ellul's pessimistic arguments about technologyellul's pessimistic arguments about technology

ellul's pessimistic arguments about technology30 Apr ellul's pessimistic arguments about technology

With new forms of transportation, one can in a few hours travel to distant cities that once took months to reach. We now know that algorithms control every aspect of digital life and have subjected almost aspect of human behaviour to greater control by techniques whether employed by the state or the marketplace. The search for omnipotence is a denial of creaturehood. Buckminster Fuller, The Critical Path (New York: St. Martins Press, 1981); Herman Kahn et al., The Next 200 Years (New York: William Morrow, 1976); Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Bantam, 1971) and The Third Wave (New York: William Morrow, 1980). Technique automatically reduces actions to the one best way. Technical progress is also self-augmenting: it is irreversible and builds with a geometric progression. Technology is indivisible and universal because everywhere it goes it shows the same deterministic face with the same consequences. Comparing his ideas with the thoughts of other anti-technicists and technicists, we confirm . We must do so, first, as the name of compassion. More Leisure. Technology has its own inherent logic and inner necessity. He has won seven National Magazine Awards for his journalism since 1989 and top honours for investigative writing from the Association of Canadian Journalists. The people who make most of the decisions about technology today are not a technical elite or technocrats trying to run society rationally or disinterested experts whose activity was supposed to mark the end of ideology. The decisions are made by managers dedicated to the interests of institutions, especially industrial corporations and government bureaucracies. Automation, for example, is capital-intensive and labor saving. It is no longer merely a means and an intermediary. They are less concerned about economic growth than about how that growth is distributed and who receives the costs and the benefits. 35. 17. A series of six lectures to be delivered in academic session 20202021. In part 2 we will encounter optimistic forecasts of each of the particular technologies examined. 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? This may help explaining the predominance of pessimistic themes both in literature (such as "Brave New World" and "1984") and in art (such as Francis Bacon's "head . Living standards were actually very low, work was brutal, and roles were rigidly defined. Frederick Ferr (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1990). . Linear Development. Only the nave can really believe that the world-wide movement toward centralism results from the machinations of evil statesmen, writes Robert K. Merton, Elluls English translator. 3. Marxists are thus as critical as the pessimists concerning the consequences of technology within capitalism but as enthusiastic as the optimists concerning its potentialitieswithin a proletarian economic order. Kipnis claims that the person with technological knowledge-often has not only a potent instrument of control but also a self-image that assumes superiority over people who lack that knowledge and the concomitant opportunities to make decisions affecting their lives.28. Winner says that large-scale systems are self-perpetuating, extending their control over resources and markets and molding human life to fit their own smooth functioning. 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. I am not a member yet (register) | It disrupts and then disrupts again with unforeseen consequences, requiring more techniques to solve the problems created by latest innovations. ?k+OpJJ=H_ANuOWEU37Q@.^` N&]p6'-[4. He repeatedly takes Lewis Mumford to task for focusing narrowly on modern technology, which Ellul sees as merely a physical manifestation of the broader concept of technique. Human ends are then adapted to suit the techniques available rather than the reverse. Roger Shinn, Forced Options: Social Decisions for the 21st Century, 3d ed. The moment of unity following the death of Elizabeth II reminds us of the importance of honoring our own political Post-liberalism must embrace the universal to save the West and its nations. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981). <>/Font<>/ProcSet[/PDF/Text/ImageB/ImageC/ImageI] >>/MediaBox[ 0 0 595.32 841.92] /Contents 4 0 R/Group<>/Tabs/S/StructParents 0>> Church and state have different roles but can cooperate for human welfare in society. In the case of energy, it is claimed that breeder reactors and fusion will provide environmentally benign power to replace fossil fuels. Plus que le politique et l'conomie. Strong gender divisions are present among employees of technology-related companies. Executive Summary Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI)a general purpose technology affecting many industrieshas been focused on advances in machine learning, which we recast as a quality-adjusted drop in the price of prediction. We simply cannot sleep while there are masses to feed and diseases to conquer, seas to explore and heaving to servey.15. Another critique worth considering is that Elluls definition of technique casts too wide a net. Andrew's latest book,Empire of the Beetle, a startling look at pine beetles and the worlds most powerful landscape, Tags: building resilient societies, fake news, techno-optimists, Technology, By Multiple organizations, 