Coming to Grips with Ellul
Reading Jacques Ellul is at once liberating and frustrating: liberating because The Technological Society offers penetrating insights into not only modern technical society, but specific intellectual habits. It is frustrating because of his obscure language—what we now affectionately deem Ellulian. His overarching concept of technique is the first stumbling block, not the least because it translates poorly into English. French has many cognates—words similar to their English counterparts—but in this case it might be what is called faux ami. In a word: misleading.
Also misleading are the darker aspects of his work—and his reputation as a “doomsayer.” Any realistic assessment of the human costs of industrialization, technology, and modernity is bound to be bleak. But simply calling attention to facts and realities that make us uncomfortable does not mean we are doomed. Ellul does not, according to Menninger, seek “to show why we must be condemned to a living hell but rather to recall to us our responsibility for ourselves as human beings.” Rather than making us the victims of fate, he places fate back in our hands. A solution to the technical dilemma, however, does not appear anywhere in the book. This refusal to provide a technical solution to a technical problem, while consistent with his thought, may strike some as slightly disturbing.
The subtitle of the original French volume, L’enjue du siècle, indicates that humanity in the twentieth century put all its hope in technology—an aspiration that found its ultimate expression in the ethos of Star Trek. But the technological paradise is nothing more than a cage, according to Ellul, and the closer the interaction between man and machine, the more man comes to resemble a machine. Thus, technique extends even to non-technical pursuits, such as education, law, religion, and so on. In the end, it is a form of idolatry.
The Meaning of Technique
The best way to overcome the definitional obstacle may be to provide an assortment of definitions, as well as an anti-definition—that is, explaining what is not technique. In his Note to the Reader for the English translation, Ellul writes:
The term technique, as I use it, does not mean machines, technology, or this or that procedure for attaining an end. In our 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. Its characteristics are new; the technique of the present has no common measure with that of the past.
The phrases “rationally arrived at” and “absolute efficiency” signify the core of his meaning, although “totality of methods” is a bit of a red herring. The final sentence is especially revealing—it indicates a qualitative shift, a dramatic break from previous technical history. Technique has always been with us, true, but its present configuration is something dangerous and monstrous.
In the search for origins, mathematics, science, and primitive technology provide the most obvious source points. When studying mathematics, for example, one soon recognizes that the key to success lies in procedures and formulae. Moreover, mathematical study engenders a certain mode of thinking—rational and logic based—that both arises from and forms the root of procedure and formulae. It is my assertion that this “mode of thinking” gets us closer to Ellul’s meaning.
Leslie Sklair points out, “The term technique rather than technology is used for the good reason that technique includes technology and other phenomena besides. It is generally agreed that ‘technological order’ is closer to the meaning of technique and it is in this wider sense that Ellul intends it to be understood.”
Science may also be thought of as an expression of technique since the discipline rests upon ordered thinking. However, “by [Ellul’s] statement that ‘science has become an instrument of technique,’ it is clear that he subsumes both science and technology, defined simply as the applications of science (directly and indirectly), under his sociology and philosophy of technique.” Thus, technique divorces pure science (research for the sake of knowing) from applied science, with the threat of eliminating the former altogether. According to Ellul:
Such is the dilemma of the researcher today. Either he allows his findings to be technologically applied or he is forced to break off his research. Such is the drama of the atomic physicists who saw that only the laboratories at Los Alamos could provide them with the technical instruments necessary to the continuation of their work. The state, then, exercises a very real monopoly, and the scientist is obliged to accept its conditions.
A more recent example is that of the Superconducting Supercollider (SSC)—a $5 billion particle accelerator which was scheduled to be built in Texas during the 1990s. Such a device would be capable of mapping out the structure of matter in spaces a hundred thousand times smaller than the diameter of a proton and producing energies equivalent to those in the big bang. The SSC would cost about $250 million per year to operate, an expense that Morris rhetorically challenges: “Whether the expense is justified is a question that could be argued endlessly. The manner in which we answer it is likely to depend upon the value that we place on knowledge for its own sake.”
Technique would deny the right of such an impractical apparatus to exist at all, and indeed, funding for the SSC was discontinued by Congress during the late 1990s. Apparently, knowledge for its own sake has little value. This is why Ellul argues that technique is focused only on means, rather than ends. Or to put it another way, means becomes an end-unto-itself. Hence, the purpose of solving an equation is not to get the correct answer, but to utilize the correct procedure. This is reflected in Information Technology: for all the computational powers of a computer, a simple mistake—such as uppercasing or lowercasing a single letter—can render the machine helpless. The human eye catches the mistake instantly and compensates. But this shows one dangerous limitation of technique: its blindness.
In the Foreword to Ellul’s book, Robert K. Merton writes, “Technique refers to any complex of standardized means for attaining a predetermined result. Thus, it converts spontaneous and unreflective behavior into behavior that is deliberate and rationalized.” Richard Meier defines it as “generalized public knowledge” of a technical nature. Here, technique is firmly rooted in thinking and acting—that is, in human agency—and is not simply a by-product of technology. The culprit is a specific kind of thinking and acting that is methodical, contrived, and above all, self-aware. Again, “The Technical Man is fascinated by results, by the immediate consequences of setting standardized devices into motion… he is committed to the never-ending search for ‘the one best way’ to achieve any designated objective.” The “one best way,” otherwise known as absolute efficiency, is noteworthy for its single-mindedness. In one stroke all moral concerns—such as the toll extracted from human beings—are jettisoned, along with the likelihood of innovation, experimentation, and imagination.
Consider the auto industry, for instance. Henry Ford revolutionized car manufacture with the assembly line, a move that simultaneously reduced costs and increased productivity. Rather than producing a dozen cars per day (pre-assembly line), a Ford plant could produce hundreds. The only problem with this stroke of genius was its effect on workers. A Taylorized work force demanded that intelligence be divorced from job performance: workers were to perform rote tasks, within strict time limits, repetitiously. Absolute efficiency requires that men themselves become mechanisms—the more machine-like, the better. And the less actual thinking they do, the better. This had deleterious effects on labor, of course, and Ford was eventually forced to make adjustments.
Merton’s statements above also provide us with an anti-definition: what is not technique. Whatever is spontaneous, intuitive, or indeterminate in human thinking and behavior is antithetical to technique. Non-technique, according to Meier, “…includes all those social transactions that could have been completed without the intervention of generalized public knowledge, of modern artifacts, or the associated agencies.” The realm of imagination and inspiration, from which springs music, art, literature, philosophy, and “transcendental religions” (among other things), cannot be governed by technique, although it may be colonized. Certain ideals—such as Justice—tend to resist technique, since taking the time and expense to prove the guilt or innocence of an accused cannot be truly “efficient.” Ethics and morality work against technique, as the Ford analogy demonstrates. The ethical thing would be to place the health and well-being of workers first, but that would slow production—and hamper efficiency.
Although technique is an intangible quantity, emanating from the human being, it is nonetheless foreign to the deeper spiritual dimension of humanity. At risk is “humanity” itself—that which makes us human.
The Technical State
Subordinated to technique, of course, are innumerable individual techniques—methods and processes for administrating material conditions. Agricultural techniques, manufacturing techniques, construction techniques, educational techniques, administrative techniques… the list is endless. As civilization developed, the state became the natural entity to coordinate technical activity, but until the eighteenth-century technique was but one force in competition with others—politics, economics, religion, etc. This has changed, according to Ellul. Technique is now the milieu in which modern man—and his civilization—is situated, replacing the old milieu, which was nature: “Since Technique has become the new milieu, all social phenomena are situated in it. It is incorrect to say that economics, politics, and the sphere of the cultural are influenced or modified by Technique; they are rather situated in it, a novel situation modifying all traditional social concepts.”
