As compared to The radical critique of the Technocratic Paradigm in Laudato si’, Francis’ predecessors have been on the whole rather selective in their treatment of the various aspects of the technological question, as discussed in Elements of the Technocratic Paradigm before Laudato si’. However, in Christian-inspired literature one can find clearly radical holistic positions which are so close to Laudato si’ that they may well have inspired this or that passage.

This contribution will briefly present, in chronological order, a selection of three authors.

1. Georges Bernanos: La France contre les robots (1945)

In 1945, on the verge of returning to Europe after seven years of exile in Brazil, Bernanos took a sharp look at the ‘civilization of machines’ that he saw unfolding in the West. “The Civilization of machines is the civilization of technicians... that of quantity as opposed to that of quality” (La France contre les robots, 1042).

However, Bernanos does not incriminate science but its use mislead by the logic of search for profit: “the system does not result at all from the work of scientists, but that of the deeds greedy men who have created it, so to speak, without intention – as the needs for their trade arose” (1044). In this civilization of machines, Bernanos goes on, technique “ought not be discussed, as the solutions it imposes are deemed to be, by definition, the most practical” (1047).

Bernanos unfolds his analysis in two directions. On the one hand, he asserts that the civilization of machines cannot accommodate democracy: “How on earth can you expect Technology to tolerate a regime in which the technicians would be designated by popular voting [...] Each progress of Technology takes you a little further away from democracy” (1048-1049).

On the other hand, Bernanos stresses that civilization of machines has an anthropological foundation and consequences: “whether it is called capitalist or socialist, this world is founded on a certain conception of man, common to the English economists of the eighteenth century and to Marx or Lenin [...] The system has defined man once and for all as an economic animal, not only a slave but also an object [to be handled by] methods capable of a more efficient use of the human material every day” (982).

These few quotations show with what precision – and what intuition – Bernanos identifies the components of what Laudato si’ would call seventy years later “the technocratic paradigm”. All the three building blocks of the paradigm are designated by Bernanos: the logic of action fueled by the quest for techno-economic efficiency, technical power derived from economic and political power, and the development of knowledge guided exclusively by the “needs of trade”. The only notable difference is in the vocabulary used: the “civilization of machines” for Bernanos rather than the “technocratic paradigm” for Francis.

In fact, Bernanos’ diagnosis goes even further, since he sees in technology the common denominator of all totalitarianisms, left and right, and thus the direct cause of the atrocities of the war that has just ended.

Is, for Bernanos, the victory of technology unavoidable in the medium term? His answer is to be compared with what Pope Francis calls “authentic humanity”. For Bernanos, the civilisation of machines “will have only one enemy tomorrow: ‘the man who does not do what everyone else does’ – or [...] more simply, if you like: ‘the man who believes in something other than Technology’” (1049).

2. Romano Guardini: The End of Modern World (1950)

Like Bernanos’ France contre les robots, Romano Guardini’s work devoted to “the end of modern world” is marked by the experience of war, where the power of technology was pushed to its peak of inhumanity.

Guardini - the only one of the authors discussed here to be cited by Laudato si’ – enters the technological theme through the anthropological door. He notes that modern man is, by necessity, ‘non-human’ since there is a growing distance between what he can experience directly (through his senses) and what he knows through scientific knowledge. As knowledge progresses, this gap inexorably increases. For Guardini, deprived of direct experience in the areas in which he is called to act, man runs the risk of losing moral control over his actions.

“Man can no longer experience work he does; he can only calculate his possibilities and control its effects from a distance… (M)an becomes himself, is himself through what he experiences. What can he be, however, if he can no longer involve himself “sensibly” in the work he does? ... Responsibility involves growth, growth from an immature process of executing material acts to mature process of squaring them with ethical standards. But how ethical standards can be applied to areas of work which have become lost in abstract formulae and distant machines?” (The End of Modern World, 88).

Indeed, “there is no being without a master”, says Guardini, when man loses his moral grip, when his conscience slips away, demonic forces enter the scene: “demons may take possession of faculties of man if he does not answer for them with his conscious” (103).

Once entered into the age of technical and scientific power, with a moral sense abated due to the increased distance between experience and knowledge, humanity is condemned to live on the edge of the abyss of its own destruction: “Without exaggeration, one can say that a new era of history has been born. Now and for ever, man will leave at a brink of an ever-growing danger which shall leave its mark upon his entire existence” (110). This warning resonates with peculiar strength today, when humanity is confronted with the perspective of use of AI on an industrial scale.

It is likely that when writing these lines, the author of The End of Modern World was referring to the destructive power of the atomic bomb. Yet, sixty-five years later, Laudato si’ takes up this same diagnosis and puts it forward in the perspective of the imminent social and ecological crisis.

The prospect of catastrophe calls for a reawakening of the moral sense, in particular – and on this point Pope Francis agrees with R. Guardini – by emphasising the unique importance of direct, sensitive and tangible experience, which is the only means for bridging the abyss that is being opened everyday wider by the progress of knowledge not matched by experience.

