The Administration of Fear – technology, politics and religion
Paul Tyson
Abstract
In this paper I first describe my own enculturation into a shared
climate of fear via the raft of new airport security measures
introduced after 9/11. This leads me to think about the broad
sweep of the different meanings of and responses to mortal fear
within Western culture. Longitudinally, two things are quite
unique about our own cultural norms regarding mortal fear: 1.
the functional materialism of consumer culture and; 2. the role
of technology in shaping and ‘securing’ the very life-world we
live within. The paper then focuses on this second point and
hones in on a French stream of thought within the Philosophy
of Technology, particularly in relation to insecurity and
security. Unpacking what the Philosophy of Technology is, via
some key ideas in the work of Jacques Ellul, the paper finishes
up with an exploration of Paul Virilio’s understanding of “the
administration of fear.” According to Virilio the primary
reason why we are afraid has nothing to do with terrorists; our
fear is a function of the speed, power, invasiveness and global
interconnectivity of our own technologies. Terrorism and
securitization provides a convenient means of managing this
fear without addressing it, yet that management has totalitarian
tendencies.
* * * * * * *
Introduction
Since 9/11 the security consciousness of Australian life has changed dramatically. In the early
days of the War On Terror (WOT) I can remember finding it difficult to fit in with a rapidly
deployed raft of new security procedures, particularly at airports. I can remember hearing a
long list of prohibited carry-on items being broadcast to us at the Townsville airport,
including predictable items like scissors, but also umbrellas and frisbees. I can remember a
number of items in our nappy bag being confiscated – safety pins, baby nail clippers, talcum
powder. At that time I discovered that no sense of humour would surface if you asked a
security officer how a frisbee could be used as a weapon of terror. And then, normal security
procedures were not enough. My wife and I would often get randomly checked to see if our
shoes, pusher or armpits had high explosives in them. My pregnant wife was even checked;
apparently she was either so callous looking that she was prepared to kill the child in her own
womb for some extremist religious cause, or the child itself was not a real baby, but a bomb.
My wife was shocked and offended at these implications, all made under the rubric of
impersonal randomized safety procedures.
1
The next time we went through airport security we were on our way to Hobart, and I was
randomly selected for the high explosives test. I asked the security man making sure I was
not a human bomb, ‘what intelligence do you have leading you to suspect that a flight to
Hobart is a credible terrorist target?’ Such a comment was not seen as funny, and yet the
question was not taken seriously either. Meek and respectful submission to the security
procedure was the beginning and end of what was required of me.
Perhaps security staff are trained to be deadpan blank about performing invasive and
suspicious procedures on people. In my experience, any attempt the recipient of such
treatment makes to personalize the engagement with humour only heightens discomfort and
distrust. On our way to Hobart that day, this impersonal suspicion annoyed me. I was on the
point of making a joke about my risk of spontaneously combusting due to their humourless
indifference to my discomfort, when it occurred to me that any sort of explosion joke was
now simply unsayable. We are required to not only be securitized, but to display compliant
and silent loyalty to the value and appropriateness of all security measures, without question.
Airport bomb jokes are now as funny as ‘well I am a Communist’ jokes during the Cold War.
Impersonal and invasive security procedures are now treated as intrinsically necessary for our
safety. If you buck the manner in which security staff treat you in any way – particularly if
you are Arabic – you can expect to be met with humourless hard suspicion at best, but more
likely with heightened degrading invasiveness. After nearly two decades of such security
procedures, I don’t buck the inconvenience, neuroticism and invasive suspicion of that
normality any more. I am conditioned to just fitting in and not making life difficult for
myself. We live embedded within a securitized nation state that has accepted a background
level of fear and suspicion as normal to daily life. Roosevelt’s famous injunction that “the
only thing we have to fear is fear itself”1 seems sadly irrelevant to how we live now.
For your average Australian, the WOT security culture is just annoying. But if you are an
asylum seeker who has attempted to come to Australia without documents and not through
our carefully gated airport security system, things have changed dramatically since 2001. The
military will pick you up before you get near Australia and you will no longer get your
asylum claim heard. You will be given the choice between indefinite detention, deportation
or perhaps relocation to some other country. The process is designed to be degrading and
hopeless2 in order to deter non-standard would be asylum applicants from exploiting our
obligations under the UNHCR refugee convention. In this climate of vigilance against terror,
national security now trumps our UNHCR obligations. Running traumatizing offshore prison
camps as deterrent centres, having tight border security, and eradicating people smugglers –
the ultimate low life scum3 – are popular government policies, and no expense is too great in
supporting these projects, even as our tiny foreign aid budget continues to shrink.4 In this
climate of vigilance against terror, security trumps humanity.
1
This is the opening line of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1933 inaugural address. Interestingly, this comment was
made when the US was in the very teeth of the Great Depression and populist fascism was strongly on the rise in
Europe.
2
See Michael Green, Angelica Neville, Andrea Dao, Dana Affleck, Sienna Merope (eds.), They Cannot Take
the Sky (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2017).
3
See Robin de Crespigny, The People Smuggler (Melbourne: Penguin, 2012).