4Liberation.org. I'm not sure (get help), Sister Society: Association Internationale Jacques Ellul. The automobile, for example, enables people to do what they want and enhances geographical and class mobility. It is a universal mediator, producing a generalised mediation, totalizing and aspiring to totality. The dense and discursive work lays out in 500 pages how technique became for civilization what British colonialism was for parts of 19th-century Africa: a force of total domination. Unqualified devotion to technology as a total way of life, they say, is a form of idolatry. With this new power over heredity, he said, we can replace the crude forces of natural selection and seize the tiller to control the direction of future evolution. We will see later that particular legislative committees, government agencies, and industries have formed three-way alliances to promote such technologies as nuclear energy or pesticides. Or the more limited claim is made that the development and deployment of technology in capitalist societies follows only one path, but the outcomes might be different in other economic systems. A third basic position holds that technology is neither inherently good nor inherently evil but is an ambiguous instrument of power whose consequences depend on its social context. Without shame, technical wonks now talk of building artificial scientists to resolve climate change, poverty and, yes, even fake news. On the other side, technique constitutes a system in the strict sense of the term (cf. Nonconformity hinders efficiency, so cooperative and docile workers are rewarded. Computers and automation hold the promise of eliminating much of the monotonous work typical of earlier industrialism. La technique's advances through a combination of its own logic and Man's greed/quest for power. The idea of effecting decentralization while maintaining technical progress is purely utopian, wrote Ellul. Technique encompasses the totality of present-day society, wrote Ellul. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. This view encourages a qualified optimism about social change (and, I suggest, about technology). 2. Aquinas held that there is both a revealed law, known through scripture the church, and a natural law, built into the created order and accesable human reason. Ellul didnt regard technology as inherently evil; he just recognized that it was a self-augmenting force that engineered the world on its terms. Technology is either the independent variable on which other variables are dependent, or it is the overwhelmingly predominant force in historical change. 50. endobj Technology has been an almost exclusively male preserve, reflected in toys for boys, the expectations of parents and teachers, and the vocational choices and job opportunities open to men and women. But Ellul does not spell out such a transformation because he holds that the outcome is in God's hands, not outs, and most of his writings are extremely pessimistic about social change. They see run-away technology as an autonomous and all-embracing system that molds all of life, including the political sphere, to its requirements. - According to Ellul's pessimistic arguments are: 1. technological progress has a price 2. technological progress creates more problems 3. technological progress creates damaging effects 4. technological progress creates unpredictable devastating effects TECHNOLOGICAL OPTIMISM - This view is strongly supported by technologists and engineers and Writers mentioned in the second section, by contrast, typically adopt some variant of technological determinism. But they do not consider the institutional structures of economic power and self-interest that now control the directions of technological development. 7, ed Paul Durbin (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1984). Among the volumes dealing with broad attitudes toward technology are Albert H. Teich, ed., Technology and the Future, 5th ed. Power over nature gives greater opportunity for the exercise of human freedom.6. Human identity is defined by roles in organizations. There is something satisfying in the way Ellul presents his assertion like a mathematical formula. Only citizens who remain connected to traditional human societies can see, hear and understand the disquiet of the smartphone blitzkrieg or the Internet circus. Starting with a historical survey of some key philosophers and writers on technology as it relates to spirituality -- in particular, Henry David Thoreau, Romano Guardini, C.S. The technician treats other people as objects to be understood and controlled.31Martin Buber contrasts the IIt relation of objective detachment with the IThou relation of mutuality, responsiveness, and personal involvement. Sometimes a technology was indeed based on recent scientific discoveries. 4. Founded in 1957 by the great Russell Kirk, Modern Age is the forum for stimulating debate and discussion of the most important ideas of concern to conservatives of all stripes. But it also is idealistic in its demands for social justice in the distribution of the fruits of technology. 8, 9, and 10. If the calculating attitude of control and mastery dominates a person's life, it excludes the openness and receptivity that are prerequisites of a relationship to God or to other persons.32 P. H. Sun holds that a high-tech environment inhibits the life of prayer. 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 human fabric is not an envelope around a culturally neutral artifact. By the nineteenth (19th) century the bourgeoisie recognized technique as the key to their material and commercial interests. 