Technology, Humanity, and Identity in Modern Literature

The Lie of Technology's Promise in WWI Literature

"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 had been seen — as part of the progressive movement and mechanized progress — as life-giving and life-sustaining. However, the lie at the heart of Owen's poem 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 survive only with the aid of their gas masks — and one of Owen's comrades dies because he cannot even manage to get his mask on in time.

The arbitrary nature of national groupings during mechanized, technological warfare becomes 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, yet with numerous similar resonances. At the end of All Quiet on the Western Front, the soldier-protagonist is shot by a sniper while reaching for the one element of the natural world — rather than the technological world — he can still access on the battlefield: a butterfly. Technology mows down the young man along with the very beauty of the world it was purporting to save and sustain.

The soldier-protagonist of Remarque's tale is initially persuaded to enlist after being exhorted to do so by his teacher. More poetically, the Latin of Owen's poem underlines the importance of a classical education typical of members of Owen's social class. Thus technology and its new promise of a better tomorrow, alongside the beauty and glory of the heroic classical past, are condemned in both works about the Great War.

The Promise of Progress and the Mechanized World

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

Technology After Hiroshima: Machines as Life Support

Despite the bitterness of what technology caused in terms of human destruction, its impact has not absented itself from modern life — even when the final horrors of the First World War were eclipsed by the horrors of the Second World War. Technology has only become more omnipresent in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sherry Turkle's work on thinking of oneself as a machine stresses that even the human body has become dominated, in the late modern era, by a mechanized understanding of the world. Rather than cultivating relationships with other human beings or with God — as Adams discussed at the beginning of the century — individuals now have relationships with machines: with things that are not themselves, yet not fully human either. Machines have become the oxygen that sustains our lives, much like the air transmitted through the gas masks in Owen's poem.