Ellul believed that Christians had a special duty to condemn the worship of technology, which has become societys new religion. Paradoxically, as one continues to read, understanding decreases for some time until, in fact, the average reader misunderstands Ellul. He argues that urban industrial societies offer more freedom than rural ones and provide grater choice of occupations, friends, activities, and life-styles. Pace adds living things among the ordered systems (in order to include agriculture, medicine, and biotechnology), but I suggest that these are already included under the rubric of practical tasks. Frederick Ferr. This is close to the definition given by Arnold Pacey in The Culture of Technology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), p. 6. The practical tasks can include both the production of material goods (in industry and agriculture, for instance) and the provision of services (by computers, communications media, and biotechnologies, among others). 3. The rich are usually more anxious about their future than the poor. Yet youve probably never heard of the French legal scholar and sociologist despite all the recent media about the corrosive influence of Silicon Valley. Alternative purposes would lead to alternative designs. 48. All aspects of a new technologythe destructive as well as the productivewill inevitably be used, according to Ellul, and we will often tap into the destructive uses first because it is easier, and more lucrative, to fashion a blunt weapon than a socially beneficial tool. Technological determinism underestimates the diversity of forces that contribute to technological change. Some of the most quotable passages from the book are also its most problematic. Technological change has its own momentum, and its pace is too rapid for trial-and-error readjustments. Moreover, technology has created subtle ways of manipulating people and new techniques of electronic surveillance and psychological conditioning. We can make decisions about technology within a wider context of human and environmental values. Pacey calls for greater public participation and a more democratic distribution of power in the decisions affecting technology. Next year it may be artificial intelligence or virtual reality, depending on which of those in-development technologies gets off the ground first. 3. As Frederick Ferr puts it, science and technology in the modern world are both products of the combination of theoretical and practical intelligence, and neither gave birth to the other.44 Technology has its own distinctive problems and builds up its own knowledge base and professional community, though it often uses science as a resource to draw on. This would give to the commercial sponsors of technology the choices that are ours as responsible citizens. Man is caught like a fly in a bottle. . The optimists may think that, by fulfilling our material needs, technology liberates us from materialism and allows us to turn to intellectual, artistic, and spiritual pursuits. 37. Systems in which human or mechanical failures can be disastrous are risky even in a stable society, quite apart from additional risks under conditions of social unrest. The further one moves along on the Ellul Understanding Curve, the further ones existential despair edges over into a subtle but perceptible joyregardless of whether one is actually making a difference in the world. Technologies are not neutral because social goals and institutional interests are built into the technical designs that are chosen. But citizens can also influence the direction of technological development. See also The Place of Technology in a General Biology of Mankind, and On Looking at a Cyclotron, in The Activation of Energy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971). But Gendron insists that the Soviet Union did not follow Marx's vision. Some see it as the beneficent source of higher living standards, improved health, and better communications. Here psychological techniques, surveillance techniques and propaganda have all merged to give the Russians and many other groups a golden opportunity to intervene in the political lives of 126 million North Americans. Several degrees and types of determinism can be distinguished. Ellul contends that this divinely assisted shift in perspective helps put science back in its proper place among human endeavors. 1. I favor this last option and will develop it further in subsequent chapters. In each case the underlying assumptions and value judgments are examined. 8. The Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of the Continent, which considers the worlds largest energy project, was a national bestseller and won the 2009 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award and was listed as a finalist for the Grantham Prize for Excellence In Reporting on the Environment. In this instance we have sought to be more literal than on other occasions when technique has been rendered as technology and socit technicienne as technological society. 2 The French text mis-titles this volume Sept essais. 35. : Episode 99 Fran Korten, Protect the Flame: But Where the Danger Is, the Saving Power Also Grows, The Response: The French Uprising with Konstantin, Drive for domination puts U.S. unity at risk, Crazy Town: Episode 70. 21. 31. 