Ideas - Are we ‘born obsolete’? How our tech make us feel ashamed

Episode Date: September 4, 2025

Günther Anders predicted the exact technological crises we’re facing today… but 70 years ago. The uncanny relevance of Anders’ thoughts about technology—from the atomic bomb to artificial intelligence— and how it makes us feel what he called “Promethean Shame”.

It's summer, and it's going to be a hot one in Canadian politics. I'm Catherine Cullen. Join me and some of CBC's best political reporters as we bring you all new summer programming, focused on everything from negotiating with Donald Trump to Canada's climate goals, to the future of the Senate, and more. We'll talk to the chief of the defense staff and a top senator. We'll visit the Maritimes to learn about the future of energy production there. Catch the House Saturdays wherever you get your podcasts. B.C. podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. March 11, 1942, California. Believe I've found the signs of an entirely new form of shame that did not exist in the past. Gunter Anders, maybe the most prophetic

philosopher you've never heard of. I will provisionally call it Promethean shame for myself. I understand this to mean the shame when confronted by the humiliatingly high quality of fabricated things. Anders has been called the most neglected German philosopher of the 20th century. Ginter Anders has kind of slipped through the cracks, so the discovery of his work for me was like a lightning bolt. And yet, despite his obscurity, he also anticipated the exact technological crises we're facing today. He's really good at giving us that map, that emotional map, of... how the world feels when it's mediated by technology. In 1956, Anders published the first volume of his major work,

The Obsolescence of the Human, which will finally be available in English in December 2025, 69 years after its original publication. Each day, out of machines arise ever more beautiful machines. Only we remain malformed. only we're born obsolete. That work contains his seminal essay on Promethean shame, in which Anders uses the Greek myth of Prometheus

to describe how we humans increasingly feel ashamed when compared to our technological creations. This is Jeopardy, the IBM Callum. Here we go. Ken, what's a committee? Let's go to legal ease for 1,200. Watson, what is executor? Right.

Same category. Watson won handily. And I remember standing there behind that podium as I could hear that little insectoid thumb clicking it. And you could hear that little, T-T-T-T-T-T-T-T-T-T. That's former Jeopardy champion, Ken Jennings,

in a TED Talk, recalling his 2011 loss to Watson, an IBM computer. And I remember thinking, this is it. I felt obsolete. I felt like a Detroit factory worker of the 80 seeing a robot that could now do his job on the assembly line. And it was freaking demoralizing. When Gunter Anders was writing just after World War II, he intentionally exaggerated the potential consequences of new technologies as a technique to warn us about their dangers. But his exaggerations paint a frightening picture of how those dangers are being realized

right now. I think in some ways he preempted or foresaw that moment of AI within which we find ourselves at the moment, whereby you have texts produced by AI, read by AI, and two can beautifully coexist ultimately without us. While Anders is still largely obscure in the English-speaking world, the list of intellectuals he was connected to is a veritable who's-who of 20th century German philosophy. When I first saw the constellation of thinkers Anders knew during his life, I think my jaw dropped, so many familiar names, and yet I had never heard of Anders himself. Who were some of these well-known philosophers that Anders had ties to?

That's a long list. It can even just be short. Ideas contributor Olivia Trono explores the uncanny relevance of Gunter Anders, and his idea of Promethean shame, eight decades after he first described it. Where to start? He studied with some of the leading figures in German philosophy, if not world philosophy.

Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl. He collaborated with Jean-Paul Sartre, Max Schaler. He was associated with Bertolt Brecht. His cousin was Walter Benjamin. He's married to Hannah Arendt. Yes, Hanna Arendt from 1929 to 1937, he knew the members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, Teodor W. Adorno, Lockeheimer. So he is connected to some of the most important thinkers of the 20th century.

But despite that connection, there was something that distinguished Anders from these big names. Gunder Anders wasn't in this tier of haughty, intellectual, philosophizing, remote from politics. He was very much on the ground and very, very concerned with the plight of common people of humanity in general. I'm Harold Marcus and I'm a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Harold Marcus is also the grandson of German-American philosopher Herbert Marcusa. I studied in Germany and ultimately became a professor of German history and specialized in how German look back on the period of Nazism in World War II. Anders' critique of technology was rooted in his everyday observations and lived experience.

And in order to understand his work, we have to understand more about him. So I think the first place to start is that Gunther Anders, Anders is a pseudonym. His real name was Gunther Stern. He was born in 1902 to prominent German Jewish psychologists, Clara and William. They actually psychoanalyzed his childhood and published their results, but that's a story for a different day. Gunther Stern slash Anders completed his doctorate at Freiburg University in the early 1920s, and towards the end of the decade, was encouraged to pause pursuing academic work because of creeping Nazism in the university. He then moved to Berlin, where he got a little help finding work as a journalist.

