At the end you say “Ellul says”. This is the most succinct summation of the crux of the issue I’ve run across. I meditate on this, also, almost daily. It’s a question of “is it better to die on your feet, or live on your knees”. Echoes of ghost dances and iron shirts. It is quite clear to me that to stand against, in any meaningful way, is to suffer defeat. The power differential is almost unfathomable. I recently traveled through Diné land. The whole time I had a sense of seeing people who had been living this dilemma for generations, and persist anyway. I would not blame them in any way, at all, for not sharing their hard earned wisdom with the moderns slamming face first into the same dilemma.
I redefine defeat to an inward state. Death triumphs over all but death is individually met. Reaffirming freedom in resistance to unfreedom is winning.
Yes, I have more or less arrived here as well. But I'm a stubborn cuss. And I think about Winston Smith. After all that has been learned from MK and all it's offshoots, as well as simple torture, if it came down to it, in spite of being stubborn and willful, I doubt if they wouldn't break my spirit in the end. I may be too fixated on 'the end' and on winning. Perhaps it's as you say. It's more in the doing, and the being, than in any end state. Every moment of defiance and resistance is a +1 to the high score, as it were. End state be damned.
My thought based on my life has evolved over the years.
I worked with CISPES for about a year in the late 80's as I was an idealist. I personally met FMLN people who had stories of capture and torture. My job actually was human rights work. My role with CISPES included rapid response when individuals were detained by police or military. We had a national response network set up with telegrams, faxes, phone calls. I broke with the organization on several points, which now I see was an objection to the organization being mired in Technique from Romance-street demonstrations consuming time and money, buying ads in Subway in D.C. or NYT to protest Death Squads-next to a Rolex watch ad or luxury Jaguar ad - seemed to me to make what was important trite..
Though I have read a few of Ellul's books prior to Pandemic, only the last year or so of reading has integrated a great deal of inchoate ideas and feelings. And his focus on Technique seems for me today a far more sophisticated approach to our situation by stressing the individual person and personal responsibility. Death don't have no mercy in this land as we well know and we also know human ability to have a Dialectic with Divinity has no choice other than giving the Divine the last word. We are but men.
In a documentary I watched on Native lives in Canada, a very old man could be heard to say that once they separated people from nature, we were broken. Our separation from nature (illusary though it is) began even longer ago than the computer age, probably the industrial age (roughly 1750-1850) and the post industrial age that followed, where we were driven into cities in search of money, essentially. I don't know what to call the age we are in now except for post apocolyptic with a dash of new agrarian as some people flee 'back' to the countryside, those that have the means. A long power outtage and pop goes the weasel.
Brings forward the question of tool use. Technique is our environment. We are born into the Post-Industrial world. Itself born of the Industrial. And walking backwards we go a long away, further back in time than we imagine probably.
At the end you say “Ellul says”. This is the most succinct summation of the crux of the issue I’ve run across. I meditate on this, also, almost daily. It’s a question of “is it better to die on your feet, or live on your knees”. Echoes of ghost dances and iron shirts. It is quite clear to me that to stand against, in any meaningful way, is to suffer defeat. The power differential is almost unfathomable. I recently traveled through Diné land. The whole time I had a sense of seeing people who had been living this dilemma for generations, and persist anyway. I would not blame them in any way, at all, for not sharing their hard earned wisdom with the moderns slamming face first into the same dilemma.
I redefine defeat to an inward state. Death triumphs over all but death is individually met. Reaffirming freedom in resistance to unfreedom is winning.
Yes, I have more or less arrived here as well. But I'm a stubborn cuss. And I think about Winston Smith. After all that has been learned from MK and all it's offshoots, as well as simple torture, if it came down to it, in spite of being stubborn and willful, I doubt if they wouldn't break my spirit in the end. I may be too fixated on 'the end' and on winning. Perhaps it's as you say. It's more in the doing, and the being, than in any end state. Every moment of defiance and resistance is a +1 to the high score, as it were. End state be damned.
My thought based on my life has evolved over the years.
I worked with CISPES for about a year in the late 80's as I was an idealist. I personally met FMLN people who had stories of capture and torture. My job actually was human rights work. My role with CISPES included rapid response when individuals were detained by police or military. We had a national response network set up with telegrams, faxes, phone calls. I broke with the organization on several points, which now I see was an objection to the organization being mired in Technique from Romance-street demonstrations consuming time and money, buying ads in Subway in D.C. or NYT to protest Death Squads-next to a Rolex watch ad or luxury Jaguar ad - seemed to me to make what was important trite..
Though I have read a few of Ellul's books prior to Pandemic, only the last year or so of reading has integrated a great deal of inchoate ideas and feelings. And his focus on Technique seems for me today a far more sophisticated approach to our situation by stressing the individual person and personal responsibility. Death don't have no mercy in this land as we well know and we also know human ability to have a Dialectic with Divinity has no choice other than giving the Divine the last word. We are but men.
In a documentary I watched on Native lives in Canada, a very old man could be heard to say that once they separated people from nature, we were broken. Our separation from nature (illusary though it is) began even longer ago than the computer age, probably the industrial age (roughly 1750-1850) and the post industrial age that followed, where we were driven into cities in search of money, essentially. I don't know what to call the age we are in now except for post apocolyptic with a dash of new agrarian as some people flee 'back' to the countryside, those that have the means. A long power outtage and pop goes the weasel.
Brings forward the question of tool use. Technique is our environment. We are born into the Post-Industrial world. Itself born of the Industrial. And walking backwards we go a long away, further back in time than we imagine probably.