The Dangers of Technocracy

The Year of Our Lord 1943 is a fascinating and surprising book. The author, Alan Jacobs, is Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Baylor University, Texas. He writes in a lucid style, with worthy scholarship, historical balance and a firm grip on his narrative. He chronicles the war-years thinking and activity of five intellectual giants: Simone Weil, Jacques Maritain, W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis. He concludes with a brief analysis of the post-war work of Jacques Ellul, who shared their religious perspective and their concerns about the direction of our technology-saturated culture.

Jacobs’s immediate context is straightforward: by 1943 it was becoming clear that the Allies would defeat the Axis powers. The thoughts of many people not involved directly in the fighting turned to the shape of the culture after the war. Maritain, Lewis, Auden, Weil and Eliot, each largely independent of the others, worried that a war won in large measure because the victors possessed superior technology would privilege technical answers to the problems of peace. A technocracy would dominate Western societies, and this technocracy would contribute massively to the eventual undoing of those societies. All of these thinkers were profoundly influenced by Personalist philosophy and recognised that the triumphant technocracy was in many ways anti-Personalistic. Jacobs focuses on 1943 because most of the crucial thinking and writing of the five figures on these matters had been concluded by the close of that year. Each of them, except Weil who died in August 1943, moved on to other work, although that work—poems, essays, fiction—showed the fruit of their intense reflections during the war years.

In his preface Jacobs notes:

This was a time—it seems so long ago now, a very different age, and one that is unlikely to return—when prominent Christian thinkers in the West believed that they had a responsibility to set a direction not just for churches, but for the whole of society. And, stranger still, in that time, many of their fellow citizens were willing to grant them that authority—or at least to listen when they asserted it.

Alan Jacobs organises his book by following a chronology (with some necessary departures) of the writing and lectures of these five figures from 1939 to 1943. This method highlights the fact that there was little interaction between them: they were united by their faith, and the similarities of their assessments and conclusions reflected that faith-informed unity. Personalism helped shape their thinking and is another reason for the relative consistency of thought among them.

Personalism was hugely influential in France (and in Britain to a lesser extent) in the 1930s, with a growing influence in the United States through the 1940s. It lent primacy to the individual, although it was not individualistic because it knew that responsibilities to others are key to the individual’s fulfilment.

Maritain defined Personalism’s main focus:

To say that a man is a person is to say that in the depths of his being he is more a whole than a part and more independent than servile. It is this mystery of our nature which religious thought designates when it says that the person is the image of God.

All five thinkers were alert to the temptation to seek a solution to society’s problems by technical means. This was not the fault of technology, which served human needs; it was a temptation that arose when scientific empiricism was applied inappropriately to areas that were psychological, moral or spiritual. Maritain differentiated between technology and a technocracy:

Technology is good, as a means for the human spirit and for human ends. But technocracy, that is to say, technology so understood and so worshipped as to exclude any superior wisdom and any other understanding of life than that of calculable phenomena, leaves human life nothing but relationships of force, or at best of pleasure, and necessarily ends up in a philosophy of domination. A technocratic society is but a totalitarian one.

The bulk of the book—although it is not a bulky book at 256 pages—follows Auden, Weil, Eliot, Lewis and Maritain as they confronted difficulties around the definition of humanism, the proper limits of patriotism and of peace, and the false hopes that technology would provide. Of course, given the war, the place of force in human affairs is examined and Jacobs cites Simone Weil’s bleak but realistic commentary:

“The moderate use of force, which alone would enable man to escape being enmeshed in its machinery, would require superhuman virtue, which is as rare as dignity in weakness.” The human being does not settle on the employment of extreme force after careful consideration, but rather “dashes … to it as to an irresistible temptation”.

The chapter on force is preceded by a chapter on demons. Yes, demons. What other scholarly book published this millennium, looking at culture and society, would commit a chapter to the possibility of demonic activity? It is revolutionary and refreshing. C.S. Lewis’s classic The Screwtape Letters, set in London during the Blitz, is the best-known creative portrayal of this malign influence on human affairs. But the likelihood of demonic activity in human history was alive for all these writers.

Weil thought deceptive spiritual activity especially operated in the human imagination, inflating false values and engendering contempt for the limitations of our embodied state. Maritain and Eliot held a similar position. As the war years dragged on, Auden replaced “a psychoanalytic account of human wickedness with a demonological one”. Each concluded that demons, often operating invisibly through human political structures and ideologies, used force to inflict misery on people. While reading this chapter, I was reminded of Ronald Knox’s amazement that the existence of the devil could be so widely denied in an age marked so prominently by the hallmarks of his cruel and deceptive work.

