The New Culture: Danger
The coming order by which the individual will be related to his or her own works differs radically from the older one. It lacks the precise elements which constituted a culture in the older sense: the feeling of tranquil fertility, of a flowering, beneficent realm. The new culture will be incomparably more harsh and more intense.
It will lack the organic both in its sense of growth and of proportions; for the new culture will have been willed into being by the spirit
of the human being, built up abstractly by people’s own hands. The new culture does not promise that breath necessary for a secure
life and free growth; on the contrary, it presents a vision of factories and barracks to the eyes of the mind.
A single fact, we must emphasize, will stamp the new culture: danger. Previously the simplest need for, and the meaning of, culture has always been that culture created security. The experience of the earliest ages teaches us that when people can only see themselves as surrounded by nature, they neither understand themselves nor have they come to terms with their environment.
At the dawn of civilization, the order of culture held back the encroaching power of nature, thus making possible an individual’s very life. As time moved on, people gained a measure of security. Nature lost its alien or dangerous character and became a spring of inexhaustible plenitude and never·failing rejuvenation. This primitive source of perfection was what the modern person found
in nature. Today the situation is being reversed. The course of history has again led us into danger, but the danger confronting us today arises from within culture itself.
From the efforts men and women expended and from the fortresses they built to conquer that ancient danger, they created new dangers.
This pervasive threat does not originate in any of the par- ticular difficulties facing people today, nor does it allow that science and technology can yet cope with it. The new danger arises from a factor intrinsic to the work of the individual, even to the work of an individual’s spirit. The new danger arises from the factor of power.
To exercise power means, to a degree at least, that one has mastered the given. Power over the given means that a person has succeeded in checking those existential forces which oppose his or her life, that people have bent them to their will. Today the scepter of power is wielded by the hands of men and women. They have extensively mastered the immediate forces of nature, but they have not mastered the mediate forces because they have not yet brought under control their own native powers. People today hold power over things, but we can assert confidently that they do not yet have power over their own power.
Human beings are free; they can use their power as they please. Within their very freedom reside the possibilities of misuse, a misuse which is one with destruction and with evil. What can guarantee an individual’s proper use of his or her power in the realm of freedom? Nothing. There is no guarantee that men or women will use their freedom for the good; at best we could have the mere probability that they would use it for the good.
We have mentioned already that even a prejudiced observer must conclude that people today lack that rectified character which would ensure their right use of power. As yet they have not developed thoughtfully that ethic which would be effective for controlling the use of power. More· over, no proper training ground now exists for such an ethic, either with the elite or with the great body of people. And so it is that the dangers facing human freedom mount ominously day by day. Science and technology have so mastered the forces of nature that destruction, either chronic or acute, and incalculable in extent, is now a possibility. Without exaggeration one can say that a new era of history has been born. Now and forever people will live at the brink of an ever·growing danger which shall leave its mark upon their entire existence.
The End of the Modern World, page. 108-110 (1950)
