Chapter 1. Biographical Overview
Jacques Ellul was born on January 6, 1912, in Bordeaux, France. His mother, Marthe (née Mendes), was also from Bordeaux. His father, Joseph, was considered a foreigner since he was of Serbian and Italian origin. Ellul believed that one of the most decisive parts of his early life was that he grew up in a poor family. He worked at an early age, balancing school with the need to contribute to the family’s income.
Jacques was an only child. Although he describes his relationship with his parents as loving, it is also apparent in his autobiographical writings that they were distant and reserved (1981, p. 1). His father had strict rules and demanded obedience to his authority. Still, he did not seem to care what Jacques did when he was not around. His mother also let him roam the port of Bordeaux, so outside school he spent his free time and vacations around sailors and dock workers. In hindsight, he calls this milieu for a child to grow up in “astonishing,” “educational,” and “rather dangerous” (p. 2).
Jacques did not have much of a religious upbringing, which is surprising since he would eventually have a prominent role in the French Reformed Church as an adult. His father was critical of religion, believing that it was all myths and fairy tales. However, being a libertarian, he was not opposed to Jacques, who was somewhat familiar with Christianity. Although he characterizes his mother as a religious Protestant, she seldom talked to him about her beliefs. She never went to church, and he learned about her faith only later when he asked her questions.
Growing up in a poor home, Jacques had only the Bible to read, with no library close to his house to borrow other books. He believes that this marked his early years and education, teaching him understanding of and empathy for poor students in his later career (1981, p. 3). Jacques was a good student, but his intellectual life was confined to school. However, another family characteristic that he considered fundamental to his development was that his mother was a painter who gave drawing and painting lessons. Her teaching contributed to the family’s meagre income. It gave Jacques a “certain artistic atmosphere,” though one confined to the visual arts. He never heard music in the house or attended a concert until his early 20s (p. 3).
After Jacques graduated from lycée (college) with his baccalaureate degree, his mother encouraged him to further his studies. He chose to study law because it seemed to lead to a profession, and the course of study was short compared with those for other degrees. His focus was on the history of law and institutions. His doctoral dissertation was on the mancipium, an ancient Roman institution that subjected one person to another. Jacques focused on the right of a father to sell his children to another man (1981, p. 4).
In 1930, while attending the Faculty of Law at the University of Paris, Ellul first encountered Marx’s thinking in courses on political economy. With his interest aroused, he checked out a copy of Capital at the library. The book struck a chord in the young man, helping him to understand his father’s employment struggles and his family’s poverty in a broader context. His father experienced prolonged unemployment periods and had no government or family assistance. Ellul believed that Marx helped him to understand the plight of people who experienced poverty when sick with no medical care and no money to pay for medicine (1981, pp. 4–5). Beyond economics and the mechanics of capitalism, Ellul found in Marx a total system, a vision of history, society, and humanity itself.
Interacting with socialists and communists at the time, Ellul found that they were little versed in Marx’s thought. They were interested in making it in the Communist Party, spouting the party line, rather than advocating the transformation of society. Consequently, Ellul recalls staying on the periphery of the movement until Joseph Stalin’s show trials of the mid-1930s began and he broke with communists and the party. Although the writings of Marx remained a significant influence throughout his life, early on Ellul recognized and rejected Soviet communism as a totalitarian system that had little connection to Marx. Ellul came to appreciate the need for coherence in life, beliefs, and acts to support one another and “a continuity between Marx’s thought and one’s life in terms of that thought” (1981, p. 10).
Ellul integrated several elements of Marx’s analyses of society into his theoretical system. The first element was a revolutionary tendency, a realization that the world could not continue along the present path. Marx convinced him that people have a “revolutionary function to their society” at “certain historical times” (1981, p. 11). The second element was the importance of the concrete material and social reality surrounding us. Ellul writes that our self-interests and economic positions often mask this reality in the guise of ideals and values. The third element was a concern for people who experience poverty. In this connection, Ellul asserts that many people misunderstand Marx’s concern for the poor. Marx focused not just on the lack of money that the proletariat had but also on their lack of social resources and their alienation in modern life. They were forced into inhuman conditions at work, crowded into cities and ghettos, and kept in economic conditions that prevented them from having a full family life. Marx gave a complete account of humans’ psychological, sociological, and economic unmet needs under the capitalist system, and the poor person is “deprived in all of these things,” Ellul notes (1981, p. 12). However, it is not just the proletariat that concerns him. Others are deprived of full lives, too, such as many older adults, single mothers, teenage delinquents, and other social misfits in modern society, with whom Ellul sides.
In summarizing his position on Marx, Ellul is critical on two levels. First, he rejects the claim that Marx was scientific and that through scientific socialism he had found the meaning of life and history. Marx was passionate, and his passion is what appeals to Ellul. Second, Marx was very perceptive about the prejudices and assumptions of the people whom he attacked. Still, he failed to critique his biases and assumptions, and doing so is critical for any social theorist. Ellul contends that Marx biased his theory with the notion of progress, that each evolutionary stage represented an advance over the previous stage. Ellul also questions Marx’s assumption that work is the defining characteristic of human beings. Ellul rejects that idea, pointing out that many people throughout history thought of work as a curse and that it was under the system of capitalism that the discipline required by work became a positive value.
Religion and God comprised the one area in which Marx had little or no influence on Ellul. When he originally read Marx, he was indifferent to that area of life. When faced with the existential questions of life and love, Ellul found that the Bible gave him a level of understanding different from Marx. He had a sudden and profound conversion to Christianity in 1932. From then on, he combined his faith with what he took from Marx, struggling with what he saw as contradictions between the two systems but refusing to give up on either system. This struggle led him to internalize a dialectical mode of thinking, which he maintains is the foundation for his theories (1981, pp. 14, 15).
Since dialectical thinking is foreign to many, Ellul offers explanations and examples. Marx was the first to popularize the concept, though he borrowed it from Hegel. Ellul writes that dialectical thinking includes contradiction, not the simple combination of thesis and antithesis to produce a synthesis, as many say, but something much more subtle and meaningful (1981, p. 7). For example, he points to the seemingly contradictory concepts of life and death. Every living organism has several forces working to preserve its life and a number working to end it. These forces include nutrition, pollution, disease, aging, and genes. Thus, life can be considered synthesizing a succession of “equilibriums” between forces promoting life and forces promoting death (1981, p. 8). In terms of a social system, some forces are both favourable to the continuation of that system and harmful or contrary to its continuation. In historical development, the two forces do not simply cancel each other out—white becoming black or black becoming white. Neither is synthesis simple, a combination leading to grey. Rather, the synthesis integrates the thesis and the antithesis into an altogether different form, eliminating the contradictions and producing a new historical situation (1981, p. 8). It is not then that the process begins anew, as some describe it. Instead, it is a continuous historical process that occurs on a minute level in the short term but is capable of fundamental systemic changes over the long term. Quantitative change often leads to qualitative change. These changes can be “revolutionary,” sudden, and violent, as Marx predicted for the end of capitalism. However, often missed is that his prediction of revolution was posited on a long-term struggle between the thesis (capitalism) and the antithesis (proletariat exploitation) as well as significant and growing economic crises caused by the two systems.
