Inspiring college students to discover, embrace, and advance the principles and virtues that make America free and prosperous. We will confine ourselves here to criticisms of the human rather than environmental consequences of technology. When technology is treated as merely one form of cultural expression among others, its distinctive characteristics may be ignored. I believe that we should neither accept uncritically the past directions of technological development nor reject technology in toto but redirect it toward the realization of human and environmental values. ISI is a 501(c)(3) organization under the Internal Revenue Code, Apply for a Journalism Internship or Fellowship. He wrote of technique, about which he meant more than just technology, machines and digital gadgets but rather the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency in the economic, social and political affairs of civilization. Technique automatically reduces actions to the one best way. Technical progress is also self-augmenting: it is irreversible and builds with a geometric progression. Their proliferation combined with our growing dependence on their services inevitably led to an erosion of human freedom and unintended consequences in every sphere of life. - may seem that technology is primarily concerned with the product. Western religious traditions have often drawn a sharp line between humanity and other creatures (see chapter 3). Few come away from a serious investigation of his writing without at least some aspect of their thinking changed. Yesterday's luxuries are today's necessities. Understanding Jacques Ellul is an excellent overview that strives mightily to deliver on its titles promise, and Jeffrey M. Shaws Illusions of Freedom: Thomas Merton and Jacques Ellul on Technology and the Human Condition brings the Frenchmans ideas into dialogue with one of his most famous sympathizers. 40. The interlocking structure of technologically based government agencies and corporations, sometimes called the technocomplex, is wider than the military-industrial complex. Many companies are virtually dependent on government contracts. Wendell Berry, who affirms many of Elluls ideas in his life and writing, is perhaps the best known. The people who make most of the decisions about technology today are not a technical elite or technocrats trying to run society rationally or disinterested experts whose activity was supposed to mark the end of ideology. The decisions are made by managers dedicated to the interests of institutions, especially industrial corporations and government bureaucracies. 1). Bijker and Pinch show that in the late nineteenth century inventors constructed many different types of bicycles. 1. It is a universal mediator, producing a generalised mediation, totalizing and aspiring to totality. The official slogan of the Century of Progress exposition in Chicago in 1933 was: Science FindsIndustry AppliesMan Conforms. This has been called the assembly-line view because it pictures science at the start of the line and a stream of technological products pouring off the end of the line.19 If technology is fundamentally benign, there is no need for government interference except to regulate the most serious risks. Traditional Western ethics have been anthropocentric and have considered only short-range consequences. 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. Contextualists also point to the diversity of science-technology interactions. To subscribe now, go here. The Washington Post noted his passing in a few scant paragraphs. 48. 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. Bernard Gendron, Technology and the Human Condition (New York: St. Martins Press, 1977). The dominant class will be scientists, engineers, and technical experts; the dominant institutions will be intellectual ones (universities, industrial laboratories, and research institutes). Let me try to summarize these three views of technology in relation to the conflicting values (identified in italics) that are discussed in the next two chapters, There are many variations within each of the three broad positions outlined above, but each represents a distinctive emphasis among these values. 7, ed Paul Durbin (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1984). Any product or process can be made safer, but always at an economic cost. For instance: History shows that every technical application from its beginnings presents certain unforeseeable secondary effects which are much more disastrous than the lack of the technique would have been. 4. But when he looked to the future, he expected that because of our technology and our spirituality we will be increasingly separated from other creatures. He insists that the critics have romanticized the life of earlier centuries and rural societies. 23. 39. . What happened? 