Lewis, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Jacques Ellul, Martin Heidegger, George Grant, Samuel Florman, Wendell Berry, Robert Banks, Albert Borgmann, Erazim Kohk, Jeremy Begbie, Charles Taylor, and Neil Postman -- I give the . 2017 Gifford Lecturer Agustn Fuentes elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Athens and Jerusalem: God, Humans, and Nature. 12. <> Note that contextualism allows for a two-way interaction between technology and society. with Ellul on the rejection of technology's positivist . But with the Industrial Revolution it morphed into something overwhelming due in part to population, cheap energy sources and capitalism itself. 20. 30. 1, Technics and Human Development, and vol. From the editorial pages of USA Today, The Week, and even Wiredwhich devoted an entire issue to this topic in 2017commentators agonize over the societal destabilization caused by the ongoing tech onslaught and grasp at possible solutions: decentralize the Web; create apps to limit our time online or reclaim our lost sleep cycles; improve encryption technology; break up the Big Tech companies or require them to make their algorithms more transparent and/or more racially sensitive; and so on. Every successive technique has appeared because the ones which preceded it rendered necessary the ones which followed. To use one of his favorite examples, the appearance of the automobile necessitated the creation of an elaborate system of roads that necessitated elaborate new systems of maintenance and policing. Bertalanffy), that is to say, an ensemble in which factors are so closely linked together that: It is thus necessary to consider technique as an ensemble. 8, 9, and 10. The Scale of Technology. 13. But those with power seldom use it rationally and objectively when their own interests are at slake. Toxic wastes may contaminate groundwater decades after they have been buried. The redirection of technology will be no easy task. Technique automatically reduces actions to the one best way. Technical progress is also self-augmenting: it is irreversible and builds with a geometric progression. Technology is either the independent variable on which other variables are dependent, or it is the overwhelmingly predominant force in historical change. Chapter 1: Views of Technology - Ethics in an Age of Technology In other words, it doesnt matter if a drone is delivering a bomb or book or merely spying on the neighbourhood, because technique operates outside of human morality: Technique tolerates no judgment from without and accepts no limitations.. 2. If technique is a milieu and a system, the ethical problem can only be posed in terms of this global operation. A more qualified claim is that there are very strong tendencies present in technological systems, but these could be at least partly counteracted if enough people were committed to resisting them. First, in . As Frederick Ferr puts it, science and technology in the modern world are both products of the combination of theoretical and practical intelligence, and neither gave birth to the other.44 Technology has its own distinctive problems and builds up its own knowledge base and professional community, though it often uses science as a resource to draw on. Except for an interruption brought on by World War II, Ellul taught in this field from 1937 up to his retirement in 1980, all the while writing an avalanche of books on subjects that often ranged far outside his area of professional expertise. 1. We should err on the side of caution, adopting policies designed to avert catastrophe rather than to maximize short-run benefits. Obviously, Kaczynskis actions should not be laid at the feet of Ellul; Kaczynski had a history of mental illness, and in any case Ellul was just one of several technology critics the future terrorist read (others included Rachel Carson and Lewis Mumford). In the past, technology has been an instrument of profit, and decisions have been motivated in short-run private interests. Nuclear energy is a prime example of a vulnerable, centralized, capital-intensive technology. He, too, warned about the promise of leisure provided by the mechanization and automatization of work. New techniques for teaching, selling things or organizing political parties also required propaganda. In each case the underlying assumptions and value judgments are examined. Human identity is defined by roles in organizations. Technique takes possession of it and enslaves it. Computers and automation hold the promise of eliminating much of the monotonous work typical of earlier industrialism. Higher Living Standards. Joan Rothschild (New York: Pergamon Press, 1983) see also articles by Cheris Kramarae, Anne Machung, and others in Technology and Womens Voices, ed. He didnt come from French blue blood; he was a meteque.. When social planners think they are deciding for the good of allwhether in the French or Russian revolutions or in the proposed technocracy of the futurethe assumed innocence of moral intentions is likely to be corrupted in practice. The idea of effecting decentralization while maintaining technical progress is purely utopian, wrote Ellul. Daid Kipnis, Technology and Power (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1990). drain tax revenue comes to half a billion U.S. dol-lars (row 6). In an affluent society there is time for continuing education, the arts, social service, sports, and participation in community life. Cf. The reverse contribution of technology to science is also often evident. 