I don't watch TV much anymore and when I do I watch it much differently then I used to. In the past I actually watched it as if it could help me be more informed as to what is going on in the world. Things have changed in regards to how I see the information that comes across the TV and radio. You can read about it here.
Beginning to see it in this new light does now allow me to watch and not get caught up in it. It's like I'm standing on the outside looking into a conversation without any ideological horses in the race. It makes everything look and sound so different. Today I watched The Glenn Beck Show and everything Glenn said confirmed this statement of Jacques Ellul from his book The Ethics Of Freedom. I don't think Glenn would think this applies equally to the kinda power it seems he is pushing for and hoping to see emerge (decentralized government)...as if that is possible, but I am sure he could describe how it applies to the current administration.
"No matter what may be its form or level, it inevitably tends to enhance itself and to initiate a movement towards centralization. No political power will ever reduce itself or accomplish decentralization. There is a law that power will grow without limit. The only recognized limit is fact. Power will always go as far as it possibly can geographically or judicially. It ceases to expand only when it comes up against an obstacle that is more powerful than itself. Power is under the necessity of becoming absolute and totalitarian. This depends neither on the men who wield it nor on the ideology nor on the circumstances. Political power would not be power if this were not so." Jacques Ellul
2 comments:
There's an interesting tension in Ellul's work on this point. He's completely correct about power, and he even includes it as one of the Powers and Dominions (in The Subversion of Christianity). So it would seem that he'd be an advocate of conservative, small-government policies. And yet in his interviews, he stated that his liberal students were consistently brighter and more creative than his conservative students. I think he was more optimistic about his liberal students (and Ellul was after all heavily influenced by Marx), even as he recognized the dangers of secular big-government policies.
Hello Stephen.
Ellul is a bit hard to pin down (which is probably by his design)
Doesn't he say in Subversion that he chooses Socialism over Capitalism as the form of government he wants to live under? (as far as governments go)
I get the sense that he would see conservatism as a more dangerous political illusion just because it is more subtle and harder to detect that it is still all about power (centralized) even though it claims to be aiming for decentralization. Government always grows under conservative control also...just in different ways than it does under liberal control.
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