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Frank O’Hara, “Nocturne”

Is it April 30 already? My goodness, I’d hoped to post more poems during the month, but time slips away. Here is one more, anyway.

I’ve always struggled a bit with Frank O’Hara; whenever I read through a collection of his, I find myself moving rapidly through the pages, the poems themselves running together (and my eyes glazing over a bit) as if I were flipping through someone else’s bedside dream journal. It has only been relatively recently that I have tried to train myself to read him more deliberately, one poem at a time, to see what lies behind the apparently unstructured work.

For example, flipping through his collected poems the other day, I came across this one. The first quick read brought me to a full stop and demanded several rereads, and I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind since. The poem reminds me of my first few decades, that sense of misplaced orientation (“It’s the architect’s fault”) provoking distance from other people – but which was frankly more of an excuse for certain attitudes and behaviors than their cause. You have no telephone, and live so far away.

Nocturne

There’s nothing worse
than feeling bad and not
being able to tell you.
Not because you’d kill me
or it would kill you, or
we don’t love each other.
It’s space. The sky is grey
and clear, with pink and
blue shadows under each cloud.
A tiny airliner drops its
specks over the U N Building.
My eyes, like millions of
glassy squares, merely reflect.
Everything sees through me,
in the daytime I’m too hot
and at night I freeze; I’m
built the wrong way for the
river and a mild gale would
break every fiber in me.
Why don’t I go east and west
instead of north and south?
It’s the architect’s fault.
And in a few years I’ll be
useless, not even an office
building. Because you have
no telephone, and live so
far away; the Pepsi-Cola sign,
the seagulls and the noise.

Frank O’Hara

William Stafford, “Bess”

I pulled down a copy of William Stafford’s The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems and noticed a dog-eared page in the middle of the book. It’s not like me to turn over a sheet like that, and in this case it looked like I had twisted two pages downward, as if emphatically.

I don’t recall reading this poem, “Bess,” let alone marking it, but based on the subject, I can only assume I must have read it in the throes of my stage 4 diagnosis and treatments. Depending on which day I read the poem, I might have marked it out of recognition, aspiration, irony, or disdain — I don’t remember with which emotion I reacted, but any of them would have been honest.

Bess

Ours are the streets where Bess first met her
cancer. She went to work every day past the
secure houses. At her job in the library
she arranged better and better flowers, and when
students asked for books her hand went out
to help. In the last year of her life
she had to keep her friends from knowing
how happy they were. She listened while they
complained about food or work or the weather.
And the great national events danced
their grotesque, fake importance. Always

Pain moved where she moved. She walked
ahead; it came. She hid; it found her.
No one ever served another so truly;
no enemy ever meant so strong a hate.
It was almost as if there was no room
left for her on earth. But she remembered
where joy used to live. She straightened its flowers;
she did not weep when she passed its houses;
and when finally she pulled into a tiny corner
and slipped from pain, her hand opened
again, and the streets opened, and she wished all well.

William Stafford

Donald Justice, “On the Night of the Departure by Bus”

It is April, which has been designated (by somebody, somewhere) Poetry Month, and given the importance of such Official Pronouncements, I find myself drawn to thinking, again, about poetry.

Now, my relationship with reading poetry is complicated, in the sense that one might describe a relationship with a great-aunt as “complicated” if one only encounters that particular great-aunt once every year or three, even though one always enjoys those encounters because said great-aunt is so insightful and wickedly funny. But then one also hears murmured stories about her abrasive and alcoholic personality, and how she pushes (literally) everyone away whenever she gets in “one of her moods,” and those are the stories one recalls whenever one thinks that maybe one should try to get together with the proverbial great-aunt before time runs out for all concerned.

I wondered over coffee if it might be a useful experiment, during this Poetry Month, to pull a volume of poetry off the shelf, not every day but maybe a couple times a week, and share it with my Breathlessly Expectant Readers, along with (if any) my own thoughts on the selected poem.

But don’t worry, I don’t think that this will be as dull and useless as it sounds, so no need to turn off the email updates or delete my RSS feed just yet. (There’s more Ellul coming, after all.)