Bertolt Brecht got him a job at the Berlin Berzin Courier, which is basically the Berlin equivalent of the Wall Street Journal. There were many Jewish journalists working at the time, and Stern was an obviously Jewish name. So his editor asked him, said, you know, can't you take a different name so that it doesn't look like we've only hired Jewish journalists? And so Anders said, okay, call me different. That's the German word Andars. Anders would later leave Nazi Germany for 17 years, precisely because he was another. 1950, he comes back to Europe, settles in Austria, in Vienna, and he begins to fully identify and use the name Gunter Anders. So much so that he not only, that's the name people know him by, he really does begin to identify with this notion of being different, being an outsider, that that name has these associations with.

I'm Jason Dawsey. I am assistant teaching professor at Arizona State University. And what led to his exile? So when Hitler becomes chancellor, the end of January, 1933, that's already an ominous sign for anti-Nazis. And then you have this fire in the German parliament building, the Reichstag, a month later. And a massive crackdown on communists, radical leftists. The story goes is that Under's name was in an address book that Brecht had that was confiscated in a police raid. And so he gets out. In 1938, so about five years after Anders fled Germany, his German citizenship was revoked by the Nazi government.

Right. So he was a stateless refugee or emigree and was constantly. fighting for his permits to work and were struggling with English. By that time, Anders had emigrated to the U.S., to California, where he had to take work wherever he could find it. So he ended up doing all sorts of jobs that at the time would have been very different from what he worked in Germany. So he worked in factories and at assembly lines.

He worked in a movie prop factory for the Hollywood movie industry, was a private tutor. So had all sorts of jobs. and it's really out of this experience of exile and of being an outsider in society or look down upon in society that a lot of his philosophical thought emerges. My name is Chris Miller. I teach at Macquarie University in the media department.

I'm also a translator of the work of Ginter Anders and author of a book called Prometheanism. You mentioned the assembly line. I want to set the stage for this concept of Promethean shame by talking about this, by talking about this factory work as a concrete example of his theories. How does Anders describe what happens to people when they're working alongside the conveyor belt in a factory?

He uses it to kind of introduce the pressure we have to keep up with a machine, to kind of have to focus all our attention to just kind of match the rhythm of the machine. And this date is continuously interrupted by the kind of bodily reality of the worker themselves. right? So they might feel an itch or they might be lost in thoughts and suddenly realize, oh my God, I haven't been paying attention to this automatism or to my job. And it's this kind of tension between, you know, experiencing oneself as being kind of not able to keep up, that, you know, he describes this Promethean shame. He certainly has in mind a movie that many of your listeners will know,

which is Charlie Chaplin's modern times. In the factory work scene of modern times, Chaplin struggles to keep up with the fast pace of the conveyor belt. He's chastised for being slow, but after a series of physical gags, including going into the belly of the machine, he manages to stop the conveyor belt entirely. He then skips around happily,

celebrating his triumph over the machine. And he will say that Charlie Chaplin's modern times is already dated, that now two decades later, you're talking about the 1950s, that now people really aren't resisting it. They've been really fully subsumed by this kind of labor operation, where they adjust, line up their movements day after day with a mechanized process that he finds at some level is just inhuman. For Anders, how does humanity position the machine or things that have been made and not born? So I guess this is where the concept of Promethean shame comes from. He goes to an exhibition of dishwashers and observes how people are hiding their hands behind their back as if they were embarrassed to bring these kind of clumsy hands into the presence of dishwashers that are so good at washing dishes.

In a diary entry dated March 11, 1942, Anders describes going to a tech exhibition with a friend he refers to only as tea. Joined a tour together with tea of an exhibition of technology that is opened here. Tea behaved in a most peculiar manner. As soon as one of the highly complicated pieces started to work, he lowered his eyes and fell silent. Even more strikingly, he concealed his hands behind his back, as if he were, a shame to have brought these heavy, graceless and obsolete instruments into the company of machines working with such accuracy and refinement. So he's kind of describing how the better technological objects become,

the more they seem to be able to accomplish what we can, but just faster, better. The more it feels embarrassing that we are who we are and that we can't match their performance. To stand in his bodily clumsiness and his corporeal and precision under the gaze of such perfect devices was really unbearable for him. He was truly ashamed. And he kind of observes how this starts to infect the way we speak of ourselves.

