Jacques Ellul on Leisure

I just finished Jacques Ellul's most famous book, The Technological Society (1964), a jeremiad pronounced against the increasing influence of mechanical, computer, and psychological techniques on modern life.

He sometimes pressed his arguments a bit far; but, on the whole, he showed himself a sensitive observer of early trends.  Many of Ellul's premonitions have come to pass in the half century since he wrote his warnings.

Here are two short excerpts from The Technological Society:


We see first of all that leisure, instead of being a vacuum representing a break with society, is literally stuffed with technical mechanisms of compensation and integration. It is not a vacuous interval. It is not a human kind of emptiness in which decisions might be matured. Leisure time is a mechanized time and is exploited by techniques which, although different from those of man's ordinary work, are as invasive, exacting, and leave man no more free than labor itself. As to the second condition, it is simply not the case that the individual, left on his own, will devote himself to the education of his personality or to a spiritual and cultural life. We are perpetually falling into this idealism. In fact, modern man himself seeks to give a technical form to his leisure time and rebels against entering the sphere of human creativity. Since his youth, and in his vocational activity, he has been unrelentingly "adapted." If the individual must be regimented into intelligent use of his free time, if he is obliged to spend this time learning how to be "human," of what value are vacations and leisure? Where in this new framework of propaganda is there room for the transcendingly important elements of personality formation, choice, personal experience, and spontaneous participation in creative activity? Who or what is to be his guide in the collective, educative employment of leisure? The employer? the administration? the labor unions? To put the question at all is to recognize its fatuity. What if man's leisure allowed him to judge his own work? What if, in becoming "cultivated" or, even better, "a real person," he should rebel against his stupid, mechanized job?

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Consider the average man as he comes home from his job. Very likely he has spent the day in a completely hygienic environment, and everything has been done to balance his environment and lessen his fatigue. However, he has had to work without stopping and under constant pressure; nervous fatigue has replaced muscular fatigue. When he leaves his job, his joy in finishing his stint is mixed with dissatisfaction with a work as fruitless as it is incomprehensible and far from really productive work . At home he "finds himself" again. But what does he find? He finds a phantom. If he ever thinks, his reflections terrify him. Personal destiny is fulfilled only by death; but reflection tells him that for him there has not been anything between his adolescent adventures and his death, no point at which he himself ever made a decision or initiated a change. Changes are the exclusive prerogative of organized technical society, which one day may have decked him out in khaki to defend it, and on another in stripes because he had sabotaged or betrayed it There was no difference from one day to the next. Yet he was never serene, for newspapers and news reports beset him at the end of the day and forced on him the image of an insecure world. If it was not hot or cold war, there were all sorts of accidents to drive home to him the precariousness of his life. Torn between precariousness and the absolute, unalterable determinateness of work, he has no place, belongs nowhere. Whether something happens to him, or nothing happens, he is in neither case the author of his destiny.

The man of the technical society does not want to encounter his phantom.  He resents being tom between the extremes of accident and technical absolutism. He dreads the knowledge that everything ends "six feet under." He could accept the six-feet-under of his life if, and only if, life had some meaning and he could choose, say, to die. But when nothing makes sense, when nothing is the result of free choice, the final six-feet-under is an abominable injustice. Technical civilization has made a great error in not suppressing death, the only human reality still intact.

Man is still capable of lucid moments about the future. Propaganda techniques have not been able wholly to convince him that life has any meaning left. But amusement techniques have jumped into the breach and taught him at least how to flee the presence of death.  He no longer needs faith or some difficult asceticism to deaden himself to his condition. The movies and television lead him straight into an artificial paradise. Rather than face his own phantom, he seeks film phantoms into which he can project himself and which permit him to live as he might have willed. For an hour or two he can cease to be himself, as his personality dissolves and fades into the anonymous mass of spectators. The film makes him laugh, cry, wonder, and love. He goes to bed with the leading lady, kills the villain, and masters life's absurdities. In short, he comes a hero. Life suddenly has meaning.