ellul's pessimistic arguments about technology

Thomas Derr, Conversations about Ultimate Matters: Theological Motifs in WCC Studies in the Technological Future, International Review of Missions 66 (1977): 12334. Peter G. Makukhin (a)*, Yevgeny A. Mezentsev (b), Natalia V. Solomina (b), Elena V. . The optimists usually evaluate technology in a utilitarian framework, seeking to maximize the balance of costs over benefits. . Carl Mitcham and Jim Grote (New York: University Press of America, 1984). 8, 9, and 10. It plays a vital role in these contentious, confusing times by applying timeless principles to the specific conditions and crises of our ageto what Kirk, in the inaugural issue, called the great moral and social and political and economic and literary questions of the hour.. Some see it as the beneficent source of higher living standards, improved health, and better communications. Although Jacques Elluls name has largely faded from the public consciousness, his heirs are carrying the torch forward. Nineteenth-century factories and twentieth-century assembly lines did involve dirty and monotonous work, but the newer technologies allow greater creativity and individuality.8, A postindustrial society, it is said, is already beginning to emerge. 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. Social and geographical mobility allow a greater choice of jobs and locations. A good jumping-off point for those who wish to venture down the rabbit hole is Chastenets collection of interviews (Jacques Ellul on Politics, Technology, and Christianity), which provides a human touch that Ellul denied himself in his writing. Even the interactions among people are mechanized and objectified. Since then it has engulfed Western civilization and become the globes greatest colonizing force. 8. 3. Technology, he wrote, cant put up with human values and must necessarily don mathematical vestments. 1. He holds that biblical ethics can provide a viewpoint transcending society from which to judge the sinfulness of the technological order and can give us the motivation to revolt against it, but he holds out little hope of controlling it.23 Some interpreters see in Ellul's recent writings a very guarded hope that a radical Christian freedom that rejects cultural illusions of technological progress might in the long run lead to the transformation rather than the rejection of technology. . Separate technologies form an interlocking system, a total, mutually reinforcing network that seems to lead a life of its own. Ellul proposes a form of reflection based on dialectical tensions, thus opening the way to . Writers mentioned in the second section, by contrast, typically adopt some variant of technological determinism. . In the public sphere, however, sin must be restrained by the secular structures of authority and order. Ellul believed that Christians had a special duty to condemn the worship of technology, which has become societys new religion. 44. The suppression of the critical faculty mans growing incapacity to distinguish truth from falsehood, the individual from the collectivity, action from talk, reality from statistics, and so on is one of the most evident results of the technical power of propaganda., Faking the news may have been a common practice on Soviet radio during Elluls day, but it is now a global phenomenon leading us towards what Ellul called a sham universe.. The people who make most of the decisions about technology today are not a technical elite or technocrats trying to run society rationally or disinterested experts whose activity was supposed to mark the end of ideology. The decisions are made by managers dedicated to the interests of institutions, especially industrial corporations and government bureaucracies. The economy will be devoted mainly to services rather than material goods. But to become a mass man entails a tremendous amount of psychic mutation. The optimists stress the contribution of technology to economic development. Impersonality and Manipulation Relationships in a technological society are specialized and functional. As summarized by the authors of Understanding Jacques Ellul: Christians are called to exercise what freedom they have by profaning technologydeconstructing its soteriological mythsand refusing to submit to technological necessity. Several components of the theory are controversial and in need of critical empirical investigation. I have found much of utility in the book and also much to criticize. 1. Ellul's pessimistic Arguments are: a. Whats more, technique is amoral. 48. Technological progress has a price. Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: The Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. x. All aspects of a new technologythe destructive as well as the productivewill inevitably be used, according to Ellul, and we will often tap into the destructive uses first because it is easier, and more lucrative, to fashion a blunt weapon than a socially beneficial tool. How will this sharp drop in price impact society? It is a universal mediator, producing a generalised mediation, totalizing and aspiring to totality. Schuurman was also a contributor to Stephen Monsma, ed., Responsible Technology: A Christian Perspective (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986). Typesetting in large printing frames once required physical strength and mechanical skills and was a male occupation. The media backlash against Silicon Valley and its peevish moguls, however, typically ends with nothing more radical than an earnest call for regulation or a break-up of Internet monopolies such as Facebook and Google. Thomas Misa, How Machines Make History, and How Historians (and Others) Help Them Do So, Science, Technology & Human Values 13 (1988): 30831. Yet most designs still allow some choice as to how they are deployed. Bijker and Pinch show that in the late nineteenth century inventors constructed many different types of bicycles. 