Medical Anarchy: Jacques Ellul, Technique, and Modern Western Medicine
Benjamin Parks, PhD. (c), Graduate Assistant, Saint Louis University
Max Weber may have been one of the first people to describe the manipulation of human nature by “the latest scientific knowledge and technique, organized by bureaucracy and market forces,” but it was Jacques Ellul who explored the authoritarian nature of this reality and demonstrated its control over society. The picture he paints is extraordinarily bleak, and surprisingly accurate in retrospect. In response to this dystopian future that he boldly predicts, Ellul calls for Christians to embrace a form of anarchy to resist the power of technique as it is manifested in political states.
It is my contention that the world of medicine is a battlefield in the larger struggle Ellul describes and that, by engaging in a kind of medical anarchy, practitioners, patients, and religious communities can resist the “intellectualization, rationalization, and disenchantment” of not only modern medicine but also our culture and society at large.
This paper presentation will proceed in three steps. First, I will open with an explanation of Jacques Ellul’s definition of technique and an overview of his thought. Second, I will demonstrate how technique currently dominates the medical setting. Finally, I will present Ellul’s Christian anarchy as a way of re-enchanting medicine.
I will mainly draw on Ellul’s The Technological Society, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, and Anarchy and Christianity, with relevant articles on the current state of technology and bureaucracy in modern medicine.
Max Weber may have been one of the first people to describe the manipulation of human nature by “the latest scientific knowledge and technique, organized by bureaucracy and market forces,” but it was Jacques Ellul who explored the authoritarian nature of this reality and demonstrated its control over society. The picture he paints is extraordinarily bleak, and surprisingly accurate in retrospect. In response to this dystopian future that he boldly predicts, Ellul calls for Christians to embrace a form of anarchy to resist the power of technique as it is manifested in political states.
It is my contention that the world of medicine is a battlefield in the larger struggle Ellul describes and that, by engaging in a kind of medical anarchy, practitioners, patients, and religious communities can resist the “intellectualization, rationalization, and disenchantment” of not only modern medicine but also our culture and society at large.
This paper presentation will proceed in three steps. First, I will open with an explanation of Jacques Ellul’s definition of technique and an overview of his thought. Second, I will demonstrate how technique currently dominates the medical setting. Finally, I will present Ellul’s Christian anarchy as a way of re-enchanting medicine.
I will mainly draw on Ellul’s The Technological Society, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, and Anarchy and Christianity, with relevant articles on the current state of technology and bureaucracy in modern medicine.