Systemic change can be non-violent and peaceful. Each new synthesis—say that which led to the creation of the welfare state, first in anti-socialist Germany and then worldwide—is subject to these constructive and destructive forces. Some of these forces are brought into existence by the evolving synthesis, whereas others are a continuation of the earlier historical period as changed by the new synthesis. As with Marx, this dialectic is the overall vision by which Ellul interprets socio-cultural systems and change. According to Marx, it was how feudalism in Europe evolved into capitalism. It was how Ellul arrived at the theory that technique replaced Marx’s capitalism as the prime mover of the historical moment.
Shortly after his conversion to Christianity and looking at the Catholic Church and different Protestant sects, Ellul joined the Reformed Church in France “because one cannot be Christian all alone” (1981, p. 16). He began reading and studying the works of Karl Barth, a theologian consistent with his dialectical thinking. Both Barth and Marx became significant influences on his life and work. Ellul writes that much of his work on theology explores the “significance of Barth’s theology” (1981, p. 18).
Throughout his studies of Marxism and Christianity, Ellul continued to pursue his studies at the Faculty of Law—though he seemed to get much more out of his studies outside the formal curriculum. As he neared graduation, he had to decide on a career. Considering the state of France at that time, he decided against becoming a judge; both as a Christian and as a follower of Marx (though not a Marxist), he could not see himself as the servant of a capitalist society. For the same reason, he decided against working in the civil or corporate service or working as a lawyer in the legal profession. After some internal struggles, he decided on teaching since it would allow him to teach about life to students and give him some distance and detachment from the world’s demands.
Beginning about 1933, when Hitler came to power in Germany, Ellul started to take a more active role in politics. In February 1934, he took part in a demonstration in Paris against the dangers of a Fascist coup d’état. After Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, Ellul joined the first anti-Fascist movement in France (Antifa) and demonstrated against the right-wing strikes to pressure the government to support Italy. Then, during the Spanish Civil War, he supported the Popular Front against Francisco Franco until late 1937.
During this time, Ellul and his friends launched the “personalist movement” under the leadership of Emmanuel Mounier. Upon a Christian foundation, it tried to steer an anti-Fascist movement based on a rejection of individualism and collectivism. It advocated the restructuring of society along the lines of the full development of personhood—spiritual and material—and the integration of the person into a community of close personal relationships. The movement rejected the alienating aspects of the distant, secondary relationships of collectivism and advocated the interhuman relationships of community instead. However, the movement had barely started when France entered the Second World War in 1939 and “everything disappeared” (1981, p. 19). However, Ellul’s advocacy of the importance of primary groups and the local community would remain a central feature of his sociology and political life.
In 1937, Ellul married Yvette Lensvelt, who was of English nationality but was born Dutch. Ellul, a lecturer at the Faculty of Law, had his doctorate by this time. In 1938 and 1939, he applied for the Aggregation Competition, an examination to recruit associate professors who taught history or geography at the college or lycée level. The armistice with Germany in 1940 divided France into two parts. The southern part gave nominal independence under Marshal Phillipe Pétain, commonly called Vichy France, after the resort town where the government was located. The German military occupied the rest of the country, about 60% of the total land area, consisting of northern France and the western coast. When Pétain came to power, Ellul was a lecturer at the University of Strasbourg, which withdrew from the occupied area to the city of Clermont-Ferrand in Vichy France.
Ellul reports that he was dismissed from his position a few days after the Vichy government took over. The Germans took control of the French province of Alsace, intending to incorporate it into Germany. Ellul was popular with a group of Alsatian students and, in a speech to about 50 or 60 of them, recommended that they not trust Pétain and not return to the province since they would be drafted into the German army. One of the students reported this to the authorities, whose investigation also revealed that Ellul’s father was foreign born. The Vichy government dismissed Ellul for being the son of a foreigner and for having made statements hostile to the government (1981, p. 21).
At about the same time as the dismissal, Ellul and his wife returned to Bordeaux in the German-occupied zone. Upon his return, he discovered that the Germans had arrested his father. Ellul believed that his wife, also a foreigner, would be arrested by the Germans as well. Out of a job and other options, he and his wife and newborn baby vanished into the countryside, living in a very isolated area about 50 kilometres from Bordeaux. Helped and advised by his neighbours, he took up sheep and potato farming to support his family. He joined the French Resistance, called the Maquis in rural areas. The Maquis were small groups who fought against the Nazi occupation of France and the collaborationists of the Vichy government during the Second World War. Ellul writes modestly that it was not a choice; there were no other options. In the Resistance, he helped to formulate tactics and served as a liaison among the various groups in the region. During this time, he discovered an abandoned church and, in 1943, began directing worship services for local farmers.
In 1944, Ellul was part of the Movement of National Liberation. He and fellow Resistance leaders dreamed of going from resistance to revolution, which meant restructuring economic life along the socialist lines advocated by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, based on “going back to grassroots by means of a federative and cooperative approach” (1981, p. 22). However, General Charles de Gaulle had other ideas, such as a traditional republican government and the old political parties reconstituted. Ellul and his compatriots were blocked in their proposed reforms. Given these disappointments, he abandoned political involvement in 1947, concluding that “society cannot be changed through political action” (1981, p. 23).
After the war, Ellul returned to teaching at the university and was welcomed back without reservation because it was an honour to have been dismissed by the Vichy government. While pursuing his academic career, he remained active in the French Reformed Church, serving on its National Council, a group of 20 lay and clergy directing church affairs. He reports that he worked hard for 15 years trying to make the Reformed Church an active force in promoting social justice but had limited success. Ellul came to believe that the organization was too traditional and resistant to change. “Once a movement becomes an institution, it is lost,” he claims (1981, p. 24). This claim parallels Weber’s insights into routinization or how even revolutionary change must be adjusted to the forces of everyday life.