For one thing, I’m not going to try to explain poems, and any thoughts I actually do share, I promise, will be scant. I think that reading poetry is similar to reading Kierkegaard, in that the purpose is not to figure out what the author is saying, but what the work is saying — to me, specifically. And even I recognize the limits of interest anyone else might have in my specific emotional reactions.

This morning, the first volume that grabbed my eye was Donald Justice’s Collected Poems, and that’s because it is always the closest in proximity, the volume with which I am most familiar, since I read through it every couple of years. I discovered Justice in a college class, and since even then I was already old beyond my years, I found myself drawn to his elegiac, but plain-spoken, voice. I mean, I was reading “Men at Forty” and only pretending to roll my eyes when I was barely in my twenties.

Which is a perfect lead-in to the following poem, which I must have read many times but don’t recall, and to which I randomly opened the book this morning.

On the Night of the Departure by Bus

Tell me if you were not happy in those days.
You were not yet twenty-five,
And you had not yet abandoned the guitar.

I swore to you by your nakedness that you were a guitar.
You swore to me by your nakedness that you were a guitar.
The moon swore to us both by your nakedness that you
had abandoned yourself completely.

Who would not go on living?

The typewriter will be glad to have become the poem,
The guitar to have been your body,
I to have had the luck to envy the sole of your shoe in the dead of winter.

A passenger has lost his claim-check,
The brunette her barette,
And I – I think that there are moths eating holes in my pockets,
That my place in line is evaporating,
That the moon is not the moon and the bus is not the bus.

What is the word for goodbye?

Donald Justice

Oh, misty-eyed Donald. Setting aside the unfortunate last line (which I think should have been left off, but let’s face it, Donald liked that heavy-handed sort of thing), this poem jarred me this morning, the jar of recognition of a conflicting set of emotions in myself. A sense of loss for youthful dreams and artistic ambitions, and the understanding that, with age, our pathways first narrow and then vanish completely. The poem brings forth my outright grief for those things I wanted to achieve, but didn’t — and yet, also, for me anyway, a profound sense of gratitude.

It’s true that most of us will not achieve all that we dreamed, and yet — and yet — aren’t we lucky to have known that desire? To still know that desire?

Who would not go on living?

I would, until I cannot.

Ellul on the Unreal Life

This entry is part 24 of 24 in the series Presence in the Modern World

Continuing, after an extended break, my read-through of Ellul’s Presence in the Modern World; this will be the first of likely several posts here discussing Chapter Four, simply (and somewhat misleadingly) titled “Communications.”

As citizens of the modern world, on any given day we are inundated with thousands of bits of stories and information and data — what we (and Ellul) might call “news” that we “learn” (in his day, of course, he spoke of “newspapers, TV, and radio”). This data is all very sensational, and demands our attention, unlike the humdrum routine of our actual daily experiences.

It is these phenomena — which we only hear about, learn about, see from a distance — that feel “real” to us more than the things we actually do, the people we encounter, what we actually experience. “[M]odern people, caught up in this flood of images that they cannot verify, are in no way capable of mastering them, because these images lack all coordination,” Ellul writes. “One item of news follows another without pause. An issue appears and then disappears … It is replaced by other issues and is forgotten.”

Since our attention is consumed entirely by the appearances of these phenomena, “drawn to facts that have no deep importance and constitute trivial news items … people focus their passions” on “politics, the military, the economy, the democratic system” — all of these things which we become convinced matter, although they only exist as external appearances that we do not actually experience, over which we have no control, which we can only accept as true without any sort of personal verification.

But none of us can exist only as an “unmoving eye” receiving appearances — we require some sort of coherence. And so “the more necessary it becomes to simplify … to provide the explanation and connection for all this trivial news.” These explanations, Ellul points out, “must be at the level of the ‘average reader'” — a bar which is always being lowered.

And so comes the “explanatory myth” that establishes the connections between all of the phenomena with which we are pelted. Ellul says that we usually associate an explanatory myth with an authoritarian regime — he references such explanatory myths for communism (the myth of anti-revolutionary saboteurs, the myth of Soviet-era Moscow control over other countries’ internal affairs) and fascism (the myth that Jews were enemies of the people).

