Jacques Ellul was a french thinker who in his famous book on the subject, The Technological Society, discusses how technology shapes the moral condition of humanity, by creating a tyranny of efficiency. He defines technology as any technique that has as its goal the efficient ordering of human activity. As if the most important object of human life is the optimization of efficiency. In a godless world, efficiency has become the new god, the standard by which we measure our lives, our work, our governments our politics and our relationships and all other human activity.
Democratic governments are often criticized for their lack of efficiency in decision-making. The messiness of government is inefficient and surely we cry as a public, there is a more efficient way of doing things. The cult of efficiency has caused us to loathe the machinations of our government but perhaps, I would argue, the inefficiencies of our government are what makes us a human society. Yes there are more effective ways to make decisions but they are not necessarily better.
If we consider our politics as well. the one thing that we seem to judge our politicians on is the efficient managing of the economy. It is the only thing that seems to actually rile people up enough to comment on the politics of the day. Politics has not always been so. The politics of the past had a much stronger moral component, politicians argued more about what kind of world they wanted to live in, today they all agree unilaterally they want to live in a more efficient world, they only disagree about how to get there, and even then less and less. One of the reasons, I think, that our politicians, have become so bland and that our political culture has become one of the personality cult is that there is little of substance to truly differentiate our politicians from one another than their self-created images.
We can take this idea of efficiency down to our own lives as well and the way that we judge ourselves and others. The amount of ink, digital and traditional, that has been spilled over the last number of years on how to better organize our lives and live more efficiently. Everything from how to organize our closets better to how to organize better our relationships, how to accomplish more, as if we need only apply the right technique to an aspect of our lives to make it better, where better is more efficient. The whole culture of self-improvement is about applying the concept of efficiency to our lives.
The thing about efficiency is a measure of our lives is that it requires some sort of measurement. So if it is a diet it is number of pounds lost in a certain number of weeks, it is a certain number of tasks to accomplish in a certain period of time, how to live longer. It all comes down to trying to achieve a certain number either higher or lower than the one we are currently at which we are constantly told is sub-optimal. The ones who win in this life are the ones with the lowest bmi, the longest life, the most organized closets.
But can we measure the value of a human life in years lived, in pounds lost, in the numbers in a bank account, in the number of Gigabytes/second? It seems to me the measure of man is the life in the years not the years in the life. I don't want to be cliche here because I think it can be really challenging to learn how to live especially in the modern world where the promise of technological improvements to our lives are everywhere, it has become more difficult to choose the moral life but perhaps even more meaningful.
I don't wish to discourage people from trying to improve their lives that would seem to be a bit contrary to the purpose here as a blog for the modern renaissance man. But what I would discourage is the attempt to improve ones life by trying to achieve efficiency or get to a number. Live, laugh, love, it is messy and rarely efficient but the it is the moral life.
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