What we refer to as the “developed world” (industrialized societies) is the realm where man is encased in technique, and where nature is on the retreat. The “developing world” is where technique is emerging—at nature’s expense. Only in those increasingly scarce areas where primitive tribes live in the Stone Age can we safely say technique has not taken over. The “novel situation” Ellul mentions has to do with the characteristics of modern technique. They are as follows:
Technical Automatism: in any technical matter the question of efficiency arises, and there is always “one best way” to complete a task. Once this is determined, technical development becomes automatic.
Self-Augmentation: in the artificial milieu of technique, innumerable minor improvements guide technical growth, making human intervention secondary. Thus, “technique engenders itself.”
Monism: the totality of all techniques forms a whole, all with the same fundamental characteristics. Differences between various techniques are secondary.
Universalism: self-augmentation and monism work together, causing all individual techniques to link together. Thus, technique is self-aggrandizing, drawing all things it touches into itself. This is why Ellul says, “Technique cannot be otherwise than totalitarian.”
Autonomy: technique is a closed system that operates according to its own rules. It is independent and self-regulating: “External necessities no longer determine technique. Technique’s own internal necessities are determinative. Technique has become a reality in itself, self-sufficient, with its special laws and its own determinations.”
In light of Ellul’s characterology of technique, then, “traditional social concepts” (i.e., providentialist Christianity, Enlightenment belief in progress, Marxist ideology, etc.) are little more than myths and illusions—the fantasies of men imprisoned in technique. The two main aspects of the milieu—rationality and artificiality—combine to produce an “amoral instrumentalism.” Technique thus transcends mere “technical operations” (individual techniques), resulting in an abstract “technical consciousness.” Its transcendent nature indicates a collective consciousness among men, but one that is far more subtle than the obvious examples of national identity, cultural immersion, groupthink, or mob instinct. Technique disguises itself well.
Instrumentalism—the type of thinking found in proximity to machines—is utilitarian, where “rationalization of process (‘technique’) becomes the only consideration.” The other side of the rationalistic coin is artificiality, “a tendency to view things not as objects to be perceived but as processes to be measured and transformed into artifacts.” This seems to be what Baudrillard referred to as a culture of signs. The postmodernist would assert that underneath the signs and symbols there is no deep reality (or that reality is unknowable), but Ellul casts new light on the idea: the signification of reality is a by-product of technique. How could an artificial milieu be anything other than one of signs?
Ultimately, it relates to propaganda technique, “…whose aim is to control human behavior so that we are integrated into the technological system.” In Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (1965), Ellul describes three categories of propaganda: 1) integration and agitation; 2) sociological and political; 3) horizontal and vertical. In the first category, propaganda of integration seeks to reinforce the status quo, while that of agitation seeks to influence social action. In the second category, sociological propaganda—a “subtle form”—involves mass media, education, religion, the arts, etc. (political propaganda is self-explanatory). In the third category, horizontal propaganda comes from peer groups, vertical propaganda from authorities.
The effects of propaganda on the individual are dire:
…[he is] assailed by a number of equally skillful propagandas acting upon his nervous system, and now, with the discovery of new methods, probing and disturbing his unconscious, working over his intelligence, and exacerbating his reactions. The individual can no longer live except in a climate of tension and overexcitement… He is indeed “engaged,” but involuntarily so, since he has ceased to dominate his own thoughts and actions. Techniques have taught the organizers how to force him into the game.
The excesses of fascist and communist regimes are often cited, but according to Ellul, the propaganda machines in these societies are less intense than in liberal democracies:
The intensive use of propaganda destroys the citizen’s faculty of discernment. In a truly democratic regime, everything rests on judicious choice and free will. But it is precisely in democracies that propaganda machines proliferate. Where only a single propaganda machine exists, that of the state, it conditions individuals directly and could not be really intensive since there is no competition. In the so-called democracies, propaganda must become more and more intense in order to dominate its rivals. It becomes thereby more and more insidious.
The phrase “so-called democracies” relays the ominous meaning here: in societies dominated by technique, notions such as “popular sovereignty,” “free elections,” and “constitutional rights” are illusory.
As science has become the instrument of technique, so has politics—and by extension, the state. And as the machine became the symbol of technique, economics naturally became its first field of hegemony. But no sooner was the conquest made than a new dilemma arose: only the state could properly administer economic techniques. Ellul writes, “…either it receives from the state that sanction which alone can render it efficacious, or it must remain a mere abstraction, an offer without a taker.” What is the offer? It is nothing other than paradise, a materialist utopia—to each according to need, from each according to ability. Whether it is the communist “workers paradise” or capitalist “prosperity,” makes little difference. Without the imprimatur of law (government), homo economicus cannot achieve absolute efficiency. The apparatus of state had to be co-opted:
In spite of the frequent mention of Machiavelli’s Prince, the truth is that until the twentieth century no one ever drew the technical consequences of that work. What existed, then, was a kind of original chaos in which the man of genius always outclassed his adversaries because they never had at their disposal a technique which sufficed to redress the balance. The beginnings of a political technique had to await the appearance of Lenin.
The turmoil of the twentieth century, in this regard, might be considered the outward history of the “painful” marriage of technique and the state. The marriage did not occur easily or instantaneously—it was a shotgun wedding, as it were. The courtship phase climaxed with The Communist Manifesto (1848), Marxism being “nothing but an epiphenomenon of technical development.” Here is the application of “scientific principles” to social phenomena, a political doctrine that openly admits the need of the state to assume a technical function while at the same time dismissing such ephemera as religion, humanism, philosophy, morality. The marriage itself occurred in two phases: World War I and World War II. The Cold War could be considered the honeymoon period—a time, not coincidently, when the threat of nuclear holocaust hung above man’s head like the Sword of Damocles. Such is the ultimate result of technique, according to Jacques Ellul: annihilation.
The intermediate stage to annihilation, however, is the only form that nation-states, inextricably merged with technique, can possibly assume: totalitarian. In The Political Illusion (1967), the third installment of Ellul’s technological trilogy, he asserts that political activities in modern states are a charade designed to lend an air of legitimacy to governments taken over by technique. The political illusion is “the persistent belief characteristic of liberal democracies that human beings today continue to control their lives through political action as much as they ever did.” Ellul’s argument is not that political control is non-existent, but that it is constantly diminishing. According to Menninger,
The political passions and victories of an earlier era—the revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—have turned into myths concealing the hard realities of contemporary politics. The state, now in symbiosis with technique, is controlled less by the ballot and more by its own internal necessities: bureaucracy, military power, propaganda, economic growth and the like. Popular participation, removed from a clear understanding of the necessities imposed on politics by technique, increasingly expends itself on ephemeral symbols and victories having no effect but further to concede political power to technical necessities. Political solutions turn out to be no solutions at all when they cannot be translated into technical terms.
A few examples come readily to mind: Prohibition, the War on Drugs, and our current War on Terror. The first two examples—politically popular enough to become law and policy—were unmitigated failures for just this reason: they could not be translated into technical terms. Of course, this suggests the ultimate failure of the third example. The debacle in Iraq seems to bear this out.
The process by which the state becomes totalitarian goes something as follows: first, techniques develop in the private, predominately economic, sphere. These are always more efficient and more highly developed than those found in the public sphere, therefore they have a certain appeal to the state. When private techniques begin to transform areas of public interest (transportation, insurance industries, education, vital manufacturing), the state appropriates the techniques—through regulation, nationalization, etc. Although private techniques are not always suitable to the state’s needs, this changes in cases where corporations assume dimensions equal to, or greater than, the state. Gradually, but ineluctably, the state apparatus morphs into something that is less political and more machinelike. This brings politicians into conflict with the technicians (and by “technicians” Ellul means the apparatchiks who keep the gears moving), a conflict which the politicians inevitably lose. In different regimes, the transformation of politicians into technicians occurs at different rates (in liberal democracies the process is slower, in dictatorial regimes faster), but in the end all are technicians. Ellul calls this a “radical transformation” of the political perspective—that is, the role of politics streamlines to that of coordinating all other techniques, becoming a technical function. Then the technical state emerges.
