Confronting the Technological Society

Metadata

Author: Samuel Matlack
Full Title: Confronting the Technological Society
Category: #articles
URL: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/confronting-the-technological-society?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Highlights

From this stint in politics, however, he concluded that “the politician is powerless against government bureaucracy; society cannot be changed through political action,” a view that would become the topic of his 1965 book The Political Illusion.
but again he discovered that institutionalism was an obstacle to effective social reform.
Although technique does not refer simply to technology and machinery, Ellul writes that the machine “represents the ideal toward which technique strives.” The machine has created the modern, industrial world, but it was originally a poor fit for society; technique was the process of adapting social conditions to the smooth churning of the machine, for instance in the way urban housing developed around factories and traffic patterns were then designed to accommodate high-volume traffic in densely populated cities. “All-embracing technique is in fact the consciousness of the mechanized world.” Technique is a certain kind of social change, maybe even a Zeitgeist or ethos, and the process of adaptation is essential to it.
In Ellul’s way of thinking, once the technique of standardized testing is in place, the primary concern for everyone involved becomes improving the means of learning so as to meet the standards, while the ends of learning — the ultimate purposes of educating our young — move out of sight.
the convergence of five phenomena in the nineteenth century: the availability of scientific knowledge amassed over centuries; population growth; an economy at once stable but adaptable; a clear intention on the part of the whole society to exploit technical possibilities in all areas; and perhaps most importantly social plasticity — that is, a society willing to surrender its religious and social taboos and to trade in the supremacy of traditional groups for that of the individual.
technique creates the circumstances in which it flourishes.
The other five characteristics of technique are less widely discussed. They are automatism, which is the process of technical means asserting themselves according to mathematical standards of efficiency; self-augmentation, the process of technical advances multiplying at a growing rate and building on each other, while the number of technicians also increases; wholeness, the feature of all individual techniques and their various uses sharing a common essence; universalism, the fact that technique and technicians are spreading worldwide; and autonomy, the phenomenon of technique as a closed system, “a reality in itself … with its special laws and its own determinations.”
It may appear to us that this process has been driven by economic or political decisions. But in fact, Ellul argues, the mere technical possibility has served as the impetus for achieving it; economic, political, and moral considerations have all followed.
But their naïveté, Ellul writes, has less to do with their technical predictions than with their failure to consider the immense social transformation that would be necessary to accommodate the new inventions.
But even in governing techniques, we adapt to their demands and structures, and our activities are gradually shaped by them.
Rather, for Ellul the complex interplay of opposing forces is simply a given feature of being human: “To obey a multiplicity of motives and not reason alone seems to be an important keynote of man,” he wrote in The Technological Society. And again in that 1981 essay: “Human life has no meaning if there is no chance of changing anything, no part of one’s own to play, that is, if there is no history begun but not yet finished.” For Ellul, society is not a determined system but one that is (or ought to be) in constant flux, and the individual can in some important sense be free to shape it.
- Note: cf. William James
The threat of technique is that it suppresses this multiplicity and flux, binding opposing forces into a uniform, static, and paralytic system, as in totalitarian societies.
Technique is most efficient at ironing out society’s wrinkles, Ellul says, when we have learned to ignore the mechanisms of technique. For example, a government’s surveillance of citizens or a business’s tracking of consumer habits are most efficient when we are unaware of them or have become accustomed to them. The fact that they make us uncomfortable when thinking about them suggests that we recognize natural tensions between us and the government or the business.
We might compare this tool to a map. Maps represent observable facts from a given place, but the facts are selectively chosen depending on the kind of map it is, and many details are left out. On a trail map, only the larger elevations, depressions, rivers, hills, and roads are recorded. But with the help of this information, selective and abstracted from reality as it may be, we can make sense of our surroundings, learn about relationships between landmarks, and deduce our own position, which of course is not recorded on the map. Maps are interpretations of reality and also help us create interpretations of our own experience. Similarly, technique explains the relationships, the inner logic, between the social facts Ellul observes, and in turn sheds light on an array of other social phenomena and on society as a whole.
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The closest Ellul ever came to proposing a solution was in later essays in which he calls for an “ethics of nonpower,” whereby “man will agree not to do all he is capable of.” This includes choosing not to maximize certain technical means in one’s private life as well as in the public sphere. It is not until we are capable of this kind of relinquishment that we can be free, both from technical determinism and for rational control of technique, as neither type of freedom is a simple given.
Not so fast, critics of Ellul might reply: the “total system” is surely a phantom product of Ellul’s method. People assert their freedom from technology, and thus the possibility of its rational control, whenever they engage with culture and the arts, sports, or nature; faith is not the only way.
But as more and more activities and areas of life get absorbed in technique — in recent years perhaps most visibly through digital technologies shaping friendships, learning, buying and selling, travel, music, leisure, and much else — the possibilities of pushing back against it diminish. The lesson here is not that the particular technologies are necessarily harmful and ought to be shunned. Rather, while they aim to make countless activities easier and more efficient — and us happier — they tend to obscure from our vision the real, kaleidoscopic, sometimes maddening but appropriate complexities of these activities. Education, political engagement, friendship, artistic and scholarly excellence, moral and intellectual virtue — these are and remain vexingly difficult, and there are no shortcuts to becoming good at them, even if various tools are helpful along the way. What we need is to learn to appreciate the tensions and difficulties of pursuing these deeply meaningful ends. As Ellul writes in The Political Illusion, “Only tension and conflict form personality, not only on the loftiest, most personal plane, but also on the collective plane.”
Whereas technologies grant us greater freedom to master our environment, technique as a whole restrains it and itself becomes the new environment resisting our mastery.
An important point Ellul seems to have missed is that for the technician, the craftsman, and the mechanic, mastery over technology requires not confrontation from without but proper care for the thing and submission to its physical demands. Freedom from the tool goes hand in hand with freedom and skill to manipulate it, which often makes older tools that reveal their workings superior to the new ones that conceal them. The master technician may thus be freer than the mere user who has not been disciplined by the making of the tool .