1/30/2013
THE SELF-JUSTIFICATION OF MEANS
GOAFS II: #27
THE PRESENCE OF THE KINGDOM: 14
Chapter 3, the end and the means
JANUARY 30, 2012
A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money.
G. Gordon Liddy
If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free!
P.J. O'Rourke
Cell phones in 2011 contained more computing power than the entire Apollo Program in 1969.
Swift Blind Horseman by Peter Thiel, Oct. 3.2011
Once we see that everything has become a means, the second big thing about the question of the end and the means today is that the means justifies itself. The days are over when men used to argue that ‘the end justifies the means.’ Of course, it is true that there are still theorists who support this idea and who construct systems based upon it, like the Communists; or some moralists who are naïve enough to get excited about it, and they deal with the problem on an ethical level. But in reality, all this is simply ideology, belonging to an epoch when man was master, spiritually and intellectually, of his means, when he could choose between different kinds of means, and when he used to choose that which seemed the best in order to attain his end, and if this ‘means’ was condemned on moral grounds it was allowed to be used on account of the elevation and beauty of the ‘end’ in view.
But these ideas went out 50 years before Ellul wrote, and it is laughable to see politicians who think they are ‘modern’ and ‘free from prejudice,’ who adopt this rule as a principle of action. ‘Facts’ have made the system out of date, the principle inapplicable, and the ideas useless.
Today, what justifies any means used is the means itself. In our day, everything that ‘succeeds,’ everything that is ‘effective,’ everything in itself ‘efficient,’ is automatically justified. The means, by being applied, produces a result, and this result is judged by the simplest criteria, -- everything to which we can apply the adjective ‘more,’ that is, greater, quicker, more precise, etc., allows us to declare the means to be good. Everything that succeeds is good. Everything that fails is bad (not ‘evil’ since transcendence never enters into the calculation).
Technics now infallibly teaches us to discern the means, the only means which contains within itself the most brilliant success. Technics always succeeds. All technical objectives (which are not ends, and should never be confused in our minds that way) are necessarily attained by the most perfect technical means. It follows that a political system of means will almost always be triumphant, at least in the short run.
The Communist economy of Ellul’s day was entirely concentrated on means, produced marvelous successes, and as long as it concentrated on these means, it continued to make swift progress. Of course during this time, a lot of Russians starved or died by their own government’s hand.
Germany’s army was also a good example. It was a model of technical means, and represented a certain kind of ‘success.’ Although the odds were 4-1 against it, it took the Allies 4 years to break it. It is easy to find numerous examples of this kind of thing.
A close look at the nature of contemporary means makes it clear why it triumphs in all spheres of life. Means having become exclusively technical, knows no limits. It can be applied quite indifferently to every kind of object, and knows no other rule than technical laws.
Means is subject to no judgment of values. It can only be an instrument that functions well. This is because judgments of value (good or evil, just or unjust) are generally applied only to the end and not to the means. The technological process has gotten rid of every ideological or moral hindrance or constraint. It functions absolutely like a machine, without any external value to trouble the good order of the flywheels or the pistons.
Sometimes technical results, like the concentration camps, make the majority of men shudder with horror, but that is simply because these people were outside the sphere of these technical means; a Russian Communist did not shudder over the camps in Siberia, nor was a National Socialist in Germany horrified at the extermination camps. When this kind of practice becomes general, and we have all become used to the mechanism of these ‘means,’ no one will be surprised or appalled by them any longer. (over a million abortions a year seem just business as usual unless it is your daughter who has been raped, or your grandchild who is being legally murdered because her mother would rather have a boy.)
This process of self-justification has three results; the first is that man is no longer to any extent master of his means—man can no longer choose his means. This reality is partly reflected in the general observation that ‘in any political action, there are usually unintended consequences.’
Man no longer has at his disposal a variety of processes from which to choose at will to accomplish his desired end. Technics chooses for him, and it chooses with a precision, with an exactitude which man cannot attain. It shows him the only means which is truly effective, and after all, why should man refuse this ‘best of all possible means’? So man’s responsibility for the use of means is eliminated: there is no choice. (This reality is the reason that in an all-powerful State, whenever something bad happens, ultimately no one is responsible; think of the recent murder of the Ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi, Libya for example.)
