Some early thoughts on "The Technological Society", by Jacques Ellul

Or, "why the state doesn't even think about ethics most of the time anymore"

“Earlier, economic or political inquiries were inextricably bound with ethical inquiry, and men attempted to maintain this union artificially even after they had recognized the independence of economic technique. Modern society is, in fact, conducted on the basis of purely technical considerations… When… moral flourishes overly encumber technical progress, they are discarded - more or less speedily, with more or less ceremony, but with determination nonetheless. This is the state we are in today.”

~Jacques Ellul, not really writing about vaccine passports in this 1950s book, but at the same time yes, really writing about vaccine passports

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As I briefly said last week, I have been somewhat shocked that “'let’s pressure people into a medical procedure that many of them don’t even need” has generated not even a whisper of “but is that ethical?” from the people doing it. And near as I can tell, the ethical concern isn’t one that occurred to them, was considered, and was then dismissed, but is rather something that never bothered their brains at all. Ellul, a French sociologist who wrote The Technological Society in the 1950s might say sure, that’s because they are not ethical thinkers… not to mean they are particularly wicked, but as in they do not think about ethics. They are technical thinkers, their only concern is technique. And (he would say) technique is the most powerful force in our cultures and nations today.

What is technique? To Ellul, technique is connected to technology and perhaps got started with technology, but is more a concern with doing everything in the most efficient way possible, with what counts as “efficiency” itself eventually determined by technique, so that man becomes the servant of technique rather than the other way around. He says:

In our 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.

The technical phenomenon is the main preoccupation of our time; in every field men seek to find the most efficient method.

In fact, technique is nothing more than a means and the ensemble of means.

You might say this is a “mechanization” of life that began with machines, but eventually gets carried into all aspects of human life. Although he doesn’t use the phrase (I’m not sure it existed yet), you might say this is as if all of life, all human interactions, became nothing but a collection of best-practices statements, with exactly what you should do in every instance precisely determined by the concerns of technique (indeed, he even refers to our age as one of “technological determinism”).

Primitive man, hemmed in by prohibitions, taboos, and rites, was, of course socially determined. But it is an illusion - unfortunately, very widespread - to think that because we have broken through the prohibitions, taboos, and rites that bound primitive man, we have become free. We are conditioned by something new: technological civilization.

Inasmuch as we just lived through what was probably the most all-encompassing attempt by the state to micromanage human life of all time… Ellul would recognize what was happening immediately, more advanced now than it was in the 1950s - we live in an age of technique.

There is much that could be said about this book (and I’m only a hundred pages in so far), but let me share just a few thoughts under four headings.

1. But wait… hasn’t life always been about technique? One of your reactions early in the book is something like “but if human affairs” (and especially business affairs) “weren’t about making things more efficient… what would they be about?” Ellul would probably say that our literal inability to think about human affairs without prioritizing efficiency just shows how much technique does indeed control our thinking today. But he would also say yes, to some extent technique has always been part of human life, and limited and constrained it isn’t bad (better farming technique means we can feed more people, for example). But now it is in all of life and controls all of life, and that’s the difference.

   The translator’s (John Wilkinson) introduction actually talks about “Engel’s Law”, named after the Marxist German philosopher (but that doesn’t make him wrong about everything, now), which I had never heard of before, but it is relevant to this discussion. Engel’s Law includes the idea that once the quantity of something gets large enough, the quality of it also changes. (And we know this is true in science, by the way - a bar of gold does behave differently than a single detached gold atom.) So the idea would be that, for example, a city of two million is qualitatively a different animal than a city of twenty. At some point the number gets big enough that the quality also changes.

   And likely Ellul would say this describes what happened with technique. Primitive man surely had a least some concern with gathering berries in a more efficient way, lest he starve, but efficiency didn’t run his life. Medieval swordmakers (an example he provides) surely had some concern with making their swords functional and “efficient”, but the very fact that there is so much diversity in the swords they designed shows also that efficiency didn’t dictate all of their actions. What is different now is that technique is in charge.