6. To be sure, sensitivity to nature is sometimes found among technological optimists, but it is more frequently found among the critics of technology. A new technology may displace some workers but it also creates new jobs. The practical tasks can include both the production of material goods (in industry and agriculture, for instance) and the provision of services (by computers, communications media, and biotechnologies, among others). (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981). Cynthia Cockburn, Machinery of Dominance: Women, Men, and Technical Knowhow (London: Pluto Press, 1985). Reference to ordered systems of people and machines directs attention to social institutions as well as to the hardware of technology. This position has much in common with the Catholic view and shares its understanding that God is at work in history, society, and nature as well as in personal life and the church. What is called Technique can be assimilated neither to the machine nor to a collection of machines, methods and products. % The replacement of workers by machines was intended not only to reduce labor costs but also to assert greater control by management over labor. A larger number, however, see technology as an ambiguous instrument of social power. She answers the question of What Could Possibly Go Right?. Here was an inspiring vision of a planetary future in which technology and spiritual development would be linked together. 26. Man is caught like a fly in a bottle. Harvey Cox, The Secular City (New York: Macmillan. Like cancer in a living organism, the systematization of technique pervades every cell of our modern technical and technological society. Nevertheless, determinism and pessimism are often found together among the critics of technology. All rights reserved. Individual choice has a wider scope today than ever before because technology has produced new options not previously available and a greater range of products and services. Cf. In practice, few did. EDUCATION VIRTUALIZATION PROSPECTS IN PESSIMISTIC LIGHT OF TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM BY JACQUES ELLUL . 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. Gabriel Marcel, The Sacred in the Technological Age, Theology Today 19 (1962): 2738. Alvin Weinberg, Can Technology Replace Social Engineering, in Technology and the Future, ed. This is an unrelentingly grim picture. by James Fowler Exclusive dependence on technological rationality also leads to a truncation of experience, a loss of imaginative and emotional life, and an impoverishment of personal existence. 40. 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. Technology is predominantly beneficial, and the reduction of any undesirable side effects is itself a technical problem for the experts. Social and geographical mobility allow a greater choice of jobs and locations. The son of a French-Portuguese mother and a Serbian-Italian father, Ellul came to view his outsider statusboth as a product of the melting pot and as that rare French intellectual who eschewed Parisas a key component of his self-identity. Here there are six arrows instead of two, representing the complex interactions between science, technology, and society. Buckminster Fuller, The Critical Path (New York: St. Martins Press, 1981); Herman Kahn et al., The Next 200 Years (New York: William Morrow, 1976); Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Bantam, 1971) and The Third Wave (New York: William Morrow, 1980). . Mitcham and Grote. But the welfare of humankind requires a creative technology that is economically productive, ecologically sound, socially just, and personally fulfilling. Families break down. I believe that we should neither accept uncritically the past directions of technological development nor reject technology in toto but redirect it toward the realization of human and environmental values. Ellul indirectly invokes God. The staff members of regulatory agencies, in turn, are mainly recruited from the industries they are supposed to regulate. H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951), See also Carl Mitcham, Technology as a Theological Problem in the Christian Tradition, in Theology and Technology, ed. Technology assuredly fragments human communities, but in the world of technique centralization remains the norm. Marxists assign justice a higher priority than freedom. In a later chapter we will look at technology assessment, a procedure designed to use a broad range of criteria to evaluate the diverse consequences of an emerging technologybefore it has been deployed and has developed the rested interests and institutional momentum that make it seem uncontrollable. When wealth is distributed unevenly, the luxuries of a few people carry much more weight in the marketplace than the basic needs of many others. The Technological Society is crammed to bursting with similar instances of wild speculation masquerading as ironclad certainty. By Vicki Robin, Fran Korten, Resilience.org, Fran Korten is former executive director, publisher and contributing editor for YES! The Pentagon of Power (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967 and 1969). Clearly they blame capitalism rather than technology for these evils of modern industrialism. 