Now it is true that some spheres, medicine, law, economics, these techniques are still in their infancy (since Ellul wrote 60 years ago, there has been considerable development). Man still ‘practices’ medicine. Competing economists argue mightily to promote and defend their own mutually exclusive theories and no machine can yet decide which theory is correct. But technics is like a child who grows very fast, and we already know what it looks like when it reaches maturity. Unless something changes, in another 50 years technics will have all the answers in all the spheres of life and the best means will always be self-evident—without any possible discussion.
Ellul saw a future where, “all over the world, means will be the same, and everyone will be at peace—R.I.P.”
A second consequence is the extension of technics to all spheres of life. To the extent to which ends disappear, to the extent in which man no longer has the choice of means, but where one way alone offers itself to his desires for action, he will apply technics to all objects. This fact (which Ellul will be considering in detail later on) is all the easier to achieve because technics is regarded as neutral.
We have the conviction, very restful in our agitated world, refreshing in our inferno, that means do not signify much, that they are secondary in comparison to the very noble and very righteous ends at which we are supposed to be aiming, that they are negligible and neutral. A table is neutral—from the point of view of good and evil. A machine is neutral; consequently the organization of labor is considered neutral, and the same view is held of the technical side of administration or propaganda.
This being so, drones, tactical nuclear weapons, and peacemaker missiles are also thought to be neutral. In reality, when we say that we regard technology as neutral, we really think, at the bottom, that it is good. The very fact that it extends man’s powers shows that technology is good. Today the means is justified by the power that technology gives to man: that is bottom line of what Ellul has been saying.
And now comes the third consequence, (1-Man is no longer master of his means and (2-technology extends to all spheres of life) all the ends proposed by man for the exclusive means placed at his disposal by technology are useless or inadequate. The means no longer has any need of the end, since the means is always self- justified in advance. That is what makes it so ridiculous and so tragic when people try to propose fresh ends for our technical civilization. This does not work because by the very fact that the means are technical makes it impossible to assign to it any other ends.
Means goes on its way, the blind leading the blind. It goes where every step leads it, an implacable monster which nothing can stop. If there is any doubt in your mind about this, you should read Chimera’s children: Ethical, Philosophical and Religious Perspectives of Human—Nonhuman Experimentation, Edited by David Albert Jones and Calum MacKellar, Continuum Books.
The Church would like to offer transcendent ends to the technicians, but generally fails. First because the technician feels no need for them, like the golfer asked if he was saved, who answered, “I don’t need to be saved, I am #1 on the tour.” The second reason the church usually fails in combatting the dominance of means is that it has adopted technical means for its own use--modern marketing, modern communications, modern management, etc., (most church growth doctrine is no more than sanctified means used to expand market share) and so stands on shaky ground when it tries to speak authoritatively of transcendental ends.
Going back to Genesis 3.6, we are reminded that the self-justification of technics has a theological root. And when the woman saw that the Tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the Tree was to be desired to make one wise—she took of the fruit and did eat. The evidence is the means used by Satan to move man to act, without having convinced him. You do not argue with ‘evidence’; you do not argue with the plane that flies faster than the speed of sound or with the latest wonder drug! And man needs such evidence in order to give himself confidence.
The result of all this is that means have become totalitarian. Our civilization is wholly a civilization of means and means affect all spheres of life. They respect nothing. Next week we will go on from here.
Jerry Sweers
cmudgeon@windstream.net
1/24/2013
THE PROLIFERATION OF MEANS
GOAFS II: #26
THE PRESENCE OF THE KINGDOM: 13
Chapter 3, The End and The Means
JANUARY 23, 2012
Jesus Is Coming—Look Busy
California Bumper Sticker
Genius is the art of making things simple.
Abner Crownover, The Coach King
A well-lived life is a succession of difficult choices made for the right reasons.
Richard Foster
Holiness is to do the will of God with a smile.
