ellul's pessimistic arguments about technology

• 8 September 2023

Taxing the Brain Drain - JSTOR 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. Ellul, a brilliant historian, wrote like a physician caught in the middle of a plague or physicist exposed to radioactivity. 28. 48. And it is autonomous. Technique now constitutes a fabric of its own, replacing nature. The practical tasks can include both the production of material goods (in industry and agriculture, for instance) and the provision of services (by computers, communications media, and biotechnologies, among others). Explore intellectual conservatism 21. This is most clearly evident in the defense industries with their close ties to government agencies. Elluls primary explanation of how necessity determines and dominates contemporary society was to attribute such to the methodology of technique. He credits his life-long friend, Bernard Charbonneau, as having drawn his attention to technique as the most important phenomenon of sociological understanding back in 1935, and notes that had Karl Marx understood this sociological factor, he would have posited technique as the thrust of his social dialecticism rather than material inequities. Views of the Interactions of Science, Technology, and Society. <>>> Elluls issue was not with technological machines but with a society necessarily caught up in efficient methodological techniques. 32. The current concern is social media: Facebook and Twitter and their incursions into personal privacy and the democratic process. Wiebe Bijker, Thomas Hughes and Trevor Pinch (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987). 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. Queen Elizabeths death inaugurates an uncertain new era. . Emanuel Mesthene, Technological Change: Its Impact on Man and Society (New York; New American Library, 1970). Everything in human life that does not lend itself to mathematical treatment must be excluded Who is too blind to not see that a profound mutation is being advocated here.. Man was made to do his daily work with his muscles, Ellul writes. Studs Terkel, Working (New York: Pantheon. Harvey Cox, The Secular City (New York: Macmillan. By turning our backs on technological change, we would be expressing our satisfaction with current world levels of hunger, disease, and privates. Ellul and Technique | | The International Jacques Ellul Society The Pentagon of Power (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967 and 1969). The youth counterculture of the 1970s was critical of technology and sought harmony with nature, intensity of personal experience, supportive communities, and alternative life-styles apart from the prevailing industrial order. Conformity to a mass society jeopardizes spontaneity and freedom. Christianity brought about the desacralization of nature and allowed it to be controlled and used for human welfare.16 Norris Clarke was technology as an instrument of human fulfillment and self-expression in the use of our God-given intelligence to transform the world. Facebook, vowed the pathologically adolescent Mark Zuckerberg, would help the Internet become a force for peace in the world., But technology obeys its own rules and prefers the psychology of tyranny.. It has a single role: to strip off externals, to bring everything to light, and by rational use to transform everything into means. Reactions vary, but many would agree with Bernard Gendron that in the Soviet Union workers were as alienated, factories as hierarchically organized, experts as bureaucratic, and pollution and militarism as rampant as in the United States. For Ellul, technique, an ensemble of machine-based means, included administrative systems, medical tools, propaganda (just another communication technique) and genetic engineering. In The Humiliation of the Word, Ellul criticizes abusive scientism that pretends to be the whole truth by limiting and excluding everything that goes beyond it. Science, for Ellul, is a commendable human pursuit, but in the vacuum created by mysterys retreat it has taken on religious overtones. Computer enthusiasts anticipate the Information Age in which industry is automated and communications networks enhance commercial, professional, and personal life. Ellul sees technique everywhere: at the highest levels of government, in the economy, in our educational institutions, in our media, in our workplaces, in our churches, and even in our kitchenshe devotes a surprising amount of ink to the concerted and entirely successful propaganda campaign by the food industry to soften the publics views toward industrially produced bread, an innovation that was initially resisted. The Washington Post noted his passing in a few scant paragraphs. The redirection of technology will be no easy task. Technology, then, is but an expression and by-product of the underlying reliance on technique, on the proceduralization whereby everything is organized and managed to function most efficiently, and directed toward the most expedient end of the highest productivity. Ellul calls for personal acts of auto-critique, humility and authentic liberty. 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? 7. But with the Industrial Revolution it morphed into something overwhelming due in part to population, cheap energy sources and capitalism itself. Borgmann thinks that some large-scale capital-intensive industry is needed (especially in transportation and communication), but he urges the development of small-scale labor-intensive, locally owned enterprises (in arts and crafts, health care, and education, for example). Do we really need our cities to be lit up like Christmas trees every night? February 04, 2021 11:00 PM. endobj Engineering was once considered heavy and dirty work unsuitable for women, but long after it became a clean and intellectual profession, there are still few women in it. Technological Pessimism - this view is extremely supported by French philosopher Jacques Ellul. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. 3. 33. But Ellul never intended for his readers to stop there. Elle uniformise les civilisations. 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. Daniel Bell, The Coming of Postindustrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1973). Despite his daunting prose style, Jacques Ellul belongs in the contemporary conversation. Some technologies poison the environment, but others reduce pollution. Notes: 1 The translation of Elluls Technique, technique, and socit technicienne have presented problems for all English versions of his work. Ellul was one of the first to note that you couldnt distinguish between bad and good effects of technology. If we are convinced that nothing can be done to improve the system, we will indeed do nothing to try to improve it. 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.

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