In other areas of action, Ellul became a community leader in preventing juvenile delinquency by working with youth beginning about 1958, work that he continued to perform until 1976. He focused on helping adolescents and getting the government and the police to recognize that many of the problems could be addressed better through prevention rather than the criminal justice system.
Ellul’s last area of action began in 1968 with his involvement in the environmental movement. Ellul writes that this commitment was consistent with his research interests in technique and how industry transforms human and natural environments. It was also consistent with his commitments to Christianity and Marxism: “Intellectual interest means concrete commitment, practical and political involvement” (1981, p. 25). In advocating for things such as national planning for land use and against the proliferation of nuclear energy plants, Ellul writes that he was attacking the three things that he despised: “technology (let us say, technocrats), bureaucracy, and capitalism” (1981, p. 26). According to him, the problem is that we have no real control over the technology that determines our lives. Technocrats exercise dictatorial power, using the argument of the necessity of progress to force the acceptance of their projects. Although Ellul was a generalist, perceiving the world through a macro-sociological frame, his areas of action were on a much smaller scale. He did not believe in global or even national action but advocated action at the local level. Many credit him with the motto “think globally, act locally,” by which he claimed to live. Ellul’s wife, Yvette, died in April 1991; Ellul then fell into a deep depression following her death and died three years later, on May 19, 1994.
In addition to teaching, Ellul authored over 50 books, many on religion and theology. My focus is on his sociology of technique, a broad category that he defines as “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity” (1964, p. xxv).
Understanding Our Age
Ellul concluded early on that the world is much more complicated than Marx had thought. Although capitalism had periodic crises of overproduction and recession, the proletarian revolution never occurred. It also became clear to Ellul that Soviet and capitalist economies had remarkably similar goals: increasing industrialization at any cost and rapidly developing technical objects and procedures. He began to suspect that technology was more of a force in his time than in Marx’s time. Ellul credited his friend Bernard Charbonneau, a geographer, for first bringing technology to his attention as a significant force in understanding our world. However, Charbonneau was not given the attention that his ideas deserved. Ellul took the basic concept and developed it more fully, concluding that technique in all of its forms was replacing capitalism as “the most decisive factor” of the social evolutionary process (1981, p. 32). It is technique—in material, social, and mental life—that channels the centralization and enlargement of power and authority in modern societies and increases the efficiency and productivity of industry (1981, p. 32).
Ellul points out that a problem in translating the French word technique into English has caused fundamental misunderstandings of his theories. The French word is translated into English as technology. However, the French word carries a more specific meaning. As Ellul uses it, it is a general term that includes mechanical, biological, and electronic technologies, organizational processes, and the totality of rationalized methods to achieve ends efficiently. Thus, when reading Ellul in English, it is often necessary to remember that he is referring to the breadth of technical phenomena: material (mechanical, electronic, and biological technologies), organizational (bureaucracy), and rational goal-oriented procedures and processes in various areas (advertising, education, propaganda, public relations, economic and social planning). These techniques have been developed and refined throughout the modern era to become ever more productive and efficient and expand into broader areas of human activity. This expansion of technique is a relatively modern phenomenon: “The technique of the present has no common measure with that of the past” (Ellul, 1964, p. xxv).
The most readily apparent components of technique, of course, are the physical means and methods encompassing tools, machines, and processes employed to achieve specific goals—whether technology to exploit energy in the form of wood, coal, oil, nuclear, or solar; machinery to assist on assembly lines for consumer products such as automobiles and perfumes; or computer grammar programs to assist writers in composing commentary on Ellul’s theory. His emphasis is not only on the object itself but also on the method of using the physical technology. The method involves rationalizing and systematizing actions to achieve maximum efficiency regardless of wider social or ethical consequences—a process that changes with the physical technology.
Organizational techniques refer to the procedures, systems, and hierarchies developed to organize and manage the use of physical means. They involve the creation of structured organizations, a detailed division of labour, standardized procedures, and efficient workflows. There are two basic forms of social organization: primary groups and secondary groups. Primary groups rely on the personal relationships of family and community, loosely organized and based on social bonds of affection and familiarity. Secondary groups tend to be large and impersonally organized around status and role and coordinated through bureaucracy. (Actually, groups exist on a continuum, with primary and secondary being at each end, but it is useful to dichotomize.) Think of bureaucratic structures (corporate, government, and other formal organizations), assembly lines, supply chains, and sophisticated managerial systems that now encompass global markets. Organizational techniques encompass vast networks and systems of control designed to maximize efficiency and output, extending techniques beyond individual tools and machines. Ellul sees this organizational aspect as crucial to the pervasiveness of technique; it is not simply about isolated tools and machines but also about entire production, distribution, and consumption systems. He posits not a simple argument of technological determinism but, like Weber, a nuanced system theory of social evolution.
Goal-oriented rationality is arguably the most far-reaching aspect of technique since it largely determines the mindsets of individuals in modern society. It is not just about the efficient use of tools and machines or the smooth functioning of formal organizations; it is also about a way of thinking that prioritizes efficiency, calculability, and control more than anything else. This type of rationality focuses the individual on achieving a goal through the most efficient means possible. Mandated by participation in formal organizations of work, this rationality often ignores or downplays ethical, social, and environmental considerations. It is a form of technocratic or instrumental thinking in which the means justify the ends regardless of the larger social or ethical context. (Weber called it formal rationality as opposed to substantive rationality.) Goal-oriented rationality represents a way of thinking that permeates modern society, influencing everything from individual decision making regarding personal lives to large-scale projects by industries, governments, and other organizations.
The three aspects of technique are deeply interconnected. Goal-oriented rationality drives the development and application of physical methods and organizational structures. They, in turn, reinforce the dominance of the goal-oriented mindset, creating a feedback loop that shapes human behaviour and society. This integrated and systemic nature of technique, extending beyond mere physical technology, makes Ellul’s concept so compelling. It is not simply a matter of using technology; it is also about an encompassing system of technique (physical, organizational, and mindset) that shaped and defined social life in the past and continues to be the principal driver of social evolution.
For example, once introduced, the automobile became an independent force that transformed transportation systems and a whole way of life. Its development led to the construction of extensive road networks and altered where people lived and how they interacted (including the sex lives of teenagers). Technological innovation continues in the automotive industry, creating new features such as airbags, electric vehicles, and autonomous-driving cars—technical innovations driven by the logic of efficiency and productivity in meeting market demands (both natural and created), capital maximization, as well as government incentives and mandates to promote economic development, safety, and efficiency (brought about by industry and consumer organizations).
