“[W]hat does it mean for a thing to be real in the modern order? In my judgment, the modern technological order tacitly communicates to us, day in and day out, that reality (the sort that actually concerns us) belongs to the order of the manipulable — subject, in principle, to human agency. We saw in Heidegger that modern technology is the destining of revealing such that nature answers back to me in the shape of my questions (i.e., uses) for it. That it appears resonant with the realm of material manipulation has everything to do with how we have approached reality in the first place. For Ellul, technique is a pattern of thought that changes everything it touches — a reduction of reality to the terms of the rational and ordered and the efficient. What does not fit this mold is ultimately invisible.

“It is not that there is no longer a philosophical argument for invisible realities. On the contrary (in my judgment), many classical arguments are compelling, but they belong to a discourse that is unnatural to us and was quite natural (teleology, etc.) in its original context. As such, their persuasive power depends upon accounting for this disjunct and attempting to reharmonize our reality instincts with the conclusions of our free minds. This is because we have been shaped to relate to the cosmos and to perceive the cosmos only (or almost only) in its manipulable dimensions, which is to say that dimension in which human agency can, in principle, interfere. As such, any aspect of it that does not conform to this dimension is perceived to be nonexistent. Or, stated differently, the least personal aspects of reality become the only realms of concern and care for us. Inasmuch as these are that as which we perceive the real, it is natural for us to feel as though anything else is superfluous. We fancy our explanatory itch scratched when it has rather been numbed.

“In any case, it is my claim that this is a large part of why atheism, for instance, and an urbanized modernity are highly correlated. It is here that one can move around in a world that has been controlled for the human and that consequently forecloses the experience of agency that has classically reinforced the notion of God by making personhood seem like a fundamental property of all being. This is especially the case by the 1960s, by which time the majority of those living in the West experienced lifestyle comforts that were historically unimaginable to their ancestors just a few generations before. In any case, this point is made clearest to us as we consider our own immediate context. I, for instance, live in an air-conditioned house. When a storm comes that would have been a crisis to my ancestors, I do not even flinch. I can hardly imagine what it is like to get food or water anywhere else but a grocery store or a tap, the products of each appearing, for all practical purposes, as by magic (albeit I assume of the demystified, technical sort in the hands of an anonymous, different sort of clergy). When I experience nature, it is manicured nature, whether it be the neatly placed trees in my neighborhood, the mowed lawn, the pruned bushes, or the nonthreatening sky. When I walk outside to the bus, the notion that my path is lit, that I walk on smooth concrete, that I am in a vehicle that transports me at high but efficient speeds, does not even enter my consciousness. This is reality to me. I know that it is technologically mediated, but that is only when I am thinking about it. When I am simply moving around in it, it is simply the world. One could go on to speak of technologically mediated encounters with health, death, and other persons. Even the most agentic aspects of reality (human relationships) are increasingly subjected to media, surrogates, and options that are historically unprecedented and mechanistic. That on which I rely is less family and neighbor than institution, expert, and system. To put it bluntly, the world is a world for me. I do not find myself in a big, mysterious world suffused with agencies to which I am subject and around which I must learn to co-navigate with my immediate community. I find myself in a world almost entirely tool-i-fied, a world of my own (agentless!) subjectivity before an increasingly silent cosmos.

“[M]y argument is that it is this shifting background noise that constitutes the existential space within which modern persons develop their sense of the divine in relationship to nature and to the city. And this noise is fundamentally impersonal. This is the era of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents and Albert Camus’ The Stranger. The former puts the irrational at the very heart of civilization. The latter captures the indifference of the cosmos — a fundamental truth that filters down into the most basic of human realities.”

— from Joseph Minich, Bulwarks of Unbelief: Atheism and Divine Absence in a Secular Age (Lexham Academic, 2023) 

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