Jacques Ellul's technical morality in Mormon culture

Anyone following this blog for a while—even from a distance—will have noticed how frequently I reference Jacques Ellul, and anyone paying attention to what I’m reading these days will note that there’s been an uptick in the Mormon Studies books I’m reading recently. Without giving too much away, the idea for a book I mentioned a month ago brings these two ideas together. As evidenced by my recent presentation at the International Jacques Ellul Society, I think that Ellul’s writing is helpful for understanding Mormonism’s relationship with technology and media, and I expect to be writing more about this in the years to come.

In the meantime, though, I find it helpful to draw attention to specific examples of how Ellul’s writing is salient in Mormon contexts. Here’s an example that isn’t specifically about technology or media—but then again, Ellul’s technique is broader than just technology or media. Indeed, to quote Russell Willis in the most recent issue of The Ellul Forum:

Ellul was not offering a theory of machines, nor was he primarily concerned with technological artifacts. He was naming a social logic that had come to organize modern life: a pervasive orientation toward efficiency that shapes how institutions function, how decisions are made, and how possibilities are evaluated. (p. 5, emphasis added)

One of the aspects of this pervasive orientation is Ellul’s idea of technical morality. In The Ethics of Nonpower, a contribution to a 1980 book, Ellul argues that:

Technique itself has become a value. Technical progress appears to the average Western person as the guarantee of the future good and happiness, and technology assures him of the necessity of the kind of behavior favorable to this progress. Technique carries our hopes (thanks to technical progress, cancer will be conquered). Here it gives life a meaning. And the usual attitude, whenever there appear to be drawbacks in the use of technique, consists in declaring that it is not technique that is to be blamed, but rather man, who does not know how to use it. (p. 205, emphasis added)

Shortly thereafter, he writes:

Morals based on the behavior required by technique are dominant. Those who mean to support another ethical direction are forced to enter into conflict, not directly with technique, but rather with the ideology of technique, with technical beliefs and morals. (p. 206)

In short, technique is treated as a moral imperative—it must be adopted, other ethical values are downplayed, and any ethical problems cannot be assigned to the technique itself. Now, compare that with this excerpt from a recent Salt Lake Tribune article:

In a video clip that has ricocheted across social media about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a retired high-level leader chastises fellow members considering departing the faith, admonishing, “Darth Vader could be your bishop,” he states, “the culture could be like Alcatraz, and it will not drive you away.”

Lawrence Corbridge, who served as a general authority Seventy from 2008 to 2019, doesn’t stop there.

“Some claim church culture is driving people away,” he continues. “The members feel unseen, disconnected, empty and the solution they say is a transformation to a more open, inclusive, transparent, loving and tolerant culture wherein more people can comfortably gather.”

But that, he argues, misses the point entirely.

“The ultimate question is not, ‘Do I fit in?’” he explains in the video, part of a series produced by the independent advocacy organization Scripture Central.“The ultimate question is: Is the church true?”

If the answer is yes, he concludes, tears brimming in his eyes, “then you will stay — come what may.”

This follows a very similar “social logic,” and it’s one of many examples that I want to draw on to start conceiving of Mormonism as a technical phenomenon. There’s one thing that I want to add to this observation, though, and one that further demonstrates the value of Ellul’s thinking for understanding Mormonism. Corbridge uses the word “true” to describe the need to conform to the Latter-day Saint technical system, but in Ellulian terms, Mormons tend to care more about reality than truth.

As the translator-to-English of Ellul’s Humiliation of the Word puts it:

Reality deals with fixed things not open to discussion, things which one can only observe. It forces us to conform. Truth, like the word, is infinitely open-ended and invites reflection, response, relationship, and dialogue. Reality refuses to allow us to the distance necessary so that we can be critical of what we are considering. [p. xvi]

As I read it, Humiliation is an extended reflection on two epistemological stances: One that sees things as self-evident, fixed, and forcing conformity to those fixed ideas, and the other that sees things as harder to pin down, negotiable, and subject to dialectic dialogue (I was pleased to see this pop back up when rereading Graeber and Wengrow’s Dawn of Everything, which suggests some anarchist underpinnings to Ellul’s preferred stance). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mormonism is firmly rooted in the first of these two stances, and not the second. Corbridge’s comments are just one example of that, and I look forward to using this reality/truth dichotomy for further exploration of Mormonism and technique.

• Jacques Ellul
• Mormonism
• image vs. word
• Mormon studies
• technique
• technical morality
• Latter-day Saint technical system
• anarchism
• David Graeber
• David Wengrow
• The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
• The Humiliation of the Word