Written sixty years ago, Jacques Ellul's The Technological Society is “an inquiry into the consequences of …. the monolithic technical world that is coming to be." That is, where technology, rather than multiplying human agency to produce benefits and reduce hardships, has been used to contain and control all human existence - a world similar to Huxley’s Brave New World. Its coda, A Look at the Year 2000, speculates on how this will play out by the start of the 21st century.
The new order was meant to be a buffer between man and nature. Unfortunately, it has evolved autonomously in such a way that man has lost all contact with his natural framework and has to do only with the organized technical intermediary which sustains relations both with the world of life and with the world of brute matter. Enclosed within his artificial creation, man finds that there is no exit; that he cannot pierce the shell of technology to find again the ancient milieu to which he was adapted for hundreds of thousands of years."
Much of the technology Ellul (1) surveys is familiar to us in 2022. We don't have casual tourist trips to the moon, but space travel, national boundaries and population, food production, energy and resource exploitation, electronic storage of information, control of reproduction, automation and unemployment are all live technological and political issues of our time. This may not be such an achievement of prescient forecasting: as he indicates, these concerns and technological aspirations have been around since the nineteenth century.
However, seeing which predictions have come to pass is not the most interesting part of the book. Ellul was clear sighted about how these technocratic promises would work out. For example, most material gains have been grounded in consumption. No matter how it has been sold, there is only a weak relationship between comfort and convenience, and human fulfillment. Luxury goods and services can be industrially replicated and profitably monetised. It is harder to ground them in human needs like personal agency, meaningful action and affectional bonds. After a certain point, consumption is as empty as an opiate - it gives the illusion of meaning without the human action that generates actual fulfilment.
Also, whilst there has always been technological development and societal change, the ultra-fast technological change of the last century happened far faster than society could adapt to it. Deindustrialisation and automation have weakened social roles, social bonds and social structures. Not surprisingly, it has been deracinating and psychologically undermining for many people, even those with plenty of wealth and material luxuries.
Ellul saw that that the moral justifications given by technologists were weak and do not address the human consequences of this inexorable technicalisation:
“Yet it is apparently our fate to be facing a "golden age" in the power of sorcerers who are totally blind to the meaning of the human adventure… We are forced to conclude that our scientists are incapable of any but the emptiest platitudes when they stray from their specialties...Particularly disquieting is the gap between the enormous power they wield and their critical ability, which must be estimated as null....when we consider the mediocrity of the scientists themselves outside the confines of their specialties, we can only shudder at the thought of what they will esteem most "favorable".
Whatever their limitations, he presents scientists as disinterested, non-partisan technicians. At best, as noble seekers in a pure search for humanity’s better truths. No-one is saying that now. For Ellul , dictatorship was a Bad Thing without qualification, like poking a fork into the electricity socket. Nowadays, rule by self-willed tyrants seems to be thinkable. Those technocratic platitudes are familiar enough, but have a different flavour. They are less flat-footed thinking by people out of their specialism, but Orwellian euphemisms. Much of promised comfort and convenience has significant costs of social control and loss of privacy. Banal platitudes are used to send the message that you are powerless, and no-one is going to give you a proper answer.
It is not just the technology that has changed since it was written - so have the moral assumptions underlying social discourse. Listening to these earlier unspoken assumptions can point out, by comparison, what is presented as acceptable today.
Reflecting morally on society might seem like a luxury from another, less fraught time. Is it worth reflecting as Ellul did? Yes, it must be.
The technological pressures on us are immense, shrinking our privacy and agency and autonomy. This is presented as inevitable and futile to resist, but it is not yet clear how it will all play out. The more technological control encroaches on the everyday details of our lives, the more morally loaded those details become. Until we are reduced to unreasoning drones, we will always need opportunities for agency and autonomy, no matter how tiny.
If technological developments have negative effects, then those effects should be expressed. If they work against legitimate human interests, then those interests should be expressed too. It is still worth trying to articulate what our real interests are, despite everything, in the circumstances in which we find ourselves.
