3. 49. Darrell Fasching, The Dialectic of Apocalypse and Utopia in the Theological Ethics of Jacques Ellul, in Research in Philosophy and Technology, vol. 17. Another philosopher, Albert Borgmann, does not want to return to a pretechnological past, but he urges the selection of technologies that encourage genuine human fulfillment. Such an obsession with things distorts our basic values as well as our relationships with other persons. Of course, pollution abatement technologies can treat many of the effluents of industry, but often unexpected, indirect, or delayed consequences occur. The Redirection of Technology. Summer/Fall 2014 . He didnt hail from Paris, but rural Bordeaux. Niebuhr holds that the majority of Christians are in three movements that fall between the extremes of accommodation and withdrawal. Some examples: unless Im seriously misunderstanding Ellul, I believe that he would view the growing calls to reduce global warming via nuclear power with skepticism. 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. Appropriate technology can be thought of as an attempt to achieve some of the material benefits of technology outlined in the first section without the destructive human costs discussed in the second section most of which result from large-scale centralized technologies. Technology is finally thought of as the source of salvation, the agent of secularized redemption.29 In an affluent society, a legitimate concern for material progress readily becomes a frantic pursuit of comfort, a total dedication to self-gratification. Only citizens who remain connected to traditional human societies can see, hear and understand the disquiet of the smartphone blitzkrieg or the Internet circus. Only relatively affluent groups or nations can afford the latest technology the gaps between rich and poor have been perpetuated and in many ideas increased by technological developments. Policy changes require a combination of protest, political pressure, and the kind of new vision that the biblical concern for social justice can provide.42. Families break down. Cheris Kramarae (New York and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1988). 8, 9, and 10. Almost entirely absent from these discussions is any mention of Jacques Ellul, once regarded alongside Lewis Mumford as one of the worlds foremost critics of unchecked technological development. 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). Technology is participation in divine creativity. John W. Staudenmaier, Technologys Storytellers (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), p. 16. Several degrees and types of determinism can be distinguished. According to Ellul's pessimistic arguments are: 1. technological progress has a price. Apparently ignorant of Elluls Christianity and pacifism, the militantly atheistic Kaczynski came to the conclusion that the only means of overcoming the hegemony of technique was literally to blow up the system. . For the first time ever a political candidate or party can effectively talk to each individual voter privately in their own home and tell them exactly what they want to hear in a way that cant be tracked or audited.. Why? I admire these critics for defending individuality and choice in the face of standardization and bureaucracy. 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. Technologies are not neutral because social goals and institutional interests are built into the technical designs that are chosen. 1. He didnt come from French blue blood; he was a meteque.. Moreover, strong protest and vivid examples are needed to challenge the historical dominance of technological optimism and the disproportionate resource consumption of affluent societies. 6. He was optimistic about the use of technology in a communist economic order, and thus he belongs with the third group below, the contextualists, but his idea of alienation has influenced the pessimists. Ferr, Philosophy of Technology, p. 44. 48. (I can safely state. The near catastrophe at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in 1979 and the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 were the products of human errors, faulty equipment, poor design, and unreliable safety procedures. The work week has been cut in half, and human wants have been dramatically fulfilled.7Emanuel Mesthene, former director of the Harvard Program in Technology and Society, grants that every technology brings risks as well as benefits, but he says that our task is the rational management of risk. We will have total power over matter, reconstructing the very stuff of the universe. He looked to a day of interplanetary travel and the unification of our own planet, based on intellectual and cultural interaction.18. Robert Dean Lurie is the author most recently of Begin the Begin: R.E.M.s Early Years. He distrusts technology as an instrument of corporate profit, but he believes it can be reoriented toward human liberation and ecological balance. The research material is based on the ideas of the French respective philosopher Jacques Ellul (1912-1994), who in the Russian encyclopedic literature is positioned primarily asa philosopher and. This will be a future-oriented society, the age of the professional managers, the technocrats.9 A bright picture of the coming technological society has been given by many futurists, including Buckminster Fuller, Herman Kahn, and Alvin Toffler.10, Samuel Florman is an articulate engineer and author who has written extensively defending technology against its detractors. Several components of the theory are controversial and in need of critical empirical investigation. This is most clearly evident in the defense industries with their close ties to government agencies. Like cancer in a living organism, the systematization of technique pervades every cell of our modern technical and technological society. 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. We are even denied a human culprit. Alternative purposes would lead to alternative designs. Government intervention is needed only to regulate the most harmful impacts. It disrupts and then disrupts again with unforeseen consequences, requiring more techniques to solve the problems created by latest innovations. STAS - Different selected views on technology. - Studocu Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) French philosopher; Holds that technology is progressive and beneficial in many ways, it is also doubtful in many ways. 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. They believe that society is basically sinful. Ellul wasnt just worried about the impact of a single gadget such as the television or the phone but the phenomenon of technical convergence., He feared the impact of systems or complexes of techniques on human society and warned the result could only be an operational totalitarianism., Convergence, he wrote, is a completely spontaneous phenomenon, representing a normal stage in the evolution of technique.. 