La Technique as Ensemble
Yeah, let's forget the ideological crap and go deeper
“If technique is total, if it is all-encompassing (that is, if the system of technique integrates into itself every phenomenon that arises), if it is “assimilative” (in the sense that all revolutionary movements are ultimately assimilated), then what can escape the system of technique? From a human outlook, we see nothing that does. We therefore need a transcendence in order to escape it. Only something that belongs to neither our history nor our world can do this. I mean, of course, something that does not “essentially” belong to them, because even the most distant planets are increasingly becoming part of our system.
We need a transcendence. “ Ellul
In Ellul the characteristics of the technical phenomenon are Autonomy, Unity, Universality, Totalization. Technique obeys a specific rationality. The characteristics of technical progress are self-augmentation, automization, absence of limits, casual progression, a tendency toward acceleration, disparity, and ambivalence. Nevertheless, technique is lacking in one of the essential characteristics found in any organized ensemble, reaction. It is not yet able to control its errors and dysfunctions, to react on its source and modify itself. However, we may now be in the presence of the progressive elaboration of such a reactive capability. The ethical problem, that is human behavior, can only be considered in relation to this system, not in relation to some particular technical object or other. Learning how to use “rightly” or “do good” with such and such a technique does not much matter, since each technique can only be interpreted within the ensemble. If technique is a milieu and a system, the ethical problem can only be posed in terms of this global operation. Behavior and particular choices no longer have much significance. What is required is thus a global change in our habits or values, the rediscovery of either an existential ethics or a new ontology.
https://ellul.org/themes/ellul-and-technique/
Berdyaev writes - The rationalisation, the technisation, the machinisation of the whole of human life and of the human soul itself cannot but provoke a reaction against itself. This reaction existed during the XIX Century. The romantics always protested against the might of technology, the dissociating of the organic wholeness, and they appealed to nature, to the elemental foundation within man. A strident protest against technology was made by Ruskin. He did not want to reconcile even with the railroad and he journeyed in a carriage parallel to the rail tracks. The romantic reaction against technology is understandable and even indispensible, but it is impotent, it either does not decide the problem or it resolves it too easily. To return to former times, to the organic lifestyle, to the patriarchal relationships, to the old forms of the familial economy and handicrafts, to the life with nature, with the land, with plants and animals, is impossible. And indeed this return would be undesirable, for it is connected with an exploitive use of people and animals. In this is the tragedy of the position. And it remains but for spirit creatively to define its own relationship towards technology and towards the new epoch, to master technology in the name of its own ends. Christianity ought creatively to define an attitude towards the new actuality. It cannot be too optimistic. But it also cannot run away from the human reality. This presupposes an exertion of spirituality, an intensification of the inner spiritual life. Soul-emotive sentimentalism within Christianity has become already impossible. Soulful emotionality cannot bear up under the harsh reality. Indifference is possible only for the hardened, the obdurate spirit. Spirit can be an organiser, it can master the technical for its own spiritual ends, but it would have to resist itself being turned into a tool of the organising technical process. In this is the tragedy of spirit.
The Spiritual Dynamic of Berdyaev's Critique-J. Norris Beam, Ph.D.
For Berdyaev, the arrival of technics in the modern period opens up a whole new chapter in humanity's relationship to the cosmos. With technics the relationship of spirit to reality (matter) is involved. The creative human spirit relates to nature as it invents machines and technology out of physical elements; thus, the arrival of technics is a phase in humankind's spiritual development. Yet the arrival of technics also signals humanity's enslavement to objects in the world. This is true as far as humanity has abandoned spiritual aims and values. It has begun to look to the earth and the miracles of applied science to provide life with an ultimate meaning and happiness. A novel reality has entered history. It is human organization. Because it is neither organic nor inorganic reality, technics poses a challenge to human existence. Having separated itself from God and spiritual values, modern humanity pridefully turns exclusively to the construction and organization of its material world to find meaning, happiness, and security. Technics is precisely the means by which modern humanity, apart from God, and by its own devices, seeks to achieve desired beneficial ends for itself.
In modernity, several autonomous spheres of existence seek to dominate exclusively the whole of life, and technics is one of them. Once modern humanity discarded the Medieval worldview, with its religiously integral view of reality, it has sought integrality of being in one of several spheres of life. Technics is a part of these spheres. Specifically, technics must reckon with the spheres of statism and economics. Berdyaev perceives a pernicious development in modernity in which collective forces (the "masses") look to the state, economics, and technics to provide them with total happiness and well-being. Like Dostoevsky, from whom he gleamed many insights, Berdyaev thinks that humankind's appeal to technics, statism, and economics for total well-being only leads to human self-enslavement. Thus, humanity illustrates Dostoevsky's dictum that when humans abandon God, they (unknowingly) abandon or betray themselves as well.
Berdyaev explains more specifically that humankind has experienced certain periods in history when different relationships of spirit to matter are suggested. The ultimate outcome of the arrival of technics depends upon whether the human spirit can attain sufficient moral control over the machine to avoid a total domination and destruction by the machine.
Ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity
“Day after day the wind blows away the pages of our calendars, our newspapers, and our political regimes, and we glide along the stream of time without any spiritual framework, without a memory, without a judgment, carried about by “all winds of doctrine” on the current of history, which is always slipping into a perpetual past. Now we ought to react vigorously against this slackness—this tendency to drift. If we are to live in this world we need to know it far more profoundly; we need to rediscover the meaning of events, and the spiritual framework which our contemporaries have lost.”
—Jacques Ellul, The Presence of the Kingdom (p. 138)
So where I am looking at this again is not anti-tech but appropriate tech. Instead of pesticides use birds say, or instead of ignoring ecology learn to use it wisely. Citing the work of sociologist Marcel Mauss, Ellul describes the affinities between magic and technique:
“Magic developed along with other techniques as an expression of man’s will to obtain certain results of a spiritual order. To attain them, man made use of an aggregate of rites, formulas, and procedures which, once established, do not vary. Strict adherence to form is one of he characteristics of magic: forms and rituals, masks whichever vary, the same kind of prayer wheels, the same ingredients for mystical drugs, for formulae for divination, and so on.”
And a little later on he writes,
“Every magical means, in the eyes of the person who uses it, is the most efficient one. In the spiritual realm, magic displays all the characteristics of a technique. It is a mediator between man and ‘the higher powers,’ just as other techniques mediate between man and matter. It leads to efficacy because it subordinates the power of the gods to men, and it secures a predetermined result. It affirms human power in that it seeks to subordinate the gods to men, just as technique serves to cause nature to obey.”
This latter observation also recalls Walter Benjamin’s observation that “technology is not the mastery of nature but of the relations between nature and man.”