Jacques Ellul's technique and Brian Daley's Alderaan

I recently finished an audiobook of Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society and have been finding other things to listen to now that I don’t have mid-twentieth century French philosophical reflections on technique to think through anymore. Last night, I began (re)listening to the National Public Radio Star Wars radio drama—adapted by Brian Daley—while cleaning up the kitchen, and I continued listening on the way in to work today. The radio drama is interesting in so many ways! For one, it expands a two hour movie into a nearly six-hour radio serial, and so it crams in a lot of material that isn’t present in the movie (or even—as far as I can tell—the original script).

I was fascinated this morning by one of these scenes in the second episode (starting around 17:43), where the creepy Imperial Lord Tion is dining with Princess Leia and her father with the hopes of wooing Leia to further his career. There’s an exchange between Tion and his hosts that captures some of Ellul’s ideas in a fascinating way that I wanted to capture in a post. (As a Star Wars fan, I don’t know that I’ve ever heard these ideas explored elsewhere in the canon, which also makes this interesting.) Here’s my rough transcript:

TION: But you really ought to look beyond your Alderaan philosophies and consider the value of other things.

BAIL ORGANA: Such as?

TION: Technology! Oh, I’ll admit that you are more than comfortable here on Alderaan, but by employing more efficient methods, you could expand your economy three-fold.

LEIA: If we cared to.

TION: Consider our two attitudes, your majesty: Your people place primary importance upon being at one with themselves.

BAIL ORGANA: You don’t approve?

TION: Well, consider the other side of the coin: A technology and methods of organizing people that can reshape entire planets and bring the galaxy under a single rule.

LEIA: Whether the galaxy desires it or not.

TION: Alderaan could profit from a closer link to the Empire. I could provide that link.

This nicely captures some of Ellul’s thoughts on technique. I’ll quote a couple of passages from his essay “Investigation toward an Ethic in a Technical Society,” included in the posthumous collection Theology and Technique: Toward an Ethic of Non-Power. First, Tion’s defense of technology, efficiency, and totalitarianism evokes Ellul’s description of “technical ethics”:

But when it comes to Technique, there is no systematic intellectual construction of a scale of values. We see the spontaneous creation of corresponds to the system’s functioning: normalcy, efficiency, success, work, professional conscience, devotion to the collective work; such are the main values of this technical ethic from whose standpoint all behaviors are judged in our society. All concur in favoring the most complete adaptation of [humanity], on the one hand, to machines, instruments and process, and, on the other hand, to his technical environment.

In contrast, the Organas seem to me to defend Ellul’s ethic of non-power:

An ethic of non-power—the root of the matter—obviously means that [humanity] accepts not to do all that [they] could do.

A couple of pages later, Ellul specifically argues:

the fundamental choice that is before us is indeed the one having to do with increasing or diminishing power, production, means, etc.

Tion is disappointed with the Organas that they don’t grow their economy as much as they could with more adoption of technology. The Organas implicitly concede that they could do this but that they don’t need to. They have enough, and don’t need to pursue more.

This is just a quick post, but I’m delighted to find Ellul in Star Wars as I continue thinking about his writing. I also need to buy Theology and Technique—I’ve cribbed these quotes from Google Books based on a memory from a hoopla checkout that I didn’t get very far with, but it’s time to read the whole dang thing. It’s available for relatively cheap from the Swiss publishing house, so I’m inclined to order from Geneva and read in French, though I’m sure I’ll regret that once I realize how much it tasks my French to read more philosophy.

• Star Wars
• Star Wars: The Original Radio Drama
• Jacques Ellul
• technique
• The Technological Society
• NPR
• radio
• Théologie et technique
• degrowth
• non-power