Nolen Gertz on Ellul

In the AI Story

Gertz's contribution to contemporary Ellul scholarship is distinctive in two respects. First, he has insisted on reading Ellul structurally rather than theologically, making the framework available to secular readers without stripping it of its analytical force. Second, he has applied the framework with unusual specificity to the AI moment, identifying which of Ellul's concepts retain purchase and which require extension or modification.

His central AI-era claim is that the philosophical debate about machine understanding has been structured wrongly. The question is not whether AI systems genuinely comprehend what they produce, because the same question can no longer be confidently answered for human beings operating inside technique. When a lawyer submits an AI-drafted brief she has not fully examined, when a student turns in an essay she has not fully written, when a developer ships code she has not fully understood — in each case, the epistemic gap between output and comprehension is structurally analogous to the gap in the AI. Technique has produced, in humans, the same relation to their own productions that AI has to its outputs: the capacity to generate convincing material without the corresponding capacity to evaluate it.

This is a more disturbing diagnosis than the standard AI-ethics debate produces. The standard debate asks whether we can trust AI outputs. Gertz's Ellulian diagnosis asks whether we can trust human outputs when the humans producing them are operating inside technique's logic. The answer, on Ellul's framework, is that human judgment under technique's conditions degrades in ways structurally similar to AI's limitations — and that the degradation is masked by the continued prestige of human intelligence as such.

Gertz's reading converges with Segal's own observations in The Orange Pill — particularly Segal's account of catching the Deleuze error only on second reading. The near-miss is not anomaly. It is evidence of the structural condition Gertz diagnoses: builders under technique produce smooth output whose quality they cannot reliably evaluate, and the system rewards the production over the evaluation.

Origin

Gertz encountered Ellul through his doctoral work at the New School for Social Research and sustained engagement with the phenomenological tradition. His 2018 Nihilism and Technology established him as a leading Ellul interpreter for the digital age. The 2023 Commonweal essay 'Ellul Among the Machines' marked his first major intervention specifically on artificial intelligence, and he has continued to develop the analysis in subsequent essays and lectures.

Key Ideas

Ellul's framework is structural, not theological. Gertz has demonstrated that the analysis can be deployed without commitment to Ellul's Christian convictions, while acknowledging that those convictions shaped Ellul's specific responses.

AI's epistemic crisis is continuous with technique's human epistemic crisis. The question of whether AI understands what it produces is not separable from the question of whether humans under technique understand what they produce.

Technique degrades human judgment. The conditions technique creates — speed, volume, smooth output, competitive pressure — erode the human capacity to evaluate what the system produces, including what the humans themselves produce inside it.

Individual awareness is necessary but insufficient. Gertz follows Ellul in insisting that structural responses are required, but his writing emphasizes the individual practices — genuine skepticism, refusal to accept plausibility as truth — that counter-technical institutions would need to institutionalize.

AI makes Ellul's framework newly legible. Claims that were once dismissed as hyperbolic — technique colonizes cognition, produces its own legitimacy, erodes judgment — are now empirically demonstrable in ways Ellul could only describe structurally.

Debates & Critiques

Gertz's readings have been challenged both by Ellul purists, who argue that secularizing the framework loses its theological depth, and by AI ethicists, who argue that Ellul's analysis is too totalizing to produce actionable recommendations. Gertz has responded to both critiques by emphasizing that the framework's diagnostic power is what matters — that correctly identifying the problem is the precondition for any response, and that the specific shape of adequate responses is a task for collective institutional work rather than individual prescription.