Marx saw labour as the force that creates value. Today, Ellul asserts, technique is the prime mover in creating value through applying science, observation, and rationality in all of its fields. This prime mover is true not only of capitalist systems but also of communist and socialist systems. Ellul believes that, if Marx were alive and writing in the 20th century rather than the 19th century, he would have named technique the most significant force in structuring society’s social and political organization. Therefore, Ellul considers his study of technique as continuing the development of Marx’s theory into the present day (1981, p. 34).
Although Ellul arrived at technique as the prime mover in modern socio-cultural systems through Marx and dialectics, the concepts and theory surrounding technique have many similarities to Max Weber’s rationalization theory. Recall that Weber theorized that the increase in population and intensifying production had caused the development of both government and private bureaucracy. He argued that, the larger the state, the more it depends on bureaucracy: “It is obvious that technically the great modern state is absolutely dependent upon a bureaucratic basis. The larger the state, and the more it is or the more it becomes a great power state, the more unconditionally is this the case” (quoted in Gerth & Mills, 1958/1946, p. 211).
Weber also argued that the growing complexity of the production process also provides significant stimulus to bureaucratic growth:
The growing demands on culture, in turn, are determined, though to a varying extent, by the growing wealth of the most influential strata in the state. Increasing bureaucratization is a function of the increasing possession of goods used for consumption and a sophisticated technique of fashioning external life. This technique corresponds to the opportunities provided by such wealth. This wealth reacts upon the standard of living and makes for increasing subjective indispensability of organized, collective, inter-local, and thus bureaucratic, provision for the most varied wants, which previously were either unknown, or were satisfied locally by a private economy. (quoted in Gerth & Mills, 1958/1946, p. 212).
Weber asserted that political, economic, and social institutions adopt bureaucratic organizational techniques to reach their goals more efficiently. They include educational institutions, political parties, faith-based entities, economic firms, and an expanding number of local, regional, and national government agencies. These bureaucracies rely on goal-oriented rational behaviour to achieve their aims and encourage the development of rational thought and behaviour among their officers and clients. Weber called this the “rationalization process” and posited that it will continue to expand its role in human affairs at the expense of values from religion or philosophy, social traditions and customs, and individual emotions such as love, loyalty, and hate. Weber’s rationalization theory is a socio-cultural systems theory. As technique is applied to ever more complex and expanding production processes employing ever more sophisticated machines and a detailed division of labour, the population grows; bureaucracies proliferate, enlarge, and centralize to provide the needed coordination and control; and rationalization of human thought and behaviour becomes more dominant in human affairs.
However, Ellul states that, when he began his studies of technique, he was unacquainted with Weber’s sociology, which he did not know till after the Second World War: “We certainly have a similar approach to the issues and a similar sociological method, but there is a major difference between us” (1981, p. 34). Ellul writes that Weber, who died in 1920, could not have known the full extent of technical society. Ellul suggests that the first fully formed technical society did not appear until about 1945 when the United States emerged from the war as a global power. Weber had a general view of technical growth and its causes and predicted its continued expansion, but he never experienced the full-blown phenomenon. He made some brief comments about the growth of rationalization in the future but did not fully explore its effects. Regarding the study of technique, Ellul’s theory elaborates Weber’s theory, with a more detailed and comprehensive explanation and description of technical civilization and its effects on individuals, organizations, and total societies (1981, pp. 33–34). Also, like Weber’s theory, Ellul’s is a systems theory that explores the phenomenon of technique (or Weber’s rationalization process) as an “all-encompassing” social force that progressively affects every area of social life (1981, p. 35).
To those who argue that the only difference between the techniques that created primitive tools such as the stone axe and today’s nuclear weapon is one of degree, Ellul responds that, beyond a certain point, quantitative change often becomes qualitative or a difference in kind. He posits several qualitative distinctions between today’s techniques (material technologies, organizational practices, and goal-oriented rationality) and techniques before the 18th century. In the past, technique was based mainly on custom and practice. Only in the 18th century did people begin to analyze the techniques around them and try to improve their efficiency (1981, p. 36). For example, Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine was invented in 1698 and used to pump water from coal mines. Later engines, such as the one developed by James Watt in 1765, increased the efficiency and convenience of the steam engine. The new perspective was one of improving efficiency—European artisans began designing tools and machines to perform the specific task at hand.
The second qualitative difference is that, beginning in the 18th century, technique came to assume functions outside material devices and in social relationships. Rational methodology to increase productivity and efficiency soon invaded all human activities. Psychology, economics, anthropology, and sociology give us increasingly precise knowledge of human social behaviour. Technicians use much of that research in management, human resources departments, public relations, advertising, corporate governance, propaganda, and the armed services (Ellul, 1981, p. 37). Mechanical and other material technologies are thus only a part of the wide-ranging technical phenomenon.
As an example of the expansion of technique, Ellul points to athletics. He states that training for athletics was a personal affair a century ago, left to the individual styles and intuitions of athletes and their coaches. However, in the 20th century, that changed dramatically. Biological science has given us more precise knowledge of anatomy, physiology, nutrition, sleep, and exercise. Athletic trainers (technicians) have taken this knowledge and devised training schedules and nutritional plans. Serious athletic training is “thoroughly programmed,” Ellul posits, in accordance with the latest findings (1981, p. 38). Track and field coaches discipline their athletes; they teach them optimal and precise body movements for running, swimming, or jumping to excel in competitions. Baseball managers often make game decisions based on statistics rather than intuition. Football coaches and players study films of opposing teams and their tactics in previous games to anticipate and master each football match. All of this, Ellul writes, is technique, and it continues to expand into every area of human life.
Another difference between modern technique and what existed before the 18th century is its multiple and complex relationships to science. Although the popular view is that science advances technique, it is also true that science relies on technique to advance. Ellul points to space exploration as an example of this interdependent relationship. Think of the scientific advances in geography, geology, and meteorology enabled by satellites and the advances in astronomy enabled by the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes. The relationships between science and technology are both mutual and growing. Technique increases scientific productivity; scientific organizations are progressively more extensive, compartmentalized, and coordinated; and scientific understanding has thereby advanced substantially.
However, perhaps the most significant difference among modern techniques is their self-augmentation properties. Because a critical mass of techniques has been achieved, there is an almost autonomous process of cross-fertilization as technical innovation in one field interconnects with others and produces innovations and discoveries (Ellul, 1981, p. 39). One can see this in computer science, in which advances in computing power, miniaturization, and programming have led to numerous innovations and inventions. They include personal computers, complicated role-playing, action games, cell phone apps of infinite variety, statistical packages, accounting software, global positioning systems, self-driving cars, and various innovations in multiple fields.
