Education Virtualization Prospects in Pessimistic Light of Social controls over the controllers are always essential. The Technological Imperative in Jacques Ellul and Walter M. Miller Technique has taken substance, wrote Ellul, and it has become a reality in itself. The technologies needed there must be relatively inexpensive and labor-intensive. Our material wants have escalated and appear insatiable. Barbour. in the context of the philosophy of technology by J. Ellul. Policy will influence the impact on two key dimensions: diffusion and consequences. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. 37. The city is the place where technique excludes all forms of natural reality. We should rely on the recommendations of experts on such matters.14 Florman extols the unquenchable spirit and irrepressible human will evident in technology: For all our apprehensions, we have no choice but to press ahead. With this new power over heredity, he said, we can replace the crude forces of natural selection and seize the tiller to control the direction of future evolution. People move to cities because they prefer life there to the tedium and squalor of the countryside. Florman says that worker alienation in industry is rare, and many people prefer the comfortable monotony of routine tasks to the pressures of decision and accountability. However, we may now be in the presence of the progressive elaboration of such a reactive capability. Studs Terkel and others have found in interviews that resentment, frustration, and a sense of powerlessness are widespread among American industrial workers. It makes little difference who is nominally in controlelected politicians, technical experts, capitalist executives, or socialist managersif decisions are determined by the demands of the technical system. Second, environmental destruction is symptomatic of a deeper problem: alienation from nature. Increases in productivity have led to shorter working hours. We now know that algorithms control every aspect of digital life and have subjected almost aspect of human behaviour to greater control by techniques whether employed by the state or the marketplace. More recent writers point out that alienation has been common in state-managed industrial economies too and seems to be a product of the division of labor, rationalization of production, and hierarchical management in large organizations, regardless of the economic system. . Paul Tillich claims that the rationality and impersonality of technological systems undermine the personal presuppositions of religious commitment.30 Gabriel Marcel believes that the technological outlook pervades our lives and excludes a sense of the sacred. See also Charles Susskind, Understanding Technology. Nineteenth-century factories and twentieth-century assembly lines did involve dirty and monotonous work, but the newer technologies allow greater creativity and individuality.8, A postindustrial society, it is said, is already beginning to emerge. Whats more, technique is amoral. 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. Alternative purposes would lead to alternative designs. 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. But men continued to exclude women from compositors unions when some type, and more recently computer formatting, required only typing and formatting skills.48 Today most computer designers and programmers are men, while in offices most of the data are entered at computer keyboards by women. Cynthia Cockburn, Machinery of Dominance: Women, Men, and Technical Knowhow (London: Pluto Press, 1985). I favor this last option and will develop it further in subsequent chapters. 7. Technique takes possession of it and enslaves it. Technique became universally totalitarian in modern society as rationalistic proceduralism imposed an artificial value system of measuring and organizing everything quantitatively rather than qualitatively. Any product or process can be made safer, but always at an economic cost. On the other side, technique constitutes a system in the strict sense of the term (cf. This is most clearly evident in the defense industries with their close ties to government agencies. The passions it provokes which exist in everybody are amplified. The simple pleasures of making music, hiking and running, gathering with friends around the hearth, or engaging in creative and self-reliant work should be our goals. Throughout his life Ellul maintained that he was neither by nature, nor doctrinally, a pessimist, nor have I pessimistic prejudices. Life is indeed impoverished if the technological attitudes of mastery and power dominate one's outlook. Rather, it means consciously choosingknowing both the upsides and downsides of any technique or machinewhether or not to use it, rather than simply saying that we must use it. 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. Ellul's pessimistic Arguments are: a. Technique encompasses the totality of present-day society, wrote Ellul. If we are convinced that nothing can be done to improve the system, we will indeed do nothing to try to improve it. But often the institutional biases associated with expertise are more subtle. The increased death rates among shipyard workers exposed to asbestos in the early 1940s were not evident until the late 1960s. Marxists grant that absolute standards of living have risen for every time under capitalist technology. 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. Technique is no longer some uncertain and incomplete intermediary between humanity and the natural milieu. well, progress must not be impeded! 21. that no-one was shot in Bordeaux without being judged, he later told friend and interviewer Patrick Troude-Chastenet.). Gibson Winter (New York: Harper & Row, 1968). 10. The final option described by Niebuhr is a transformation of society by Christian values. Sometimes a technology was indeed based on recent scientific discoveries. Cynthia Cockburn, The Material of Male Power, in The Social Shaping of Technology, ed. Note that contextualism allows for a two-way interaction between technology and society. Ellul didnt regard technology as inherently evil; he just recognized that it was a self-augmenting force that engineered the world on its terms. The Washington Post noted his passing in a few scant paragraphs. He insists that the critics have romanticized the life of earlier centuries and rural societies. The French critic was the first to note that technologies build upon each other and therefore centralize power and control. The dynamism of technology can liberate people from static and confining traditions to assume responsibility for their own lives. Without experimentation and change our existence would be a dull business. They were confident about human reason, scientific and technological knowledge, and social progress. The key question will be: What decision-making processes and what technological policies can contribute to human and environmental values? We can make decisions about technology within a wider context of human and environmental values. Membership is free. There is something satisfying in the way Ellul presents his assertion like a mathematical formula. Families break down. It is only in the process of giving one's mind and soul to Christ, according to Ellul, that one is set free from the false gods of the material worldand this includes the god of technique. arguments about Western technological development and its ambiguities, especially the aftermath of . 1 0 obj The breadth of the definition also reminds us that there are major differences among technologies. 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. I will indicate why I agree with the third of these positions, which emphasizes the social construction and use of particular technologies. The views expressed in the third section presuppose a social conflict model. Only two possibilities are left to the individual, he writes. Yesterday's luxuries are today's necessities. ?k+OpJJ=H_ANuOWEU37Q@.^` N&]p6'-[4. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, trans. To be sure, sensitivity to nature is sometimes found among technological optimists, but it is more frequently found among the critics of technology. We have seen that a few theologians are technological optimists, while others have adopted pessimistic positions. He argued that propaganda had to become as natural as breathing air in a technological society, because it was essential that people adapt to the disruptions of a technological society. The ethical problem, that is human behavior, can only be considered in relation to this system, not in relation to some particular technical object or other. H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951), See also Carl Mitcham, Technology as a Theological Problem in the Christian Tradition, in Theology and Technology, ed. Fifth, greater dependence on experts for policy decisions would not be desirable. Without God, my work would have an eminently tragic meaning, Ellul told Chastenet. 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. They hold that meaningful work is as important as economic productivity in policies for technology. The human fabric is not an envelope around a culturally neutral artifact. 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.. We have let technology define the good life in terms of production and consumption, and we have ended with mindless labor and mindless leisure.

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