5. 23. 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. 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. True, there are the technicians, those who cook up and implement these new solutions, but Ellul contends that they themselves are under the control of technique, driven on by the compulsion always to search for that one best way, because. 2000 by James A. Fowler. All rights reserved. endobj by James McElroy. Victor Ferkiss, Technological Man and The Future of Technological Civilization (New York: George Braziller, 1969 and 1974). (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1991). Views of the Interactions of Science, Technology, and Society. In his earlier writings, Harvey Cox held that freedom to master and shape the world through technology liberates us from the confines of tradition. Technological progress creates damaging effects. Strict determinism asserts that only one outcome is possible. The Technological Society is at its strongest when it emphasizes the human cost of all this hyper-development. 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. - According to Jacques Ellul's pessimistic arguments: a. 5. %PDF-1.5 1, Technics and Human Development, and vol. This is where the so-called Ellul Understanding Curve comes into play. Membership is free. Contextualists also point to the diversity of science-technology interactions. Notes: 1 The translation of Elluls Technique, technique, and socit technicienne have presented problems for all English versions of his work. . 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. Privileged, almost exclusive relationships exist among the elements of the system, regardless of what is situated outside the system. The rich are usually more anxious about their future than the poor. 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. They hold that greater productivity improves standards of living and makes food and health more widely available. Second, environmental destruction is symptomatic of a deeper problem: alienation from nature. They are less concerned about economic growth than about how that growth is distributed and who receives the costs and the benefits. We should challenge the rule of technology and restrict it to the limited role of supporting the humanly meaningful activities associated with a simpler life.27, In Technology and Power, the psychologist David Kipnis maintains that those who control a technology have power over other people and this affects personal attitudes as well as social structures, Power holders interpret technological superiority as moral superiority and tend to look down on weaker parties. Whats more, technique is amoral. The optimists may think that, by fulfilling our material needs, technology liberates us from materialism and allows us to turn to intellectual, artistic, and spiritual pursuits. with Ellul on the rejection of technology's positivist . Genuine community and interpersonal interaction are threatened when people feel like cogs in a well-oiled machine. When the technological mentality is dominant, people are viewed and treated like objects. 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. It is impossible to have confidence in men who apparently lack these faculties. Sojourners could readily devote an issue to himand did just . Technological progress creates more problems. Ramsey sees this advance in science and technology as a mixed blessing. My attempt seems to have failed, Ellul wrote in the later essay On Dialectic. No one is using my studies in correlation with one another, so as to get at the heart of our crisis in a conscious manner, based on a Christian understanding of it.. Systems in which human or mechanical failures can be disastrous are risky even in a stable society, quite apart from additional risks under conditions of social unrest. Join the ISI community. Ellul had no formal training in theology, but this may have contributed to his originality. It is, of course, a fantastic counterterrorism tool. Alternative patterns of modernization are less environmentally and socially destructive than the path that we have followed. We are increasingly cut off from our sense of wonderand with that dies the religious impulse. Pandemonium, which examines the impact of global trade on disease exchanges, received widespread national acclaim. ^l)|{-13;+-n{x'J?ouGD O Zc +Sio&xA6|rJ O!&sk+G4R&K But the welfare of humankind requires a creative technology that is economically productive, ecologically sound, socially just, and personally fulfilling. Elluls 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. 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. 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. Let me try to summarize these three views of technology in relation to the conflicting values (identified in italics) that are discussed in the next two chapters, There are many variations within each of the three broad positions outlined above, but each represents a distinctive emphasis among these values. G. Friedman, Sept tudes sur lhomme et la technique) 2. Egbert Schuurman, Technology and the Future (Toronto: Wedge Publishing, 1980), also The Modern Babylon Culture, in Technology and Responsibility, ed. Education Virtualization Prospects In Pessimistic Light Of Technological Determinism By Jacques Ellul. 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. . Studs Terkel, Working (New York: Pantheon. The historian Arnold Pacey gives many examples of the management of technology for power and profit. 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. Automation gave engineers and managers increased power over workers, who no longer needed special skills. However, he also believes that it is inevitable and irreversible, meaning that we cannot simply choose to go back to a pre-technological age. For that matter, do we need so many roads? 7. In the book Ellul explains in bold and uncompromising terms how the logic of technological innovation conquered every aspect of human culture. To be sure, sensitivity to nature is sometimes found among technological optimists, but it is more frequently found among the critics of technology. 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. J. Neugroschel (New York: Continuum, 1980), and The Technological Bluff, trans. 32. Higher Living Standards. It is not yet able to control its errors and dysfunctions, to react on its source and modify itself. 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? He wrote of technique, about which he meant more than just technology, machines and digital gadgets but rather the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency in the economic, social and political affairs of civilization. 