[This article offers an argument. It is not everything that needs to be said. And, blog articles are ‘supposed to be’ 600 words long. This article is about 1900 words. It will take three times as much patience. My apologies.]
Much of our belief in the viability of the future (for humans) is tied up in technology: technology will save us! Technology has created the problems, but only it can save us. There is an argument that our biggest problem was the advent of machines. This was supposedly the biggest advance in the history of humankind: the replacement of human energy with machine power. The arguments for this conclusion are compelling. And yet, this blessing has likewise been a major curse. Here is an example.
In Cornwall (my father’s ancestors came from Cornwall), tin and copper had been mined for thousands of years, probably back to around 3,000 BCE. It eked along as a craft, and was interspersed with farming depending on the weather and the price of ore, for that long. But in the early nineteenth century, steam engines were invented, and were applied to mining. They ran the pumps that pumped water out of the mines, and all the other machinery involved in the mine.
In less than fifty years, the mines were mined out. Yes, a great amount of money was made in those few years (by a few people). For a short space of time they were the most profitable copper mines in the world. And of course the end point would have been the same if it had taken a hundred or a thousand years longer. But another way of saying it is this: they exceeded the capacity of nature to provide. The slow way had enabled them to persevere. If you take something to its logical conclusion, you have probably taken it too far.
There is a higher-level argument to be made as well: indigenous peoples never exhausted their environment by plundering non-renewable resources. They enjoyed abundance and left abundance to be enjoyed tomorrow.
This is the essential sadness. Technology is our conceit, our religion. We believe it will deliver us into freedom. We don’t ask why it has not done so already. We ignore the damage technology has created. We have not yet prepared an apology for the people of Cornwall for the empty mines, much less anyone since then. They are all just collateral damage in the onrush of progress.
I think of the things that are supposedly working now, and I think about the eighty percent of employees worldwide who are disillusioned by their work environment and their bosses, or who merely tolerate their bosses. I think: this is what is supposedly working. Why would you put your faith in it?
A book called The Technological Society was published in 1954, written by a French thinker, Jacques Ellul. He is not against technology, but he takes issue with our attitude towards it. He was saying that we have been so beguiled by technology that we have made it the goal rather than a tool.
He goes as far as saying: “Since the religious object is that which is uncritically worshipped, technology tends more and more to become the new god.” This statement is hard for people to accept today, because we think that technology has been our salvation from religion.
However, Ellul says, “The distinctive characteristic of our time is a precise view of technical possibilities, the will to attain certain ends, application in all areas and adherence of the whole of society to a conspicuous technical objective. All these, taken together, constitute what I have termed a clear technical intention” (p. 52). He builds his case ominously and relentlessly.
It is not just about machines or other forms of technology. It is the place of technique as a mode of thinking in our lives. Technique overrides human life with its concern with method. Method usurps human considerations and eventually comes to constitute the end – in itself, as they say.
The effect is chilling. He says, “Technique is opposed to nature. Art, artifice, artificial: technique as art is the creation of an artificial system…. It destroys, eliminates or subordinates the natural world, and does not allow this world to restore itself or even to enter into a symbiotic relation with it…. We are rapidly approaching a time when there will be no longer any natural environment at all” (p. 79).
I think that Ellul’s concept of technique, fashioned in the 1940s, was an extraordinary insight, which encapsulated developments occurring in the twentieth century across every field of human experience and endeavour: “We are today at the stage of historical evolution in which everything that is not technique is being eliminated” (p. 84). To make it worse, the advance of technique necessarily accelerates. He goes on to say:
“Since techniques, proportionally to their development, exhaust the resources of nature, it is indispensable to fill the vacuum so created by a more rapid technical progress. Only inventions perpetually more numerous and automatically increasing can make good the unheard-of expenditures and the irremediable consumption of raw materials such as wood, coal, petroleum and even water” (p. 90).
Apart from consuming, destroying or despoiling the environment, technique overtakes humans themselves. (Ellul speaks of ‘man’ where he means ‘humans’; this was an understood convention of the time when he wrote.) It is supposed “that men orient technique in a given direction for moral, and consequently non-technical, reasons. But a principal characteristic of technique is its refusal to tolerate moral judgements. It is absolutely independent from them and eliminates them from its domain. Technique never observes the distinction between moral and immoral use. It intends, on the contrary, to create a completely independent technical morality” (p. 96).
