Posts tagged "culture:":

Writing About Jacques Ellul

I am by no means an expert on Ellul, I have merely read three of his books (Presence in The Modern World, The Technological Society, and The Meaning of the City) But in trying to communicate his influence on my thinking, I have inadvertently written many times about him, albeit at an all too basic level. There are many theories claiming to explain all of human history, or at least the structure of our current society, but Ellul’s technique works because of its simplicity and deliberate vagueness. It is however this quality that makes explaining Ellul to others so challenging. Here is one example of an attempt made by me to quickly summarise the central ideas of Ellul’s technique.

The technical concept can be briefly summarized as a conglomerate of thoughts, methods, and approaches considered to be objectively the best for achieving a purpose. It is important to distinguish this concept from technology, such as computers, engines, weaving machines, and so on. Technology is merely a consequence of technique, not the cause. People in modern society can no longer imagine life in the way that prehistoric and medieval populations lived. Almost all problems are expected to have technical solutions; if the solution to a problem requires something to be done, then the problem is technical. This seems almost tautological — if nothing needs to be done, is there really a problem? However, problems often arise from attempts to improve the situation, and technique always demands solutions to increasingly complex problems.

This is by no means a short summary, it is longer than the introductory paragraph. But to compress it inevitably means allowing for serious misinterpretation, and readers are not often familiar with an obscure post-war anarchist christian sociologist. This is made even more difficult owing to the fact that technique is applicable to such a wide number of disparate fields. It is for this reason that explaining Ellul has become dreadfully boring, despite the fact that I recognise Ellul as a figure that would bring enormous comfort — I almost dare to say enlightenment — to a great number of people. But I feel compelled to do so, again and again, because I too am a member of our technical society. Just like Kaczynski¹ I feel compelled to utilize technique against itself despite being fully aware of the fruitlessness of doing so.

Ellul naturally takes inspiration from Marx’ historical materialism as well as Hegel’s idea of Geist. The main difference is that where Marx and Hegel both see an end point, a perfect communist society and Absolute knowledge respectively, Ellul instead sees technique as an ever-expanding being driven only be a need to encompass every facet of human society. Technique per definition can have no limit because when it reaches absolute mastery over any one idea it will simply move on to greater and greater scales. Only something like the paperclip maximizer converting all of the mass-energy in the universe would ever reach a hard limited; technical society however still hopes for a continued advancement after that.

Since technique dominates every area of society, it has become relevant for an untold number of discussion I have come across. For example, in an article about the possibly planned use of TikTok by the CCP to destroy western civilization, Gurwinder effectively makes clear how Wang Huning describes America’s crisis of technology, and how it shares similarities with Nick Land’s view of accelerationism (all in attempt to expose a CCP accelerationist plot). While I see Gurwinder’s thesis as fundamentally incorrect, the moral decline of western civilisation is not to be solved through any return to “traditional moral values”, technique only moves forward, though it very well might be marketed as such². Gurwinder quotes Land’s A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism:

The point of an analysis of capitalism, or of nihilism, is to do more of it. The process is not to be critiqued. The process is the critique, feeding back into itself, as it escalates. The only way forward is through, which means further in.

Land is entirely correct in his description of the symptom, but misattributes the cause. Capitalism is not a driving force of anything, it is simply a state of affairs itself caused by technique. As I write in my essay on the philosophy of nuclear weapons, technique is inherently alienating and a cause for nihilism, as Land has realized. But capitalism is not the cause of this; Soviet socialism is an even purer form of technique³. The planned economy requires a constant need for things to be done, for organisational meetings and for statistics to be collected so that more accurate and better choices can be made, even at exorbitant costs. Why socialism ceased in the USSR and China was because of a technical choice that free-market capitalism was more efficient, and it was this decision that Fukuyama described as his end of history; the triumph of free market liberal democracy as the most efficient mode of societal organisation. This does not mean that it will remain so forever of course, but that it is simply meaningless to discuss the issue, for when something more efficient comes along, it will simply be done.

Divided Empire

The video game Victoria 3 is a historical, and often times ahistorial, 4X grand strategy video game by Swedish developer Paradox Interactive. It is meant to depict the period of world history from 1836 to 1936, including events such as the middle and late industrial revolution, American civil war, the scramble for Africa, the first world war, among numerous others. Emerging from the Napoleonic wars as one of the great European powers of the age was the Austrian empire. In reality, the history of the Habsburg monarchy was very tumultuous during the period portrayed. In Victoria 3 however, the Austrian monarchy often remains stable and even when it undergoes significant economic and social reforms when controlled by the player, the empire often exits the fires of nationalism comparatively unscathed. This essay intends to describe the limitations of the model in Victoria 3, as well to recommend changes that might better represent the unique history of the dual monarchy.

