ellul's pessimistic arguments about technology ellul's pessimistic arguments about technology

Government intervention is needed only to regulate the most harmful impacts. Toxic wastes may contaminate groundwater decades after they have been buried. The work of astronomers, for instance, has been dependent on a succession of new technologies, from optical telescopes to microwave antennae and rockets. In the past, technological decisions have usually been governed by narrowly economic criteria, to the neglect of environmental and human costs. This view encourages a qualified optimism about social change (and, I suggest, about technology). Join the ISI community. Teich. But everybody had to play along and pretend that it was real because no one could imagine any alternative.. Improved Communications. The work week has been cut in half, and human wants have been dramatically fulfilled.7Emanuel Mesthene, former director of the Harvard Program in Technology and Society, grants that every technology brings risks as well as benefits, but he says that our task is the rational management of risk. Whatever guidance is needed for technological development is supplied by the expression of consumer preferences through the marketplace. For example, U.S. legislation supporting railroads and public mass transit systems was blocked by a coalition of auto manufacturers, insurance companies, oil companies, labor unions, and the highway construction industry. (Translated by Dominique Gillot and Carl Mitcham from Recherche pour une Ethique dans une socit technicienne, Morale et Enseignement (1983), pp. The pessimists typically make personal fulfillment their highest priority, and they interpret fulfillment in terms of human relationships and community life rather than material possessions. I will suggest that the most important from of freedom is participation in the decisions affecting our lives. . In addition, the bicycle carried cultural meanings, affecting a person's self-image and social status. . This would appear to be a clear-cut case of attempting to solve the problems of technique with more technique, when the questions ought to be: Why are we using so much power? The pessimists have defended human values in a materialistic and impersonal society. One of his heroes is Benjamin Franklin, who proposed technological ways of coping with the unpleasant consequences of technology.12 Florman holds that environmental and health risks are inherent in every technical advance. First, the environmental costs and human risks of technology are dismissed too rapidly. Technology has been celebrated as the source of material progress and human fulfillment. Without God, my work would have an eminently tragic meaning, Ellul told Chastenet. The experience of working in the heart of bureaucracy put Ellul off politicsat least in a public sensefor the rest of his life. pGBBB5afr 25Y) diEu2. . Unfortunately, he gives us few examples of what such a technology would be like or how we can work to promote it.41, The American theologian Roger Shinn has written extensively on Christian ethics and gives attention to the structures of political and economic power within \ which technological decisions are made. Technology is indivisible and universal because everywhere it goes it shows the same deterministic face with the same consequences. He was created for a living environment, but he dwells in a lunar world of stone, cement, asphalt, glass, cast iron, and steel. 50. The combination of visual images and auditory message have an immediacy not found in the linear sequence of the printed word. Such an obsession with things distorts our basic values as well as our relationships with other persons. One thing is clear: readers who ignore Elluls spiritual writings are missing one of the major objectives of his work. Victor Ferkiss, Technological Man and The Future of Technological Civilization (New York: George Braziller, 1969 and 1974). But, of course, life doesnt work this way: not all technologies are created equal. With many middle-level jobs eliminated, these lower-level jobs often become dead ends for women.49 A study of three computerized industries in Britain found that women were the low-paid operators, while only men understood and controlled the equipment, and men almost never worked under the supervision of women.50. 40. In 1939, the Vichy regime removed Ellul from his teaching post at Strasbourg University for allegedly making subversive statements. Ellul, the Karl Marx of the 20th century, predicted the chaotic tyranny many of us now pretend is the good and determined life in technological society. They believe that society is basically sinful. 48. The latter is totally dominated and utilized (in Western society). By the nineteenth (19th) century the bourgeoisie recognized technique as the key to their material and commercial interests. Frederick Ferr (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1990). %PDF-1.5 Jacques pined for the life of a naval officer, but the elder Ellul insisted his son study law. But Ellul does not spell out such a transformation because he holds that the outcome is in God's hands, not outs, and most of his writings are extremely pessimistic about social change.24, The political scientist Langdon Winner has given a sophisticated version of the argument that technology is an autonomous system that shapes all human activities to its own requirements. Networks of industries with common interests form lobbies of immense political power. How can we explain the explosive emergence of global awareness of the polycrisis over the past year, 2022-2023? It is often easier to find a technical fix for a social problem than to try to change human behavior or get agreement on political policies.13, Florman urges us to rely on the judgment of experts in decisions about technology. Technology is not a neutral means to human ends but an all-encompassing system that imposes its patterns on every aspect of life and