Technology in the Modern Age Technology's Attempts to Address the Human Need in the Modern and Post-Modern Ages

Literary Grouping One: The crisis of World War I and the lie of a technology's ability to sustain the human body and soul

Gas!" With this one word, Wilfred Owen's poem "Dulce Et Decorum Est" encompasses the sense of failure that many soldiers felt, regarding the promise of technology, throughout the duration of the First World War and during its immediate aftermath. In the previous era of capitalist industrialization, technology was seen, as part of the progressive movement and mechanized progress, as life giving and life-sustaining. However, the lie, in Owen's poem, of the value of technology, runs just as deep as the lie that it is sweet to die for one's country. The innovations of technology simply yield new ways for humanity to destroy other humans, based on arbitrary national groupings. The soldiers live only with the aid of their gas masks -- and one of Owen's number of comrades dies, because he cannot even manage to get his mask on in time.

The arbitrary nature of national groupings during mechanized, technological warfare is especially instructive when one compares Owen's short poem with Erich Maria Remarque's longer prose work All Quiet on the Western Front. The same wartime experience of ordinary soldiers is treated from the German perspective in Remarque's novel, but with numerous similar...

At the end of All Quiet on the Western Front, the soldier is shot by a sniper while reaching for the one element of the natural world, rather than the technological world, he can access on the battlefield -- a butterfly. Technology mows down the young man and the beauty of the world it is purporting to save and sustain.
The solider-protagonist of Remarque's tale is initially impressed to conscript himself into the army after being exhorted to do so by his teacher. More poetically, the Latin of Owen's poem underlines the importance of Latin in the schoolboy education typical of members of Owen's class. Thus technology and its new lie of a better tomorrow, and the beauty and glory of the heroic, classical past are thus condemned in both works regarding the Great War.

The promise of progress

Henry Adams contrasted in his turn-of the century autobiography, in his chapter on "The Dynamo and the Virgin" the figure of the Virgin Mary, which he identifies as the unifying ideology image of the European Middle Age, with "the dynamo." For Adams, rather than religion, technology and industry would create the civilization of the early 20th century. Adam's work shows in many ways what the later, dispirited works of Owen and Remarque were reacting to -- the lie of technology's promise to provide a moral, shaping hand of history as religion had in ages past.

Despite the bitterness of what technology has…