19. John Zerman and Alice Carnes. In other words, it doesnt matter if a drone is delivering a bomb or book or merely spying on the neighbourhood, because technique operates outside of human morality: Technique tolerates no judgment from without and accepts no limitations.. In replying to these authors, we may note first that there are great variations among technologies, which are ignored when they are lumped together and condemned wholesale. 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. Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: The Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. x. Subsequent chapters will point to inadequacies of these views, but some major criticisms can be summarized here. He distrusts technology as an instrument of corporate profit, but he believes it can be reoriented toward human liberation and ecological balance. Whats more, technique is amoral. . 7. Intermediate-scale technology allows decentralization and greater local participation in decisions The decentralization of production also allows greater use of local materials and often a reduction of impact on the environment. 8. This contrasts strongly with the greater work autonomy, job satisfaction, and commitment to work found in the professions, skilled trades, and family-owned farms.21, Other features of technological development since World War II have evoked widespread concern. Thomas Derr, Conversations about Ultimate Matters: Theological Motifs in WCC Studies in the Technological Future, International Review of Missions 66 (1977): 12334. Using the Internet the government can nowtrackthe movements of every citizen and rank their political trustworthiness based on their history of purchases and associations. Ellul contends that this divinely assisted shift in perspective helps put science back in its proper place among human endeavors. 30. Samuel Florman, Science for Public Consumption; More Than We Can Chew? Technology Review 86 (April 1983): 1213. 9. Such an obsession with things distorts our basic values as well as our relationships with other persons. Affluent nations use a grossly disproportionate share of the world's energy and resources. 5. The digerati also promised that digital technologies would usher in a new era of decentralization and undo what mechanical technologies have already done: centralize everything into big companies, big boxes and big government. endobj What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument. 2. How are science, technology, and society related? Florman, Blaming Technology, p. 183. The effects of carcinogens may not show up for twenty-five years or more. Technological progress has a price b. Leaders from a top U.S. business lobbying group said on Wednesday that Beijing's probe against U.S.-based chipmaker Micron Technology Inc marked a "major concern" for other companies operating in . The further one moves along on the Ellul Understanding Curve, the further ones existential despair edges over into a subtle but perceptible joyregardless of whether one is actually making a difference in the world. It is impossible to have confidence in men who apparently lack these faculties. pGBBB5afr 25Y) diEu2. Cheris Kramarae (New York and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988). Because there are choices, public policy decisions about technology play a larger role here than in either of the other views. He agrees with the pessimists that various technologies reinforce each other in interlocking systems, and he acknowledges that large-scale technologies lead to the concentration of economic and political power. . (The short-term dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works, Palihapitiya hassaid.). He insists that the critics have romanticized the life of earlier centuries and rural societies. 1, Technics and Human Development, and vol. Only two possibilities are left to the individual, he writes. The hole in the ozone layer caused by the release of chlorofluorocarbons had not been anticipated by any scientists. La Technique ou lenjeu du sicle [1954], Le Systme technicien [1977]). Again, technology may be considered an autonomous interlocking system, which develops by its own inherent logic, extended to the control of social institutions. The philosopher Hans Jonas is impressed by the new scale of technological power and its influence on events distant in time and place. 1. Here there is a compartmentalization of spiritual and temporal spheres and different standards for personal and public life. Why? They consider technology to be predominantly beneficial, and therefore little government regulation or public policy choice is needed; consumers can influence technological development by expressing their preferences through the marketplace. Few come away from a serious investigation of his writing without at least some aspect of their thinking changed. I am most sympathetic with the contextualists, though I am indebted to many of the insights of the pessimists. Technology leads to rational and efficient organization, which requires fragmentation, specialization, speed, the maximization of output. (Propaganda in all its forms is a major point of interest for Ellul and the subject of one of his other well-known books.). Ellul warned that if each of us abdicates our human responsibilities and leads a trivial existence in a technological society, then we will betray freedom. The work of astronomers, for instance, has been dependent on a succession of new technologies, from optical telescopes to microwave antennae and rockets. Technology is taken to be applied science, and it is thought to have an essentially one-way impact on society. Barbour. Rational order is everywhere imposed at the expense of spontaneity and freedom. Receiving it in joy and love, and responding in obedience, we can cooperate in meaningful service of God and neighbor. We can make decisions about technology within a wider context of human and environmental values. 