Within the technical state, constitutions and political ideologies play a symbolic role, but little more: “… the structures of the modern state and its organs of government are subordinate to the techniques dependent on the state. If we were to consider in turn each of the indispensable services of the modern state, we would find that they are becoming more and more alike, regardless of the theories of government under which they operate.” Just as the vital organs of different species perform identical functions, government organs from different states resemble one another. Eventually, all states will come to resemble one another as well. The human factor of decision-making and political control is being progressively eliminated.
Technical states become totalitarian, according to Ellul, because technique has consumed them—the self-augmentation, monism, and universalism resulting in an autonomous entity that is, by nature, totalitarian. This is not necessarily the Orwellian variety, but the “radicalized modernity” of Anthony Giddens: centralized planning and control, surveillance, reliance on propaganda, and the propensity to war.
Dwight D. Eisenhower once warned of the threat posed by the “military-industrial complex,” in which economic motives provide an impetus to war. There are domestic ramifications as well. Lyndon B. Johnson pursued his Vietnam War strategy, in part, to maintain political support for Great Society programs. U.S. interventions in Iraq have long been cited as having economic, rather than ideological, reasons. As for “political choice,” there is little doubt that Ellul would scoff at contests between Republicans and Democrats: it is like being given a choice between iron or stainless steel shackles. Either way, one is a prisoner.
The authoritarian states that emerged in the twentieth century (Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Red China, etc.) were all-too-human aberrations, according to Ellul, and not true representations of technical totalitarianism:
The totalitarian state we are discussing here is not the brutal, immoderate thing which tortured, deformed, and broke everything in its path, the battleground of armed bullies and factions, a place of dungeons and the reign of the arbitrary. These things did certainly exist; but they represented transient traits, not real characteristics of the totalitarian state. It might even be said that they were the human aspects of the state in its inhumanity. Torture and excess are the acts of persons who use them as a means of releasing a suppressed need for power. This does not interest us here. It does not represent the true face of the completely technical, totalitarian state. In such a state nothing useless exists; there is no torture; torture is a wasteful expenditure of psychic energy which destroys salvageable resources without producing useful results. There is no systematically organized famine, but rather a recognition of the pressing necessity of maintaining the labor force in good condition. There is nothing arbitrary, for the arbitrary represents the very opposite of technique…
It may be a bit of a stretch to call this sort of thing “benign”—the most important aspects being the elimination of waste and of the arbitrary. But it is totalitarian in the paradoxical sense that it pulls everything (and everyone) in towards it, yet has no regard for the natural man.
The Dystopia of Technique
The biggest challenge to a totalitarian regime is the management of large populations, and there are, arguably, two methods of stifling dissent: one is through brutal repression—state security organs, surveillance, use of torture, etc. The other is through distraction—mass media, moral permissiveness, drugs, etc. Two of the best-known literary dystopias argue these respective positions—George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Of the two, Ellul’s totalitarianism would seem to favor Huxley’s account.
In Brave New World, social stability is ensured through cloning and a strict caste system. Although viviparous reproduction is forbidden, sexual promiscuity is expected, and practiced. The populace is further distracted by vivid sex-and-violence prone movies called feelies, and soma—a legal narcotic. Those “savages” who are unable to adapt to the Brave New World pose a problem, but are not mistreated. They are simply exiled to remote areas where they can live as they wish. In a letter to Orwell, Huxley explained,
The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it. Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways in governing and satisfying its lust for power, and that these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World… Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant-conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.
Men, in other words, must be psychologically modified. Consider the way surveillance works: the ultimate goal, suggested by the Panopticon, is that it become internalized, that those under observation become self-policing. What could be more efficient? In discussing technique’s modification of time, Ellul points out, “That man until recently got along well enough without measuring time precisely is something we never even think about, and that we do not think about it shows to what a degree we have been affected by technique.”
If technique has the power to so influence human thinking, it is because alternative frames of reference have been removed. This results in the inability to think in anything other than technical terms. But keeping a populace in submission also requires a widespread epidemic of non-thinking (nescience), and mass media serves this purpose admirably: the airwaves are continuously pulsating with a weird mélange of escapist television, movies, advertising, infotainment, abrasive music, talk-radio, the Internet, and so on. Whether the tactic is repression or seduction, it is all a function of propaganda technique, which involves
…the creation of an abstract universe, representing a complete reconstruction of reality in the minds of its citizens… Men fashion images of things, events, and people which may not reflect reality but which are truer than reality. These images are based on news items which, as is the case in much of the world, are “faked.” Their purpose is to form rather than to inform… This type of thing represents the first step toward a sham universe. It is also indicative of an important element in today’s psychology, the disappearance of reality in a world of hallucinations.
It would be mistaken to assert, however, that all this subconscious manipulation is coordinated by some Godfather secretly pulling the strings: for technique is, after all, autonomous and self-augmenting. While granting that any specific propaganda campaign is deliberate, the totality is an emanation of technique, and serves its purpose. That purpose, according to Ellul, is enslavement.
The question of whether the United States is totalitarian would depend upon the polity’s possession, or non-possession, of a meaningful political will. The fact that the U.S. once engaged in a nuclear arms race and was prepared to wage total (nuclear) war against the Soviet Union—a confrontation that would almost certainly destroy both sides—argues in favor of Ellul’s thesis. Only a totalitarian culture would contemplate such a thing.
Ellul makes a distinction between “political illusion” and “true politics,” the latter being characterized by what he calls effective choice, something technique tends to eliminate:
Effective choice exists when people are under no compulsion to favor one political solution over another because that solution happens to be more efficient, or more economical, or more administratively correct. If a choice is made out of considerations of efficiency, economy, or administration, it is simply not political at all, but of some other nature…
Technology run amok cannot be reigned in by legislation because, according to Langdon Winner, “technology in a true sense is legislation…technology is itself a political phenomenon.” Ironically, a controversial and blundering decision—such as the Bush Administration’s push to invade Iraq—might be called “truly political.” Technique would never countenance this type of costly and counterproductive move. And neither would it countenance the government’s recent policies of torture and secret gulags. These will be considered anachronisms—throwbacks from the darker days of the twentieth century.
It is important to realize that Ellulian totalitarianism resembles what the British call the “nanny state”—that is, a paternal (or maternal) entity that provides for everyone’s needs and oversees even the smallest details of citizen’s lives. But along with governmental largesse, strings are attached—strings that bring order, control, and diminished freedom. American government in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was much less involved in ordinary people’s lives. If people grew wealthy or became destitute, suffered the effects of natural disasters, became sinners or saints—it was none of the government’s business. That began to change with the Great Depression and FDR’s New Deal. By the end of World War II the transformation was complete.
The most significant transformation, however, is in the way people think: whenever some tragedy or hardship strikes (9/11 or Hurricane Katrina, for example), we automatically look to the federal government for solutions. Like wounded children we cry, “Make it better…” We seem unable, or unwilling, to cope with the vagaries of life. In Huxley’s Brave New World, Mustapha Mond (a government shill) explains, “There isn’t any need for a civilized man to bear anything that’s seriously unpleasant. And as for doing things… It would upset the whole social order if men started doing things on their own… industrial civilization is only possible when there’s no self-denial.”
* * *
One important tenet of Marxist ideology is the concept of alienation—workers are alienated from the means of production, it is argued. But alienation is more than that: it is a universal, ubiquitous experience, a defining feature of modernity. Who among us has not felt, at least at times, that odd sense of disconnect—of being adrift and isolated? This means the milieu in which human beings lived from time immemorial has begun to vanish. The first thing to disappear, in industrialized societies, was the extended family. Later, the nuclear family began to disintegrate. Ellul argues that man is cut off from his natural milieu, and this is the real source of alienation. The modern world is a stainless steel machine, unwelcoming of man.
Although Ellul presents the triumph of technique as fait accompli, it does not mean that all is lost. Leslie Sklair writes, “So far the ‘despair’ of man’s condition in the technological society has been far more in evidence than any ‘hope’ that Ellul might hold out for him. But this impression is not entirely just, for Ellul does point toward some possible rays of light that may enable man to emerge from the dark tunnel.”