But, Ellul insists, such over-arching explanatory myths are not limited to dictatorships; the explanatory myth is “an essential part of every contemporary kind of politics … It becomes the intellectual key for opening all secrets, interpreting every fact, and recognizing oneself in the whirl of phenomena.”

In our own time, we see some of this in contemporary tribalism: the explanatory myth accepted by a viewer of MSNBC versus those accepted by a viewer of Fox News; the explanatory myth of the NPR listener versus that of the Epoch Times reader.

I’m not trying to assert equivalency between these viewpoints, but only to show that they are, in fact, viewpoints. I accept that the New York Times front page is true, even though I have no way to personally verify anything reported on it. You assert, also without any evidence, that it is false.

Essentially, we have removed our own experience from what we believe to be important. We believe that important things are happening, we believe we know why they are happening, we believe these things somehow have meaning to us — even though they are not happening to us! We are not important, our personal experiences are not important: only the phenomena are important, and the myth that explains those phenomena.

As a result of our society’s requirement of belief in an explanatory myth, we are, Ellul said 85 years ago, completely separated from reality: “the major fact of our time is a kind of unconscious but widely shared refusal to grasp the real situation that the world reveals.”

The “real situation,” unchanged after so many years except for becoming, so to speak, more real, is that we are not individuals, but an audience; not agents, but consumers; not active participants, but data points to be sold and bought.

It’s not as bad as it sounds when you’re actually living in it. As Ellul writes, “This enables everyone to avoid the trouble of thinking for themselves, the worry of doubt, the questioning, the uncertainty of understanding, and the torture of a bad conscience. What prodigious savings of time and means, which can be put usefully to work manufacturing more missiles!”

How did this happen? How did we come to live inside such a “complete unreality” where our conscience is clear, where all our questions can be answered, where everything can be explained by the “countless facts and theories” in which we choose (are required) to believe? And what is the role of the thinking Christian living within this “permanent … realistic dream”?

Ellul on Being Alive

This entry is part 23 of 24 in the series Presence in the Modern World

By this point in our lengthy reading of Chapter 3 of Presence in the Modern World, perhaps you find yourself asking (as I do): So, uhhhh, what exactly is it Ellul thinks I’m supposed to be doing here, like, day to day?

That’s what we always look for – a plan, a process, a roadmap to success. Yet all this time, Ellul has continued to insist that there is no plan, other than God’s, and in God’s plan there is no call to action or arms for us to follow.

We are not supposed to be doing anything; we are supposed to be.

Our world, Ellul writes, “is completely oriented toward action. Everything is expressed in actions, nothing is finer than action, and we seek slogans, programs, means of action. Our world is in the process of losing its life because of action.”

Remember, the world’s will always leads to suicide, and it is dragging everyone with it by grinding their individualities down into a mechanical uniformity. In the modern world, humans become a mass, lifestyles are standardized, attention spans segmented by algorithms. People forget themselves as they are swept away into a life of doing, acting, consuming, producing.

“People who spend their time in action,” Ellul writes, “cease in this way even to live. People at the steering wheels of their cars … have the sensation of living through speed, acting, and ‘gaining’ time. But a mental stupor overtakes them, and they become increasingly stupid, a machine operating a machine. They have reflexes and sensations but no judgment or awareness. They have lost their souls in the perfect whir of their engine.”

That was written 80 years ago. It’s 2024; forget the car driving analogy and think instead about the phone in your hand, or the computer on your desk, or, most likely, both. Talk about increasingly stupid! We’re always doing something on our phones, doing something on our computers.

But if Christians are called to be the presence of the end in the modern world, then we have to free ourselves from the world’s demand for doing. We have to, Ellul says emphatically, refuse “the action that the world has proposed to us.”

Just as they did in Ellul’s time, “Christians” today come together to choose action, to decide whether they will march or vote or organize or fight, for Progress or political power or, at the very least, to punish and pulverize their “enemies.” Sometimes these “Christians” still meet in churches, but church is so often now beside the point that they are more likely to connect and rage in subreddits, or Twitch streams, or Twitter threads, or political rallies.

