Technology has undoubted benefits. But modern technology can bring with it a certain mindset and worldview–utilitarianism, materialism, and reductionism–which, in turn, can lead to unintended consequences.
Swedish theologian Stefan Lindholm sorts out these issues as they apply to Artificial Intelligence, Transhumanism, and other contemporary issues with the help of the French Reformed thinker Jacques Ellul. Lindholm is a Lutheran priest (what they call pastors in Sweden) and theology professor at the Johannelund School of Theology, operated by the Lutheran Swedish Evangelical Mission.
His article, Jacques Ellul and the Idols of Transhumanism, is published in Religion & Liberty, the periodical of the Acton Institute, edited by Anthony Sacramone. (We blogged about him and his magazine, which is now available for hard-copy subscription. His fans will want to read the essay in which he tells of his return to Christianity and to Lutheranism.)
Jacques Ellul, to be mentioned in the same breath as Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, was a Christian thinker who wrote about the effects of modern technology back in the 1950s, when even television was brand new and long before the internet and the digital revolution. And yet he anticipated much of what we are trying to deal with today and gives us some helpful concepts to make sense of it all.
I’m going to extract from Lindholm’s article what he gleans from Ellul. I’ll then make some applications of my own. I’ll let you read the article to learn of Lindholm’s applications to Artificial Intelligence, Transhumanism, the Singularity, and the like. Ellul’s analysis also helps to account for the ethical ideology that has become popular among our tech lords, which I’ll post about next week.
Ellul’s key book on the subject is The Technological Society, originally published in French in 1954 and translated into English in 1964, at the suggestion, Lindholm adds, of Aldous Huxley, author of the dystopian classic Brave New World. Ellul focuses on “technique.” Here is how Lindholm explains the concept and what Ellul does with it (my emphases):
Technique is simply defined as the complex of rationally ordered methods and means for making all human activities more efficient. On the surface it may not sound harmful, but problems arose in the modern period when this innate tendency in human practical rationality began to be applied to virtually all areas of human life and beyond, converting everything into a means to an end. As a consequence, the ends to which the tightly controlled means are directed have been arbitrarily stipulated by the whims and wishes of human societies. The modern methods of technique, so understood, are all-pervasive and have become a complex integrated and autonomous system that has slipped out of the hands of humans so that we are always and everywhere in the hands of technique. It has become its own kind of all-embracing ideology. Ellul points out that for modern people, virtually every problem in every domain of life—from a mere inconvenience to an illness to an existential crisis—is expected to have a technical solution. The irony is that the problems that technique is supposed to solve often arose as a consequence of an earlier technique. The result is a kind of technological totalitarianism that exponentially will—although not by absolute necessity, Ellul is careful to add—continue to shape and control human societies and life. . . .[Ellul] remarks: “When Technique displays an interest in man, it does so by converting him into a material object,” and man will be guaranteed the kinds of “material happiness as material objects can [guarantee].… But the technical society is not, and cannot be, a genuinely humanist society, since it puts in first place not man but material things.” Ellul is convinced that human or “spiritual” excellence and progress is not reducible to technique. Conversely, material development is not identical to spiritual or intellectual maturation.
As theologian Norman Wirzba points out in The Paradise of God: Technique (Techne) in the antique was the human way of working with the inherent order and reason (Logos), whereas the modern combination of the two—technology—is the exaltation of human intelligence as the order of things. Ellul teases out the spiritual consequences:
The individual who lives in the technical milieu knows very well that there is nothing spiritual anywhere. But man cannot live without the sacred. He therefore transfers his sense of the sacred to the very thing which has destroyed its former object: to technique itself. In the world in which we live, technique has become the essential mystery.
Again, read Lindholm’s article for how this applies to the tech world. But let’s consider how it applies to other issues.
For example, sex. This natural drive can create problems for people. So we have developed techniques and technological solutions. Sex can lead to pregnancy, which sometimes women and men do not want: so we have used our technology to provide contraceptive pills and devices. Pregnancy sometimes happens anyway, so we have come up with abortion technology, whether surgical or chemical, to take care of that problem. Some people want sex but do not have a partner, so we have technological solutions, such as pornography on the internet and sex robots. But do you see how this technological approach to sex reduces its natural and moral meaning?
Some people would prefer to be a different sex. Technology can solve that problem too, with puberty blockers, masectomies hysterectomies, castration, and plastic surgery. Do you see how this technological approach to gender reduces human beings to the status of inanimate material, to be fabricated like any other raw material according to consumer demands? And do you see the danger of unintended consequences?
Or consider education. Classical education was preoccupied with “ends,” with things that are valuable in themselves, such as the absolutes of goodness, truth, and beauty; humane qualities such as virtue, freedom, and duty; and spiritual realities such as faith, hope, and love. Modern education, assuming education must be a means to some material end, asks, but what can you do with all that? Teaching became reduced to a set of techniques designed to achieve strictly material and measurable ends, whether economic (getting a good job; making lots of money) or social (holding to progressive ideologies and attitudes).
Or consider religion. Church membership is down, so we look for “techniques” to grow the church. Since that mindset sees everything as a means to an end, we evaluate Christian worship, doctrine, and practices accordingly, jettisoning those elements that we think get in the way of the goal. Technology, we think, can help, so we make use of high tech production equipment, musical recordings, video screens, online services, and the virtual reality metaverse. Some things might be gained, if we are careful, but what is lost or ignored? At what point, in Ellul’s terms, have we transferred the sense of the sacred to the very thing which has destroyed the sacred?
How else could we apply Ellul’s analysis?
Photo: “Jacques Ellul in his studio” by Jan van Boeckel, ReRun Productions, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In