Perspectives on Our Age by Jacques Ellul

Author:Jacques Ellul [Ellul, Jacques]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, Not Read
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc.
Published: 2004-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

4

Faith or Religion ?

THROUGH OUR ANALYSIS of the system of technique, we are obviously led to reflect on two kinds of issues: the human condition in this system; and the conditions that are necessary for taking the positions or making the critiques that I have presented.

Regarding the human condition in this system, we have repeatedly witnessed the transformation of human beings by technique. We must understand that, no matter what the political form, no matter how developed or underdeveloped a country may be, all the citizens agree on the development of technique, notwithstanding the dangers, and people offer justifications—ideological, intellectual, or philosophical. Let me quote a few passages from my book The Technological Society.

It is literally impossible for the public to believe that so much effort and intelligence, so many dazzling results, produce only material effects. People simply cannot admit that a great dam produces nothing but electricity. The myth of the dam . . . springs from the fact that mass man worships his own massive works and cannot bring himself to attribute to them a merely material value. Moreover, since these works involve immense sacrifices, it is necessary to justify the sacrifices. In short, man creates for himself a new religion of a rational and technical order to justify his work and to be justified in it.

Never before has so much been required of the human being. By chance, in the course of history some men have had to perform crushing labors or expose themselves to mortal peril. But those men were slaves or warriors. Never before has the human race as a whole had to exert such efforts in its daily labors as it does today as a result of its absorption into the monstrous technical mechanism—an undifferentiated but complex mechanism which makes it impossible to turn a wheel without the sustained, persevering, and intensive labor of millions of workers, whether in white collars or in blue. The tempo of man’s work is not the traditional, ancestral tempo nor is its aim the handiwork which man produced with pride, the handiwork in which he contemplated and recognized himself.

I shall not talk about the difference between conditions of work today and in the past—how today’s work is less fatiguing and of shorter duration, on the one hand, but, on the other, is an aimless, useless, and callous business, tied to a clock, an absurdity profoundly felt and resented by the worker whose labor no longer has anything in common with what was traditionally called work.

This is true today even for the peasantry. The important thing, however, is not that work is in a sense harsher than formerly, but that it calls for different qualities in man. It implies in him an absence, whereas previously it implied a presence. This absence is active, critical, efficient; it engages the whole man and supposes that he is subordinated to its necessity and created for its ends.

Consider the average man as he comes home from his job. Very likely he has spent

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