Jacque Ellul’s The Technological Society, originally published in 1954, has become a footnote to one of the stranger events in U.S. history. A terrorist known as the Unabomber spent almost 20 years mailing bombs to corporate leaders and scientists. After the longest and most expensive FBI investigation in history, investigators discovered that the Unabomber was a Harvard-educated mathematician named Ted Kaczynski, who lived alone in a cabin with almost no possessions except Ellul’s book.
Kaczynski called The Technological Society his Bible, but readers drawn by the allure of danger may be disappointed. Ellul’s writing is dense, his abstract arguments are recursive, and the title of the book is misleading. In fact, he added a note to the English edition clarifying that The Technological Society is not truly about technology. But it is, for readers who rediscover it today, a strikingly relevant warning that explains the past year more than any contemporary commentary. Ellul helps articulate the feeling, shared by many, that there is a crisis looming on the horizon.
Ellul was a historian, sociologist, and Christian theologian. He was born in 1912 in Bordeaux, France, and was raised in a poor household. He began his career as a devoted Marxist but rejected Marxism for Christianity after an intense conversion experience. During World War II, Ellul was a hero of the French resistance, helping Jewish families and resistance fighters escape authorities. In 1954, he published The Technological Society, a curious book that Aldous Huxley helped bring to English readers because, as he wrote, it “made the case I tried to make in Brave New World.”
The Technological Society focuses on how “technique” affects society. Technique is closely tied to technology but is something more encompassing. Technique “does not mean machines, technology, or this or that procedure for attaining an end”; rather, it is “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency … in every field of human activity.” Even this explicit definition is vague.
It’s helpful to understand that “rationality” is not a settled term and that there are competing philosophical conceptions of what it means. Every version of “rationality” is embedded within a larger value system. Technique, in Ellul’s sense, might be described as all the forms of reasoning that are only constrained by questions of efficiency. For example, an assembly line is “rational,” but it applies reasoning only in order to achieve an end more efficiently: the production of a commodity. It therefore precludes questions of aesthetics or morality. This form of reasoning is spreading into everything.
The ideal of technique is the machine. As technique is introduced to new areas of life, it renders them sterile and mechanical. Ellul warns that technique “has now become completely independent of the machine,” meaning that it spreads independently of any particular technology. All human values are reduced to some version of efficiency. Today, restaurants are assembly lines, and romance is conducted on profit-seeking apps.
Technique is not a new phenomenon, but it is no longer embedded within distinct cultural, moral, and aesthetic boundaries. “Technique belonged to a civilization, and was merely a single element among a host of nontechnical activities,” Ellul writes. “Today, technique has taken over the whole of civilization.” All that was organic becomes mechanized. All that was good becomes data. All that was beautiful is now efficient. Ellul shows the surprising and dramatic way this happens by examining the concept of “comfort” in Medieval societies.
“For us, comfort is closely associated with the material life,” Ellul writes, pointing out that we equate it with the convenience and physical pleasure brought by modern appliances such as air conditioning. Comfort is the most efficient path toward a pleasant physical feeling. But in the Middle Ages, comfort meant a “feeling of moral and aesthetic order.” Rather than convenience, the basis of comfort was space, or a certain atmosphere. “Man sought open spaces, large rooms, the possibility of moving about … of not constantly colliding with people.” His point is that there is a mutually reinforcing relationship between technique as a mindset and the material circumstances it creates. The rise of technique has changed our conception of the economy, the state, and man himself.
Previously, “man was made to do his daily work with his muscles; but see him now … seated for eight hours motionless at his desk.” Technique begins as a way to make things more efficient and ends with man building himself into a cage. This creates a mental malaise that is viewed as one more problem to be solved with technique, in the forms of therapy and propaganda. Ellul describes propaganda as “psychological rape,” and his analysis of it is especially interesting.
For Ellul, propaganda is the combination of mass communications and psychological techniques used to persuade people. A radio jingle designed to get stuck in a listener’s head, a social media platform designed to be addictive, and a movie that gets viewers to root for the lovable misfit are all forms of propaganda. When it comes to the political domain, we always think of propaganda as something that affects other people, never ourselves. But all of us, in effect, agree to be propagandized in order to escape the sterility of modern life. Propaganda “integrates the anarchic and antisocial impulses of the human being into society” by giving people an “official enemy.” For the Soviets, the official enemy was the capitalist; for the Nazis, the Jews.
People who might revolt against the system instead partake in an “official revolution” sanctioned by society. This means that constant cultural revolution is a prerequisite for the continued advance of technological society.
In a sense, the most striking feature of Ellul’s book is that it is not unique. A decade prior, C.S. Lewis wrote Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength about the danger of what would happen when man turned technique on himself. The same year Ellul published The Technological Society, Martin Heidegger published “The Question Concerning Technology,” which raises similar issues, though Ellul refused to read it because of Heidegger’s ties to the Nazis. And early in The Technological Society, Ellul compares his thesis to that of James Burnham in The Managerial Revolution. These books, which described a revolutionary social transformation, were written by people who still had one foot in the old world and so could articulate how it differed from the new.
We are living through a similar period today. 2020 was the year that our society finally crystallized into something new and distinct from all prior civilizations. The word “shutdown” used to be associated with turning off a machine; now, it refers to government attempts to turn off human life. In The Republic, Plato compares society to man written in big letters, i.e., an organic extension of the human creature. Now, it’s considered a machine run by managers. But beneath all the statistics and austere proclamations about “following the data,” it was clear, throughout the pandemic, that most of us were motivated by a neurotic fear of death. Behind the masking, social distancing requirements, and stay-at-home orders, there was an obvious desire to pretend that man has total power over his environment. Yet in our desire to conquer death, we have trapped ourselves in comfortable prison cells in which our only true freedom is to choose among different brands of mind-rotting propaganda. Early in The Technological Society, Ellul warns that because technique is obsessed with tracking and categorizing data, it will always tend toward the creation of a police state, a society of total control.
Ellul is not a Luddite who tells us that technology is inherently evil. Rather, he wants us simply to ask: “What is the cost?” Life is a series of compromises; there are costs and benefits to every decision. We are quickly approaching a point at which the majority of people will no longer be able to understand the costs of technological society. But we cannot have it all: not in our personal lives, and certainly not at a civilizational level.
Ellul asks us to consider the cost of technique. Have we sacrificed community for comfort? Efficiency for beauty? Stability for profits? Have we sacrificed a nation of free citizens ruling themselves for a vast bureaucratic empire of lonely consumers kneeling before obscure powers? And how will the internet age develop? Will digital life be able to free us from top-down culture and create a decentralized world that places the human person at the center? Or are we to be ruled by an automated Stasi that never sleeps, never feels remorse, and never considers the cost? Ellul’s work provides trenchant insight and wisdom needed to navigate the future.
James McElroy is a novelist and essayist based in New York.