Teresa of Calcutta
The remarkable proliferation of means leads inevitably to making everything ‘useful.’ In our world, everything has to serve -- to be a ‘means.’ Art, and everything else that is ‘useless’ has to give way to the overwhelming pressure of the necessity for ‘utility.’ Anything which does not serve some ‘useful’ purpose must be eliminated or rejected.
In the back of my mind is a Peanuts cartoon strip where Lucy is watching Linus on his baby grand and she is asking, “Are we going to dance to it? Are we going to play musical chairs to it?” She continues through a list of possible ‘uses’ for the music and gets all ‘nos.’ Finally he tells her that he is just playing to hear the beautiful music and it blows her mind. Lucy is the supreme utilitarian.
In the more serious matters that concern men and women the same view is dominant. This is what explains the practice of euthanasia (for old people and incurables) in the ideal National Socialist State. Anyone who is not useful to the community must be put to death (for the benefit of the ‘Community.’) In 1990 in the Netherlands, about 11,800 deaths [9% of all deaths] were inflicted by doctors, about half of them without the patient’s consent.
To most people this seems like a barbarous practice, but it is simply the product of the universal predominance of means. Things being what they are, Ellul predicted that this practice would spread rapidly across the whole of civilization. Physician-assisted suicide in the United States is now (2013) legal in the states of Oregon, Montana, and Washington. It will not stop there. With the full flowering of Obamacare, it will spread rapidly out of necessity as health care is rationed and costs are controlled by unaccountable bureaucrats (Medicare Independent Payment Advisory Boards, [IPAB]) who will eloquently justify it as being “for the greater good of (abstract) Man.”
Further, as means increase, and as ends are relegated to the abstract, they become implicit and are no longer questioned. Means become the “given” without reflection or defense. Everyone is already aware of the general aim of civilization and it seems futile and old-fashioned to raise questions about it.
Everybody has vague ideas about ‘progress,’ and it seems to many that progress might be capable of replacing the pursuit of ends. People think that whenever there is change, there is progress, and in consequence we are increasingly approaching that very vague and hypothetical goal which was exploited with such romantic ecstasy in the 19th century.
But we are not closing in on paradise on earth, or any optimistic utopia. No one now is interested in questioning of what our ends consist, nor to see exactly in what direction we are headed. No control is now possible, for the ends have disappeared, or at least seem to have no connection with the means. It is the means which now occupy the whole field of activity, the full attention and admiration of man in general, the man-in-the-street, the man who answers the questions of the pollsters.
It is true that we have a hazy recollection of the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence,
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—“
and we still use words like happiness, or liberty or equality, but the White House, the Congress and the Supreme Court have been busy for years, emptying these marvelous words of their content. These grand words have been replaced by “fairness” or “empathy” for the most part and it is an authoritarian State that has a monopoly on empathy and is the sole arbiter of what is ‘fair.’ People who can’t even point out the State of Florida on a map or who won the revolutionary war no longer have any idea of what these words mean, nor of the conditions they require. These empty words and phrases are only used to grease the skids for taking autocratic measures which have no real relationship to the words of the Declaration.
These great words, these ends, which have become implicit in the mind of man and in his thought, no longer have any formative power. They are no longer creative in any sense. The vague recollections of these dead illusions are simply put among the devices used as motivators in political propaganda. It is no longer possible to take them seriously, and few people would be willing to die for them.
A man will die for his own well-being, or because he himself has already become a means: the means of a party, of a nation, of a class, and as a ‘means’ he is thrust into a battle which is being fought for no end. The heroism of a soldier in wartime, or of a workman in a strike, is in reality the heroism of a means which does not really know where it is going.
These impotent ends are incapable of creating means. Until recently, means were created in order to achieve an end. Now, the end no longer inspires, for it is only a word, it does not even rise to the level of myth. It no longer creates anything, as the mechanism for the creation of means is very different. Means reproduce themselves; new means grow out of old means as technology advances.
