One author who should be on every thoughtful Christian’s “must-read” list is French sociologist, philosopher, and theologian Jacques Ellul. He has written widely on numerous subjects but is best known for his penetrating analysis of technology and propaganda. Ellul can be challenging in that he tends to exhaustively examine every subject he looks at with an unflinching willingness to see the hard realities of the way things are, refusing to let people off the hook, and not allowing easy justifications. But if you want to understand the way things are and why they work the way they do at the deepest levels—the source code of modern life, so to speak—there is no better author than Jacques Ellul. If you, as a Christian, are trying to understand politics and society, and trying to get beyond the stories you read in the news—even from your favorite outlets—Ellul will help you get beyond thinking of political realities in terms of electoral politics. Reading this writer will take you deeper than “we need to win back the White House,” and “we need to get our people into the institutions” and so on. He will push you to see that we live within a grand system built to instantiate a certain way of thinking about the world. Ellul is a grandmaster at showing how liberalism is an ideology that underpins government, big business, non-profits, NGOs, and even our churches.
Let me very briefly walk you through a few key books, giving a brief introduction to each.
The Technological Society
What makes this book particularly helpful in understanding our current moment is that Ellul takes the time to develop a history of technology, examining the process of how we shifted from the long period in which people used tools and were their masters, to today’s situation. We are now subservient to a vast technical system. He gets past merely looking at the artifacts of technology itself, helping readers understand that the most important thing about technology is not the devices and machines themselves, but the technological society at its heart is mostly a way of thinking about the world. This he calls “technique.” It is this technical pattern of thought that has become all-encompassing in our society. All problems today are seen as technical and systematic, and all solutions are a form of technique. There is only a single answer to every problem, whether that problem is encountered in the churches, in business, or in government: produce a technical solution.
The Technological Bluff
This is Ellul’s mature work about “technique.” For me, this was the first book of his I read. In it, Ellul develops his thesis regarding the “ambivalence” of technology. People generally think about technology and technical systems in one of three ways: technology is either good, bad, or neutral. Most reject the idea that technology is purely good or purely bad. Most of us tend to think of technology and technical systems like business or government administration as neutral. They are inert and waiting to be filled with moral content.
Take guns, for example. What matters is how you use a gun. If used responsibly, they become a social good. We tend to think of government administration this way (and church and business administrative systems as well). This, Ellul argues, is not just wrong but dangerous. This understanding, argues Ellul, entirely misses the point of technology. It is especially dangerous when analyzing a large technical system like the administrative state. Most of us see the administrative state as an empty vessel that we can potentially fill with conservative, even Christian, political content. We can seize the institutions and make them conservative by enacting conservative policies. This is mistaken.
All technology has its own inherent telos. The mere implementation of techniques will have good and bad effects. Both come together. The benefits are often frontloaded, thus making it easy to sell new innovations and new systems. The problems are often unforeseen and show up later once many of the benefits have been realized. This then encourages a new round of technical solutions to be implemented to solve the ills of other technologies. Thus, the whole technical system grows ever more complex and fragile while the problems become more entrenched and more difficult to solve, if at all. It is like a Ponzi scheme. The one thing we cannot do is say, “no,” as this would challenge the whole ideology of Human Progress. So, we proceed always “forward.” Ellul calls this the “unreason” of the technical system.
Understanding the “ambivalent” nature of technical systems like the grand complex of the administrative state in all its forms in government, business, NGOs, and non-profits, impresses upon us that it is not possible to simply take control of the administrative state and wield it for conservative ends. The whole technocratic system was built by liberalism and for liberalism. The very nature of the system is an attack on traditional, conservative, and specifically Christian ways of being and doing things.
Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes
The left nature of the technological system is brought more clearly into focus as Ellul directs his attention to the subject of propaganda. We tend to think of it as brainwashing. But its purpose is not really to change how we think, although it does do that. Its primary function is to first change your actions, to get you to serve, to act in the right way. Once your actions are aligned your thoughts will follow to justify them. Because technological society is not natural, but is the artificial imposition of rationalized systems onto society, the primary purpose of propaganda is to adapt people to live within the modern technical reality built around the utopian left liberal ideal of Human Progress.
So many of the tropes used in the movie “The Matrix” are terrifyingly apt once you understand the nature of propaganda. Your thoughts are not your own. You are not free. You have been, since birth, propagandized to fit within and serve the grand technological system. The purpose of this system is to harness power and wealth at scale by managing ever more complex systems. You are integrated into this system to dutifully play your role, which is your part in the mass technological society. You are the product of propaganda. It is all built on the basic myths of our modern Western culture:
“In our society the two great fundamental myths on which all the other myths rest are Science and History [that is, Progress]. And based on them are the collective myths that are [technical] man’s principal orientations: the myth of Work, the myth of Happiness (which is not the presumption of happiness), the myth of the Nation, the myth of Youth, the myth of the Hero.”
