The Technological Society

Summary: A dated, but at times quite helpful book on the movement toward modernism.

I decided to read The Technological Society because of my reading project on Christian Discernment. One of the reasons why there is some resistance to discernment is that some view discernment as a type of spiritual knowledge, not unlike magic, where you seek to negotiate with God or invoke God in your own plans in an inappropriate way. I want to say that yes, I agree that there is a type of discernment that reduces it to magic or an incantation. Ellul, in his exploration of where the idea of technique developed, specifically suggests premodern people's use of magic was a type of technique. But Ellul, earlier in the book, suggests that the modern idea of technique was developed in parallel to the development of machines. So, while Ellul thought that magic was a type of technique, it was intentionally hidden knowledge so that others would not see the technique in action. With the rise of the machine, the technique was visible and public in a way that magic was not.

The Technological Society was initially published in French 70 years ago this year. It is both eerily prescient and quite dated. When he speaks about early electronic calculators, computer punch cards, or communism, you can see the age of the book. There are many areas where you can see how his comments apply to issues that arose after the book was released. Self Help books and how that technique is applied to the individual is part of his discussion, but I think if he were writing today, it would be an even larger part of the book.

Hannah Anderson has a piece in Christianity Today about self-help and the problems of applying it as an individual. One of the points that she is pointing out is that the problem is not the intention of self-improvement but the method of self-improvement that has moved from opportunity to obligation. Self-improvement as a technique in Ellul's sense means that we have an obligation to adopt universal ideas and methods, whether they work for us or not, and whether they are a denial of our created limitations or not. Christians are just as susceptible to this denial of limitation when we emphasize how much we can do for God and how extreme we can take our obedience or commitment. Seth Hahne has a thread on twitter about people speeding up audiobooks to consume more instead of enjoying the art of the narration at the intended speed. Which I think is exactly this type of technique for self improvement that is a denial of our humanity and limitation. The discussion that prompted the thread was about pushing listening to the limit of comprehension as a means of consuming to the edge our intelligibility.

The rise of AI is exactly the type of technique that Ellul was asking us to be wary of. Esau McCaulley had a recent podcast where they discussed religion stories of 2024 and they spent a lot of time on AI in the church. It is pretty easy to dismissed AI bots that are designed to be Jesus or a priest who you can confess to. But asking AI to write a sermon isn’t really much different from buying or stealing a sermon from another pastor. The problem is is not using other people’s ideas, but presenting them as it they were your own. Wesley and other pastors have written sample sermons for untrained pastors to use. But the point was for them to learn how to preach on their own. Trish Warren (on McCaulley’s podcast) was making the point that the role of the pastor is to pastor a local body of Christians. The pastor isn’t preaching to all people at all times some vague Christian platitude, but to preach to this particular group of people, whom she or he would know intimately enough that they can speak to the congregation God’s words that are borne to them through prayer and intimacy with the congregation. In Ellul’s conception of technique, a pastor cannot skip forward to intimacy with God and the congregation by using AI because technique intentionally skips the hard work of building intimacy.

Similarly, when students write papers the point isn’t to produce the paper, it is to learn how to produce a paper and how to think about and research a topic. Students may think they are accomplishing the task when they produce an AI generated paper, but they have used technique to avoid the main goal. For discernment, the main reason I was reading, there are two important threads. First, the goal of discernment isn’t decision-making to get to the right end, the goal is to become Christlike. Second, the methods we use to get to Christlikeness can’t skip the hard steps. We have to actually struggle against sin and do hard things and search within ourselves to know our motivation and desires as we attempt to discern God’s path for us. The purpose of a spiritual director or mentors isn’t to make decisions for us or to discern in our place, but to talk through problems and issues so that we can build our own capacity for discernment and Christlikeness. The goal of all of these things is maturity.

I did not finish The Technological Society, I read about 70 percent of it and skipped around the end a bit. The introduction and the first two chapters defining technique and giving historical context to the development of technique was the main sections that I was looking for when I picked up the book. The later chapters on technique and the economy and technique and the state had a lot of focus on capitalism and communism and the modern state and those had some value, but they were so focused on the issues of the 1960s that I could have skipped those without much harm.

This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/the-technological-society/