The New Demons Quotes

“The novelty of our era is that man's deepest experience is no longer with nature. For most practical purposes it no longer relates to it. From the moment of his birth, man lives knowing only an artificial world. The dangers which confront him are in the domain of the artificial. Obligations are imposed not by contact with nature but solely by contact with the group. It is not for reasons of survival in the natural milieu that the group formulates its rules, its structures, and its commands. The reasons are entirely intrinsic. The relations of the group with other groups have become more unremitting and imperious than formerly and in any case more imperious than the relations with nature had been. Nature now is subdued, subjugated, framed, and utilized. No longer is it the threat and the source, the mystery and the intrusion, the face and the darkness of the world-either for the individual or for the group. Hence it is no longer the inciter and the place of the sacred. Man's fundamental experience today is with the technical milieu (technology having ceased to be mediation and having become man's milieu) and with society. That is why the sacred now being elaborated in the individual and in the collective consciousness is tied to society and technique, not to nature. The sacralized reality will have less and less reference to natural images and relation ships. Formerly, when power participated in the sacred it was always in a sacred of nature (having to do with the power of fertility, Lupercalia, destructive powers, and revelatory powers, etc.). It was with reference to nature that the social power was exercised. Today, however, there is no longer any reason to make use of that reference. It simply has no meaning or content. It is the political power in itself which becomes the source and the instigation of the new sacred. Society now becomes the ground and the place of the forces which man discerns or feels as sacred, but it is a society turned technician, because technique has become the life milieu of man.”
― Jacques Ellul, The New Demons

“The truth is that for nearly a half century we have witnessed a massive invasion by the sacred into our western world. Rational man has not been able to adhere to his rationality. In the end, the world is revealed to have a number of false bottoms. The more man penetrates into himself the more he is led to question the systematic certitudes so painfully acquired during the nineteenth century. We are detecting the remote depths which can no longer be concealed, and we have learned that our lucid intelligence rests on a base of mystery. We have seen reasonable man caught up in waves of mystic insanity and acting like a barbarian. We have witnessed the exasperated search for universal communions, from surrealism to jazz to eroticism. The fact is that man cannot live without participation in the sacred, and we are seeing his protest.”
― Jacques Ellul, The New Demons

“The last and most important aspect of post-Christian society is the very fact that it has experienced Christianity and left it behind. Contemporary society cannot, therefore, be regarded as a simply pagan society. It does not have the innocence and simplicity that come from ignorance of Christianity and of all it entails. Post Christian society is marked by its experience of Christianity and at the same time it thinks it knows what it is turning away from. Post Christian society has been deeply affected by Christianity, and bears the latter's mark: the mark of original sin, of the desire for salvation, hope, and a kingdom of God, of the conviction that a Saviour is needed, of the anxiety of those who are aware of radical guilt yet know that they cannot pardon themselves. We have not ceased to be products of the Christian era, but we have managed to reject what is specifically Christian in this product and retain only its psychic aspect. Thus, post-Christian society is a society of men who are at the point to which Christianity brought them but who no longer believe in the specific truth of the Christian revelation.”
― Jacques Ellul, The New Demons

“Being nonreligious involves more than intelligence, knowledge, practicality, and method. It calls for virtue, heroism, and greatness of soul. It takes an exceptional personal asceticism to be nonreligious. All of us have known great atheists, genuinely strict ones, who didn't deceive themselves about a god. For them, atheism was an honor, the highest form of human courage. They maintained those heights only by a constantly renewed act of the will, stretched to the limit against every suffering, and finally death. This is no easier today. So where do we get the idea that modem man, the average man, he whom we adjudge to be atheistic, indifferent, and irreligious, has achieved those heights? In the routines of a society of comfort, of moral flabbiness, of an absence of willpower, of debasement, what is there to prepare a person for lifting himself to the heights of atheism's rigorous virtue? What readies him for that merciless clarity about himself and about the world, which irreligion always involves? Where do we see the spiritual greatness, the morale, the quality of exactitude, the rigor on which criticism of myth and the rejection of the sacred are always based? The scientific method and a smug materialism are not enough! It takes men who are hardheaded with their feet on the ground. I do not see them. Everything points to the opposite. We see people on a bed of ease, and wishing no other happiness for others. They whimper at the slightest danger, the slightest suffering (look at the leftists ! ). Flabby skepticism and exuberant disdain are not enough to produce an adult man and an irreligious society. We can rest assured, to the contrary, that in the current psychological tendencies, in the absence of any character preparation for facing up to great progress and great tests, in the transfer of human energies to the exclusively cerebral, in the collapse of the will in favor of the imagination, in the rejection of all self discipline, the only way of escape is into the social and the religious. Everybody since Bergson has proclaimed the need for a soul-supplement. All right, we have it in the new religions.”
― Jacques Ellul, The New Demons

