Techniques of the Technophobe

...e) man must turn back before it's too late...

...The oft-mouthed Cartesian dichotomy between body and mind illuminates a continuing and perhaps irreparable cleavage in our thinking which plays a significant part in considerations of technology...

...Since Ellul is a paradigmatic technophobe (a phrase he would love dearly), his work offers a splendid opportunity for taking a look not only at the techniques that sustain and promote fear of technology but also at the intellectually untenable nature of that fear...

...Yes, Jacques, there was alienation and there was technology always, from the beginning of recorded history...

...In addition to the neglect of context, a certain psychological undercurrent flows into the stream of technophobic thinking...

...As to the legitimacy of Ellul's thesis, so widely shared by other writers and so warmly embraced by the humanistic community, it may be effective to recall a story told by Chuang-Tzu, an exponent of Lao-Tze's doctrines, recorded 2,500 years ago: While traveling about the countryside, Tzu-Gung stopped to watch an old man working in his vegetable garden...

...At the other extreme-less alarming in the long run because it is outside the domain of scholarship, but more appalling because it is disguised as scholarship-we find the Big Think Panoramic Systematizes...

...The predominantly humanistic orientation of the intellectual community disposes its members to disdain works that extol the accomplishments and potentials of technology, or proceed from the premise that technical progress is irreversible regardless of its virtues and/ or evils...

...It is impossible to maintain any sympathy for technophobic thinking, especially if it is as soggy as Ellul's, so long as such efforts lack consideration for a number of documented and not easily disputable data...

...The subject is clearly inexhaustible, and in line with the frequently made assertion that technology is to our age what theology was to others, one may conveniently refer to its literature as the "Varieties of Technological Experience...

...Water- and windmills, sources of great revenues as well as laborsaving inventions, were no less a technological revolution in the context of the age than the invention of the steam engine hundreds of years later...

...Thus the amusing nonsense of Marshall McLuhan is taken seriously only by the impressionable merchant-philosophers of Madison Avenue and Wall Street and ignored or ridiculed by intellectuals, while the bemusing nonsense of Jacques Ellul is treated with somber respect...

...Sir Arthur Eddington may have posed the whole problem most succinctly: "We have found that where science has progressed the farthest, the mind has but regained from nature that which the mind has put into nature...

...The Greeks' disdain for technological accomplishments had a solid grounding in their aristocratic social structure and their agricultural economy...

...Having previously dug an irrigation ditch, the old man was descending into his well, fetching pails of water, and pouring them into the ditch...

...Moreover, artisans were specialists trained in the oral tradition, working by necessity in secrecy, completely cut off from innovations introduced in their craft elsewhere...

...it is our own...

...It is a matter of uncontrived convenience that one may regard the two books as one, Propaganda being a stupendously verbose explication and extensio ad absurdum, as it were, of a section in the earlier work...

...Such a contraption, he went on, was called a draw-well...

...The Technological Society and Propaganda, recently published here in that order in quick succession, in formats exclusively reserved for "important" books, constitute Ellul's total view of our age...

...We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin...

...10.95 by Jacques Ellul Reviewed by ROBERT MEISTER Editor, The Journal of Existentialism In the postwar era, with philosophy restricting itself to sectarian struggles and science accumulating reasoned knowledge, those inclined to unshackled thought have found their most congenial environment in the social sciences...

...While the soundness and utility of much of the work in the social sciences are beyond question, two unfortunate types of studies-methodologically opposite but equally invidious-have begun to proliferate of late...

...his power of reasoning is so rudimentary that it raises the gravest of doubts about the University of Bordeaux where he is professor of the history of law and social history...

...he completely lacks historical perspectives, and such historical information as he does occasionally adduce reveals a degree of ignorance that no other European academic can possibly equal...

...We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown...

...Inspirational references to the Greeks or to the Middle Ages -inevitably encountered in technophobic works - are completely deluded because they ignore the most essential facts...

...The atrociousness of his style is such that even the most derogatory adjectives are unfit to describe it...

...It is in the way Ellul makes these familiar points that he distinguishes himself from other toilers in the same field...

...After all, is technology not the munificent agency of our progress, if the thinker is a technophile, and the source of man's alienation, estrangement and angst, if he is a technophobe...

...Not one social and economic factor in the Middle Ages was conducive to broad technological development...

