Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom; although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glorification. None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory. 1 Corinthians 2:6-8
The aftermath of the prolonged war in southeast Asia and of the coinciding political crisis which has come to be symbolized in the name “Watergate” furnish temptation for most Americans to misapprehend and oversimplify the present situation and prospects for their society.
The accrued fatigue of these ordeals and scandals yearns for respite, as do the pent frustrations which find expression in cynicism and quietism. But besides such sentiments there is the easy tendency to exaggerate the villainy of presidents, or military and intelligence professionals, or other public officers -- as if their stupidity or malice, their practical incompetence or moral turpitude, their criminality or vanity were enough to account for the plight of the nation.
Thus people hallucinate: they suppose, for instance, that war is over, even though the war establishment is as deeply entrenched as it ever has been and even though the war enterprise, since the formal conclusion in Vietnam, has become more heavily financed. Even though the war policy of America is more reckless now because, as a war, Indochina means an American failure of disastrous magnitude. Or people imagine that the constitutional and political crisis was exposed and resolved in the prosecution of a few Watergate personalities and in the resignation of Richard Nixon, even though the unlawful excesses of the Nixon presidency and the criminal offenses of the Nixon cabal are known not to have been unique, and even though, in the case of Nixon himself, the constitutional process was aborted.
I do not diminish by an iota the necessity of accounting for the public villains. Indeed, I complain that the task was not accomplished -- as, with regard to war, the Calley case shows, and, as, with regard to Watergate, the Nixon pardon proves. Yet I do suggest that both the Indochina war and the Watergate uproar represent symptoms rather than causes, and that in the disposal of either or both of these outbreaks, the essential American crisis has not been confronted, much less settled. The grave temptation now is for Americans to become persuaded that in these events “the system has worked,” or that it has been somehow (incongruously) vindicated, and thereby overlook the truth of how the system has radically, perhaps irrevocably, changed. To press the matter further: not only do Vietnam and Watergate represent symptoms merely, but the crisis of America as a nation and society is such that, had these not happened at all, Americans would in any case find themselves in much the same circumstances.
Since World War II, technology superseded industrialization as the dominant institutional and ideological power in society, America has been suffering a counterrevolution of extraordinary scope and consequence. It has been concentrated in the profusion of extra-constitutional agencies and authorities. This is a counterrevolution with the classical connotation of the term; that is, the effort is the undoing of the political and social ethic of the American Revolution, or at least of that aspect of the societal ethic of the Revolution which embodied a policy esteeming human life. It cannot be said that the ethical origins of the nation are unambiguous, containing as they do so much that renders the concern for property more basic than the concern for human life. It may be argued that technology and the technocracy it sponsors are an implementation, in extremely sophisticated terms, of the primitive property ethic which was so prominent in the settling and founding of the nation.
Whatever the truth about such a proposition, the reality in this past quarter century or so has been the emergence of such a militant technology that the historic tension between the property ethic and the priority of human life has been unstrung: the political development of technology has spawned a form of government which abolishes that familiar tension by its destruction of human rights, and its coercion of human life; in short, by its unraveling of that part of the constitutional fabric which values human beings. Technology has installed a counterrevolutionary regime -- a technocratic totalitarianism -- which has set aside, if not overturned, the inherited constitutional structures. It has thereby vested ruling authority outside law and beyond accountability to people.
Notice that the American technocratic totalitarianism is, from the point of view of a constitutional system, inherently lawless. The morality which dominates the functioning of this array of principalities (joined as the military-industrial-scientific complex) is the survival of the principalities. Everything else, everyone else, is sacrificed to that overwhelming goal. The principalities of technocracy are literally predatory. If there is some benefit for human beings in consequence of their political ascendancy it is either incidental or inadvertent. Commonly it will be found to be illusory as well, a means by which people are further enthralled and demeaned as human beings. One stereotypical appeal -- sponsored in one version by the military establishment, in another by the police power -- is that human freedom cannot be politically honored because security would thereby be jeopardized. In context, “security” may refer to “the national security” -- a concept which had some definition during the second World War but, retained in currency by the military establishment, has deteriorated into the vagueness of a ritual term invoked to intimidate and conform any opposed to adventurism, waste, or aggrandizement of the Pentagon’s political and economic power. Or, in relation to the escalation of the internal police power, “security” commonly means the protection of official or corporate premises or other property, or the convenience of technical procedure or routine, or the conditioning of people to exist in fear for their own safety, whether or not an empirical basis for such fear is warranted. Amidst the multifarious variations of the excuse of “security,” the central consequence is the same: the exercise of human rights is removed as an impediment to the operation of lawless authority.
