At the time of his death in 1994, Jacques Ellul had secured a comfortable place in the fleur-de-lis carved bookcases of French intellectual history. His work might have enjoyed the limited but steady exposure that academic cult interest lends figure like Pierre Bourdieu or René Girard—formative writers for intellectually precious students until they realize they'll want to seek tenure and dump the experimental stuff. Indeed, by the mid-90s Ellul's sociological writings had inspired both an international "societé" and "association" with annual conferences, sizable subscriptions, and dedicated publications, guaranteeing him the kind of tepid immortality that most academics spend decades-long careers blindly vying for.

All of that changed on April 3rd, 1996, when federal agents unearthed a copy of Ellul's ecological treatise from Ted Kaczynski's cabin in rural Montana. Kaczynski had retreated there to isolate from the world and to assemble the crude, hand-delivered bombs that would kill three people and injure twenty-three more—and also, it seems, to ruminate over French philosophy (or theology, or sociology, depending on which lens you bring to Ellul's writing). The Technological Society—La Technique ou l'enjeu du siècle in the original French—figures alongside fragments of pipes and rudimentary explosive-carving tools in the dimly-lit evidence photos that survive from the April 3rd raid. From that point forward, Ellul's legacy would be inextricably linked with the reign of domestic terrorism that Kaczynski wrought on America, an activity that has been dubiously filed under the umbrella term "Green Anarchism."

"Green Anarchism"—the revolutionary praxis that aims at bringing about an environmentally sustainable society—has much in common with Ellul's self-professed "Christian Anarchism." Both paradigms view modern technology as a threat to human freedom. Green Anarchism is relatively far younger, a scion of the deep distrust and suspicion of the Industrial Revolution, per those now memeworthy opening lines of Ted's manifesto. Christian Anarchism, on the other hand, is rooted in the material-world-denying asceticism of the second-century Gnostics, and before them even, in the book of Revelation in the Bible.

I don't propose to examine Jacques Ellul's influence on Ted Kaczynski—mostly because I think Kaczynski's manifesto is garbage and proof that all of the STEM education that federally-allocated funds can buy won't produce an individual capable of cogent thought. It seems pretty clear, moreover, that Kaczynski engaged with Ellul's work in bad faith, ignoring dozens of books and thousands of articles in favor of the cherry-picked theories that best supported his own violent, hostile paranoia. What interests me is the appeal to medieval social structure that Ellul articulates throughout the course of his career, an appeal whose echoes deeply inform The Technological Society. What is the allure that the Middle Ages hold for a Christian Anarchist like Ellul and, consequently, for those Green Anarchists who borrowed from Ellul, including, perhaps unknowingly, Kaczynski?

Jacques Ellul was born in southern France in 1912; he came of age in a depressed and politically volatile Europe, and his early adulthood was devoted to the French Resistance. He and much of his intellectual cohort emerged from the horror of the Second World War with a disgust for modernity: modern statecraft had failed to wage the peace that its adherents had promised and modern technology that had bred the tools for unimaginably deadly and ever more destructive forms of war. This distrust of all things modern bred a renewed interest in the Middle Ages, and an intellectual atmosphere that formed some of the greatest medievalists of the last century. I like to think of the second-generation Annales school as a direct reaction to the disillusionment with the Second World War, a concerted attempt to rethink Western European civilization starting from its earliest moments. Ellul's distrust of technology goes hand in hand with this nostalgia for a lost sense of stability that the Western European Middle Ages afford.

By his own admission, Ellul's preference is for the medieval traditions, born of both religious and popular belief, that anchor social rules. Ellul identifiesa rupture between the traditions of the past and the technologies of the present as a moment that occurred in the fourteenth or fifteenth century(see: The Betrayal of Technology: A Portrait of Jacques Ellul). Conveniently enough, he never explicitly mentions what these traditions are, nor does he ever elucidate the rupture. Like many modern intellectuals who are dissatisfied by modernity, he resorts to the evocation of the Middle Ages as a purer, simpler time, when man was in direct connection with the product of his labor, without ever bothering to support that assumption with fact. He drops vague hints about activities like hunting and farming that oblige mankind to fall in rhythm with the seasons. But he never cites any studies that attempt to illustrate what quotidian life in the Middle Ages might have resembled, nor how individuals in the Middle Ages understood their own relationship to the past.

If he were to look closely enough at the literature, he might realize that people in the Middle Ages also had the impression that technology had irrevocably disrupted the harmony of the natural world, that everything had already gone irrevocably wrong, and that they too were living in the end times. In fact, an entire industry of millenarianist prophecy aimed at predicting the exact date when this profanation of nature would trigger the apocalypse thrived for most of the Later Middle Ages (this is actually the wave that lifted Joan of Arc to fame—just before it wiped her right out of the water). No, there were no silicon chips or automobiles in the Middle Ages, nor were there any of the electronic devices that might register as technology to the modern mind. But it's chauvinistic to assume that "technology" can only refer to the things that we recognize as technology, a concept that is by definition a moving target.

Take the horseshoe, for example. In Technics and Civilization (1934) Lewis Mumford argues that the invention of the horseshoe revolutionized Western European society by allowing for the creation of commerce between isolated settlements, which then became cities, and by allowing for the cultivation of far larger tracts of agriculture. Lewis Mumford is well-researched, and his argument is plodding and historical and boring. Ellul deliberately supplants historians like Mumford, shifting the paradigm with sexy anarcho-primitivist theories, which have the added allure of being Christian and thus theological and thus irrefutable. We no longer have to perform the same volume of intellectual labor to challenge our inborn assumption that things are bad now and they were better before, and we can take the More Recent Past to task for separating us from and driving an ever-widening wedge between us and the Edenic Past.

In my view, Ellul's Christian Anarchism errs when it commits the casual slippage between "God" and "nature." Green Anarchism commits a similar slippage when it replaces "God" with the elusive leftist "virtue" (you know, the one that we're all so invested in signaling). The conflation between divinity/virtue/goodness and nature is a common one, but it's also one that we, in the wake of the Enlightenment, cannot afford to make. Ellul and Kaczynski converge on the misinformed notion that nature is good and technology is evil, and that some pre-industrial, pre-modern Eldorado holds the key to resolving man's deep-seated grievances with his situation in history. But they also both create a bunch of white noise and discourage any genuine inquiry into the very ideas that they take as a starting point.

Ellul had the advantage of good-natured hypocrisy. He could decry man's enslavement to the automobile, and then ride shotgun to the market in his wife's car. But Kaczynski took Ellul's fictions à la lettre. He unwittingly swallowed Ellul's ill-informed nostalgia for the Middle Ages and digested it into a campaign of worse-informed violence.