His views on technique led Ellul to a much more nuanced view of the Industrial Revolution. Most scholars emphasize the initial development of industry, but for Ellul industry was only one aspect of a technical revolution that predated it. He notes that the modern state appeared simultaneously with the Industrial Revolution and depended on bureaucratic organizational structures oriented toward efficiency and rationality. The movements toward rationality in production and the state are rooted in the 16th and 17th centuries, along with the initial rationalization of finance, law, and science (1981, p. 39). So, Ellul concludes, the technical mindset emphasizing rationality, efficiency, and productivity was infiltrating various areas of social life, blossoming in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Ellul asserts five causes of the growth of technique in a variety of fields in the premodern era. First, population increase and denser population centres necessitated a more efficient bureaucratic organization to coordinate and control social life and a more detailed division of labour, all leading to a significant increase in the circulation of social experiences and ideas.
Second, there was an era of “social plasticity” caused by weakening long-standing social structures such as nobility, family, guild, and community. With the Enclosure Movement in the 18th century in England, land held in common by village members for raising livestock and growing crops was fenced off by the aristocracy for their private profit. Although enclosure had its roots as far back as the 12th century, it became far more common in the 18th and 19th centuries as the aristocracy claimed that larger fields were more efficient and productive for growing crops and raising sheep. Enclosures separated many peasants from their means of production, uprooting them from rural areas of England and forcing them into cities, where their only means of subsistence was to become the proletariat or a working-class population. Enclosures soon spread to France, Germany, and other areas of northern Europe.
Third, according to Ellul, the rise of technique was caused by individuals’ clear, rational motivation to apply technical reasoning to different areas of life. This intellectual innovation parallels Weber’s rationalization process, in which traditions, values, and emotions have diminished roles in human affairs and rational, goal-oriented behaviour becomes more dominant. Weber asserted that rationality becomes the predominant way of thinking as individuals spend more of their lives working in or subject to formal rational organizations.
Fourth, the rise of technical dominance was the result of centuries of maturation of technical development. Ellul posits that the slow accumulation of techniques went on for well over two centuries before blossoming in the 18th century in a seeming revolution. This slow maturation might also account for the gradual emergence of rational motivation among individuals (1981, p. 41).
Fifth, Ellul asserts that capital accumulation in Western society was behind the early evolution of technical dominance. This accumulation was the result of the growing success of commerce and the exploitation of the New World. This capital played a vital role in developing industry and utilizing all technical means by governments, militaries, education systems, and other social institutions. According to Ellul, these five factors led to the transition of traditional society to modernity, and the Industrial Revolution was only one aspect of the transformation (1981, p. 41).
Ellul considers technique to affect not only human activities but also the values of a socio-cultural system. He states that technique relates to specific values such as efficiency, functionality, utility, and the positive attributes of work (what Weber called “formal rationality”). These values, in turn, promote further bureaucratization and intensification of production, all of which are essential in a technological society for its stability and development (1981, pp. 41–42). He notes that most premodern societies considered work a curse rather than a value. People worked to survive, not for the joy of accomplishment or satisfaction in a job well done. Ellul argues that the positive value of work is a 20th-century development, a concept that becomes indispensable in advancing technique and capitalism.
Ellul also points out that there is a dual aspect of technology’s promise regarding work, making it more than a means of survival. On the one hand, technological society promotes work as a positive value, with the potential to give meaning to life and lead to feelings of accomplishment and satisfaction. On the other hand, it promises progress, freeing us from work some day by building a technological utopia, a society free from want and sacrifice. Both values are necessary for the advancement of technical society. Another essential value, Ellul argues, is individual happiness and commitment to the social order. Beginning in the 19th century, many abandoned spiritual happiness through religion and faith. The rationalization process has advanced secularization and demystification among an increasing segment of the population, replacing happiness through spirituality with joy through consumption and material comfort. Mass production requires mass consumption; thus, the roots of consumer society lie in the overall needs of the system and of the individual (1981, p. 43).
According to Ellul, new technological developments often cause a crisis of values among many people. The values associated with both hard work and consumerism are questioned by many because technology has undermined many traditional social structures, replacing them with those that promote the further development of technique: “Every time technology penetrates an environment that is not made for it, it will upset that environment” (1981, pp. 43–44).
This distress is apparent in the Global South, where technical means rapidly infiltrate traditional societies. Western Europe and much of North America rode the first wave of technology as it developed over decades. The Global South’s tradition-bound cultures are experiencing massive and rapid changes for which they are unprepared. The people who become workers in the industries and sweatshops of these societies crowd into the ghettos of cities. They are uprooted from their families and the social control, morals, and discipline of their communities (Ellul, 1981, p. 44). Whereas some groups in these countries can adapt to change, many others cannot. The shock of absorbing massive amounts of technology in a short time can destroy the specific character of a society. “There is no integration of technologies into a society with a different culture,” Ellul asserts. “It is an either/or situation”; technology destroys tradition (1981, p. 77). The Global South is experiencing unprecedented cultural shocks and has embarked on a process that will destroy, in large part, its traditional culture and create for its people a social system “totally alien to them” (1981, p. 77).
Ellul writes that a new ruling class replaced the capitalist in the latter half of the 20th century. He claims that society is evolving, becoming knowledge based, that power is not reliant on what you have but what you know—the class of technical experts is rapidly taking charge of the new economy. Individual capitalists still exist under the corporate capitalism of the 20th and 21st centuries. However, now they invest their capital in multinational corporations under the overall direction of a board of directors and managed by a chief executive officer. The chief financial officer allocates resources throughout the corporate bureaucracy, which consists of professionals and managers at various levels as well as clerks and staffers. However, one’s capital comes to naught unless invested in people with technical expertise; even between capitalists and their investments in these corporations, there exists a layer of bankers and brokers (also called banksters) with the technical expertise and software to guide investments in the most profitable corporations. Capitalists do not claim that technocrats hold all of the political power in a society, but they do claim that societies—capitalist, socialist, and communist—are moving toward technocracies (Ellul, 1981, p. 47).
Ellul asserts that corporate and government technicians are rivals to capitalist dominance rather than simple technical tools that capital employs to enhance efficiency, coordination, and control. He might be wrong on this point, at least in the short term of the next 100 years. Although managers and boards of directors control the day-to-day operations of corporations and, like most technicians, even engage in long-term planning, major stockholders have ample board representation, and modern corporations tend to laser-focus on shareholder value.
