Derek: 00:28

Welcome back to the Fourth Wave Podcast. Today, I want to talk to you about a concept that on its face probably doesn't seem like it really fits in too much to this season. I wanna talk to you about technique or technology. But before I do that, maybe I think what would be best would be to have a little bit of a recap and then go into the concept of technique. So this season, we have talked a lot about simplicity.

Derek: 00:59

And in opposition to simplicity, we've talked about complexity and we've tried to unpack both of those ideas. We said that simplicity was fidelity and submission to like our nature, our calling, like what our purpose is supposed to be, what we were made to be. So fidelity and submission. And complexity on the other hand is that which occurs through our desire for power and control. So maybe one word to sum that up might be usurpation or maybe overreaching.

Derek: 01:35

To set the stage for discussion of technology and technique, let me give you an amoral example of complexity and simplicity. Something that's not really like usurpation and fidelity and all that stuff, but just some something that demonstrates simplicity versus complexity, or so it seems. All right. So I want you to think about doing laundry, what doing laundry would have been like hundreds of years ago. You probably had a washboard or maybe you you found some rocks.

Derek: 02:06

You took your clothes down to the river or some body of water and you just kind of rubbed them against the rocks in the moving water. Okay? Simple, right? Alright. So now think about modern day.

Derek: 02:21

Think about a washing machine. How much simpler is that to just take all of your clothes, walk one or two rooms over, dump your clothes into the washing machine, a little bit of soap, push a button, let it go for an hour or so, come back, move it over to a dryer, and press another button, and then you're done. Your clothes are all washed and dried. Now when you compare that to actually going down and washing them in the river, then having to hang them up on a line, and then waiting for, you know, the wind to dry them, hope it doesn't rain and and ruin your laundry, a washing machine, which is greater technology, is actually far more simple, right? Far more simple than the old way of doing laundry.

Derek: 03:12

But if you really think about that example, a washing machine is actually way more complex because it requires piping coming into your home, which pipes don't do anything without a source of water. And so there has to be some like water plant that is going to supply the water for you. And because we are sanitary today, that actually you're going need this water treatment plan. So there are lots of chemicals and things that they do to the water to make sure that it's treated well. You need your washing machine.

Derek: 03:51

Yeah, it controls the temperature and turbulence and all that stuff for you. So you don't have to, right? You don't have to find just the right spot of the river where it's moving correctly. You don't have to find the perfect rocks to scrub. But at the same time, how is your washing machine composed?

Derek: 04:08

It's composed of lots of different parts that were created over one hundred years. I mean, the washing machine today doesn't look like it used to. So there's tons of knowledge that has gone into this, tons of manufacturing. And you've got the oil companies that have to dig oil out of the ground that then they process it to create plastic parts. And you've got metal ore that's refined and all of these things.

Derek: 04:38

You have electrical company that supplies electricity for your washing machine to work. You have all of these the transportation system, the infrastructure in in your country to carry the electricity and the water and all of the parts that have to get to the factory through semi trucks and trains or whatever else, your washing machine is way more complex than actually taking your washout to a river and just scrubbing your clothes. And while in one sense, this technology, this washing machine and dryer, they actually add some certainty into your life because it doesn't matter if it's a rainy day, I can do my wash. It doesn't matter if it's wintertime, I can do my wash, right? And I can let it dry in my dryer.

Derek: 05:32

I don't need to worry about the weather. And so there's simplicity in that sense, but now there's also a whole lot more complexity because I can go outside to the river anytime. But if my washing machine breaks, then I'm out of luck. I probably won't be able to fix it. I don't know how to do that.

Derek: 05:52

And a washing machine is more complex. It's got lots of moving parts. Any one piece of that could go bad and it would stop the whole process from working if the button didn't work or, I don't know, if a turbine didn't work or if the electricity wasn't supplied. Any moving part goes away and I'm out of luck. I had the experience with this recently where somebody in my parents' neighborhood was giving away an electric smoker, and I was excited because we weren't going spend the money on a smoker, but hey, we'll take a free one.

