intellectuals

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Certainly biases and shared ideas exist, but they no longer represent the civilization’s “deepest and most authentic expression.”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

This entry is part 26 of 28 in the series Presence in the Modern World

Continuing our read of Chapter 4, “Communication,” we will return to the “renewed mind” discussed in the last post in due course, but let’s take a look at the non-renewed mind, that of the “intellectual” in general living in the modern world.

According to Ellul, these intellectuals (I really do feel the need to continue putting that word inside quotation marks, but I won’t, just because it gets annoying) are just as overwhelmed by the flow of phenomena as anyone else. However, while they are able to perceive that the “explanatory myths” of various systems, parties and states are, in fact, myths, they are still so flooded by these fake “facts” that they can’t see the reality beyond them, either.

Commonly, these intellectuals take one of two responses, both of which can be considered a sort of mental suicide.

One is to actually choose to accept these myths, and work as if they were true, even though they are not. Ellul says these intellectuals obey the sophism, “The phenomenon and the myth do not correspond to facts, of course, but since people believe them, they become reality, and that is the reality we need to deal with.”

In Ellul’s time, this example referenced intellectuals within the communist and fascist parties, who adapted to the “reality” in which they lived in order to maintain their careers — but of course, we see this same thing happening today. Whether on the Right or Left, the “elite” is comprised almost entirely of thinkers and leaders who clearly “know better” about a wide variety of topics and assertions, but choose to fall into lockstep with their particular tribe. To do otherwise would leave them out in the cold, career-wise.

Certainly it’s easy to think of examples of this form of intellectual suicide in Trump’s GOP, but you can find the same response in leftist academia, government agencies, corporate bureaucracies, and your small-town chamber of commerce.

The other response of intellectuals, Ellul wrote, is to decide that they can never know anything beyond the “appearances” of modern phenomena — that, if any sort of reality beyond those phenomena exists, “it is impossible to grasp and holds no meaning for human beings.” Since they are no more capable than anyone else of verifying the reality of facts flooding the cultural zone, “intellectuals refuse to hold any fact as valid and sure” and “awareness of the world they are in slips away from them.” (In short: “LOL nothing matters.”)

While Ellul at the time was talking particularly about a European-style intelligentsia that doesn’t really exist any more, these two responses still seem pretty common among elites. Aspire to leadership in business, government, the academy — then accept the prevailing myth in your chosen tribe, even if it requires you to change your views rather quickly and shamelessly (paging J. D. Vance). Smart kids (even well-read ones, a la Pete Buttigieg) aspire to careers in consulting, or finance — the very definition of “appearances” separate from reality.

Any world of meaning that exists beyond the material world, beneath the appearances of modern phenomena, has become so completely obfuscated that, when you hear someone refer to “the real world” today, you can be sure that they are talking about exactly that which has no meaning.

Ellul on the Renewed Mind and the Fog of Facts

This entry is part 25 of 28 in the series Presence in the Modern World

When I last wrote about Ellul’s Presence in the Modern World (Good Lord, was that over four months ago?), I had just begun a discussion of Chapter 4, “Communication.”

To summarize that post, since we are so inundated with images and other “phenomena” that are completely separate from our actual experience, and therefore personally unverifiable, we come to accept the coherence of an “explanatory myth” that connects all of these various phenomena into something simple that we can understand. We live in an unreality, in a sort of permanent dream, no longer individuals but part of a collective mass.

And I ended asking, along with Ellul, how did this situation come about, where we live in a dream, with a clear conscience, where everything can be explained by the “countless facts and theories” in which we choose to believe?

I want to begin answering this question by backing up a bit to the start of the chapter and Ellul’s discussion of “Christian intellectuals,” which a footnote points out might also have been translated as “thoughtful Christians” or “Christian leaders,” although all of these things sound different to me.

According to Ellul, Christian intellectuals are laypeople like any others, but with a specific function within the world and the church. He is not talking about academic theologians here, but to anyone who thinks, writes, reads, etc. by choice and vocation.

Your role, as a thinking Christian, no matter your particular area of interest or specialty, is to “undertake a kind of practical theology” and determine how your faith will determine the way you interact with our decadent civilization.

Faith, Ellul asserts in quoting Romans 12:2, “produces a renewing of the mind.” Faith transforms the very way we see and understand reality, the world, human beings, etc. This isn’t a “purely intellectual process” — not simply exchanging one philosophy for another — but a transformation of your life.

Ellul sees this is an ongoing activity of the Holy Spirit in the Christian’s life, helping him to discover new ways of thinking and understanding. But when this happens, it happens for a specific purpose. One’s role as a thinking Christian is not the discernment of knowledge for its own sake, but specifically the discernment of “God’s will for the world, which is active in people’s midst, not God’s abstract or general will or his essence.”

In short, as we have seen before, living as a Christian means serving as an ambassador in a sort-of permanent state of (non-violent) revolution against the world; living as a Christian thinker means being primarily concerned with figuring out “what human beings can and must do in this world in order to live according to God’s will.”

(In this little section, Ellul seems to have been laying out his own task, as it describes the intellectual work he then spent the rest of his life doing.)

Having defined what he means by a Christian intellectual, Ellul goes on to point out that they live in the exact same world as everyone else, even as their renewed mind represents a point of separation from it. Which brings us back to the original question, of how the world came to be in its current unrealistic situation.

This modern world is a complex one, comprised of many interlocking organizations and structures. It is impossible for an individual to grasp all of these structures as a whole. “We wander aimlessly in this forest,” Ellul writes.

We encounter all of these structures and their various “facts” in the media. (Remember, this was written over 75 years ago.) The media themselves are organizations requiring capital (either private or state) for their operation.

Because of their mechanical nature, all media are concerned only with the externality of facts. As Ellul writes, “there are some things that can be produced on TV and some things that cannot.”

In a world where TV is no longer the prevalent media it once was, this mechanistic reliance on externality is still true.

Just as one can witness the evidence of genetics in rapid time by observing generations of fruit flies, we can also witness the devolution of media in a similar fashion. 20 years ago, for example, “social media” meant, primarily, blogging — and primarily a long text form of that (like the one you are reading now). Then came Twitter, which reduced everything into small bits, and Facebook, which eventually turned everything into images — and almost nobody “reads” (or internalizes) social media anymore.

In less than two decades, this particular media (once hailed as a democratizing, individually-controlled form of media) was swept inside the walls of larger organizations and restructured into a simpler, externalized mechanic. Social media “memes” become popular because they are images and they are obvious, and because they support a particular explanatory myth.

No matter the form they take, media are everywhere, inescapable in modern society, and the way in which media asserts rather than reasons — because one cannot reason with a crowd — becomes irresistible. “Even if we have private doubts,” Ellul writes, “this does not keep the crowd from accepting the information, due to how forceful it appears.” (There is no “community note” strong enough to counteract the most myth-enforcing “fact” spread on Twitter.)

Finally, all of us are kept from becoming aware of reality by the fact that all of this unreality is so darn entertaining, and we love to be amused. “[O]ur entire civilization, from its pastimes right up to its serious issues, looks on everything from the perspective of entertainment,” Ellul writes. All of this “information” is so absorbing on its face that we can’t help but accept it as truth.

“Although they know more things, have more means, and are theoretically more advanced than at any other period,” Ellul says that modern humans “are advanced in a dream of explanations and a fog of facts.”

Now, given that Christian intellectuals are living in the exact same world as everyone else, subject to the same overwhelming and irresistible media and means, how are they supposed to perform their specific function in discerning God’s will?