STAS - Different selected views on technology. - Studocu See for example Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, vol. But Gendron insists that the Soviet Union did not follow Marx's vision. Technology assuredly fragments human communities, but in the world of technique centralization remains the norm. 5. . 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. - may seem that technology is primarily concerned with the product. John W. Staudenmaier, Technologys Storytellers (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), p. 16. In a world of limited resources, it also appears impossible for all nations to sustain the standards of living of industrial nations today, much less the higher standards that industrial nations expect in the future. Public opposition to nuclear power plants was as important as rising costs in stopping plans to construct new plants in almost all Western nations. In each case the underlying assumptions and value judgments are examined. First, in . Schuurman was also a contributor to Stephen Monsma, ed., Responsible Technology: A Christian Perspective (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986). Reactions vary, but many would agree with Bernard Gendron that in the Soviet Union workers were as alienated, factories as hierarchically organized, experts as bureaucratic, and pollution and militarism as rampant as in the United States. Only citizens who remain connected to traditional human societies can see, hear and understand the disquiet of the smartphone blitzkrieg or the Internet circus. The idea of human domination of nature has many roots. Expertise serves the interests of organizations and only secondarily the welfare of people or the environment. More than science, which limits itself to explaining the how, technique desacralizes because it demonstrates (by evidence and not by reason, through use and not through books) that mystery does not exist. The dense and discursive work lays out in 500 pages how technique became for civilization what British colonialism was for parts of 19th-century Africa: a force of total domination. It disrupts and then disrupts again with unforeseen consequences, requiring more techniques to solve the problems created by latest innovations. The key question will be: What decision-making processes and what technological policies can contribute to human and environmental values? But technology directed to genuine human needs is a legitimate expression of humankind's creative capacities and an essential contribution to its welfare. But to become a mass man entails a tremendous amount of psychic mutation. ?k+OpJJ=H_ANuOWEU37Q@.^` N&]p6'-[4. The mysterious is merely that which has not yet been technicized. - According to Jacques Ellul's pessimistic arguments: a. The optimists may think that, by fulfilling our material needs, technology liberates us from materialism and allows us to turn to intellectual, artistic, and spiritual pursuits. Wise, Science and Technology. If Elluls proposed solution to the technological problemto essentially Get right with Godcomes across as trite and frustratingly vague, it may be because Ellul feared that resistance itself could become technicized and did not want to offer up a point-by-point plan. Intermediate-scale technology allows decentralization and greater local participation in decisions The decentralization of production also allows greater use of local materials and often a reduction of impact on the environment. Kipnis shows that military and transportation technologies fed the conviction of colonists that they were superior to colonized peoples. Machines, whether mechanical or digital, arent interested in truth, beauty or justice. Fourth, large-scale technologies typical of industrial nations today are particularly problematic. The magnitude of these stakes, taken with the insufficiency of our predictive knowledge, leads to the pragmatic rule to give the prophecy of doom priority over the prophecy of bliss.26 We should seek the least harm, not the greatest good. We have no right to tamper genetically with human nature or to accept policies that entail even the remote possibility of the extinction of humanity in a nuclear holocaust. Mitcham and Grote. Technology is not a neutral means to human ends but an all-encompassing system that imposes its patterns on every aspect of life and thought.25. 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.. 19. It is no longer merely a means and an intermediary. Families break down. Ferr, Philosophy of Technology, p. 44. <> Daid Kipnis, Technology and Power (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1990). Peter G. Makukhin (a)*, Yevgeny A. Mezentsev (b), Natalia V. Solomina (b), Elena V. . Computers and automation hold the promise of eliminating much of the monotonous work typical of earlier industrialism. Insight and inspiration in turbulent times. Life is indeed impoverished if the technological attitudes of mastery and power dominate one's outlook. She answers the question of What Could Possibly Go Right?. February 04, 2021 11:00 PM. Although Jacques Elluls name has largely faded from the public consciousness, his heirs are carrying the torch forward. 18. Langdon Gilkey, Religion and the Scientific Future (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). 