How Tech Despair Can Set You Free

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Author: Samuel Matlack
Full Title: How Tech Despair Can Set You Free
Category: #articles
URL: https://thenewatlantis.com/publications/how-tech-despair-can-set-you-free

Highlights

But Ellul rejects it. He refuses to offer a prescription for social reform. He meticulously and often tediously presents a problem — but not a solution of the kind we expect. This is because he believed that the usual approach offers a false picture of human agency. It exaggerates our ability to plan and execute change to our fundamental social structures. It is utopian. To arrive at an honest view of human freedom, responsibility, and action, he believed, we must confront the fact that we are constrained in more ways than we like to think. Technique, says Ellul, is society’s tightest constraint on us, and we must feel the totality of its grip in order to find the freedom to act.
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Is Ellul a determinist or fatalist, believing that dehumanizing social systems are the inevitable outcome of rationalist thinking, or even of history? He rejects this charge as well, explaining that his writing on technique is a sociological endeavor offering a big picture of a large phenomenon. He describes a reality that is quite independent of individual action. We may think of it this way: It’s as if our society is playing a game called Technique, and he is describing its rules. Whether or not we individually all play by the rules is another matter, although we often do even when we think we are not.
And yet, when we read Ellul on technique, we can never quite shake the feeling that what he says is a probability is a virtual certainty. It can be hard to take his self-defense and attempts at qualification seriously. But the payoffs of his totalizing picture of technique remain significant. The first payoff is pragmatic. We see patterns best when we paint them in the broadest strokes possible. They help us to see that our food system’s failure during a pandemic, our opioid crisis, our rapid loss of animal species, and our “warehousing” of the elderly may all be symptoms of the same long-term disease, manifesting deep-seated cultural habits we have too long ignored. The second payoff is prophetic, in the tradition of the biblical prophets Ellul knew well. We will ultimately get what our hearts desire. If what we get is bad (and it looks like it’s going to be), that’s because we don’t desire what is good. We have been worshipping an idol. And because in the face of large-scale problems we are by nature both complacent and complicit, we may fail to see the error of our ways until it’s too late. But the third payoff of Ellul’s totalitarian critique is the most intriguing. We might call it an existentialist therapy — a journey of the soul toward anxiety in order to find rest beyond it, and motivation to act. Reading Ellul, if one can temper one’s frustrations with him, has the initial effect of anxiety verging on despair. This is where his work is most fruitful.
Kierkegaard argues that these hints of anxiety we each feel — and that we each try either to escape from or to put up with — are really symptoms of a universal “sickness unto death” that is largely hidden from view. Christianity, he says, has “discovered a miserable condition that man as such does not know exists.” But Christianity not only finds this condition, it also describes its relief. The “state of the self when despair is completely rooted out,” Kierkegaard writes, is when “the self rests transparently in the power that established it.” There is no relief from our despair until we get to the bottom of it, recognize its all-pervasiveness, confront it, and find at the other end of that journey a place of divine rest that is also the beginning of freedom.
Ellul might best be understood as engaging in a similar process. The despair we may feel when our technological system dehumanizes us — as in the commodification of life in fetal-tissue research, or the death wish at the heart of transhumanists’ dreams, or the way that much of public-health governance has become mass manipulation, or even just the vague sense that something stinks beneath the surface of most public “ethical” thinking on science and tech — all these are symptoms that something at the very core is rotten. Fully exposing that rotten core is Ellul’s project in his writings on technique. To what end? To produce the despair he thinks we must face in order for hope to have any real weight. Hope is the key term, and Ellul is adamant that it is not optimism. “The best formula,” he writes, is “one of pessimism in hope.” But we don’t find his account of hope in his writing on technique. To the perpetual frustration of many of his readers, his books often fall into two sharply separate domains: sociology on the one side, theology on the other. If we encounter only the sociology side, we may easily conclude that he is evidently a pessimist, despite his insistence that he’s not. We have to turn instead to a theological book like Hope in Time of Abandonment.
We can see in that book Ellul’s existentialist leanings, for example when he ranks living over exposition of ideas. This is why hope in the face of uncontrollable technique is hard to wrap one’s mind around. “You cannot talk about hope,” he writes. “The question is how to live it.” The reason you cannot talk about hope — or, rather, cannot describe the action it takes — is this: Hope is not a program for reform, a solution to implement, or a prescription to follow. To borrow from the farmer and writer Wendell Berry, hope means “work for the present,” whereas optimism means “making up a version of the future.” It is at this point that one itches to see, if not solutions, then images of what hopeful living might be like. Berry talks of the need for each of us to create a “lexicon of good examples” — examples that show “a better way” of food production, of life together, of preserving the Earth. Unfortunately, it was Ellul’s shortcoming as a writer that he seemed unable to breathe life into his ideas, in addition to worrying constantly that readers might turn examples into programs.
This is not an optimistic program for how to defeat the Nazi regime. It is one man’s faithful, hopeful, and loving act of defiance against tyranny, bringing to mind the final words of Middlemarch: “For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
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Did we still need an Allied invasion of Normandy to finally solve that problem? Probably yes, and we may owe our lives to those who in their historic acts drew up the plans and saw them through. For most of us, hope may look smaller but is no less virtuous. It is providing safe passage for others during war, or having a baby during a pandemic, and it is the daily labor — painfully inefficient — of cultivating plots of mind and land the tyrants shall not claim.