4
See this Sydney Morning Herold article (28 December 2016) quoting then CEO of World Vision, Tim Costello
on the decline of foreign aid this century: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/australiasforeign-aid-spending-at-lowest-level-in-eight-years-20161228-gtiqpe.html
2
Why are we afraid? How does fear work? What does fear mean? What are the social and
political implications of the threat consciousness that now defines how we must behave in
many public places? What is really driving our ever more tightly monitored security and
immigration policy agendas? Who benefits from this climate of fear? Who loses in this
climate of fear? Are we really safer because of these security measures?
The basic answer to the above questions that we will explore in this paper is surprising.
According to Paul Virilio the primary reason why we are afraid has nothing to do with
terrorists; our fear is a function of the speed, power, invasiveness and global interconnectivity
of our own technologies. Terrorism and securitization provides a convenient means of
managing this fear without addressing it.
Virilio’s understanding of why we are fearful and how the dynamics of fear works seem farfetched at first glance. In order to make his argument comprehensible we will first think
about how the meaning of mortal fear within Western culture has undergone a number of
major shifts, and we will then look at the field of scholarship within which Virilio writes –
the philosophy of technology. Then we will unpack Virilio’s understanding of the
administration of fear more closely.
A brief history of the meaning of mortal fear in Western culture
As we all know, mortal fear is a visceral instinctive reaction producing a powerful fight or
flight response in us to a present or pending danger. This much is common – at an animal
level – to us all. And yet how we respond to mortal fear is also culturally conditioned, for
death has cultural and religious meanings. The background meaning of death has undergone
significant changes in the course of Western history.
Going back to the warrior culture of Ancient Greece and Rome, the shame of cowardice was
more feared than fear itself. A key component of this outlook was a tragic understanding of
mortality, combatted to some extent by the hope of attaining lasting glory in stories of honour
about deeds of death defying and death embracing courage on the battle field. As Simone
Weil points out, Homer’s Iliad shows no sense of good guys verse bad guys because within
the pagan warrior dynamic the forces governing mortal endeavours are more powerful than
mortals.5 This meant that enemies were in some sense brothers in mortality, and that the
destiny of victory or defeat was less important than embracing conflict like mortals who have
overcome their fear of death. In the distinctive arena of mortal combat – an arena that defined
what it was to be a man – glory was incompatible with cowardice. Here being controlled by
fear so that personal preservation overcome all other considerations was deeply associated
with a sub-human shame.
After Classical Antiquity was transformed into medieval Christendom, the texture of
dominant attitudes towards mortal fear was profoundly changed. The end of public blood
sports in the Colosseum in the early 5th century illustrates the nature of this shift. Here is how
Theodoret of Cyrus recounts the switch event that brought the gladiatorial games to an end:
5
Simone Weil, “The Iliad or poem of force” in Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff, War and the Iliad (New
York: New York Review Books, 2005), 1–37.
3
Honorius, who inherited the empire of Europe, put a stop to the gladiatorial combats
which had long been held at Rome. The occasion of his doing so arose from the
following circumstance. A certain man of the name of Telemachus had embraced the
ascetic life. He had set out from the East and for this reason had repaired to Rome.
There, when the abominable spectacle was being exhibited, he went himself into the
stadium, and stepping down into the arena, endeavoured to stop the men who were
wielding their weapons against one another. The spectators of the slaughter were
indignant, and inspired by the triad fury of the demon who delights in those bloody
deeds, stoned the peacemaker to death. When the admirable emperor was informed of
this he numbered Telemachus in the number of victorious martyrs, and put an end to
that impious spectacle. 6
Christian martyrdom is a form of courage in the face of death that renounces the honour
culture of the warrior. The honour of the peacemaker and martyr is the opposite of the honour
of the warrior and gladiator, and yet both display a renunciation of mortal fear. Ironically, the
early antipathy between the sacrificial peacemaker as subject to the authority and glory of
Christ, and the violent warrior as subject to the authority and glory of Caesar, becomes
softened into the notion of different vocations in Medieval Christendom. The higher vocation
of the monk is non-violent and continues the early tradition of martyrs, but the soldier, the
prince, bishop and the pope must be entangled in the affairs of power, and cannot avoid
violence and war. Augustine’s Christianised re-working of Classical Just War concepts
makes this demarcation of vocations and the use of violent power by Christians justifiable
within Medieval Christendom. Even so, a crucial feature of attitudes towards mortality is the
Christian confidence in the resurrection, because of belief in the overcoming of Death itself
by Christ. Neither the glory of making a name to endure after you, or mere survival, were the
highest value in the context of mortal danger. Good faith in the victory of Christ over Death
meant that giving in to the fear of death itself was a falling short of the values and
commitments of Christendom. The medieval culture of chivalry is thus a complex blend of
Christian peacemaker and martyr virtue with the tribal warrior culture that flourished after the
collapse of Classical Roman civilization.
Fear, to an Enlightenment perspective, is grounded in irrational feelings, animal instincts, in
ignorance, in superstitious falsehood and in incorrect evaluations of that which is
unavoidably certain. As such, fear is a mark of immaturity or sub-human weakness which the
reasonable, well-educated and morally courageous adult must rise above.
This Enlightenment outlook is embedded in the modern age of science, which, in the West,
also became the political age of reasoned collective action fostering the common good under
the sign of an egalitarianism of intrinsic human worth. Universal human rights affirming
liberal democracy is the framework of political ideology within this Enlightenment outlook.
