He remains the most revolutionary, prophetic and dangerous voice of this or any century. 10, ed. Mitcham and Grote. 10, ed. Since then it has engulfed Western civilization and become the globes greatest colonizing force. Others are critical of technology, holding that it leads to alienation from nature, environmental destruction, the mechanization of human life, and the loss of human freedom. In part 2 we will encounter optimistic forecasts of each of the particular technologies examined. People move to cities because they prefer life there to the tedium and squalor of the countryside. Florman says that worker alienation in industry is rare, and many people prefer the comfortable monotony of routine tasks to the pressures of decision and accountability. <>/Font<>/ProcSet[/PDF/Text/ImageB/ImageC/ImageI] >>/MediaBox[ 0 0 595.32 841.92] /Contents 4 0 R/Group<>/Tabs/S/StructParents 0>> Material progress represents liberation from the tyranny of nature. According as its defenders, technology brings psychological and social benefits as well as material progress. It is worth noting that the word normal didnt come into currency until the 1940s along with technological society. Through most of history, leisure and cultural pursuits have been the privilege of the few, while the mass of humanity was preoccupied with survival. Technology has its own inherent logic and inner necessity. They would side with our first group, those who are optimistic about technology. 18. - According to Jacques Ellul's pessimistic arguments: a. Several theologians have expressed particular concern for the impact of technology on religious life. The dynamism of technology can liberate people from static and confining traditions to assume responsibility for their own lives. His attempts at culture, freedom, and creative endeavour have become mere entries in techniques filing cabinet.. . (Propaganda in all its forms is a major point of interest for Ellul and the subject of one of his other well-known books.). A synthesis of christianity and society has been advocated historically by the Roman Catholic Church. For instance, the spinning mule helped to break the power of labor unions among skilled textile workers in nineteenth-century England. 1 0 obj By hard work, community cooperation, and frugal ways, they have prospered in agriculture and have continued their distinctive life-styles and educational patterns. 15. La Technique ou lenjeu du sicle [1954], Le Systme technicien [1977]). Samuel Florman, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (New York: St. Martins Press, 1977) and Blaming Technology: The Irrational Search for Scapegoats (New York: St. Martins Press, 1981). 2. This would give to the commercial sponsors of technology the choices that are ours as responsible citizens. Three views have been proposed (see Fig. (Translated by Dominique Gillot and Carl Mitcham from Recherche pour une Ethique dans une socit technicienne, Morale et Enseignement (1983), pp. Strict determinism asserts that only one outcome is possible. Arnold Pacey, Culture of Technology. The research material is based on the ideas of the French respective philosopher Jacques Ellul (1912-1994), who in the Russian encyclopedic literature is positioned primarily asa philosopher and. . That, argued Ellul, is what technology does. Elle n'est ni bonne ni mauvaise, mais ambivalente. 44. In a bureaucracy, the goals of the organization are paramount and responsibility is diffused, so that no one feels personally responsible. Because it explains the nightmarish hold technology has on every aspect of life, and also remains a guide to the perplexing determinism that technology imposes on life. The ethical problem, that is human behavior, can only be considered in relation to this system, not in relation to some particular technical object or other. It is increasingly evident that many of these goals are desirable also in industrial nations, I will suggest that we should develop a mixture of large and intermediate-scale technologies, which will require deliberate encouragement of the latter. In 1939, the Vichy regime removed Ellul from his teaching post at Strasbourg University for allegedly making subversive statements. Automation, for example, is capital-intensive and labor saving. Studs Terkel and others have found in interviews that resentment, frustration, and a sense of powerlessness are widespread among American industrial workers. Charles Susskind, Understanding Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), p. 132. Behavior and particular choices no longer have much significance. Second, technological pessimists neglect possible avenues for the redirection of technology. Abstract. In many respects technology has hypernormalized a technological society in which citizens exercise less and less control over their lives every day and cant imagine anything different. The answer to the destructive features of technology is not less technology, but technology of the right kind. I am most sympathetic with the contextualists, though I am indebted to many of the insights of the pessimists. But the welfare of humankind requires a creative technology that is economically productive, ecologically sound, socially just, and personally fulfilling. 4 0 obj 2. J. Wilkinson (New York: Knopf, 1964); also The Technological System, trans. The subtle illusion of this invasive methodology of technique is that people view technology as the liberator of mankind, the operational instrument that sets them free from natural function. The inevitability or inherent logic of technological developments is not supported by historical studies. Man was made to do his daily work with his muscles, Ellul writes. Rational order is everywhere imposed at the expense of spontaneity and freedom. One must eventually read attentively a great number of pages of Elluls writing before finally coming again to a clear understanding of Elluls arguments. The reverse contribution of technology to science is also often evident. 