Here again resonates the voice of Pope Francis who calls to go beyond the veil of concepts, to go to the encounter and to direct and interpersonal contact, to the experience of love lived in daily life. Indeed, in Evangelii gaudium (2013) the Pope insists: reality is more important than the idea.

It is a question, in particular for the Christian, of putting into practice that love of neighbour which is not sympathy, mutual aid, social obligation or anything similar, but the faculty of “affirming the “thou” of the other even as it must accept the obligation of an “I”” (122).

3. Jacques Ellul and the systemic dimension of technology (1977)

Jacques Ellul – a Protestant thinker – has devoted half a century to the study of the emergence of what he calls the ‘techno-system’ and to the moral qualification of subsequent societal transformations.

The book Système technicien was published in 1977 after more than ten years of work. The English version appeared in 1980 under the title Technological System. In this work Jacques Ellul distinguishes between technique and technology. He opposes the two notions by showing that the transition from techniques to technology marks the systemic dimension that the latter takes on:

“Wherever there is research and application of new means as a criterion of efficiency, one can say that there is a technology (meaning here a single technique – PHD). ... People thus came to a new conception of technology, as an environment and as a system. That is to say: The combined technologies, affecting the totality of human actions and life-styles, took on a qualitatively different importance. Technology was no longer an addition of ‘techniques’. By combining and universalizing, observers had now given it a kind of autonomy and specificity. This is the point we have reached” (Technological System, 26-27).

The overwhelming technology becomes an interface between man and his natural environment, it becomes a mediator, but it also creates a distance with nature that is increasingly difficult for man to cross.

“Technology acts upon these environments first by dividing and fragmenting the natural and cultural realities. The process ... always consists in breaking up reality into malleable fragmentary units. ... . Thus, in the complex tissue of (social and human) reality, technology cuts out what can constitute an environment, but neutralizes and designifies anything it does not keep” (44-46).

Total technization “occurs when every aspect of human life is subjected to control and manipulation, to experimentation and observation, so that a demonstrable efficiency is achieved everywhere. The system is revealed in the change ... owing to the interdependence of all the components, owing to the totality and, finally, the stability attained. This last point is particularly essential. “Detechnicization” is impossible. The scope of the system is such that we cannot hope to go back. If we attempted a detechnicization, we would be like primitive forest-dwellers setting fire to their native environment” (82).

“It is quite obvious that technology develops on the basis of a certain number of possibilities offered by the economy. And when the economic resources are lacking, technology cannot operate at its full capacity, achieving what its possibilities allow it to achieve” (139).

Yet – contrary to what Laudato si’ asserts – for Ellul the logic of technology does not systematically coincide with that of the economy. According to Ellul, who was writing at a time when the arms’ race was pitting two different economic systems against each other with the same thirst for technical progress for military purposes, technology is autonomous in regard of the economy. The economy “can be a means of development, a condition for technological progress, or, inversely, it can be an obstacle, but never does it determine, provoke, or dominate that progress”. “(P)rofit motive is alien, by nature, to technology. The profit motive compels an unsuitable finality upon technology from the outside” (271).

After having analysed the capacity of the logic of technology to create and feed the extension and increasing complexity of the technological system, Ellul comes to question the propensity of the technician system to take over – to endogenise – the field of moral judgment: “Man does what technology allows him to do. He has thus undertaken to do anything. Maintaining that morality should not judge invention or technological operation leads to saying, unwittingly, that any human action is now beyond ethics. The autonomy of technology thus renders us amoral. .... This is very remarkable, for hitherto, man has always tried to refer his actions to a superior value, which both judged and underpinned his actions, his enterprises. But this situation is vanishing for the sake of technology” (147-148).

In the book Théologie et technique – pour une éthique de la non-puissance, published posthumously (2014) but written around 1975, at the time when the author was working on the Technological System, Jacques Ellul asks himself what ways can be found to regain moral control over the logic of technology. (A condensed version of the argument has been published in English in 1980 – see reference list). The answer he proposed was “an ethics of non-power”. However, this comes up against a major obstacle: “as long as man is oriented by the spirit of power [...] nothing is possible” (65).

Is there a breach in this ‘spirit of power’ that could offer hope and opportunity to the ethics of non-power? Ellul sees a possibility, he locates it in the need for limits which, according to him, is constitutive of any society. For Christians, the Scriptures, especially in the Old Testament, offer concrete guidelines. These include the Sabbath, the Sabbatical year and the Jubilee, which are all divine limits and injunctions stressing the obligation to suspend, to limit, technical activity and to return to “adoration and contemplation.

The Christian therefore has an obligation that stems from his faith, that of not to allow himself to be imprisoned by the logic of technology, that of retaining the capacity to look at it and judge it from the outside. The Sabbatical injunctions remind and confirm, according to Ellul, that technology cannot be the producer of freedom. (T)his comes from the free act of God who liberates and nothing else” (207).

At this point in the argument, the societal question arises. How can the sense of limits laid down in the Bible, foundation of Christianity, be understood and accepted by non-Christians today and become an option for a society that would seek to regain control over the technological system? Ellul answers that the only way is the exemplarity of postures of Christians preserved by their faith from being blinded by the logic of technology. “It is exactly to the extent people will see how Christians cope with technical insanity, that they will be willing to take seriously what Christians can say about the limits” (231).