thought.25. Buckminster Fuller, The Critical Path (New York: St. Martins Press, 1981); Herman Kahn et al., The Next 200 Years (New York: William Morrow, 1976); Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Bantam, 1971) and The Third Wave (New York: William Morrow, 1980). His most influential sociological book with the English title, The Technological Society, was originally entitled in French, Technique, the Stake of the Century, for example. However, those same readers are often confounded upon picking up another book in Elluls corpus and encountering what seem to be very different assumptions, methods, and conclusions. An International Jacques Ellul Society is going strong, publishing The Ellul Forum and holding well-attended biannual conferences focusing on all aspects of Elluls work and their implications for contemporary society. His efforts to smuggle Jews out of the country earned him a posthumous designation of Righteous Among the Nations from the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. Ellul believed that the first act of freedom a citizen can exercise is to recognize the necessity of understanding technique and its colonizing powers. Technology, he wrote, cant put up with human values and must necessarily don mathematical vestments. Mitcham and Grote. Christianity brought about the desacralization of nature and allowed it to be controlled and used for human welfare.16 Norris Clarke was technology as an instrument of human fulfillment and self-expression in the use of our God-given intelligence to transform the world. 26. Emanuel Mesthene, Technological Change: Its Impact on Man and Society (New York; New American Library, 1970). Paul Tillich, The Person in a Technological Society, in Social Ethics, ed. The dense and discursive work lays out in 500 pages how technique became for civilization what British colonialism was for parts of 19th-century Africa: a force of total domination. Human identity is defined by roles in organizations. Some critics assert that technology is not just a set of adaptable tools lot human use but an all-encompassing form of life, a pervauttuie with its own logic and dynamic. But his confidence really lay in the unity, convergence, and ascent of the cosmic process of which humanity and technology are manifestations. 3. We have let technology define the good life in terms of production and consumption, and we have ended with mindless labor and mindless leisure. Studs Terkel, Working (New York: Pantheon. . A reader could be forgiven for throwing the book down at this point and pining for that blissful time just prior to the discovery of the works of Jacques Ellul. Another option is the view of Christian life and society as two separate realms, as held in the Lutheran tradition. I join them in upholding the significance of personal relationships and a vision of personal fulfillment that goes beyond material affluence. When the technological mentality is dominant, people are viewed and treated like objects. Darrell Fasching, The Dialectic of Apocalypse and Utopia in the Theological Ethics of Jacques Ellul, in Research in Philosophy and Technology, vol. This view is common among the optimists. For Ellul, technique, an ensemble of machine-based means, included administrative systems, medical tools, propaganda (just another communication technique) and genetic engineering. Darrell Fasching, The Dialectic of Apocalypse and Utopia in the Theological Ethics of Jacques Ellul, in Research in Philosophy and Technology, vol. The technician treats other people as objects to be understood and controlled.31Martin Buber contrasts the IIt relation of objective detachment with the IThou relation of mutuality, responsiveness, and personal involvement. Their goal is to make the world a more efficient place for more machines. The list is endless because technique, or what most of us would just call technology, has become the artificial blood of modern civilization. The characteristics of technical progress are self-augmentation, automization, absence of limits, casual progression, a tendency toward acceleration, disparity, and ambivalence. 38. 11. Facebooks mantra move fast and break things epitomizes the technological mindset. . ed. The ethical problem, that is human behavior, can only be considered in relation to this system, not in relation to some particular technical object or other. On the surface, he appeared to be a thinker nearly torn apart by his contradictions, yet the deeper one goes into his writing, the chief quality one encounters is continuity. Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, U.S., April 10, 2023. Notes: 1 The translation of Elluls Technique, technique, and socit technicienne have presented problems for all English versions of his work. They would tend to side with our sec-and group, the critics of technology. 15. The optimists usually evaluate technology in a utilitarian framework, seeking to maximize the balance of costs over benefits. But Faramelli also advocates restructuring the economic order to achieve greater equality in the distribution of the fruits of technology.38 Similar calls for the responsible use of technology in the service of basic human needs have been issued by task forces and conferences of the National Council of Churches and by the World Council of Churches (WCC).39 According to one summary of WCC documents, technological society is to be blessed for its capacity to meet basic wants, chastised for its encouragement of inordinate wants, transformed until it serves communal wants.40, Egbert Schuurman, a Calvinist engineer from Holland, rejects many features of current technology but holds that it can be transformed and redeemed to be an instrument of God's love serving all creatures. Man was created to have room to move about in, to gaze into far distances, to live in rooms which, even when they were tiny, opened out on fields. My copy of EllulsThe Technological Societyhas yellowed with age, but it remains one of the most important books I own. Alvin Weinberg, Can Technology Replace Social Engineering, in Technology and the Future, ed. My attempt seems to have failed, Ellul wrote in the later essay On Dialectic. No one is using my studies in correlation with one another, so as to get at the heart of our crisis in a conscious manner, based on a Christian understanding of it.. This does not mean opting out of the use of technology. Despite his daunting prose style, Jacques Ellul belongs in the contemporary conversation. 