A Look at the Year 2000
Extract from The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul (1964, translated from the French by John Wilkinson)
"In 1900 the weekly L'Express of Paris published a series of extracts from texts by American and Russian scientists concerning society in the year 2000. As long as such visions were purely a literary concern of science-fiction writers and sensational journalists, it was possible to smile at them.' Now we have like works from Nobel Prize winners, members of the Academy of Sciences of Moscow, and other scientific notables whose qualifications are beyond dispute. The visions of these gentlemen put science fiction in the shade. By the year 2000, voyages to the moon will be commonplace; so will inhabited artificial satellites. All food will be completely synthetic. The world's population will have increased fourfold but will have been stabilized. Sea water and ordinary rocks will yield all the necessary metals. Disease, as well as famine, will have been eliminated; and there will be universal hygienic inspection and control. The problems of energy production will have been completely resolved. Serious scientists, it must be repeated, are the source of these predictions, which hitherto were found only in philosophic utopias.
The most remarkable predictions concern the transformation of educational methods and the problem of human reproduction. Knowledge will be accumulated in "electronic banks" and transmitted directly to the human nervous system by means of coded electronic messages. There will no longer be any need of reading or learning mountains of useless information; everything will be received and registered according to the needs of the moment. There will be no need of attention or effort. What is needed will pass directly from the machine to the brain without going through consciousness.
In the domain of genetics, natural reproduction will be forbidden. A stable population will be necessary, and it will consist of the highest human types. Artificial insemination will be employed This, according to Muller, will "permit the introduction into a carrier uterus of an ovum fertilized in vitro, ovum and sperm... having been taken from persons representing the masculine ideal and the feminine ideal, respectively. The reproductive cells in question will preferably be those of persons dead long enough that a true perspective of their lives and works, free of all personal prejudice, can be seen. Such cells will be taken from cell banks and will represent the most precious genetic heritage of humanity . . . The method will have to be applied universally. If the people of a single country were to apply it intelligently and intensively . . . they would quickly attain a practically invincible level of superiority." Here is a future Huxley never dreamed of.
Perhaps, instead of marveling or being shocked, we ought to reflect a little. A question no one ever asks when confronted with the scientific wonders of the future concerns the interim period.
Consider, for example, the problems of automation, which will become acute in a very short time. How, socially, politically, morally, and humanly, shall we contrive to get there? How are the prodigious economic problems, for example, of unemployment, to be solved? And, in Muller's more distant utopia, how shall we force humanity to refrain from begetting children naturally? How shall we force them to submit to constant and rigorous hygienic controls? How shall man be persuaded to accept a radical transformation of his traditional modes of nutrition? How and where shall we relocate a billion and a half persons who today make their livings from agriculture and who, in the promised ultra-rapid conversion of the next forty years, will become completely useless as cultivators of the soil? How shall we distribute such numbers of people equably over the surface of the earth, particularly if the promised fourfold increase in population materializes? How will we handle the control and occupation of outer space in order to provide a stable modus vivendi? How shall national boundaries be made to disappear? (One of the last two would be a necessity.)
There are many other "hows," but they are conveniently left unformulated. When we reflect on the serious although relatively minor problems that were provoked by the industrial exploitation of coal and electricity, when we reflect that after a hundred and fifty years these problems are still not satisfactorily resolved, we are entitled to ask whether there are any solutions to the infinitely more complex "hows" of the next forty years. In fact, there is one and only one means to their solution, a world-wide totalitarian dictatorship which will allow technique its full scope and at the same time resolve the concomitant difficulties. It is not difficult to understand why the scientists and worshippers of technology prefer not to dwell on this solution, but rather to leap nimbly across the dull and uninteresting intermediary period and land squarely in the golden age. We might indeed ask ourselves if we will succeed in getting through the transition period at all, or if the blood and the suffering required are not perhaps too high a price to pay for this golden age.
If we take a hard, unromantic look at the golden age itself, we are struck with the incredible naivete of these scientists. They say, for example, that they will be able to shape and reshape at will human emotions, desires, and thoughts and arrive Scientifically at certain efficient, pre-established collective decisions. They claim they will be in a position to develop certain collective desires, to constitute certain homogeneous social units out of aggregates of individuals, to forbid men to raise their children, and even to persuade them to renounce having any. At the same time, they speak of assuring the triumph of freedom and of the necessity of avoiding dictatorship at any price.' They seem incapable of grasping the contradiction involved, or of understanding that what they are proposing, even after the intermediary period, is in fact the harshest of dictatorships. In comparison, Hitler's was a trifling affair. That it is to be a dictatorship of test tubes rather than of hobnailed boots will not make it any less a dictatorship. When our savants characterize their golden age in any but scientific terms, they emit a quantity of down-at-the-heel platitudes that would gladden the heart of the pettiest politician.
