Saeculum: government, law and culture

Jacques Ellul’s book The Technological Society is often considered to be one of the most important books of the twentieth century. First published in French in 1954, and translated into English in 1964, it is a fascinating, complex, terrifying and profound work.

Ellul’s basic thesis is that technique has come to dominate every aspect of the world, eclipsing the natural and enveloping humans within its domain. “Technique” does not mean machines or technology, although these are the most obvious manifestations of technique. Ellul defines 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”.

Several elements of this complex definition are worth unpacking. Technique is about the application of rational methods to achieve efficiency. For Ellul, the goal of technique is the quest for efficiency. That quest is not confined to technology or manufacturing, but has been extended to every domain of life, including employment relationships, agriculture and government administration.

Further, technique is fundamentally about method, or means. One of the most fascinating statements in the book is this: “Our civilization is first and foremost a civilization of means; in the reality of modern life, the means, it would seem, are more important than the ends”. Having lost any sense of the divine or any ultimate telos, we no longer recognise any ultimate ends or values, and so our civilisation no longer has any direction. We are going nowhere faster and ever more efficiently.

For instance, farmers pursue greater efficiency in agriculture to extract ever more production from the ground. But why? So that they can purchase more land on which to grow more crops more efficiently. The means – efficient production – has swallowed up the ends.

Technique recognises no external constraints and creates a completely independent technical morality. Earlier generations asked of a particular technological development: “is this righteous, good and just?” Technique recognises only efficiency as the supreme value.

Technique frames every problem in a particular way, namely as a technical one requiring a technical solution. However, technical solutions always carry significant side effects which must be met by further technical developments and government regulation.

For Ellul, technique is a totalising force that subsumes everything. Technique has its own logic: “Everything which is technique is necessarily used as soon as it is available without distinction of good or evil. This is the principal law of our age”. Technique is an autonomous force which extends to every area of life. Humans become recast as instruments to our means rather than ends in themselves. Rather than technique serving humans, humans serve technique.

Technique necessarily requires state intervention, because only the government has the resources necessary to adopt and enforce the use of techniques throughout society. Indeed, Ellul considers technique to be a more fundamental force than ideology or politics and indeed bends politics and government to its will. Political motivations do not dominate technical phenomena, but rather the reverse.

Some criticisms

I have a few critiques of Ellul’s account. The first is his conflation of means and ends. It seems to me that Ellul’s account is perceptive, but overstated. One reason is that Ellul seemingly has little conception of natural law or moral order. Natural law recognises important ends or self-evident goods which humans can grasp through the use of reason, including life, health, knowledge, play, beauty, friendship, sociability, practical reasonableness, and religion. These ends, it seems to me, are inherent to human nature and have a habit of reasserting themselves, notwithstanding the dominance of techniques. “Nature” always has its revenge. This, in my view, is one of the key reasons why Ellul’s predictions of the future have not come true.

Secondly, life is more inefficient than Ellul gives credit for. Absolute efficiency is not attainable in any field of human endeavour. Indeed, many areas of life have elements of inefficiency built in by design. This is especially true of government and government administration, which include (for example) inefficient mechanisms of review in order to serve other ends which are considered worth preserving (such as executive accountability).

Ellul considered that parliamentary government was doomed because of its inefficiency. But of course, that prediction has not eventuated: parliamentary government has proven to be persistent, despite its many inefficiencies. Anyone who has had the misfortune of working in a government department would struggle to characterise government as having “absolute efficiency” or as being staffed by technical experts.

Ellul significantly downplays the role of ideology and political differences. This is an important insight. And yet if it is true that (as Ellul writes) “politics assigns the goal; but the technician dictates the means to the last dot”, then there remains a significant role for political differences in determining the ends which technique implements. 

An insight into Covid?

All this is simply to say that technique is, in my view, a less totalising concept than Ellul’s account suggests. Nevertheless, Ellul offers us a profound analysis of modern civilisation. I conclude by offering three observations drawn from Ellul’s account, which include some reflections on Covid.

The first is that, as a result of the dominance of technique, in politics the similarities are greater than the differences. It is often thought that progressive and conservative wings represent profoundly different approaches to government and politics. And there are of course differences. But Ellul would argue that technique is a more dominant force which subsumes political differences.

Consider the responses adopted by Australian governments during the Covid years. During Covid, the Coalition held office in three States (New South Wales, South Australia and Tasmania), and the Labour Party held office in the remaining States and Territories, and also won elections in New South Wales and South Australia in 2022 and 2023 respectively.

There were differences in the responses adopted by governments to Covid regulation. Perhaps, as a generalisation, the regulations imposed by Coalition governments were slightly less restrictive than those imposed by Labor governments. 

But these were differences of degree rather than fundamentally different approaches. All governments adopted some variant of lockdowns, “social” distancing, mask requirements, and mandatory vaccination. The differences related to things such as the length of the lockdown, which sectors were required to be vaccinated, and so on. In other words, the responses adopted to deal with Covid were fundamentally of a piece, and it made little difference what side of politics the government was on.

A second observation relates to the obsession with means in our world. One of the infuriating aspects of modern university life is the obsession with process. If I wish to travel to attend a conference, I cannot simply book a flight and claim reimbursement. I need to use the official travel management system. The system (which, of course, constantly changes) is difficult to navigate and far more time-consuming than simply booking the flight.

Why do I have to do this? Because the system exists. Whether it’s useful or not, whether it saves time or not, is totally irrelevant. The system does not exist as a means to the end of efficiently and painlessly booking travel, but as an end in itself. A trivial example, but it illustrates Ellul’s analysis.

The worldwide response to Covid provides a more significant illustration. In the world of technique, Covid was simply a technical problem to be solved by means of a technical solution (especially vaccination). Once it has been developed, the means becomes more important than the ends, and the ends become subservient to the means.

For example, even now people are encouraged to, and do, wear masks, ostensibly for the purpose of stopping the spread of Covid, and masks are still mandatory in hospitals. In 2023 the Cochrane Institute, a mainstream medical research institute, published a study of whether physical measures such as hand-washing or wearing masks stop or slow the spread of respiratory viruses. The authors concluded that “We are uncertain whether wearing masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses”.

That is, we are encouraged, urged and even required to employ a technical means to stop the spread of Covid, long after it has been shown to be ineffective. Ellul was right: our civilization is a civilization of means and the means are more important than the ends.

Finally, Ellul gives us a window into our modern world. We have lived through some of the most severe peacetime restrictions on human rights in living memory. One question that has frequently occurred to me is why there was so little opposition to the imposition of draconian (and often ineffective) restrictions by governments, and why populations were so willing to accept those restrictions.

There is no shortage of conspiracy theories about what was really going on. And there are cynical explanations to the effect that “Covid was really about control.” But Ellul points to a simpler explanation: the response to Covid was driven by technique.

As noted, technique frames the issues in a particular way: Covid was simply a technical problem to be solved by technical means. That technical solution (especially vaccination) was developed by the private sector. It required state power to enforce compliance throughout society. The technical solution carries significant side effects which must be addressed by further technical developments.

As soon as the technique became available, it must necessarily be used without distinction of good or evil. And if Covid is simply a problem to be solved through technical means, then it must be enforced throughout society in order to be effective.

This is not a plot or conspiracy – simply the logic of impersonal, totalising technique.