Dialogues
Seven Voices
Society

Humane Village Journal
Volume 2, 1995

Compiled by
Alexander Manu

There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.

Marshal McLuhan

Society - Advance or Decline

Jacques Ellul •

Ours is a progressively technical civilisation; the ever expanding and irreversible rule of technique is extended to all domains of life. It is a civilisation committed to the quest for continually improved means to carelessly examined ends. Technique transforms means into ends. "Know how" takes on ultimate value. Every part of our technical civilisation responds to the social needs generated by technique itself. Progress then consists in progressive de-humanisation, a pointless and self defeating submission to technique.

Thomas Berry •

It is all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story. Our traditional story of the universe sustained us for a long period of time It shaped our emotional attitudes, provided us with life purposes, and energised action. It consecrated suffering and integrated knowledge We awoke in the morning and knew where we were. We could answer the questions of our children. We could identify crime punish transgressors. Everything was taken care of because the story was there. It did not necessarily make people good, nor did it take away the pains and stupidities of life or make for unfailing warmth in human association. It did provide a context in which life could function in a meaningful manner.

Christopher Lasch •

Our growing dependence on technologies no one seems to understand or control has given rise to feelings of powerlessness and victimisation. We find it more and more difficult to achieve a sense of continuity, permanence, or connection with the world around us. Relationships with others are notably fragile; goods are made to be used up and discarded; reality is experienced as an unstable

environment of flickering images. Everything conspires to encourage escapist solutions to the psychological problems of dependence, separation, and individuation, and to discourage the moral realism that makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom.

Jacques Ellul •

Admittedly, the machine has enriched man as it has changed him. The machine's senses and organs have multiplied the powers of human senses and organs, enabling man to penetrate a new milieu and revealing to him unknown sights, liberties, and servitudes. He has been liberated little by little from physical constraints, but he is all the more the slave of abstract ones. He acts through intermediaries and consequently has lost contact with reality...He is acquainted only with the machine. His capacity to become a mechanic has replaced his knowledge of his material; this development has occasioned profound mental and psychic transformations which cannot yet be assessed.

Thomas Berry •

We have before us the question not simply of physical survival, but of survival in a human mode of being, survival and development into intelligent, affectionate, imaginative persons thoroughly enjoying the universe about us, living in profound communion with one another and with some significant capacities to express ourselves in our literature and creative arts. It is a question of interior richness within our own personalities, of shared understanding with others, and of a concern that reaches out to all the living and nonliving beings of the earth, and in some manner out to the distant stars in the heavens.

Christopher Lasch •

Even our deeply rooted, misplaced faith in technology does not fully describe modern culture. What remains to be explained is how an exaggerated respect for technology can coexist with a revival of ancient superstitions, a belief in reincarnation, a growing fascination with the occult, and the bizarre forms of spirituality associated with the New Age movement. A widespread revolt against reason is as much a feature of our world as our faith in science and technology. Archaic myths and superstitions have reappeared in the very heart of the most modern, scientifically enlightened, and progressive nations in the world. The coexistence of advanced technology and primitive spirituality suggests that both are rooted in social conditions that make it increasingly difficult for people to accept the reality of sorrow, loss, aging, and death&emdash;to live with limits, in short. The anxieties peculiar to the modern world seem to have intensified old mechanisms of denial.

Thomas Berry •

We now control forces that once controlled us, or, more precisely, the earth process that formerly administered the earth directly is now accomplishing this task in and through the human as its conscious agent. Once a creature of earthly providence, we are now extensively in control of this providence. We now have extensive power over the ultimate destinies of the planet, the power of life and death over many of its life systems.

For the first time we can intervene directly in the genetic process. We can dissolve the ozone layer that encircles the earth and let the cosmic radiation bring about distortions in the life process. We can destroy the complex patterns of life in the seas and make the rivers uninhabitable. And we could go on with our description of human power, even over the chemical constitution and the very topography of the planet.