So rather than saying I'm ill, we might say I'm broken or I need a new organ or something like that the way we might talk about a machine or we might talk about our brain as if it was a computer. We assess ourselves as though we were to assess a product, a technological product. I am Elka Schwartz. I'm professor of political theory at Queen Mary University in London.

Now, in that comparison, we don't really stack up because we know that our products are perfectable. We can improve them, we can iterate them, change them, perfect them ultimately. But as humans, we're not afforded that possibility. Our bodies fail, we grow old, we're vulnerable, our minds are limited. So in that relationship, we are actually quite shameful. in comparison to our machine. And this is where this notion of Promethean shame ultimately enters the picture. But it is an interesting relationship because ultimately we make the technologies after which we then measure ourselves. So it's a co-constitute of entanglement, if you will,

in which we increasingly look worse, ultimately. What Anders concludes Promethean shame ultimately means is that we're embarrassed to be bodily creatures rather than machines. Anders argues that shame from human-machine interactions, quote, erupts daily a thousand times over. Just think of your GPS telling you off for making a wrong turn, or the angry red squiggles pointing out a typo in your word document, or your friends being more interested in their phones than in you. But some of the most acute examples in our own day may come from our interactions with AI. According to KPMG, who surveyed over 400 Canadian students about this in the fall,

around 60% use AI chatbots like ChatGPT for their schoolwork. A recent poll from study.com... When we're interacting with something like generative AI, something quite remarkable happens that we can put in a prompt and within a few seconds there's a whole written text that is just in front of us. It seems competent and coherent. And of course this is something that we might start. struggle a lot to do ourselves, and it takes a lot of effort and a lot of doubt, a lot of

self-doubt. And I think that kind of gap between how easily the machine seems to perform that can also feel a bit like a reminder how much we struggle and how much effort it takes, and that might feel embarrassing. And on a larger scale, why is Promethean shame more than just an individual, laughable, or infuriating experience? What's the larger problem? So for Anders, it is a shift in the way we relate to technological objects, right? He says technology is more like a space of possibility. As humans, we are always already technological, right?

The oldest technological objects are about 3 million years old. So they predate homo sapiens. We evolve with it. And, you know, we learn how to speak. We have clothes. All these kind of artifacts that shape how we experience the world and ourselves. And for him, as technology advances in Westerns, society, there's a point suddenly where stuff flips, where rather than feeling that technology

is part of us, it feels like this kind of separate thing that we experience as an entity of its own kind. So in a sense, he says the Prometheus in us, so this drive to create objects and create things, has resulted in objects that we can no longer truly understand, that surpass our ability to compute, so to speak. Promethean shame, what it reveals Anders thinks, is a kind of debasement towards our machines, towards mechanized processes that he finds as itself part of a phenomenon he will call technological totalitarianism. Anders doesn't refer to this feeling simply as shame. He calls it Promethean shame. Why Promethean? Yeah, this is such an evocative phrase. Jason Dossi.

Anders is really fascinated with Prometheus as are many figures in the German intellectual tradition. So why does he use this phrase? Because he thinks that the figure Prometheus, what's important for modern human beings after World War II, is the kind of mixture of divinity and humanity he sees in this figure as a titan. and that we have created a kind of product world which has now come to dominate us. It goes back to the myth of Prometheus, which has a lot of different versions in Greek mythology,

but it's usually, I guess, related to an act of hubris, right? Prometheus is introduced as the creator of mankind. We're created naked and without weapons, without clothes. And he then tricks Zeus. and steals fire and gives humans the gift of artifice. And this is considered a transgression, right? You've taken a divine power and given it to mankind. So it is really connected with this idea

that we can amplify ourselves, that we can turn ourselves into new beings that are bigger than we are born, right? And that there is somehow no measure that might contain what we can unleash with that power. So fire, of course, stands for all sorts of destructive technologies, but also for all sorts of beneficial technologies, such as cooking and so forth. So there's really this imbalance.

In the obsolescence of the human and his other works, Anders, who was an anti-nuclear activist, describes the dire consequences of technologies developed for the Second World War. At 2.45 in the morning, August 6, 1945, Colonel Tibbets takes the Inola Gay down the runway into the air, beginning the six-and-one-half-hour flight to Japan. It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws his power has been loosed against those who brought war. The more powerful our technologies become, the more they can do, the smaller humans actually look in comparison. And he especially narrates this relating to nuclear weapons, right?