Genius is no longer necessary for most technical discoveries. When a certain state of technical advance has been reached the next discovery follows almost inevitably. In the same way genius is no longer necessary for the politician, since circumstances and technological means today tell him what he ought to do (or, more likely, what he can get away with—the polls give him the latest feelings of a historically illiterate nation of voters). So it is in all spheres of life, existing means produce the creation of new means.
This amounts to a law of mechanical causality. Man hardly needs to intervene at all. New kinds of production appear because new machines have been created, or because men have discovered new and fresh ways of exploiting matter. It seems to make no difference that man may not need these new products, that these new creations may be absolutely useless, or at least unnecessary. When means begets a new means, the new means gets applied—this is where the general observation arose, “If it can be done, it will be done.” This very process is clear confirmation of the absence of ends today.
We have seen how the aim or end sought becomes implicit or abstract. When this happens it ceases to move, it becomes static. We still hold the ideas of “life” of “liberty” and ”happiness” of a hundred years ago, although in a debased and weakened form. But the development of modern technological means makes these ends absurd! For the means have destroyed the very possibility of reckoning with habitual ends—people do not even realize that the means now being used involve the negation of implicit ends.
A good example would be the fact that the people who were little troubled by the Supreme Court’s decision in 1973;
Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973), is a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court on the issue of abortion. Decided simultaneously with a companion case, Doe v. Bolton, the Court ruled 7–2 that a right to privacy under the due process clause of the 14th Amendment extended to a woman's decision to have an abortion…
are the same people who will very likely be euthanized, should they live long enough, based on the same specious reasoning used by this court and later extended to the entire time until the child is totally out of the woman’s body.
We congratulate ourselves on every new airplane speed record broken, and we work harder to make airplanes go faster, or now, farther on the same amount of fuel, as if speed or conservation were ends in yhemselves. But what really is the use of getting to Paris sooner on the SST? Actually the SST was an overreach, but there will likely be efforts to accomplish the same time saving in the future--maybe by sub-orbital rocket?
What is the value of time, of life? It is precisely due to the use of means in our civilization that time and life no longer have any meaning. Man does not really know what to do with his time. Life is more absurd than ever. Ours may be the first generation in history to suffer terminal boredom. We “entertain ourselves to death” in the words of Neil Postman, but it does not work.
This is the result of the destruction of the spiritual foundations of time and of life in the heart of man. Modern man having been dehumanized by means, having himself become a means—in spite of the fact that ‘time’ has been gained, and new methods of preserving human life have been discovered—is like a savage who has been given a very delicate and perfect machine which he does not know how to use.
Look, then, at this man, now deprived of his ‘time’ and his ‘life,’ after people have tried so hard to make him earn his own living! No civilization has ever been so wasteful of the time of human beings, and their lives. Immense forces are used to enable man to gain a few seconds of time, yet whole days will be wasted by unemployment or by standing in lines outside a government office; both the result of the exaggerated importance given to means.
All that science can do will be used to save one life, and at the same time millions of men are massacred by bombs or in concentration camps. In one room a surgeon will do open heart surgery on a preborn child in his mother’s womb while next door another surgeon will carve up and suck out the remains of a healthy preborn child of the same age in his mother’s womb. This is only possible in a society without a moral compass and obsessed with means.
In this terrible dance of means which have been unleashed, no one really knows where we are going. The aim of life has been forgotten. The end has been left behind. Man has set out at tremendous speed—to go nowhere.
Next week we will see that the means not only creates itself, but justifies itself as well.
Jerry Sweers
cmudgeon@windstream.net
THE END AND THE MEANS
GOAFS II: #25
THE PRESENCE OF THE KINGDOM: 12
Chapter 3, the end and the means
JANUARY 16, 2012
Then some little children were brought to him, so that he could put his hands on them and pray for them. The disciples frowned on the parents’ action but Jesus said, “You must let little children come to me, and you must never stop them. The kingdom of Heaven belongs to little children like these!” Then he laid his hands on them and went on his way.
Matt. 19.13-15 J.B. Phillips
A person’s a person, no matter how small.