50. The Amish for example, have resolutely turned their backs on radios, television, and even automobiles. But the place of technique began to change dramatically in the eighteenth (18th) century with the quest for efficient procedures to find the one best means in every human endeavor. Facebooks mantra move fast and break things epitomizes the technological mindset. Quite the contrary, says Ellul, technique enslaves people, while proffering them the mere illusion of freedom, all the while tyrannically conforming them to the demands of the technological society with its complex of artificial operational objectives., ___________________________________________________________, ____________________________________________________________, Technique, for Ellul, is a FORCE over society that controls people, and not merely a FUNCTION of what people in a society use to control things. Ted Lewis, Elluls Lectures on Planning and Forecasting, Excerpts from Presence in the Modern World Communication, Technological Society Excerpt for Spring 2023. Some see it as the beneficent source of higher living standards, improved health, and better communications. Emanuel Mesthene, Technological Change: Its Impact on Man and Society (New York; New American Library, 1970). It plays a vital role in these contentious, confusing times by applying timeless principles to the specific conditions and crises of our ageto what Kirk, in the inaugural issue, called the great moral and social and political and economic and literary questions of the hour.. Technological progress creates unpredictable devastating effects EXISTENTIALISM The final option described by Niebuhr is a transformation of society by Christian values. Norman Denny (New York: Harper & 1964), chaps. This view encourages a qualified optimism about social change (and, I suggest, about technology). Three views have been proposed (see Fig. 48. Power over nature gives greater opportunity for the exercise of human freedom.6. Meaningful work roles exist for only a small number of people in industrial societies today. In a bureaucracy, the goals of the organization are paramount and responsibility is diffused, so that no one feels personally responsible. eds., Questioning Technology (Santa Cruz, CA: New Society Publishers, 1991), p. 217. When telephones were introduced, women were the switchboard operators and record keepers, while men designed and repaired the equipment and managed the whole system. Freedom understood individualistically became license for the economically powerful. We will note below some cases in which there were competing technical designs and the choice among them was affected by various political and social factors. Jeffrey Greenman, Read Schuchardt, and Noah Tolythe authors of the 2012 survey volume Understanding Jacques Elluldescribe (and provide a graph for) a conundrum they call the Ellul Understanding Curve: Readers who have successfully traversed the terrain of one work by Ellul often believe that they understand Elluls assumptions, methods, and conclusions. But Gendron insists that the Soviet Union did not follow Marx's vision. This third position seems to me more consistent with the biblical outlook than either of the alternatives. Carl Mitcham and Jim Grote (New York: University Press of America, 1984). Ellul, a brilliant historian, wrote like a physician caught in the middle of a plague or physicist exposed to radioactivity. Teaser photo credit:Jacques Ellul, the Karl Marx of the 20th century. 42. Without God, my work would have an eminently tragic meaning, Ellul told Chastenet. Automation, for example, is capital-intensive and labor saving. Philosophy of Technology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1988), defines technology as the practical implementation of intelligence and argues that intelligence itself has both practical and theoretical forms. 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. 16. Plus que le politique et l'conomie. Productivity and economic growth, it is said, benefit everyone in the long run. Read him. Alvin Weinberg, Can Technology Replace Social Engineering, in Technology and the Future, ed. Expertise serves the interests of organizations and only secondarily the welfare of people or the environment. As Ellul argues, technique has taken on a mind of its own; it is autonomous. Technique, he writes, is capable of self-generation. . The contextualists are more likely to give prominence to social justice because they interpret technology as both a product and an instrument of social power. Above all, soil erosion and massive deforestation threaten the biological resources essential for human life, and global warming from our use of fossil fuels threatens devastating changes in world climates. Ellul's own comprehensive definition is found in the preface of The Technological Society: "Technique is the totality of methods, rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity." According to Ellul, technique necessarily came into play at the Fall of man into sin. in the context of the philosophy of technology by J. Ellul. In order to avoid misunderstanding it may be useful to mention again what I mean by Technique often wrongly called Technology (cf. See for example Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, vol. Linear Development. Langdon Gilkey, Religion and the Scientific Future (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). There is something satisfying in the way Ellul presents his assertion like a mathematical formula. Donald McKenzie and Judy Wajcman (Milton Keynes, England: Oxford University Press, 1985). In presenting virtually no solution to the problems he has just spent 436 densely packed pages exploring, Ellul creates a crisis for the reader, as the authors of Understanding Jacques Ellul put it. Once we allow technology to define the good life, we have excluded many important human values from consideration. Impersonality and Manipulation Relationships in a technological society are specialized and functional. Individual choice has a wider scope today than ever before because technology has produced new options not previously available and a greater range of products and services. Each element has a meaning or significance only within the ensemble. However, we may now be in the presence of the progressive elaboration of such a reactive capability. 24. The hole in the ozone layer caused by the release of chlorofluorocarbons had not been anticipated by any scientists. 