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What Is A Technological Society? | Dr. Herman Middleton

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Throughout history and throughout the world, there are different kinds of societies: religious societies, ideological (communist, etc.) societies, and so on. Most of us in the post-Christian West live in what is primarily a technological society. Certainly, this technological society may have influences from religious or ideological societies, but at the end of the day, they are societies that are most characterized by their technological dimension. This of course begs the question: What is a “technological society”?

In Jacques Ellul’s classic text The Technological Society, he refers to something he calls “technique” by which he means: “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity” (p. xxv). In Ellul’s understanding, a technological society is a society that places the concept of efficiency at the center of every aspect of life.

At its heart, the technological society believes in science and its handmaid, technology, in a similar way that, for example, a Christian society believes in Jesus Christ and His revelation in the Old and New Testaments. For most of us in the West, science and technology are where we first turn for hope in the face of life’s problems. When there’s something we don’t understand, we turn to science to explain it to us, when we have a problem, we put our hope in science’s technological solutions.

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Because we were born into this technological society, it can be difficult both to see that this is true, and to appreciate the consequences of this truth. A concept was developed about seventy years ago: the technology adoption life cycle. The  purpose of the technology adoption life cycle is to follow the path of a technology as it’s introduced into society: the earliest adopters are known as the “innovators,” followed by “early adopters,” an “early majority,” a “late majority,” and finally the “laggards.”

Today, when a new technology appears, we usually first encounter it in the news somewhere (Elon Musk and Tesla were famous long before most people encountered their first Tesla in the wild). As a new technology goes through the adoption life cycle, we become increasingly comfortable with it. Perhaps at first we have reservations about a given technology, but after a few years, we get used to the idea, we see that others are adopting the technology safely and happily, and eventually we’re ready to take the plunge ourselves.

In this sense, technological adoption is a slippery slope that most of us do not even notice. By the time we finally adopt a new technology, we are under the impression that we have freely chosen to do so. In one sense we have, but in another sense, this process is not without coercion. As René Girard said, “Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.”

Most humans tend to have good natural intuition, a natural sense of what is good and what is bad for us. Sometimes this intuition is wrong, but more often than not, our natural intuitions are correct. It would, for example, be natural to be concerned about a technology such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which creates a physical connection between human brains and computers. The reality is, however, that many people are interested and open to having a computer attached to their brain. This is not because their natural intuition is telling them that it’s a good idea, but because we are all swimming in a technological society that has been advocating for technology since we were born.

If you went back fifty years and asked someone on the street if they thought that it’d be a good idea to connect a computer to their brain, they would have thought you were crazy. How do I know this? I know this because some of those people are still alive, and I have asked them! Ask anyone who was an adult fifty years ago if they think Neuralink is a good idea, and I can more or less guarantee you that nearly every person over the age of seventy has a natural aversion to the idea of attaching a computer to their brain.

“But Herman,” you might say, “That’s just because they don’t understand computers and technology.” Perhaps…if that’s the case, let me challenge you: in the comments section below, please explain to me what it is that someone over the age of seventy needs to know about Neuralink that would convince them that it’s a good idea. I don’t think there’s anything that we actually know about the effects of Neuralink on the human person that they would find convincing.

One of the problems of course is that we simply don’t know the effects of a technology until after the fact. And even after the fact, we tend to focus on the benefits of the technology rather than on its ill side effects. This is because the new technology reshapes the culture in its own image, making it appear that the new technology is a necessity.

As we have become a technological society, the process of technological adoption increasingly includes elements of peer pressure, keeping up with the Joneses, as well as René Girard’s idea of mimesis, all of which diminish our free will and can work against our natural intuition.

Finally, as Jacques Ellul said, in a technological society there is only one essential criterion for the adoption of new technologies: is it efficient? That is: does it work? Does it make my life easier in some way?

What to do? Again, we would do well to look at the wisdom of the Amish approach to technology: they place criteria such as the health of their community and the individual above that of efficiency, and thus often come to different conclusions than most of the modern world.

At the end of the day, each of us must decide what kind of a life we want to live, what kind of people we want to be, what kind of a world we want to live in, what is important to us, and whether or not we want to actually have control over our lives, or if we are happy to simply be reshaped in the image of the new technologies that are foisted upon us daily.

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