We must urgently defend ourselves against technology. Human beings will lose their identity and becomes cogs in a vast machine that chews up both things and creatures, destroying everything which lives and grows naturally. In the future, to exist will mean to exploit nature; but in the vortex of this self-devouring enterprise there will be no fixed point. The solitary stroller in the country, who is certain of belonging, will in fact be no more than the client of a hotel tourist chain, unknowingly manipulated by calculations, statistics and planning. No one will exist for themselves.

There is some truth in this declamation. Technical things are dangerous. There is a risk of blowing up the planet! But the enemies of industrial society are in most cases reactionary. They forget or detest the great hopes of the modern age, whilst opportunistically making use of whatever it offers to make their own lives more convenient or comfortable. However, when they criticize us for destroying their world, the world of ‘yesteryear’, let them at least recognize that this hope of ours is not placed in the facilities that machines and the new sources of energy offer the childish instinct for speed; nor is it attached to the pretty mechanical toys that entice the perpetually puerile adult.

No, the only thing of value in the inheritance of the West is its ability to shake up sleepy civilizations, including those elements of a nocturnal sluggishness which persist in our own, whether it be the heavy dullness of the past or all those cumbersome and obtuse things that burden human particularisms. As for those who want to remain underdeveloped so as to claim these elements as reasons for being, where do they find their inspiration? From a certain prestigious current in modern thought, which emerged from Germany to flood the pagan recesses of our souls. I am thinking of Heidegger and the Heideggarians. By now, its refrain is well known: One would like the human to rediscover the world. Humans will lose the world. They will know only matter that stands before them, put forward in some way as an object to be utilized and ‘used up’. To rediscover an authentic world means rediscovering a childhood mysteriously snuggled up inside the Place, to open up to the light of great landscapes, the fascination of nature, and the delight of camping in the mountains. It means to follow a path that winds its way through fields, to feel the unity created by the bridge that links two river banks, the presence of the tree, the chiaroscuro of forests. The mystery of things is there in a jug, in the worn-down shoes of a peasant girl, in the gleam from a carafe of wine sitting on a white tablecloth. The very Being of reality reveals itself behind these privileged experiences, giving and trusting itself into our keeping. And the human, the Keeper of Being, will derive from this grace their entire existence and their entire truth.

This doctrine is subtle and new. It teaches that everything which for centuries seemed to be added to nature by human beings was already shining forth in the splendors of the world. A work of art is really a blazing forth of Being, and not human artifice, and its anti-human glow is splendid. Myth announces itself within nature, which is implanted in that first language which hails us, only to found human language. We must be attentive, able to listen and hear and reply. To hear this language and reply to it consists not in giving oneself over to logical thoughts raised into a system of knowledge but in ‘being-there’, existing in a state of enrootedness. This, then, is the eternal seductiveness of paganism, beyond the infantilism of idolatry, which humanity long ago surpassed.