20. For others, the great benefit of Elluls workincluding his theological writingsis that it provokes debate and further inquiry. Mitcham and Grote. The issues cut across disciplines; I draw from the writings of engineers, historians, sociologists, political scientists, philosophers, and theologians. G. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990). But Ferkiss thinks that economic criteria can be subordinated to such social criteria as ecological balance and human need. Choices that could only be made and enforced collectivelysuch as laws concerning air and water pollutionwere resisted AS infringements on free enterprise. In modern capitalism, according to Marxists, corporations dominate the government and political processes serve the interests of the ruling class. Defense of the Personal. 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. 10. 7-20. Nevertheless, technique is lacking in one of the essential characteristics found in any organized ensemble, reaction. Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker, The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit from Each Other, in The Social Construction of Technological Systems, ed. 25. In this view, technologies develop from the push of science and the pull of economic profits. At times he seemed to have unlimited confidence in humanity's capacity to shape its own destiny. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981). This will be a future-oriented society, the age of the professional managers, the technocrats.9 A bright picture of the coming technological society has been given by many futurists, including Buckminster Fuller, Herman Kahn, and Alvin Toffler.10, Samuel Florman is an articulate engineer and author who has written extensively defending technology against its detractors. 1965), and The Responsibility of the Christian in a World of Technology, in Science and Religion, ed. Elluls issue was not with technological machines but with a society necessarily caught up in efficient methodological techniques. 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.. : 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. 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. If Elluls proposed solution to the technological problemto essentially Get right with Godcomes across as trite and frustratingly vague, it may be because Ellul feared that resistance itself could become technicized and did not want to offer up a point-by-point plan. Aquinas held that there is both a revealed law, known through scripture the church, and a natural law, built into the created order and accesable human reason. From the editorial pages of USA Today, The Week, and even Wiredwhich devoted an entire issue to this topic in 2017commentators agonize over the societal destabilization caused by the ongoing tech onslaught and grasp at possible solutions: decentralize the Web; create apps to limit our time online or reclaim our lost sleep cycles; improve encryption technology; break up the Big Tech companies or require them to make their algorithms more transparent and/or more racially sensitive; and so on. It does systematically impose distinctive forms on all areas of life, but these can be modified through political processes. See for example Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, vol. Ellul seems to anticipate Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and their ilk when he writes of his own eras tech visionaries: To wield power well entails a certain faculty of criticism, discrimination, judgment, and option. This is an unrelentingly grim picture. Cheris Kramarae (New York and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988). Need-oriented values and local human benefits would then play a larger part in technological change.35, The political scientist Victor Ferkiss expresses hope about the redirection of technology. In an affluent society there is time for continuing education, the arts, social service, sports, and participation in community life. Because it explains the nightmarish hold technology has on every aspect of life, and also remains a guide to the perplexing determinism that technology imposes on life. Moreover, technology has created subtle ways of manipulating people and new techniques of electronic surveillance and psychological conditioning. . Individuality is lost and local or regional differences are obliterated in the homogeneity of industrialization. K. C. Smith (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1937). Technique is no longer some uncertain and incomplete intermediary between humanity and the natural milieu. In part 2 we will encounter optimistic forecasts of each of the particular technologies examined. Paul Tillich, The Person in a Technological Society, in Social Ethics, ed. For Teilhard eschatological hope looks not to an intervention discontinuous from history, but to the fulfillment of a continuing process to which our own actions contribute. Only citizens who remain connected to traditional human societies can see, hear and understand the disquiet of the smartphone blitzkrieg or the Internet circus. And even with all the luxuries and tools technique has brought to our work and home lives, we can feel no real security because there is always the possibility that automation or some other aspect of technique will render us redundant. (Propaganda in all its forms is a major point of interest for Ellul and the subject of one of his other well-known books.). 8, 9, and 10. 2. . endobj Technique is global, monolithic, and unvarying among diverse regions and nations.
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