Another surprise is the place given to the idea of vocation as central to humanity and therefore to the education of young people. Auden addressed this subject in a lecture titled “Vocation and Society”, delivered to students at Swarthmore College in January 1943:

To have a vocation, Auden says, is to be in a state of “subjective requiredness”: your vocation is something you are required to do, but the requirement comes from within. You are the one who is called, not necessarily anyone else, and likewise you are the discerner of the call. “For this reason Vocational Guidance is a contradiction in terms. The only reasons another can give me why I should adopt this career rather than that are that I should be more successful or happier or it pays better, but such matters are precisely what I must not think about if I am really to find my vocation.”

The idea of vocation is integral to Personalism, and training in discerning one’s vocation would be an important part of the education of young people. The proper role of education is another of the concerns of all five thinkers. They did not want education to have as its aim the training of young people, like superior animals, for the utility of the state. Broadly, albeit in varying degrees, they believed the education of young people needed to be in line with Personalist values, especially discernment of vocation; the primacy of our responsibilities above our rights; love for oneself and others and training in the traditional virtues. Inculcating respect for the literature and culture of the past is another crucial role of education. Familiarity with history and the literature of previous ages provides a necessary perspective to understand and critique the characteristics of the present age. Lewis and Weil held comparable views, as Jacobs highlights:

Weil’s argument in “The Romanesque Renaissance” certainly rhymes with Lewis’s, but it is in certain respects more subtle. “The past offers us a partially completed discrimination,” she writes. “Our attachments and our passions do not so thickly obscure our discrimination of the eternal in the past.” For Weil, the given task of thought is just this, to discern the eternal, that which is always and everywhere true but also always and everywhere obscured by the “attachments and passions” of a given person or a given culture. What has survived the discrimination of the past is the discrimination of the eternal achieved by that time and place, a discrimination that is never complete and never directly mappable onto our own moment but that nevertheless remains of inestimable value. What the past saw clearly is a pearl of great price for us.

Alan Jacobs provides a brief outline of the immediate post-war work of Auden, Eliot, Lewis and Maritain. In the final chapter, Jacobs introduces the French academic Jacques Ellul, who developed a perceptive analysis of the triumphant technocracy, its associated propaganda and societal effects. Ellul suggested a Christian response to it: not a total rejection of technology, nor a total acceptance of technology, but careful discernment of its benefits and shortfalls while placing a renewed emphasis on prayer.

The space given to the idea of prayer as world-changing is one more surprise, but Ellul is aligned to the thinking of the other thinkers. Auden asked, rhetorically, whether the saints were the salvation of the Church, and thus of the world, or were they not? Maritain identified saints and martyrs as the true educators of mankind. It is not mentioned in this book, but Maritain was attracted to the ascetic example of Charles de Foucauld, and spent the last years of his life at a Little Brothers of Jesus house. Lewis thought the war brought no essentially new conditions to mankind; rather it brought the perennial concerns of mankind into sharper focus: mortality, ethics, responsibility and judgment. Religion rather than politics is the natural home of these concerns. Simone Weil learned the Our Father in Greek and prayed it at the start of each day; she wrote a beautiful meditation on Christ’s most celebrated prayer. Yet, unlike the others, she never could embrace worship through the Church, believing all institutions were dangerously coercive.

For Ellul, deep human and societal problems caused by technocracy cannot be solved by the technocracy; the problems need answers from something outside the technocracy: faith, which has a spiritually-based authority. Ellul believed no matter how difficult, complex or intransigent the problems of technocracy, politics or society, with God there is always hope for a new and a better way. 

The Year of Our Lord 1943 is an immensely interesting book, especially if one is an admirer of any of the main figures. Since I admire all five of these brilliant writers, and Jacques Ellul as well, it is a book that I read with delighted attention. It is not a conservative tract, although there is a strong conservative strain, but only where goodness needed to be protected. Where change could restore goodness, all writers were properly progressive. Alan Jacobs quotes C.S. Lewis:

If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man … And I think if you look at the present state of the world, it is pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistakes. We are on the wrong road. And if that is so, we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.

Jacobs commends the insights of Auden, Weil, Maritain, Eliot and Lewis and their deep commitment to the tragedies of their time. His conclusion is realistic: despite their acuity their prescriptions were not implemented; indeed, there was little possibility of them being implemented. The technocracy was too well-established and in charge. These writers were left to make what they could of the diminishment of their hopes and pleas. But they bequeathed much of value for later generations, as Jacobs concludes:

If ever again there rises a body of thinkers eager to renew Christian humanism, they should take great pains to learn from those we have studied here: both what they agreed upon and what divided them. But may those future thinkers also be quickly alert to the signs of the times.

This book indicates a way forward for Western culture grounded in Personalism, which acts as a corrective to notions of both shapeless individual freedom and collective force. Jacobs and the figures he studies remind us that evil is a mystical reality as well as a human one. Proper education, vocation and prayer, they argued, can inform a broader and richer sense of our humanity in an age of rampant individualism and one-dimensional development.

The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis
by Alan Jacobs
Oxford University Press, 2018, 256 pages, $60

Gary Furnell, who lives in rural New South Wales, is a regular contributor of fiction and non-fiction. His latest story appears in this issue