On that very point, it is pertinent to recall that the security issue was used to justify both the illegality of the Indochina war and the unconstitutional surveillance and harassment of scores of thousands of citizens who sought to expose the genocide in Indochina. It is significant, furthermore, that the burden of the antiwar protests, notably that part informed by the conscience of Christians, was at once theologically traditional and politically conservative. The official defamations which portrayed the Christian opposition -- exemplified by the Berrigan brothers -- to the war as a movement of extreme radicalism or perverse rebellion were categorically false. These protests understood that the war was both unconstitutional and criminal and that the war was being prosecuted by illegitimate political authority, which Christian people are called in the New Testament to resist. In political terms, moreover, the effort was to expose and oppose a lawless counter-revolutionary regime so that the constitutional system might be restored in America -- a most conservative cause, indeed.
In the light of that, of course, the Christian antiwar protests would have to be accounted failures, since the end of combat for Americans has not affected the way in which the nation is ruled. The same lawless authority which administered the war policy with such savagery in Indochina and such deceit in America remains incumbent in the great principalities of the “second government” of the military-industrial- scientific complex, together with every other feature of the totalitarianism of advanced technocracy. The biblical mandate -- in the letter to the Romans no less emphatically than in the book of Revelation -- to resist illegitimate regimes remains as impelling and unequivocal since the reputed ending of war in southeast Asia as it was at any moment during the open hostilities in Vietnam or the covert warfare in Cambodia or Laos. At the same time, the political effort to stop the counterrevolution wrought by advanced technology, and to restore political authority which is lawful and accountable to human life, has, if anything, become more relevant and compelling than ever just because of the endemic temptation, in the wake of ordeal or scandal, to conclude that the crisis has abated.
That the technological revolution has in the course of a quarter century entrenched lawless authority as the real polity of the nation, that society is effectually governed by the principalities (both public and private) of technocracy, is now verified in practically every realm of American life. Common knowledge, which must in the circumstances be counted as minimal and superficial, furnishes enough citations to boggle the imagination; the extent of this new totalitarianism exceeds calculation.
The media of technocracy, for instance, is heavily saturated with the image of a police power, modeled on the military, reliant upon technological apparatus to investigate, watch, or coerce persons, and generally featuring blunt ridicule of constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure, self-incrimination, detention without formal charge, false arrest, invasion of privacy, and of the tradition of civilian control. The redundant themes are the glorification of official violence and the justification of police lawlessness for the sake of efficient order, and these have now been reiterated so often for so long that they become normative in the social definition of the police power.
Meanwhile, one of the great public utilities acknowledges its practice, made possible by advanced technology, of the illegal monitoring of telephone communications of at least forty million persons.
Despite disclosures at once bizarre and appalling of complicity in assassinations, subversion of other governments, ubiquitous oversight of citizens attempting to exercise basic political rights, usurpation of the policy-making functions of the presidency and of the Congress, and compilation of masses of useless or erroneous intelligence data, the CIA and its counterparts in practically every federal department persevere unbeholden to public control or the discipline of law.
Or the great banking institutions and financial powers, whose speculations have prospered the wanton proliferation of technical capacity and have converted this society to the consumption ethic, arrogantly move to abrogate representative government -- or even the appearance of it -- in New York City, in preface, one may predict, to similar seizures of other cities.