This Enlightenment Humanist outlook was the philosophical underpinning of the ideology of
liberal democracy in the post-world-war-two era of last century. Of course, democratic
processes can be driven by fear – as the Cold War demonstrates only too clearly – but to the
Enlightenment outlook on the nature of fear itself, fear is always to be avoided in any rational
and humane deliberation. For fear can engender irrational fight and flight responses that may
violate universal human rights and undermine cosmopolitan good order between states. Fear
is hence dangerous to the political ideology of liberal democracy, which is why a free and
fearless press is considered so important. That is, truth that dispels the ignorance and
6
Theodoret, The Ecclesiastical History, Book V, Chapter XXVI.
4
prejudice of irrational crowd reflexes is vital for the humanity and rationality of liberal
democracy.
Another feature of our modern Western civilization which did not end with the passing of the
Middle Ages is its long historical embedding in the Christian religion. To Christianity fear is
the opposite of love and is sign of a failure of faith in the providence of God. Love, Saint
John notes, casts out fear (1 John 4:18). Saint Peter notes that the walk of faith is
incompatible with anxiety (1 Peter 5:7) and the gospels strictly forbid self-preserving fear
(Matthew 6:25–34), for this is to lean on one’s own resources and to turn one’s back on the
care that God gives us, and to fail in the love that we must give all neighbours – be they
friend or enemy. Most significantly, the central figure of Christian faith – Jesus of Nazareth –
is a friend of the outcasts, and is one Himself. To confess that this Jesus is one’s Lord, is to
embrace the outsider, to risk receiving violence whilst refusing to give violence. To embrace
the way of the cross is to reject fear and force as a way of life. So religiously, Western culture
is strongly conditioning against the fear dynamic of minority scapegoating. The novelty and
power of the Christian valorisation of the scapegoat is something the French philosopher
René Girard brings out very well.7 This refusal of fear motivated violence is a clear religious
principle within Western culture, even though scapegoating and the use of fear based mass
manipulation has a long heritage in the West, often, alas, deeply entangled in the practice of
Western religion.
So the Classical West, the Medieval West, the age of Reason, and the Christian heritage of
Western culture all see mortal fear as something to be overcome. Arguably, the rise of
functional materialism in consumer culture gives us less means of dealing with the inevitable
encounter with death than was the case in our pre-20th century Western cultural heritage, and
it is likely that this has considerable bearing on contemporary approaches to mortal fear. That
George W Bush could describe the 9/11 terrorists – who had obviously overcome the fear of
death itself – as cowards, and could counsel Americans to ‘go shopping’ as an act of defiance
against these terror attacks, points to an approach to mortal insecurity that has almost no
resonance with pre-consumer culture attitudes.
The point of the above sketch is that collective attitudes to mortal fear have changed
profoundly in the course of Western cultural history, and arguably, most profoundly from the
1960s on when our culture became focused on material security and sensual gratification in
ways that largely displaced the life and death consciousness of our civilization before this
time. But other things have happened since the 1960s too. The switch event in relation to the
public treatment of mortal fear that reshaped Western societies towards internal security was,
of course, 9/11. More exactly, the way that event is given a meaning, the narrative of good
and evil that event now carries, and the way in which responses to that event are justified and
continued, is the switch. Let us look at this more closely.
How does the War On Terror security narrative work?
The “War on Terror” narrative that was the US government’s response to 9/11 is that our
good, free, secular and life affirming Western liberal democracy is under attack from evil
religious forces determined to destroy it. We must be very careful to protect that which we
value, and because the enemy is a fifth column within our societies, we must be prepared for
7
René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1977).
5
attacks from non-conventional and covert operators. Where this narrative is taken to be true,
it engenders a response where we the people are afraid, we are suspicious of those foreigners
within our ranks that might be covert terrorists, we want our governments to take strong and
decisive action to protect us, and we are prepared to accept invasive security measures and
the suspension of civil liberties and universal human rights in order to get security.
As we can see, the meaning of mortal fear is situated within cultural assumptions about the
nature of life and death, and at this point in the West’s cultural history, there are multiple
layers of contradicting meanings possible. So the success of the War On Terror security
narrative is not automatically assured. In reality, its success is maintained by three factors.
Firstly, there are a set of government instigated physical security practices integral with the
US lead War On Terror. “The free world” is at war. Airport securitization is but the tip of that
iceberg. Since 9/11 we have seen a massive surge in the production and deployment of new
military technologies, an exponential proliferation of ubiquitous surveillance technologies,
the rise of a privatized international military industry, the rehabilitation of torture,
astonishingly distorted reporting of sensitive events and theatres concerning the involvement
of our military in border policing and overseas deployments, and the radical de-stabilization
of Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and associated regions due to US Alliance military action.8 Drone
technology and the international arms industry have also blossomed during this time.9 Postwar Allied defence spending has never been healthier.
Secondly, we are embedded in the propagation of a continuous stream of threat narratives via
our mass media. Any terror incident in the first world is immediately world news, and that
news means that where ever we are in the world – even the outer suburbs of Hobart – we feel
entangled in the narrative of civilizational threat.
Thirdly, there is the irrational crowd psychology of fear. These animal spirits have a powerful
effect on democratic politics, as their power is easy for our politicians to harness, and once
one side has tapped in, the other side is desperate not to be seen as moving against the
instincts of the herd.
