Jonas on power and ethics

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technology

Hans Jonas on the inverse relationship between our powers and our ethics:

Now we shiver in the nakedness of a nihilism in which near-omnipotence is paired with near-emptiness, greatest capacity with knowing least for what ends to use it.

The Imperative of Responsibility (University of Chicago Press, 1984), 23

Ellul on the 20th century decline of the church

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Ellul

The decline of the western Church seems fortunate to me in the sense that those who drift away from the church never really belonged to it. There was a crisis in this church. But it was a crisis dating back to the eighteenth century whose results appeared only in the nineteen-fifties. And it had to happen to purify the situation: now the truth of God can again be proclaimed, free from political and social compromises, from class distinctions, and above all, from the illegitimate use of the Christianity. By God’s grace, it is no longer useful to be a Christian or to make reference to the church and the Bible.

FROM: Jacques Ellul, In Season Out of Season: An Introduction to the Thought of Jacques Ellul (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), 210–211.

Ellul on forgiving and forgetting

“there is more mercy in the heart of the individual than in the memories of society or its information systems.”

SOURCE: Jacques Ellul, Living Faith: Belief and Doubt in a Perilous World (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983), 73.

Ellul’s comment is true in an era like ours where the state captures and stores our data and records in massive databases. But this was a comment before the internet, and social media where we store things ourselves and often emails and posts which we would rather people forgot.

 

Ellul’s defense of the Occupy Movement

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Ellul, Occupy Movement

In 1968 when student demonstrations broke out everywhere in France, the great cry of condemnation of the participants was: “They don’t even know what they want. When you ask them what kind of society they’re looking for, all you get is confused stuttering or useless general ideas. They’re wholly negative and destructive. They have no plan; they propose no solutions.” We hear this same speech periodically today, sometimes aimed at young people when they happen to challenge the adult world (a rare event these days) or else at the leftists: “Look at them, they’re assassins. They want to destroy society, but what for? They have no idea. They have no solution for the difficulties we’re in now. Same thing with the ecologists. “They don’t want to have anything to do with nuclear power. They talk about alternate energy sources, but everybody knows they would barely provide ten percent of what we need. They’ve got no solution to the energy crisis, but they don’t want any more pollution. They’re just idealists.”

What an odd reversal. It’s the young, the leftists, the ecologists who seem to be dangerous idealists, devotees of irrational ideas, whereas their accusers are the realists, whose feet are firmly planted on the ground and who are not swept away by passionate belief. Well, in my view it’s just the other way around. It’s the leftists, ecologists, Third-World residents, and feminists who are the realists, who see reality as it is, who detect the dangers menacing us and bring them to light, who call our attention to new features of age-old questions. Their accusers are dangerous idealists and fantasts, because they believe (but that’s all it is, an idle belief) they have solutions – which are nothing of the sort.

Before accusing those sometimes vacillating movements of lacking a program, we ought to begin by asking whether we, the adults, the old-timers, have had real solutions over the last half century to the problematic situations that have sprung up. Did we come up with answers? Evidently not, which is just what the young are accusing us of. Well, that being the case, how could we have the gall to demand that such movements, now groping their way forward, have ready at hand something that we ourselves couldn’t find after a thousand studies and every kind of scientific, philosophical, and humanistic research?

 

SOURCE: Jacques Ellul, Living Faith: Belief and Doubt in a Perilous World (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983), 37–38.

Chesterton explains the robbery of poor Greece by the rich…

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Chesterton, poverty, robbery

To-day the rich man knows in his heart that he is a cancer and not an organ of the State. He differs from all other thieves or parasites for this reason: that the brigand who takes by force wishes his victims to be rich. But he who wins by a one-sided contract actually wishes them to be poor. Rob Roy in a cavern, hearing a company approaching, will hope (or if in a pious mood, pray) that they may come laden with gold or goods. But Mr. Rockefeller, in his factory, knows that if those who pass are laden with goods they will pass on. He will therefore (if in a pious mood) pray that they may be destitute, and so be forced to work his factory for him for a starvation wage. It is said (and also, I believe, disputed) that Blücher riding through the richer parts of London exclaimed, “What a city to sack!” But Blücher was a soldier if he was a bandit. The true sweater feels quite otherwise. It is when he drives through the poorest parts of London that he finds the streets paved with gold, being paved with prostrate servants; it is when he sees the grey lean leagues of Bow and Poplar that his soul is uplifted and he knows he is secure. This is not rhetoric, but economics.

G. K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils (1922) [link to source on archive.org]

Chesterton on “The rich man to-day …”

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Chesterton, private property, public property

The rich man to-day does not only rule by using private property; he also rules by treating public property as if it were private property.

G. K. Chesterton, Utopia of Usurers (2017) [link to page on archive.org]