36. Stalin and Mao would be impressed or perhaps disappointed that so much social control could be exercised with such sophistication and so little bloodletting. But some former Facebook executives such as Chamath Palihapitiya belatedly realized they have engineered a force beyond their control. Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, trans. Former Gifford Lecturer John Polkinghorne dies at age 90. 44. Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture (New York: Doubleday, 1969), and Where the Wasteland Ends (New York: Doubleday, 1972); see Ian G. Barbour, Science, Religion, and the Counterculture, Zygon 10 (1975): 38097. Apart from the city, the only choices left are either the urbanization of rural areas, or desertification (nature then being submitted to a technical exploitation controlled by a very small number of people). Contemporary technology is so tightly tied to industry, government, and the structures of economic power that changes in direction will be difficult to achieve. Schuurman was also a contributor to Stephen Monsma, ed., Responsible Technology: A Christian Perspective (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986). Some examples: unless Im seriously misunderstanding Ellul, I believe that he would view the growing calls to reduce global warming via nuclear power with skepticism. CHAPTER 6 STAS.docx - CHAPTER 6: THE HUMAN PERSON - Course Hero G. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990). Like the authors in the previous group, those in this group are critical of many features of current technology. Third, technology has contributed to the concentration of economic and political prove. The Technological Society: Social Theory, McDonaldization and the What should we make of them? Yet most designs still allow some choice as to how they are deployed. An isotope separator can enrich uranium for peaceful nuclear reactors or for aggression with nuclear weapons. In part 2 we will encounter optimistic forecasts of each of the particular technologies examined. A series of six lectures to be delivered in academic session 20202021. But an ancillary development like power steering doesnt carry much discernible downside. In China the authorities have gone one step further. We must do so, first, as the name of compassion. According to the critics, there is little evidence that an electronic, computerized, automated society will produce more diversity than earlier industrialism did. Peter G. Makukhin (a)*, Yevgeny A. Mezentsev (b), Natalia V. Solomina (b), Elena V. . . Join a vibrant community of students and scholars But to become a mass man entails a tremendous amount of psychic mutation. By that I mean that hope is transmissible, even without reference to a given God.. The Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of the Continent, which considers the worlds largest energy project, was a national bestseller and won the 2009 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award and was listed as a finalist for the Grantham Prize for Excellence In Reporting on the Environment. For them the most important fount of participatory freedom are opportunities for participation in political processes and in work-related decisions. The passions it provokes which exist in everybody are amplified. William Pickets (San Francisco: San Francisco Press, 1977). It has a magnificent future if it is incorporated into God's work of creation and redemption. Liberation from bondage to nature, he says, is the victory of spirit over matter. 34. He parsed the dynamics of technology with a cold lucidity. How, then, do Western Marxists view the human effects of technology in Soviet history? Again, technology may be considered an autonomous interlocking system, which develops by its own inherent logic, extended to the control of social institutions. See for example Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, vol. Technology is dehumanizing and uncontrollable. Human ends are then adapted to suit the techniques available rather than the reverse. Any modification of the ensemble likewise modifies the elements of their relationships. Studs Terkel and others have found in interviews that resentment, frustration, and a sense of powerlessness are widespread among American industrial workers. Contextual Interaction. According to Ellul's pessimistic arguments are: technological progress has a price 10. Economic institutions treat nature as a resource for human exploitation. Reactions at the conference to this disturbing argument varied. ?k+OpJJ=H_ANuOWEU37Q@.^` N&]p6'-[4. 35. To further complicate matters, it becomes apparent when one begins to grapple with Ellul that pigeonholing him as a critic of modernity is itself an oversight. To Ellul, freedom is only possible when one submits wholly to the will of God, which one does by embracing Christian revelation. But, of course, life doesnt work this way: not all technologies are created equal. Marxists are thus as critical as the pessimists concerning the consequences of technology within capitalism but as enthusiastic as the optimists concerning its potentialitieswithin a proletarian economic order. Ellul offers us no way out, since all our institutions, the media, and our personal lives are totally in its grip. . In a later chapter we will look at technology assessment, a procedure designed to use a broad range of criteria to evaluate the diverse consequences of an emerging technologybefore it has been deployed and has developed the rested interests and institutional momentum that make it seem uncontrollable. %PDF-1.5 The key question will be: What decision-making processes and what technological policies can contribute to human and environmental values? The worker's alienation was a central theme in the writing of Karl Marx. A knife can be used for surgery or for minder. The technical elite likewise serves the profits of the owners. While many of its expressions were short-lived, many of its characteristic attitudes, including disillusionment with technology, have persisted among some of the younger generation.22. Insight and inspiration in turbulent times. This is close to the definition given by Arnold Pacey in The Culture of Technology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), p. 6. 