Though the impotence of sophisticated weapons technology and the patent insanity, from a human point of view, of military overkill capability has been demonstrated again and again since the second World War, the Pentagon remains the archetypical technocratic institution and the single most dominant ruling power. It is maintained as a law unto itself, recalcitrant to either presidential or parliamentary direction, and its essential lawlessness is sustained by the enormity of its procurement capacity and the consequent over-dependence of the economy upon the Pentagon for employment. Thus the Pentagon technocracy has achieved a near-perfect dilemma, by which its political ascendance, heedless of those who invoke the constitution, is assured: it poses for the nation the alternatives of insatiable waste and indefinite warfare, or of so radical a dislocation of employment, and employability, as to be unthinkable.
It is surely unnecessary to multiply this news. It is critical to understanding the totalitarian implications of advance technology that one realize that priority is assumed by technical capability over human discretion in rendering budgets, in making policy, and in ruling society. The basic social premise, under the impact and momentum of technology, is putting into practice whatever becomes technologically feasible. It is the application of every technical capacity, without regard to human critique or control, and without regard to empirical benefit for human life or moral consequence for society. If the matter can be stated that succinctly, it has, nonetheless, complex elaboration. Yet what is consistently involved is the intimidation or abdication of the most elemental human faculties when confronted by what technology can do.
The preemption of policy-making -- of government itself -- by technical capacity was exposed, symbolized grotesquely, and foreshadowed most ominously in Hiroshima. If therefore scientists, as well as politicians, had often been negligent in considering the morality of their activity, by the time of Hiroshima the scope of technology had so vastly expanded, diversified, and sped that the problem was no longer quaint or theoretical, but quite literally implicated the destiny of human life. In any case, at Hiroshima technical capability became the overwhelming factor in the making of policy. There was a conclusive fascination with building the bomb because it was so “technically sweet,” as Robert Oppenheimer put it. The bomb was made primarily because the bomb could be made; the bomb was dropped because it could be dropped. The facility of technology became, then and there, the determinant of policy, overpowering everything else, including especially human discretion addressed to whether the bomb should be built or delivered.
The implication politically is that policy-making becomes incorporated into the technical process itself. The participation of human beings in the sense of the exercise of rational and conscientious thought or action atrophies or is otherwise obviated. Thus humans become adjuncts to technology -- robots or puppets deprived or inhibited in the use of the very faculties which distinguish them as human.
Such is the American story since Hiroshima, played out with truly fantastic acceleration, so that no sector of society is unaffected by change of counterrevolutionary magnitude. Everywhere the evidence abounds from the open commitment to genocide in southeast Asia and the convenience of that policy for the testing of napalm, defoliation, and other weapons systems and military stratagems to the profusion of wasteful, harmful, useless, redundant products and packages and the techniks of conditioning their consumption.
If the extraordinary political change in American society signaled by Hiroshima had, somehow, taken place abruptly, in the space of some days or weeks, it would more readily be recognized as the equivalent of a coup d’etat. As it is, the change has spanned 30 years, during which time the gradual, relentless effect of technology upon people has attracted less alarm and has even been taken as normative. In the process, human beings have been repeatedly subdued, conformed, and defeated, coerced and conditioned. The resistance to such radical dehumanization has been sporadic. One major reason for the adaptation of citizens to their own subservience to technocracy is that the metamorphosis is accomplished without the ideological fanfare associated with other forms of totalitarianism. The technocratic state does not need ideology (in the classical sense of ideology, though there is room for the argument that technology is itself an ideology) or an elaborate apparatus of propaganda and indoctrination.
In place of that, technology furnishes technocracy with an invention capable of immobilizing human comprehension and conscience. There is no necessity for brainwashing where a machine can paralyze the head. This is, manifestly, the distinguishing faculty of television. That instrument -- by its sheer redundancy, by direct relay of data and by subliminal manipulation -- can hypnotize people, neutralize human response, transfix the mind. Not only does it indulge fantasy and inculcate indolence, it habituates human beings to a spectator posture, which is incongruous with human life. Thus citizens are readied for political acquiescence while they are rendered largely unaware of how their most elemental human faculties have been harmed or lost.
The aberration of American society under the impetus of technology from putative democracy to technocratic totalitarianism has long since been foretold in the work of George Orwell. As I hear Orwell’s message, he finds a fundamental irreconcilability between the political reality of advanced technology and a constitutional system or rule of law such as that familiar to Britain or America. Whether that be true as prophecy or not, the time is very late indeed in the political development of technocracy in the United States. How late it is now is evidenced by the situation emerging from the enfranchisement of younger voters.
