dChan
Anonymous ID: fcbd38 Aug. 18, 2024, 8:22 a.m. No.21434779   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>4859

Jacques, Jack and the Technocrats

 

A full decade before Jacques Ellul wrote his groundbreaking work, The Technological Society, C. S. Lewis completed the third book of his Space Trilogy, That Hideous Strength. Since Lewis was called Jack by his family and friends, it is interesting that he and Ellul shared a first name rooted in the name Jacob. But they also shared a prescient sense of where applied science and technology would lead modern societies if human-based values were no longer at the helm.

 

Whereas the first two novels of Lewis’ trilogy involve the prospect of Mars and Venus being colonized by imperialistic scientists, the final novel takes place on Earth, setting the stage for the beginnings of a dystopian society seeded by a group of British technocrats. Lewis was genuinely concerned that other planets, through technological advancements, would be corrupted by adherents of what Lewis knew as Scientism. Arthur C. Clarke, at the time, took great offense to this scenario of corruption; he engaged Lewis in correspondence from 1943 to 1954 (Miller).

 

One interesting feature in the effort toward totalistic control over society, as developed in That Hideous Strength, is the matter of influencing public opinion through the news media. Mark, the insecure protagonist in the story, finds himself drawn into the “inner ring” of the technocratic project; he eventually discerns his role to write stories that support the agenda of the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.).

 

read more…. https://ellul.org/current-drift/jacques-jack-and-the-technocrats/

Anonymous ID: fcbd38 Aug. 18, 2024, 8:37 a.m. No.21434859   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>4899

>>21434779

more….

Dynamic Tension for Pandemic Times

 

One of the great features of Ellul’s writings is his extraordinary ability to keep focused on what is important. It is important, for example, to take account of how readers are going to interpret your writings. It is important that they become engaged in an issue. Constant qualification can baffle the hearer.

 

Ellul’s political and sociological writings tend to leave us with unsolved problems. In the case of propaganda, for example, he points to a need on the part of a liberal government to engage in propaganda to offset seditious ideas from within the state or propaganda from other states seeking conquest over one’s own state. But he recognizes that once a state begins to engage seriously in propaganda, it erodes its own claim to being liberal. In Propaganda, he leaves his readers with a stark understanding of the dilemma without resolving it.

 

I see a parallel with Albert Camus who dealt with the problem of free will and determinism by ranking different certainties. He was certain that he was free. And he was certain that the world of science presented us with a deterministic universe. What was important, then, was to be faithful to what reason presented him and not to deny one or other of these two certainties. He was not going to deny one of his certainties merely because there was an apparent contradiction.

 

As I understand Ellul, he preferred to hold fast to the clash of ideas, leaving the reader to solve a dilemma, rather than presenting a solution that would save the reader the trouble of thinking on her own. That did not mean he did not have a solution. For example, in conversation he approved of what might have been done (but wasn’t done) to stand up to Hitler in the late 1930s. Left wing publications folded after the victory of Franco in Spain, but keeping them alive through subsidies would likely have fostered more anti-Hitler sentiment.

 

continued here… https://ellul.org/current-drift/dynamic-tension-for-pandemic-times/