In a paper published in Science Robotics this past March, a group of MIT-based researchers revealed that they are close to perfecting an idea previously relegated to the speculative world of science fiction: robotic insects capable of functioning much like their organic counterparts. As one journalist covering the story was keen to point out, this possibility was most recently explored in Netflix’s dystopian series Black Mirror. The relevant episode featured murderous artificial bees originally designed to compensate for declining insect populations. 

Long before Black Mirror and the latest research developments at MIT, however, the enigmatic German author Ernst Jünger raised the possibility of a future where real bees are replaced by artificial robots in his 1957 novel The Glass Bees (originally Glӓserne Bienen). Although dismissed by some critics as “lacking contemporary relevance” in the technophilic decades following the Second World War, many of the novel’s uncanny predictions concerning the altered relationship between nature, technology, and humanity are highly pertinent in our age of artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and virtual reality. Indeed, the future world that Jünger imagines looks very much like the one we now inhabit.

Set in a vague cyberpunk post-war Europe, The Glass Bees is the story of Captain Richard, a disgraced and penniless former cavalryman who has been offered a job as chief of security at Zapparoni Works, a powerful corporation that resembles a futurist hybrid of Tesla and Disney. At the helm of Zapparoni Works is the eponymous Giancomo Zapparoni, an Italian tech mogul who has revolutionized the entertainment and defense industries with his intricate automatons. As Captain Richard tells us, with Zapparoni, “technology took a new turn toward downright pleasure—the age-old magicians’ dream of being able to change the world by thought alone seemed almost to have come true.”

In spite of his Midas-like ability to turn a profit from everything he touches, Zapparoni is concerned that the quizzical inventors and artisans he retains to put his ideas into practice may one day take their talents elsewhere, thus jeopardizing his precious trade secrets. To prevent such an eventuality, Zapparoni needs a man “capable of doing the dirty work.” This is where Captain Richard, whose checkered war-time reputation precedes him, comes in.

Almost from the outset, it becomes clear that Captain Richard, who often ruminates on a bygone age when men rode horses into battle, is not your typical science-fiction hero. As Bruce Sterling observes in his insightful introduction to the NYRB edition of the novel, Richard is a man who “knows what it means when people line up for soup.” In Richard’s own estimation, he is little more than “one mass of useless and antiquated prejudices.” But these characteristics are what make Richard compelling as a protagonist. Like many of Jünger’s characters, Richard feels uprooted and disoriented by the ever-increasing dynamism of modern life. As the archetype of a “man out of time,” he invites us to consider the meaning of ideals like honor, duty, and heroism in a world where “words have lost their meaning.” The choice with which he is ultimately confronted—whether to hold fast to his “fossil judgments” tied up with these values or discard them—is the choice that confronts all of us today in some shape or form.

If Captain Richard is emblematic of the “old” Western man who, much like Jünger himself, feels out of place in the modern world, then Zapparoni is the modern world’s living embodiment. When Richard finally encounters the elusive entrepreneur in his home (which is suggestively built on the ruins of a Cistercian abbey), he describes Zapparoni in terms befitting a kind of magician or alchemist: “And this is what I felt at the sight of Zapparoni. I thought: ‘That man has the formula’ or, ‘He is an initiate, one of the elect.’ Suddenly, ‘knowledge is power’ took on a new, immediate, and dangerous meaning.” Of particular interest for Richard are Zapparoni’s “extremely powerful” eyes, which also appear capable of changing color: “They had the royal look, the open gaze, revealing the white of the eyeball above and beneath the iris. The impression was at the same time slightly artificial, as if it resulted from some delicate operation.”

Like the Titans of myth, Zapparoni has appeared on the stage of history intent on dethroning the old order and instituting something unprecedented. As Captain Richard reminds us time and again throughout the novel, Zapparoni ultimately endeavors to overcome nature and improve upon its design. “In his opinion, nature was inadequate, both in its beauty and logic, and should be surpassed.” 

The lengths to which Zapparoni is willing to go to achieve this objective are revealed when he sends Richard to the strange garden behind his home to await a kind of test. Here, Richard finally encounters the titular glass bees—insectoid automata that restlessly suck the nectar from the garden’s flowers and distribute it in a series of artificial hives.

