The Cult of Efficiency and the Technological Society

One can imagine the builders of Babel arguing over the most efficient way to build bricks, the Israelites proudly admiring their golden calf as a rapid feat of production, or Noah holding a meeting to streamline shipbuilding tactics, as the air smells of the coming storm.

The real danger of technology is not your device or your computer. The real danger is not even in why you use technology. The real danger is a quiet king that modernity has crowned silently and with cold, hard reason: efficiency. If it’s quicker, it is better. There is a place for efficiency, just as there is a place for stillness, yet its danger lies in the quiet and unassuming power it usurps when it becomes idolized. Efficiency is a good servant but a dangerous master.

I have to continually remind myself to slow down as I blaze through the day, the week, or the month. There is something in our nature, in our society, that pulls us to be speedier, quicker, more efficient. Wandering the grocery store is a waste of time. The purpose of the hike lies purely in the view and the top of the mountain. The Sunday service is to get to communion. The purpose of the lesson is to get to the clearly stated objectives. All of these are good things; everyone wants the stunning view at the end of the hike, every Christian seeks communion, and every teacher wants to reach the goals of the lesson. But how we arrive at our goals is the question that ought to be taken seriously. The activities themselves form us; our participation matters. The hike forms patience, church shapes attention, and teaching shapes souls, but the moment efficiency is crowned above all other goods, we are no longer shaped as human creatures but as widgets in an endless production line.

Modernity lays at your feet hundreds if not thousands of tools to make our lives cleaner, smoother, and more efficient. It’s true, the life we live in 2026 makes it difficult to give up any of these tools. Our lives are so deeply embedded in technology that the layers become impossible to peel away. The list is endless: stacked communion cups, tap-to-pay, food as fuel instead of community, drive-though oil changes, pre-cooked meals, saved passwords, disposable utensils, and, my least favorite, articles and books advertised as spoon-fed, bite-sized lists. Thanks to modern advertising, everything has to be “5 simple tasks,” or “10 ways to achieve X.” The list could go on. Yes, the attention span of kids and adults alike is dwindling. Everyone blames the phones or the computers, and those obviously play a large role in eroding attention spans, but after digging a bit deeper a far more interesting question lies just under the surface: By the very use of a phone as a tool, what value does this technology prize? The answer is startlingly simple. It prizes efficiency. The rapid acceleration of technology in modernity is largely driven by our growing devotion to efficiency. If any tool or item that we use lets us save a few seconds, get to our destination faster, or learn content a bit quicker, then it should be done. It’s a genius ploy, for time is the only resource that dwindles and is impossible to save.

Jaques Ellul in his famous and rather dense book, The Technological Society, makes a similar critique and offers a helpful way to approach technology. He sets aside the more modern idea of technology as that of computers, phones, and calculators; instead, he focuses on “technique,” which he defines as “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency in every field of human activity.” Ellul urges his readers to give up a narrow conception of technology as merely digital devices. If we grant this definition, the whole world shines with the tools we use on a daily basis for the sake of efficiency: our cars, pens, pencils. (I am sure there is a catchy article somewhere that supplies a long list of things…) Being efficient is not an evil. In fact, we know that sloth is a vice. Yet, crowning efficiency as the sole good comes with many of its own dangers.

Charles Taylor in his book, The Ethics of Authenticity, gives a rather scathing, and arguably correct, diagnosis of this very malady of modernity. Taylor urges his readers to live in a world that has an expanded horizon. A horizon that encompasses a larger moral framework. Modernity’s pride of efficiency blocks our ability to see and abide in the world where efficiency is a good but not the highest good. Taylor recognizes that society needs to live in a world that moves beyond mere instrumental logic, efficiency, categorization, and analysis. The tool of efficiency is not an evil, yet it becomes one if pursued for its own sake. Hence Taylor calls for “an alternative enframing of technology” that puts it in the service of love for others and thus prevents it from ruling every aspect of our lives.

There are many things in life that should be inefficient. Yet, inefficiency is not the same as sloth. Sloth refuses to do what ought to be done; the vice of sloth turns away from the good. Inefficiency, put in its proper place, can occur through our dedication to patience, care, or love. These are goods that modernity can’t optimize or monetize: a slow prayer, a steady walk, a long conversation. To modernity, these are all things that appear inefficient, yet these are the places that humanity lives the most.

We get stuck in the habits of life and forget that there are spaces where we need to not prize efficiency. You look around and are met by people bustling through life, heads down and hopes high. This is not a ploy to start a luddite cult, or a rousing call for all of us to throw our phones and computers into the sea, but it is a call to reevaluate the speed at which we move through life. Efficiency organizes, it orders, it categorizes. Yet sometimes we need to be slow; there will be plenty of times where life demands a sure foot and a steady pace. The Christian life is not a life of speed, the road to salvation is not a highly manufactured and perfectly measured highway. The walk of a Christian is one that goes forward and backwards and rises and falls. It is a journey that takes years to reach the end and is full of doubts. Yet at the end of each of our lives, as we await the entrance to the pearly gates, I highly doubt we will be admiring the turnstiles the angels installed to keep the line moving smoothly.

Image Credit: Adolph Menzel, “The Iron Rolling Mill (Modern Cyclopes)” (1875)