This is a significant oversight: to write of the downside of modern technology without referencing Ellul is arguably tantamount to writing about Communism without referencing Marx. They swore that social media would help citizens fight bad governments and would connect all of us. This essay appears in the Summer 2019 issue of Modern Age. 38. Technologies are social constructions, and they are seldom neutral because particular purposes are already built into their design. 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. 32. 23. Ellul sees technique everywhere: at the highest levels of government, in the economy, in our educational institutions, in our media, in our workplaces, in our churches, and even in our kitchenshe devotes a surprising amount of ink to the concerted and entirely successful propaganda campaign by the food industry to soften the publics views toward industrially produced bread, an innovation that was initially resisted. This is understandable among English speaking readers and critics due to the mistranslation of his books. Alternative patterns of modernization are less environmentally and socially destructive than the path that we have followed. 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. 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. What should we make of them? 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. He was a onetime politician who largely disdained politics and did not vote; a hero of the World War II French Resistance who refused in his writings to side with the flawed democracies of his day over the totalitarian regimes that menaced them; an ardent admirer of Marx who had few kind words for socialism or Communism and spent most of his adult life witnessing to a very un-Marxist Christian faith. 48. We will see later that particular legislative committees, government agencies, and industries have formed three-way alliances to promote such technologies as nuclear energy or pesticides. If you are growing more anxious about our hypernormalized existence and are wondering why you own a phone that tracks your every movement, then readThe Technological Society. An excerpt from 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. The individual feels powerless facing a monolithic system. Exclusive dependence on technological rationality also leads to a truncation of experience, a loss of imaginative and emotional life, and an impoverishment of personal existence. He argues that urban industrial societies offer more freedom than rural ones and provide grater choice of occupations, friends, activities, and life-styles. But they do not consider the institutional structures of economic power and self-interest that now control the directions of technological development. The near catastrophe at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in 1979 and the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 were the products of human errors, faulty equipment, poor design, and unreliable safety procedures. stream 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. In all these versions, science is itself driven primarily by technological needs. 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.. Some see it as the beneficent source of higher living standards, improved health, and better communications. G. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990). Elluls primary explanation of how necessity determines and dominates contemporary society was to attribute such to the methodology of technique. He credits his life-long friend, Bernard Charbonneau, as having drawn his attention to technique as the most important phenomenon of sociological understanding back in 1935, and notes that had Karl Marx understood this sociological factor, he would have posited technique as the thrust of his social dialecticism rather than material inequities. Now genetics gives us power over humanity itself. . . 20. But it does not seem to be working out that way. They were confident about human reason, scientific and technological knowledge, and social progress. Cynthia Cockburn, The Material of Male Power, in The Social Shaping of Technology, ed. 46. 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. For the first time ever a political candidate or party can effectively talk to each individual voter privately in their own home and tell them exactly what they want to hear in a way that cant be tracked or audited.. Facebook and othersocial mediahave undermined whats left of the illusion of democracy, while smartphones damage young brains and erode the nature of discourse in the family. His subsequent books, especially The Political Illusion (1965) and Propaganda (1962), further develop and refine elements . By that I mean that hope is transmissible, even without reference to a given God.. Ellul calls for personal acts of auto-critique, humility and authentic liberty. Separate technologies form an interlocking system, a total, mutually reinforcing network that seems to lead a life of its own. In the past, technology has been an instrument of profit, and decisions have been motivated in short-run private interests. Only citizens who remain connected to traditional human societies can see, hear and understand the disquiet of the smartphone blitzkrieg or the Internet circus. This does not mean opting out of the use of technology. But some former Facebook executives such as Chamath Palihapitiya belatedly realized they have engineered a force beyond their control. Confronting the Technological Society - JSTOR Moreover, technology has created subtle ways of manipulating people and new techniques of electronic surveillance and psychological conditioning. 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. (Propaganda in all its forms is a major point of interest for Ellul and the subject of one of his other well-known books.). 2. 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. (Ellul never set foot in the U.S., the country where he enjoyed his widest readership. Meanwhile computers and other gadgets have diminished our attention spans along with our ever-failing connection to reality. Linear Development. Yet it is apparently our fate to be facing a golden age in the power of sorcerers who are totally blind to the meaning of the human adventure.. According to Ellul's pessimistic arguments are: technological progress has a price Technology, the source of the problem, will once again prove to contain within itself the germs of a solution compatible with the betterment of man's lot and dignity. Similarly, medical knowledge and specialization have led doctors to treat patients as impersonal cases and to keep patients at arms length with a minimum of personal communication. It remains to be seen whether any distinctive legacy from Marxism will remain there after the economic and political turmoil of the early nineties. Expertise serves the interests of organizations and only secondarily the welfare of people or the environment. It went unnoticed here in Detroit. Resistance, which is never futile, can only begin by becoming aware and bearing witness to the totalitarian nature of technological society. % 1, Technics and Human Development, and vol. I will suggest that the most important from of freedom is participation in the decisions affecting our lives. Though influenced by Marx, Ellul looked to technique rather than forces of production or class struggle as his key to understanding modern society. Teilhard's writings present us with a magnificent sweep of time from past to future. 