Horton Hears a Who, Dr. Seuss
Between 1973, when Roe v. Wade was decided, and 2008, nearly 50 million legal abortions have occurred in the U.S. (Over 95% were for convenience)
Guttmacher Institute
In the current science of Human-Nonhuman Experimentation there are three terms you should know:
+A hybrid consists of an ovum/egg(human or non-human) fertilized with the sperm of another species.
+A cybrid consists of ovum/egg (human or non-human) stripped of its chromosomes and given a nucleus from another species.
(Hybrids and cybrids both combine genes from different species at the cellular or sub-cellular level.)
+A chimera is an embryonic, fetal or post-natal combination of human and non-human. There are three ways to create a chimera: 1) cells from different species are combined in an early embryo; 2) these cells are combined at a later stage in the fetal development: 3) human stem cells are injected into a normal non-human embryo, which is then put into the womb of an animal to then develop to birth.
If these facts give you the ‘shivers’ and make you very uncomfortable, they should--this kind of thing is going on right now, with very little moral or theological insight or input. In 2005 scientists at Stanford University considered producing mouse chimeras whose brains would be “100% human.” An informal ethics committee endorsed the project but gave this advice: If the mice start acting human, kill them… We have long been aware of the general observation that if it can be done in science or technology, it will be done. This sort of thing makes one think; suppose the scientists had made these mice, the mice had escaped, taken over PET (People For The Ethical Treatment of Animals) , sent lobbyists to Washington and got a bill passed banning mouse traps and residential cats. Being almost as smart as people to begin with, their human brains might even had given these mice the edge over the incumbent politicians in the primaries…but I digress…
As we take up Chapter 3, we will consider the effects on a society when means become ends. In a way, the first two chapters have laid the groundwork for what follows. So that we do not get lost in the weeds, let me give a simple example of the question of the end and the means.
When were married in 1954, there was still a general cultural consensus in America that I needed to work and provide for my wife and myself, and any children that followed. The working was the means of acquiring money to do this--a decent life of basic necessities was the end in view. Had I chosen robbing banks as my profession, in those days this would have been seen as violating the general rule that that just ends require just means. At that time the question could still be and discussed. Today it is seldom thought of and less mentioned. We will see as we get into chapter 3 that technological means have become ends in themselves, and that ends, as we once knew them, have become irrelevant and largely forgotten.
When we reflect on the possibilities of action in the world, whatever form this action may take, for instance, evangelization, or political action; when, we reach the idea that the ‘style of life’ is today one of the most positive forms of revolutionary action; and when, finally, we search for ways in which the faith of the Christian may be expressed, we are setting forth the problem of the end and the means.
At the same time, as we look at our own day, we soon become aware that this is a formula, which, whether directly or not, preoccupies our contemporaries. If they are intellectuals, they study the question both at its heart, and in its repercussions, like Huxley (Brave New World). If they are not intellectuals they adopt a pragmatic attitude that implies an implicit decision in this respect. In reality, this question is absolutely central for our civilization, and the solution which is given risks being the decisive element in the decline of our civilization.
So when we consider ‘the end and the means’ we find ourselves both in the sphere of consequences, springing out of our previous study, and in the most important sphere of action for the Christian in the modern world.
The problem of the end and the means is an ancient problem, but its form has altered, and it is now expressed in very different terms from those of earlier days. To wish to study the problem from its philosophical angle, whether moral or metaphysical, to state and resolve the problem in eternal terms is to condemn oneself to understand nothing, in spite of apparent cleverness. In reality today the problem has been absolutely transformed; it is no longer a discussion between two conceptions of the relation between the end and the means (for instance, ‘the end justifies the means’ and ‘just ends require just means’), for it is no longer expressed in philosophical terms, but in terms of facts, and of particular facts, which are peculiarly urgent: technical facts. Today the issue can only be understood by looking at it in the light of technics (Ellul’s term for technology).
And it will no longer do to give an abstract answer to the question. We pay little attention to abstract obligations. In reality, the majority of questions of fact raised in contemporary civilization do not imply an intellectual or abstract answer. For those concerned, the question calls for a practical decision: one has to come down on one side or the other. This is a life decision on the part of those who really understand the question—the concrete question of one’s attitude to life. It is not amenable to the game played by the makers of economic and political systems of giving abstract answers to concrete questions.