The version of Austria present in Victoria 3 has many issues owing to its internal structure, or lack thereof. To better understand these issues, we should compare it with another example that exists in 1836, that being Förenade Konungarikena Sverige och Norge, the personal union between Sweden and Norway. The two countries are depicted as separate entities with a shared market and military policy. This is a fitting interpretation as the two countries had separate legislatures, citizenships, and two different constitutions (Stråth, 2005). The only shared institution was the foreign department, due to the shared foreign policy. This is similar to the situation in Austria-Hungary. During the 1867 compromise, the empire was partitioned into Austrian and Hungarian domains. These areas were refereed to as Cislethania and Translethania respectively. Similarly to Sweden-Norway, Cis- and Translethania shared foreign policy and military and had a common customs union and currency. But at the same time they had two different parliaments, selected their own ministers, and maintained wholly separate judicial systems (Steven, 2006). In Victoria 3 however, when the citizenship law Racial Segregation is passed and the Hungarian population ceases to be discriminated against, an event fires that transforms the formerly Austrian empire into Austria-Hungary, and making Hungarians a so-called primary culture in the new nation. What should instead occur is that Hungary should partially secede from Austria, falling under a personal union similar to that of Sweden-Norway. This should also motivate the player to avoid the compromise at all costs. The solution to the Hungarian question is very therefore similar to Sweden-Norway, and the game should aim to reflect the downsides of the union rather than merely giving it benefits. Paradox should put more effort into depicting the division present between the two parts of the dual monarchy.

Nationalism did not merely threaten the empire from its eastern parts, but nationalists calling for the creation of a German nation occupied a large share of the empires attention. In 1848, the Frankfurt Parliament’s revolutionaries created the first German nation, laying claim to all areas encompassed by the post-Napoleonic German Confederation, including the predominantly German-speaking parts of Austria (Heikaus, 1997). Due to the large non-German minorities in the empire, a new German nation would require the Habsburg monarchy to surrender large portions of their territory in exchange for a new unstable state. Their unwillingness to do so prompted German nationalists to seek an alternative solution for a united Germany not encompassing the Austrian lands, a Kleindeutsche Lösung as opposed to that of Großdeutschland. The other major German power, Prussia, also controlled significant non-German groups, but these were considered small enough to possibly Germanise through the Ostsiedlung that had occurred during the middle ages (Nipperdey, 1996). Victoria 3 models this struggle of Groß- and Kleindeutschland through the war goal of German Leadership. This does a very good job of representing the Austro-Prussian war in the event of a Prussian victory, but fails to model the situation of a possible Austrian-led Germany being formed. If Austria should emerge as the victorious party in a question of German leadership, it would also entail the expulsion of all non-German regions from the empire. The Austrian player should therefore be forced to decide between retaining their non-German lands or fight a series of wars to unify the various smaller German states. This choice will not be as attractive to the Austrian party as it would to the purely expansionist Prussia, but that would only serve to mimic historical incentives. The forces of nationalism should therefore be strengthened to further weaken the Austrian state’s expansionist abilities.

The period in which Victoria 3 plays out is one which sees the primacy of large European empires (Paradox Interactive, 2022). In the game, one uses the “Colonial Administration” institution to slowly conquer the land of decentralized powers. Practically all European nations have the required technology to enact the legislation required for such a colonial effort in any region they have an interest in, with the main obstacle being competition with other imperial powers. But in reality obtaining colonial possessions was far from simple. On a superficial level, the fact that one of the European great powers of the Victorian age did not posses any major overseas colonies appears very strange. But this was due to the lack of firm coöperation and control within its European domains, and the comparative lack of sea access. The troubles with domestic ethnic conflict has already been mentioned, but it is worth it to note that Hungarians were not the only large minority in the empire. There were also large numbers of Poles, Czechoslovaks, Ukrainians, Slovens, Romanians, and Italians. These contributed to the fragmentation of any effort to obtain colonies, even after 1867. Secondly, while Austria-Hungary had access to the sea, the dual monarchy was never a true naval power. This lack of ships made it harder to project power far away from home. For Victoria 3 to tackle this the number of interests a country can declare should be even more strongly tied to the size of a country’s fleets, perhaps even as a share of the global total. While the game makes a noble attempt to limit colonialism, it is ultimately not enough to model the difficulties of the dual monarchy.

The Victorian and Edwardian periods are ones of profound change not only in Europe, but in the world as a whole. The challenges of modeling something as complex as this while still creating an engaging experience for a player trying to construct a national economy and shape their own society are of course tremendous, but it is likely still possible for the unique trajectory of Austria to appear as it was in history. The empire faced many difficult obstacles both from its multi-ethnic makeup and from the nature of its geography, and it was partly these obstacles that caused the archaic and enigmatic monarchy to collapse in the fires of the great war.