He says these are the most powerful devices ever created, the image of fire unleashed. And yet they're so powerful that we're newly vulnerable and vulnerable in a way that we couldn't have been vulnerable by natural means, right? This is a vulnerability we've created ourselves. Anders writes that the creation of... of the atomic bomb altered our understanding of the mythic figure of Prometheus.

How did we view Prometheus before the bomb versus how did we view him after? This, in a sense, is at the heart of Anders's thought. So his famous book, or his most famous book, is called The Obsolescence of the Human. And what he means by this, at least in some of his text, he says this, is the model of the human that Western thought has created.

And Prometheus is really central, especially to the German literary imaginary, right? It's the myth of the kind of self-made man, the idea of the defiance towards nature, the ability to kind of create this artificial cultural world. But he's saying, well, with the atomic bomb, there's a strange nostalgia, a strange wish to not be a titan anymore, right? He's kind of saying, we've become so powerful, so big. And the world this has created is so imbalanced and destructive that we are no longer able to contain this Promethean ability to create objects

and the desire to kind of continuously improve and invent and push the boundaries further and further. It's interesting. It's like previously, as you're mentioning, Prometheus is treated allegorically. And there are some things, especially with American Prometheus and the idea of Oppenheimer. It's almost as though humans are really trying to emulate Prometheus and his godly world-shaping abilities as opposed to perhaps acknowledging our potential limits as humans. Well, I think that's, yeah, that's a really good way of putting it, right?

So for Anders, being human is an experience of limits. Our capacity to think, to feel, is limited by nature. And technology is the promise of renegotiating that. So simply by picking up a hammer, I suddenly have a hard hand and I can strike a nail and I couldn't do that otherwise. And so in that respect, Prometheus signifies that ability to overcome the limit. But what Anders is saying is what we're discovering is that this ability itself has no limits at all, right? We can make a computer faster and faster and faster and more powerful, more powerful, more powerful. Yet we as humans kind of remain constant.

we're still the same vulnerable beings and the more powerful technology becomes, the more vulnerable we might be in comparison and the harder it might become for us to really understand what these objects are or what they do in our lives, right? Because we remain limited beings. We remain bound to a kind of a mode of existence

that technology doesn't share. I asked Chris Muller if he knows of thinkers today who believe that with technological help, there are no limits to what humans can become. I think today maybe it's tech oligarchs that we could look towards who are embodying a certain desire to surpass all these limits and to create a world in which everything becomes controllable, manipulable, for the benefit of really quite few people.

That's a really key aspect of this whole work, is that it always amounts to a concentration of power, So because the more powerful a technology becomes or an ability, the more the people who create or control that technology have also power over other people's lives. Meta continuing its massive investments in AI, this time in the form of compute power, announcing two new major AI data centers.

So this is Zuckerberg's most aggressive play yet in the race to build superintelligence that is AI systems that can outperform humans. Now to get there, he says meta will invest hundreds of billions of dollars. Billions of dollars and the name of the first multi-gigawatt AI data center, Prometheus. You heard that right. Prometheus. I'm Nala Ayed, and you're listening to Ideas. Canada, a place which is a country and a nation.

Is that what you spent the whole day doing, Chris? I'm trying to make a grand statement. It's not working, is it? Hi, I'm Chris. And I'm Neil Cooksau. Listen, you can relax, Chris. As it happens, in case you've forgotten, has been on for more than 50 years. That is true. And you and I will be away for a part of this summer. But as it happens, we'll still be on with some fantastic guest hosts filling in. And the show will still be sharing stories from Canada and the rest of the world. You can listen to As It Happens wherever you get your podcasts. Today, artificial intelligence is marketed as being able to work faster and better. than any of us can.

That uncomfortable fact may make us humans feel ashamed in comparison, a phenomenon which philosopher Gunter Anders calls Promethean shame. Anders first outlined the term in 1956, and it's astonishing how he predicted the rise of technological dominance. You'd think he was observing the world today. This is CBC News Roundup. Today, the defenders of South Korea took a beating, and it was necessary to evacuate the American military headquarters at Siouan.

But the first American ground troops are... Anders uses a story about General MacArthur in the Korean War to describe a turning point in the history of our relationship with technology. Ideas contributor Olivia Trano. What is that story, as Anders tells it? So he's trying to identify cases where Promethean, shame becomes publicly visible. Chris Mueller is the author of Prometheanism, technology, digital culture, and human obsolescence.