Derek: 06:26

So I got it, made something with it. It was great. And then I went to make something again, and it just died. And so I was reading up on it, and people are like, yeah, electric smokers, you know, some people said they lasted like three or four times for them. Some people said six months or like a year.

Derek: 06:43

And of course it depends on which electric smoker you get, but the point is that they had because you're dealing with heat and moving parts or at least complex parts, circuitry, that it's prone to failure. And so a lot of people in the smoking forums were like, Yeah, if you're going to get something, you should get something like a kettle grill, a Weber kettle grill. Because if you do that, there aren't any moving parts. You literally, it's just you light the fire on the coals and it smokes. It is much more simple and therefore much less prone to failure.

Derek: 07:20

But at the same time, it's a lot harder to control the temperature. There's a lot more precision and expertise which is involved in using a kettle grill as a smoker. On the electric on the electric smoker, I could just push a button and tell it what temperature I wanted and it would make it so. On the the kettle, you have to be around and you have to you have to have experience and know what you're doing. So technology is a really interesting thing.

Derek: 07:47

It's it creates apparent simplicity, but it does so by actually being very complex. And a lot of times when we use the word technology, we mean things like electronic devices. But here we're going to use it more broadly to refer not only to electronics and mechanization, but to things like technique or methodology. For example, something like an assembly line. In some ways, it's more simple because, you know, one person does one job and so therefore what they have to know and do is simpler, but it requires hundreds, thousands of people.

Derek: 08:31

It requires lots of different machines, a lot more space, large space because you're spreading out all of the jobs instead of having one person at like one station do it. And there's just overall a lot more complexity that has the appearance of simplicity in some ways. Now this can increase speed, it increases output, and it can increase the uniformity of a product, but it really is a more complicated system that has a larger footprint. It's interesting that we used Jacques Elul to talk a lot about propaganda in our season on propaganda, but the book which Elul wrote immediately following his work on propaganda, I think I think propaganda came out in like 1962 and the Technological Society came out in 1964. And this Technological Society, talking about technology or technique, is is what Elul thought he needed to write after propaganda because he recognized that propaganda's rise was related to technology or to technique.

Derek: 09:42

We are living in a world where we both want and have more and more control and efficiency through technique. We live in a technological society. To be more efficient, one must not only control the inanimate machines, as we usually think of technology, but the animate machines, people, have to be controlled as well. And that's propaganda. And Elul recognizes this, right?

Derek: 10:10

He saw people are so propagandized and then he's like, Oh, it's because we live in a system of technique where technique is, you know, at the forefront. Being efficient is at the forefront. Humans and societies have to be controlled for efficiency to make them run well. In the technological society, as well as, his follow-up to that, which is the technological bluff, I don't I'm not sure when that was, when that came out. But, in those two books, Elul delves into complexity and technique, and I'd definitely recommend those.

Derek: 10:50

Now in the last episode, we discussed patience and its importance, its centrality to Christianity. I think most people are gonna view the opposite of patience as impatience, of course. I mean, that just makes sense. But really, it's impatience of a particular kind that people have in mind. So I would think of kids in a store having a tantrum because they want a toy, and the parents say no.

Derek: 11:18

Or an erratic driver on the highway that is zipping in and out of lanes just trying to get around people because they're in a hurry. We view patience as something that we view impatience as something that is uncontrolled, right? Something that builds up and spews out of somebody. That's how we envision impatience manifesting itself. But I want to touch on technique here to show that a very real and perhaps even more dangerous type of impatience is that of the cold and calculating type.

Derek: 11:56

And technique embodies this. Now I'm not saying that all technique, all technology is bad. I'm not saying that nobody should have a washing machine or something like that, right? It's not that technology is bad, it's just that technique, tends to be employed by people who are very calculating, who care very much about results. And if you are not discerning how you implement those things, it can lead to a very cold and calculated and justifying the means sort of, methodology and morality.

