The Technological Bluff, by Jacques Ellul, translation by Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Eerdmans, 418 pp., $24.95)
THE MOST genuine part of today’s philosophizing is the dispute between those who would usher in a technocratic world and those who want to preserve human freedom of action. One position suggests an efficiency that would reduce the marvelously complex structure of nature, man, and the supernatural to mechanical formulas of living in programmed happiness; the other position asserts the value of spontaneity, imagination, mystery, and beauty. Just as Socrates opposed the Athenian mob-mind, so have the best thinkers of modernity, from Bergson to Heidegger, resisted the technocratic ideologue’s computerized global culture. Jacques Ellul is a foremost figure in this struggle, and although The Technological Bluff is as subtle as a bulldozer, it may be called a final indictment. Technology is not only a potentially mortal danger, an overwhelming impoverishment of higher things, it is also fraudulent, promising one thing and delivering another.
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