Kaczynski called The Technological Society his Bible, but readers drawn by the allure of danger may be disappointed. In fact, he added a note to the English edition clarifying that The Technological Society is not truly about technology.
But it is, for readers who rediscover it today, a strikingly relevant warning that explains the past year more than any contemporary commentary. Ellul helps articulate the feeling, shared by many, that there is a crisis looming on the horizon. Ellul was a historian, sociologist, and Christian theologian. He was born in in Bordeaux, France, and was raised in a poor household.
He began his career as a devoted Marxist but rejected Marxism for Christianity after an intense conversion experience. Technique is closely tied to technology but is something more encompassing. It therefore precludes questions of aesthetics or morality. This form of reasoning is spreading into everything. The ideal of technique is the machine.
As technique is introduced to new areas of life, it renders them sterile and mechanical. All human values are reduced to some version of efficiency. Today, restaurants are assembly lines, and romance is conducted on profit-seeking apps.
Technique is not a new phenomenon, but it is no longer embedded within distinct cultural, moral, and aesthetic boundaries. All that was good becomes data.
All that was beautiful is now efficient. Comfort is the most efficient path toward a pleasant physical feeling. The rise of technique has changed our conception of the economy, the state, and man himself. This creates a mental malaise that is viewed as one more problem to be solved with technique, in the forms of therapy and propaganda. For Ellul, propaganda is the combination of mass communications and psychological techniques used to persuade people. When it comes to the political domain, we always think of propaganda as something that affects other people, never ourselves.
But all of us, in effect, agree to be propagandized in order to escape the sterility of modern life. This means that constant cultural revolution is a prerequisite for the continued advance of technological society. A decade prior, C. Lewis wrote Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength about the danger of what would happen when man turned technique on himself.
These books, which described a revolutionary social transformation, were written by people who still had one foot in the old world and so could articulate how it differed from the new. If you agree with it and it doesn't change the way you look at things, you haven't grasped its importance. Most political theorists take ideology to be a central point from which "real world" consequences emanate.
In other words, a Communist or libertarian ideology in practical use will produce a particular type society and individual divorced from the actual technical workings of the society. Liberals and conservatives both speak of things in such a manner as if ideology is the prima facie cause of existence - but as Ellul shows in painstaking detail, this is wrong. What almost everyone fails to grasp is the pernicious effect of technique and its offspring, technology on modern man.
Technique can loosely be defined as the entire mass of organization and technology that has maximum efficiency as its goal.
Ellul shows that technique possesses an impetus all its own and exerts similar effects on human society no matter what the official ideology of the society in question is. Technique, with its never-ending quest for maximum efficiency, tends to slowly drown out human concerns as it progresses towards its ultimate goal. This is the law of technique; this yield can only be obtained by the total mobilization of human beings, body and soul, and this implies the exploitation of all human psychic forces.
Ellul thoroughly shows that much of the difference in ideology between libertarians and socialists becomes largely irrelevant in the technological society this is not to say that ideology is unimportant, but rather that technique proceeds with the same goals and effects. This will doubtlessly please no one; liberals want to believe that they can have privacy and freedom despite a high degree of central planning, and libertarians want to believe that a society free of most regulation and control is possible in an advanced technological society.
July 7 offers a symposium on music and antifascism. The Ellul Forum. Introducing Ellul. Short Biography of Ellul. What is Technique? Theme: Apocalypse and Utopia. New Publications. The Humiliation of the Word. A New Reprint See New Publications Page. Bernard Charbonneau. Philosopher, Social Critic, Environmentalist.
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