He says, oh, this phenomenon that I've been talking about must be in the public eyes somehow. And he picks General MacArthur, who during the Korean War, was on record of wanting to deploy nuclear weapons to kind of resolve that conflict. And the way Anders relates it is that rather than just simply trusting the general, his staff, fed all the information into a computer, an electric brain, as it's called, and everything is calculated, and the machine says, no, this would be a terrible idea, this would be a loss-making business. And MacArthur is, you know, demoted. It was the deepest personal regret that I found myself compelled to take this action.

General MacArthur is one of our greatest military commanders. But the cause of world peace is much more important than any individual. All of a sudden, his word no longer counts. And underst says, well, of course, we were very lucky that he was disowned. But it also marks this shift where we can no longer trust humans or human judgment, where we'd prefer a machine to figure it all out. These processes become more and more technologized for him, and the role of human beings becomes less and less.

Jason Dossi teaches history at Arizona State University. University, and he researches World War II, European socialism, and critiques of technology. Marxists would talk about alienation. They would talk about reification with their analyses of capitalism. You know, that humans were involved in these kind of social, socioeconomic processes that had come to exploit and dominate workers and ultimately all people. But Andres would say that that just doesn't go far enough. He would say that under modern technology, what's really involved is liquidation. It's the steady erosion of human action, of human decision-making, of human control. Part of the problem in our relationship with technology is we often can't see it's happening when it's happening. The changes are too fast and too vast. Digitalization and the computer, it digitizes everything, but it also makes power disappear. I'm Christian Fox. I'm a critic.

theorist of technology, digital media and society. And I'm a professor at Paderborn University in Germany where I teach students of media studies. If you just go to Google, it's a search box and you search for something, but you don't see the power structures there. You don't see how the algorithm really works, how the algorithm selects what is considered as an important, as an unimportant result. But basically, Google defines reality. If you search for something and Google does not show the result as one of the top 10 results, then it really does not exist for us.

So algorithms and artificial intelligence really mediate the way we perceive reality and they manipulate it also. And Guntar Anders, if we were alive today, he would be highly critical of that. He would argue that the power of algorithms and artificial. intelligence is a further step in the dehumanization of society. He argues when machines become highly powerful, then this results in dehumanization and an explosion of dehumanization. The more complex technologies become, the more decisions are being made out of sight, out of mind, by entities we'll never meet and probably never will be aware of. And I guess the reason why

we use these technologies or why we accept it, I think really does have to do with this feeling of shame or we're coerced into it. And so a number of these developments, both mundane and catastrophic, if we're talking about the atomic bomb, a lot of the times these are initiatives that keep going and keep going without being questioned in a way we perhaps should be questioning them. In his essay called Theses for the Atomic Age, Andrews-Quaintinger's a new term to explain why we do this. That term is inverted utopians.

What does he mean by inverted utopians? So the traditional utopian idea is that we can imagine a better world, maybe a future world, but we struggle to create it. We might not yet have the technological skill. And he's kind of inverting that image and says, well, we've created a world, we can no longer imagine. Elka Schwartz. We are inverted utopians because normal utopians, their problem is that they can't produce what they imagine. Our problem is that we can't imagine the impact of that which we produce, which makes them such an interesting thinker in the context of the climate crisis,

in the context of the newly accelerated ways of doing warfare. For Anders' objects do not enter the world, they create new worlds around them. And so when we're inventing something like nuclear weapons or AI, we're creating a world that will be shaped by that technology. But we're also kind of really struggling to predict what that world will look like, what my place will be in that world, who will govern it, what laws will we need to contain it. And there's always going to be this lag where technology is rushing ahead and we're somehow trying to catch up and learn how to live with the technology. and the more powerful technologies become, the bigger the lack, right? The bigger the leap. The harder it becomes to catch up and adjust.

And there's that. I opted to maybe not use the terminology of the Promethean discrepancy or the Promethean slope because in audio it feels like it's a little hard to understand. Like I was like, I don't know if I'm going to include that my questions. But I guess just so we can cover it, can you briefly describe what he means by this Promethean discrepancy or sense. So I like to think of it these days. It's almost a gap between what we can collectively create and what we can individually imagine. So we can collectively create something like an AI system. And it's actually a very good example because I guess the data it runs on is created

by millions or if not billions of humans. But it's almost impossible for any one individual to imagine or know or feel what that means. An artificial intelligence chatbot, capable of doing everything from writing essays, computer code, even passing the bar exam, a revolutionary tool or growing threat, depending on who you ask. We checked out one of its more practical. So what does it mean that I'm using chat chitp and helping to train it? What is my responsibility towards the future or to other people? And that feeling can't really translate. And that's what he means by the Promethean slope, right?