Interestingly, all of the above three factors are profoundly technologically mediated and
manipulated factors. The role of technology in our society is deeply enmeshed in the War On
Terror security dynamic. It is now time to look at the philosophy of technology and return to
the dynamic and management of fear through that lens.
8
Significant texts in some of these areas are: Nicky Hager, Other People’s Wars (New Zealand: Potton &
Burton, 2011); Patrick Cockburn, The Rise of Islamic State (London: Verso, 2015); John Chilcot, The Report of
the Iraq Inquiry, Executive Summary (UK: House of Commons, 2016); Michael Otterman, American Torture
(London: Pluto Press, 2007); Michael Otterman and Richard Hil, Erasing Iraq (London: Pluto Press, 2010);
Anthony Burke, Beyond Security (London: Routledge, 2007); Anthony Burke, Fear of Security (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008); Andrew Wilkie, Axis of Deceit (Melbourne: Black Inc, 2004); Peter W.
Singer, Corporate Warriors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008).
9
See Peter W. Singer, Wired for War, the robotics revolution and conflict in the 21st century (London: Penguin,
2010); Andrew Feinstein, The Shadow World, inside the global arms trade (London: Penguin, 2012).
6
Virilio and the Philosophy of Technology
Paul Virilio’s book The Administration of Fear sheds startling light on the way modern
Western society works.10 His insights run very much against the grain of the standard
narrative of security. In a nut shell, Virilio argues that we now live in a perpetual state of
uncertainty and insecurity because of the continuous and rapid pace at which our space and
time overcoming technologies are re-shaping our lives. That is, external threats, such as
religious terrorism, have little to do with why we are committed to ever more invasive
security policies and procedures. This is not a conspiracy or Luddite argument, for Virilio
identifies no evil class driving this dynamic and technology itself is not seen as bad. And yet,
Virilio does name a central problem. He find that it is our sacralisation of technology, our
blind faith in technology’s positive impacts on the practical conditions in which we live, that
requires us to falsely locate external threats as the reason for our fears. Once we do this, of
course, more security technology aimed at great surveillance, more invasive controls of
individuals, better military equipment, and tougher risk containment policies are seen as the
obvious answer to our fears. But these monitor and control solutions undermine social trust
and mean that we are treated with increasing levels of suspicion by our own governments.
This – along with a continuous news diet of international disasters – exacerbates rather than
alleviates our background sense of fear. Virilio holds that as long as we must locate the
causes of our fears in ways that are not integral with the deep life-world re-shaping power of
our own technologies, we will only make the dynamic of fear and ever invasive security
technologies more unbearable. Significantly, while this dynamic is operative, externalized
security threats are embraced and magnified in ways that do not address the real causes of our
insecurity, and that have very disturbing human rights violating and totalitarian leaning
political consequences. Dark and destructive political trends are thus an integral component
of the administration of fear.
As this initial summary indicates, the causes and controllers of collective fear that Virilio
identifies are in radically conflict with the way in which we are accustomed to externalizing
an inchoate background sense of insecurity. If Virilio is right about the inner logic of how
fear is generated and administered in our society, then we should expect that his analysis will
be hard for us to believe. So I am going to assume that you are likely to have a rather
sceptical initial response to his analysis and will need some background perspective on his
thought in order to evaluate it.
Virilio’s writings are situated within a field of scholarship called the philosophy of
technology. The philosophy of technology seeks to understand how our technologies shape
the way we live and explore what the meaning of that shaping might be.
The world shaping role of modern science and technology has been a serious concern in
European high culture since at least the 18th century. I will not describe the many varieties of
approaches great thinkers and artists have pursued in grappling with how our technology
changes both us and nature. Rather I will focus on Virilio’s distinctive French trajectory
looking firstly at the core insights of Jacques Ellul.
I have chosen Ellul as the starting place here for a number of reasons. Firstly, he is one of the
great 20th century theorists of technology and is a significant influence on Virilio’s thought.
But Ellul and Virilio also have something else in common which they share with a rather
10
Paul Virilio, The Administration of Fear (Los Angeles: semiotext(e), 2012).
7
small group of recent French intellectuals, such as Jean-Luc Marion and René Girard; they
are Christians. I will briefly touch on the theoretical significance of this fact later.
Jacques Ellul’s Philosophy of Technology
Ellul was born in France in 1912 during the tumult of World War One. His father, whom
Jacques admire greatly, was highly critical of religion in the tradition of Voltaire. As a young
man Ellul studied law, read Marx, Kierkegaard and Barth, became a Christian anarchist and
experienced the ravages of the great depression. During World War Two he was active with
the French Resistance, hiding and smuggling out Jews during the German occupation of
France. After the war he was a professor of History and the Sociology of Institutions at the
University of Bordeaux until he retired in 1980. He died in 1994.
Ellul’s two best known texts in the philosophy of technology are The Technological Society
(1954) and Propaganda (1962).11 In these books Ellul describes the deep impact on our way
of life of the practice and ideology of efficiency and of the powers of collective formation
expressed through the mass media.
Ellul observed that increasingly, the logic of efficiency – faster, cheaper, more powerful with
less effort – is seen as an unqualified good and as a final justification in its own right. That is,
functionally, instrumental rationality defined in financialized terms has displaced moral,
aesthetic and religious conceptions of human purpose in Western culture. So la technique as
a mode of existence – the looking at everything as a practical problem that admits of a
technical solution towards some efficient, quantifiable and profitable outcome – has come to
define the unifying horizon of rational purpose for our society. This has a number of striking
effects. Firstly, human ends become denuded of all meaning other than those that can be
defined in terms of physical needs and desires and numerical quantifiers. Secondly, as
intrinsic, qualitative and transcendent ends become meaningless, so human existence
becomes determined by physical necessity. This second point is worth dwelling on.