Let's take a few examples: "To render human nature nobler, more beautiful, more harmonious." What on earth can this mean? What criteria, what content, do they propose? Not many, I fear, would be able to reply. "To assure the triumph of peace, liberty, and reason." Fine words with no substance behind them. ''To eliminate cultural lag." What culture? And would the culture they have in mind be able to subsist in this harsh social organization? "To conquer outer space." For what purpose? The conquest of space seems to be an end in itself, which dispenses with any need for reflection.
We are forced to conclude that our scientists are incapable of any but the emptiest platitudes when they stray from their specialties. It makes one think back on the collection of mediocrities accumulated by Einstein when he spoke of God, the state, peace, and the meaning of life. It is clear that Einstein, extraordinary mathematical genius that he was, was no Pascal; he knew nothing of political or human reality, or, in fact, anything at all outside his mathematical reach. The banality of Einstein's remarks in matters outside his specialty is as astonishing as his genius within it. It seems as though the specialized application of all one's faculties in a particular area inhibits the consideration of things in general.
Even J. Robert Oppenheimer, who seems receptive to a general culture, is not outside this judgment. His political and social declarations, for example, scarcely go beyond the level of those of the man in the street. And the opinions of the scientists quoted by l'Express are not even on the level of Einstein or Oppenheimer.
Their pomposities, in fact, do not rise to the level of the average. They are vague generalities inherited from the nineteenth century, and the fact that they represent the furthest limits of thought of our scientific worthies must be symptomatic of arrested development or of a mental block. Particularly disquieting is the gap between the enormous power they wield and their critical ability, which must be estimated as null. To wield power well entails a certain faculty of criticism, discrimination, judgment, and option. It is impossible to have confidence in men who apparently lack these faculties. Yet it is apparently our fate to be facing a "golden age" in the power of sorcerers who are totally blind to the meaning of the human adventure. When they speak of preserving the seed of outstanding men, whom, pray, do they mean to be the judges. It is clear, alas, that they propose to sit in judgment themselves. It is hardly likely that they will deem a Rimbaud or a Nietzsche worthy of posterity. When they announce that they will conserve the genetic mutations which appear to them most favorable, and that they propose to modify the very germ cells in order to produce such and such traits; and when we consider the mediocrity of the scientists themselves outside the confines of their specialties, we can only shudder at the thought of what they will esteem most "favorable".
None of our wise men ever pose the question of the end of all their marvels. The "wherefore” is resolutely passed by. The response which would occur to our contemporaries is : for the sake of happiness. Unfortunately, there is no longer any question of that. One of our best-known specialists in diseases of the nervous system writes: "We will be able to modify man's emotions, desires and thoughts, as we have already done in a rudimentary way with tranquillizers." It will be possible, says our specialist to produce a conviction or an impression of happiness without any real basis for it. Our man of the golden age, therefore, will be capable of "happiness amid the worst privations.” Why, then, promise us extraordinary comforts, hygiene, knowledge, and nourishment if, by simply manipulating our nervous systems, we can be happy without them? The last meager motive we could possibly ascribe to the technical adventure thus vanishes into thin air through the very existence of technique itself.
But what good is it to pose questions of motives? of Why? All that must be the work of some miserable intellectual who balks at technical progress. The attitude of the scientists, at any rate, is clear. Technique exists because it is technique. The golden age will be because it will be. Any other answer is superfluous.”
(1) Ellul, not a familiar name nowadays, has many similar concerns to Lewis Mumford, often referred to in *The Technological Society*. Wikipedia calls Ellul a philosopher, sociologist, lay theologian, and Christian anarchist. The book is long, verbose and discursive, and you need a good reason to read it from cover to cover. Much like a four-hour podcast, it promises a wealth of rich ideas, but it can feel like a dense, headache-inducing conceptual burden. On the other hand, you don't need all the detail to grasp the overall argument; the text (in Wilkinson's translation) is never inpenetrable, and often a pleasure to read; and it is full of insight. Much of it can be skimmed or skipped - using the contents and the index to guide your attention is an easier way to clarity and ease of understanding of this interesting book.
Ellul,Jacques: TheTechnological Society