The first step is to correctly diagnose the problem, and to reach a “genuine consciousness”—that is, a non-technical frame of reference:
Ellul’s use of the phrase ‘genuine consciousness’ is interesting in so far as it suggests a reference (undocumented) to ‘false consciousness’ used in Marxist writings. This interpretation is reinforced when he argues that technique enslaves man by making him ‘happy’, in much the same way that Marxists argue that capitalism can appear to the working class to be solving its problems in a significant sense.
The next step is to ruthlessly “destroy the myth” of technique, to desacralize and deideologize it. While postmodernism champions the end of “grand narratives,” such as Christianity and Marxism, Ellul presents technique as de facto grand narrative—an object of worship. It is faith—faith that science and technology can answer every question, solve every problem, and indeed, give meaning to life. The subtitle L’enjue du siècle suggests a subtle form of idolatry. Langdon Winner goes so far as to call technique sin (but this is an apparent misreading: in Ellul, technique is amoral—neither good nor bad). It’s the idolatry of a false promise: the search for salvation in the material world leads nowhere but to the grave.
Last comes the practical step of dialogue:
Again it is relevant to draw attention to Ellul’s work on propaganda, for it is through this means that the technicians control the prestige of technique and reinforce their own indispensability. In a sense, the real battle for a humane civilization (and Ellul is by no means the first to have pointed this out) is between the technicians and the people. Whether it be technicians, technologists, scientists, bureaucrats, administrators, the essential message rarely alters. Theirs is a closed and exclusive world, a world with which it is difficult to communicate, but a world with which dialogue is necessary.
Many have pointed out that The Technological Society is not a latter-day Luddite tract or a call-to-arms of any kind. No solution to the technical dilemma is given. But even though a dystopia of sorts is certainly invoked, it is by no means escape-proof. Men willingly surrender their freedoms in exchange for the material rewards technique offers. They tend to become objects of technical necessity. They could, however, just as willingly opt out of the program and reclaim their freedom.
We should keep in mind that freedom is a virtue which guarantees little. It implies risk, danger, discomfort, and constant vigilance. It accepts the indeterminate nature of reality. The polar opposite of freedom is security—an abhorrence of indeterminism. A desire for security is one of certainty, of knowing, of avoiding risk. It is also the mark of mediocrity: what person in history has ever accomplished an extraordinary thing by playing it safe?
Technique, at its core, is an attempt to corral indeterminate nature and make it subservient to man. This artificial milieu that Ellul describes offers, above all else, security, physical comfort, “peace of mind,” happiness and bliss. All one has to do is sign the Faustian pact, give up all thoughts of independence, and embrace the manacles.
Is Ellul Correct?
In an episode of the original Star Trek, a revolutionary new computer called M-5 is installed on the Enterprise—a machine that runs everything on the ship, even command functions. Captain Kirk is humiliated and reduced to the status of dunsel (a useless object). Mr. Spock is much more appreciative of M-5’s abilities, acknowledging that it is superior in every way to humans. But in a revealing moment he rejects the supercomputer, saying, “…I have no desire to serve under it.”
Jacques Ellul says that modern man has become an object of technique—which is to say, an object of his own creation. Technique conditions him and orders his life, providing creature comforts and material well-being. To offset the nagging effects of ennui and captivity, propaganda technique offers an array of vivid distractions. The question we should ask, perhaps, is the one Jesus asked 2000 years ago, “What hath a man profited, to gain the world and lose his soul?”
Is it possible to gain the world and keep one’s soul? The Marxist would argue that there is no soul, therefore gaining the world is all that matters. The historical Christian view is that only the soul is important, and man’s lot in this life is somewhat analogous to that of a prisoner awaiting release. A committed Protestant, Ellul rejects any notion of an earthly utopia. David Menninger writes,
…he has been harshly critical of fellow Christians who have suggested that humanity might completely liberate itself by action instead of faith. Yet he is also at odds with Christians who counsel complete withdrawal from action and a life of fearful anticipation of the world’s end. Both positions are based on a “blind trust in God” that contradicts what Ellul sees as the real responsibility of the Christian in this world.
That responsibility is based on a dialectic—the unending struggle between man’s spiritual life and the demands of physical existence. The same dialectic is at the core of his politics—the opposition of democratic values to authoritarian rule. Ideologies usually have utopian ambitions, but democracies tend to resist them. The main tragedy of the “political illusion” (to whatever extent it’s true) is that democratic choice becomes a sham. The ability to choose is the mark of a free people, but that necessitates genuine alternatives to choose from. A meaningless choice is the same as no choice at all.
It is no coincidence that the advance of technique was accompanied by the retreat of Christianity as a unifying (which is to say, political) force. Nature abhors a vacuum, and the withdrawal of the Judeo-Christian God created the conditions that not only allowed, but demanded that a new force emerge. The technological crisis is thus a crisis of faith—what to believe in, what to trust, what to hold sacred. That it was an unconscious choice does not negate the reality. Or the consequences.
One cannot seriously dispute the facts as Ellul presents them: technique seems to be real enough. The leading industrialized nations are proceeding on their technical paths unabated. It could even be argued that globalization is driven by technique. The ambiguity, however, comes from interpretation: what are we to make of it? Concerning technological determinism, Ferkiss points out, “To say that we have lost our ability to deal with the problems of choice and agency…because…we cannot escape technology as a whole, is the equivalent of saying that we are unfree because we cannot control—or reject—society as a whole but can only make marginal inputs into the flow of history. It is to complain that we are not God.”
Technical states become totalitarian, but it is a “benign” form of socialism. Aren’t more people better off? Even Ellul admits that technique “delivers the goods,” but bemoans the loss of freedom. But isn’t it possible that freedom lost in one place is gained in another? Although technological progress creates additional “needs,” it eliminates any number of other “needs.” How can we know whether the political choices we make are real? Partisan battles here and elsewhere continue to be rancorously fought—the politicians believe it’s real!
Jacques Ellul has been criticized for his “anti-intellectual” views, and that bears a moment’s reflection. The word “intellectual,” in this context, is a euphemism for linear logic—indeed a technical way of thinking. But linear logic could not produce the thesis expounded in The Technological Society because, in essence, it is a theological argument. It wears the clothing of social philosophy, but is theological all the same. The thinking is non-linear and presupposes the authority of God. Remove the theistic underpinnings and the result is trivial.
It seems best to think of technique as a culture—a materialist, technical culture. The problem is not that the culture exists, but that men surrender to it so willingly. That could be attributed to seduction, laziness, and habit. Human nature too often opts for the easy way out, and the result can be disastrous.
Ellul appears to yearn for a romanticized past, an idyllic yesteryear before technique began its conquest. But how much of that is unrealistic nostalgia? Wasn’t man’s lot in that era described by Hobbes as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”? Who would want to return to that? Technique is simply too useful and successful to disavow altogether. Consciousness-raising is the only practical alternative. While acknowledging the obvious benefits of technical culture, we should nevertheless (like Mr. Spock) assert that we have no desire to serve under it.
References
Byrne, Edmund. “Society for the Study of Philosophy and Technology: Chicago, April
1977.” Technology and Culture, Vol. 19, No. 1. (Jan., 1978), pp.100-103.
Ellul, Jacques. “The Technological Order.” Technology and Culture, Vol. 3, No. 4,
Proceedings of the Encyclopaedia Britannica Conference on the Technological Order.
(Autumn, 1962), pp. 394-421.
Ellul, Jacques. The Technological Society. Trans. John Wilkinson. New York: Knopf,
1964.
Ferkiss, Victor. “Autonomous Technology. Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in
Political Thought.” The American Political Science Review, Vol. 72. No. 4. (Dec.,
1978), pp. 1396-1397.
Hope, Samuel. "Homage to Jacques Ellul. (role of educational assessment in critical
thinking)(includes bibliography)." Arts Education Policy Review 97.n5 (May-June
1996): 38(2)
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: Harper & Row, 1932.