This gap between what we know and what we can feel. So I know that I'm influencing others, but I can't really feel what that means. So it's really hard to feel that sense of resistance or hesitation or doubt. Alka, you write that, quote, with contemporary AI, the rift between our products and our moral imagination has become a steep abyss. Where does this steep abyss leave us? Well. I've been going back to Guntar Anders lately for exactly this reason.

I think it leaves us in a terrible space. It leaves us in a very strange and reactionary space. And Guntar Anders himself also, he was very acutely aware that when he raised his critique of technology at the time, he always ended up being called like a romantic reactionary, I think he said. And that reaffirms those who make the technologies as like the great progressives. and it sort of validates their claims that anything that constitutes progress needs to be done. This is one of under thesis and the obsoleses of men, is this notion that one should just do what one is able to do and call that progress ultimately,

and that is a really, really problematic condition. Now, in this steep abyss that we find ourselves, we are constantly reactionary, and I see this with various governments, with departments of, Defense or Ministries of Defense who are on the back foot in having to adopt and fashion the world, fashion their ecologies around the artificial intelligence universe ultimately, into which we all now need to integrate. Well, the Guardian is calling it AI's Oppenheimer moment due to the increasing appetite for combat tools that blend human and machine intelligence. This has led to an influence. We're beginning to see artificial intelligence pretty much in every single decision made in war.

But as AI becomes more deeply embedded in military operations, migrating from surveillance to assistance and targeting, the voices calling for international regulation are getting louder. Gunter Anders' moral philosophy somehow tells us, when there is a new technology, don't fall into the trap of positivism and technological fetishism, first and foremost, ask yourself, what could be the negative consequences for humans in contemporary society? It's not even a steep abyss. It's like it's an enormous gulf that we're dealing with at the moment. We have a completely disrupted education landscape, which the educational mandate to cultivate critical thinking is undermined through an AI ecology.

You have a defense landscape which is accelerated and scaled up through the logics of artificial intelligence. And so we find ourselves within a shaped subjectivity in which the human skills of taking time, of deliberation, of doing less, of deciding not to decide, of relating to one another, of creating meaning, all of that finds no more space. Again, I think he would have said that is not surprising because we have made technologies for a long time that are fashioned to work without us.

So we're writing ourselves ultimately out of the story. In a sense, humanity used its right hand to rob its left, offering up the booty, its own conscience and freedom to decide, on the altar of machines. Ander's prophetic work is still not widely known, at least in the English-speaking world. Until recently, many of his works simply weren't available in English, something that Chris Muller and others have been working to rectify,

to get Anders out of the shadows of his more famous contemporaries. In terms of his institutional reality, he wasn't an academic who ever had an academic post, He literally survived as a kind of freelance writer and philosopher and very much writing for a public audience. Part of the non-reception of Anders's work stems from an issue of timing. Chris, one of the quotes that you include that is almost heartbreaking in that sense is

those who arrive early are also not on time, which he was reflecting on in his older years. He would often arrive at ideas and concepts that, you know, a decade later, some other person would become really famous for publishing that. And that's kind of where he's noting, oh, I always seem to be too early when people are not yet worried about the things I'm talking about. And then 10 years later, they suddenly think, oh, why have we never thought about this? He was certainly a strident critic of technology at a time. You think about the three decades after World War II.

People will talk about this golden age. You had a real upswing, high levels of prosperity enjoyed by large numbers of people, not least here in the United States. And so figures who were criticizing technology, criticizing these notions of indefinite progress, a lot of people were not interested in this kind of critique. Another reason for Anders' lack of reception had to do with being a perpetual outsider. So he was very much on track of becoming a. academic in pre-war Germany. He, you know, was doing the equivalent of what is today a postdoc when he was encouraged to leave the university because of anti-Semitic tension.

So he was kind of told, wait until the Nazi hype is over and then come back and complete your work. And he never was able to return. And in exile, when he traveled to America, it was a massive culture shock. All his cultural capital, all his knowledge of all these German philosophers was completely worthless and ridiculed, right? No one cared to listen to him. And in this time, I think it was 17 years, he wrote really prolifically and was kind of on the margin of an intellectual culture that survived. So a lot of academic, established academics also fled to California,

but there was one difference. They all had money. The best known philosophers of the Frankfurt School are Max Horkeimer and Theodore Adorno, who were not only elitist, but they were members of the elite. Harold Marcuse's grandfather was philosopher Herbert Marcusa. He was a close friend of Anders. My father tells the stories of when his father, Herbert Marcusa, were invited to Horkheimer's, for instance, they had to, you know, dress properly, and he was admonished to be on his best behavior, and Horkheimer and Adorno had maids in their houses. So they were sort of the top-level elites. They could spend their time of exile writing philosophical books, and Anders was working all these jobs that would have been considered menial

