nuclear weapons: the level of destruction that a nuclear bomb can achieve is far beyond anything we can imagine. That possibly apocryphal saying ascribed to Josef Stalin, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic,” captures this idea. I might be horrified at the face of a murder victim on the news; a picture of the mushroom cloud at Nagasaki does not have the same impact. Today, we can apply it to the tech bros: their technological innovation proceeds at a pace that outstrips any moral vision that might curb or direct it.
In light of this, the early departure of the tech bros from the summit I mentioned is understandable: there can be no moral accountability—indeed, they cannot even imagine what that would look like—because they are engaged in technological innovations beyond anything the current moral imagination can grasp. As Hans Jonas observed in the early 1970s, the advent of technology that was not simply external to human beings (steam, the internal combustion engine) but that touched on the nature of existence at both a profound and highly abstract level—for Jonas, chemistry; for us now, genetic engineering—grants the technological revolution theoretically limitless power to destabilize what it means to be human. And we cannot imagine what that might look like. Add to that the implications of social acceleration—that technology develops at a faster pace than can be assimilated into the moral imagination—and the problem Anders calls the Promethean gradient is set to become worse. Our technology liberates us from any sense of the authority of natural limits (let alone God-given ends), yet in itself it provides no new moral norms for how such liberation is to be exercised.
But the Promethean gradient is not simply significant in the way it unshackles technological development from the moral imagination. It also has a paradoxical effect on human experience: our genius for technological development, that capacity that separates us from all other creatures and arguably forms part of our greatness, is precisely what renders us nothing in our eyes and therefore feeds despair. This Anders calls “Promethean shame,” which he sees as the result of the conflict between knowing ourselves as persons and yet finding ourselves reduced to mere “things” because of the technology we ourselves have developed. In Anders’s day, the primary culprits were nuclear weapons. Their development required the collaboration of free, intelligent, intentional human persons. But the result was that we human beings became the only creatures on earth who could, quite literally, annihilate ourselves. Man’s exceptional technological greatness had ironically given him the ability to make himself puny, contingent, and unnecessary in his own eyes.
Today, this still applies, but it has expanded beyond narrow military technology to include such things as AI and transhumanism. We are using our genius to degrade ourselves into nothing much at all, and the existential results are anxiety, caused by a sense of inferiority in the presence of our creations, and shame at how small we have become.
Anders does overstate his case at points. His argument that women wearing makeup have reduced themselves to commodities hints at the influence of Georg Lukács (he does not cite him); and his notion that capitalist modernity led to all things, including human persons, becoming subject to the commodity form, assumes, rather than proves, that the nature of erotic attraction conforms to the Marxist notion of reification. Certainly there are cases—prostitution and pornography, for example—where human beings self-consciously sell themselves as consumer items. But the desire to be attractive to a loved one or potential suitor via the use of makeup (or dressing well) does not necessarily involve turning oneself into a trinket for sale.
While Anders presents a bleak picture, he refuses to surrender to a technological determinism. If we are to retain our humanity, then we must focus on training and forming an expanded moral imagination. We have to work on closing the gap between technological ability and that moral imagination that constitutes the Promethean gradient. Here, Anders acknowledges a problem: the moral imagination is, for him, a matter of feeling, and feeling tends toward a kind of mysticism. While he never states it in these terms, what he is calling for is a renewed Romanticism that can reconstitute human nature as a stable unity. He sees the problems: the division of labor in the modern world, facilitated by technological specialization, undermines this unity. That is why, he says, Nazis were able to commit such horrific crimes: they acted without any moral framework that gave them a sense of personal responsibility.
The answer to such is an attitude shaped by moral feelings. But appeals to feelings are simply too vague. Romanticism (almost) worked because it did assume that such a thing as human nature existed and could be retrieved through art, even if it was deeply obscured by a world in which instrumental reason was granted increasingly privileged status. However, Anders’s appeal to feeling is more akin to a sheer act of will. Indeed, in a comment reminiscent of the existentialism in vogue at the time he was writing, he asserts that the content of the correct reshaping of the imagination is by definition indescribable; what counts is that we simply make the attempt.
What he needs, of course, is a proper metaphysics of human nature and personhood. Those would provide him with a normative, limited, and teleological anthropology to supply criteria for judging whether a technological innovation enhances, subverts, or contradicts what it means to be human. His lack of Christian faith prevents him from making this choice. But, as so many intellectuals today are finding, it is only a recovery of orthodox religion that offers a way forward in the face of both the Promethean gradient and Promethean shame.
This is a dazzling, fertile work. It provides both an analysis of the nature and impact of modern technology on the human condition and the conceptual vocabulary for understanding some of the most worrying aspects of today’s technological revolutions. English speakers can now add Anders to the list of names of those asking the correct anthropological questions about technology, a list that includes Mumford, Ellul, Grant, and Postman. And in pointing to the problem—the metaphysical destruction of humanity—he unconsciously points us to where we must look for a solution. That solution, of course, is Christian metaphysics—even though Anders does not go there himself.