Technology and the Demonic

An inquiry.

Similarly, no Christian priest may be in any doubt that what emerges when an eternal flame is replaced by an electric bulb is no longer a sacred, but only a technical affair. Since, however, as we saw, there is no such thing as a purely technical affair, there is no mistaking that strange omens appear. Therefore, when the clergy identifies the realm of technology with the realm of Satan, it still possesses a deeper instinct than when it places a microphone beside the body of Christ.

— Ernst Jünger, The Worker

Where the automatism increases to the point of approaching perfection—such as in America—the panic is even further intensified. There it finds its best feeding grounds; and it is propagated through networks that operate at the speed of light. The need to hear the news several times a day is already a sign of fear; the imagination grows and paralyzes itself in a rising vortex. The myriad antennae rising above our megacities resemble hairs standing on end—they provoke demonic contacts.

— Ernst Jünger, The Forest Passage

The recognition and description of demoniacal traits in the machine deserves a treatment of its own. Demoniacal traits are present wherever the machine is at work, and they unfold in the machine realm with constantly growing power. The reasons are obvious. Technical thinking itself, which must be recognized as a collusion of causal and teleological thinking, throws open the doors for the invasion of the demons. They display their fullest power in the forced organization of elemental energies, that is machinery—and most of all in the consequences of this violation, consequences that turn directly against man himself. Depending upon which aspect of the machine we are studying, the demoniacal activity can be described in various ways. The process as a whole is often understood as one of inner corrosion and emaciation, and from the Christian point of view as a deadening of the soul.

— Friedrich Georg Jünger, The Failure of Technology

A result of human understanding and specialized knowledge, such as a discipline and in particular modern technology, also cannot simply be presented as dead and soulless any more than can the religion of technicity be confused with technology itself. The spirit of technicity, which has led to the mass belief in an anti-religious activism, is still spirit; perhaps an evil and demonic spirit, but not one which can be dismissed as mechanistic and attributed to technology. It is perhaps something gruesome, but not itself technical and mechanical. It is the belief in an activist metaphysics—the belief in unlimited power and the domination of man over nature, even over human nature; the belief in the unlimited receding of natural boundaries, in the unlimited possibilities for change and prosperity. Such a belief can be called fantastic or satanic, but not simply dead, spiritless, or mechanized soullessness.

— Carl Schmitt, The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations

The machine age strives to replace the image and likeness of God by the image and likeness of the machine, and this does not mean the creation of a new man but the destruction and disappearance of man, his substitution by another being with another, nonhuman existence. Man created the machine, and this may give him a grand feeling of his own dignity and power, but this pride imperceptibly and gradually leads to his humiliation. All through history man has been changing, he has always been old and new, but throughout the ages he was in contact with eternity and remained man. The new man will finally break away from eternity, will definitely fasten on to the new world he has to possess and conquer, and will cease to be human, though at first he will fail to realize the change. We are witnessing man’s dehumanization…It is not machinery, which is merely man’s creation and consequently irresponsible, that is to be blamed, and it is unworthy to transfer responisbility from man to a machine. Man alone is to blame for the awful power that threatens him; it is not the machine which has despiritualized him—he did it himself.

— Nicholas Berdyaev, Man and Machine

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There are spirits within technology that are nothing technological.

It is not news that modern technology is a force of destruction and dissolution. Nor is it news that technology is far from being a neutral tool. What, then, is technology? Martin Heidegger wrote that the essence of technology was enframing. You can read more about that here:

In sum, modern technology threatens to enframe man and shape his understanding of the world without his noticing. When it reveals the world, it reveals it as a challenging; it makes man and nature a standing reserve which can be called-upon at any time, and man, if he is not observant and contemplative, falls into this without noticing. The danger is that technology works to understand reality for us and order it accordingly, thus robbing man of his vocation to seek and receive the truth.

I agree with much of what Heidegger writes, but I believe there is something vital that he misses in his analysis (forgive me for daring to say so). If one believes in God, if one believes that man is made in his image, if one believes that the created order is God’s handiwork and that he is sovereign over it, if one believes in angels and demons and spiritual warfare, then he will naturally come to certain conclusions about the nature of modern technology that differ from those who do not believe in a supernatural reality.