Huxley, Aldous. “Letter to George Orwell.” Rpt. in Nineteen Eighty-Four to 1984. Ed. C.
J. Kuppig. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1984. pp. 165-67.
Meier, Richard L. “On Living during the Reformation of Science.” Comparative Studies
in Society and History, Vol. 13. No. 2, (Apr., 1971), pp. 236-239.
Menninger, David C. “A Defense of Jacques Ellul.” Polity, Vol. 14, No. 1. (Autumn,
1981), pp. 110-127.
Morris, Richard. The Edges of Science: Crossing the Boundary from Physics to
Metaphysics. New York: Prentice Hall, 1990.
Sklair, Leslie. “The Sociology of the Opposition to Science and Technology: With
Special Reference to the Work of Jacques Ellul.” Comparative Studies in Society and
History, Vol. 13, No. 2, Special Issue on Tradition and Modernity. (Apr., 1971), pp.
217-235.
Strate, Lance. "Ellul and technology studies.(A Media Ecology
Review)." Communication Research Trends 23.2 (Summer 2004): 28(4).
Weinstein, Jay. “Feeling Helpless: The Idea of Autonomous Technology in Social
Science.” Theory and Society, Vol. 10. No. 4. (Jul., 1981), pp. 567-578.
Also misleading are the darker aspects of his work—and his reputation as a “doomsayer.” Any realistic assessment of the human costs of industrialization, technology, and modernity is bound to be bleak. But simply calling attention to facts and realities that make us uncomfortable does not mean we are doomed. Ellul does not, according to Menninger, seek “to show why we must be condemned to a living hell but rather to recall to us our responsibility for ourselves as human beings.” Rather than making us the victims of fate, he places fate back in our hands. A solution to the technical dilemma, however, does not appear anywhere in the book. This refusal to provide a technical solution to a technical problem, while consistent with his thought, may strike some as slightly disturbing.
The subtitle of the original French volume, L’enjue du siècle, indicates that humanity in the twentieth century put all its hope in technology—an aspiration that found its ultimate expression in the ethos of Star Trek. But the technological paradise is nothing more than a cage, according to Ellul, and the closer the interaction between man and machine, the more man comes to resemble a machine. Thus, technique extends even to non-technical pursuits, such as education, law, religion, and so on. In the end, it is a form of idolatry.
The Meaning of Technique
The best way to overcome the definitional obstacle may be to provide an assortment of definitions, as well as an anti-definition—that is, explaining what is not technique. In his Note to the Reader for the English translation, Ellul writes:
The term technique, as I use it, does not mean machines, technology, or this or that procedure for attaining an end. In our 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. Its characteristics are new; the technique of the present has no common measure with that of the past.
The phrases “rationally arrived at” and “absolute efficiency” signify the core of his meaning, although “totality of methods” is a bit of a red herring. The final sentence is especially revealing—it indicates a qualitative shift, a dramatic break from previous technical history. Technique has always been with us, true, but its present configuration is something dangerous and monstrous.
In the search for origins, mathematics, science, and primitive technology provide the most obvious source points. When studying mathematics, for example, one soon recognizes that the key to success lies in procedures and formulae. Moreover, mathematical study engenders a certain mode of thinking—rational and logic based—that both arises from and forms the root of procedure and formulae. It is my assertion that this “mode of thinking” gets us closer to Ellul’s meaning.
Leslie Sklair points out, “The term technique rather than technology is used for the good reason that technique includes technology and other phenomena besides. It is generally agreed that ‘technological order’ is closer to the meaning of technique and it is in this wider sense that Ellul intends it to be understood.”
Science may also be thought of as an expression of technique since the discipline rests upon ordered thinking. However, “by [Ellul’s] statement that ‘science has become an instrument of technique,’ it is clear that he subsumes both science and technology, defined simply as the applications of science (directly and indirectly), under his sociology and philosophy of technique.” Thus, technique divorces pure science (research for the sake of knowing) from applied science, with the threat of eliminating the former altogether. According to Ellul:
Such is the dilemma of the researcher today. Either he allows his findings to be technologically applied or he is forced to break off his research. Such is the drama of the atomic physicists who saw that only the laboratories at Los Alamos could provide them with the technical instruments necessary to the continuation of their work. The state, then, exercises a very real monopoly, and the scientist is obliged to accept its conditions.
A more recent example is that of the Superconducting Supercollider (SSC)—a $5 billion particle accelerator which was scheduled to be built in Texas during the 1990s. Such a device would be capable of mapping out the structure of matter in spaces a hundred thousand times smaller than the diameter of a proton and producing energies equivalent to those in the big bang. The SSC would cost about $250 million per year to operate, an expense that Morris rhetorically challenges: “Whether the expense is justified is a question that could be argued endlessly. The manner in which we answer it is likely to depend upon the value that we place on knowledge for its own sake.”
Technique would deny the right of such an impractical apparatus to exist at all, and indeed, funding for the SSC was discontinued by Congress during the late 1990s. Apparently, knowledge for its own sake has little value. This is why Ellul argues that technique is focused only on means, rather than ends. Or to put it another way, means becomes an end-unto-itself. Hence, the purpose of solving an equation is not to get the correct answer, but to utilize the correct procedure. This is reflected in Information Technology: for all the computational powers of a computer, a simple mistake—such as uppercasing or lowercasing a single letter—can render the machine helpless. The human eye catches the mistake instantly and compensates. But this shows one dangerous limitation of technique: its blindness.
In the Foreword to Ellul’s book, Robert K. Merton writes, “Technique refers to any complex of standardized means for attaining a predetermined result. Thus, it converts spontaneous and unreflective behavior into behavior that is deliberate and rationalized.” Richard Meier defines it as “generalized public knowledge” of a technical nature. Here, technique is firmly rooted in thinking and acting—that is, in human agency—and is not simply a by-product of technology. The culprit is a specific kind of thinking and acting that is methodical, contrived, and above all, self-aware. Again, “The Technical Man is fascinated by results, by the immediate consequences of setting standardized devices into motion… he is committed to the never-ending search for ‘the one best way’ to achieve any designated objective.” The “one best way,” otherwise known as absolute efficiency, is noteworthy for its single-mindedness. In one stroke all moral concerns—such as the toll extracted from human beings—are jettisoned, along with the likelihood of innovation, experimentation, and imagination.
Consider the auto industry, for instance. Henry Ford revolutionized car manufacture with the assembly line, a move that simultaneously reduced costs and increased productivity. Rather than producing a dozen cars per day (pre-assembly line), a Ford plant could produce hundreds. The only problem with this stroke of genius was its effect on workers. A Taylorized work force demanded that intelligence be divorced from job performance: workers were to perform rote tasks, within strict time limits, repetitiously. Absolute efficiency requires that men themselves become mechanisms—the more machine-like, the better. And the less actual thinking they do, the better. This had deleterious effects on labor, of course, and Ford was eventually forced to make adjustments.
Merton’s statements above also provide us with an anti-definition: what is not technique. Whatever is spontaneous, intuitive, or indeterminate in human thinking and behavior is antithetical to technique. Non-technique, according to Meier, “…includes all those social transactions that could have been completed without the intervention of generalized public knowledge, of modern artifacts, or the associated agencies.” The realm of imagination and inspiration, from which springs music, art, literature, philosophy, and “transcendental religions” (among other things), cannot be governed by technique, although it may be colonized. Certain ideals—such as Justice—tend to resist technique, since taking the time and expense to prove the guilt or innocence of an accused cannot be truly “efficient.” Ethics and morality work against technique, as the Ford analogy demonstrates. The ethical thing would be to place the health and well-being of workers first, but that would slow production—and hamper efficiency.
Although technique is an intangible quantity, emanating from the human being, it is nonetheless foreign to the deeper spiritual dimension of humanity. At risk is “humanity” itself—that which makes us human.
