Randal Marlin Read online

  for Sick Children or publish her findings. The Canadian Association of University

  Teachers came to her defence, and in October 2001 a Committee of Inquiry issued

  a report on the case, warning that tougher measures were needed to protect patients’

  rights and to ensure that clinical drug trials were free from the influence of drug

  manufacturers.52

  What Ellul writes about technique is fundamentally connected to his thoughts

  about propaganda:

  Technique has become autonomous; it has fashioned an omnivorous world which

  obeys its own laws and which has renounced tradition. Technique no longer rests on

  tradition, but rather on previous technical procedures; and its evolution is too rapid,

  too upsetting, to integrate the older traditions.53

  In other words, propaganda is itself a technique, resulting partly from the application

  of the social sciences, including psychology, to technology. It is a technique used to

  promote acceptance of other techniques. Viewing the technological system as a whole,

  we see that maximal efficiency—defined, for example, as maximal return on invest-

  ment over a given period of time—may no longer involve adapting products to human

  wants, practices, and capacities. It may instead require adaptation of human beings to

  the requirements of the system. If the reader is involved with an institution of any size,

  he or she may be familiar with the scenario wherein perfectly workable routines, which

  have performed satisfactorily, are replaced by a new system that appears to accomplish

  the same tasks more efficiently, but does not. Certain important things are lost in the

  process, such as continuity and the ability to make adequate comparisons with past

  practice. Another common result is that the range of discretion is reduced, and equi-

  table concerns are de-emphasized in favour of mechanistically arrived-at results. For

  instance, in the health care profession, more and more reliance is being placed on gad-

  getry and monitoring rather than on human contact between patient and caregiver.

  But if the frenetic pace of modern life is too upsetting to some individuals, the system

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  itself does not have to slow down. What we see is the development and marketing of mood-enhancing drugs to enable people to cope. As Ellul points out, one branch of

  technology makes up for deficiencies in another, but the technological system as a

  whole keeps growing.

  Propaganda plays a key role in all of this. At each stage various interests work to

  minimize the prospective harms and inconveniences and to maximize prospective

  benefits appearing in the assessment of some new technique. Each specialized contri-

  bution to the technological system is promoted in connection with the narrow con-

  tribution it can make, without any overall assessment of where the system as a whole

  may be heading—for example, to an unsustainable ecology, to pill-popping zombies,

  or whatnot. Publicly funded bodies, designed to look at the long-range, overall impact

  of technological developments on society, might be expected to provide a counter-

  weight to specialized interests, but the experience in Canada has been that they have a

  precarious existence and are easily targeted when the government is looking for ways

  to cut back on spending. For instance, cutbacks put pressures on universities to accept

  funding from private sources, which may dampen the enthusiasm for speaking out on

  matters that might adversely affect those same sources.54

  Ellul’s analysis of propaganda comes from a concrete source: his experience in

  working on such local projects as the preservation of the fishing life in southwestern

  France in the 1950s. His opponents worked for a bureaucracy with the impressive name

  of the “Interdepartmental Mission for the Amelioration of Aquitaine.” It involved three

  things he detested: technocracy, the bureaucratic attitude, and capitalist power. The

  technocrats chose a place for tourist development, without consideration for the actual

  terrain. If flaws in their studies were pointed out, the technocrats claimed the stud-

  ies were outdated. Maps were drawn not to scale but to fit the preconceived plan; for

  instance, what appeared on their maps as a hairline back road was, in reality, a major

  expressway. Administrative secrecy was the rule.

  El ul feels that people have to be educated to deal with this kind of circumstance,

  that universities should not turn out good technicians who will make capable executives

  who are also nonentities. Instead, he thinks students should learn, along with the appro-

  priate knowledge of their field of study, an understanding of people and a fundamentally

  critical approach to their discipline, their lives, and the world. Then, the justificatory

  ideologies and powers of any kind can be questioned, not in order to destroy them, but

  to allow each person to exercise freedom. Social transformation begins with business

  executives, since it is no good separating the expertise that gets things done from the

  criticism of society in which Marxists, for example, engage. You need both expertise and

  criticism. In El ul’s view, Marx is important because he wanted to reintegrate the totality

  of the human being in a scientific study of economy and society.