Derek: 12:34

So it's important to recognize this, so that we can evaluate it rather than assume it as, you know, technology and technique and efficiency and productivity, rather than assuming that this is the way that things ought to be all the time. And to see technique more clearly for what it can be, it's gonna be important for us to first discuss the world as it is. In our world, nature is very complex in in a very certain way. And we generally call this complexity diversification. I think of of a movie that I'd really recommend.

Derek: 13:12

It's it's, it's fascinating, educational, you can watch with your whole family. It doesn't matter how old your kids are. But, this movie called The Biggest Little Farm. And on this on this show, they basically have this family who took this large piece of land and they wanted to farm it in a a healthy, sustainable way. And the way they did this was by valuing all of the local wildlife, whether that's, you know, plants or animals, like including coyotes and I forget what type of animal it was.

Derek: 13:46

It was like a gopher mole or something, right? But initially, you'd be like, Man, coyotes we don't want coyotes because they kill our chickens. Or, We don't want these moles or these gophers because they destroy these certain plants. And we don't write just you can name whatever creature and all of the problems that they cause. But what the what the, film shows is that over time, they begin to recognize the role that each of the creatures plays within that ecosystem.

Derek: 14:19

And, yeah, there are certain constraints, right? Because if you, you know, if if you try to go against the way that local nature functions and you try to impose yourself on it rather than work with it, yeah, you're going to run into problems. You're going see those things as problems, and you're going to have to use technology to conform nature and the world to the way that you want it to be. But when you farm the way that these people were farming, it's more challenging in one respect, but in another respect, nature begins to work with them. And things run very smoothly and there's less of a need to impose oneself to try to conform nature to the way that they want it to be because nature works with them.

Derek: 15:08

You know, a great way that we can see the opposite of this sort of thing is when we think of invasive species. Environments, have their own balances. And sometimes when you get a particular species that isn't balanced with the others, it begins to take over or it begins to push out some of the other creatures that were native to that habitat. So nature functions and it functions best when each creature within a particular environment, each plant, each, process performs its role without overstepping its bounds. Other creatures keep each other in check to support the complex system.

Derek: 15:54

A system supported not by creatures trying to game the system, you know, and not trying to take too much. Lion lions aren't going around just like killing every single zebra they can. They kill a zebra and eat it and rest and go out and hunt when they need more food. Everything plays a role and everything stays within its bounds. That is not often the way that humans work.

Derek: 16:22

We constantly seek to gain more. We do things like creating monoculture crops. I think, one of the the ways that this is really precarious now, I think is with potatoes. I think that's the plant where we have this huge monoculture where we've got like one type of potato rather than varieties of potatoes. And that's simple.

Derek: 16:45

You'd be like, well, one is one is simpler than five, right? Which is simpler than 10. It's like, sure, it's simple in a sense, but, now we with mass producing these things, now we have to do all kinds of stuff to ensure that there's no blights or other sort of disease that comes and wipes this out because if there's a disease that gets through all of our defenses, it will wipe out everything, all the potatoes, because we have only one type of potato, one variety. We don't have, diversity that buffers us against those sorts of problems. Factory farming.

Derek: 17:26

It seems like it's really simple, right? We can get lots of meat for lots of people, from one farm. One farm can supply tons of meat. Okay. That's great.

Derek: 17:38

I mean, are all kinds of ethical things going on with the treatment of animals and stuff. But why do we have so many E. Coli outbreaks? Because of our factory farming and all of the runoff and everything that goes down into spinach and everything else, we're starting to get more E. Coli outbreaks from runoff, from processing, from all kinds of things because we're we think we have this simple system, but really it requires a whole lot of complexity to to build up, to organize, and to run.