What is it about technology which brings about the type of demonic images and comparisons which I quoted to begin this essay? It is in its origin and the force which propels it through history. Before we explore this force, let us first review the Christian understanding of the demonic from a Scriptural point of view.

According to Scripture and Catholic teaching, Satan/Lucifer/The Devil was originally an angel. Angels are purely spiritual beings with an intellect and will. At some point, Satan/Lucifer/the Devil, one of the angels, rebelled against God. The reasons for this rebellion are said to be jealousy of God—pride, in short. Another theory is that Lucifer saw how God would elevate man by becoming man, and this enraged him. Regardless, Lucifer elevated himself above God and because of this he rebelled, even though he knew he could not be God. This may have been a cause of further rage; his deepest desire was closed off to him. We can read of these events in Isaiah 14:12-15.

Other angels followed Lucifer’s example and these are the demons, the fallen angels.

In the garden of Eden the serpent (Lucifer disguised) tricked man into sinning, because Lucifer hates mankind and wishes to cause man to stray from God and serve him instead. Demons aid in this mission. In Revelations 12:9, we read, “And that great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, who seduceth the whole world; and he was cast unto the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.”

In the Bible we read many interesting things about demons. Everyone is aware of the idea of demonic possession, for instance. But demons and the Devil are far more involved in earthly affairs than modern man tends to accept and believe. St. Paul writes in Ephesians 6:12 that, “For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and power, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places.”

In another passage, 2 Corinthians 4:4, St. Paul refers to Satan as the “god of this world.” He also refers to Satan as “the prince of the power of this air, of the spirit that now worketh on the children of unbelief” in Ephesians 2:2.

Scripture assures us that Satan and his demonic hordes are quite active in the world and that they possess a great deal of power, to the point that he is called the god of this world, and he and his demons are called the “world rulers.” Of course, their rule is doomed by Christ and the Church, but they are nevertheless very active and powerful in this world. Their goal is simple: to bring about the ruin of souls.

Satan on His Throne, John Martin

With this understanding of what demons are, how they came to be, and what influence they have in our world, let us move on to the question of technology and its relationship with the demonic.

Europe, after the Enlightenment, has been possessed by the “Faustian Spirit,” a zeitgeist which thirsts for power, progress, and innovation. The Faustian Spirit pursues knowledge relentlessly to further its ends (this knowledge is primarily technical and scientific). The Faustian Spirit aims above all for pleasure, comfort, and freedom from restraints. It wishes to subject nature to the human will, including human nature itself (consider the phenomenon of autogynephilia and its consequence, transgenderism). The Faustian Spirit is inherently anti-Christian, as Christianity is incompatible with its ideals. Christianity teaches obedience to God, adherence to the Divine and Natural Law, humility, patience, prudence, and a respect for tradition. These are hated by the Faustian Spirit—it mocks and derides such values, and seeks to remove Christianity from the public life and culture as much as possible, since the Christian religion is an obstacle to its highest aspirations. Is it any wonder that we have seen an unprecedented decline of religion?

The Industrial Revolution, when understood within in its historical context, was nothing more than these ideals taking shape in a concrete manner on a massive scale. Machine technology serves the Faustian Spirit in every way. Mass production leads to more stuff, and more stuff means stuff is cheaper, and more people can own stuff that makes their lives more comfortable, more efficient, easier, etc.

Since the Faustian Spirit prizes power, innovation, and technical knowledge, it sees all mechanical and technological development as progress. Technology is given the benefit of the doubt in every situation—any abuse of technology is simply viewed as an unintended consequence of some human failure. The technology itself is never to blame, and there is always an underlying assumption that the technology could even be perfected to such a degree that human error is impossible. Even further, any technological problem is met with a technological response. The solution to any technical problem is just…more technics! Returning to the idea that human error is the cause of technology’s failure, the true solution is the removal of man from the equation altogether. I suspect Nick Land would find this an acceptable statement. Transhumanists proudly proclaim that their goal, or at least the inevitable result of technological progress, is the overcoming of man and a metamorphasis into something entirely new, a mass extinction and the emergence of a new machine being. Technology that marketed as serving man is, in their mind, supplementing and supplanting him, and man will inevitably be consumed by such technology entirely. This, to be clear, is seen as a good thing, and this makes sense when we understand that they are fully devoted to the zeitgeist.

