News Letter 005: Introduction to Jacques Ellul (Part III)...
and just that, due to excessive word count.
Hey,
Welcome to The Musings of Tyler Hurst where I look at issues surrounding church, culture, and technology through Christian theology, Christian philosophy, and Christian ethics. As a pastor and doctoral candidate in ethics and public theology these are important issues to me and their intersection often is missed.
Thanks for reading, hope you enjoy the thoughts,
tdh
Before we get into it,
here are five things that caught my eye…
It’s time to tame the Wild Wild West of IVF - Scientists and biomedicine developers are notorious for wanting the government to stay out of their work in developing new treatments and technologies. In this article over at Public Discourse Margret Brady informs the reader that the “The last significant regulation of the fertility industry in the United States was in 1992, with the Fertility Clinic Success Rate and Certification Act (FCSRCA).” While there doesn’t need to be regulation every so often for regulation sake, numerous stories from “awful cases like that of Dr. Donald Cline, who fathered at least ninety-four children with unsuspecting women who thought they were being inseminated with donor sperm or their husband’s sperm” to the recent Alabama Supreme Court case. Brady worries “Without meaningful regulation, the human family in our country risks becoming just another tech product.”
Stick with IVF, let’s talk about divorce and property law - The Washington Post has an article titled “A Va. woman wants access to two frozen embryos. Her ex-husband says no.” Many Evangelical ethics textbooks argue that IVF is only permissible within the boundaries marked off by a few fence posts, one of which is an emotionally healthy biblically defined family, but presumably this couple didn’t undergo thousands of dollars worth of treatments knowing they would get divorced right? That is presumably the reason why the ex-husband doesn’t want to allow his ex-wife to have the remaining embryos—he doesn’t want more kids with a woman he isn’t married to. The article unintentionally raises other philosophical issues as well. The divorced couple has one daughter from the same embryo batch created back in 2015, so (A) these embryos have been frozen since then and (B) how does one think about children that were made on the same day, but gestated and birthed years apart? Food for thought.
Is ethical shopping a part of Christian morality or hipster mentality? - This is a question I have asked myself a bunch. Coming out of a two deeply moral environments in California, one very Christian, based around an Evangelical University, and the other very secular, based around the surfer-libertarian-enviormentalist-silicon-valley-Left. The article gets at the heart of the issue: “It’s all too easy to conclude that my class-driven aesthetic preferences line up neatly with my Christian duty. Of course, my allegiance to #slowliving and yuppie lifestyle brands works itself out to solidarity with the marginalized. We worship the God of sabbath and stillness, the God who made things from clay, the God who deploys pastoral images, who blessed a wedding with choice wine. Of course we should serve craft beer at the church function!” I rarely agree down the line with Plough a magazine put out by a radical Christian community, but they are always helpful in asking good and important questions.
Francis Schaeffer died forty years ago today - One of my theological heroes died forty years ago today so a few articles on him and his work over at the Gospel Coalition caught my eye.
Over at Christianity Today there are some reflections on Aaron Renn’s Life in the Negative World - Renn’s book is a fleshing out of his hyper-popular “Three Worlds of Evangelicalism” article that came out a few years back at First Things it kicked a hornets’ nest causing reflections on the Neocalvinist project of Tim Keller and others. Currently I am preaching through Daniel and I’ve got some questions about Renn, culture, and faithful Christian discipleship on the mind.
Here we go in news letter three on an obscure French sociologist. Why? Because I know what the internet wants! In my last two news letters I gave a brief biography of Jacques Ellul and a reflection on Ellul and H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture framework. In this post I want to turn my attention to considering his primary contribution to my thought and reflections as I work on my PhD. Ellul is one of the more critical thinkers on issues of technology and Evangelicals, usually early adopters of technology, need to ask Ellulian questions before we begin to undermine the gospel message that we are so eager to get out via the kind of technology we use. So here is an overview of Ellul’s thoughts on technology.
Technology
Ellul believed that technique was the defining sociological condition.[1] However, before unpacking technique it is important to begin with a crucial point about technology. “For Ellul,” Matthew Prior explains, “technology simply is. It is neither good nor bad but nor is it neutral.”[2] This concept is a crucial starting point as contemporary thought veers toward techno-optimism on one hand and techno-pessimism on the other. We need to be careful in classifying Ellul in the pessimistic camp (there really is no fear of accidentally or uncritically classifying him as optimistic), for he does not necessarily see technology as inherently negative, the sociological phenomenon of technique is the real problem. Additionally, we must also avoid the third-way approach of thinking Ellul views technology as neutral with the good or ill contained in the use of technology. This too misses the point as Ellul’s critique of technique will be about its “automatic” and imaginative effects.