6. Technological Pessimism - this view is extremely supported by French philosopher Jacques Ellul. Studs Terkel and others have found in interviews that resentment, frustration, and a sense of powerlessness are widespread among American industrial workers. Advertising creates demand for new products, whether or not they fill real needs, in order to stimulate a larger volume of production and a consumer society. <>/Font<>/ProcSet[/PDF/Text/ImageB/ImageC/ImageI] >>/MediaBox[ 0 0 595.32 841.92] /Contents 4 0 R/Group<>/Tabs/S/StructParents 0>> Defend your principles. Once armed with one (or all three) of these introductory texts, one is well poised to begin wrestling with the genuine item. Jacque Ellul's The Technological Society, originally published in 1954, has become a footnote to one of the stranger events in U.S. history. The Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of the Continent, which considers the worlds largest energy project, was a national bestseller and won the 2009 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award and was listed as a finalist for the Grantham Prize for Excellence In Reporting on the Environment. Technological progress creates damaging effects. Yet in developing nations capital is scarce and labor is abundant. 25. The issues cut across disciplines; I draw from the writings of engineers, historians, sociologists, political scientists, philosophers, and theologians. 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. I admire these critics for defending individuality and choice in the face of standardization and bureaucracy. For Ellul, technique, an ensemble of machine-based means, included administrative systems, medical tools, propaganda (just another communication technique) and genetic engineering. 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 . When the technological mentality is dominant, people are viewed and treated like objects. By 1975, two thirds of the pumps had broken down because the users lacked the skills and maintenance networks to operate them. At the opposite extreme are the critics of modern technology who see it as a threat to authentic human life. It is worth noting that the word normal didnt come into currency until the 1940s along with technological society. Wise, Science and Technology. 1. What should we make of them? with Ellul on the rejection of technology's positivist . 18. There is a considerable range of views among contemporary Marxists. 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. . Ellul seems to anticipate Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and their ilk when he writes of his own eras tech visionaries: To wield power well entails a certain faculty of criticism, discrimination, judgment, and option. Gabriel Marcel, The Sacred in the Technological Age, Theology Today 19 (1962): 2738. The idea of effecting decentralization while maintaining technical progress is purely utopian, wrote Ellul. Nonconformity hinders efficiency, so cooperative and docile workers are rewarded. (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1991). An isotope separator can enrich uranium for peaceful nuclear reactors or for aggression with nuclear weapons. Technique has taken substance, wrote Ellul, and it has become a reality in itself. Roger Shinn, Forced Options: Social Decisions for the 21st Century, 3d ed. Contextualists also point to the diversity of science-technology interactions. Ellul offers us no way out, since all our institutions, the media, and our personal lives are totally in its grip. 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. Human ends are then adapted to suit the techniques available rather than the reverse. Because there are choices, public policy decisions about technology play a larger role here than in either of the other views. Any product or process can be made safer, but always at an economic cost. The technologies needed there must be relatively inexpensive and labor-intensive. . Gabriel Marcel, The Sacred in the Technological Age, Theology Today 19 (1962): 2738. 2 0 obj According to the critics, there is little evidence that an electronic, computerized, automated society will produce more diversity than earlier industrialism did. Niebuhr holds that the majority of Christians are in three movements that fall between the extremes of accommodation and withdrawal. Only two possibilities are left to the individual, he writes. This is close to the definition given by Arnold Pacey in The Culture of Technology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), p. 6. This is where the so-called Ellul Understanding Curve comes into play. Some technologies seem to be neutral if they can be used for good or evil according to the goals of the users. The Pentagon of Power (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967 and 1969). Reactions at the conference to this disturbing argument varied. When Teilhard looked to the past, he portrayed humanity as an integral part of the natural world, interdependent with other creatures. 42. For such people, Elluls recommendation will ring true and is perhaps all that is needed. 30. New drugs, better medical attention, and improved sanitation and nutrition have more than doubled the average life span in industrial nations within the past century. 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. I'm not sure (get help), Sister Society: Association Internationale Jacques Ellul. . Florman, Blaming Technology, p. 183. Each element has a meaning or significance only within the ensemble. The average teenager now works about two hours of every day for free providing Facebook and other social media companies with all the data they need to engineer young peoples behaviour for bigger Internet profits. The youth counterculture of the 1970s was critical of technology and sought harmony with nature, intensity of personal experience, supportive communities, and alternative life-styles apart from the prevailing industrial order. He didnt hail from Paris, but rural Bordeaux. 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). Similarly, nuclear power has well-documented negative secondary effects, but can the same be said for solar power? Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, trans. Either he remains what he was [prior to the disruptive technological development], in which case he becomes more and more unadapted, neurotic, and insufficient, loses his possibilities of subsistence, and is at last tossed on the social rubbish heap, whatever his talents may be; or he adapts himself to the new sociological organism, which becomes his world, and he becomes unable to live except in a mass society. The standard of living of low-income families in industrial societies has doubled in a generation, even though relative incomes have changed little. Ellul's own comprehensive definition is found in the preface of The 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." According to Ellul, technique necessarily came into play at the Fall of man into sin. Higher Living Standards. 23. In this new society, according to the sociologist Daniel Bell, power will be based on knowledge rather than property. His relative obscurity has many roots. They may acknowledge the presence of technological choices but expect such choices to be missed because they are pessimistic about human nature and institutionalized greed. Receiving it in joy and love, and responding in obedience, we can cooperate in meaningful service of God and neighbor. Daid Kipnis, Technology and Power (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1990). 16. Technological progress creates unpredictable devastating effects. 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. They are less concerned about economic growth than about how that growth is distributed and who receives the costs and the benefits. Diverse users were en-visioned (workers, vacationers, racers, men and women) and diverse criteria (safety, comfort, speed, and so forth). But it is more skeptical about the exercise power by the institutional church, and it looks instead to the activity of the layperson in society. Privileged, almost exclusive relationships exist among the elements of the system, regardless of what is situated outside the system. She answers the question of What Could Possibly Go Right?. Each of us can adopt individual life-styles more consistent with human and environmental values. Frederick Ferr (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1990). The Foundation for Responsible Robotics recentlycreateda small stir by asking if sexual intimacy with robots could lead to greater social isolation.. This essay appears in the Summer 2019 issue of Modern Age. . They would side with our first group, those who are optimistic about technology. 14. The search for omnipotence is a denial of creaturehood. Subsequent chapters will point to inadequacies of these views, but some major criticisms can be summarized here. Mitcham and Grote. 49. This technical milieu involves, on the human side, a complete re-examination of ancient modes of behavior, or physiological capacities (cf. In some renditions, the ways in which technology shapes culture are forgotten while the cultural forces on technology are scrutinized. 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. Technological progress has a price b. drain tax revenue comes to half a billion U.S. dol-lars (row 6). Second, environmental destruction is symptomatic of a deeper problem: alienation from nature. His most influential sociological book with the English title, The Technological Society, was originally entitled in French, Technique, the Stake of the Century, for example. Individuality is lost and local or regional differences are obliterated in the homogeneity of industrialization. . 45. Any modification of an element has repercussions on the ensemble and modifies it. 43. (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1991). 3. 33. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. He says that no citizen can be adequately informed about complex technical questions such as acid rain or radioactive waste disposal. ed. Technology assuredly fragments human communities, but in the world of technique centralization remains the norm. In the previous volume, I discussed the social construction of science thesis, in which it is argued that not only the direction of scientific development but also the concepts and theories of science are determined by cultural assumption and interests. He was a onetime politician who largely disdained politics and did not vote; a hero of the World War II French Resistance who refused in his writings to side with the flawed democracies of his day over the totalitarian regimes that menaced them; an ardent admirer of Marx who had few kind words for socialism or Communism and spent most of his adult life witnessing to a very un-Marxist Christian faith. See also The Place of Technology in a General Biology of Mankind, and On Looking at a Cyclotron, in The Activation of Energy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971). W. Norris Clarke, S.J., Technology and Man: A Christian Vision, in Science and Religion. 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. We will return in chapter 8 to this crucial question: How can both experts and citizens contribute to technological policy decisions in a democracy? The philosopher Hans Jonas is impressed by the new scale of technological power and its influence on events distant in time and place. This view is common among the optimists. Stalin and Mao would be impressed or perhaps disappointed that so much social control could be exercised with such sophistication and so little bloodletting. 38. As cocreators with God we can celebrate the contribution of reason to the enrichment of human life.17 Other theologians have affirmed technology as an instrument of love and compassion in relieving human sufferinga modern response to the biblical command to feed the hungry and help the neighbor in need. G. Friedman, Sept tudes sur lhomme et la technique) 2. 31. Teilhard's writings present us with a magnificent sweep of time from past to future. 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.

First Mass In Canada Was Celebrated On This Peninsula, Blackwell Funeral Home, Articles E