Ironically, the greater our commitment to the ideology of efficient technique the more
mechanistic and instrumentalised we ourselves become. We become human resources, we
become expendable on the grounds of inefficiency and un-profitability, the intrinsic human
point of institutions becomes invisible to those who run them, and politics becomes reduced
to economic pragmatics and electoral marketing. In the name of greater technical power, we
become the powerless objects of our own ideology of efficiency.
Ellul is not advocating inefficiency or the rejection of technology, rather he is pointing out
that efficient technique as an overarching cultural ideology, as the central life-world
organizing agenda of our way of life, is incompatible with the political expression of intrinsic
values and the non-standardized possibilities of human freedom. In this he sits firmly within
Max Weber’s sociological trajectory. To Weber bureaucratic logic – a technocratic systems
logic that serves pre-defined instrumental ends – is a good servant for specific categories of
tasks, but it is a terrible universal master. Yet the effectiveness and measurable success of our
technocratic management class tend naturally towards the subjugation of moral and political
deliberation to calculations of outcomes defined technical mastery. The manner in which the
11
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage, 1964). Jacques Ellul, Propaganda (New York:
Vintage Books, 1973).
8
cunning instrumental intelligence of Humphry Appleby plays with the opinion poll sensitive
Prime Minister Hacker in “Yes Prime Minister” illustrates this dynamic with powerful
satirical force. Human political deliberation which aims at such vague notions as human
values, moral truths and the common good can never – in our pragmatic materialist age –
compete with the hard calculative realism of the machine men on whom our politicians
depend. To Weber, the very success of good technocrats promotes them towards a mastery of
human affairs and the crushing of the human spirit.
Ellul’s reflections on the mass media are also very important.
Interestingly Ellul’s classic texts on how our society has become centred around efficiency
techniques and what role the mass media plays in our society, were written in the 1950s and
60s. This is the period when the TV was becoming widely available, and when village rural
life was being changed forever by the introduction of heavy farming machinery. The entire
fabric of French life, both in the countryside and the urban centres, was being radically reconfigured in ways tied in directly with the introduction of new technologies. It was also a
very prosperous time. The collapse of church life in France happened at the same time as
rural employment was dramatically reduced, urban manufacturing greatly increased and
personal freedoms from old ways and traditional family and community bonds was celebrated
as a new liberty. This was the beginning of post-war consumer society where the urban
individual earns money and buys products as central features of their life mission and
personal identity.
The new mass production and mass marketing society was characterised by the increasing
weakening of middle order social institutions; the intergenerational and extended family
living in close proximity, neighbourhoods as communities, parish church life, local
associations and community located sporting groups flourished briefly after the war, but they
were all on their way out. Now the individual is a free floating atom within a pluralized and
transient soup of relationships and identities on one hand, channelled by impersonal mass
society institutional powers – government, big business, complex bureaucracies – on the
other hand. So the individual became an atomized earner-consumer constructing their own
meaning, relationship and identity as they saw fit, but increasingly unable to shape the deep
channels of impersonal institutional power. In this context the mass media – via the TV –
stepped into people’s living rooms to fill in the meaning and narrative void created by the
quiet but dramatic dissolution of the old ways.
This relentless re-configuring of established orders of life by new modes of work, commerce
and technology is a staple feature of the Industrial revolution, so few people in the 1960s saw
anything unusual about the transformations in our common way of life that they were then
going through. But at this point Ellul noted very carefully the need for a powerful mass media
and the role this new technology performed in making our way of life sociologically and
psychologically viable. People need fantasies that enable them to escape the dull
instrumentalism of their lives as earners and consumers, and people need to feel that they can
understand the world of high power in which they passively move.
Significantly, we like to think the mass media provides us with news that facilitates our
informed choices and that it provides us with entertainments of our choosing when in fact this
is not how the mass media works. The aim of the mass media within the context of a
technically efficient society is to obtain a certain effect in the recipient rather than provide
information or give people the entertainment they want. That is, the information and
9
entertainment the mass media provides has instrumental aims driving it, aims mostly tied to
either profit or social control, and it has mass society formation aims rather than individual
service provision aims. Again, this is no dark conspiracy, it is simply a function of the
instrumental logic of mass media business interests and the need that democratic
governments have to sell their policies to the masses. But what this means is that we are
being continually conditioned to expect certain news narratives and certain forms of
entertainment that we believe we are choosing, when, in fact, commercial and government
interests find only certain types of news and entertainment to efficient and effective means of
advancing their own instrumental agendas.
The nexus between the mass media and the technological efficient society is very strong.
One final thing needs to be said about Ellul. As an observer of how the logic of technique has
become our dominant governing logic, Ellul has sought to shown us how the horizons of
intrinsic meaning and transcendent belief have faded from power. This means that our
politics – even though it uses the language of morality and ultimate meaning for promotional
effect – is functionally devoid of substantive moral imperatives and transcendent reference.