Derek: 18:16

Whereas letting a cow out in a pasture to eat and roam as it will without a whole bunch of oversight and prodding and all that kind of stuff, that's actually a lot simpler. Letting a cow be a cow is simpler than trying to impose ourselves on the cow. Or we also think of our huge use of pesticides. And we know that pesticides, especially certain ones, are carcinogenic. We know that pesticides and other sorts of things are getting into the waterways and that they are harming keystone species.

Derek: 18:53

They're changing the genders and like the fertility of all kinds of different animals. And so now we have to do things to offset the pollution and all kinds of EPA and things that are trying to go and police. There's so much complexity that goes into trying to fix the problems that we're making and to make this system that we've built through our technology to make it function because we're continuing to have to plug the holes in the boat in the dam. And Michael Crichton, he might be the most famous person who's who's written about this type of thing and author of Jurassic Park, right? The whole idea is, yeah, you've got this technology and you think that you're master of it, and, you think that it does all this good stuff for you, but you can't control nature, Right?

Derek: 19:45

You don't know what what nature is going to do. Because trying to impose yourself rather than submit to the bounds, you know, that that you have, while it's not always inherently bad, it is problematic. It does create issues and it it creates its own complexity even though it it's behind the guise of simplicity. A monoculture of potatoes, factory farming, right? It all, a washing machine.

Derek: 20:17

It all looks really simple. It all seems to work really well except for all of the complexity that is needed to build that up and to sustain it. So we find that complexity and technique, they provide the appearance of simplicity, but it's a facade. A three by three washing machine sits in my house, and I don't need a river. I don't need to rely on good weather, a few rocks, and two hours on my hands to scrub laundry or to hang up laundry.

Derek: 20:49

But it required several large factories to make all the parts, oil wells and oil refineries to dig up and process the oil to make plastics, large infrastructure and transportation suppliers to ship the materials, and power station to create and distribute the electricity, and I mean, lots of other things that just go into it. So that which makes our lives more simple, more efficient, quick and entertaining is usually the result of a lot of complexity. And really, if you think back to earlier discussions, it's really just distilled power, right? Think of all the distilled power that it that sits in my washing machine, all those things that I I just mentioned that go into creating it and making it run. And like I said, that, you know, we think of that with technology.

Derek: 21:44

So iPhones, washing machines, all that kind of stuff. But the same thing is true of processes of technique, right? Think about politics. Politics goes the exact same way. You can go back to our season on government and think about legislation and all of our talking on legislation.

Derek: 22:08

How legislation, oh, it seems really simple. There's just something that is not good for society, you just create a law and boom, it's fixed. But the mechanisms of government that go into that, that go into if you're in a democracy, the voting and all processes of voting, the way that bills have to get passed through, the way that they're enforced. And then you think of all of the ramifications those have that you don't necessarily intend. We had an episode on the Constitutio Criminalis, which was this, law that they had back in the 1500s in Germany.

Derek: 22:50

And we talked about some of the ramifications of that, right? You're trying to reduce criminal behavior, but it leads to a bunch of things that aren't good, potentially even like part of the witch craze and the burning of witches, which wasn't always that big of a thing, kind of flared up around this time and might potentially be attributed to some of those changes in laws. We talked about this in our in several episodes where we mentioned where we discussed CRT, right? CRT, the observation that it makes, whether you agree with their solutions or not, their observations are very astute that, hey, when when some of these things happen, when you when you get rid of slavery, it doesn't do what you think it does. Like it actually has all of these negative ramifications too.

Derek: 23:42

Sure, it masks the the slavery that was the shadow slavery. But now you've got sharecropping, convict leasing. I mean, you still have slavery. You just call it something else. You made this other thing illegal and things kind of shift.

Derek: 24:00

So the whole moral system, the political system and implementation, there's a lot of complexity that goes into the technique of running society and masking masking our problems and enforcing things and stuff too. So through these things, through technology and through technique, we are seeking to have more control over the world. And Elul's The Technological Bluff especially gets into this idea of methodology and how we're shaped by it. So if you're going to read one of Elul's works, you should really read the three that I mentioned, but definitely read The Technological Bluff. It's it's a lot more dry.