2. What was the world like before technique, then? It might now be replied “OK, but our world is so built around technique now that it’s hard for me to imagine any other way. What is the alternative?” He gives many historical examples, but let me just highlight a few comments I found interesting.

   2A. Efficiency was a concern, but efficiency was not the primary concern.

   Even in activities we consider technical, it was not always that aspect which was uppermost. In the achievement of a small economic goal, for example, the technical effort became secondary to the pleasure of gathering together.

   He gives the example of families in New England coming together once a year for communal work - it was the best time of the year.

   The activity of sustaining social relations and human contacts predominated over the technical scheme of things and the obligation to work, which were secondary causes.

   2B. Men used tools, but variation in production was expected because the men were different - emphasis was laid less upon design of the tool, more upon the men using the tool.

   Imperfect tools were compensated for by the skill of the worker… and that was OK, and not seen as a problem that needed fixing. Production would vary from man to man… and that was also OK, also not seen as a problem that needed fixing.

   Everything varied from man to man according to his gifts, whereas technique in the modern sense seeks to eliminate such variability.

   Today we think a lot about how to improve the tool (and again, I don’t want to say that is all bad!), but that is a modern mindset, influenced by the triumph of technique.

   …until the 18th century, all societies were primarily oriented toward improvement in the use of tools and were little concerned with the tools themselves.

   2C. Individuals were content in a stable social structure that provided for their needs. Change and a desire for the “next new thing” were less part of life than they are now.

   Ellul spends a decent amount of time actually talking about the strong social collectives that were common throughout most of human history. Technique has tended instead to produced atomized individuals (which then also elevates the power of the state).

   The individual found livelihood, patronage, security, and intellectual and moral satisfactions in collectives that were strong enough to answer his needs but limited enough not to make him feel submerged or lost. They sufficed to satisfy the average man who does not try to gratify imaginary needs if his position is fairly stable, who opposes innovation if he lives in a balanced milieu, even if he is poor. This fact, which is so salient in the three millennia of history we know, is misunderstood by modern man, who does not know what a balanced social environment is and the good he could derive from it.

   2D. Particularly in Christian lands, there was a respect for the natural order (which, in the minds of many, included the social hierarchy).

   Ellul talks about how Christianity (think the early Church) initially condemned luxury and money. Renunciation was presented as ideal. And, many held, the world was soon to end anyway, so why be particularly focused on technical progress?

   In the medieval period, these doctrines lost their hold, but technical development was still restrained by the moral judgment with which Christians subjected all human activity.

   That something might be useful or profitable to men did not make it right and just. It had to fit a precise conception of justice before God.

   We all know are certain clip from Jurassic Park that could be referenced at this point! There were certain limited technical improvements, but they came with great consideration and care.

   The natural order must not be tampered with and anything new must be submitted to a moral judgment - which meant an unfavorable prejudgment.

3. So why did technique come into existence?

   Ellul puts forward the idea that the modern dominance of technique really began in perhaps the 18th century and is still accelerating. Why then? He isn’t sure himself, but puts forward the combination of five things:

   the fruition of a long technical experience; population explosion; the suitability of the economic environment; the plasticity of the social milieu; and the appearance of a clear technical intention.

   Some of these are pretty obvious. Technology does build upon itself. The explosion in population is probably what your mind would naturally run to - bigger populations have needs that cannot be satisfied by the informal arrangements of earlier humanity, we might need technical development just to feed everybody.

   By Ellul actually leans the most on the fourth - the plasticity of the social milieu, which he expands upon as the disappearance of social taboos and the disappearance of natural social groups. Christianity, as we said, had created a sort of anti-technical mindset, where there was a natural order which much not be too tampered with - that was the “social taboo” part. And the pre-18th-century period was also one of closely organized families, guilds, universities, and so on.