The extension of franchise to 18-year-old citizens superficially seems like an opening of society to a greater participation. But a second thought about the matter challenges that conclusion ... these new voters are soon to constitute the potential majority of the electorate, yet they have little in their own experience or political memory associated with a society in which accountability to human beings is esteemed. To be more concrete, the younger voters in the United States were born and reached the age of franchise after the counterrevolution occasioned by technology began to gravely jeopardize the inherited constitutional ethic. At least some older citizens, including those of my own generation, have a recollection of American society prior to the inception of technocracy. For all its frailties and failures, there was then an effort in society to redeem that aspect of American polity which bespeaks concern for human beings -- a concern epitomized in the law in the Bill of Rights.
The 18-year-old voters can have no such remembrance; they have lived only since that value began to be subverted and usurped by the emerging technocratic state. Why should, for instance, any one of these younger voters uphold the right of privacy when in their everyday experience in school, in employment, in recreation, in travel, in credit transactions, in telephone conversations or receiving mail, in military service, as well as in politics, they have known no privacy -- but rather, ubiquitous monitoring. The condition has become so pervasive that for the recently enfranchised young it is regarded as normative. In consequence, they have yet to be persuaded that privacy as a right of human beings in society is either feasible or worthwhile. In this context, Orwell may be proved right: The enfranchisement of 18-year-old citizens and their impending majority status in the electorate may be the empirical confirmation that technocracy is categorically incompatible with constitutional rule.
If, on top of that, it is the case that the great military, scientific, and commercial principalities have significantly displaced the constitutional structures as the functional regime, then it must be asked, realistically and openly: Has suffrage any substantial relationship to how human beings are effectually governed and to how policy is actually made? Perhaps, in the technocratic state, the whole scheme of elections is obsolescent and politically irrelevant.
I understand that the view I have of the American political crisis -- far exceeding what surfaced in war and in Watergate -- as incipient in Hiroshima, compounded by technology, institutionalized as technocracy, vested in a conglomeration of principalities and powers of war, science, and commerce, overtaking the inherited constitutional system as a totalitarian regime victimizing human life and brutalizing society. I understand it not as the accomplishment of public criminals and villains, as reprehensible and culpable as any of them may be. Mine is likely to be read as a melancholy message, one that deprives Americans of hope in a social or political sense.
So be it ... From a biblical point of view, the best that can be said of any such hope is that it is incredibly naive. Such hope is certain to betray those deceived by it. And that not only in America, now, but in any nation, at any time.
For what I have been telling here, in a quite particular way, is the doctrine of the Fall. The Fall means the profound condition of chaos and disorientation, brokenness and violence, struggle and conflict within and among all creatures and all things in the present age. The Fall refers to the pervasiveness of the power of death reigning throughout the whole of creation. Biblically speaking, that death, incarnate and militant in many forms in an advanced technocratic society such as America, is no novelty introduced by technology, but has been characteristic of every other society in every other era.
This means, for human beings, that the only way to cope with the predatory nature of the technocratic regime is to confront, comprehend, resist, and transcend the reality of death at work in this world. It is that which is the whole concern of the gospel of Jesus Christ. In that concern the issue is not how death can be somehow defeated, but it is how the power of death is broken and confounded in the life of the word of God in the world. Thus, the concern is how human life is emancipated from servitude and the idolatry of death in the American technocracy -- or in any other society whatsoever.
That means that the biblical lifestyle is always, in some sense -- though it be diversely imagined -- a witness of resistance to the status quo of politics and of economics and of everything in society. It is a witness of resurrection from death. Paradoxically, those who embark on the biblical witness constantly risk death empirically -- execution or exile, imprisonment or persecution, defamation or harassment -- at the hands of the rulers of this age. Yet those who do not resist the rulers of the present darkness are consigned to death morally -- to the death of their humanness. That, of all the modes of death, is the most ignominious.
When this article appeared, William Stringfellow was an attorney, lay theologian, social critic, and author of several books, including An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land. He was a contributing editor and regular columnist for Sojourners.
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