The Technical State
Subordinated to technique, of course, are innumerable individual techniques—methods and processes for administrating material conditions. Agricultural techniques, manufacturing techniques, construction techniques, educational techniques, administrative techniques… the list is endless. As civilization developed, the state became the natural entity to coordinate technical activity, but until the eighteenth-century technique was but one force in competition with others—politics, economics, religion, etc. This has changed, according to Ellul. Technique is now the milieu in which modern man—and his civilization—is situated, replacing the old milieu, which was nature: “Since Technique has become the new milieu, all social phenomena are situated in it. It is incorrect to say that economics, politics, and the sphere of the cultural are influenced or modified by Technique; they are rather situated in it, a novel situation modifying all traditional social concepts.”
What we refer to as the “developed world” (industrialized societies) is the realm where man is encased in technique, and where nature is on the retreat. The “developing world” is where technique is emerging—at nature’s expense. Only in those increasingly scarce areas where primitive tribes live in the Stone Age can we safely say technique has not taken over. The “novel situation” Ellul mentions has to do with the characteristics of modern technique. They are as follows:
Technical Automatism: in any technical matter the question of efficiency arises, and there is always “one best way” to complete a task. Once this is determined, technical development becomes automatic.
Self-Augmentation: in the artificial milieu of technique, innumerable minor improvements guide technical growth, making human intervention secondary. Thus, “technique engenders itself.”
Monism: the totality of all techniques forms a whole, all with the same fundamental characteristics. Differences between various techniques are secondary.
Universalism: self-augmentation and monism work together, causing all individual techniques to link together. Thus, technique is self-aggrandizing, drawing all things it touches into itself. This is why Ellul says, “Technique cannot be otherwise than totalitarian.”
Autonomy: technique is a closed system that operates according to its own rules. It is independent and self-regulating: “External necessities no longer determine technique. Technique’s own internal necessities are determinative. Technique has become a reality in itself, self-sufficient, with its special laws and its own determinations.”
In light of Ellul’s characterology of technique, then, “traditional social concepts” (i.e., providentialist Christianity, Enlightenment belief in progress, Marxist ideology, etc.) are little more than myths and illusions—the fantasies of men imprisoned in technique. The two main aspects of the milieu—rationality and artificiality—combine to produce an “amoral instrumentalism.” Technique thus transcends mere “technical operations” (individual techniques), resulting in an abstract “technical consciousness.” Its transcendent nature indicates a collective consciousness among men, but one that is far more subtle than the obvious examples of national identity, cultural immersion, groupthink, or mob instinct. Technique disguises itself well.
Instrumentalism—the type of thinking found in proximity to machines—is utilitarian, where “rationalization of process (‘technique’) becomes the only consideration.” The other side of the rationalistic coin is artificiality, “a tendency to view things not as objects to be perceived but as processes to be measured and transformed into artifacts.” This seems to be what Baudrillard referred to as a culture of signs. The postmodernist would assert that underneath the signs and symbols there is no deep reality (or that reality is unknowable), but Ellul casts new light on the idea: the signification of reality is a by-product of technique. How could an artificial milieu be anything other than one of signs?
Ultimately, it relates to propaganda technique, “…whose aim is to control human behavior so that we are integrated into the technological system.” In Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (1965), Ellul describes three categories of propaganda: 1) integration and agitation; 2) sociological and political; 3) horizontal and vertical. In the first category, propaganda of integration seeks to reinforce the status quo, while that of agitation seeks to influence social action. In the second category, sociological propaganda—a “subtle form”—involves mass media, education, religion, the arts, etc. (political propaganda is self-explanatory). In the third category, horizontal propaganda comes from peer groups, vertical propaganda from authorities.
The effects of propaganda on the individual are dire:
…[he is] assailed by a number of equally skillful propagandas acting upon his nervous system, and now, with the discovery of new methods, probing and disturbing his unconscious, working over his intelligence, and exacerbating his reactions. The individual can no longer live except in a climate of tension and overexcitement… He is indeed “engaged,” but involuntarily so, since he has ceased to dominate his own thoughts and actions. Techniques have taught the organizers how to force him into the game.
The excesses of fascist and communist regimes are often cited, but according to Ellul, the propaganda machines in these societies are less intense than in liberal democracies:
The intensive use of propaganda destroys the citizen’s faculty of discernment. In a truly democratic regime, everything rests on judicious choice and free will. But it is precisely in democracies that propaganda machines proliferate. Where only a single propaganda machine exists, that of the state, it conditions individuals directly and could not be really intensive since there is no competition. In the so-called democracies, propaganda must become more and more intense in order to dominate its rivals. It becomes thereby more and more insidious.
The phrase “so-called democracies” relays the ominous meaning here: in societies dominated by technique, notions such as “popular sovereignty,” “free elections,” and “constitutional rights” are illusory.
As science has become the instrument of technique, so has politics—and by extension, the state. And as the machine became the symbol of technique, economics naturally became its first field of hegemony. But no sooner was the conquest made than a new dilemma arose: only the state could properly administer economic techniques. Ellul writes, “…either it receives from the state that sanction which alone can render it efficacious, or it must remain a mere abstraction, an offer without a taker.” What is the offer? It is nothing other than paradise, a materialist utopia—to each according to need, from each according to ability. Whether it is the communist “workers paradise” or capitalist “prosperity,” makes little difference. Without the imprimatur of law (government), homo economicus cannot achieve absolute efficiency. The apparatus of state had to be co-opted:
In spite of the frequent mention of Machiavelli’s Prince, the truth is that until the twentieth century no one ever drew the technical consequences of that work. What existed, then, was a kind of original chaos in which the man of genius always outclassed his adversaries because they never had at their disposal a technique which sufficed to redress the balance. The beginnings of a political technique had to await the appearance of Lenin.
The turmoil of the twentieth century, in this regard, might be considered the outward history of the “painful” marriage of technique and the state. The marriage did not occur easily or instantaneously—it was a shotgun wedding, as it were. The courtship phase climaxed with The Communist Manifesto (1848), Marxism being “nothing but an epiphenomenon of technical development.” Here is the application of “scientific principles” to social phenomena, a political doctrine that openly admits the need of the state to assume a technical function while at the same time dismissing such ephemera as religion, humanism, philosophy, morality. The marriage itself occurred in two phases: World War I and World War II. The Cold War could be considered the honeymoon period—a time, not coincidently, when the threat of nuclear holocaust hung above man’s head like the Sword of Damocles. Such is the ultimate result of technique, according to Jacques Ellul: annihilation.
The intermediate stage to annihilation, however, is the only form that nation-states, inextricably merged with technique, can possibly assume: totalitarian. In The Political Illusion (1967), the third installment of Ellul’s technological trilogy, he asserts that political activities in modern states are a charade designed to lend an air of legitimacy to governments taken over by technique. The political illusion is “the persistent belief characteristic of liberal democracies that human beings today continue to control their lives through political action as much as they ever did.” Ellul’s argument is not that political control is non-existent, but that it is constantly diminishing. According to Menninger,
The political passions and victories of an earlier era—the revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—have turned into myths concealing the hard realities of contemporary politics. The state, now in symbiosis with technique, is controlled less by the ballot and more by its own internal necessities: bureaucracy, military power, propaganda, economic growth and the like. Popular participation, removed from a clear understanding of the necessities imposed on politics by technique, increasingly expends itself on ephemeral symbols and victories having no effect but further to concede political power to technical necessities. Political solutions turn out to be no solutions at all when they cannot be translated into technical terms.
A few examples come readily to mind: Prohibition, the War on Drugs, and our current War on Terror. The first two examples—politically popular enough to become law and policy—were unmitigated failures for just this reason: they could not be translated into technical terms. Of course, this suggests the ultimate failure of the third example. The debacle in Iraq seems to bear this out.