We are all so “imbued with the fundamental doctrines of the world” that we have no choice but to act, right? We must act, and now! People are going to destroy our way of life, or something. If we don’t act, who will?!?

“We have lost the meaning of true action that is the evidence of a deep life,” Ellul writes, “action that comes from the heart, that is the product of faith and not of myth, propaganda, and Mammon! It is a matter of living, not of doing, and that is the revolutionary attitude in this world … We must take seriously the spiritual powers that are enclosed within the fact of being spiritually alive.”

And being alive, for Ellul, is “the complete situation of human beings placed before God.” The world wants all of us to forget that we are unique individuals in relationship with a living God. The world causes this forgetfulness with demands that we orient ourselves toward action, with means improperly separate from ends, with consumerism and ideologies and philosophies that distract us from our state of being.

In the human world, action always takes “the rational form of mechanical means.” All worldly action is designed to make something happen, to achieve something, to influence the future, to gain us physical needs or comforts, to turn us all into markets, all through the use of means that generate new means.

But Christians are called toward a different kind of action, depicted in the Scriptures as seeds that grow, yeast that causes dough to rise, light that dispels the dark – the seed, the yeast, the light are not doing something. They are being. And that, Ellul says, is what is required of us, because “this is how the Holy Spirit works.”

“In a civilization that no longer knows what life is,” Ellul writes, “the most useful thing that Christians can do is precisely to live, and the life held in faith has remarkably explosive power. We no longer realize it, because we no longer believe in anything but efficiency, and life is not efficient. But it – and it alone – can provoke the astonishment of the modern world by revealing to everyone the ineffectiveness of techniques.” (emphasis added)

And so we come to the end of this remarkable chapter with a final reminder from Ellul that he is not, most definitely not, speaking of life as some kind of mysticism or hermetical existence. He is talking about “the expression of the the Holy Spirit working within us and being expressed in our material life through our words, habits, and decisions. We are speaking, then, of rediscovering all that the fullness of personal life signifies for human beings, standing on their own feet, within the world, and who can recognize their neighbors again, because they themselves have been recognized by God.” (emphasis added)

This sounds almost exciting, a glorious rediscovery of what it means to be human, but the word Ellul chooses to describe it is “deflating.” It’s much easier to live one’s life within the constraints of the culture, as a member of a mass, a cog in civilization’s wheel, following the will of the world.

But Ellul tells us we must reject that civilization completely, and to instead leap into uncertainty – into a life where there is actually only one certainty, but it is one that is both promised and granted at the same time: “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all the rest will be given to you.”

In the next chapter, “Communication,” Ellul makes a provocative turn toward what he describes as one part of being alive – the Christian intellectual life.

Ellul on the True Value of Means

This entry is part 22 of 24 in the series Presence in the Modern World

Continuing my read-through of Ellul’s Presence in the Modern World, we are still in Chapter 3. As discussed in the last post, in God, means and end are unified: the end is God’s Kingdom, and it is God’s Kingdom, through the presence of Christ and his followers, that will bring about that end.

On a more practical level, what are Christians to do about the means of modern humanity, the ones whose ends are simply created to justify those means? We already know that Ellul does not advocate withdrawal from the culture in which we live; quite the opposite.

First, we have to recognize that these means (and he lists some: “money, mechanical power, propaganda, the cinema, the press, modern conveniences, or means of communication, all this pandaemonium of noise”) are in no way effective at bringing about the true end. None of them will result in God’s Kingdom.

Ok, you say, maybe not God’s Kingdom, but that doesn’t have to be the only end, does it? We are adapting our means to more immediate, material goals, not aiming for the whole, spiritual enchilada.

That’s bullshit, Ellul insists (not a direct quote). For one thing, the very idea of Progress is synonymous with a misguided attempt to bring about God’s Kingdom on earth — in piecemeal, step by step, with small improvements in the lot of humanity. The coming of the Kingdom, Ellul says, will not be gradual, but “catastrophic.”

And for another thing, Ellul says that you cannot separate, for example, the material and the spiritual, or grace and law, etc. “In reality, the two orders, of preservation and redemption, are not separate but integrated with each other. All the actions of human beings are in submission to the Lordship of Jesus Christ.”