1. But it is more skeptical about the exercise power by the institutional church, and it looks instead to the activity of the layperson in society. Third, technology has contributed to the concentration of economic and political prove. We should err on the side of caution, adopting policies designed to avert catastrophe rather than to maximize short-run benefits. However, he also believes that it is inevitable and irreversible, meaning that we cannot simply choose to go back to a pre-technological age. As Ellul argues, technique has taken on a mind of its own; it is autonomous. Technique, he writes, is capable of self-generation. They see it as a source not only of higher living standards but also of greater freedom and creative expression. Donald McKenzie and Judy Wajcman (Milton Keynes, England: Oxford University Press, 1985). To be fair to the current critics, Ellul did not leave behind an easily summarized philosophy after he died in 1994. Technological progress creates damaging effects. Technique automatically reduces actions to the one best way. Technical progress is also self-augmenting: it is irreversible and builds with a geometric progression. The Technological Society is at its strongest when it emphasizes the human cost of all this hyper-development. How can we explain the explosive emergence of global awareness of the polycrisis over the past year, 2022-2023? The redirection of technology will be no easy task. A Synopsis and Analysis of the Thought and Writings of Jacques Ellul There is no one best way to design a technology. J. Edward Carothers, Margaret Mead, Daniel McCracken, and Roger Shinn, eds., To Love or to Perish: The Technological Crisis and the Churches (New York: Friendship Press, 1972); Paul Abrecht and Roger Shinn, eds., Faith and Science in an Unjust World (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1980). Egbert Schuurman, Technology and the Future (Toronto: Wedge Publishing, 1980), also The Modern Babylon Culture, in Technology and Responsibility, ed. It is only in the process of giving one's mind and soul to Christ, according to Ellul, that one is set free from the false gods of the material worldand this includes the god of technique. The individual feels powerless facing a monolithic system. Further, we must press ahead in the name of the human adventure. The key question will be: What decision-making processes and what technological policies can contribute to human and environmental values? Several components of the theory are controversial and in need of critical empirical investigation. Nineteenth-century factories and twentieth-century assembly lines did involve dirty and monotonous work, but the newer technologies allow greater creativity and individuality.8, A postindustrial society, it is said, is already beginning to emerge. But it also is idealistic in its demands for social justice in the distribution of the fruits of technology. For most of them, the most important form of participatory freedom is the economic freedom of the marketplace, though in general they are also committed to political democracy. Each of us can adopt individual life-styles more consistent with human and environmental values. They may acknowledge the presence of technological choices but expect such choices to be missed because they are pessimistic about human nature and institutionalized greed. Contextualists also point to the diversity of science-technology interactions. Any modification of an element has repercussions on the ensemble and modifies it. Strong gender divisions are present among employees of technology-related companies. Good citizens today now leave their screens at work only to be guided by robots in their cars that tell them the most efficient route to drive home. It is an object in itself, an independent reality with which we must reckon.. The technocrats claim that their judgments are value free; the technical elite is supposedly nonpolitical. He rejected any note of despair, which would cut the nerve of constructive action. For such people, Elluls recommendation will ring true and is perhaps all that is needed. Automation, for example, is capital-intensive and labor saving. by James Fowler Elle pitine la dmocratie. Privileged, almost exclusive relationships exist among the elements of the system, regardless of what is situated outside the system. The dramatic, Alberta-basedSaboteurs: Wiebo Ludwigs War Against Big Oil, won the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction in 2002. 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.. In this chapter, views of technology are grouped under three headings: Technology as Liberator, Technology as Threat, and Technology as Instrument of Power. Machines have released us from much of the backbreaking labor that in previous ages absorbed most of people's time and energy. Ellul calls for personal acts of auto-critique, humility and authentic liberty. Second, technological pessimists neglect possible avenues for the redirection of technology. . 22. Ellul scoffs at the efficacy of individual efforts to resist technique. It makes little difference who is nominally in controlelected politicians, technical experts, capitalist executives, or socialist managersif decisions are determined by the demands of the technical system. In part 2 we will encounter optimistic forecasts of each of the particular technologies examined. The simple pleasures of making music, hiking and running, gathering with friends around the hearth, or engaging in creative and self-reliant work should be our goals. Proponents of this viewpoint say that people can move behind materialism when their material needs are met. 1). 18. Technique takes possession of it and enslaves it. 4 Uncontrollability. The increased death rates among shipyard workers exposed to asbestos in the early 1940s were not evident until the late 1960s. Its true that if we take the example of the automobile, Elluls claim is borne out: the secondary effects include fatalities and planet-threatening pollution, consequences that are arguably more disastrous for the world than the lack of the automobile would have been. Until the 18th century, technical progress occurred slowly and with restraint. Peter G. Makukhin , Your time at college is too important to get a shallow education in which viewpoints are shut out and rigorous discussion is shut down. 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. William Pickets (San Francisco: San Francisco Press, 1977). The values and world views, the intelligence and stupidity, the biases and vested interests of those who design, accept and maintain a technology are embedded in the technology itself.47. Technology assessment and the legislative processes of democratic politics, he holds, can be effective in controlling technology. 7, ed Paul Durbin (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1984). As Ellul noted back in 1954, History shows that every technical application from its beginnings presents certain unforeseeable secondary effects which are more disastrous than the lack of the technique would have been..
ellul's pessimistic arguments about technology