The process by which the state becomes totalitarian goes something as follows: first, techniques develop in the private, predominately economic, sphere. These are always more efficient and more highly developed than those found in the public sphere, therefore they have a certain appeal to the state. When private techniques begin to transform areas of public interest (transportation, insurance industries, education, vital manufacturing), the state appropriates the techniques—through regulation, nationalization, etc. Although private techniques are not always suitable to the state’s needs, this changes in cases where corporations assume dimensions equal to, or greater than, the state. Gradually, but ineluctably, the state apparatus morphs into something that is less political and more machinelike. This brings politicians into conflict with the technicians (and by “technicians” Ellul means the apparatchiks who keep the gears moving), a conflict which the politicians inevitably lose. In different regimes, the transformation of politicians into technicians occurs at different rates (in liberal democracies the process is slower, in dictatorial regimes faster), but in the end all are technicians. Ellul calls this a “radical transformation” of the political perspective—that is, the role of politics streamlines to that of coordinating all other techniques, becoming a technical function. Then the technical state emerges.
Within the technical state, constitutions and political ideologies play a symbolic role, but little more: “… the structures of the modern state and its organs of government are subordinate to the techniques dependent on the state. If we were to consider in turn each of the indispensable services of the modern state, we would find that they are becoming more and more alike, regardless of the theories of government under which they operate.” Just as the vital organs of different species perform identical functions, government organs from different states resemble one another. Eventually, all states will come to resemble one another as well. The human factor of decision-making and political control is being progressively eliminated.
Technical states become totalitarian, according to Ellul, because technique has consumed them—the self-augmentation, monism, and universalism resulting in an autonomous entity that is, by nature, totalitarian. This is not necessarily the Orwellian variety, but the “radicalized modernity” of Anthony Giddens: centralized planning and control, surveillance, reliance on propaganda, and the propensity to war.
Dwight D. Eisenhower once warned of the threat posed by the “military-industrial complex,” in which economic motives provide an impetus to war. There are domestic ramifications as well. Lyndon B. Johnson pursued his Vietnam War strategy, in part, to maintain political support for Great Society programs. U.S. interventions in Iraq have long been cited as having economic, rather than ideological, reasons. As for “political choice,” there is little doubt that Ellul would scoff at contests between Republicans and Democrats: it is like being given a choice between iron or stainless steel shackles. Either way, one is a prisoner.
The authoritarian states that emerged in the twentieth century (Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Red China, etc.) were all-too-human aberrations, according to Ellul, and not true representations of technical totalitarianism:
The totalitarian state we are discussing here is not the brutal, immoderate thing which tortured, deformed, and broke everything in its path, the battleground of armed bullies and factions, a place of dungeons and the reign of the arbitrary. These things did certainly exist; but they represented transient traits, not real characteristics of the totalitarian state. It might even be said that they were the human aspects of the state in its inhumanity. Torture and excess are the acts of persons who use them as a means of releasing a suppressed need for power. This does not interest us here. It does not represent the true face of the completely technical, totalitarian state. In such a state nothing useless exists; there is no torture; torture is a wasteful expenditure of psychic energy which destroys salvageable resources without producing useful results. There is no systematically organized famine, but rather a recognition of the pressing necessity of maintaining the labor force in good condition. There is nothing arbitrary, for the arbitrary represents the very opposite of technique…
It may be a bit of a stretch to call this sort of thing “benign”—the most important aspects being the elimination of waste and of the arbitrary. But it is totalitarian in the paradoxical sense that it pulls everything (and everyone) in towards it, yet has no regard for the natural man.
The Dystopia of Technique
The biggest challenge to a totalitarian regime is the management of large populations, and there are, arguably, two methods of stifling dissent: one is through brutal repression—state security organs, surveillance, use of torture, etc. The other is through distraction—mass media, moral permissiveness, drugs, etc. Two of the best-known literary dystopias argue these respective positions—George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Of the two, Ellul’s totalitarianism would seem to favor Huxley’s account.
In Brave New World, social stability is ensured through cloning and a strict caste system. Although viviparous reproduction is forbidden, sexual promiscuity is expected, and practiced. The populace is further distracted by vivid sex-and-violence prone movies called feelies, and soma—a legal narcotic. Those “savages” who are unable to adapt to the Brave New World pose a problem, but are not mistreated. They are simply exiled to remote areas where they can live as they wish. In a letter to Orwell, Huxley explained,
The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion by going beyond sex and denying it. Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways in governing and satisfying its lust for power, and that these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World… Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant-conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.
Men, in other words, must be psychologically modified. Consider the way surveillance works: the ultimate goal, suggested by the Panopticon, is that it become internalized, that those under observation become self-policing. What could be more efficient? In discussing technique’s modification of time, Ellul points out, “That man until recently got along well enough without measuring time precisely is something we never even think about, and that we do not think about it shows to what a degree we have been affected by technique.”
If technique has the power to so influence human thinking, it is because alternative frames of reference have been removed. This results in the inability to think in anything other than technical terms. But keeping a populace in submission also requires a widespread epidemic of non-thinking (nescience), and mass media serves this purpose admirably: the airwaves are continuously pulsating with a weird mélange of escapist television, movies, advertising, infotainment, abrasive music, talk-radio, the Internet, and so on. Whether the tactic is repression or seduction, it is all a function of propaganda technique, which involves
…the creation of an abstract universe, representing a complete reconstruction of reality in the minds of its citizens… Men fashion images of things, events, and people which may not reflect reality but which are truer than reality. These images are based on news items which, as is the case in much of the world, are “faked.” Their purpose is to form rather than to inform… This type of thing represents the first step toward a sham universe. It is also indicative of an important element in today’s psychology, the disappearance of reality in a world of hallucinations.
It would be mistaken to assert, however, that all this subconscious manipulation is coordinated by some Godfather secretly pulling the strings: for technique is, after all, autonomous and self-augmenting. While granting that any specific propaganda campaign is deliberate, the totality is an emanation of technique, and serves its purpose. That purpose, according to Ellul, is enslavement.
The question of whether the United States is totalitarian would depend upon the polity’s possession, or non-possession, of a meaningful political will. The fact that the U.S. once engaged in a nuclear arms race and was prepared to wage total (nuclear) war against the Soviet Union—a confrontation that would almost certainly destroy both sides—argues in favor of Ellul’s thesis. Only a totalitarian culture would contemplate such a thing.
Ellul makes a distinction between “political illusion” and “true politics,” the latter being characterized by what he calls effective choice, something technique tends to eliminate:
Effective choice exists when people are under no compulsion to favor one political solution over another because that solution happens to be more efficient, or more economical, or more administratively correct. If a choice is made out of considerations of efficiency, economy, or administration, it is simply not political at all, but of some other nature…
Technology run amok cannot be reigned in by legislation because, according to Langdon Winner, “technology in a true sense is legislation…technology is itself a political phenomenon.” Ironically, a controversial and blundering decision—such as the Bush Administration’s push to invade Iraq—might be called “truly political.” Technique would never countenance this type of costly and counterproductive move. And neither would it countenance the government’s recent policies of torture and secret gulags. These will be considered anachronisms—throwbacks from the darker days of the twentieth century.
It is important to realize that Ellulian totalitarianism resembles what the British call the “nanny state”—that is, a paternal (or maternal) entity that provides for everyone’s needs and oversees even the smallest details of citizen’s lives. But along with governmental largesse, strings are attached—strings that bring order, control, and diminished freedom. American government in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was much less involved in ordinary people’s lives. If people grew wealthy or became destitute, suffered the effects of natural disasters, became sinners or saints—it was none of the government’s business. That began to change with the Great Depression and FDR’s New Deal. By the end of World War II the transformation was complete.
The most significant transformation, however, is in the way people think: whenever some tragedy or hardship strikes (9/11 or Hurricane Katrina, for example), we automatically look to the federal government for solutions. Like wounded children we cry, “Make it better…” We seem unable, or unwilling, to cope with the vagaries of life. In Huxley’s Brave New World, Mustapha Mond (a government shill) explains, “There isn’t any need for a civilized man to bear anything that’s seriously unpleasant. And as for doing things… It would upset the whole social order if men started doing things on their own… industrial civilization is only possible when there’s no self-denial.”