This means that even humanity’s means are essentially ordered to the one true end — the Kingdom — rather than whatever end toward which they claim to strive. We must view all of these modern techniques from the perspective of “this end that is already present in the means that God uses.”

This doesn’t represent an arbitrary rejection or “casting off” of our modern civilization’s means. Instead, we are to judge, accept or reject, humanity’s means based on their value to God’s means and end. There is nothing intrinsically valuable about any of our means or structures; they are neither bad nor good; they must simply be judged on “their eschatological content, their ability to be integrated into the Lordship of Jesus Christ.”

We are not to look at these modern techniques and structures as means at all, but only as content, as activities. These are simply things that human beings do. As Christians, our one task is to act as God’s presence and prepare for the preservation of the world by showing it the way of salvation. Where do these particular human activities fit into our task? They can be useful, Ellul says, unless they are not.

I’m old enough to remember when the Internet was going to bring people together. This is not the way it panned out. Now, AI is going to — do something good, we’re told. Something something medical breakthroughs, something something problem-solving, I don’t know.

The point is that these technologies are created and pushed because of what they will do. In the mid-90s, when I eagerly climbed online, the cultural and political climate assured everyone of the good things (ends) that would be brought about by these new capabilities. If we had looked at it as an activity (not as a means), evaluated the Internet as the content that it was (not what we imagined it might be), then perhaps we could have properly judged it.

AI, same thing. Etc.

Ellul’s recommended approach is to view and judge all of these techniques and institutions and structures, not based on their consequences (which we should know by now never materialize as predicted, at least not without many unintended consequences as well), but on their actual content, as purely temporary activities from the perspective of the kingdom.

The world looks at what it is doing in terms of how it believes or wants those activities to affect the future. Humans labor under the false notion that the present will inform the future. Christians, Ellul insists, already know the future, and in God, it is the future that informs the present.

So yes, we might seek institutional reforms should we find a Scriptural basis for it, and use modern techniques, understanding that all these things are temporary, with no value beyond their role in helping us further God’s presence (which is never, remember, about political power, or “Progress”). But we also must reject those things whose content and activity has no value to the Kingdom.

There is no end but God. There is no means but God. All else is disposable.

But how can we stop this stance from becoming just one more ineffective ideology?

Books In and Out of Season

I admire people like Joel Miller who are able to plan out their reading, which seems infinitely preferable to my habit of perusing my to-be-read shelves (now numerous, spanning multiple rooms) waiting for a certain inspired curiosity to fall on my head like, well, a book from a high shelf.

But I doubt I will ever be able to join the ranks of the planners. Instead, every time I must choose my next book, I’m seized with a bit of paralysis. What’s the book for me right now? is one of the questions with which I struggle. And, is it a book I want to have read, or one I want to read? — which are sometimes the same, sometimes not.

This is why my husband rolls his eyes at how many books I bring whenever we go anywhere, weighing down the luggage. Well, I don’t know what I will feel like reading when I finish the one I’m reading right now! I must have choices.

Unfortunately, once I defeat the paralysis and answer the questions, sometimes those answers are wrong.

I have a habit of accumulating books that make sense for a certain time and place in my life, but then never getting around to reading them — until, possibly, they are well past their season.

For example, John Fowles’ The Magus has existed in a corner of my shelves in various editions throughout multiple housing situations since I was in high school. I didn’t know much about it, but as a young man (boy) the idea of it, as encapsulated in whatever marketing copy was on the back of that original tattered paperback, thrilled me.

But I always put off reading it, imagining it would be an experience I could savor at any time. Last summer I found a very nice Modern Library edition at a bookstore in Maine, and then last week, when asking myself, What’s the book for me right now?, I decided to answer myself, Why, it must be The Magus, finally.

Oof. Wrong answer. 700 pages of, to be frank, absolute shit, which does not qualify as the most insightful book review ever written, I agree. But this book started off as the sort of faux intellectual potboiler I would ordinarily enjoy, and very quickly devolved into what can only be termed a “hate read.” I finished it only because I couldn’t believe it was as bad as it was. I sometimes wondered if Fowles was pulling my leg.

