explanatory myth

Ellul on the Void and the Wasteland

This entry is part 28 of 28 in the series Presence in the Modern World

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Certainly biases and shared ideas exist, but they no longer represent the civilization’s “deepest and most authentic expression.”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.

Ellul on the Death of Contemplation and Intuition

This entry is part 27 of 28 in the series Presence in the Modern World

So far in Chapter 4 of Presence in the Modern World, Ellul has shown us —

  • how modern citizens, inundated by a blizzard of facts and phenomena, create over-arching “explanatory myths” in order to make these phenomena somewhat coherent;
  • why Christian intellectuals should focus their work on how a transforming faith determines the ways in which one should interact with our externally-focused culture;
  • how other intellectuals and leaders, who know that the explanatory myths are not true, secure their own continued role in the culture by either choosing to treat this non-reality as if it were reality, or deciding that there is no such thing as reality at all.

Now we return to Ellul’s concept of technique, which we discussed earlier, and which he would go on to discuss further in numerous books (to the point that when his name is encountered in the present day, it is usually being misremembered as that of a critic of technology).

In our modern civilization, Ellul wrote, the intellect has become constrained by a need to produce practical results. This is not only true of science but of any other field, including history, the law, sociology, etc. Each field has its own set rules for producing such practical results, based on technique and its usual advantages: speed, precision, security, universality.

These very advantages are what transform technique, from a tool at the disposal of a practitioner, into the very purpose of the practitioner’s work: the means become the ends. Technique actually changes intellectual behavior.

Intuition, for example, might be “affirmed in the abstract” — but it plays no role in modern intellectual work, because it lacks the precision of technique. A leap of imagination? Not if you wish to be considered anything other than amateur or fool. (Or unless you work in a field like theology or metaphysics, which Ellul describes as “intellectualism of fantasy” that doesn’t matter to the culture.)

Ellul writes, “We can grasp this imperialism of technique by … our modern intellectuals’ attitude toward ways of knowing and doing that follow other methods, such as those of Indians or Tibetans.” These alternative “ways of knowing” are fair fodder for sociological study, but only “lunatics” take them seriously as a route to actual knowledge.

Intellect in the West is now tethered to this one singular tool; all modern intellectuals are materialists, basing their work on what can be “seen, weighed, counted, or measured.” Like any other layperson, the intellectual might choose to hold some other philosophical or even religious position, but she would certainly never let it interfere with her actual work.

The problem that Ellul sees here is that “a doctrine can be refuted, but technical method cannot be called into question. The intelligence of modern human beings ceases to be nourished by the springs of contemplation or awareness.”

Today all matters of policy and doctrine are evaluated and debated based on evidence or data or “study” results, which then (if one disagrees) can be refuted with other evidence, other data, different “study” results — but the technique itself is never called into question. Of course, the audience for all of this data has no way of knowing whether or not it is “accurate,” except for whether or not it supports the audience’s preferred explanatory myth.

Ellul writes, “Freed from dogmas, [intellect] is enslaved to its means.” Admittedly there can sometimes be explosive reactions against the prevailing technique; Ellul cites cubism and surrealism as examples, but points out that these movements, in their reaction against the dominant false reality of their fields, instead denied the existence of any objective reality at all.

And besides, once these countervailing movements come into existence, they immediately become obsessed with their own effectiveness — and thus slaves to their own technique. Intellectual freedom is quickly excluded.

Ellul on the Unreal Life

This entry is part 24 of 28 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”?