The first great fact that emerges from our civilization is that today everything has become a ‘means.’ There is no longer an ‘end’; we do not know whither we are going. We have forgotten our collective ends, and we possess great means: we set huge machines in motion in order to arrive nowhere (the SST). The end has been effaced by the means. (He means the collective end of civilization, he allows that individuals still have their own ends, for example, to succeed in a competition, or to get a higher salary, etc.)
So man, who used to be the end of this whole human system of means, man, who is still proclaimed as an ‘end’ in political speeches, has in reality become himself the ‘means’ of the very means that ought to serve him. In order that the economy should flourish and grow, man submits to the demand of an economic mechanism, becomes a total producer, and puts all his powers at the disposal of production. He becomes an obedient consumer, and with his eyes shut he swallows everything that economics puts in his mouth. Fully persuaded that we are procuring the happiness of man, we are instead turning him into an instrument of these modern gods, which are our ‘means.’
This process of development is pervasive, and largely irresistible. For example, man has a right to ‘the pursuit of happiness’ and to be happy. He is certain that if he has plenty of stuff to consume, he will be happy. To achieve the considerable production of this stuff, production has to be organized, and then man’s consumption adapted to that production. But this is a very complicated process involving technical and human obstacles. The technical obstacles are gradually overcome by research. The human obstacles are overcome by subordinating man to the machine, division of labor, and propaganda to make it all seem great.
The result is that man himself, alive and concrete, the ‘man-on-the-street,’ is subjected to ‘means’ which are supposed to secure happiness of ‘man’ in the abstract. The ‘man’ of the philosophers and the politicians, who does not exist, is the only result of this tremendous adventure which brings misery to the man of flesh and blood, and transforms him into a ‘means.’ He has become simply an economic unit in the hands of the all powerful State.
The quest for technological excellence has replaced the quest for truth. There was a time when men felt it was important to know the Truth (This goes all the way back to Adam, who chose to make himself the source and measure of all truth, but that is another book.) After the philosophers and the theologians came the scientists. The scientists elaborated their theories, while others applied them; these have been used to prove the truth of these theories, and then for the use of man. From that moment science was lost, to anything more significant than the pursuit of a faster cell-phone and a perfect weight-loss drug.
Gradually, technical means became more important than the search for truth. Science had to become more and more effective for technical purposes, and finally science became only significant in terms of technology. Its whole direction is towards applied science. It is fully at the service of means. Science has become a ‘means’ for the creation of ‘more perfect means;’ and the abstraction called ‘science,’ to which homage is always paid, has replaced the search for Truth. 60 years ago this development was particularly evident in the United States and the Soviet Union, but it is already penetrating the rest of the world.
Much of the world today is wholly given up to the pursuit of better means in the name of progress. That which 100 years ago was an ‘end,’ has now become a ‘means’ in its turn, and even the ‘means of means.’ But some remembrance of the good old days remains. The present situation is so bleak that it is difficult to accept, so people transfer the ends once pursued into the realm of the ideal, of the abstract, of utopia. (recall President Obama’s first Presidential campaign).
Communism was an excellent example when Ellul wrote. Communism was the most remarkable doctrine of political means that has ever been known. It was also the most elaborate and comprehensive, but for what end? People (especially the ‘Perfessers’ in their ivory towers) said, the ‘end is a perfect Communist society.’ But that is not what Lenin said, he said “it has not entered the head of any socialist to promise the coming of a higher stage of Communism.” He adds that “no one must ever promise this Communist society, nor even intend to introduce it, for in a general way it is impossible to introduce it.”
So Russia had a admirable political machine which carried on in the form of means (for the dictatorship of the proletariat is also a means), in order to achieve illusory and hypothetical ends. To secure happiness for abstract men in the future, the concrete men of the present day were sacrificed by the millions.
This remarkable proliferation of means leads inevitably to making everything ‘useful.’ In our world, everything has to serve, that is to say, to be a ‘means.’ We will pick it up here next week.
Jerry Sweers