  El ul makes clear that his goal is not to seek to eliminate technology but to recap-

  ture a space for human spontaneity, openness, and understanding of what is happen-

  ing in the world. He has been credited with inventing the phrase “Think globally, act

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  locally.” In order to act effectively, people must understand the influences operating on their consciousnesses, influences often generated from sources that seek to benefit

  their own, private interests, which often have little to do with the public good. One

  might be tempted to demonize external forces, but El ul focuses not just on the pur-

  veyors of propaganda but on the willingness of the population generally to accept it.

  Ellul sees the modern individual as hungry for a sense of meaning for his or her

  existence. The decline of church, village, and family influences has tended to atomize

  human existence, cutting people off from bonds that automatically provided a sense

  of identity. Under these circumstances, with individuals thrown together in a mass,

  there is a fertile field for propaganda. Lacking the determination and energy required

  to make sense of the world, the modern individual is all too willing to have meanings

  supplied to him or her through the mass media. Or else they opt out of any seri-

  ous thinking. In an interview with Claude Steiner and Charles Rappleye, Ellul says,

  “Today, the greatest threat is that propaganda is seeking not to attract people, but

  to weaken their interest in society. I am astonished by the enormous number of TV

  game shows, football games, computer games. They encourage people to play: ‘Let

  yourselves be entertained, amuse yourselves, do not concern yourselves with politics,

  it’s not worth the trouble.’”55

  Propaganda Analysis

  One of El ul’s main contributions to the study of propag
anda is his expansion of the

  horizons under which it is commonly viewed as a highly organized, top-down, politi-

  cally motivated strategy for control ing a population. This needs to be supplemented

  by other categories and related considerations. The study of propaganda needs to take

  into account the way a targeted group is conditioned to make it more receptive to the

  propagandist’s message. El ul calls this “pre-propaganda.” No direct propaganda can be

  effective, he writes, without pre-propaganda, which creates images, ambiguities, and

  stereotypes, apparently without any particular purpose. The essential objective is to

  prepare a person for a particular action and to do so without delay. It does not have a

  precise ideological objective. “It proceeds by psychological manipulations, by character

  modifications, by the creation of feelings or stereotypes useful when the time comes.”

  Besides altering stereotypes, a propagandist may seek to build up useful myths in the

  minds of a population, which would also count as pre-propaganda. El ul explains what

  he means by “myth”:

  By “myth” we mean an al -encompassing, activating image: a sort of vision of desir-

  able objectives that have lost their material, practical character and have become

  strongly coloured, overwhelming, all-encompassing, and which displace from the

  conscious all that is not related to it. Such an image pushes man to action pre-

  cisely because it includes all that he feels is good, just, and true. Without giving a

  metaphysical analysis of the myth, we will mention the great myths that have been

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  created by various propagandas: the myth of race, of the proletariat, of the Führer, of Communist society, of productivity. Eventually the myth takes possession of a man’s

  mind so completely that his life is consecrated to it. But that effect can be created

  only by slow, patient work by all the methods of propaganda, not by any immediate

  propaganda operation.56

  Elsewhere El ul refers to other governing myths, which he identifies as work, hap-

  piness, the nation, youth, and the hero. His thesis is that when one or other or all of

  these myths take hold of a population’s consciousness, they pervade all thinking. The

  obvious case is the racist myth in Hitler’s Germany, but El ul claims that other myths

  can also take root and dominate our outlook on life. Take the notion of work. A non-

  mythological attitude is that work is something most of us have to do to provide a

  livelihood. It would be better if we had the leisure to do creative things, but life is not

  so kind to everyone, and work in the sense of something necessary but disagreeable is

  the lot of many or most people. But work is mythologized when it is treated as some-

  thing especially meritorious, as if the “worker” were some being superior to others. The

  mythologized notion of work is convenient for the unscrupulous capitalist, since it

  provides the psychological conditions for an exploited class to accept atrocious work-

  ing conditions willingly, even enthusiastically. El ul is not contradicting St. Benedict’s

  idea that work, carried out in the right spirit for love of God, can be good for the soul.

  What he treats as myth is the idea that work is good in and of itself, salvific, conferring

  nobility and superiority on the working class over other classes in society. El ul thinks

  that work took on a mythical nature in the nineteenth century, when the factory work

  required of workers became repetitive, uncreative, and degrading. The mythologized

  view of work helped to restore self-esteem. As myth, one could perhaps view it as a

  capitalist tool to motivate the workers, but if so it was turned against its originators

  by the labour movement.