When only material, measurable and technically possible criteria determines the underlying
‘realism’ of our political discourse, then all actions are understood as determinate relations of
relative interest and force. Politics becomes a matter of mechanics and engineering. Here, the
bigger the force and interest of any given political stake holder, the more power they have.
But power defined in these terms is not freedom, and is not a function of collective
deliberation, as materially and quantatively defined interests are only manipulable with in the
rational logic of technique when they are understood as necessities. What this means in
practice is that the freedom of deciding what the common good should be, in relation to
intrinsic human ends, and as discussed and deliberated by free citizens, becomes irrelevant to
power. As much as we have a liberal democratic form of government, the ‘real’ decision
making power is in the hands of those with the financial force who are driven towards
financially determined ends. Political freedom is pretty well done for in this context. Ellul
maintains that the dominant political trends of the technological society are towards highly
invasive personal, commercial, social and political controls – totalitarianism. Does, then,
Ellul have an irrational fear of technology, and does he think that technology now controls us
and that we are powerless to decide our own future? Is, in other words, Ellul a technopessimist and a technological determinist?
If your intellectual horizons are defined by what Anglo-Americans call a positivist empirical
approach to the social sciences, then Ellul’s philosophy of technology looks to be inherently
technophobic and techno-determinist. But it is worth pointing out that Ellul himself is not an
Anglo-American positivist, or a postmodern social constructivist. This is where the fact that
Ellul is also a theologian becomes important.
Ellul’s work is profoundly influenced by the Danish existential philosopher Søren
Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard wrote many different kinds of philosophical texts, using a veritable
village of pseudonymous ‘authors’ whose stances were quite distinct from each other. As
well as that body of literature, he wrote Christian theological reflections under his own name.
Towards the end of his life Kierkegaard explained that he intended his authorship to be read
as a whole, dialectically. That is, his disparate voices should be read as in conversation with
each other. This is the pattern Ellul follows in his expansive authorship as well. Ellul does not
write using different pen names, but he did write very different types of texts. He wrote
significant texts in theology, biblical commentary and legal history, as well as in the
10
philosophy of technology. If you only read his philosophy of technology you will not get a
complete understanding of what he thinks, and he will look like a technological determinist.
Ellul explains that in his sociology of institutions and philosophy of technology he is
concerned with the categories of necessity within the logic of technique in the realm of the
material conditions of society. In his theology he is concerned with the categories of freedom
and intrinsic meaning and value. The two sorts of texts should be read in conversation with
each other. Because he is a Christian he is not a technological determinist, even though when
warning us about the manner in which we can become entrapped in the logic of mere
instrumental efficiency, he does indeed warn against the crushing of human freedom and the
iron cage of technological determinism. Sociological positivists – because they only look at
the material and the empirical – typically approach the operations of society in a determinist
manner. But they are reading Ellul through an interpretive lens that is foreign to his work.
This is enough background about Ellul and the French stream of the philosophy of
technology which he developed. This will give you important background on where Virilio is
coming from.
Paul Virilio; sacralising technology and the new grand accidents of speed
To Virilio, we have genuine and objective reasons to be fearful, but those reasons have
almost nothing to do with ‘security threats’ defined by culturally external agents of human
evil. Rather, we are afraid because of the internal insecurity of our civilization. We are now
totally dependent on a global technological society that has become so fast, so boarderlessly
interconnected, so instrumentally powerful, so mobile with its own relentlessly reconfiguring
inertia, and so amorally pragmatic in its operational imperatives, that our political processes
have no way of controlling it. This is real cause for fear, and this speaks to the disturbing
reality that the very way in which our lives are made physically possible is unsustainable.
There are – Virilio maintains – very powerful objective reasons why our very civilization is
defined by an inchoate and debilitating sense of profound insecurity.
An examples will help here.
As a result of high speed automated computerized stock market trading, the dominance of
interconnected and algorithmically pre-determined responses so governs the world of
international finance that the safety of the system as a whole is beyond human control. Superfast, super-profit making derivative trading nearly crashed global finance in 2008. There are
some safety checks built into it (which President Trump is hoping to dismantle),12 but we
only just managed to escape cataclysmic global disaster during the GFC, and only by
transferring astronomical sums of money from public coffers into private banks. We remain
profoundly vulnerable to future accidents of this nature because superhuman speed, deep
global inter-connectivity and profit defined automation in lightly regulated speculative
moneymaking is now built into the very infrastructure of how the entire process works. Here
the velocity of international finance is so much faster than the tempo at which thoughtful
12
At the 100 day marker of his President, Trump has signalled that he intends to undo significant components of
the Obama instituted Dodd-Frank Act that sought to regulate dangerous profiteering by banks more closely after
the 2008 crisis. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/may/1/trump-vows-roll-back-dodd-frank-meetingbankers/ ; http://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-paul-volcker-fears-trumps-push-to-roll-back-dodd-frank2017-05-01
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human decisions can be reasonably made that thoughtful human decisions are removed from
the overarching dynamic of how the system works.
This is unsafe at a macro-financial level, so it is above our heads, and yet, our globally
situated way of life now depends on the viability of the international banking sector.
But super-fast and de-localizing technologies of inter-connectivity do not only operate ‘above
our heads’ – they also operate within our heads as means of processing, communicating and
navigating the virtual realm upon which we are becoming increasingly dependent. This has
some particularly disturbing implications for the formation of our children, which we will
touch on shortly. The more dependent we become, the less we notice how these technologies
condition us to be adapted to the interests of those who sell us services through these devices,
and the less we notice the potential dangers of these technologies.