1972); Robert Schrag, Ten Thousand Working Days (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978); William A. Faunce, Problems of an Industrial Society, 2d ed. Next year it may be artificial intelligence or virtual reality, depending on which of those in-development technologies gets off the ground first. Thus, nuclear power was weaponized before it was ever used as an energy source. The digerati also promised that digital technologies would usher in a new era of decentralization and undo what mechanical technologies have already done: centralize everything into big companies, big boxes and big government. Other contextualists have pointed to the role of technology in the subordination of women. Technological progress has a price. It has a single role: to strip off externals, to bring everything to light, and by rational use to transform everything into means. The deployment of technology is primarily a function of the marketplace. Pacey gives as one example the Western experts in India and Bangladesh who in the 1960s advised the use of large drilling rigs and diesel pumps for wells, imported from the West. The workers, not the technologists, are the agents of liberation. Power over nature gives greater opportunity for the exercise of human freedom.6. Fabricated Man: The Ethics of Genetic Control - PhilPapers His subsequent books, especially The Political Illusion (1965) and Propaganda (1962), further develop and refine elements . (The argument that solar is more expensive and less efficient than other power sources is a separate matter.) A larger number, however, see technology as an ambiguous instrument of social power. Hans Jonas (1979 [1984]) has argued that technology requires an ethics in which responsibility is the central imperative because for the first time in history we are able to destroy the earth and humanity. 14. in what he does not say, write Greenman, Schuchardt, and Toly, by espousing no other hope. And so, bereft of material solutions, the reader is supposed to turn to spiritually oriented works such as The Presence of the Kingdom or The Ethics of Freedom. 30. Paul Durbin (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1987), and A Christian Philosophical Perspective on Technology, in Theology and Technology, ed. 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. In many respects technology has hypernormalized a technological society in which citizens exercise less and less control over their lives every day and cant imagine anything different. Any modification of an element has repercussions on the ensemble and modifies it. Emanuel Mesthene, Technology as Evil: Fear or Lamentation? in Research in Philosophy and Technology, vol. Four issues seem to me particularly important in analyzing the differences among the positions outlined above. In the case of energy, it is claimed that breeder reactors and fusion will provide environmentally benign power to replace fossil fuels. Industrial technology was developed when capital and resources were abundant, and we continue to assume these conditions. 42. Throughout his life Ellul maintained that he was neither by nature, nor doctrinally, a pessimist, nor have I pessimistic prejudices. Buckminster Fuller, The Critical Path (New York: St. Martins Press, 1981); Herman Kahn et al., The Next 200 Years (New York: William Morrow, 1976); Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Bantam, 1971) and The Third Wave (New York: William Morrow, 1980). Kipnis shows that military and transportation technologies fed the conviction of colonists that they were superior to colonized peoples. Through most of history, leisure and cultural pursuits have been the privilege of the few, while the mass of humanity was preoccupied with survival. Elle puise les ressources naturelles. Ellul wasnt just worried about the impact of a single gadget such as the television or the phone but the phenomenon of technical convergence., He feared the impact of systems or complexes of techniques on human society and warned the result could only be an operational totalitarianism., Convergence, he wrote, is a completely spontaneous phenomenon, representing a normal stage in the evolution of technique.. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). . 