3. The answer to the destructive features of technology is not less technology, but technology of the right kind. In addition, the bicycle carried cultural meanings, affecting a person's self-image and social status. 27. It is worth noting that the word normal didnt come into currency until the 1940s along with 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). The standard of living of low-income families in industrial societies has doubled in a generation, even though relative incomes have changed little. Increases in productivity have led to shorter working hours. What happened? The fact of the matter is that when one begins to read Ellul, understanding increases. . Networks of industries with common interests form lobbies of immense political power. Paul Tillich claims that the rationality and impersonality of technological systems undermine the personal presuppositions of religious commitment.30 Gabriel Marcel believes that the technological outlook pervades our lives and excludes a sense of the sacred. Norman Faramelli, Technethics (New York: Friendship Press, 1971). Here society is considered basically good and its positive potentialities are affirmed. 19. According to Ellul's pessimistic arguments are: technological progress has a price To subscribe now, go here. In 1954, Ellul appealed to all sleepers to awake. <> Do we need to live so far from our places of employment, or from our extended families, thus necessitating so much travel and energy consumption? 2. Cf. 5. The Technological Society is meant to pose questionsquestions that can only be resolved in the theological milieu. Ellul, a brilliant historian, wrote like a physician caught in the middle of a plague or physicist exposed to radioactivity. Melvin Kranzberg, a prominent historian of technology, has presented a very positive picture of the technological past and future. His relative obscurity has many roots. Man was made to do his daily work with his muscles, Ellul writes. For starters, the world of technique imposes a rational and mechanical order on all things. Thomas Misa, How Machines Make History, and How Historians (and Others) Help Them Do So, Science, Technology & Human Values 13 (1988): 30831. Translation copyright c by David Lovekin and Carl Mitcham.). <>>> Mass production yields standardized products, and mass media tend to produce a uniform national culture. For Ellul, technique, an ensemble of machine-based means, included administrative systems, medical tools, propaganda (just another communication technique) and genetic engineering. These effects exist alongside those effects which were foreseen and expected and represent something valuable and positive. But Ellul does not spell out such a transformation because he holds that the outcome is in God's hands, not outs, and most of his writings are extremely pessimistic about social change.24, The political scientist Langdon Winner has given a sophisticated version of the argument that technology is an autonomous system that shapes all human activities to its own requirements. 1. Philosophy of Technology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1988), defines technology as the practical implementation of intelligence and argues that intelligence itself has both practical and theoretical forms. Economic institutions treat nature as a resource for human exploitation. To Ellul, freedom is only possible when one submits wholly to the will of God, which one does by embracing Christian revelation. If Elluls proposed solution to the technological problemto essentially Get right with Godcomes across as trite and frustratingly vague, it may be because Ellul feared that resistance itself could become technicized and did not want to offer up a point-by-point plan. 47. What should we make of them? The threat of this ever-encroaching authority, along with its causes and possible remedies, would consume much of Elluls intellectual energy in the postwar years. Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker, The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit from Each Other, in The Social Construction of Technological Systems, ed. So me examples in the choice of designs for agricultural harvesters, nuclear reactors, and computer-controlled manufacturing are discussed in later chapters. In modern capitalism, according to Marxists, corporations dominate the government and political processes serve the interests of the ruling class. The technologies needed there must be relatively inexpensive and labor-intensive. This is understandable among English speaking readers and critics due to the mistranslation of his books. 6. And it is autonomous. . 3. 36. See also Charles Susskind, Understanding Technology. Teich. My copy of EllulsThe Technological Societyhas yellowed with age, but it remains one of the most important books I own. (I can safely state. Elle uniformise les civilisations. His efforts to smuggle Jews out of the country earned him a posthumous designation of Righteous Among the Nations from the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. Large-scale systems send to be vulnerable to error, accident, or sabotage.

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