Virilio points out that with each new form of speed – such as jet travel for instance – new
forms of accidents integral with the great power and speed of the new technology are created.
The accidents of instantaneous global interactivity in finance, and the accidents we are
inadvertently causing by our interference with the very balances of the big systems of nature
are new kinds of accident made possible by our technologies and the mind set of technique,
and we are right to fear them. Indeed, since the Industrial Revolution we can see that the
history of ‘homo-technologicus’ gives us no reason to think that we have the moral and
political will to refrain from using any powerful technology that our hands can make, just
because the use of it might go catastrophically pear shaped.
The way technologies of speed and automated interactivity are defining our world is,
according to Virilio, the objective cause of fear and insecurity faced by modern Western man.
Yet, because we are so committed to our power enhanced way of life as good, progressive
and free, we are committed to not examining the real causes of our insecurity. Virilio warns
that we have sacralised technology. Technological progress is now almost religiously seen as
good and progressive, regardless of the risks. Any form of hesitation about what a new
technology will do to us is treated as regressive and unrealistic (even impious), no matter how
much evidence there is that the technology will be harmful. A good example of this is in the
use of information technologies in schools.
The internationally acclaimed neuroscientist Susan Greenfield has shown beyond doubt that
brain plasticity means our children now integrate information technologies into the way their
brains actually function. This is making them increasingly dependent on ever more invasive
social, gaming and information processing technologies which are algorithmically linked
back to the companies that sell these applications and technologies for commercially useful
purposes.13 This has far reaching social and intellectual implications, not the least of which is
a fostering of a brain process dependency in children on the amoral commercial interests
providing those technologies, in the very thought and communication processes shaping their
social contexts and outlook on the world.
Apart from anything else, there are persuasive pedagogic reasons to want to put very tight
controls on the manner in which these technologies are used in an educational context. But, in
general, the opposite of restraint is seen. Schools think they must get with the inevitable flow
of the new technologies, that there is no point in trying to resist the trends, and, in defiance of
13
Susan Greenfield, Mind Change (London: Rider, 2014).
12
the scientific evidence in child neurology, that ICT progress is obviously a good thing in
education. In this context schools are often proud of getting rid of physical libraries and of
firstly offering, and increasingly requiring students to have their own devices at school. Here
is what the state primary school my daughter attends say regarding why they are providing a
BYO iPad class to grade 4 children.
To ensure young Queenslanders are well equipped to contribute fully to the
information economy, the education sector is responding to the innovation directions
of the Smart State Strategy through Smart Classrooms.14
The State Government and the Education Department are deeply committed to the continuous
expansion of new Information and Communication Technologies into every area of education
and the Queensland economy. The commercial and practical advantages justifying such a
program give it the same obvious motherhood goodness as apple pie. Conservatives and
progressives alike are agreed on this; this policy direction is not going to change because of a
change in government. Clearly our policy directions are embedded in an undifferentiated
sacralisation of innovative new technologies, whatever their harmful effects, even for our
primary school children.
So here is the big picture Virilio paints. We are existentially and materially committed to the
ideology of ever faster, ever more powerful technical efficiency. Our way of life, and the very
way it materially, commercially and socially functions, is defined by this ideology. Our very
identities, thought processes and communication networks and information sources are being
constructed by this ideology. As such, the only way we can think of solving problems is by
faster and more powerful technological fixes. And yet, the fear is there, and the fear is
growing. For the ever accelerating speed and power of this way of life has escaped our
control. So we call on governments and companies to have more security and greater
executive control to ameliorate our sense of being behind the pace of change, and powerless
and insecure within the grip of impersonally determined and individually unassailable
instrumental power. On top of this, our consumer society has lost its religious framework in
dealing with the ultimate powerlessness of death. Avoiding death at all costs is what matters
now, rather than being able to face death and overcome our fear of death. So prosperity,
health and security become the overarching purposes towards which our instrumental means
of ever faster efficiency are directed. Individual prosperity, health and security are now the
summum bonum of the functionally materialist, instrumentally efficient technological society.
In this context we must generate some object of dread on which to place our fears, but it must
be an object that is not the real cause of our insecurity. The religious terrorist is purpose built
for such a task. This brings us to the manner in which fear is constructed and administered in
our context.
Due to our total dependence on technological efficiency, we are now profoundly committed
to the ideology of efficiency towards the amoral and non-religious ends of prosperity,
security and health. It is too hard for us to face the manner in which the way of life we are
embedded in is intrinsically dangerous and heading, inevitably, to a catastrophic accident
which is a function of the logic of its instrumental, amoral and merely profit driven nature. So
14
ilearning@Craigslea, p5. At this stage iPad are optional, yet it is not hard to see that the intention of the
Queensland Education Department is to increasingly introduce ICT into the learning context until it is pervasive
and mandatory.
https://craigsless.eq.edu.au/Supportandresources/Formsanddocuments/Documents/Ipad%20Program%202016/il
[email protected] See also: http://education.qld.gov.au/smartclassrooms/
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if we can scapegoat our sense of insecurity onto some suitable externalized threat, we can
manage our fear in such a way that enables us to continue on apace towards our date with
destruction, whilst hiding all worries about the apocalyptic internal unravelling of our way of
life. It is a head in the sand approach, but in collective psychology terms, it is very powerful.