* * *
One important tenet of Marxist ideology is the concept of alienation—workers are alienated from the means of production, it is argued. But alienation is more than that: it is a universal, ubiquitous experience, a defining feature of modernity. Who among us has not felt, at least at times, that odd sense of disconnect—of being adrift and isolated? This means the milieu in which human beings lived from time immemorial has begun to vanish. The first thing to disappear, in industrialized societies, was the extended family. Later, the nuclear family began to disintegrate. Ellul argues that man is cut off from his natural milieu, and this is the real source of alienation. The modern world is a stainless steel machine, unwelcoming of man.
Although Ellul presents the triumph of technique as fait accompli, it does not mean that all is lost. Leslie Sklair writes, “So far the ‘despair’ of man’s condition in the technological society has been far more in evidence than any ‘hope’ that Ellul might hold out for him. But this impression is not entirely just, for Ellul does point toward some possible rays of light that may enable man to emerge from the dark tunnel.”
The first step is to correctly diagnose the problem, and to reach a “genuine consciousness”—that is, a non-technical frame of reference:
Ellul’s use of the phrase ‘genuine consciousness’ is interesting in so far as it suggests a reference (undocumented) to ‘false consciousness’ used in Marxist writings. This interpretation is reinforced when he argues that technique enslaves man by making him ‘happy’, in much the same way that Marxists argue that capitalism can appear to the working class to be solving its problems in a significant sense.
The next step is to ruthlessly “destroy the myth” of technique, to desacralize and deideologize it. While postmodernism champions the end of “grand narratives,” such as Christianity and Marxism, Ellul presents technique as de facto grand narrative—an object of worship. It is faith—faith that science and technology can answer every question, solve every problem, and indeed, give meaning to life. The subtitle L’enjue du siècle suggests a subtle form of idolatry. Langdon Winner goes so far as to call technique sin (but this is an apparent misreading: in Ellul, technique is amoral—neither good nor bad). It’s the idolatry of a false promise: the search for salvation in the material world leads nowhere but to the grave.
Last comes the practical step of dialogue:
Again it is relevant to draw attention to Ellul’s work on propaganda, for it is through this means that the technicians control the prestige of technique and reinforce their own indispensability. In a sense, the real battle for a humane civilization (and Ellul is by no means the first to have pointed this out) is between the technicians and the people. Whether it be technicians, technologists, scientists, bureaucrats, administrators, the essential message rarely alters. Theirs is a closed and exclusive world, a world with which it is difficult to communicate, but a world with which dialogue is necessary.
Many have pointed out that The Technological Society is not a latter-day Luddite tract or a call-to-arms of any kind. No solution to the technical dilemma is given. But even though a dystopia of sorts is certainly invoked, it is by no means escape-proof. Men willingly surrender their freedoms in exchange for the material rewards technique offers. They tend to become objects of technical necessity. They could, however, just as willingly opt out of the program and reclaim their freedom.
We should keep in mind that freedom is a virtue which guarantees little. It implies risk, danger, discomfort, and constant vigilance. It accepts the indeterminate nature of reality. The polar opposite of freedom is security—an abhorrence of indeterminism. A desire for security is one of certainty, of knowing, of avoiding risk. It is also the mark of mediocrity: what person in history has ever accomplished an extraordinary thing by playing it safe?
Technique, at its core, is an attempt to corral indeterminate nature and make it subservient to man. This artificial milieu that Ellul describes offers, above all else, security, physical comfort, “peace of mind,” happiness and bliss. All one has to do is sign the Faustian pact, give up all thoughts of independence, and embrace the manacles.
Is Ellul Correct?
In an episode of the original Star Trek, a revolutionary new computer called M-5 is installed on the Enterprise—a machine that runs everything on the ship, even command functions. Captain Kirk is humiliated and reduced to the status of dunsel (a useless object). Mr. Spock is much more appreciative of M-5’s abilities, acknowledging that it is superior in every way to humans. But in a revealing moment he rejects the supercomputer, saying, “…I have no desire to serve under it.”
Jacques Ellul says that modern man has become an object of technique—which is to say, an object of his own creation. Technique conditions him and orders his life, providing creature comforts and material well-being. To offset the nagging effects of ennui and captivity, propaganda technique offers an array of vivid distractions. The question we should ask, perhaps, is the one Jesus asked 2000 years ago, “What hath a man profited, to gain the world and lose his soul?”
Is it possible to gain the world and keep one’s soul? The Marxist would argue that there is no soul, therefore gaining the world is all that matters. The historical Christian view is that only the soul is important, and man’s lot in this life is somewhat analogous to that of a prisoner awaiting release. A committed Protestant, Ellul rejects any notion of an earthly utopia. David Menninger writes,
…he has been harshly critical of fellow Christians who have suggested that humanity might completely liberate itself by action instead of faith. Yet he is also at odds with Christians who counsel complete withdrawal from action and a life of fearful anticipation of the world’s end. Both positions are based on a “blind trust in God” that contradicts what Ellul sees as the real responsibility of the Christian in this world.
That responsibility is based on a dialectic—the unending struggle between man’s spiritual life and the demands of physical existence. The same dialectic is at the core of his politics—the opposition of democratic values to authoritarian rule. Ideologies usually have utopian ambitions, but democracies tend to resist them. The main tragedy of the “political illusion” (to whatever extent it’s true) is that democratic choice becomes a sham. The ability to choose is the mark of a free people, but that necessitates genuine alternatives to choose from. A meaningless choice is the same as no choice at all.
It is no coincidence that the advance of technique was accompanied by the retreat of Christianity as a unifying (which is to say, political) force. Nature abhors a vacuum, and the withdrawal of the Judeo-Christian God created the conditions that not only allowed, but demanded that a new force emerge. The technological crisis is thus a crisis of faith—what to believe in, what to trust, what to hold sacred. That it was an unconscious choice does not negate the reality. Or the consequences.
One cannot seriously dispute the facts as Ellul presents them: technique seems to be real enough. The leading industrialized nations are proceeding on their technical paths unabated. It could even be argued that globalization is driven by technique. The ambiguity, however, comes from interpretation: what are we to make of it? Concerning technological determinism, Ferkiss points out, “To say that we have lost our ability to deal with the problems of choice and agency…because…we cannot escape technology as a whole, is the equivalent of saying that we are unfree because we cannot control—or reject—society as a whole but can only make marginal inputs into the flow of history. It is to complain that we are not God.”
Technical states become totalitarian, but it is a “benign” form of socialism. Aren’t more people better off? Even Ellul admits that technique “delivers the goods,” but bemoans the loss of freedom. But isn’t it possible that freedom lost in one place is gained in another? Although technological progress creates additional “needs,” it eliminates any number of other “needs.” How can we know whether the political choices we make are real? Partisan battles here and elsewhere continue to be rancorously fought—the politicians believe it’s real!
Jacques Ellul has been criticized for his “anti-intellectual” views, and that bears a moment’s reflection. The word “intellectual,” in this context, is a euphemism for linear logic—indeed a technical way of thinking. But linear logic could not produce the thesis expounded in The Technological Society because, in essence, it is a theological argument. It wears the clothing of social philosophy, but is theological all the same. The thinking is non-linear and presupposes the authority of God. Remove the theistic underpinnings and the result is trivial.
It seems best to think of technique as a culture—a materialist, technical culture. The problem is not that the culture exists, but that men surrender to it so willingly. That could be attributed to seduction, laziness, and habit. Human nature too often opts for the easy way out, and the result can be disastrous.
Ellul appears to yearn for a romanticized past, an idyllic yesteryear before technique began its conquest. But how much of that is unrealistic nostalgia? Wasn’t man’s lot in that era described by Hobbes as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”? Who would want to return to that? Technique is simply too useful and successful to disavow altogether. Consciousness-raising is the only practical alternative. While acknowledging the obvious benefits of technical culture, we should nevertheless (like Mr. Spock) assert that we have no desire to serve under it.
References
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