Man and Auto-man: Part II

The Glass Bees & Confrontation with our Sterilizing Techno-Present

If the first half of “The Glass Bees,” and indeed, the first Man and Auto-man essay set out to discuss the situation of man-in-society during the rise of the automaton, than it is fitting to see the second half of the book (and indeed this essay) as commentary on man’s personal confrontation with automatonism. This is embodied textually in “The Glass Bees” first by Captain Richards’ interview with Zapparoni himself, the cunning creator of his manufactured content-empire, and then second with his confrontation against the constructs themselves, the Glass Bees.

Zapparoni became the instantiation of a figure that Junger outlined, that we now see commonly in our daily lives, but that outside of this novel I have never seen coined: the Power Saint. Jünger doesn’t use this term specifically but his discussion of Zapparoni cuts with this message:

“Why are those who have endangered and changed our lives in such terrifying and unpredictable ways not content with unleashing and controlling enormous forces and with enjoying their consequent fame, power, and wealth? Why must they want to be saints as well?”¹

Again, Jünger’s almost clairvoyant vision cuts through from this fictionalized 1957 and captures the real men of this position in our time: Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg. The image of the tech CEO exudes this level of hubris and ego. They terraform the world with their technological supra-structure, with no moment of thought given to the unintended consequences of this global meddling, and turn around to lecture from their digital platforms all who have not taken up their pet social causes.

“Everything devised, constructed, and mass-produced at Zapparoni’s made life much easier. It was not considered good form to mention that these things were at the same time dangerous, but it was difficult to deny the danger… All his liliputian robots and luxury automatons could contribute not only to the improvement but also to the shortening of life… By and large, the Zapparoni Works resembled a temple of Janus with one bright and one dark portal, and when clouds were gathering on the horizon, a stream of fiendishly devised, murderous tools began to pour forth from the dark gate. At the same time this dark gate was taboo; actually it should not have existed at all.”²

And is this not the same dissociative dissonance with which we approach our own tech magnates? They design and sell the apparatus of surveillance, tracking, missile guidance, drone operation and all the rest -- but we are shown only the storefront version of their true occupation. It is with this great irony that the technological Power Saints flatter themselves as sophisticated and superior above the old warrior or aristocrat.

“That Zapparoni should feel superior to a cavalryman and patronize him was as absurd as a shark passing judgement on his own teeth, which are, after all, its most efficient part. Horsemen have existed for thousands of years, and the world has continued to exist in spite of Ghengis Khan and other gentlemen who came and went like the tides. But when saints like Zapparoni began to appear, the earth itself was threatened. The peaceful stillness of the forests, the depth of the ocean, the outermost part of the earth’s atmosphere were in danger. Even in peace they had brought about greater evils than any tyrant or warlord had ever imposed; they prepared poisons which no one before had imagined or even known by name. Each day their machines took a toll equal to the casualty list of a single battle, and the yearly toll equaled that of a war— and in what a ghastly manner.”³

There is a tendency on the right to neglect this sort of sentiment, or worse to condemn it as being ‘of the left’, linked to environmentalism, the Green Grift, etc. but in so doing we are ignoring the elephant in the room.

The ultimate threat posed by global ‘development’ of this sort is that the consequences of the system are global. The planet really is a closed system and the things that we do build, develop, or destroy, stay inside of that system. Things like microplastics and PFAs are now inescapable. They will kill far more people, and lead to far more destruction over time, than any particular weapon of any bygone era. Junger is using his and Richard’s connection to the life lost by the construction of automatonism to frame what is often considered merely ‘progress’ as instead a domination of industrial violence across the landscape. If I was to make such a point myself, I could be accused of rose-lensed romanticism; but Junger, we must remember, lived in both worlds. What we are promised in return for this sacrifice of the countryside is a triumph of efficiency in production.

But could they create an olive tree or a house? With all their enormous potentialities they could, of course, build cities, but not the smallest dwelling of the kind once built by a simple mason or carpenter… The churches they got were built in a style suitable only for pillboxes, airplanes and refrigerators; there they celebrated their religious rites before a congregation that considered penicillin more effective than any sacrifice of the Mass.

