So far in chapter 4 of Presence in the Modern World, “Communication,” Jacques Ellul hasn’t been talking about the stated topic so much as its complete absence.
Nobody understands each other. We talk past each other, not as the result of an earnest but frustrated attempt to communicate, but actually on purpose. That’s true of now, and it was true of the era in which Ellul wrote this book.
Ellul says that, up until the modern era, “the intellect” served as a bridge to connect people. But now this bridge has been destroyed, as we have seen in the last few posts. Intellectuals have surrendered to the constraints of technique, decided that nothing is absolute, and/or (just as nihilistically) chosen to accept as “real” beliefs that they know to be false, in order to maintain status.
In making those choices, the “intellectual” has essentially ceased existing, since it has always been the purpose of the intellectual to try to understand, and to communicate that understanding. But that sort of communication requires a minimum of unconsciously shared “true ideas, biases and values” and our civilization today no longer has any of those in common.
Certainly biases and shared ideas exist, but they no longer represent the civilization’s “deepest and most authentic expression.” Instead, they are merely the “myths and artificial ideas created by propaganda.”
Human beings are no longer free to encounter each other as individuals, but instead can see each other only through the prism of the myths they themselves have chosen to believe.
In other words: we judge everyone we meet based on where they fit in, or not, with our particular frame of reference. In 2024 America, that might involve you immediately sizing up someone you meet as a Trump supporter, or as a leftist — categories that only exist in your mind because they were created by propaganda, as part of a particular group’s shared mythology.
Ellul wrote (in 1948!):
“We are caught up in this increasingly greater abstraction that is occurring in relation not only to facts but also to human beings. We can no longer communicate with one another because our neighbors have ceased to be real to us. Intellectuals today no longer believe in the possibility of joining with others. They speak into the void and for the wasteland, or else they speak for the proletariat, the Nazi, the intellectual, and so on. People have never spoken so much about human beings while at the same time giving up speaking to them.”
There is no more speaking to human beings, Ellul says, because the human being doesn’t exist; there are only categories. But it is impossible to communicate with a category. You can only communicate with a human being.
Technique makes this sort of communication impossible, because technique demands result. “[Real] communication transcends technique,” Ellul writes, “because it cannot occur unless two interlocutors are completely engaged in real discussion.”
Modern intellectuals, including Christian intellectuals, instinctively understand the impossibility of their task and seek out new (“useless”) paths to reach people. For example, Ellul offers another quite prescient example, of thinkers and novelists who claim that humanity can only be found in extreme situations, such as war, concentration camps, and the like, even though this is obviously not helpful. “Such efforts do not get to the crux of the problem,” Ellul writes, “because they necessarily fall within a temporary, limited, and inconstant sphere.”
Of course, with enough spare time and cash, you can put yourself in an exceptional situation, from skydiving to mountain climbing to orbiting the earth, but this gets you no closer to your humanity than “feeling a rush.”
More likely, you can fritter away all that spare time issuing online demands that the entire civilization put itself in danger instead. Both left and right Twitter feeds, cable news networks, and podcasts are full of apocalyptic rants, spittle-flecked calls for vengeance and war (inside our own country, if not with others), grim proclamations of our opponents’ intent and gleeful fantasies of getting them first. There is little if any difference between these warnings of doom, and desire for it.
Ellul believes that this is further evidence of the world’s ongoing and unstoppable will toward suicide. People become habituated to the notion of death, he writes: “Suicide through pleasure or despair, intellectual or moral suicide — people then become ready for the total suicide that is slowly being readied and that will involve, body and soul, the entire world.”
In general, people fear the possibility of our own deaths, and even deny it altogether; we do not, despite the exhortations of motivational speakers and memes everywhere, “live today as if it were our last” because nobody wants to think about that.
But by accepting entertainment as an excuse for meaning, or embracing the despair of believing that there are enemies hell-bent on our personal destruction, we are readying ourselves for death and anticipating annihilation.
Ellul believes it is the Christian’s role to stand against this civilizational habituation to suicide, which is particularly dangerous because it is being fostered in an “invisible” way. In 1948, this meant that people were meeting each other, and developing these despairing tendencies, not in “bodily reality” but in “the postal system, railways, and television.”
Today, of course, those dangerously invisible exchanges are happening, not only or even especially on television, but on our phones, in our pockets — even on blogs like this one.