Because modern technology is developed within the context of the Faustian Age, it takes on all its characteristics in its design and processes. Modern technology cannot help but reflect that of the culture which designed it. Technology today is all about efficiency, maximizing comfort, increasing output, and giving its handlers power, whether it be power over the material world, themselves, or others. It will inherently alienate man from his fellows, it will inherently confuse him and strip him of his identity, it will inherently exploit him and the environment, it will inherently pull him away from religion, it will inherently subjugate him to ever-growing mechanisms of control and surveillance.

My assertion is merely that what is behind this Faustian Spirit is the same spirit that St. Paul speaks of in Ephesians and 2 Corinthians. In Goethe’s play, Faust makes a deal with the devil. The West has made a similar deal, and I mean this straightforwardly. Satan has held up his end of the deal: we really are experiencing “progress” at a more rapid pace than any other age in history. Meanwhile, we suffer the consequences, which are not quite what we expected. We are far from the utopia that previous generations imagined. We are at once the most comfortable and least happy people to walk the earth. It is a terrible paradox, that man at his wealthiest is at his most miserable.

Besides this idea that technology today is developed in the context of a zeitgeist which has the devil as its master, there is another idea (reality?) that I want to suggest in this essay which I do not see discussed often enough: demons are fully capable of acting within cyberspace and other technologies. Remember what demons are: they are purely spiritual beings, in other words, they have no bodies. They are capable of possessing humans and directing us to do certain things; they have dominion over certain objects and have power over the material world. Therefore, their beings spirits in no way prevents them from embedding themselves within material. What, for instance, would prevent a demon from possessing a certain server? A program? From interfering with the internet? Could demons inhabit websites?

In the St. Michael prayer we say that evil spirits “prowl around the world seeking the ruin of souls.” Could we say just as accurately that they prowl around the internet seeking the ruin of souls? I do not see why not.

That demons may be behind the screen or that they have influence in cyberspace should not be sensationalized. Demons already operate within the “real world” so it is something we should already be aware of. Just as we do not abandon the real world for fear that a demon may get us, similarly it is not advisable that one totally abandon the internet just because demons prowl about. For instance, I doubt you will encounter many devils while emailing a coworker (as annoying as that can often be). But you may very well encounter some on “adult sites.”

At the end of the day, I am not saying anything new. Jünger, Heidegger, and others have recognized it: “there is no such thing as a purely technical affair, there is no mistaking that strange omens appear” (Ernst Jünger). The spirit, the mind, the reason behind this age must have some effect on the technology it produces. “Technical thinking itself, which must be recognized as a collusion of causal and teleological thinking, throws open the doors for the invasion of the demons” (F.G. Jünger). We should not be surprised when technology does exactly what its driving spirit says it wants to do. The technical spirit is, as Heidegger says, “The belief in unlimited power and the domination of man over nature, even over human nature; the belief in the unlimited receding of natural boundaries, in the unlimited possibilities for change and prosperity.”

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Is there any hope? I think so. Our hope, however, cannot not lie in technology. We must accept this right away. That is not to say we must renounce technology entirely. This is impossible. Technology is all around us. Even the pencil is a technology. Moreover, some technology may really serve man in a good way, in a way that does not offend God. Some technology is more neutral than others. However, some technology might really be just outright evil. Some might lend itself more to bad than to good. We must have the mind of discernment in this matter. We do not have to be the Amish, but we should learn from the capacity as a community to actually contemplate a technology and make a decisive choice as to whether or not it ought the be adopted. We can do this as individuals, as families, as churches, and so on. Most importantly: the motivations behind technology matter. The Spirit it proceeds from matters. Technology produced by the modern zeitgeist will inevitably possess certain traits, and we should be aware of this.

Ultimately, the solution to our modern problems can only be a return to God. This is very much a cliche at this point, and I will not sit here and tell you how important a real and thorough sense of the transcendent is for man. But I will end by saying that the only way to defeat the Faustian Spirit and to live in a world where technology is driven by something more benign is to repent and submit to the Lord.