...As for the Middle Ages, populations were so decimated by recurring plagues and continuous wars that in some respects its technology was miraculous...

...Finally, the extent of Ellul's technophobia is so vast that one cannot help but call him a chronic technopath...

...he is unable to distinguish between sequence and consequence and falls into every single logical fallacy laboriously collected by logicians over centuries...

...In these fields there is a propensity for believing that the deductive elaboration of hypotheses is the sole mark of scientific method...

...The clich?© that "man cannot keep up with his inventions" is a veiled admission of that conflict which shows no signs of reconciliation...

...He who does his work like a machine grows a heart like a machine, and he who has the heart of a machine loses his simplicity...

...Every age had its technology within the limits of its needs and potentials...

...And Lo...

...Tzu-Gung approached him and observed that there was a way to irrigate a hundred ditches in one day with less effort...

...Devices like the flail, the crank, the horsecollar-indispensable to agricultural sophistication -were widely used by the 10th century...

...He who has lost his simplicity becomes unsure in the strivings of his soul...

...At one extreme, strenuous efforts are being made to apply the principles of formal logic and scientific method in areasparticularly psychology and sociology-where they are inapplicable at worst, and unedifying at best...

...Such mundane considerations shed more light on the nature of Greek technology than can be derived from "humanistically" oriented idealizations...

...c) earlier eras did not develop it, although they could have, especially the Greeks...

...When the old man asked how that could be done, Tzu-Gung explained that by making a wooden lever, weighted in the back and light in front, one could bring up water from the well so quickly that it would just gush out...

...f) I don't know how he can do it or where he can turn, but perhaps God will help...

...In contrast to colleagues struggling to be admitted into the community of science, they strive with their systems for Kantian stature...

...agricultural methods were such that the labor of four-fifths of the population could easily support one-fifth, and returns from industry of the day yielded 30 per cent on the capital value of slaves employed...

...We are still unable to let our bodies adapt to the products of our mind without grievous conflict...

...severely underpopulated, isolated into strictly managed feudal units, the self-supporting household communities developed what was, under the circumstances, a highly ingenious technology...

...Here, knowledgeable reason serves as a qualifying resource and the generous criteria that prevail-despite their pretensions, not easily comparable to those in philosophy or pure science-have allowed production and publication of a continually astounding body of intellectual curiosities...

...b) it causes man to divest himself of his humanity, resulting in alienation...

...his repetitions and selfcontradictions, sometimes occurring on the same page, are hair-raising...

...It is not that I do not know of draw-wells," concluded the old man, "I am ashamed to use them...

...A census of Athens taken by Demetrius in the fourth century BC counted 21,000 adult citizens, 10,000 metics (resident aliens), and 400,000 slaves...

...d) man is totally at the mercy of technology-analogy to the Sorcerer's Apprentice is especially useful here...

...There is even ample documentation to verify that statement, if one only wants to take the trouble to look for it instead of desperately trying to explain the problems of this particular age by conjuring up intellectually appetizing concepts...

...For example, we are frequently offered hypotheses derived from statistical data which itself is based on implicit, but often unverified premises, with the basically speculative results disguised by highly calibrated quantifications...

...They specialize in overviews, judgments and prophecies...

...As it is axiomatic for the profound thinker to identify and schematize the main currents of his era, it follows that the subject of technology should become a theme for frequent and minute scrutiny...

...It is not valid to attribute to the nobility and delicacy of the Greek mind the failure of the Greeks to create a full technology...

...Ellul's technique of technophobia consists of the same elements as that of his predecessors and contemporaries: (a) technology is the product of our age...

...After hearing him out, the old man responded angrily, "I have heard my teacher say that whoever uses machines does all his work like a machine...

...At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint...

...Humanistic intellectuals (as against scientific intellectuals) genuinely, if erroneously, believe in the dehumanizing effect of technology, and every new work based on that truism is greeted with affection and a marked reduction of critical standards...

...The assertion that every civilization in every age made every effort it was capable of making in these four areas simply cannot be shoved aside...

...As concisely put by A. Rupert Hall, the following factors establish any given technology: organization of labor, use of machines in manufacture, exploitation of man-made materials, and application of new sources of energy...

...Both agricultural and industrial labor was performed by metics and slaves...