or would have been considered unskilled. So that contrast. And he never gave up that position and instead made it his business to kind of call out a certain academic hypocrisy, right, to kind of say, well, you write about all these things you don't actually know, you haven't lived this reality. You don't really know what it means

to work a shift at a machine, that kind of thing. It seemed nonsensical and comic to me, if not even downright immoral, to produce texts about morality that could only be read and understood by academic colleagues, as nonsensical as if a baker would only bake bread rolls for other bakers. Chris, you're noting kind of how accessibility and activism were also cornerstones of his work.

You know that Heidegger had warned Anders not to wade into practical matters, but Anders ultimately refused. Why did Heidegger warn him not to do that? Oh, that's an interesting question. I mean, Heidegger is the epitome of the kind of arrogant philosopher for Anders, and there's all sorts of personal reasons about this. Yeah. A very personal one being Hannah Arendt, who was Anders first wife,

and who also had an affair with Heidegger. I don't know. That probably plays into it. But the German academic culture of the time was very much what we might today call an ivory tower, in the sense that it was a clique and a club, and to an extent intellectual or academic culture still has those traits. And Anders always wanted to translate philosophical ideas

into very concrete questions. And he was always warned not to go there. And this becomes one of his narrative devices to use these very relatable everyday scenes as the starting point of philosophy to kind of say, that's really what philosophy should be trying to do. It shouldn't be engaging these abstract ideals or try to give us definitions of what it means to be human.

It should help us answer the question, what is happening to me right now? Why am I feeling the way I am? These very concrete questions are really the driver of his philosophical thought. And that's why like kind of caricature, portrayal, diary, entries, all sorts of writing that we usually don't relate to philosophical writing, are really the kind of vehicle by which he writes and works. Diary entries, invented song lyrics, rye humor, and the offhand mention of an extraterrestrial reporter observing the cultural practices of Earth.

All of these are part of Anders' philosophical observations. He can switch between these registers quite effortlessly. And I guess this has to do with his attempt to somehow find the thing that will connect with us, How can we understand this idea? How can it become real with us and in a safe way? It has to do with this technique that he calls philosophical exaggeration. In this first volume, he uses the phrase in German,

Ubertribal, exaggeration as a method, as an approach. When a microscope exaggerates the size of a virus a million times over, does it also exaggerate the danger? Or does it make it visible? It is in this sense that I exaggerate. He compares it to microscopy and telescopes where he says we need some sort of device to amplify these feelings or these situations. Otherwise we can't really recognize what they are.

So the use of diaries, poems, songs, these shifts of perspective are all there to make something fleeting or suppressed, very present and very tangible and very comprehensible. like the potential dangers of technology. What he wants to do is to show his readers in the most extreme cases where this kind of technological domination might go. So he's always overstating it. He's always thinking about the most radical implications of this, even if we are not currently there yet. But what may have seemed like exaggeration in the 1950s feels a lot of.

lot more like reality now. Both then and now, Anders is telling us to take action and to avoid treating the possibility of these scenarios as inevitabilities. This technique of exaggeration as a call to action is front and center in his short story, mourning the future. It's a really beautiful story and really, it became a really key story in the German anti-nuclear movement in the 1960s. It's a retelling of the story of Noah and the Ark. And it's positioning us in Noah's world and he's got these grand plans. He's heard the flood is coming and he says, oh, I'm going to save everyone. I'm going to build hundreds and hundreds of arcs. We're going to save everyone. And every day he goes out into the world and tries to convince his fellow humans to

help him build these arcs. And they're all like very quickly bored of his petitions and very used to his strategies. And they say, are you and your arc, you and your flood, we don't care. Then he says, well, this is clearly not working. So he decides to play a trick. Noah is known as being very successful, nothing bad has ever happened to him. So he dresses up in this morning garb, in these morning cloths, covers his face in ashes and stands in the middle of the city, weeping and mourning. And, of course, everyone around him wants to know what has happened, who has died.

Have you lost someone close to you? Have I lost someone? can't you see? What did he say? He said he lost someone. We can see that for ourselves. But who? Who is it that you've lost?

They're kind of nosy. They're curious. They want to figure out and gossip. And then he kind of carefully dramatizes a dialogue. They ask, you know, who has died? He says, well, many have died. Who is it that I lost? Don't you know?