33. La technique's advances through a combination of its own logic and Man's greed/quest for power. But everybody had to play along and pretend that it was real because no one could imagine any alternative.. . However, we may now be in the presence of the progressive elaboration of such a reactive capability. It is a universal mediator, producing a generalised mediation, totalizing and aspiring to totality. . These are wildly impractical questionsimpractical because, among other reasons, only a centralized, authoritarian state could compel people to turn off their lights or decrease their car use at a level that would make any difference, and that would be antithetical to everything Ellul stood for. Typesetting in large printing frames once required physical strength and mechanical skills and was a male occupation. We should challenge the rule of technology and restrict it to the limited role of supporting the humanly meaningful activities associated with a simpler life.27, In Technology and Power, the psychologist David Kipnis maintains that those who control a technology have power over other people and this affects personal attitudes as well as social structures, Power holders interpret technological superiority as moral superiority and tend to look down on weaker parties. (New York: St. Martins Press, 1989), and Carl Mitcham and Robert Mackey, eds., Philosophy and Technology (New York: Free Press, 1972). The Christian perfectionists, seeking to maintain their purity and to practice radical obedience, have withdrawn into monasteries or into separate communities, as the Mennonites and Amish have done. P. Hans Sun, Notes on How to Begin to Think about Technology in a Theological Way, Theology and Technology, ed. Jonas calls for a new ethic of responsibility for the human future and for nonhuman nature. The concrete example of this is the city. 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). The Scale of Technology. Through most of history, leisure and cultural pursuits have been the privilege of the few, while the mass of humanity was preoccupied with survival. But one wonders what the Unabomber would have made of Elluls religious works. I'm not sure (get help), Sister Society: Association Internationale Jacques Ellul. Humanity will move beyond dependence on the organic world. The worker becomes the servant of the machine, adjusting to its schedule and tempo, adapting to its requirements. 2. His relative obscurity has many roots. Philosophy of Technology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1988), defines technology as the practical implementation of intelligence and argues that intelligence itself has both practical and theoretical forms. Need-oriented values and local human benefits would then play a larger part in technological change.35, The political scientist Victor Ferkiss expresses hope about the redirection of technology. Hope Beyond Technique: On Jacques Ellul 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. According to Ellul's pessimistic arguments are: 1. technological progress has a price. This emphasizes again that technique is really the Milieu in which modern humanity is placed. In a bureaucracy, the goals of the organization are paramount and responsibility is diffused, so that no one feels personally responsible. Thus, nuclear power was weaponized before it was ever used as an energy source. 41. Paul Tillich, The Person in a Technological Society, in Social Ethics, ed. The Technological Imperative in Jacques Ellul and Walter M. Miller This technical milieu involves, on the human side, a complete re-examination of ancient modes of behavior, or physiological capacities (cf. Few come away from a serious investigation of his writing without at least some aspect of their thinking changed. G. Friedman, Sept tudes sur lhomme et la technique) 2. What is called Technique can be assimilated neither to the machine nor to a collection of machines, methods and products. Philosophy of Technology - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy He distrusts technology as an instrument of corporate profit, but he believes it can be reoriented toward human liberation and ecological balance. Ellul ends with a technological determinism, since technique is self-perpetuating, all-pervasive, and inescapable. An isotope separator can enrich uranium for peaceful nuclear reactors or for aggression with nuclear weapons. Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: The Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. x. 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. Unrelieved pessimism undercuts human action and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Photo byJan van Boeckel, ReRun Productions, Creative Commons licensed (CC BY-SA 4.0). George Wise, Science and Technology. Osiris, 2d ser., 1 (1985): 22946. William Pickets (San Francisco: San Francisco Press, 1977). Schuurman was also a contributor to Stephen Monsma, ed., Responsible Technology: A Christian Perspective (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986). Joan Rothschild (New York: Pergamon Press, 1983) see also articles by Cheris Kramarae, Anne Machung, and others in Technology and Womens Voices, ed. Facebook and othersocial mediahave undermined whats left of the illusion of democracy, while smartphones damage young brains and erode the nature of discourse in the family. Ellul argues that technology is not an objective force that can be used for good or evil; instead, it is intrinsically neutral. Others are critical of technology, holding that it