Chief executive officers, chief financial officers, corporate technicians, and the bureaucracies that they rule can have much power under latter-day capitalism (indeed, many become major shareholders themselves). However, they still serve as the representatives of the capitalist class and are dismissed if they fail to perform adequately. Technicians who serve in capitalist and government bureaucracies (local, regional, and national) and other public and private organizations are specialists in technical information used to advance the interests of the organizations that they represent. When it comes to private corporations, the primary interests that they advance are those of the stockholders, the true holders of power. Government bureaucracy and the technicians who staff it are specialists for those who wield political power. Technique is a powerful force in the modern world, but capital remains a potent force, and its power is enhanced by technique. If indeed we are evolving into a true technocracy, then it is only in its beginning stage. Capital and technique are separate but often complementary social forces.
One of the problems with his exposition is that Ellul is not always clear with his time frame—whether he is writing of the present, the immediate future, or a more distant future. For example, he writes about living in a purely rational technological universe, labelling it “an extraordinary icy, extraordinary alien universe” (1981, p. 48). He compares such an environment with “countless science fiction stories” and astronauts who attempt to live and work in space. However, Ellul does not claim, nor can he, that this is the universe in which we live today; his thesis is that technique is continually expanding its reach and power in modern societies, not that it now dominates all areas of social life (see, e.g., 1981, pp. 69–70). Instead, his forecast of a distant future is dark, implying that, if present evolutionary trends continue without human intervention, it is where they will lead.
However, in the same paragraph, Ellul mixes this forecast with observations of the present, suggesting that people have extreme difficulty adjusting to the present technical environment. He argues that we are irrational creatures motivated by rationality, passions, values, habits, and desires. Nevertheless, we are increasingly embedded in rational organizations in which we cannot be spontaneous and express the full range of our emotions, values, or beliefs. This parallels Weber’s thesis of the increasing dominance of rational, goal-oriented behaviour in the modern world. Ellul posits that, because of the rationalization process, many people are unhappy and seek “compensations” (1981, pp. 48–49). He argues that many consumer goods, services, and entertainments are compensations for technique’s impacts on our lives by providing an escape from an increasingly rational world. Many people feel this emptiness, according to Ellul, but it is especially true for the young.
He details two consequences of technology that are especially important, which he labels as “suppression of the subject” and “suppression of meaning.” Suppression of the subject occurs because technology mediates most of our communications with others. For example, Ellul writes about how the telephone is interposed between subjects, a weak argument at the time that he was writing. However, his point is now much more persuasive because of the ubiquity of cell phones “connecting” everybody with everyone else through text, social media, video conference, email, voice mail, or even a phone call. Couples and families at restaurants often look at their phones rather than communicate with others at their tables. In-person relationships must compete with entire social networks for attention and with a myriad of amusements such as games, shows, memes, propaganda, funny stories, and news. As social animals (still), many people desire personal contact, excitement, and interpersonal mystery. Hence, according to Ellul, we are mismatched with the technical milieu. However, he suggests that succeeding generations might adapt better to the increasingly technical environments in which they are born (1981, p. 48). We are currently experiencing this phenomenon since many young people are far more technologically savvy than most of their elders and spend more time on, and seem to be more satisfied with, mediating technologies.
By the suppression of meaning, Ellul refers to the idea that the proliferation of techniques has obscured all human ends. All techniques are merely mechanical, electronic, organizational, chemical, formulaic, or algorithmic means to unexamined ends. Technical development is self-augmenting, with developments in one area stimulating others. “It develops because the world of means has developed, and we are witnessing an extremely rapid causal growth” (1981, p. 50). This self-augmentation leads to a suppression of meaning. Asking and answering questions about the meaning of life or “why am I here?” become the exclusive concerns of philosophers and are ignored by technicians. Technique “destroys values and meaning” (1981, p. 50).
Many in our technical society turn to religion to compensate for the loss of meaning. Ellul, a devout Christian, does not believe that this movement comes from the ministrations of the Holy Spirit; instead, he offers a sociological explanation. It is a reaction to a technical, materialistic world. It is an intense form of fundamentalism, a spiritualism of extreme piety, an escape hatch to another world (1981, p. 55). Being ever more subject to the material world, some people escape through spiritualism.
Ellul’s theorizing is inductive. Ellul constructs his theory by observing the physical and social reality around him. He points out that further observations might cause him to modify his theory to encompass new realities. He gives the example of the youth revolutions in several countries in 1968. While writing The Technological Society, he was somewhat pessimistic about the human future, but the youth rebellion of 1968 gave him some hope “that we were not truly conditioned” (1981, p. 56). However, Ellul became concerned about the recent successes of propaganda and the phenomenal growth of computers. Although both were in the initial stages of development when he was writing, he posited that their increasing technical development might cause him to “rethink a good portion of my theory” (1981, p. 50). In the following chapters, I will point to more recent technical developments—such as cell phones, pervasive surveillance, and big data—and how they weigh on his theory.
Along this line, Ellul writes that his general theory allows him to interpret additional facts. The theory can be added to, amended, and changed as necessary by continually observing the world. He believes that his analysis of technique as a system contributes to a greater understanding of the world than other macro-social theories, including classical Marxism. As a means of interpretation (a technique, if you will), it is a social evolutionary theory capable of integrating ever more facts or changing if the facts so dictate. Ellul’s theories on technique are robust and consistent not only with those of Weber but also those of Gerhard Lenski, Norbert Elias, C. Wright Mills, and George Ritzer.
The Present and the Future
Most people in the industrialized world live in cities. According to Ellul, urban settings are artificial technical worlds with almost no animal life and few meadows, parks, or trees. The modern city is made possible by techniques such as sanitation, garbage removal, sewer and water systems, electricity and gas, police, zoning, and transportation systems (1981, p. 59). People have generally lost touch with the natural milieu in which our species evolved, trading it for life in an urban environment of glass, steel, asphalt, and concrete. Even when we escape to the mountains for a holiday, we often take artificial gadgets with us—television, radio, cooking stoves, ice chests, and now cell phones and other electronics—all of the technical means for our comfort and amusement. It is a practice so widespread that in today’s world it is called “glamping.”
Ellul has a particular meaning when he discusses the concept of a milieu. For him, it is not only the place where people live but also a place from which they draw their subsistence and experience threats to their livelihoods, persons, and even lives. For him, a milieu combines the natural and social environments, offering both the means of life and the problems and dangers of continuing that life (again the dialectic). Therefore, organisms must change and adapt as the milieu changes. Living creatures never fully adapt to their milieu because the social and natural environments continue to change. After successfully adapting to environmental changes for millennia, some animal species failed to adjust to further changes and became extinct. An example of mass extinction is that of the mega-fauna of Australia and the Americas because of climate change and the probable impact of the arrival of humans.