Propaganda reinforces the technical system built around these core myths. Anything which tries to counter-message the main mythic structure of our society, such as an actual conservatism that emphasizes austerity, sacrifice, discipline, intimacy with God, and limits, will find little purchase in society. This is why most who call themselves conservatives are just cautious liberals. It’s why they never actually oppose the system:
“[Because of the myth of Progress, propaganda] must be associated with all economic, administrative, political, and educational development…thus…the general trend toward socialization can neither be questioned nor overridden. The political left is respectable; the Right has to justify itself before the ideology of the Left (in which the Rightists participate). All propaganda must contain and evoke the principal elements of the ideology of the Left in order to be successful.”
This is why, today, it seems there is no meaningful opposition to “the regime”. Moreover, why even when people are disgusted by the state of the regime and the moral degradation it shoves down our throats, even its critics will use the language of liberalism. They do all this while making the argument that they are saving society from the left. When, in fact, they share many or most of the same foundational myths and presuppositions of the ones they criticize.
The Political Illusion
In this book, Ellul specifically looks at the common ways that we understand our Western democratic systems and exposes them one by one as illusory. He begins by attacking the discursive nature of our modern political system. Here Ellul argues that all states are founded and maintained by violence, not reason or discussion. One of the key tenets of liberalism is the assertion that society is grounded upon and run by reason and discussion without recourse to violence. Ellul argues that the opposite is true, that all societies are founded and maintained by violence. Liberalism, by means of propaganda (which is itself a form of psychological and spiritual violence), attempts to hide this reality from us.
Ellul then, among other things, attacks the notion that the administrative state can be reformed. Once you understand its technical nature—that technique is not neutral—you learn the administrative state is an expression of the ideological system of liberalism. The very fact that the democratic and administrative system that supports it has its own ideological content, it becomes more obvious that meaningful reform is not possible. Additionally, reform would require you to become expert technical administrators, thus absorbing you into the system of expert managers, and expanding the same system you are trying to fight.
If you do succeed in reforming it, you only make the system stronger and more robust. And because the system is not neutral but is built for liberalism in order to pursue liberalism’s utopian goals, any time you reform the administrative state, you are actually helping the long-term goals of liberal progressives.
Autopsy of Revolution
Realizing this, one is ready to receive Ellul’s message in Autopsy of Revolution. Here he goes back to the beginning of the revolutionary period to examine the French and American revolutions. He demonstrates that in these two events, a fundamental transformation takes place: the move from revolt to revolution. The thing that makes a revolution what it is, is the revolutionary plan. The revolutionary plan is the concrete steps that need to be taken to turn the grievances of the revolt into a set of governing structures and institutions. This task, he argues, is undertaken by the bourgeoisie managerial class. Yes, that is correct. Technical managerialism is an integral part of the nature of successful revolutions, making them possible. The founding constitutional documents are examples of an abstract, rational plan imposed upon society. Ellul concludes that the state writ large, that is, modernity itself, is the enemy and must fall or be brought down.
The only problem with this realization is that our entire modern way of life is built and dependent upon the power of administrative systems to seamlessly manage complexity at scale. The price we pay for our modern standard of living is that we have become subservient to a totalizing system that manages the whole of our lives, keeping us on task and aligned with the system by means of propaganda. We can say things like “We want smaller government,” but achieving that does not just mean a smaller, less intrusive American state apparatus. It means smaller businesses, smaller trade networks, a reduction in our standard of living, the quality of health care, increased energy costs, the maintenance of infrastructure, all the many things that we take for granted in our modern complex society which is built on these systems. These systems both provide our way of life and oppress us. And the very idea that if we bring down the system, something new and better will emerge, or that we can implement a better plan, is itself a revolutionary idea and is part of the way of thinking that got us to where we are today. Ellul argues that we need a revolution against the idea that a revolution will help us.
To this end, he suggests the building of parallel social and political structures that reject the fundamental utopianism of the technological society, structures that can resist the rewards and punishments of the system that now rules over us. It’s a tough task because all of us have grown up plugged into the machine. Technical utopian thinking is all we know. The power of technology remains a threat that cannot be ignored. So how do you protect yourself against the technological system without becoming enslaved to our current technological imperatives? How do we disentangle the churches from the technological system, that is, the focus on running churches like a business, institutions focused on growth in the name of “mission?” How do we build something on a different foundation? Unfortunately, Ellul does not spoon-feed us these answers. This is our task.
