Ellul and Technology

For many years I have been reading bits and pieces of Ellul's work. I find myself drawn to his critique of the idolotry of technology or 'technique', and yet I keep finding myself unconvinced overall. For me there is resonance in the point that 'tech' is a bad master but can be a good servant. But I am not sure that some of the rhetoric actually makes an argument that seems to enlighten a genuine situation or enable us to live wisely with tech.

The linked article here Jacques Ellul and Technology's Trade-off | Comment Magazine is a helpful overview and contextualisation of this aspect of Ellul's work. And the final paragraph helps me to consider one reason why I tend to feel unconvinced by strands of Ellul's argument.

We can laugh and poke fun at technology (and its acolytes and worshippers); it is not god, not by a long shot. We can deliberately waste time having a beverage and long conversation now and then. Choosing to walk and cycle more and drive less, eating a more natural and less industrial diet, choosing not to submit our lives and our eventual deaths to the lordship of medical technology—these are other examples of practices in a life that is not centred on a sacralised technology and its value system. Technology is a good tool, but an unworthy god.

It helps my highlighting for me the partialness of the critique of tech. The article makes the point that Ellul prefers the term 'technique' to 'technology' (hence my use of 'tech' so as not to choose between them) and this is because he is trying to generalise and get away from particular technologies to finger the propensity to worship what our hands have fashioned. The problem that paragraph helps me to notice about this is that the crits are usually based on particular kinds of 'hi tech'. So notice in the suggestion of fasting from tech, 'cycle more' figures. And we might notice too a host of unnoted technologies: clothes, houses, roads etc. Perhaps it is because these don't generally figure in idolatrous attitudes? But if that is so, doesn't that undermine the critique of technique? And yet these unremarked technologies are hugely determinative of our ways of life and our attitudes, but not it ways that set off idolatry alarms.

Nevertheless, I think we do need to be aware of the way they do affect our living of our lives and how those effects influence attitudes, logics and values. But we don't have to assume that these effects will be unmitigatedly bad (or good). In the article we are told that Ellul claimed that he needn't look at the positive aspects of tech because it had enough supporters and worshippers doing that already. However, I do think that setting aside those goods gives the critique a lack of ability to help us live wisely with technology and rather ends up pushing us towards 'just say no'. And that attitude ends up being hypocritical because it inevitably ignores technologies which we have domesticated (such as clothes and cooking utensils).

We need an approach which also does what Andy Crouch does in Culture Making; seek to understand artefacts positively and negatively and then what Vanhoozer in Everyday Theology encourages us to do; to link our understanding of how artefacts function in various contexts to ideological and hegemonic concerns.