I have suffered the loss of many. What did he say now? He said he lost many. Names. Who are they? Who are they? Who are they? Don't you know? It is we who are the dead. What did he say now? He said it is we who are the dead. I'm not dead. And when was this supposed to have happened? When, dear Noah, did this catastrophe occur?

When did this catastrophe occur? Noah slowly spoke. And after a pause, and without raising his head, he replied. You really do not know? Tomorrow. It happened tomorrow. It's you who have died, all of you. ...wosted that an hour and was coming was. This is Gunther Anders himself, reading in the voice of Noah.

I stand before you because I was entrusted with a mission. I was commanded to forestall the very worst. a voice spoke to me and said, Reverse time, feel the pain of tomorrow's loss, and shed your tears today. The mourner's prayer you learnt as a boy at your father's grave, recite it now, for the sons who will die tomorrow and for the grandchildren who will never be born.

The day after tomorrow, it will be too late. Such were my instructions. And then he starts to kind of sing this morning prayer for the future. And he's mourning the future dead that will die in the flood. There is still time. It is not yet tomorrow. It is today. And this manages to move his contemporaries.

And so much so that when the rain clouds start to gather and the first raindrops fall, people turn up at this door and help him build the ark. That's the story of how the ark came into the world. And he kind of says, well, Noah manages to kind of save us. So it's really kind of a story of hope. And it's kind of a reminder that if we find the right words and right language, people can be made to care and made to see. So that's why I really like the story.

What I would say about Anders is that he pushes you to think about what space, to think and act do you still have? Almost trying to startle us into taking action. Yes, there's a kind of shock principle in his writings. He will openly talk about the fact that he wants to frighten his readers, not a fear that leads to paralysis, but a fear that is the first stage of practice of action, that you will act out of fear so that the scenario. Marriots he depicts will never come true.

Harold, you've mentioned that you have this personal connection to Anders through your grandfather. I wonder if you could share that with us. Okay. I'm going to tell you the story a little bit longer. It's actually very coincidental that I even discovered the familial relationship. I was studying in Munich in 1982, 83, and was looking for texts of how Germans thought about World War II and Hitler and the Holocaust right after the war. And I came across this book, The Writing on the Wall, where Anders tells about coming back to Vienna in 1950. and he says the sparrows were whistling Hitler's name from the roof and nobody was listening.

They were all pretending not to hear it. They were just ignoring the past completely. So I read that book and I mentioned to my parents that I found this really powerful philosophical diary that I was reading and my father must have mentioned, oh, we know Gunther Anders. Herbert Marcusa and Gunther Anders both left Nazi Germany, and Anders even rented a room from Marcusa in California.

So I kind of cold-called him when I was about to go to Vienna, and I wanted to bring him a gift as a young student encountering a major author and philosophical figure for the first time, and he immediately said, oh, I love pure dark chocolate, you know, 100% cacao. So that's how that came together. And then we really hit it off because I was very involved in the anti-nuclear movement at the time. He was interested in my work on German memories of the Holocaust and World War II. And when we were in conversation in his shabby flat in Vienna, my grandfather had been dead by about four years then.

And I probably expressed some regret at not really having known my grandfather. as a political, philosophical figure of the student movement. I'm a little too young to have been active in the student movement. And he said, well, let me be your surrogate grandfather and sort of took on the grandfatherly role in that way. And then my son was born a few years later, and I sent him a birth announcement, and he wrote very sweetly back a little letter to my son.

I wonder, if you're okay with it, could I read briefly that first line to you that he has Yeah, I don't have it in front of me, so please. It distills a lot. So saying, my dear surrogate great-grandchild, I cordially greet you on this more than dubious earth

and wish you from my heart that you will become happy here, undisturbed and undistraught. There you go, yeah. Harold, I want you to Imagine where you're sitting right now. If the door opened and in walked, Gunther Anders, your surrogate grandfather, what would you most want to say to him? Oh, boy.

Well, I would jump up and want to give him a hug in his frail body as I remember it and say, oh, Gunther, you were so right. You have no idea how spot on your philosophy. is today. But now we all know just how spot-on he was. You were listening to Ideas and to an episode called Promethean shame, Gunter Anders on Technology and the Obsolescence of the Human by contributor Olivia Trano. Thank you to Chris Muller for his translations and to David McAulis, the nephew of Gunter Anders.

readings by Greg Kelly, Lisa Godfrey, Nicola Luxchich, and Donna Dingwall. Technical production, Emily Kiervasio, and Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso, our senior producer, Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. And Harold, do you think you would offer him some dark chocolate? Oh, absolutely. As much as I could. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.com slash podcasts.