The world of the day after tomorrow

As we close out 2022, here’s Ernst Jünger in 1922:

We have become old and comfortable like the elderly. It has become a crime to be or to have more than others. Now, unaccustomed to the strong intoxicants, men and power have become an abomination to us; our new gods are the masses and equality. If the masses cannot become like the few, then let the few become like the masses. Politics, theater, artists, cafes, patent leather shoes, posters, newspapers, morals, the Europe of tomorrow, the world of the day after tomorrow: the thundering masses. Like a thousand-headed beast, crushing all that does not allow itself to be swallowed up, envious, parvenu-like, cruel. Once again, the individual was defeated, and didn’t his own representatives betray him? We live too close to each other, our great cities are grating millstones, rushing torrents that grind us against each other like pebbles. Too hard, the life; don’t we have our flickering life? Too hard, the heroes; aren’t these flickering screen heroes enough for us? And how beautifully they flow, smooth and silent, these stories. You sit in the cushion and all the nations, all the adventures of the world swim through your brain, as light and gestalt as an opium dream.

This comes from War as an Inner Experience, a short collection of essays elaborating on some of the themes latent in Storm of Steel, and it is striking how closely in anticipates the concerns and arguments of the longer and more sophisticated The Forest Passage, published almost thirty years later. It is also striking how closely this description of Jünger’s world before and after the war resembles the world of a century later with its angry levelling, its conformity, its politics of envy, its proud and corrupt urbanism, and most especially its retreat from the real and the difficult into the easy and imaginary. Excessive screentime is not a new problem.

This passage prompted a lot of thinking on my part, but I only have time for a little of it here. It occurs to me that one could respond a couple ways to what Jünger writes here:

• A person of one persuasion might—ignoring the present-tense in the passage—say, “How prophetic! Look at how bad things have gotten!”

• A person of the opposite persuasion might say, “Things haven’t gotten worse! That you perceive this as applying to 2022 just proves that some people will always be speaking doom no matter how good things get.”

To which I say You’re both right—things have gotten bad, and we have not fallen from a golden age—because a century is too short a perspective from which to be viewing the trends between Jünger’s time and our own. Things have been bad in many of the same ways for a very long time. The problems of 2022 are different from those of 1922 not in kind, but in degree.

The Forest Passage was the first book I finished reading in 2022, making this passage of War as an Inner Experience a nice thematic bookend. So that I don’t end this year of blogging on too dour a note, let me refer back to a post from January about The Forest Passage, where I quote Jünger’s 1951 prediction of what kind of men the modern world would produce—as well as the beginnings of a remedy:

[M]an is suffering a loss, and this loss explains the manifest grayness and hopelessness of his existence. . . . Giving this man an inkling of what has been taken from him, even in the best possible present circumstances, and of what immense power still rests within him—this is the theological task.

I’ve returned to this line and meditated on it many times this year. Living so that the gray and hopeless modern man will feel “what has been taken from him”—let this be our hope, motto, and prayer for 2023.