But, no. This was his first book, though he worked on it for years and published it as his third, and then later revised it again in 1977. (If this edition was an improvement, I shudder to think what the original was like.) Fowles was as serious as the seriously despicable-yet-dull narrator he had created.

I hated this book so much that I don’t even want to dwell on all the reasons why I hated it — the complete misunderstanding of women (or men), of sex, of religion, of simple adult human living and decision-making. I wasn’t bothered by how horrible all of the characters were, I was bothered by how boring they all were, despite the author’s desperate, interminable attempts to make them all seem so sinister and twisty and interesting.

Anyway. Even Fowles admitted in a foreword that he didn’t quite understand the book’s popularity, and that said popularity seemed to be centered among adolescents. If I’d read the book when it first caught my eye, instead of putting it off for 30 or so years, I might have found it just as transformative as some of the gaga Amazon reviewers. I was a pompous ass, after all — God is dead, so let’s drink coffee, and all that crap — and the book’s naive ramblings and endless circularities would probably have struck me as profound when I didn’t know what profundity was.

This isn’t the only time this has happened; I had a similar experience with John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. It was first published when I was in college, and reviews convinced me so thoroughly that I would love the book, that I always held off on reading it until there might be a time when I felt the need for a truly transformative reading experience. Such a time finally came, and I read the novel while in the waiting room every day for six weeks undergoing radiation treatments.

And oh my God, I hated that book, all of it, every word. Again, perhaps I would have loved it, if I experienced it earlier in life.

I know, some will say — life’s too short, stop reading if you don’t like it. And generally, I do; there are lots of books I’ve started and set aside, but I don’t hate those books, they just weren’t for me at that time. (Some of them I return to, and find it has become the right time.) The books I loathe, for some reason, I tend to finish. It may be that the books which engender such strong feelings have other compensatory traits that drive me forward.

So I’ve learned that the books I self-consciously put aside as a younger self to read later may not scratch any particular itch I develop in, shall we say, middle age. But I’m not sure this lesson is compelling enough to change my haphazard approach to selecting books, even though a schedule, or at least a goal, might be helpful. For example, I’ve been toying with the idea of declaring 2024 a “big book” year, and focus on finishing a few big novels I feel guilty about not having read.

But I’m hesitant to make a commitment. After all, any fiction I read is in addition to all of the Kierkegaard, Ellul and similar authors I am determined to continue absorbing. Can one actually read Either/Or and Moby-Dick in the same year?

Hmm. Come to think of it, perhaps one can and should.

Ellul on the Illusion of Inner Freedom

This entry is part 20 of 24 in the series Presence in the Modern World

Continuing in chapter 3, Ellul dwells a bit more on the meaning of means, which is “that they are totalitarian. Our civilization is entirely one of means, and means affect every domain. They respect nothing.”

There are two angles from which to consider the totalitarianism of means.

First, means destroy everything that might hinder their advance. Morality? It falls before technique (if it works, how can it be immoral?). Humanism falls, because technique will not be limited to the interest of human beings. (Paging AI, again.) “Gratuitiousness” — anything for its own sake, such as art — is flatly rejected; everything must serve. (What’s the point of art with no market value? Is it even art?)

Instead of accepting human values, means will construct their own. What Ellul calls the “new myths” — such as state, nation, race, labor, parties — are mere props for means. Humans accept these illusions because they hide the “appalling desiccation of the world” created by means.

Second, means relentlessly extend their dominion over all aspects of human existence. Humans, Ellul says, are just as much objects of technique as material goods. We are hacking our lives, not just living them; psychological problems, spiritual problems, “self-knowledge” — these are all grist for the mill of means. One “solution” leads to another to another. We never stop working on ourselves because we are actually being worked upon. Ellul writes:

“Because human beings have become objects and the spiritual is classed among spiritual means, existence no longer has any possible meaning. Existentialism, the philosophy of our time, is correct to remind us that our existence is such, but it is incorrect in saying that human beings are free to restore meaning to their lives. The irreversible triumph of means eliminates any freedom for human beings to follow this path.”

