Jacques Ellul- Prophetic or Apocalyptic Theologian of Technology?*

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228 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER most current technological innovations, with "knowledge" of all sorts--not just the knowledge of "the physicists, the chemists and the engineers"--driving the modern economy. 25 The forces behind these changes are likely; as Emmanuel Mesthene points out, economic interests pushing toward improvements. 28 The changing forms of technological advance, however, remain aligned with Frederick W. Taylor's principle: "one best way to do a job."2 7 What is different is found in the source of the innovation. As Kenneth E. Boulding labels it, "folk technology" was replaced by "science-based technology" starting in about 1850. 28 The difference in how the source can be characterized before and after is captured in Francis Bacon's aphorism: The study of nature with a view to works is engaged in by the mechanic, the mathematician, the physician, the alchemist, and the magician; but by all (as things now are) with slight endeavor and scanty success.' The "after" picture entailed in Bacon's obvious hope is powerfully articulated by Weisner in Where Science and Politics Meet: I am intrigued by the analogy between biological evolution and the present human enterprise. There are two special ways in which the similarities show up: in the evolving and progressively more sophisticated technology that is applied to the solution of problems and in the growing size and complexity of the human organizations which are being created to deal with business and social problems. In these man has found a speedy substitute for continued biological evolution to aid him in the hardships of the environment.' 0 Shift there has been. The change is not in the meaning of technology, but in the sources of technological growth. This shift does not necessarily mean that all of the negative emergent qualities Ellul fears inevitably must arise. Technology has always been able to cause social change. Long ago George Unwin 25.Peter F. Drucker, The Age ofDiscontinuity: Guidelines to Our Changing Society (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1978), 265-286. 26. Technological Change (New York: New American Library, 1970). 27. David E. Whisnant, "The Craftsman: Some Reflections on Work in America," Technology as Institutionally Related to Human Values, ed. Philip C. Ritterbrush (Washington D.C.: Acropolis Books, L.T.D., 1974), 111. 28. Ecodynamics: A New Theory of Social Evolution (Beverly Hills and London: Sage Publications, 1978), 29. 29. The New Organon, I.v. 30. Where Science and Politics Meet, 23.
ELLUL-THEOLOGIAN OF TECHNOLOGY recognized "No Act of Parliament could permanently restrain the forces making for a fundamental redistribution of economic functions, and for the establishment of a freer, but more complex and more divergent, system of social relations. "31 Indeed, Karl W. Deutsch, who sees society as commencing from a "group of individuals" united by a division of labor, saw that technology can and does affect social structure, but that social patterns, such as "chattel slavery" can, in reverse, affect the growth of technology. 32 What the newer pace of innovation in technology means is that problems can be generated more rapidly than societies are currently structured to evaluate and control them, thus permitting those interests supporting change for economic or other reasons an enhanced chance to innovate before social or political assessments can be made. In contemporary context, societies can through legislation decide how much study of unanticipated consequences must be pursued before freeing, say, drug technology. Pressures for cures (and profits) will weigh against any slowdown in innovation, but counter-arguments, also heavily structured froni -a sciencetechnology base, may be important enough for governments and publics to respond with constraints. Wiesner's evolutionary analogy can be expanded with "political selection" introduced as a process corresponding with evolution's "natural selection." "Technical imperatives," as noted by David Nobel, "define only what is possible, not what is necessary; what can be done, not what must be done. The latter decisions are social in nature." 33 The problem is in the need for better recognition of poor social-political adaptation rather than too much technological capacity. The politics of science and technology have become subjects of research, especially in the fields of science policy and technology assessment. The relations between growth and constraint by public policy are subject to research, but only if one avoids the generality of Ellul's level of analysis. Governments not only can limit the development and applications of particular technologies, they can stimulate 31. Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904), 140. 32. Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1953), 29-30. 33. Quoted from America by Design (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977) by Colin Norman, The God that Limps: Science and Technology in the Eighties (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981), 25. 229
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Jacques Ellul- Prophetic or Apocalyptic Theologian of Technology?*

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