3. Schuurman was also a contributor to Stephen Monsma, ed., Responsible Technology: A Christian Perspective (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986). By Vicki Robin, Fran Korten, Resilience.org, Fran Korten is former executive director, publisher and contributing editor for YES! Schuurman says that technology was given a messianic role as the source of salvation, and under the rule of human sin it has ended by enslaving us so we are exiles in Babylon. But we can be converted to seek God's Kingdom, which comes as a gift, not by human effort. Technology influences human life but is itself part of a cultural system; it is an instrument of social power serving the purposes of those who control it. Atdtudes of power and domination are incompatible with the humility and reverence that prayer requires.33. Andrew Nikiforukhas been writing about the oil and gas industry for nearly 20 years and cares deeply about accuracy, government accountability, and cumulative impacts. Strong gender divisions are present among employees of technology-related companies. Borgmann thinks that some large-scale capital-intensive industry is needed (especially in transportation and communication), but he urges the development of small-scale labor-intensive, locally owned enterprises (in arts and crafts, health care, and education, for example). J. Wilkinson (New York: Knopf, 1964); also The Technological System, trans. Policy changes require a combination of protest, political pressure, and the kind of new vision that the biblical concern for social justice can provide.42. Just as Marx deftly outlined how capitalism threw up new social classes, political institutions and economic powers in the 19th century, Ellul charted the ascent of technology and its impact on politics, society and economics in the 20th. Inevitably, communities are torn asunder. STAS111 Chapters 6-8 Notes - STAS111 CHAPTERS 6- CHAPTER 6 - Studocu 1, Technics and Human Development, and vol. Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: The Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. x. How will this sharp drop in price impact society? All rights reserved. One survey of journal articles finds that philosophers and those historians who trace broad trends (in economic and urban history, for example) often claim that technology determines history, whereas the historians or sociologists who make detailed studies of particular technologies are usually aware of the diversity of social, political, and economic interests that affect the design of a machine and its uses.34 I will maintain that the uses of any technology vary greatly depending on its social contexts. PDF Thomas Merton and the "Pessimism" of Jacques Ellul - GORDON OYER Wiebe Bijker, Thomas Hughes and Trevor Pinch (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987). They may be pessimistic about our ability to respond to a world of global inequities and scarce resources. The automobile, for example, enables people to do what they want and enhances geographical and class mobility. Elle n'est ni bonne ni mauvaise, mais ambivalente. Facebooks mantra move fast and break things epitomizes the technological mindset. 7, ed Paul Durbin (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1984). The Technological Society Summary (8/10) Unearned Wisdom Further, we must press ahead in the name of the human adventure. All aspects of a new technologythe destructive as well as the productivewill inevitably be used, according to Ellul, and we will often tap into the destructive uses first because it is easier, and more lucrative, to fashion a blunt weapon than a socially beneficial tool. Technique now constitutes a fabric of its own, replacing nature. In an urban industrial society, a person's options are not as limited by parental or community expectations as they were in a small-town agrarian society. Ellul ends with a technological determinism, since technique is self-perpetuating, all-pervasive, and inescapable. The increased death rates among shipyard workers exposed to asbestos in the early 1940s were not evident until the late 1960s. John Zerman and Alice Carnes. Two decades of bombing and sabotage ensued, culminating in the publication-by-extortion of Kaczynskis manifesto Industrial Society and Its Future, which contained clear echoes of Elluls themes. One must eventually read attentively a great number of pages of Elluls writing before finally coming again to a clear understanding of Elluls arguments. 2. Technology is indivisible and universal because everywhere it goes it shows the same deterministic face with the same consequences. Few come away from a serious investigation of his writing without at least some aspect of their thinking changed. 3. The attitudes toward technology outlined in this chapter can be correlated with the typology of historic Christian attitudes toward society set forth by H. Richard Niebuhr.43 At the one extreme is accommodation to society. One of his heroes is Benjamin Franklin, who proposed technological ways of coping with the unpleasant consequences of technology.12 Florman holds that environmental and health risks are inherent in every technical advance. The economy will be devoted mainly to services rather than material goods. But historical analysis suggests that most technologies are already molded by particular interests and institutional goals. Large-scale systems send to be vulnerable to error, accident, or sabotage. I am concerned only with knowing whether things are so or not.. I concluded that the strong program among sociologists and philosophers of science carries this historical and cultural relativism too far, and I defended a reformulated understanding of objectivity, which gives a major role to empirical data while acknowledging the influence of society on interpretive paradigms. Jacque Ellul's The Technological Society, originally published in 1954, has become a footnote to one of the stranger events in U.S. history. Magazine. J. Neugroschel (New York: Continuum, 1980), and The Technological Bluff, trans. Here was an inspiring vision of a planetary future in which technology and spiritual development would be linked together.

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