Humans, as a species, have been successful (so far) in adapting to changes and the various crises within the milieus in which we live. Ellul offers a theory to visualize our history of adaptation. Most theories have divided humanity into prehistorical and historical societies in which humans adapted to the different and often changing environments through culture. Instead, Ellul asks us to visualize three successive milieus: the natural milieu, the societal milieu, and (now) the technical milieu (1981, p. 60). This classification parallels a theory posited by Roderick Seidenberg in Posthistoric Man: An Inquiry (1950). A different version was made more popular later by Neil Postman in Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992), which posited a triad of eras parallel to those of Ellul: technocratic, technocracy, and technopoly.
Since life on Earth began, massive ecological changes have led to at least five mass extinctions. Since the last extinction, all surviving plants and animals could only make slow and random genetic adaptations to changing environmental conditions, sometimes leading to further speciation or extinction of individual species. This natural world was humankind’s first milieu, the one in which our genetic heritage was formed. Only primitive tools and group bonds served as intermediaries between humans and nature. Nature provided food for scavenging, hunting small animals, and gathering edible plants. The principal dangers were predatory animals, shortages of food, and exposure to the elements and other human groups.
Historically, humans have adapted to natural and social environments through social organization. Society became the usual milieu for humans, with close and regular contact with nature by drawing their subsistence through agriculture, herding, and fishing. Techniques became more numerous over the historical period, but they were means to socio-cultural ends rather than ends in themselves. The problems presented by the social milieu were mainly those of organization: political forms, the division of labour and wealth, group cohesion, and conflict and war with other societies. This social milieu is an intermediate stage between the natural milieu and the one that we are entering today, the technical milieu (Ellul, 1981, p. 61).
In the technical milieu, technique manipulates our environment; it mediates and shapes our personal and organizational relationships and leisure activities. Ellul does not claim that each successive milieu replaces the preceding one; instead, social organization becomes the best means of exploiting the natural environment while minimizing the dangers and disadvantages of living in nature. Technique does not replace nature or the social order. It mediates between the individual and the social and natural environments (1981, p. 62).
In a technological society, nature and society still pose dangers. There are still disasters such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, typhoons, and tsunamis in the natural world and epidemics, wars, and dictatorships in the social world. However, Ellul calls these problems less fundamental and more localized compared with the problems caused by technique. Environmental problems and challenges caused by this technique include pollution, depletion, and widespread extinction of animal and plant species. Technique has also created tremendous social and political problems by increasing the power and authority of political and economic elites, threatening nuclear destruction, and creating growing inequality within and between nation-states.
The technical environment has become a system in that it is composed of many interconnected elements reacting to one another. One cannot understand the individual elements apart from their relations to other parts of the system and their connections to the complete system itself. Change one part of the system, and many other parts must adjust; a change in the whole will necessitate changes in the integrated components. Each technique within the system (material technologies, organizational practices, and goal-oriented rationality) is related to each other and to the system itself (Ellul, 1981, p. 63).
The concept of systems captures the integrated and holistic nature of all forms of technique, an essential tool for understanding the technical milieu. This concept has significant consequences for interpreting technique’s impact on society. First, it leads to an understanding that the technical system is autonomous and self-augmenting. The elements within the system react to one another, and developments in one technical aspect often stimulate parallel innovations in other aspects. Human decisions and interventions in this process are minimal. They are the products of an organizational structure that determines the office-holders in government and corporate bureaucracies. These actors are scientists, technicians, and leaders in industry and government who have been accustomed to technique since childhood. They have internalized the technical mindset and supported its further development without reservation. The sole decisions allowed or possible are those that favour the growth of technique (Ellul, 1981, p. 65).
This lack of negative feedback on technical innovation causes serious problems. For example, Ellul points to the overuse of fertilizers in agriculture, but many other examples could be presented. When society encounters problems with a technique, it rarely corrects them immediately. With the pretext that “not all of the data are in,” or “the science is not yet settled,” corporations wage intensive propaganda campaigns that seek to minimize the technique’s impact on the general population, and indecision, finance, and special-interest politics reign. Society does not act until the problem festers, grows, and becomes too dangerous to ignore. Only then, Ellul notes, will social action be taken, with the preferred “solution” being additional techniques employed to address the problem (1981, p. 65). He asserts that there is no actual self-regulation in the technical system; it has gone beyond human control and only receives positive feedback for continued growth.
Second, many people fail to understand the nature of systems, including the technical system. Ellul criticizes the scientists of his day who studied the impact of television as if it were a phenomenon separate from all other entertainment techniques, distractions, advertisements, news items, and radio programs. Studying it alone missed the fact that increasingly we live in a graphically visual world, where sociality with colleagues demands familiarity with our society and culture, as mediated by our media (1981, p. 67). The critique is somewhat dated since social and behavioural scientists increasingly take systems analyses seriously. See, for example, studies on media use among children (Johnson & Puplampu, 2008; Jordan, 2004; Michaelson & Steeves, 2020), addiction (Leape et al., 1995; White, 2002), and health care (Bielecki & Nieszporska, 2019; Clarkson et al., 2018).
Likewise, Ellul bemoans the study of propaganda in a laboratory, thus minimizing its effects by ignoring that its power relies on and is increased by repetition, various media carrying the message, content of the message, social settings, and length of exposure to the intended audience. To understand any technique, one must locate it within the total technical system. One cannot study a single technique and its effects on the individual—the effects of television, commercials, or propaganda—in isolation from the totality of the technical system surrounding each human (1981, p. 67).
Each innovative technology has both positive and negative effects. Ellul posits that thinking we can have one without the other is simplistic. A product’s adverse or secondary effects are rarely known in its initial development; they become apparent only later. Medicines, processed foods, fertilizers, insecticides, and other consumer products have been subsequently found to harm people and subject to recalls. Technique’s positive and negative effects are interrelated, and each advance increases both, with little initially known, particularly regarding long-term adverse effects. This unpredictability puts books such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited, or the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth, in the realm more of warnings of possibilities than of predictions of a dystopian future. The technical system has too many unknowns, and probability reigns (Ellul, 1981, p. 68). Ellul’s work, and Marx’s and Weber’s, are of a similar nature.