Although impressed by the efficiency of the glass bees (they work several times as fast as actual bees), Richard is disturbed by the way they appear to have upset the “antediluvian economic system” of the organic bees, which Richard curiously describes as “messengers of love” on account of their essential role in the “cosmic plan” of pollination and fertilization. By contrast, Zapparoni’s “unerotic” automatons engage in what the Germans commonly refer to as Raubbau—a methodical draining of the flowers’ substance until nothing remains for the true bees. If put to use beyond the experimental testing grounds of the Zapparoni Works, Richard fears that bees and flowers alike will inevitably become extinct:

Zapparoni’s glass collectives, as far as I could see, ruthlessly sucked out the flowers and ravished them. Wherever they crowded out the old colonies, a bad harvest, a failure of crops, and ultimately a desert were bound to follow. After a series of extensive raids, there would no longer be flowers or honey, and the true bees would become extinct in the way of whales and horses.

Richard’s observations concerning the glass bees invite us to reflect critically on the modern compulsion for what, in the Continental tradition, has come to be known as Perfektion. While in English the word “perfection” is imbued with a certain moral connotation, the German Perfektion conveys the idea of something complete, of a process that has finally come to fruition. Moreover, Perfektion suggests a purging of the irrelevant, as dross is purged from silver. As Jünger’s brother, Friedrich-Georg, explains in his critical essay The Perfection of Technology (which I have written about here): “What do we mean by saying that technology achieves perfection? What does the statement imply? Nothing else than that the thinking which produces and expands technology comes to an end, that it reaches those limits which are set by its own methods.”

In other words, the “perfection” of technology refers to the hypothetical end-point at which technological progress has nowhere left to go, when all that can be technified has been technified. Here we might think of those dream worlds of the utopian imagination (Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward comes to mind) where the operations of society function at a level approaching complete efficiency and all conceivable eventualities can be provided for by technical know-how of one kind or another. 

While a world of pure efficiency remains largely fantastical, it is clear how the ethos of perfection permeates the technocratic civilization in which we live, whether we speak of the billions spent annually on research and development or the proliferation of smartphone apps designed to streamline everything from dining to dating. Positive psychology has even contributed to the creation of an entire industry devoted to the development of techniques allegedly capable of producing human happiness!

Perhaps the clearest example of perfection at work is the contemporary mania for so-called “green” technology. In academia, politics, and big business alike, green tech is currently being flaunted as the panacea to our ever-increasing environmental woes, declining honey bee populations not least of all. According to the United Nations, global investment in such technologies has become a moral imperative for humanity.

When we look behind the environmentally-friendly rhetoric in which it is often packaged, however, it quickly becomes clear that the true appeal of green tech does not lie in its capacity to engender a collective paradigm shift vis-a-vis the natural world, but in the dubious promise of convenient solutions to all of the undesirable consequences now resulting from our frenetic levels of activity and consumption. Indeed, however we choose to spin it, green technology still partakes of the fundamental conceit of the whole modern technological project bequeathed to us by eighteenth-century rationalism, namely the belief that nature is a force amenable to human manipulation and control—a “standing reserve,” in the words of Martin Heidegger, which must be exploited “for the relief of man’s estate.”

It should thus come as little surprise that the principal beneficiary of green technology will not be the environment, but technology itself. As journalist Noel Yaxley observes in an insightful article recently published in Compact, for example, the production of purportedly clean alternatives (such as electric vehicles) depends entirely on rare earth minerals like cobalt, the large-scale extraction of which has proven harmful not only to the environment, but also human rights. Nevertheless, governments and industry leaders alike have already committed to transitioning entirely to zero-emission automobiles by 2040.

Similarly, the 2019 documentary Planet of the Humans critically examines the mainstream environmental movement, concluding in part that rather than replacing fossil fuels, the energy produced by solar panels, wind farms, and the like tends to simply tack on top of them, such that the net amount of energy being consumed actually increases with every green solution we implement. Because Wall Street investors and other monied interests stand to gain from the continued development of these technologies, however, their practical limitations have been downplayed and in some cases even concealed outright from the public eye. 

Thankfully, the potential pitfalls of putting all our eggs in the green tech basket have not gone entirely unnoticed by persons of influence. In his Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, for example, Pope Francis observes that one extreme of the present environmental debate is dominated by those who “doggedly uphold the myth of progress and tell us that ecological problems will solve themselves simply with the application of new technology.” In Pope Francis’ view, however, this perspective is lacking insofar as it disregards “any need for ethical considerations or deep change.”

But the danger posed by the quest for perfection is not limited to environmental degradation. As Captain Richard soon learns, Zapparoni’s automatons also threaten the integrity of the human person. Following his encounter with the glass bees, Richard’s curiosity leads him to a small pond located on the far side of the garden. There he is disturbed to discover what appears to be a number of severed ears that have been placed on the rocks and lily pads.