39. The effects of carcinogens may not show up for twenty-five years or more. Sometimes a technology was indeed based on recent scientific discoveries. Kinder, Gentler Colonialism: Bungling Billionaires and Their Arrogant Adventures in Saving the World, Decolonizing Black Womens Health Through Land Reparations. Social controls over the controllers are always essential. Pace adds living things among the ordered systems (in order to include agriculture, medicine, and biotechnology), but I suggest that these are already included under the rubric of practical tasks. Frederick Ferr. But one wonders what the Unabomber would have made of Elluls religious works. Technological change has its own momentum, and its pace is too rapid for trial-and-error readjustments. In the past, technology has been an instrument of profit, and decisions have been motivated in short-run private interests. Freedom understood individualistically became license for the economically powerful. g\nT:{]l O@qcOV; ${ePf" t.Z1JhPb fYF(q86j, /*t+g$g6p|cb*j~F[:.HH'_ ?!VAl~%xD7AC8r\ ";&%`# Ms;-4:m#+6`L(3WBe-OHeYn6zTv \}n)C>8I6f;mO +fE7VN]jlX&>K2c. He was writing before the destructive environmental impacts of technology were evident. The enemy is techniquea broad term Ellul uses to refer to the technological mentality and structure that he sees pervading not only industrial processes, but also all social, political, and economic life affected by them. Technological optimism believes that technology is the answer to all man's problems. This is close to the definition given by Arnold Pacey in The Culture of Technology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), p. 6. Main theologians who do not totally reject technology criticize its tendency to generate a Promethean pride and a quest for unlimited power. Nuclear energy is a prime example of a vulnerable, centralized, capital-intensive technology. Lewis, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Jacques Ellul, Martin Heidegger, George Grant, Samuel Florman, Wendell Berry, Robert Banks, Albert Borgmann, Erazim Kohk, Jeremy Begbie, Charles Taylor, and Neil Postman -- I give the . Paul Durbin (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1987), and A Christian Philosophical Perspective on Technology, in Theology and Technology, ed. 2. The French critic was the first to note that technologies build upon each other and therefore centralize power and control. For most of them, the most important form of participatory freedom is the economic freedom of the marketplace, though in general they are also committed to political democracy. Peter G. Makukhin , Technology, then, is but an expression and by-product of the underlying reliance on technique, on the proceduralization whereby everything is organized and managed to function most efficiently, and directed toward the most expedient end of the highest productivity. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981). Technology is indivisible and universal because everywhere it goes it shows the same deterministic face with the same consequences. Run-away technology is said to be like a vehicle out of control, with a momentum that cannot be stopped. If the DCs will then make a matching contribution to the revenues from their general taxa-tion, on the ground that a selective immigration pol-icy is likely to bring general externalities to the DCs, the total UN receipts from the proposed tax would rise to one billion U.S. dollars. 2 0 obj Niebuhr Cites the example of liberal theologians of the nineteenth century who had little to say concerning sin, revelation, or grace. Education Virtualization Prospects In Pessimistic Light Of Technological Determinism By Jacques Ellul. 37. The Washington Post noted his passing in a few scant paragraphs. From the editorial pages of USA Today, The Week, and even Wiredwhich devoted an entire issue to this topic in 2017commentators agonize over the societal destabilization caused by the ongoing tech onslaught and grasp at possible solutions: decentralize the Web; create apps to limit our time online or reclaim our lost sleep cycles; improve encryption technology; break up the Big Tech companies or require them to make their algorithms more transparent and/or more racially sensitive; and so on. 2. Whats more, technique is amoral. However, he also believes that it is inevitable and irreversible, meaning that we cannot simply choose to go back to a pre-technological age. They must be of intermediate scale so that jobs can be created in rural areas and small towns, to slow down mass migration to the cities. Technologies are not neutral because social goals and institutional interests are built into the technical designs that are chosen. 5. 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. I admire these critics for defending individuality and choice in the face of standardization and bureaucracy. More than science, which limits itself to explaining the how, technique desacralizes because it demonstrates (by evidence and not by reason, through use and not through books) that mystery does not exist. These three chapters provide the ethical categories and principles for examining policy decisions about particular technologies in later chapters. One thing is clear: readers who ignore Elluls spiritual writings are missing one of the major objectives of his work. 28. J. Neugroschel (New York: Continuum, 1980), and The Technological Bluff, trans. 18. When technology is treated as merely one form of cultural expression among others, its distinctive characteristics may be ignored. 10. ed. Some Third World authors have been beenly aware of technology as an instrument of power, and they portray a two-way interaction between technology and society across national boundaries. %PDF-1.5 In linear development it is assumed that science leads to technology, which in turn has an essentially one-way impact on society. Ellul relocated his family to Martres in the French free zone, where he became a farmer and a participant in the Resistance. In a world of limited resources, it also appears impossible for all nations to sustain the standards of living of industrial nations today, much less the higher standards that industrial nations expect in the future. Mental illness reaches epidemic levels. The final option described by Niebuhr is a transformation of society by Christian values. It went unnoticed here in Detroit. 