  Each of El ul’s proposed “myths” could be the subject of extensive discussion, but

  there is one area in which his arguments can be juxtaposed with those of Orwell. El ul

  says that one of the “four great collective sociological presuppositions in the modern

  world” is the myth of happiness and that “A propaganda that stresses virtue over hap-

  piness and presents man’s future as one dominated by austerity and contemplation

  would have no audience at all.”57 Orwell, by contrast, writes in his review of Mein

  Kampf that “however they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psy-

  chologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life.” Obviously, he is not

  writing in approval of these doctrines, having put his life on the line in opposition to

  them; instead, he is remarking on the psychological appeal of these ideas to the masses:

  Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people

  “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them “I offer you struggle, danger and

  death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.58

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  Here, Orwell and El ul are in contradiction. El ul may have qualified his statement to allow for the special circumstances of Nazi Germany; Orwell, himself, amended his

  own statement by concluding “Perhaps later on they will get sick of it [the struggle,

  etc.] and change their minds, as at the end of the last war.” Alternatively, one could

  argue that Nazi propaganda was presenting its own version of happiness, interpreted as

  living a supremely Germanic existence, with Hitler the apotheosis of the German spirit.

  Pre-propaganda in the form either of myths or stereotypes may be less easy to

  detect because it is “softer,” in the sense of less galvanizing, but once it has settled into a public’s consciousness, it will be much more difficult to counteract the subsequent

  propaganda. Therefore, it is important to expose and resist pre-propaganda before it

  is utilized for nefarious purposes.

  There is much common ground between Orwell, El ul, and Noam Chomsky con-

  cerning their perceptions of propaganda, even though their politics, at least in the case

  of Ellul and Chomsky, differ considerably. Like Ellul, Chomsky sees propaganda as

  not necessarily controlled by the state. In Chronicles of Dissent he said of the United States: “We’re not a society which has a Ministry of Truth which produces doctrine

  which everyone then must obey at a severe cost if you don’t. Our system works much

  differently and much more effectively. It is a privatized system of propaganda, includ-

  ing the media, the journals of opinion and in general including the broad participa-

  tion of the articulate intelligentsia, the educated part of the population.” In apparent

  partial agreement with Ellul, Chomsky saw the media and educational structures as

  set up in a way “to design, propagate and create a system of doctrines and beliefs which

  will undermine independent thought and prevent understanding and analysis of insti-

  tutional structures and their functions.”59

  Categories of Propaganda

  El ul’s notion of pre-propaganda has contributed greatly to propaganda theory. So also

  has his much-used and discussed analysis of the different categories of propaganda. It

  is important to understand and appreciate these categories even though they make it


  difficult to maintain a tight, consistent grasp on the definition of propaganda.

  Ellul groups propaganda into four different pairs of contrasting kinds. As pre-

  sented here, the first of each pair represents the kind that would normally spring to

  mind when people think about propaganda. The second represents Ellul’s extended

  notion, which terms as propaganda things not ordinarily viewed as such.

  1. Political versus sociological propaganda. Political propaganda is carried out by a definite body—for example, a government, a political party, an administration, a

  pressure group—for definite goals. The methods are quite deliberate and calculated;

  goals are clearly distinguished and quite precise. By contrast, sociological propaganda is diffuse, based on a general climate of opinion operating imperceptibly without the

  appearance of propaganda. It is the sum of the ways in which society tries to integrate

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  the maximum number of people into itself, to unify its members’ behaviour according to pattern, and to spread its style of life abroad. It creates new habits and new

  standards of judgment and choice that appear to have been spontaneously adopted.

  US films of the 1950s, with their stay-at-home mothers and businessman fathers, are

  an example of this kind of propaganda.

  Sociological propaganda does not fit our usual definition of the term, which

  includes the idea of an “organized attempt” to persuade. Ellul, himself, writes, “one

  hesitates to call all this propaganda,”60 but he has a reason for wanting to extend the

  definition to cover these cases: it is to draw attention to the fact that the effects on us of these influences are similar to those of propaganda in the usual sense. Sociological

  propaganda, like its political counterpart, imparts myths and standards of good and

  bad behaviour. A person’s environment is changed at the deepest level by sociologi-

  cal propaganda. It acts gently, introducing an ethic in benign form, penetrating very

  slowly, and ending by creating a fully established personality. It is more like pre-pro-

  paganda than propaganda, inasmuch as it does not lead, by itself alone, to concerted