leads to alienation from nature, environmental destruction, the mechanization of human life, and the loss of human freedom. Technology is taken to be applied science, and it is thought to have an essentially one-way impact on society. Main theologians who do not totally reject technology criticize its tendency to generate a Promethean pride and a quest for unlimited power. Yet youve probably never heard of the French legal scholar and sociologist despite all the recent media about the corrosive influence of Silicon Valley. Receiving it in joy and love, and responding in obedience, we can cooperate in meaningful service of God and neighbor. Gendron maintains that in a truly democratic socialism, technology would be humane and work would not be alienating.37 Most commentators hold that the demise of communism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was a product of both its economic inefficiency and its political repression. We simply cannot sleep while there are masses to feed and diseases to conquer, seas to explore and heaving to servey.15. 2. A third basic position holds that technology is neither inherently good nor inherently evil but is an ambiguous instrument of power whose consequences depend on its social context. It has a magnificent future if it is incorporated into God's work of creation and redemption. 2 0 obj W. Norris Clarke, S.J., Technology and Man: A Christian Vision, in Science and Religion. Ellul believed that Christians had a special duty to condemn the worship of technology, which has become societys new religion. The characteristics of technical progress are self-augmentation, automization, absence of limits, casual progression, a tendency toward acceleration, disparity, and ambivalence. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). He examines the ramifications of genetic control, not only the now common measures of birth control and artificial insemination, but also the effect on the genetic pool of the increasing numbers of genetically poor individuals. Technology leads to rational and efficient organization, which requires fragmentation, specialization, speed, the maximization of output. 10, ed. A Theory of the Effects of Advanced Information Technologies on He, too, warned about the promise of leisure provided by the mechanization and automatization of work. 10, ed. Its consequences are unintended and unforeseeable. 22. ed. 1. Explore intellectual conservatism But it does not seem to be working out that way. 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. Several theologians have expressed particular concern for the impact of technology on religious life. Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, U.S., April 10, 2023. The biblical understanding of human nature is realistic about the abuses of power and the institutionalization of self-interest. 12. This essay appears in the Summer 2019 issue of Modern Age. Summer/Fall 2014 . This article sets forth a theory of the effects that computer-assisted communication and decision-aiding technologies have on organizational design, intelligence, and decision making. The experience of working in the heart of bureaucracy put Ellul off politicsat least in a public sensefor the rest of his life. 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. Run-away technology is said to be like a vehicle out of control, with a momentum that cannot be stopped. 3 0 obj They are capital-intensive rather than labor-intensive, and they add to unemployment in many parts of the world. The passions it provokes which exist in everybody are amplified. They may acknowledge the presence of technological choices but expect such choices to be missed because they are pessimistic about human nature and institutionalized greed. Using the Internet the government can nowtrackthe movements of every citizen and rank their political trustworthiness based on their history of purchases and associations. 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. <>/Font<>/ProcSet[/PDF/Text/ImageB/ImageC/ImageI] >>/MediaBox[ 0 0 595.32 841.92] /Contents 4 0 R/Group<>/Tabs/S/StructParents 0>> EDUCATION VIRTUALIZATION PROSPECTS IN PESSIMISTIC LIGHT OF TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM BY JACQUES ELLUL . Joan Rothschild (New York: Pergamon Press, 1983) see also articles by Cheris Kramarae, Anne Machung, and others in Technology and Womens Voices, ed. They claim that any problems created by technology are themselves amenable to technological solutions. Yes I am a member (login) | Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Stalin and Mao would be impressed or perhaps disappointed that so much social control could be exercised with such sophistication and so little bloodletting. Unqualified devotion to technology as a total way of life, they say, is a form of idolatry. . Daniel Bell, The Coming of Postindustrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1973). These effects exist alongside those effects which were foreseen and expected and represent something valuable and positive. 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). 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 . Third, technology has contributed to the concentration of economic and political prove. Second, environmental destruction is symptomatic of a deeper problem: alienation from nature. Living standards were actually very low, work was brutal, and roles were rigidly defined. By hard work, community cooperation, and frugal ways, they have prospered in agriculture and have continued their distinctive life-styles and educational patterns. 