I had admired these super-philistines long enough— these servants of forces unknown to them. As long as such admiration lasts, destruction will increase and human standards decrease. A mind that endangers worlds cannot create a fly.⁴

The resentment so carefully produced in these sentences establishes the antagonism towards Zapparoni which lasts for the rest of the interview. Richards had doubted the motives and morals of Zapparoni’s automata before their confrontation, but now he realizes in a way that can only be truly understood between man and man: that the fox is far too cunning even for his own good. This is Richards’ rejection, ultimately, of the world Zapparoni has created. Flight from that world, however, is not so easy. He lives there, it surrounds him, confronts him, and trapped inside of it all is his wife.

“Meanwhile, Teresa was sitting at home— waiting.”⁵

Jünger’s repeated return to Teresa acts throughout the novel like waves crashing over the top of a seawall— an assertion of the real against the constructed hyperreality of technological life. Despite all of the progress, and development of the age, Captain Richards is motivated by the same cause as men through time immemorial, keeping food on the table and his family safe. The stakes are raised when he moves on from the interview itself, to the space beside the pond on Zapparoni’s estate and encounters the Bees themselves, as well as the disembodied ear beside them. Richards’ grappling with the implications of the Bees is a deep, rich monologue, though I’ll sample only one bit of it to discuss here, in the context of the severed ear:

“Technical perfection strives toward the calculable, human perfection toward the incalculable. Perfect mechanisms— around which, therefore, stands an uncanny but fascinating halo of brilliance— evoke both fear and a titanic pride which will be humbled not by insight but only by catastrophe.”⁶

This is the great danger of what the Bees and the ear represent, of what cannot be denied by implication, once one has seen them in action. There is a quality of robotism that cannot be expressed by words, a fear that exists only in reaction to witness. In some sense, it is the same as seeing a storybook monster, summoned by some terrible ritual. In the same way, it is a monster, summoned by allegiance to some power divorced from nature and humanity.

Richards recognizes however that even if he had gone to the police concerning the whole incident, which he admits is his first instinct, nothing would happen. Someone sufficiently powerful, sufficiently elite, could never be brought down by the testimony of a single person- no, it is the single person who would be crushed. He must ignore the ear. The decision to ignore the ear, however, presents an extreme moral peril which, despite Richards’ protestations to the contrary, he recognizes precisely because he has never abandoned the old ethic that he embodies.

“I would have ignored a crime and neglected my first duty to my neighbor. From there to inhumanity is only one step.”⁷

The following pages are a dedicated monologue to this very point, that Richards lives and will die as a relic of the past - a man from another world, and comfortable to be buried in his old military garb. Predictably, it ends with a comment of his wife as so many of these passages do.

We gain a glimpse into the path our protagonist will take, at the beginning of chapter 18:

“I loved hunting and avoided slaughterhouses. Fishing was my passion. I became disgusted with it when I learned that brooks and ponds can be fished out by electricity down to the last stickleback. The plain fact, even mere hearsay, was enough for me: from that moment I never again touched a fishing rod. A cold shadow had fallen on the swirling trout streams and backwaters, where moss-grown carp and catfish dream, and had robbed them of their charm.”⁸

And so, a decision was made.

"I hit the Smoky Gray with the flat end of the iron and smashed it.”⁹

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I hope you enjoyed this second part of Man and Auto-man. This portion of the novel is dense, but filled with the kinds of cutting observations and chilling analysis that connects us deeply with the world Jünger is creating, or really, foretelling for us.

I have decided to extend our discussion of the book one more week, to be finished in a Part III. Next week, I will be contrasting the very end of the novel, including Captain Richards’ decision to destroy the Bee, as well as his following decision to accept a job offer from Zapparoni, with the fate of his friend Lorenz from earlier in the novel, on page 60.

As a brief aside, Twitter has begun an extreme deboosting campaign targeting substack. My ability to link, post, promote, or even discuss my writing here on that platform has been absolutely destroyed. If you enjoyed the first two parts of this series, or any more of my writing, please subscribe here - and share the link to these articles. Thank you.

1. p. 92

2. p. 91

3. p.94

4. p.95

5. p.123

6. p.155

7. p.159

8. p.163-164

9. p.198