Mere Comments: Leviathans Make Nice Pets, Don't They?
Posted by Anthony Esolen
January 24, 2008

From Romano Guardini, Power and Responsibility (1956):

We cannot escape the impression that nature as well as man himself is becoming ever more vulnerable to the domination -- economic, technical, political, organizational -- of power. Ever more distinctly our condition reveals itself as one in which man progressively controls nature, yes; but also men; the state controls its citizens; and an autonomous technical-economic-political system holds all life in thrall. This growing defenselessness against the inroads of power is furthered by the fact that ethical norms have lost much of their influence, hence their ability to curb abuses of power is weakened . . .

Father Guardini, despite the Italian name, was a German philosopher, and sometimes writes like one. But he has that rare combination of farsightedness, both backward and forward, and attention to the particulars of the day. And in his day, the particulars were terrible enough. Guardini always writes under the burden of the evil that his native land vomited forth upon the earth, made manifest in that strutting artist named Adolf, but not slain with Adolf in the bunker in Berlin. He sees, too, that Nazism was but one manifestation of the modern age gone deranged. Nazism died, but the will to power did not. Guardini argues that the whole of modernity, from the late Renaissance to the bombing of Hiroshima, can be characterized by the naive trust in power -- with the magnificent achievements in the natural sciences that we all know of, and the destruction of cultural variety and community that we also know of, but do not want to think about.
the rest-h/t Titusonenine image