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. Contemporary technology is so tightly tied to industry, government, and the structures of economic power that changes in direction will be difficult to achieve. 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. Clearly they blame capitalism rather than technology for these evils of modern industrialism. This is close to the definition given by Arnold Pacey in The Culture of Technology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), p. 6. Studs Terkel, Working (New York: Pantheon. 31. Taxing the Brain Drain - JSTOR We have let technology define the good life in terms of production and consumption, and we have ended with mindless labor and mindless leisure. By the nineteenth (19th) century the bourgeoisie recognized technique as the key to their material and commercial interests. Some see it as the beneficent source of higher living standards, improved health, and better communications. Preoccupation with technology does become a form of idolatry, a denial of the sovereignty of God, and a threat to distinctively human existence. The fact of the matter is that when one begins to read Ellul, understanding increases. The effects of carcinogens may not show up for twenty-five years or more. 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. 23. But technological enthusiasts contribute to this devaluation of the natural world if they view it as an object to be controlled and manipulated. Systems in which human or mechanical failures can be disastrous are risky even in a stable society, quite apart from additional risks under conditions of social unrest. Note that contextualism allows for a two-way interaction between technology and society. 43. Four issues seem to me particularly important in analyzing the differences among the positions outlined above. The ancient dream of a life free from famine and disease is beginning to be realized through technology. Another critique worth considering is that Elluls definition of technique casts too wide a net. Three views have been proposed (see Fig. Kipnis claims that the person with technological knowledge-often has not only a potent instrument of control but also a self-image that assumes superiority over people who lack that knowledge and the concomitant opportunities to make decisions affecting their lives.28. Many engineers are trained in the physical sciences and interpret living things in mechanistic rather than ecological terms. 11. Laborsaving devices free us to do what machines cannot do. That last sentence is key. Public opinion and the state become the servants of technique rather than its masters. Our material wants have escalated and appear insatiable. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). The issues cut across disciplines; I draw from the writings of engineers, historians, sociologists, political scientists, philosophers, and theologians. The Technological Society Summary (8/10) Unearned Wisdom Donald McKenzie and Judy Wajcman (Milton Keynes, England: Oxford University Press, 1985). But an ancillary development like power steering doesnt carry much discernible downside. On the other side, technique constitutes a system in the strict sense of the term (cf. Thomas Derr, Conversations about Ultimate Matters: Theological Motifs in WCC Studies in the Technological Future, International Review of Missions 66 (1977): 12334. For instance: History shows that every technical application from its beginnings presents certain unforeseeable secondary effects which are much more disastrous than the lack of the technique would have been. The Technological System - Jacques Ellul - Google Books G. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990). Technology is predominantly beneficial, and the reduction of any undesirable side effects is itself a technical problem for the experts. We will return in chapter 8 to this crucial question: How can both experts and citizens contribute to technological policy decisions in a democracy? 24. Technique is not the same as technology; not in French, nor in English. 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.. He insists that the critics have romanticized the life of earlier centuries and rural societies. See also The Place of Technology in a General Biology of Mankind, and On Looking at a Cyclotron, in The Activation of Energy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971). The philosopher Hans Jonas is impressed by the new scale of technological power and its influence on events distant in time and place. Let me try to summarize these three views of technology in relation to the conflicting values (identified in italics) that are discussed in the next two chapters, There are many variations within each of the three broad positions outlined above, but each represents a distinctive emphasis among these values. Third, technology can be the servant of human values. The Amish for example, have resolutely turned their backs on radios, television, and even automobiles. The people who make most of the decisions about technology today are not a technical elite or technocrats trying to run society rationally or disinterested experts whose activity was supposed to mark the end of ideology. The decisions are made by managers dedicated to the interests of institutions, especially industrial corporations and government bureaucracies. Ferr, Philosophy of Technology, p. 44. Ellul indirectly invokes God. In the past, technological decisions have usually been governed by narrowly economic criteria, to the neglect of environmental and human costs. The workers, not the technologists, are the agents of liberation. Remembering the maverick physicist who pioneered an anthropic approach to cosmology. . 