We have all been captured in a trap laid by means, whose triumph is total. “It is useless to act smart and claim inner freedom,” Ellul writes. “When a freedom is not a part of my life, it is false.”

Ellul claims that this predicament is especially hard on Christians because, while it has always been impossible to live out one’s faith fully as Christian, that was always because of inner weakness. Now, it is made even more impossible (if you’ll pardon the expression) because of the external world.

This external world, controlled by means, constrains modern humans not only physically, but mentally. It is totalitarian precisely because it changes the ways in which humans value themselves and others. Historically, Ellul believes that all ancient “civilizations have exercised certain constraints, but they left to each person a wide field of freedom and invididuality. The Roman slave or the medieval serf was more free, more individual, more socially human (I do not see materially content) than is the modern worker or Soviet functionary.”

I think that Ellul is suggesting here that, even in a world of limited social mobility and physical constraint, people were allowed the freedom to think for themselves. In the modern world (and Ellul does not deny the benefits of modern medical and scientific advances), societies claim to be free from constraints, but actually they try to “seize human beings in their totality and confine them within a detailed framework, in which all their gestures and secret thoughts will be controlled by the social system.”

Under the system of means, our human “inner freedom” is an illusion. The modern social system makes it twice-over “impossible” to live out one’s Christian faith, by layering this external framework on top of our inner weaknesses. As David Gill notes in a footnote on page 50, Ellul is arguing dialectically here, that it is impossible to live as a Christian but also, because we are called to resist and act against both internal and external forces, possible. We must ensure the continued “social expression” of Christianity by fighting “to the death” (in a specifically spiritual sense) against the primacy of means.

Advent Begins. Or Continues.

So Advent begins, the season in which we recognize the state in which we all live, all of the time — this in-betweenness. Lately I’ve been thinking not about Christ’s birth, or even his return (whatever that may mean), but about his death and resurrection.

Lorenzo Lotto, "The Nativity": Jesus is born in a manger and a crucifix hangs on the wall.
Spoiler alert.

I’m part of a group Advent reading of Auden’s For the Time Being, and before our first meeting yesterday, I became somewhat fixated on the poem’s epigraph, from Romans 6: “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid.”

This verse sounds, fittingly for Advent, as if we are in mid-conversation with Paul. It pulls me not toward the verse itself, or what comes after, but what comes before: Romans 5 and its discussion of Adam and Jesus, the one whose trespass brought sin and death, and the one whose sacrifice brought grace and life. I can’t help then but read the opening sections of For the Time Being (which is all I’ve read so far), about the annunciation, through the lens of Jesus’ death (and resurrection) rather than birth. Which I think is what is intended.

One of my favorite quotes comes from the Anglican writer Evelyn Underhill, who once wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury: “The interesting thing about religion is God.” The italics are mine but that’s how I hear the words, and I can imagine her emphasizing each with a poke in the Archbishop’s chest.

I think of something similar about Advent, reduced to overpriced calendars of jams and dog treats and tiny bottles of booze counting down the days to a federal holiday: “The interesting about Jesus’s birth is his death.” The point of the Incarnation wasn’t the God-baby in the manger, which is the frustrating obsession of the modern church, but the God-man brutally murdered on the cross — and his miraculous, unbelievable, paradoxically life-bringing-for-all resurrection.

This particular theme is also on my mind because I’ve started reading Fleming Rutledge’s The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus in preparation for a class (just “for fun,” ha) on the Theology of the Cross. I may note my way through Rutledge’s book here on the blog, but for now I will take comfort in the way she makes it sound sensible to focus more on Good Friday than Christmas, even at this time of year.

“Surprisingly,” she writes, “the liturgical season of Advent, rather than Lent, best locates the Christian community. Advent — the time between — with its themes of crisis and judgment, now and not-yet, places us not in some privileged spiritual sanctuary but on the frontier where the promised kingdom of God exerts maximum pressure on the present, with corresponding signs of suffering and struggle.”

Or, as Auden writes, “The Demolisher arrives / Singing and dancing!”