Jacques Ellul •

In discussing the effects of technique on man, we must avoid overhasty or superficial generalisations. We must not become too agitated or hold that man's nature is cut into bits and pieces. We must be wary of using a mystical vocabulary. We do not understand very well what man is, and nothing we know would justify us in declaring his character sacred or some part of it inalienable and purely personal or in asserting that he has supreme value. The values may be there, but they elude us as soon as we try to define them or to make precise their nature and location.

Christopher Lasch •

Modern technology has achieved so many dazzling breakthroughs that we now find it difficult to envision any limits to collective human ingenuity. The secret of life itself is within our grasp, according to those who predict a revolution in genetics&emdash;in which case it may be possible for us to keep ourselves alive indefinitely or at least to extend the human life span to unheard-of lengths. This impending triumph over old age and death, we are told, is the ultimate tribute to humanity's power to master its surroundings.

Jacques Ellul •

...Modern man himself seeks to give a technical form to his leisure time and rebels against entering the sphere of human creativity. Since his youth, and in his vocational activity, he has been unrelentingly "adapted." If the individual must be regimented into intelligent use of his free time, if he is obliged to spend this time learning how to be "human," of what value are vacations and leisure? Where in this new framework of propaganda is there room for the transcendingly important elements of personality formation, choice, personal experience, and spontaneous participation in creative activity? Who or what is to be his guide in the collective, educative employment of leisure? The employer? the administration? the labour unions? To put the question at all is to recognise its fatuity. What if man's leisure allowed him to judge his own work? What if, in becoming "cultivated" or, even better, "a real person," he should rebel against his stupid, mechanised job? Or find his four hours of obligatory servitude an intolerable abasement? It is unimaginable.

We conclude that the education of the human personality cannot but conform to the postulates of technical civilisation. Man's leisure must reinforce the other elements of this culture so there will be no risk of producing poorly adjusted persons.

Hannah Arendt •

The ideals of homo faber, the fabricator of the world, which are permanence, stability, and durability, have been sacrificed to abundance, the ideal of the animal labourans. We live in a labourers' society because only labouring, with its inherent fertility, is likely to bring about abundance; and we have changed work into labouring, broken it up into its minute particles until it has lent itself to division where the common denominator of the simplest performance is reached in order to eliminate from the path of human labour power-which is part of nature and perhaps even the most powerful of all natural forces-the obstacle of the "unnatural" and purely worldly stability of the human artifice.

Christopher Lasch •

The international dimensions of the current malaise indicate that it cannot be attributed to an American failure of nerve. Bourgeois society seems everywhere to have used up its store of constructive ideas. It has lost both the capacity and the will to confront the difficulties that threaten to overwhelm it. The political crisis of capitalism reflects a general crisis of western culture, which reveals itself in a pervasive despair of understanding the course of modern history or of subjecting it to rational direction.

Liberalism, the political theory of the ascendant bourgeoisie, long ago lost the capacity to explain events in the world of the welfare state and the multinational corporation; nothing has taken its place. Politically bankrupt, liberalism is intellectually bankrupt as well. The sciences it has fostered, once confident of their ability to dispel the darkness of the ages, no longer provide satisfactory explanations of the phenomena they profess to elucidate.

Hannah Arendt •

In our need for more and more rapid replacement of the worldly things around us, we can no longer afford to use them, to respect and preserve their inherent durability; we must consume, devour, as it were, our houses and furniture and cars as though they were the "good things" of nature which spoil uselessly if they are not drawn swiftly into the never-ending cycle of man's metabolism with nature. It is as though we had forced open the distinguishing boundaries which protected the world, the human artifice, from nature, the biological process which goes on in its very midst as well as the natural cyclical processes which surround it, delivering and abandoning to them the always threatened stability of a human world.

Willard Gaylin •

We live in a throw away world. Everything is to be consumed, nothing saved. But in the process of doing this, we have paid an enormous price. We have changed our normal work into labour. No one starts and finishes anything anymore. We do little pieces, small precise actions to produce things of no real value. We live in a world of paper towels and paper napkins, of built in obsolescence. In the process, we have managed to destroy our pride in products and our joy in work.