46. Though influenced by Marx, Ellul looked to technique rather than forces of production or class struggle as his key to understanding modern society. Any modification of the ensemble likewise modifies the elements of their relationships. The Washington Post noted his passing in a few scant paragraphs. In presenting virtually no solution to the problems he has just spent 436 densely packed pages exploring, Ellul creates a crisis for the reader, as the authors of Understanding Jacques Ellul put it. Biotechnology, for example, depends directly on recent research in molecular biology. Highlights La technique is an all-encompassing term involving the quest for the 'best way' to attain any objective. He associated technique with "technology," but extended it well beyond the mechanical processes and devices the term evokes. Without experimentation and change our existence would be a dull business. As Ellul noted back in 1954, History shows that every technical application from its beginnings presents certain unforeseeable secondary effects which are more disastrous than the lack of the technique would have been.. Once we allow technology to define the good life, we have excluded many important human values from consideration. Cynthia Cockburn, The Material of Male Power, in The Social Shaping of Technology, ed. The individual feels powerless facing a monolithic system. The human fabric is not an envelope around a culturally neutral artifact. For that matter, do we need so many roads? People have much greater freedom in technological societies. Biotechnology promises the eradication of genetic diseases, the improvement of health, and the deliberate design of new specieseven the modification of humanity itself. 50. }ic9jME[!4gNIwkV) Technology can contribute to the enrichment of human life and the flowering of creativity. Read him. Daid Kipnis, Technology and Power (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1990). The media backlash against Silicon Valley and its peevish moguls, however, typically ends with nothing more radical than an earnest call for regulation or a break-up of Internet monopolies such as Facebook and Google. Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, trans. Samuel Florman, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (New York: St. Martins Press, 1977) and Blaming Technology: The Irrational Search for Scapegoats (New York: St. Martins Press, 1981). Ian G. Barbour (New York: Harper & Row, 1968). Next year it may be artificial intelligence or virtual reality, depending on which of those in-development technologies gets off the ground first. . Victor Ferkiss, Technological Man and The Future of Technological Civilization (New York: George Braziller, 1969 and 1974). Tellingly, most of these solutions involve more technology. Technology, then, is but an expression and by-product of the underlying reliance on technique, on the proceduralization whereby everything is organized and managed to function most efficiently, and directed toward the most expedient end of the highest productivity. The technologies needed there must be relatively inexpensive and labor-intensive. They consider technology to be predominantly beneficial, and therefore little government regulation or public policy choice is needed; consumers can influence technological development by expressing their preferences through the marketplace. He has won seven National Magazine Awards for his journalism since 1989 and top honours for investigative writing from the Association of Canadian Journalists. Ellul believed that the first act of freedom a citizen can exercise is to recognize the necessity of understanding technique and its colonizing powers. They must fulfill basic human needs, especially for food, housing and health. Melvin Kranzberg, Technology the Liberator. in Technology at the Turning Point, ed. The economy will be devoted mainly to services rather than material goods. It is said that the technologies of the Industrial Revolution imposed their own requirements and made repetitive tasks inevitable. But see him now, like a fly on flypaper, seated for eight hours, motionless at a desk. Human identity is defined by roles in organizations. 28. (I can safely state. It does systematically impose distinctive forms on all areas of life, but these can be modified through political processes. Large-scale systems are usually more efficient than small-scale ones. This does not mean opting out of the use of technology. 7, ed Paul Durbin (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1984). 26. 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. x\[o8~/E61]"Nbq,/7CR"%QvaP[&sE=_t?W5{9f/"Z*r!g9c3^7, }f`L*wE`Oyx_l9f6udi-KK:\(Iqf7JIf,^Gqtt=Z^Ldum}yD!kAcMR|@>Yk~'7F6'+^/|z?1"3662:VZ2GT:|sk$M zBJ*ge,z6V1q`2eHa|3:Vn%m&PrkOCY1F\IZlLcZ(j@$1FE}Nv*k&Z#2>/TU2/YL!dS/4TK#+H6r7IeL}4tn@a{u52g&(d^8r>&JQTe+gEj~mx226\sLDG2:#t XGWpoY3ci;V1MKl*/E\A]($^r%)*b9 W1'Ldp>~0
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