Without using Pope Francis’ notion of a “technocratic paradigm”, Jacques Ellul’s work comes close to it. The systemic perspective he proposes is based on a careful analysis of the elements that make up the system. Ellul’s work highlights the systemic dimension of technology and the capacity of the corresponding logic to fuel expansion of the system, which is thus endowed with a totalising ambition, notably by integrating into it the criteria of moral judgement. For Ellul, only the Christian faith, because it draws its strength from Revelation, is capable of thwarting the blind forces of the technological system and curbing this logic before the system becomes overreaching. Where Pope Francis invokes the action of “authentic humanity”, Jacques Ellul puts his hope in the awakening and exemplarity of Christians, bearers of the message of Revelation.

4. Conclusion: search for limits

The notion of “technocratic paradigm” draws on systemic approach rooted in the central idea of interdependence and offers holistic perspective. By proposing a synthetic vision, it intends to go beyond disciplinary fragmentation. However, by this choice made in the name of the principle that “the whole is more important than the parts”, the Pope takes the risk of a being criticized for being only imperfectly informed, for being superficial or even biased. The Pope confronts this risk in the name of the prophetic and “integral” character of his message.

Thus, by making the best use of methodological freedom specific to the systemic approach, Laudato si’ highlights a totalizing dynamic interaction between three elements: the power structure (technocracy) based on the mastery of technical knowledge combined with economic and financial resources, decision logic, and the method of acquiring new knowledge.

As the preceding pages have shown, the corresponding systemic diagnosis is largely to be found in Bernanos and Ellul, while the other authors and Popes cited discuss mainnly the social effects of the logic of technology, without proposing a systemic vision.

Even if he does not take a direct interest in techniques or in technology, Saint John Paul II cannot be ignored. He offers a systemic sketch when he elaborates the notion of the “structures of sin” to which he gives an explicit negative moral connotation. He proposes this notion as a general tool of investigation without applying it directly neither to technology nor to any other social construct. In consequence, one could argue that the technocratic paradigm is akin in fact to a structure of sin.

All the authors converge and sound the same alert: at the time when they write – that is between 1891 and 2015 – they are convinced that the civilization is reaching the breaking point and that the collapse is imminent. This is true even if the precise circumstances differ: they go from poverty and the risk of social revolution for Leo XIII, the Great Depression for Pius XI, the aftermath of the Second World War for G. Bernanos and R. Guardini, the arms race and the perspective of atomic war for Pius XII and J. Ellul, decolonization for Paul VI, the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall for John Paul II, the financial crisis for Benedict XVI and the imminence of socio-ecological collapse for Pope Francis.

The warning is much the same: if the race for ‘more and more’ - innovation, power, money, technology - is not masterminded by moral conscience, humanity risks losing its soul and – with Laudato si’ and Laudate Deum – its “common home”. Thus, the same dramatic sense of urgency prevails during the 130 years that go from Rerum novarum to Laudato si’, and to Laudate Deum. These texts recall the concern already mentioned in the third century by Saint Augustine. This perspective should in no way diminish the sense of urgency that emerges from each of these texts and which refers to the duty – hinc et nunc – Christians, especially lay people have to remain committed to their faith in the affairs of their time.

Faced with the imminence of danger, the worst is envisaged. Laudato si’ sees in the technocratic paradigm the cause of the social and environmental crisis, Rerum novarum speaks of the revolutionary rupture, Pius XII of the superficiality and the instability that await humanity, Bernanos speaks of the enslavement of man to technology and economy, Guardini of the inhumanity and the irresponsibility of man which open the way for the takeover of the world by demonic powers. Ellul foresees the possibility of man being irreversibly locked down by the logic of technology.

Is the course of history inexorably traced? Are man and humanity doomed to allow themselves to be crushed by the logic of technology and the crisis that it carries with it prepares? Each in their own way, the authors refuse to be entirely pessimistic. For Guardini, the times to come will be dangerous, we will have to learn to live on the edge of the abyss, but man is endowed with spiritual resources and will be able to face the challenges by mobilizing these resources. Benedict XVI and John Paul II follow the same line: man must – and it is a moral duty – fight and re-establish the hold of moral judgment on technology. Bernanos sees in France a cultural melting pot likely to resist while Paul VI invokes institutional solutions. Finally, Pope Francis calls for a “cultural revolution” – which he does not define – which should be brought about by the spontaneous awakening of authentic humanity. He also stresses the urgency of establishing adequate standards and institutions, particularly at the international level.

To conclude, it is worth highlighting the way in which Jacques Ellul challenges Christians. They have a duty to bear witness to their faith also in their relationship with technology. In this context, Ellul recalls the importance of the limits that the Christian must impose on technology and its use so as to remain available to “the light breeze” where the Spirit blows. By their exemplary nature, these attitudes will stay in – says Ellul – and humanity will eventually regain control of technology which will become an additional fully mastered tool.