27. Linear Development. 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. A recentdocumentarydefined what hypernormalization did for Russia: it became a society where everyone knew that what their leaders said was not real, because they could see with their own eyes that the economy was falling apart. 7, ed Paul Durbin (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1984). Further, we must press ahead in the name of the human adventure. Below, we propose some basic insights, claims, and commitments that all seekers of new societal relations might choose to further develop and refine. We are in the midst of a technological panic. Technique takes possession of it and enslaves it. 8, 9, and 10. In other cases, such as the steam engine or the electric power system, innovations occurred with very little input from new scientific discoveries. We will return in chapter 8 to this crucial question: How can both experts and citizens contribute to technological policy decisions in a democracy? Confronting the Technological Society - JSTOR It is said that the technologies of the Industrial Revolution imposed their own requirements and made repetitive tasks inevitable. Elle s'auto-accrot en suivant sa propre logique. Narrow Criteria of Efficiency. Large-scale systems send to be vulnerable to error, accident, or sabotage. Ellul believed that Christians had a special duty to condemn the worship of technology, which has become societys new religion. The allocation of more than two-thirds of the U.S. federal research and development budget to military purposes has diverted expertise from environmental problems and urgent human needs, Technology also seems to have contributed to the impoverishment of human relationships and a loss of community. 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. W. Norris Clarke, S.J., Technology and Man: A Christian Vision, in Science and Religion. They swore that social media would help citizens fight bad governments and would connect all of us. 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. 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). ed. Fourth, large-scale technologies typical of industrial nations today are particularly problematic. Ellul was one of the first to note that you couldnt distinguish between bad and good effects of technology. Throughout modern history, technological developments have been enthusiastically welcomed because of their potential for liberating us from hunger, disease, and poverty. Ellul offers us no way out, since all our institutions, the media, and our personal lives are totally in its grip. Technique now constitutes a fabric of its own, replacing nature. Conformity to a mass society jeopardizes spontaneity and freedom. Without shame, technical wonks now talk of building artificial scientists to resolve climate change, poverty and, yes, even fake news. In this chapter, views of technology are grouped under three headings: Technology as Liberator, Technology as Threat, and Technology as Instrument of Power. La Technique ou lenjeu du sicle [1954], Le Systme technicien [1977]). Above all, soil erosion and massive deforestation threaten the biological resources essential for human life, and global warming from our use of fossil fuels threatens devastating changes in world climates. Western thought since the Renaissance has increasingly encouraged man the master of nature; secular and reductionistic assumptions have prevailed. Social media, a web of behavioural and psychological systems, is just the latestexampleof convergence. Tellingly, most of these solutions involve more technology. Science brings to the light of day everything man had believed sacred. 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. There is a considerable range of views among contemporary Marxists. There is also Chellis Glendinning, author of When Technology Wounds, and Kirkpatrick Sale, author of Human Scale and Rebels Against the Future (a history of the original Luddite movement). Daid Kipnis, Technology and Power (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1990). Read him. Pacey gives as one example the Western experts in India and Bangladesh who in the 1960s advised the use of large drilling rigs and diesel pumps for wells, imported from the West. By autonomous, Ellul meant that technology had become a determining force that "elicits and conditions social, political and economic change." The role of propaganda The French critic was the first to note that technologies build upon each other and therefore centralize power and control. Quantitative criteria tend to crowd out qualitative ones. Many readers will find this a vexing experience. What happened? Samuel Florman, Science for Public Consumption; More Than We Can Chew? Technology Review 86 (April 1983): 1213. Do we really need our cities to be lit up like Christmas trees every night? Toxic wastes may contaminate groundwater decades after they have been buried. (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1991). Throughout his life Ellul maintained that he was neither by nature, nor doctrinally, a pessimist, nor have I pessimistic prejudices. When prodded on his personal views by Chastenet, who interviewed Ellul extensively for a book titled Jacques Ellul on Politics, Technology, and Christianity, Ellul stated: Im pretty close to being a libertarian, but libertarianism with a great difference: my anarchist friends believe that a libertarian society is possible, whereas I believe it is quite impossible. The technologies needed there must be relatively inexpensive and labor-intensive. Similarly, I imagine he would look askance at Elon Musks efforts to put more green cars on the road, asking instead: Do we need so many cars on the road in the first place? But historical analysis suggests that most technologies are already molded by particular interests and institutional goals. 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. 50. 6. 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. He also urges the upgrading of indigenous technologies, the exploration of intermediate-scale processes, and greater dialogue between experts and users. The Christian perfectionists, seeking to maintain their purity and to practice radical obedience, have withdrawn into monasteries or into separate communities, as the Mennonites and Amish have done. According to the critics, there is little evidence that an electronic, computerized, automated society will produce more diversity than earlier industrialism did. He believes it is possible to combine centralized, systemwide planning in basic decisions with decentralized implementation, cultural diversity, and citizen participation.36.
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