Further, there is no shortage of political players willing to administer this convenient external
threat illusion for us and thus preserve their own position of privilege within the prevailing
world order, for as long as it lasts.
Ironically, dystopic visions of apocalyptic destruction and a relentless policing of the porous
borders of our world speaks of a society that knows its powers are dangerous and that senses
the vulnerability of an inherently unstable global interconnectivity. For our globe is not a safe
place. The globe is defined by a great many more ‘have-nots’ seeking to get to the safety of
the Western ‘have’. In the globe in which we live there is a profoundly exploited majority
and a deeply stressed nature upon which the staggering relative wealth of the global dominant
minority depends. At present we have 60 million globally displaced people due to war,
famine and environmental degradation. This number is set to radically increase if population
trends, political instability trends, financial volatility, environmental degradation, corporate
irresponsibility and geopolitical power game trends as we now see them continue.
It is wishful thinking in the extreme to think that we do not need to address the real problems
of global insecurity but can make ourselves safe by stopping the occasional suicidal terrorists.
This wishful thinking allows for an easy but inherently delusional and inhumane
administration of our fears. Our fears are all too easily administered towards curtailing civil
liberties in the name of greater security, and of scapegoating some externalized ‘other’ whom
we no longer need to treat with universal human dignity. The trend towards totalitarian
politics is powerfully advanced under this fear and security ideology. And such a channelling
of fear towards the vulnerable outsider beautifully diverts attention from the big interests of
our instrumentally efficient profit making culture who really are the cause of our sense of
insecurity. Global corporate and financial power, in deep synergy with our national
governments and the mass media, keep driving us towards destruction, as if there are no
dangers and no limits to the speed and power at which a way of life can be safe, and as if we
do not need moral and transcendent bearings in order to direct our collective powers towards
wise and humane ends.
Virilio’s point is that as long as we endeavour to make ourselves feel safe by more invasive,
totalitarian and powerful technologies of surveillance, the less we will address the real nature
of our problems. The prevailing security dynamic can only foster a desire for more violent,
more rapid, more total control in our politics. Virilio’s message is very confronting, but very
timely. As we surge towards deeper embedding in the inhumane and violent politics of fear,
if we could see terrorism as one of the many symptoms of the out of control speed and
interconnectivity of our world, we might stop trying to treat but one symptom as if it is a
switch that, once effectively flipped, will return us to safety. There can be no winning of a
War on Terror by the terror of overwhelming destructive power and surveillance technology.
How we gain humane and reasonable control of our technologies is not clear. How we might
slow things down to a human speed, how we might recover more than instrumental reasons
for doing some things and not doing other things – these are the hard questions requiring
genuine progress in order to return our world to safety.
14
Books Cited:
Burke, Anthony. Beyond Security. London: Routledge, 2007.
——. Fear of Security. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Chilcot, John. The Report of the Iraq Inquiry, Executive Summary. UK: House of Commons,
2016.
Cockburn, Patrick. The Rise of Islamic State. London: Verso, 2015.
Crespigny, Robin de. The People Smuggler. Melbourne: Penguin, 2012.
Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda. New York: Vintage Books, 1973.
——. The Technological Society, New York: Vintage, 1964.
Feinstein, Andrew. The Shadow World. London: Penguin, 2012.
Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1977.
Green, Neville, Dao, Affleck, & Merope (eds.). They Cannot Take the Sky. Sydney: Allen &
Unwin, 2017.
Greenfield, Susan. Mind Change. London: Rider, 2014.
Hager, Nicky. Other People’s Wars. New Zealand: Potton & Burton, 2011.
Otterman, Michael. American Torture. London: Pluto Press, 2007.
Otterman, Michael & Richard Hil. Erasing Iraq. London: Pluto Press, 2010.
Singer, P W. Corporate Warriors. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008.
——. Wired for War. London: Penguin, 2010.
Virilio, Paul. The Administration of Fear. Los Angeles: semiotext(e), 2012.
Weil, Simone. “The Iliad or poem of force” in Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff,
War and the Iliad. New York: New York Review Books, 2005. 1–37.
Wilkie, Andrew. Axis of Deceit. Melbourne: Black Inc, 2004.
Internet Sources Cited:
Boyer, David. “Trump vows to roll back Dodd-Frank in meeting with bankers.”
The Washington Times. May 1, 2017.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/may/1/trump-vows-roll-back-doddfrank-meeting-bankers/
Costello, Tim. Cited in, Tom MacIlroy, “Australia’s Foreign Aid Spending at Lowest Level
in Eight Years.” Sydney Morning Herold. 28 December 2016.
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/australias-foreign-aidspending-at-lowest-level-in-eight-years-20161228-gtiqpe.html
Robb, Greg. “Why Paul Volcker fears Trump’s push to roll back Dodd-Frank.”
Market Watch. May 3, 2017. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-paul-volckerfears-trumps-push-to-roll-back-dodd-frank-2017-05-01
State of Queensland, Department of Education and Training, 2015
http://education.qld.gov.au/smartclassrooms/
Theodoret, The Ecclesiastical History,
http://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/03d/03930457,_Theodoretus,_Historia_Ecclesiastica,_EN.pdf
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