   So what happened? Well both the taboos and the social groups were greatly weakened beginning around the time of the French Revolution.

   With the disappearance of religious and social taboos came the creation of new religions, the affirmation of philosophic materialism, the suppression of the various hierarchies, regicide, and the struggle against the clergy.

   There was also a new concern for individual rights, which brought with it attacks on both the social groups and the family itself (and, you might say, that continues today). Individuals were atomized, and once your society is nothing but naked individuals, it is now much easier to change.

   To uproot men from their surroundings, from the rural districts and from family and friends, in order to crowd them into cities still too small for them; to squeeze thousands into unfit lodgings and unhealthy places for work; to create a whole new environment within the framework of a new human condition… all this was possible only when the individual was completely isolated. It was conceivable only when he had no environment, no family, and was not part of a group able to resist economic pressure; when he had almost no way of life left.

4. What are some of the results of technique?

   Let me give you several here, and these will focus on the bad results. I doubt Ellul would say they are all bad (being able to feed more people is good), but given the nature of his book he would certainly say there is plenty of bad.

   4A. Ellul very nearly says something I say all the time - we live in a society now where “if you can apply a number to it, it matters, even if it shouldn’t. If you can’t apply a number to it, it doesn’t matter, even if it should.”

   Toward the end of a paragraph where he very nearly says the above, he writes,

   The “scientific” position frequently consists of denying the existence of whatever does not belong to current scientific method.

   And again, if you just lived through COVID-19, you lived through a society and a state doing all it could to make certain numbers look better, causing immense harm in other areas of society where there were no numbers to stop it. That’s technique.

   4B. More standardization and less diversity.

   Here we get to perhaps my least favorite aspect of modern life - everything is the same and everywhere is the same. Why? Because (technique holds) there is a single best way to do it, for whatever “it” may be, and by golly everyone should do it that way.

   This leads to the standardization and the rationalization of the economic and administrative life, as Antoine Mas has well shown… Standardization means resolving in advance all the problems that might possibly impede the functioning of an organization.

   And later,

   This represents an essential characteristic of technique. Every procedure implies a single, specific result.

   4C. The state becomes all-controlling, and is really guided not by its people, but by technical goals and operations.

   We just accept “rules for everything” today… it was not always so, and it represents part of the technical mindset. Speaking of Rome and an early example of technique:

   It was not until the third century A.D. that judicial technique attempted to deal with the details of life, to regulate everything, to foresee everything, thereby leaving the individual in a state of complete inertia.

   And, actually from the translator’s introduction (so Wilkinson):

   It is disconcerting in the extreme to contemplate the possibility that cherished democratic institutions have become empty forms which have no visible connection with the acts of democratic nations, except perhaps to render those acts technically less efficient than they otherwise need have been.

   4D. Human mental efforts and creativity are reduced in scope - once optimal technique is found, you simply follow that technique.

   Speaking of the industrial revolution, Ellul writes:

   For [Norbert Wiener] there has been only one industrial revolution, and that consisted in the replacing of human muscle as a source of energy. And, he adds, there is a second revolution in the making whose object is the replacement of the human brain.

Someone who recommended the book to me said that after reading it, I would go around saying “technique! technique! technique!” at everything, and I can see what she meant now. (There is truth to the idea that to confront something, it must first be named and described. Once named and described, you are now capable of seeing it when you couldn’t see it before, and therefore you can now also confront it. In fact we’re seeing this happen with the opposition to critical theory in our own day.)

So what do we do? Well that might come later in the book, but I’ll leave you with one quotation from Ellul.

At stake is our very life, and we shall need all the energy, inventiveness, imagination, goodness, and strength we can muster to triumph in our predicament. While waiting for the specialists to get on with their work on behalf of society, each of us, in his own life, must seek ways of resisting and transcending technological determinants. Each man must make this effort in every area of life, in his profession and in his social, religious, and family relationships.