Christopher Lasch •

The mass production of luxury items now extends aristocratic habits to the masses. The apparatus of mass promotion attacks ideologies based on the postponement of gratification; it allies itself with sexual "revolution"; it sides or seems to side with women against male oppression and with the young against the authority of their elders...It emancipates women and children from patriarchal authority, however, only to subject them to the new paternalism of the advertising industry, the industrial corporation, and the state.

Hannah Arendt •

Since mankind as a whole is still very far from having reached the limit of abundance, the mode in which society may overcome this natural limitation of its own fertility can be perceived only tentatively and on a national scale. There, the solution seems to be simple enough. It consists in treating all use objects as though they were consumer goods, so that a chair or a table is now consumed as rapidly as a dress and a dress used up almost as quickly as food. This mode of intercourse with the things of the world, moreover, is perfectly adequate to the way they are produced. The industrial revolution has replaced all workmanship with labour, and the result has been that the things of the modern world have become labour products whose natural fate is to be consumed, instead of work products which are there to be used. Just as tools and instruments, though originating from work, were always employed in labour processes as well, so the division of labour, entirely appropriate and attuned to the labouring process, has become one of the chief characteristics of modern work processes, that is, of the fabrication and production of use objects.

Christopher Lasch •

In a simpler time, advertising merely called attention to the product and extolled its advantages. Now it manufactures a product of its own: the consumer, perpetually unsatisfied, restless, anxious, and bored. Advertising serves not so much to advertise products as to promote consumption as a way of life. It "educates" the masses into an unappeasable appetite not only for goods but for new experiences and personal fulfilment. It upholds consumption as the answer to the age-old discontents of loneliness, sickness, weariness, lack of sexual satisfaction; at the same time it creates new forms of discontent peculiar to the modern age. It plays seductively on the malaise of industrial civilisation. Is your job boring and meaningless? Does it leave you with feelings of futility and fatigue? Is your life empty? Consumption promises to fill the aching void; hence the attempt to surround commodities with an aura of romance; with allusions to exotic places and vivid experiences; and with images of female breasts from which all blessings flow.

Hannah Arendt •

Although use and consumption, like work and labour, are not the same, they seem to overlap in certain important areas to such an extent that the unanimous agreement with which both public and learned opinion have identified these two different matters seems well justified. Use, indeed, does contain an element of consumption, in so far as the wearing-out process comes about through the contact of the use object with the living consuming organism, and the closer the contact between the body and the used thing, the more plausible will an equation of the two appear. If one construes, for instance, the nature of use objects in terms of wearing apparel, he will be tempted to conclude that use is nothing but consumption at a slower pace. Against this stands what we mentioned before, that destruction, though unavoidable, is incidental to use but inherent in consumption. What distinguishes the most flimsy pair of shoes from mere consumer goods is that they do not spoil if I do not wear them, that they have an independence of their own, however modest, which enables them to survive even for a considerable time the changing moods of their owner. Used or unused, they will remain in the world for a certain while unless they are wantonly destroyed.

Christopher Lasch •

The demands of the mass-consumption economy have made the work ethic obsolete even for workers. Formerly the guardians of public health and morality urged the worker to labour as a moral obligation; now they teach him to labour so that he can partake of the fruits of consumption.

Jacques Ellul •

Propagandistic manipulations take place under all forms of government and in all walks of life. It may be said that we live in a universe which is psychologically subversive. Even so, modern man has no clear conception of the extent of the phenomenon. Experience cannot reveal it to him; he would have to be outside looking in...Some effects of propaganda, however, are already clear.

