In the late 1950s, theologian Romano Guardini gave an address at the Munich College of Technology, a talk published later under the title “The Machine and Humanity.” The address resonated with many of the themes that Guardini pursued in Letters from Lake Como, originally published in periodical form between 1923 and 1925.

“Every technical action involves the possessing, using, and shaping of nature. Nature becomes culture. Nature is what is there on its own; culture is what we humans make of it. In the course of history, the culture factor in existence has become stronger, while the natural factor has become weaker.

“With the coming of the machine this process has reached a new stage. Nature has been seized and made ready for use. Human beings take a cultural attitude to nature when they go to it. We need only think of photography, which has become the way travelers encounter things, or of the way in which we organize travel and vacations and furnish them with all the amenities of city life.

“The process seems to be unavoidable. Still, this question arises: What will be the effect of this constant weakening of the natural factor that still remains in human existence? Each new machine means that something we previously mastered with the help of our organic intellectual equipment is now left to a technical construct. We thus make an object of something that used to be subjective, part of life’s initiative. This means release — we are freed. But it means also that we have lost a possibility of creating, of experiencing the world, and of self-development. So long as we had only sailing ships, sea journeys were often dangerous, but they also brought to life the enhancement that goes along with risk. Modern ships have greatly reduced the dangers. They give travelers a few peaceful days in floating hotels. Relative to existence as a whole, is that a gain or a loss?

“The fact that the machine brings a measure of freedom hitherto unknown is in the first instance a gain. The value of freedom, however, is not fixed solely by the question ‘Freedom from what?’ but decisively by the further question ‘Freedom for what?’ Every social pedagogue knows what problems arise regarding use of the time that is made free by machines. If we do not succeed in making meaningful use of the free days, then the result of such ‘freedom’ is negative.

“Finally, we need to say something about that which concerns our innermost life. The ongoing intensification of science and technology, with all that this means in economic life, communications, and public consciousness, seems to be a hindrance to our ability to have immediate religious experience or to our receptivity to religious motivation. Some time ago in Westphalia, or so I am told, a motto was in parlance that where the railroad comes, second sight disappears. In an incidental way this seems to point to what I have in mind. Our attention today is claimed for rational and utilitarian tasks in such a way that we can no longer pay attention to that other dimension of our existence.

“It is no accident that the worldview which sees in the machine the symbol of fulfilled culture — namely, materialistic communism — is trying systematically to destroy the religious life. It proceeds on the premise that science and technology are the only foundations of existence and that they demand such a level of empirical concentration that everything religious has to be harmful. For positivists who think in terms of Comte’s formula for historical progress — lowest stage = religion, second stage = philosophy, third and true stage = science — the disappearance of the religious element is a gain. Those who look deeper realize, however, that this means a loss, not only of an essential part of the human, but of the innermost part.”

—from Romano Guardini, Letters from Lake Como: Explorations in Technology and the Human Race (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1926, 1994)

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