Technique “dissociates the sociological forms, destroys the moral framework, desacralises men and things, explodes social and religious taboos, and reduces the body social to a collection of individuals” (p. 126). Ellul argues that there is just one, global civilisation, but not because of the rapidity of communication and travel. It is a ‘technical civilisation’. This civilisation “is constructed by technique (makes a part of civilisation only what belongs to technique), for technique (in that everything in this civilisation must serve a technical end), and is exclusively technique (in that it excludes whatever is not technique or reduces it to technical form)” (p. 128).
Technique has extended beyond the inorganic to the organic. For example, the manner in which we rest and relax becomes the object of techniques of relaxation. There is a technique of friendship and a technique of swimming. Our civilisation is no longer “the result of the profound spiritual and material effort of generations of human beings. Instead of being the expression of man’s essence, they will be accidents of what is essential: technique”, and “the cold calculations of some technician” (p. 130-131).
What is the end of this for people? “There are still artisans, petty tradesmen, butchers, domestics, and small agricultural landholders. But theirs are the faces of yesterday, the more or less hardy survivals of our past. Our world is not made of these static residues of history. In the complexity of the present world, residues do exist, but they have no future and are consequently disappearing” (p. 147). From the standpoint of sixty or so years later, one could say there are still artisans, but the thrust of technique and its direction are clearer than ever. The direction is to eliminate any aspect which is personal or non-systematised.
The dominance of technique raises many problems for humans. When a human value comes up against a technical imperative, the human value is reduced to a number (quantified) and then it has to take its chances in the technical paradigm. But there is no way to transcend the gulf between a technical ‘fact’ (eg the assignment of a monetary value to a human life) with a moral value (the intrinsic value of life).
Ellul says, “Technique can leave nothing untouched in a civilisation. Everything is its concern” (p. 125). His book seems like a message of doom, but he says: “It is not my intention to show that technique will end in disaster. On the contrary, technique has only one principle: efficient ordering. Everything, for technique, is centred on the principle of order” (p. 110). This seems even worse than doom.
He continues: “Technique elicits and conditions social, political and economic change. It is the prime mover of all the rest, in spite of any appearances to the contrary and in spite of human pride, which pretends that man’s philosophical theories are still determining influences and man’s political regimes decisive factors in technical evolution” (p. 133).
There is a sleight of hand involved in the operation of technique. The end point, Ellul says, is this: “Technique causes us to penetrate into the innermost realm of falsehood, showing us all the while the noble face of objectivity of results. In this innermost recess, man is no longer able to recognise himself because of the instruments he employs” (p. 146).
Despite this conclusion, Ellul does not intend to leave us in despair. In his Author’s Foreword to the Revised American Edition he says, “We must look at it dialectically, and say that man is indeed determined, but that it is open to him to overcome necessity, and that this is an act of freedom. Freedom is not static, but dynamic; it is a prize continually to be won. It is not a question of getting rid of [the technological phenomenon] but, by an act of freedom, of transcending it. How is this to be done? I do not know.”
The conclusion to Ellul’s examination of technique is all but despairing. How do we sustain our freedom as a person? “I do not know,” he says. But I suspect he had some idea. The two key aspects are ethics and creativity. He has described at length how technique can hijack both of these aspects of life, but if you are clear that these are integral to a worthwhile life it will be easier. He even asserts that civilisation is the result of “the profound spiritual and material effort of generations of human beings”. If one knows the nature of technique one can continually distinguish how its elements can intrude on the higher (human) values.
What it takes is for someone to notice and point out the sleight of hand that occurs through technique. An example is in music. In the 1980s, synthesisers were invented and it became possible to record all manner of sounds and reproduce them at call. You could, for example, get a choir to record every single note on the piano (as ‘ah’ or ‘ooh’), assign those notes to a keyboard and then play a song as if you were a choir.
It was predicted that we would no longer need humans to sing music. We could have it all trapped in a music box synthesiser and generate music at will. The excitement lasted for a couple of years. But humans, it seemed, like to hear other humans play music live, with all its faults, costs and inconveniences. There is something essential about the human-to-human connection. Now, although recording studios still use machines to play with the possibilities of sound, the ‘industry’ has accepted that humans are essential, with all their frailties and idiosyncracies. No one has ever said that a synthesised soundtrack was sublime.
Reference
Ellul, Jacques, 1964 (1954), The Technological Society, Vintage, New York.
This article is based on Chapter 24 of Glenn Martin’s book, FUTURE: The Spiritual Story of Humanity (2021). See https://www.glennmartin.com.au/big-picture