2024 cometh and war drums pound louder

Wallace Stevens Dry Loaf & More 'neath the poem

“Technique encompasses the totality of present-day society,” wrote Ellul. “Man is caught like a fly in a bottle. His attempts at culture, freedom, and creative endeavour have become mere entries in technique’s filing cabinet.” President Joe Biden on Friday signed into law the U.S. defense policy bill that authorizes a record $886 billion in annual military spending. 6.8 TRILLION Budget. Heidegger speaks of the impotence of philosophy in the face of the present crisis of civilization: "Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinking and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god, or for the absence of a god in [our] decline, insofar as in view of the absent god we are in a state of decline"

It is equal to living in a tragic land
To live in a tragic time.
Regard now the sloping, mountainous rocks
And the river that batters its way over stones,
Regard the hovels of those that live in this land.

That was what I painted behind the loaf,
The rocks not even touched by snow,
The pines along the river and the dry men blown
Brown as the bread, thinking of birds
Flying from burning countries and brown sand shores,

Birds that came like dirty water in waves
Flowing above the rocks, flowing over the sky,
As if the sky was a current that bore them along,
Spreading them as waves spread flat on the shore,
One after another washing the mountains bare.

It was the battering of drums I heard
It was hunger, it was the hungry that cried
And the waves, the waves were soldiers moving,
Marching and marching in a tragic time
Below me, on the asphalt, under the trees.

It was soldiers went marching over the rocks
And still the birds came, came in watery flocks,
Because it was spring and the birds had to come.
No doubt that soldiers had to be marching
And that drums had to be rolling, rolling, rolling.

Ellul’s The Technological Society has yellowed with age, left untaught, but it remains one of the most important books of 20th century thought available as a guide to the clocklike determinism technology imposes on life. This became his main field of interest having begun his writing with Protestant theology. Ellul was not like Virilio a writer on dromology but he did write on speed and how later, with the Industrial Revolution the speed of technical progress morphed into something overwhelming due in part to population, cheap energy sources and capitalism itself. Since then it has engulfed Western civilization and become the globe’s greatest colonizing force.

Totalitarianism is latent in technology Virilio writes in 1995. In Speed and Politics (1986 [1977]), Virilio undertakes his first sustained attempt to delineate the importance of accelerated speed, of the impact of technologies of motion, of types of mobility and their effects in the contemporary era. Subtitled "Essay on Dromology," Virilio proposes what he calls a "dromomatics" which interrogates the role of speed in history and its important functions in urban and social life, warfare, the economy, transportation and communication, and other aspects of everyday life. "Dromology" comes from the Latin term, dromos, signifying race, and dromology studies how innovations in speed influence social and political life. The "dromocratic revolution" for Virilio involves means of fabricating speed with the steam engine, then the combustion engine, and in our day nuclear energy and instantaneous forms of warfare and communication. Virilio was initially an urbanist.

Technics is all encompassing through speed.

Ellul (1962) believed that “Technique has become the new and specific milieu in which man is required to exist, one that has supplanted the old milieu, viz., that of nature.” In The Technological Society (1964), he defined technique as “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity” (p. xxv). Technology, then, is not only, or even primarily, artifacts or objects—although it included those, to be sure—it is systemic and incorporates processes, rules (or codes), and institutions as well. Technique is a totalizing system of methods that has become the new environment, or milieu, for all of human existence. Ellul wrote: “Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity” (1964, p. 17). In a technological society, technique shapes everything—not only transportation and communication, but also politics and religion, economics, science, and education, even love and sex—all of these are comprehended as component processes aimed at clearly identifiable and quantitative goals that can be rendered more efficient. In this way, mystery is pushed out of human experience, and replaced with benchmarks, comparison groups, and measurable outcomes. 

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