Derek: 24:41

It was harder to get through than the other two were, but it's going to give you more bang for your buck. I don't think you have to read all three if you read that and have some some background knowledge. But in our desire for more wealth, more power, more time, through distilling our power in those those areas, our technique that we implement tends to cause us to sacrifice things, to sacrifice nature through pollution, to sacrifice other across the globe, through forced and underpaid labor or at home with anti immigration stuff and the way that we're willing to treat or see other people. And it's causing us to reshape our own humanity and desire by, you know, through marketing and propaganda, through the encouragement of individualism and materialism. And this is not an irate and uncontrolled and impatient tantrum.

Derek: 25:44

It's not that emotional impatience that we see and that we envision as the antithesis of patients. Rather, what we see in a lot of our technology and technique is a cold and calculated impatience that's willing to sacrifice other on the altar, for our control over the world. It's an impatience where we manufacture everything, including the manufacturing of desire and the manufacturing of consent. So there really are a lot more avenues that I could have gone down here in regard to technology, a lot more that could be said. But I think I'm gonna save a lot of that for the next episode and try to kind of weave things in more pictorially, like through a story or or or through a real world issue, and kind of try to to bring it to life through that.

Derek: 26:45

But I wanted to have an episode specifically on technology and technique because I think it's think it's really important. It's it's important for two reasons. It's important, number one, because we don't really understand what technology is. And reading Elul, like it took me forever to figure out what technique and technology were, because I think of technology as a computer, a phone, that kind of stuff. Whereas what technology is, is far more broad than that.

Derek: 27:21

And the implications of technology are much bigger than just you're on social media or you're on your phone. There is a philosophy that is that goes behind all use of technology. What is the point of technology? And there's an article I'm gonna read by, Bernard Eller for an episode. And maybe I'll I'll put that episode in between here and the next one, so that way you can hear Eller on that a little bit and and maybe get a clearer picture of what technique and technology are.

Derek: 27:55

But I think it's important to understand the breadth of technology and the philosophical presuppositions and, you know, moral assumptions that go behind it. But secondly, I think that this is a good follow-up to the episode on patience because like I said, most of us have a particular view of what impatience is, and patience often is just seen as being calm and collected. But a leader in the technical society heads up like I think of Nazi Germany, like Farben, what was it? IG Farben and Bayer, like all those companies that were just cold and calculated making money off the Nazi regime using forced labor from people in concentration camps, like Zyklon B gassing people. They were cold and calculated, right?

Derek: 28:55

I don't think most Nazis, from at least the way that it that from things that I've read, from accounts of people in concentration camps, from movies that I've watched, from just whatever, like, it seems like the Nazis didn't have this uncontrolled vitriolic anger towards people. I'm sure that existed, but they were cold and calculated, it seems. Like, they were just putting down dogs. Compared to when I think of the South and Jim Crow and I think of the imagery of trying to integrate schools, just the vitriol that you see so much in the clashes between races, seems much more pronounced. Now maybe I'm wrong about that, but even if I am, the point is that the way that we view patients and impatience, we would call the people in Jim Crow South, that looks like impatience.

Derek: 29:54

Whereas Nazi Germany, well, it looks like they're calm and collected and controlled. We wouldn't we wouldn't call them impatient. And and that's just that's a really big problem because our proclivity is not towards the impatience that exudes as anger. Our proclivity in a technological society is to have a cold and calculated sort of impatience, to get what we want now and do it through technique. So anyway, I'll leave it at that and you can go ahead and listen to the next episode where I read Peace on Technique in Elul by Bernard Ehler.

Derek: 30:35

That's all for now. So peace, and because I'm a pacifist, when I say it, I mean it. This podcast is a part of the Kingdom Outpost Network. Please check out the links below to find other great podcasts and content related to non violence and Kingdom Living.