Our technical society does not mean that all aspects are controlled or manipulated by technique; rather, Ellul posits, it is a major “determining factor within society” (1981, p. 69). Other factors include capitalism, politics, and the inherent irrationality of human beings. Being irrational, we are subject to ideologies, histories, emotions, values, customs, traditions, and nationalisms. We are “unfit for technology” (1981, p. 69). According to Ellul, the result is a severe mismatch, a growing conflict between the technical system, which is self-augmenting, and the residents of the technological society. So, as the rational technical system enlarges, it causes increasing disorder and chaos among a sizable portion of humanity. Rationality has not yet subordinated everything, as it continues to expand into areas not yet subject to its systems, but often “some kind of crisis occurs” (1981, p. 70).
Again, how this will resolve, if it does resolve, is still unknowable. One could predict that humans will continue to adapt and submit to the technical imperative, hence the scenario of Brave New World and similar social science fiction. Alternatively, the technical infrastructure could eventually cause environmental collapse, leaving humanity to revert to a more basic social existence. Trends are rarely without their countervailing forces. However, what those forces might be—environmental collapse or nuclear annihilation—are two terrible possibilities, but so is revolution or a more benign adaptation of reform.
Ellul posits that, during the previous 500,000 years of human existence, we adapted to the natural environment by creating primary group bonds, developing basic tools, and fashioning natural resources for survival. Some 12,000 years ago, we began to rely more on adaptation through socio-cultural systems and primitive technologies. Modernity represents a qualitative change in human history, upending traditional lifestyles (1981, p. 70). Ellul asserts that humankind cannot reverse half a million years of evolutionary success in a few hundred years. Nevertheless, one prediction is nearly certain: if the technical system continues to enlarge, then there will also be increased environmental disruption and social disorder. Not that technological society will necessarily collapse, but difficulties and problems caused by our technical system will continue to mount. Historically, the responses to the problems caused by our techniques were additional technical fixes.
Over time, humankind has been challenged by new natural and social circumstances to overcome. Ellul writes that the proliferation of our techniques now challenges us. Such challenges are what life is; they are what life does. No life on Earth is static or unchanging; instead, it is a perpetual struggle to address environmental changes that create imbalances, sometimes successfully restoring a state of equilibrium, sometimes leading to extinction (1964, p. 70). Thus, the technical milieu’s challenge for humanity can lead to positive developments in civilization if people understand that the seriousness of the issue requires unprecedented action. Given the nature and severity of the problems, Ellul does not believe that politics, as usual, can address them: “Our institutions were invented between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and they are adapted to situations that have nothing to do with what we now know” (1964, p. 71). For example, he writes that fighting pollution was a local problem 100 years ago; we could pass laws and issue regulations to clean up water and air within a nation-state. However, this was not effective at the global level of pollution. Since Ellul’s writing, global organizations have been created or adapted, and international agreements have been reached to deal with many global issues.
Nevertheless, the problems continue to mount, and national institutions and interests often prohibit full cooperation in addressing these problems. If a nation-state sees an advantage in hunting whales, polluting the air, or clear-cutting rainforests, then there is little enforcement available other than international condemnation. One only needs to look at our present institutions’ impotence to date in preventing nuclear proliferation, habitat destruction, overfishing, whaling, climate change, and control of general artificial intelligence.
Ellul suggests that we can understand the social world as consisting of two levels: first, the level of events, appearances, and circumstances; that is, the level that politics plays on; second, the level of stable structures: that is, fundamental social, political, and economic institutions. Technique, of course, affects both levels. By calling the second level stable, Ellul is not saying that it does not change; it is affected only a little by events and circumstances but tends to be affected by technical change. He contends that technical change obeys its internal laws and evolves accordingly. People tend to focus on the latest news, circumstances, and events rather than on the fundamentals. Regarding the fundamentals, we always think that we have time. However, Ellul says that this is not true; if the technique continues to grow, then the disorder will continue to mount; the more this disorder mounts, the greater the danger to social life and the planet.
Ellul holds out some hope that society can accomplish some fundamental changes. He is heartened by several social movements active since the late 1960s, including the environmental, women’s rights, and social justice movements, all of which address fundamental problems (1981, pp. 74–76). Unfortunately, he believes, the working-class movement, or Marx’s proletariat, has been integrated into technical society through labour unions and traditional party structures, sapping its revolutionary potential.
According to Ellul, national power today lies not in natural resources or population size but in technical progress and growth—in the ability to innovate and refine specialized instruments in terms of efficiency and productivity. However, he makes a distinction between simple growth and development. Simple growth means continuing to produce more—oil, iron, coal, corn—than the previous year, or the economy falters. “Aiming at development means looking for the most balanced and least harmful economic structure, recognizing the value of ‘small is beautiful,’ and achieving higher quality in consumption” (1981, pp. 78–79). Until now, technology has emphasized growth over development. Many inequalities between the Global North and Global South are the results not simply of “the dynamics of capitalism, but rather the development of technologies” (1981, p. 79).
Society must organize in ways that promote work, specialization, economic growth, consumption, and other social imperatives to maximize the power of the technical milieu. Thus, there is a measure of commonality between economic systems ideologically opposed to one another. Ellul points to the United States, Europe, and China as evolving in the same direction regarding technical growth. Thus, economic and political structures are becoming more alike, with market economies forming in the socialist and formerly communist worlds and economic planning and social welfare systems developing in the Western world. The political-economic problems of production and distribution are universal; all countries must address which goods to create and how to produce and distribute them. The growth of production and distribution technologies (transportation and communication), the development of national and international organizations, and the increased trade among countries have led to a marked convergence between the different ideological systems.
This convergence, however, does not guarantee peace. Although the ideological conflict between the superpowers has lessened, the potential conflict is now one of the excessive technical powers of the three or four superpowers. Ellul believes that conflict among them is inevitable, perhaps over raw materials, although one can foresee other reasons for Armageddon. “It is a question of life and death. This, ultimately, is what endangers world peace, and nothing else” (1981, p. 80).
Ellul’s goal in writing about technique is not to advocate its elimination, for Ellul thinks that it is both impossible and potentially devastating to millions. Instead, he has been searching for a new direction. He directs his concerns to “the base,” everyday people who can understand what is happening, who take human values seriously, and who are open to change. This concern leads him to focus on local initiatives, rely on small groups to study issues, and ask people to take a stand on technical development issues. He maintains that change can come only from the individual or small group level and that to be drawn into the national political arena is to become trapped in the “extraordinarily enveloping” and “seductive” technical milieu We must develop a consciousness to become people who can use techniques “and at the same time not to be used by, assimilated by, or subordinated to them” (1981, p. 82). We must prepare future generations to live in a technical world while developing a critical awareness of its adverse effects on our natural and social environments.