But the benefit of Mumfords approach is that it hones in on something tangible, whereas Elluls idea of technique is far more nebulous. The search for omnipotence is a denial of creaturehood. It makes little difference who is nominally in controlelected politicians, technical experts, capitalist executives, or socialist managersif decisions are determined by the demands of the technical system. Why? What happened? In this new society, according to the sociologist Daniel Bell, power will be based on knowledge rather than property. But his confidence really lay in the unity, convergence, and ascent of the cosmic process of which humanity and technology are manifestations. 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. Human ends are then adapted to suit the techniques available rather than the reverse. Conformity to a mass society jeopardizes spontaneity and freedom. How will this sharp drop in price impact society? He didnt travel much, criticized politics of every stripe and was a radical Christian. Choices that could only be made and enforced collectivelysuch as laws concerning air and water pollutionwere resisted AS infringements on free enterprise. 1. Ellul argues that technology is not an objective force that can be used for good or evil; instead, it is intrinsically neutral. Nevertheless, the constant asking of these questions changes a person, sometimes imperceptibly and sometimes visibly. Each element has a meaning or significance only within the ensemble. However, we may now be in the presence of the progressive elaboration of such a reactive capability. Controversies developed about the relative size of front and rear wheels, seat location, air tires, brakes, and so forth. Many people in developing nations now look on technology as their principal source of hope. 5. 29. eds., Questioning Technology (Santa Cruz, CA: New Society Publishers, 1991), p. 217. 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. And it is autonomous. Both the linear and the determinist view imply that technology determines work organization. Melvin Kranzberg, Technology the Liberator. in Technology at the Turning Point, ed. Technological progress creates more problems. Ellul, the Karl Marx of the 20th century, predicted the chaotic tyranny many of us now pretend is the good and determined life in technological society. 46. 27. In the book Ellul explains in bold and uncompromising terms how the logic of technological innovation conquered every aspect of human culture. This is where the so-called Ellul Understanding Curve comes into play. In agriculture, some experts anticipate that the continuing Green Revolution and the genetic engineering of new crops will provide adequate food for a growing world population. Technique automatically reduces actions to the one best way. Technical progress is also self-augmenting: it is irreversible and builds with a geometric progression. Without shame, technical wonks now talk of building artificial scientists to resolve climate change, poverty and, yes, even fake news. There was nothing logically or technically necessary about the model that finally won out and now found around the world.46, The historian John Staudenmaier writes that, contextualism is rooted in the proposition that technical designs cannot be meaning fully interpreted in abstraction from their human context. Writers mentioned in the second section, by contrast, typically adopt some variant of technological determinism. In an urban industrial society, a person's options are not as limited by parental or community expectations as they were in a small-town agrarian society. But, of course, life doesnt work this way: not all technologies are created equal. But Faramelli also advocates restructuring the economic order to achieve greater equality in the distribution of the fruits of technology.38 Similar calls for the responsible use of technology in the service of basic human needs have been issued by task forces and conferences of the National Council of Churches and by the World Council of Churches (WCC).39 According to one summary of WCC documents, technological society is to be blessed for its capacity to meet basic wants, chastised for its encouragement of inordinate wants, transformed until it serves communal wants.40, Egbert Schuurman, a Calvinist engineer from Holland, rejects many features of current technology but holds that it can be transformed and redeemed to be an instrument of God's love serving all creatures. Although Jacques Elluls name has largely faded from the public consciousness, his heirs are carrying the torch forward. To be fair to the current critics, Ellul did not leave behind an easily summarized philosophy after he died in 1994. Government intervention is needed only to regulate the most harmful impacts. Some critics assert that technology is not just a set of adaptable tools lot human use but an all-encompassing form of life, a pervauttuie with its own logic and dynamic. This is a significant oversight: to write of the downside of modern technology without referencing Ellul is arguably tantamount to writing about Communism without referencing Marx. 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? Several components of the theory are controversial and in need of critical empirical investigation. Need-oriented values and local human benefits would then play a larger part in technological change.35, The political scientist Victor Ferkiss expresses hope about the redirection of technology. Gabriel Marcel, The Sacred in the Technological Age, Theology Today 19 (1962): 2738. Defenders of technology point out that four kinds of benefits can be distinguished if one looks at its recent history and considers its future: 1. 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. Explore intellectual conservatism They see run-away technology as an autonomous and all-embracing system that molds all of life, including the political sphere, to its requirements. . Norman Denny (New York: Harper & 1964), chaps. Thomas Misa, How Machines Make History, and How Historians (and Others) Help Them Do So, Science, Technology & Human Values 13 (1988): 30831. February 04, 2021 11:00 PM. These are wildly impractical questionsimpractical because, among other reasons, only a centralized, authoritarian state could compel people to turn off their lights or decrease their car use at a level that would make any difference, and that would be antithetical to everything Ellul stood for. Because there are choices, public policy decisions about technology play a larger role here than in either of the other views. 34. Technological progress creates more problems. 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. He believes it is possible to combine centralized, systemwide planning in basic decisions with decentralized implementation, cultural diversity, and citizen participation.36. Roger Shinn, Forced Options: Social Decisions for the 21st Century, 3d ed. For example, U.S. legislation supporting railroads and public mass transit systems was blocked by a coalition of auto manufacturers, insurance companies, oil companies, labor unions, and the highway construction industry. 3. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981). The breadth of the definition also reminds us that there are major differences among technologies. In each case the underlying assumptions and value judgments are examined. The current concern is social media: Facebook and Twitter and their incursions into personal privacy and the democratic process. G. Friedman, Sept tudes sur lhomme et la technique) 2. Technological Pessimism - Holds that technology is progressive and beneficial in many ways, but it is also doubtful in many ways. 6. Jacques Ellul was born in Bordeaux, France, in 1912 and lived most of his life in or near the region of his birth. The article focuses on those technology-prompted changes in organizational design that affect the quality and . In a world of disease and hunger, technology rightly used can be a far-reaching expression of concern for persons. 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. The first group usually assumes a free market model. In Elluls viewone I find hard to refutehuman beings in the modern era seem to be living their lives in service to this ever-evolving technique, rather than the other way around. 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). Daid Kipnis, Technology and Power (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1990). He didnt hail from Paris, but rural Bordeaux. I will argue that new policy priorities concerning agriculture, energy, resource allocation, and the redirection of technology toward basic human seeds can be achieved within democratic political institutions. See for example Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, vol. The latter is totally dominated and utilized (in Western society). Elle n'est ni bonne ni mauvaise, mais ambivalente. On the other hand, pessimists do not necessarily accept determinism, even in its weaker form. And a whole new arsenal of human techniquestherapy, pharmaceuticals, mass mediaemerges to help us adjust to our ever-increasing dislocation. There is something satisfying in the way Ellul presents his assertion like a mathematical formula. They are concerned about individual rights and the dignity of persons. Social and political forces affect the design as well as the uses of particular to technologies. 50. Technique is no longer some uncertain and incomplete intermediary between humanity and the natural milieu. <> 8, 9, and 10. Kinder, Gentler Colonialism: Bungling Billionaires and Their Arrogant Adventures in Saving the World, Decolonizing Black Womens Health Through Land Reparations. His foreign-born father was subsequently arrested and died in prison in 1942. Man is caught like a fly in a bottle. They would tend to side with our sec-and group, the critics of technology. At the opposite extreme, Niebuhr describes Christian groups advocating withdrawal from society. Ellul, a brilliant historian, wrote like a physician caught in the middle of a plague or physicist exposed to radioactivity. For instance: History shows that every technical application from its beginnings presents certain unforeseeable secondary effects which are much more disastrous than the lack of the technique would have been. The views expressed in the third section presuppose a social conflict model. Quite the contrary, says Ellul, technique enslaves people, while proffering them the mere illusion of freedom, all the while tyrannically conforming them to the demands of the technological society with its complex of artificial operational objectives., ___________________________________________________________, ____________________________________________________________, Technique, for Ellul, is a FORCE over society that controls people, and not merely a FUNCTION of what people in a society use to control things. Ted Lewis, Elluls Lectures on Planning and Forecasting, Excerpts from Presence in the Modern World Communication, Technological Society Excerpt for Spring 2023. A Synopsis and Analysis of the Thought and Writings of Jacques Ellul Moreover, technology has created subtle ways of manipulating people and new techniques of electronic surveillance and psychological conditioning. Stalin and Mao would be impressed or perhaps disappointed that so much social control could be exercised with such sophistication and so little bloodletting. Ellul calls for personal acts of auto-critique, humility and authentic liberty. Networks of industries with common interests form lobbies of immense political power. 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. The key question will be: What decision-making processes and what technological policies can contribute to human and environmental values? If this is the common effect of Elluls work on those who actually read it, what hope is there for casual skimmers of blogs and Facebook posts? Second, environmental destruction is symptomatic of a deeper problem: alienation from nature. by James McElroy. 4. 13. In general, power corrupts and leads people to rationalize their use of power for their own ends. Kaczynski encountered The Technological Society while teaching mathematics at Berkeley in the late 1960s. I affirm the importance of the spiritual life, but I do not believe that it requires a rejection of technology. Man was made to do his daily work with his muscles, Ellul writes. Kipnis shows that military and transportation technologies fed the conviction of colonists that they were superior to colonized peoples. in what he does not say, write Greenman, Schuchardt, and Toly, by espousing no other hope. And so, bereft of material solutions, the reader is supposed to turn to spiritually oriented works such as The Presence of the Kingdom or The Ethics of Freedom. g\nT:{]l O@qcOV; ${ePf" t.Z1JhPb fYF(q86j, /*t+g$g6p|cb*j~F[:.HH'_ ?!VAl~%xD7AC8r\ ";&%`# Ms;-4:m#+6`L(3WBe-OHeYn6zTv \}n)C>8I6f;mO +fE7VN]jlX&>K2c. Here psychological techniques, surveillance techniques and propaganda have all merged to give the Russians and many other groups a golden opportunity to intervene in the political lives of 126 million North Americans. Yes I am a member (login) | The Redirection of Technology. Schuurman holds that technology can be redirected to advance both material and spiritual well-being. 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. Through most of history, leisure and cultural pursuits have been the privilege of the few, while the mass of humanity was preoccupied with survival. More recent writers point out that alienation has been common in state-managed industrial economies too and seems to be a product of the division of labor, rationalization of production, and hierarchical management in large organizations, regardless of the economic system. 4 Uncontrollability. 33. Different individuals and groups may define a problem differently and may have diverse criteria of success. 14. Rather, it means consciously choosingknowing both the upsides and downsides of any technique or machinewhether or not to use it, rather than simply saying that we must use it. 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. Nevertheless, technique is lacking in one of the essential characteristics found in any organized ensemble, reaction. 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.
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