I find it helpful to think of Ellul’s view of technology as archaeological. When he thinks about a given piece of technology it is like reflecting on an artifact found in an excavation site. Yes, the artifact may have good uses or evil uses, but the most important things about it is, its existence and discovery. In a sense that is because an individual artifact means little by itself. An artifact means more as we see how it fits into a broader social and cultural framework. So we move from reflecting on technology to reflecting on technique when groups of artifacts begin to paint a picture of the integration of society together around the technologies possessed and how those technologies communicated a set of values and imparted power. Said differently Ellul observed and was concerned with both “the non-neutrality of technologies” and “their radical ambivalence…the power they can come to hold over and against” humans.[3] In fact, writes Prior, for Ellul, “technology is still best understood in terms of power.”[4]
Technique
What, then, is technique? Ellul writes that it is “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency…in every field of human activity.”[5] Or as Craig M. Gay explains:
Ellul uses the term “technique” to refer to any standardized set of procedures and/or means designed to attain a predetermined result. Techniques thus include what are ordinarily considered technologies (computers, television, aircraft, etc.), but also any number of other features of modern societies not typically deemed technological (e.g., the pervasive use of money and organizational and/or administrative strategies like bureaucracy). “La Technique,” Ellul argues, is the sum total of all of these procedures and/or means and their impact upon society and culture.[6]
More than that, however, Ellul writes of as a force that integrates all things into itself, that is into the logic of a technological operation. Ellul explains:
The technical operation includes every operation carried out in accordance with a certain method in order to attain a particular end. It can be as rudimentary as splintering a flint or as complicated as programming an electronic brain. In every case, it is the method which characterizes the operation… what characterizes technical action within a particular activity is the search for greater efficiency. Completely natural and spontaneous effort is replaced by a complex of acts designed to improve, say, the yield.[7]
So, all things become subject to the logic of efficiency as technique integrates them. The force of technique is integration. It “integrates,” as Ellul explains “the machine into society” by constructing “the kind of world the machine needs and introduces order.”[8] In saying technique integrates society, Ellul is saying “Technique integrates everything,” including man.[9] In this way, Ellul has a common cause with C.S. Lewis who expresses fear that man’s desire to conquer nature would culminate in the conquest of man himself—as he is a part of the natural order.[10] We need to be careful as technique’s force is subversivce and hard to note. “Technique,” Ellul writes, “did not pose the problem of adaptation because it was firmly enmeshed in the framework of life and culture. It developed so slowly that it did not outstrip the slow evolution of man himself.[11]
Let’s consider two examples that I happen to know a bit about:
Church.
As a pastor I am regularly in conversations about ministry philosophy. Most people don’t use that term, but they are trying to figure out why things happen the way they do at the church which I pastor verses at other churches. “How come,” they might ask, “you do kids’ ministry” (ahem, I interrupt, “Kids Discipleship”) “right, kids discipleship this way rather than this other way like the last church I attended?” The answer is usually, not always, but usually, because we have different definitions of success and many kids’ ministries programs function on a technological metric of success like raw numbers of attendees and disruptions. Additionally, many add in the social media metric of likes verse dislikes. By way of contrast, we might ask what the point of kids’ ministry programming is? Asking that question led my church to reconsider the name and call it Kids Discipleship. This can be difficult for the current church growth movement to comprehend as discipleship is not instantaneously measurable, which is to say that it does not function on the basis of efficiency and operations, but with technique, “Everything must accommodate itself to it with mathematical certainty.”[12]
In Vitro Fertilization.
Likewise, in vitro fertilization (IVF), a form of artificial reproductive technology in which human embryos are created in a glass petri dish (Latin: vitro) through the fertilization of a woman’s egg with a man’s sperm. IVF is a technology that seeks to maximize efficiency through technological operation while minimizing the financial burden. As such numerous eggs are extracted and fertilized in a batch often between five and fifteen. As Ellul explains, “The choice is less and less a subjective one among several means which are potentially applicable. It is really a question of finding the best means in the absolute sense, on the basis of numerical calculation.”[13] This is done at the detriment of ethical concerns by those who hold a position of qualified embrace IVF, which is to say the dominant Christian pro-IVF view. It is essentially that you can have IVF as long as you reject technique. Ellul argues that you can’t.
Sticking with IVF for a moment longer, Ellul argues that mechanistic technique advances because of five factors: long incubation (Carl Trueman’s history of the modern self is back up source here) IVF was started in the 60s and Huxley was aware of the possibility in the 30s, population growth, suitable economic milieu, a society open to technique (they are malleable and adaptable), and intention. We have such a world now.[14]
Technological Society
Technique, once it reaches a certain saturation level, creates a culture or society governed by technique, what Ellul calls a technological society. Ellul describes such a society writing, “Technical civilization means that our civilization is constructed by technique (makes a part of civilization only what belongs to technique), for technique (in that everything in this civilization must serve a technical end), and is exclusively technique (in that it excludes whatever is not technique or reduces it to technical form).”[15] Living in a technological civilization will require intentional counter-cultural living. As Ellul explains, “efficiency imposes itself, meaning that Technique is now self-augmenting, following a technical rationality that is not consciously chosen. It therefore becomes monistic, demanding and therefore creating the total integration of a range of technical processes, and finally, and inevitably universalistic, since Technique does not respect local boundaries but seeks to integrate everything within a universal system. Technique thus defined is autonomous, a law unto itself.”[16]
[1] Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), 3.
[2] Matthew Prior, Confronting Technology: Theology of Jacques Ellul, Princeton Theological Monograph Series (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2020), 6.
[3] Matthew Prior, Confronting Technology, 3.
[4] Prior, Confronting Technology, 9.
[5] Ellul, The Technological Society, xxv.
[6] Craig M. Gay, “Jacques Ellul: Christian Identity in the Technological Society,” Sources of the Christian Self: A Cultural History of Christianity Identity, ed. James M. Houston and Jens Zimmermann (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2018), 655.
[7] Ellul The Technological Society, 19-20
[8] Ellul, The Technological Society, 5
[9] Ellul, The Technological Society, 6
[10] See: C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of and C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength.
[11] Ellul, The Technological Society, 72
[12] Ellul, The Technological Society, 116
[13] Ellul The Technological Society, 21
[14] Ellul, The Technological Society, 59
[15] Ellul, The Technological Society, 127
[16] Prior, Confronting Technology, 14.