49. Different individuals and groups may define a problem differently and may have diverse criteria of success. 44. In subsequent chapters we will examine each of these specific claims as well as the general attitudes they reveal. Winner says that large-scale systems are self-perpetuating, extending their control over resources and markets and molding human life to fit their own smooth functioning. Daid Kipnis, Technology and Power (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1990). One reader who definitely did not push through the Ellul Understanding Curve was Theodore Kaczynskibetter known as the Unabomber. The rich are usually more anxious about their future than the poor. . It is said that technology is a way of life. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. Ellul had no formal training in theology, but this may have contributed to his originality. that no-one was shot in Bordeaux without being judged, he later told friend and interviewer Patrick Troude-Chastenet.). He insists that the critics have romanticized the life of earlier centuries and rural societies. Roslyn Feldberg and Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Technology and Work Degradation: Effects of Office Automation on Women Clerical Workers, in Machina Ex Dea: Feminist Perspectives on Technology, ed. 8. At the opposite extreme are the critics of modern technology who see it as a threat to authentic human life. Technology leads to rational and efficient organization, which requires fragmentation, specialization, speed, the maximization of output. We have seen that a few theologians are technological optimists, while others have adopted pessimistic positions. What should we make of them? 9. Sometimes a technology was indeed based on recent scientific discoveries. Technique obeys a specific rationality. It embraces artificiality and seeks to replace all natural systems with engineered ones. The automobile, for example, enables people to do what they want and enhances geographical and class mobility. With this new power over heredity, he said, we can replace the crude forces of natural selection and seize the tiller to control the direction of future evolution. Except for an interruption brought on by World War II, Ellul taught in this field from 1937 up to his retirement in 1980, all the while writing an avalanche of books on subjects that often ranged far outside his area of professional expertise. 1972); Robert Schrag, Ten Thousand Working Days (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978); William A. Faunce, Problems of an Industrial Society, 2d ed. Under capitalism, he said, workers do not own their own tools or machines, and they are powerless in their work life. It went unnoticed here in Detroit. All three were members of the first Jacques Ellul Society, which met frequently in the 1990s to discuss the implications of industrialization, globalization, and the nascent digital revolution. True, there are the technicians, those who cook up and implement these new solutions, but Ellul contends that they themselves are under the control of technique, driven on by the compulsion always to search for that one best way, because. He argues that urban industrial societies offer more freedom than rural ones and provide grater choice of occupations, friends, activities, and life-styles. G. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990). But technological enthusiasts contribute to this devaluation of the natural world if they view it as an object to be controlled and manipulated. Many engineers are trained in the physical sciences and interpret living things in mechanistic rather than ecological terms. 2. In the past, technology has been an instrument of profit, and decisions have been motivated in short-run private interests. Thus, nuclear power was weaponized before it was ever used as an energy source. Ellul contends that this divinely assisted shift in perspective helps put science back in its proper place among human endeavors. (The short-term dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works, Palihapitiya hassaid.). The optimists stress the contribution of technology to economic development. Roger Shinn, Forced Options: Social Decisions for the 21st Century, 3d ed. The deployment of technology is primarily a function of the marketplace. Public discussion of these issues only leads to anxiety and erratic political actions. By that I mean that hope is transmissible, even without reference to a given God.. In agriculture, some experts anticipate that the continuing Green Revolution and the genetic engineering of new crops will provide adequate food for a growing world population. 39. Resilience is a program of the nonprofit organization, Slide Anything shortcode error: A valid ID has not been provided, Navigating the PolycrisisLife in Turbulent Times, What Could Possibly Go Right? by James McElroy. We are cut off from our natural surroundings. Engineering was once considered heavy and dirty work unsuitable for women, but long after it became a clean and intellectual profession, there are still few women in it. But perhaps the strongest critique of The Technological Society is that it seems to be almost entirely devoid of hope. Pacey calls for greater public participation and a more democratic distribution of power in the decisions affecting technology. 7-20. Typesetting in large printing frames once required physical strength and mechanical skills and was a male occupation.