While Richard initially believes the ears are the remains of those who have tried and failed Zapparoni’s bizarre test, further investigation reveals that the severed appendages are not human ears after all, but artificial parts used in the manufacture of Zapparoni’s animatronic marionettes, which Richard tells us have largely replaced human actors.

Although relieved to find that the ears are subtly crafted imitations, Richard begins to brood over his realization that Zapparoni’s creations have all but effaced the distinctions between the real and the artificial, between man and automaton:

When I had examined the ear, I had done so wishing that it were a hoax, an artifice, a doll’s ear, that it had never known pain. In this place, however, a mind was at work to negate the image of a free and intact man. The same mind had devised this insult: it intended to rely on man power in the same way that it had relied on horsepower. It wanted units to be equal and divisible, and for that purpose man had to be destroyed as the horse had already been destroyed.

Through the episode with the ears, Jünger underscores the triumph of a “dissecting mentality” inherent in technological thought, which tends to fragment and compartmentalize at the expense of the whole. As Pope Benedict XVI warned when he spoke of the dangers of a nascent “atheist anthropology” in our time, should this dissecting mentality be applied to man, our conception of the human person would be despoiled in the same way that the glass bees despoil the flowers, for the individual would be reduced to the sum of his parts.

The logical conclusion of this dissecting mentality is the emergence of Transhumanism, which aims to overcome the limitations of our biology via technological upgrades and improvements. Once relegated to the fringes of science fiction, Transhumanism has become increasingly mainstream in recent years, aided and abetted by innovations in biotechnology and genetics. In its more radical variants, Transhumanism goes so far as to contemplate the possibility of attaining immortality by separating the mind from the physical body which, from the Transhumanist perspective, is a kind of biological prison doomed to senescence and, ultimately, death. To the extent that Jünger anticipates this view of the human person in The Glass Bees in order to critique it, he may be counted as an early exponent of Bioconservatism.

Given the continued momentum of the vaunted “Biotech Revolution,” it would hardly defy the imagination to conclude that technological progress may one day allow us to realize the sort of earthly paradise that the Transhumanists contemplate, a man-made Eden not unlike Zapparoni’s garden where “enjoyments currently slumbering in their bulbs and buds, unknown to man and woman” can be apprehended in full. But The Glass Bees suggests that something vital about human experience would be lost in the midst of such utopian bliss. Liberated from the reality of the tragic, from the possibility of death and loss, life would be deprived of what Captain Richard describes as its “inner weight”: “I saw the entrance to a painless world. Whoever passed into it was protected against the ravages of time. He would never be seized by a feeling of awe. Like Titus he would enter the destroyed temple, the burnt-out Holy of Holies. Time held its trophies and its wreaths ready for him.”

Richard’s difficulty in distinguishing between the real and the artificial when confronted with the severed ears also prompts reflection on a question that is increasingly pressing in our time. Namely, what does it mean to be a human being? In a world where artificial intelligence is capable not only of performing complex calculations, but also of making moral distinctions, creating art, and even delivering religious sermons, what is the essence of the human? While Jünger seems content to raise this question without resolving it decisively, The Glass Bees suggests the answer is intuitively tied to memory. While the actual events of the novel occur over the course of two days, Richard’s narrative spans decades as he relates the intimate details of his often poignant personal experiences to the reader.

This emphasis on memory throughout The Glass Bees suggests a commitment on Jünger’s part to a conception of human nature that stresses continuity between past and present in the inner life of every human being. By contrast, Zapparoni seeks to break with the past so that he might lead humanity into “fabulous realms.”

Today, it is hardly a secret that the real-life Zapparonis—Klaus Schwab, Ray Kurzweil, and the like—seek to utilize technology to propel us toward their own revolutionary visions of the future, whether we speak of “The Great Reset” or the coming “Singularity.” To maintain our humanity in the face of these futurist projects, Jünger suggests that we turn our gaze inward, to the “boundaries of our innermost being.” While this call to remembrance may seem anachronistic, even naive, amid the “cunning question-and-answer game between overbred brains” that frames the struggle for power in our increasingly digitized, hi-tech world, it may be that memory is the one thing that retains the power to orient us toward our truest riches.

As Captain Richard confides to the reader: “I came to realize that one single human being, comprehended in his depth, who gives generously from the treasures of his heart, bestows on us more riches than Caesar or Alexander could ever conquer. Here is our kingdom, the best of monarchies, the best republic. Here is our garden, our happiness.”