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. Second, environmental destruction is symptomatic of a deeper problem: alienation from nature. Remembering the maverick physicist who pioneered an anthropic approach to cosmology. 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. 1972); Robert Schrag, Ten Thousand Working Days (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978); William A. Faunce, Problems of an Industrial Society, 2d ed. But Faramelli also advocates restructuring the economic order to achieve greater equality in the distribution of the fruits of technology.38 Similar calls for the responsible use of technology in the service of basic human needs have been issued by task forces and conferences of the National Council of Churches and by the World Council of Churches (WCC).39 According to one summary of WCC documents, technological society is to be blessed for its capacity to meet basic wants, chastised for its encouragement of inordinate wants, transformed until it serves communal wants.40, Egbert Schuurman, a Calvinist engineer from Holland, rejects many features of current technology but holds that it can be transformed and redeemed to be an instrument of God's love serving all creatures. 2. 33. 37. We are in the midst of a technological panic. Technology has been celebrated as the source of material progress and human fulfillment. Ellul calls for personal acts of auto-critique, humility and authentic liberty. Cynthia Cockburn, Machinery of Dominance: Women, Men, and Technical Knowhow (London: Pluto Press, 1985). In some renditions, the ways in which technology shapes culture are forgotten while the cultural forces on technology are scrutinized. Social and political forces affect the design as well as the uses of particular to technologies. Elluls issue was not with technological machines but with a society necessarily caught up in efficient methodological techniques. Higher Living Standards. After the war, Ellul worked briefly for the reconstituted Bordeaux city administration, helping with the rebuilding of local institutions and the meting out of justice to those who had collaborated with the Germans. 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. 1. The industrialized technical employment of technique became a monster in the urbanized and technological society of the twentieth (20th) century, the stake of the century as Ellul termed it. Although Jacques Elluls name has largely faded from the public consciousness, his heirs are carrying the torch forward. Few come away from a serious investigation of his writing without at least some aspect of their thinking changed. But to them I offer the (sometimes barely discernible) message underlying all of Elluls work: Dont give up. John W. Staudenmaier, Technologys Storytellers (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), p. 16. 2. He distrusts technology as an instrument of corporate profit, but he believes it can be reoriented toward human liberation and ecological balance. 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. According to Ellul's pessimistic arguments are: technological progress has a price But this misses the mystery of human existence, which is known only through involvement as a total person. J. Edward Carothers, Margaret Mead, Daniel McCracken, and Roger Shinn, eds., To Love or to Perish: The Technological Crisis and the Churches (New York: Friendship Press, 1972); Paul Abrecht and Roger Shinn, eds., Faith and Science in an Unjust World (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1980). Traditional Western ethics have been anthropocentric and have considered only short-range consequences. The passions it provokes which exist in everybody are amplified. George Wise writes, Historical studies have shown that the relations between science and technology need not be those of domination and subordination. 46. Ellul had no formal training in theology, but this may have contributed to his originality. But to become a mass man entails a tremendous amount of psychic mutation. Jeffrey Greenman, Read Schuchardt, and Noah Tolythe authors of the 2012 survey volume Understanding Jacques Elluldescribe (and provide a graph for) a conundrum they call the Ellul Understanding Curve: Readers who have successfully traversed the terrain of one work by Ellul often believe that they understand Elluls assumptions, methods, and conclusions. Because there are choices, public policy decisions about technology play a larger role here than in either of the other views. The machine enslaves people when they adapt to its demands. For Ellul, technique, an ensemble of machine-based means, included administrative systems, medical tools, propaganda (just another communication technique) and genetic engineering. endobj It is said that technology is a way of life. Most technologies are designed by men and add to the power of men. 25. The experience of working in the heart of bureaucracy put Ellul off politicsat least in a public sensefor the rest of his life. The philosopher Hans Jonas is impressed by the new scale of technological power and its influence on events distant in time and place. 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. (Ellul never set foot in the U.S., the country where he enjoyed his widest readership. Ian G. Barbour (New York: Harper & Row, 1968). But Ellul never intended for his readers to stop there. Inevitably, communities are torn asunder. In a world of disease and hunger, technology rightly used can be a far-reaching expression of concern for persons. Victor Ferkiss, Technological Man and The Future of Technological Civilization (New York: George Braziller, 1969 and 1974). 