Be Not Machines
/
As I said in a previous post, I am making my way through Jacques Ellul’s dense The Technological Society, as a sort of starting place on my quest to understand our current moment. It’s been slow going — I’ve been chipping away at the book’s 400+ pages over the last few months — partly because of the book’s chewy ideas, but also in part because Ellul’s writing, translated from the French, tends toward the impenetrable. There are plenty of provocative and insightful ideas in the book, but not so many memorable phrases. That does mean, though, that the phrases that stand out really stand out. One example comes near the end of his chapter on technique’s effect on modern economic life and arrangements. Here’s what Ellul says (as translated by John Wilkinson):
“The stage in which the human being was a mere slave of the mechanical tyrant has been passed. When man himself becomes a machine, he attains to the marvelous freedom of unconsciousness, the freedom of the machine itself... Man feels himself to be responsible, but he is not. He does not feel himself to be an object, but he is. He has been so well assimilated to the economic world, so well adjusted to it by being reduced to the homo economicus, in short, so well conditioned, that the appearance of personal life becomes for him the reality of personal life.”
What a striking formulation, especially that second sentence: when we become machines, we access the machine’s unthinking nature. We no longer even recognize our own unfreedom, because we’ve attained a (huge air quotes) “higher” freedom found through the mechanization of our labor and our lives.
This condition, I submit, is one we find ourselves in still today, to an even greater extent than during Ellul’s time. Throughout The Technological Society, Ellul is highly attuned to the way in which humans, ever flexible, adapt their lives to the situation in which they find themselves. As he suggests later in the book, we only have two choices, at least in the economic sphere: adapt to the demands of technique placed on us by society, or find ourselves in the rubbish bin of history. But to so submit ourselves to the machine’s demands means that we risk losing that which makes us human — our eccentricities and individuality, and above all our capacity for judgement. One reason I’m highly interested in a book like Nicholas Carr’s The Glass Cage, about our over-reliance on automation, is that automation, that highest achievement of technique, completely eliminates human judgement.
If in our economic lives we either adapt or die, there is at least a chance that, in our lives beyond work, we can resist the relentless tug of technique. This is not easy, however. The food we eat, the culture we consume, the politics we “adopt” (remember, Ellul was greatly interested in propaganda and its ties to technique): these all come to us ready made through the mediation of state-approved technique. Most people in American society have already attained that marvelous unfreedom of the machine. I feel its allure even in my own life.
In the end, though, we must resist, for our own sake. Ellul patiently demonstrates in the book how our supposed adaptation to the life of the machine is in fact illusory: in bending, we break something within ourselves. One of Ellul’s canniest observations near the end of the book is that our modern psychological apparatus is largely structured around tweaking our psyches such that we can better conform to the demands of technique. Therapists troubleshoot our anxiety — itself largely a result of mechanized society — so that we can return quickly to our places within the machine. We cannot, then, lead fully human lives until we figure out how to resist the dehumanizing tractor beam of that marvelous unfreedom of the machine.
How do we effectively resist? Well, that’s an answer I’m working toward, brick by brick. Stay tuned for more.