“At this stage in our discussion, the important thing has been simply to point out that our world is so religious that objects and actions of the most materialistic kind, those seemingly most devoid of depth, are transformed into religious phenomena. The whole person is now committed at that level. That is what makes the dispute on this ground so fundamental. It is very bad that some people should be undernourished while others succumb from overconsumption, that there should be misery and injustice. It is obvious that we should struggle against hunger, misery, and unequal distribution. But that reasonable proposition is rejected by the judges. According to them, what I have just written is the statement of a heartless man, who moreover is a rightist. Those things should be talked about at the height of excitement, of indignation, with sacred fury, with voice trembling and eyes flashing despair and fire. That people should go hungry is the absolute in suffering. That there should be inequality of consumption is an absolute evil. This fury, this urgency, the quality of the ultimate in the arguments in this domain, the totalitarian nature attributed to these things, which excludes everything else and treats other problems as secondary, which makes it possible to decide exactly what is good and what is to be condemned, which involves the whole of humanity in the application-all this attests, more than anything else, to the religious character of consumption. The debate over "have/have not" has become a war of religion (I said "over," not "between").”
― Jacques Ellul, The New Demons

“It is clear that the violence of the police or of
administrations, that of the great economic powers and of "imperialism," have nothing of the religious in them; but the violence specific to our time, which is the overflow of an exaltation, and the means par excellence for the realization of an ideal carried to the absolute limit, especially that of the young leftists those are acts of the religious people of this age. They believe absolutely. They listen to no reason. Without knowing it, they have an otherworldly outlook which they describe as political. They want to change society by changing life. They are ready for every sacrifice, and are ready to sacrifice all who do not believe. They form sectarian cliques. They have a yen for spectacular martyrdom and for witnessing through propaganda. They despise all truth which fails to confirm them in their absolute. They confound a rational explanation of the world with belief in old, resurrected myths. Their violence is an expression of the combination of all that. For them, without hesitation, violence is a religious action against evil, because the world, like every religious world, is clearly divided between absolute Good and absolute Evil.”
― Jacques Ellul, The New Demons

“In a world which is difficult, hostile, formidable, man (unconsciously, spontaneously, yet willingly, to be sure) attributes sacred values to that which threatens him and to that which protects him, or more exactly to that which restores him and puts him in tune with the universe. What was achieved in the early ages, this integration into a threatening and reassuring totality, in which man restored his life forces, has been destroyed. It has to be reconstituted, perhaps for the first time in history. In that consists the depth of humanity's crisis today. Man is in search of whatever is going to assure him of this universal communication, this life-giving force, and this refuge in which he can be restored.”
― Jacques Ellul, The New Demons

“A sacral society is one in which everything, including whatever is not sacred, is judged from the standpoint of the sacred. The profane is not the sacred, but it can exist only in a society which orders everything with reference to the sacred. The fact that man treats a given element as sacred does not mean that the rest is not sacred for the world is a whole. What it means is that the rest is located with reference to the ever present sacred.”
― Jacques Ellul, The New Demons

“This negative attitude to Christianity is accompanied, in the post-Christian era, by a positive attitude of atheistic humanism. We do not mean, of course, that men are explicitly promoting a doctrine or philosophy of atheistic humanism; relatively little importance is attributed to such a philosophy. We are speaking, rather, of a change in the basic convictions of contemporary man, a change in the very context in which all their thinking takes place. We are speaking of an ideology that is unquestioningly adopted, a spontaneously accepted frame of reference, something that is usually implicit and rarely is consciously adverted to. It is the basis for a vision of the world that all accept and for a common language and a norm by which behavior is judged. It shows through in the newspapers and advertising, in our approach to contemporary society, in the content of radio broadcasting, film, and political speeches, and in the platforms of all groups whether leftist or rightist. The ideological content of this attitude can be summed up, I think, as follows. First of all, man is the measure of all things. Henceforth nothing is to be judged in relation to an absolute or a revelation or a transcendent reality. Everything is to be judged by its relation to man and is therefore as relative as man himself. both judge and criterion for judgment. In judging and making decisions he is thrown back on his own resources, and the only basis on which he can build is his own accomplishments. He knows of no higher court of appeals and no source of pardon, for he is alone on earth and is alone responsible for all that happens.”
― Jacques Ellul, The New Demons