Ellul on the Disappearing End

This entry is part 18 of 24 in the series Presence in the Modern World

As we begin at long last Chapter 3 of Ellul’s Presence in the Modern World, we come to his first exploration on technique, that for which he became best known and which he later explored in multiple books, most famously The Technological Society.

When one thinks of “means and ends,” the questions that come to mind are philosophical: Can the end justify the means? Are these the “right means for the right ends”? Ellul says that these questions are no longer relevant, or that at least they cannot be asked in the same way, because they no longer represent philosophical abstractions but the concrete fact of “technique.”

Ellul argues that modern life has become concretely, and specifically, about means; there is no longer any “end” in sight. With enormous and innovative means at their disposal, our modern societies have turned the human beings they were meant to serve into mere servants themselves. Politicians pay lip service to “men and women” as the beneficiaries of their programs, but who are these men and women?

What, for example, is the role of the individual human being in America today? We all know the answer: to participate in the economy. We must make things that can be bought so that we can buy things. “Thus, humanity is transformed into an instrument of these modern gods that are our means,” Ellul writes, “and we do it with the good intention of making humanity happy.” But who is this humanity we are told will benefit from our work, from the programs of politicians, bureaucrats and corporations? It doesn’t exist, and never will, as anything other than an abstraction.

But lest you think I (or Ellul) am specifically criticizing the market economy here, there is no difference to be found in socialism, either. Writing as he was in the 1940s, Ellul found as strong an example for his ideas in communism as he did in Western capitalism. In communism, he wrote that “we have an admirable political machine that perpetuates itself by means (because the dictatorship of the proletariat is also a means), with a view to illusory and hypothetical ends. And to produce the happiness of future people, those of the present day are sacrificed.”

Though I try to avoid social media these days, one can’t avoid the lust for “socialism” among many on the left today. They criticize the market for the same reasons Ellul does, that it turns humans into mere producers and consumers. But they have embraced the same mistaken notion of means versus ends. Whether capitalist or socialist or somewhere in between, everyone accepts the same abstract ends (happiness, justice, “humanity”) without question, so that they can focus on their own preferred concrete means.

But these ends (and I repeat myself here, for emphasis) simply do not exist. “We do still talk about happiness, freedom, or justice,” Ellul writes, “but we no longer know their content or conditions … Once these ends have become implicit in people’s hearts and minds, they no longer have any formative power. They no longer have any creative capacity. They are dead illusions that have been stored away among the props of the contemporary scene.”

Think about the state of AI, and the latest pointless kerfuffles over related corporate leadership. Just a few months ago, I might have used the (equally content-less) phrase “cryptocurrency” instead of AI. “Social media” would also work in exactly the same way. None of these things can be said to “matter” in any meaningful way. They are created because they can be created, not because they are doing any good. That is the nature of modern means, Ellul points out, which cannot lead to ends, but only create more means: “genius is no longer necessary for the majority of technical discoveries, but having arrived at a certain stage the next discovery comes along almost as a matter of course…”

This is true in every field — technical, financial, political, industrial. “It doesn’t matter that people do not need these new products,” Ellul wrote nearly eighty years ago, “or that these new creations are completely useless. One means generates another. A particular one is used, for why would it not be? Why would it be called useless?”

Ellul uses airplanes and medicine as further examples of the abstraction of means and ends. We congratulate ourselves when speed records are shattered, but what is the point of saving time? (I can only look through my long and extensive Amazon purchase history, or all of the unused apps in my Mac’s Applications folder, and ask myself what all the time-saving things I’ve purchased have actually meant for me.)

Or medical research that produces new cures. Ellul asks, “[W]hat is the point of the life that we take so much care to preserve? What is time for? What is life worth, when precisely through the interplay of the means set in motion through this civilization, time and life no longer have any meaning, when human beings really do not know what to do with their time, and when life is more absurd than ever, because the spiritual foundations of time and life have been destroyed in their hearts?”

In a world with a will toward suicide, whose relentless drive toward its own destruction becomes more apparent all the time, is it any wonder that “ends” have been turned into happy abstractions by those who can only see history as a series of random occurrences? “Human beings,” Ellul writes, “have set off at astronomically high speeds toward nowhere.”

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