1. The critical faculty has been suppressed by the creation of collective passions. The well-known phenomenon of "reciprocal suggestion" has made collective passion a very different force from individual passion...The suppression of the critical faculty-man's growing incapacity to distinguish truth from falsehood, the individual from the collectivity, action from talk, reality from statistics, and so on-is one of the most evident results of the technical power of propaganda. Human intelligence cannot resist propaganda's manipulation of its subconscious.

2. A good social conscience appears with the suppression of the critical faculty. Technique provides justification to everybody and gives all men the conviction that their actions are just, good and in the spirit of truth. This conviction is the stronger because it is collectively shared.

Christopher Lasch •

The propaganda of commodities serves a double function. First, it upholds consumption as an alternative to protest or rebellion...The tired worker, instead of attempting to change the conditions of his work, seeks renewal in brightening his immediate surroundings with new goods and services.

Hannah Arendt •

The universal demand for happiness and the widespread unhappiness in our society (and these are but two sides of the same coin) are among the most persuasive signs that we have begun to live in a labour society which lacks enough labouring to keep it contented. For only the animal labourans, and neither the craftsman nor the man of action, has ever demanded to be "happy" or thought that mortal men could be happy.

Jacques Ellul •

Two categories of propaganda must be distinguished. The first strives to create a permanent disposition in its objects and constantly needs to be reinforced. Its goal is to make the masses "available," by working spells upon them and exercising a kind of fascination. The second category involves the creation of a sort of temporary impulsiveness in its objects. It operates by simple pressure and is often contradictory (since contradictory mass movements are sometimes necessary)...A third consequence of technical propaganda manipulations is the creation of an abstract universe, representing a complete reconstruction of reality in the minds of its citizens. The new universe is a verbal universe, to use the excellent phrase of Armand Robin, our keenest student of radio propaganda. Men fashion images of things, events, and people which may not reflect reality but which are truer than reality. These images are based on news items which, as is the case in much of the world, are "faked." Their purpose is to form rather than to inform.

Theodore Roszak •

If we wish to reclaim the true art of thinking from this crippling confusion, we must begin by cutting our way through an undergrowth of advertising hype, media fictions, and commercial propaganda. But having done that much to clear the ground, we come upon the hard philosophical core of the cult of information, which is as much the creation of the academies and laboratories as of the marketplace. Gifted minds in the field of computer science have joined the cult for reasons of power and profit. Because the hucksters have enlisted so many scientists in their cause, there are tough intellectual questions as well as political interests that need to be examined if we are to understand the full influence of the computer in our society. In a very real sense, the powers and purposes of the human mind are at issue. If the educators are also finally swept into the cult, we may see the rising generation of students seriously hampered in its capacity to think through the social and ethical questions that confront us as we pass through the latest stage of the ongoing industrial revolution.

Jacques Ellul •

Television, because of its power of fascination and its capacity of visual and auditory penetration, is probably the technical instrument which is most destructive of personality and of human relations. What man seeks is evidently an absolute distraction, a total obliviousness of himself and his problems, and the simultaneous fusion of his consciousness with an omnipresent technical diversion. In diversion we are at a stage of development in which technique answers the needs of men in a technical society, but a society in which they are still free to use or not use the available technical means. "If you wish to escape, "says technique, "You are welcome to try."

Christopher Lasch •

Such is the view from the top&emdash;the despairing view of the future now widely shared by those who govern society, shape public opinion, and supervise the scientific knowledge on which society depends. If on the other hand we ask what the common man thinks about his prospects, we find plenty of evidence to confirm the impression that the modern world faces the future without hope, but we also find another side of the picture, which qualifies that impression and suggests that western civilisation may yet generate the moral resources to transcend its present crisis.

Thomas Berry •

A radical reassessment of the human situation is needed, especially concerning those basic values that give to life some satisfactory meaning. We need something that will supply in our times what was supplied formerly by our traditional religious story. If we are to achieve this purpose, we must begin where everything begins in human affairs&emdash;with the basic story, our narrative of how things came to be, how they came to be as they are, and how the future can be given some satisfying direction. We need a story that will educate us, a story that will heal, guide, and discipline us.

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