In my living room sits an incredibly gaudy computer setup. It stands a solid two and half feet, with a glass panel to see the gaudy graphics card and water cooling system, and all around and throughout it pulses with rainbow light. A curved monitor and accompanying RGB keyboard and mouse round out this monstrosity that is a testament to the unending patience of my wife. It’s a familiar sight, perhaps, for parents of teenagers, but far less cute as one approaches 30.
The whole system sits atop a mahogany veneer desk that is over a century old. It was my great-grandfather’s desk, shipped to me by family a few years after he died along with a matching bookcase, a six-generation bedroom suite, and his collection of mostly obsolete firearms.
The PC and the desk couldn’t clash more: the desk, an edifice to my family’s coal-mining heritage bearing the furniture maker’s mark from the mining town of Whitesburg, Kentucky, the PC a symbol of technological excess and bourgeois sentiment. A generational mishmash, and both symbols of a danger that goes back to the Fall of Adam. Both represent the development and depth of technique in the Western world.
Jacques Ellul, perceived at the time as a radical Christian, which he certainly was, should be regarded today as a sort of prophet. In the iron age of communication technology, Ellul looked at the development of the radio and later the television as signs of a development that are as old as sin itself: technique. Ellul defines technique in his seminal work, The Technological Society, as “the totality of methods, rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.”
For my great-grandfather and his kinfolk, the Kentucky coal mines represented the totality of methods for efficiency. Men weren’t men but were means to extract as much coal as cheaply and as efficiently as possible. Whole towns were erected, with pools and movie theaters and schools, all toward the end of an efficient mine. These were self-sufficient communities where the greenback was seldom used, but rather company chit was issued; company money for use in company stores to furnish company houses with mahogany veneer desks. The whole of the town, all of its purposes — educational, recreational, and spiritual — was oriented toward efficiency. A satisfied man made an efficient worker, and a praying man was less worried about the risk of mine collapse.
With the rise of unions we saw the fall of company towns, but not the fall of the ageless spirit that encouraged their rise, the unstoppable and all-pervasive technique that has come to define both industrial and post-industrial life in America.
Today, the economic and spiritual structures of technique are less obvious than the company towns, but more omnipresent. Setting aside our professional lives, it is our personal lives that have become even more inculcated with technique, mostly without our knowledge.
Most people spend at least an hour a day online, whether on Facebook, Instagram, or The Washington Post or First Things. Regardless of how enriching your online experience is, the technique remains the same: it is all part of a terribly efficient method. As we’ve divorced more of our recreation and social lives from the tangible world and moved it to the digital, we’ve made it more efficient for ourselves and for those who create the structures of that experience.
In our sacred rest, established by God for our use, we still contribute without our knowledge and with only tacit consent. Each video watched on YouTube, each article read on the Post, each essay cited on JSTOR, all contribute to technique metastasizing. Each piece of content engages with feeds, computers, and artificial intelligence to make it more efficient in bringing you back for another ride on the carousel.
Technique has of course benefitted us in many ways. It has made our goods cheaper; it has helped us to bridge cultural gaps through the miracle of modern communication; it has opened new ways of sharing the gospel in difficult places through the internet. Like artificial intelligence, the latest child of technique, it is hard to make a moral claim on it, difficult to get your mind around the ethical dilemma it presents.
It is plain that the all-consuming drive for efficiency that moves our modern world was never the plan; an Adamic tool developed to spite the hardness of the postlapsarian earth with its thistles and thorns. Its presence is ubiquitous, its spirit felt everywhere the Western foot treads, and its one escape is through the Church of Jesus Christ, that great bastion of inefficiency and impracticality.
The Church in her beauty and century movement is the way out for those of our age — a way, even for a moment, to get one step off the stainless-steel carousel of technique. The liturgy takes as long as it takes, and it doesn’t stop once begun. Its motions and movements echo timelessness, its vestments ornate and impractical, the time of meeting unattractive. Its spaces are full of arcane symbols and the architecture ornate. The very Lord worshiped there took six days to build a world he could have built in one; his triune life is confounding and mysterious; his life and ministry not plainspoken and straight but rather filled with the words of parables and metaphor. It is, and he is, the anti-technique and the antidote to banal efficiency.
While technique is as ubiquitous as northern cold, the Church offers the needed fireside respite of warmth and eccentricity and mystery. It is the beauty of the impractical, a place that is eternally resistant to automation, a place that is inefficient by its nature, and foolish to those who are perishing.
Our spaces and rituals and beliefs allow us to step out for a moment, out of the mundanity of efficient contemporary life, and enter into the adventure of the impractical sacred. This is itself the mundane beauty of the Church, that the earthly walk with Jesus isn’t straight, but weaves through life’s holy meanders. We choose the impractical path, the difficult path, the sacred path, where the path of technique encourages that most efficient of philosophies, utilitarianism. The Church chooses and must continue to choose the less efficient philosophy of virtue and beauty.
Our way is more radical, more beautiful, and far more foolish.