15. The problem, however, is much graver, and it is telling that most of the backlash stories invariably omit any mention of technologys greatest critic, Jacques Ellul. We can make decisions about technology within a wider context of human and environmental values. The breadth of the definition also reminds us that there are major differences among technologies. . Gibson Winter (New York: Harper & Row, 1968). The technician treats everything as a problem that can be solved by manipulative techniques without personal involvement. 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. J. Neugroschel (New York: Continuum, 1980), and The Technological Bluff, trans. First, in . Human ends are then adapted to suit the techniques available rather than the reverse. Technological progress has a price b. 40. Barbour. 2. Schuurman holds that technology can be redirected to advance both material and spiritual well-being. . Chapter 1: Views of Technology - Ethics in an Age of Technology Membership is free. I join them in upholding the significance of personal relationships and a vision of personal fulfillment that goes beyond material affluence. <> - Technology has consequences. The human and environmental values relevant to the appraisal of technology are further analyzed in chapters 2 and 3. Intermediate-scale technology allows decentralization and greater local participation in decisions The decentralization of production also allows greater use of local materials and often a reduction of impact on the environment. When telephones were introduced, women were the switchboard operators and record keepers, while men designed and repaired the equipment and managed the whole system. For instance, the spinning mule helped to break the power of labor unions among skilled textile workers in nineteenth-century England. 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). W. Norris Clarke, S.J., Technology and Man: A Christian Vision, in Science and Religion. H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951), See also Carl Mitcham, Technology as a Theological Problem in the Christian Tradition, in Theology and Technology, ed. Contextualists also point to the diversity of science-technology interactions. Contemporary technology is so tightly tied to industry, government, and the structures of economic power that changes in direction will be difficult to achieve. Typesetting in large printing frames once required physical strength and mechanical skills and was a male occupation. Several components of the theory are controversial and in need of critical empirical investigation. 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. Social media has achieved something novel, according to former Facebook engineer Sam Lessin. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. . Schuurman says that technology was given a messianic role as the source of salvation, and under the rule of human sin it has ended by enslaving us so we are exiles in Babylon. But we can be converted to seek God's Kingdom, which comes as a gift, not by human effort. In this view, technologies develop from the push of science and the pull of economic profits. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, trans. 2. 21. Policy will influence the impact on two key dimensions: diffusion and consequences. Roger Shinn, Forced Options: Social Decisions for the 21st Century, 3d ed. 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. Yet most designs still allow some choice as to how they are deployed. Among the volumes dealing with broad attitudes toward technology are Albert H. Teich, ed., Technology and the Future, 5th ed. Technological progress creates more problems. But in 1954 Ellul saw the beast emerging in infant form. Automation gave engineers and managers increased power over workers, who no longer needed special skills. The workers, not the technologists, are the agents of liberation. In this new society, according to the sociologist Daniel Bell, power will be based on knowledge rather than property. Join a vibrant community of students and scholars Man was made to do his daily work with his muscles, Ellul writes. From a stylistic perspective, Ellul is prone to hyperbole and generalization. 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. We have seen that a few theologians are technological optimists, while others have adopted pessimistic positions. 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. 2. Daid Kipnis, Technology and Power (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1990). This technical milieu involves, on the human side, a complete re-examination of ancient modes of behavior, or physiological capacities (cf. Thomas Misa, How Machines Make History, and How Historians (and Others) Help Them Do So, Science, Technology & Human Values 13 (1988): 30831. The son of a French-Portuguese mother and a Serbian-Italian father, Ellul came to view his outsider statusboth as a product of the melting pot and as that rare French intellectual who eschewed Parisas a key component of his self-identity. Technologies are not neutral because social goals and institutional interests are built into the technical designs that are chosen. By the nineteenth (19th) century the bourgeoisie recognized technique as the key to their material and commercial interests. He examines the ramifications of genetic control, not only the now common measures of birth control and artificial insemination, but also the effect on the genetic pool of the increasing numbers of genetically poor individuals. Victor Ferkiss, Technological Man and The Future of Technological Civilization (New York: George Braziller, 1969 and 1974). For Ellul, technique, an ensemble of machine-based means, included administrative systems, medical tools, propaganda (just another communication technique) and genetic engineering. Jacques Ellul, technology doomsdayer before his time By Doug Hill July 8, 2012, 12:00 a.m. Jacques Ellul in 1982. The increased death rates among shipyard workers exposed to asbestos in the early 1940s were not evident until the late 1960s. In Elluls viewone I find hard to refutehuman beings in the modern era seem to be living their lives in service to this ever-evolving technique, rather than the other way around. 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. Organized knowledge allows us to include technologies based on practical experience and invention as well as those based on scientific theories. 8. According to Ellul's pessimistic arguments are. This view encourages a qualified optimism about social change (and, I suggest, about technology). Any modification of the ensemble likewise modifies the elements of their relationships. It is said that the technologies of the Industrial Revolution imposed their own requirements and made repetitive tasks inevitable. 3. When social planners think they are deciding for the good of allwhether in the French or Russian revolutions or in the proposed technocracy of the futurethe assumed innocence of moral intentions is likely to be corrupted in practice.
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