3. Technique is not the same as technology; not in French, nor in English. We will have total power over matter, reconstructing the very stuff of the universe. He looked to a day of interplanetary travel and the unification of our own planet, based on intellectual and cultural interaction.18. Systems in which human or mechanical failures can be disastrous are risky even in a stable society, quite apart from additional risks under conditions of social unrest. The dramatic, Alberta-basedSaboteurs: Wiebo Ludwigs War Against Big Oil, won the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction in 2002. It is an object in itself, an independent reality with which we must reckon.. Elle uniformise les civilisations. 2. Government intervention is needed only to regulate the most harmful impacts. 16. Only two possibilities are left to the individual, he writes. Read him. Like cancer in a living organism, the systematization of technique pervades every cell of our modern technical and technological society. Samuel Florman, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (New York: St. Martins Press, 1977) and Blaming Technology: The Irrational Search for Scapegoats (New York: St. Martins Press, 1981). 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. But the place of technique began to change dramatically in the eighteenth (18th) century with the quest for efficient procedures to find the one best means in every human endeavor. On the other hand, pessimists do not necessarily accept determinism, even in its weaker form. But when he looked to the future, he expected that because of our technology and our spirituality we will be increasingly separated from other creatures. Technology is taken to be applied science, and it is thought to have an essentially one-way impact on society. Some Christian groups are critical of the impact of technology on human life. We simply cannot sleep while there are masses to feed and diseases to conquer, seas to explore and heaving to servey.15. By the nineteenth (19th) century the bourgeoisie recognized technique as the key to their material and commercial interests. Technological Determinism. This view encourages a qualified optimism about social change (and, I suggest, about technology). 2. An excerpt from Ellul proposes a form of reflection based on dialectical tensions, thus opening the way to . Policy will influence the impact on two key dimensions: diffusion and consequences. By 1975, two thirds of the pumps had broken down because the users lacked the skills and maintenance networks to operate them. La technique, pour Ellul, est le facteur dterminant de la socit. The impact of technology sin society is particularly important in the transfer of a technology to a new cultural setting in a developing country. This article sets forth a theory of the effects that computer-assisted communication and decision-aiding technologies have on organizational design, intelligence, and decision making. They had great respect for the created world ordered by God, and they called for social justice and the redirection of cultural life. 3. Facebooks mantra move fast and break things epitomizes the technological mindset. Wiebe Bijker, Thomas Hughes and Trevor Pinch (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987). Alternative purposes would lead to alternative designs. The ancient dream of a life free from famine and disease is beginning to be realized through technology. Unfortunately, he gives us few examples of what such a technology would be like or how we can work to promote it.41, The American theologian Roger Shinn has written extensively on Christian ethics and gives attention to the structures of political and economic power within \ which technological decisions are made. But technology directed to genuine human needs is a legitimate expression of humankind's creative capacities and an essential contribution to its welfare. A machine or process may have been the result of creative practical innovation or the modification of an existing technology. 17. In this chapter, views of technology are grouped under three headings: Technology as Liberator, Technology as Threat, and Technology as Instrument of Power. Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture (New York: Doubleday, 1969), and Where the Wasteland Ends (New York: Doubleday, 1972); see Ian G. Barbour, Science, Religion, and the Counterculture, Zygon 10 (1975): 38097. We will find many technologies in which one group enjoys the benefits while another group is exposed to the risks and social costs. We are even denied a human culprit. Organized knowledge allows us to include technologies based on practical experience and invention as well as those based on scientific theories. Darrell Fasching, The Dialectic of Apocalypse and Utopia in the Theological Ethics of Jacques Ellul, in Research in Philosophy and Technology, vol. Living standards were actually very low, work was brutal, and roles were rigidly defined. Of course, pollution abatement technologies can treat many of the effluents of industry, but often unexpected, indirect, or delayed consequences occur. By that I mean that hope is transmissible, even without reference to a given God.. It is not yet able to control its errors and dysfunctions, to react on its source and modify itself. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, trans. A recentdocumentarydefined what hypernormalization did for Russia: it became a society where everyone knew that what their leaders said was not real, because they could see with their own eyes that the economy was falling apart. Defenders of technology point out that four kinds of benefits can be distinguished if one looks at its recent history and considers its future: 1. This would appear to be a clear-cut case of attempting to solve the problems of technique with more technique, when the questions ought to be: Why are we using so much power?
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