The Technocratic Desert

Rediscovering Moral Eloquence for the Renewal of Society

Across many democracies, parties that once lingered on the fringes now dominate public attention. In the United States, the gravitational pull of populism has redrawn the map of both major parties: Donald Trump has turned the Republicans into a vehicle of anti-establishment anger, while the Democrats have felt their own insurgent energies from the activist left. In Europe, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally and Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom have moved from the margins to the threshold of power, while Italy’s Brothers of Italy now governs in Rome. On the left, Spain’s Podemos, Germany’s Die Linke, and parts of the Greens have channelled disillusionment with centrism into movements of protest and reform. Recent elections reveal a generational divide too: younger men drifting right, younger women left. Across the West, the political centre is hollowing out.

The usual explanations are familiar: social media, grievance, and economic anxiety. These certainly play their part. Social media amplifies anger while its algorithms radicalise opinion. Globalisation and automation have hollowed out the local economies that once gave people security and purpose. Many citizens feel unseen and unheard as their anxieties deepen.

Yet grievance and insecurity aren’t new. What’s changed is the moral ecology in which discontent takes shape.

In the past, hardship was mediated through thick social institutions—churches, trade unions, local parties, neighbourhoods. These gave people a moral vocabulary for frustration and a way of turning suffering into solidarity. Today, most of those institutions have thinned or vanished. Individuals often face their discontent alone, mediated only by glowing screens. Rage no longer finds its way into reform, exploding instead into resentment.

Earlier generations also shared stories that made sense of human experience. Political leaders could frame their cause in moral terms—sacrifice, duty, renewal, the dignity of work. Those narratives drew from a common moral, often biblical, grammar that made political life intelligible. We may have disagreed about policy, but we were arguing within a shared moral universe.

That universe has largely collapsed. Our stories have dissolved into data. Voters still crave meaning and purpose, but mainstream parties no longer seem able to offer it. Mainstream politics has become procedural rather than moral—airless, abstract, run by people who’ve never quite encountered the messy drama of real life.

Our leaders are formed in a world where technical competence is prized above moral imagination. They move through the same narrow channels: elite universities, law firms, consultancies, think tanks, the civil service. They’re fluent in the dialect of process and “best practice.” They can manage complexity, but they rarely inspire love. They can calculate, but they can’t captivate. They can devise plans; but find it hard to offer hope.

As Jeffrey Friedman notes in Power Without Knowledge (2019), technocrats tend to treat social problems as technical puzzles—complex but solvable through better data, design, and management. Yet societies aren’t machines; they’re moral and cultural ecosystems. David Graeber, in The Utopia of Rules (2015), saw the same paradox from another angle: bureaucracies promise freedom through efficiency but end up trapping us in webs of jargon and form-filling that drain life of meaning.

Both diagnosed a civilisation that mistakes control for wisdom. When we treat human flourishing as something to be engineered, we stop seeing society as a community to be nurtured and instead see it as a system to optimise. The results are predictable: abstract policies can dismantle more than they build, leaving those affected weary, frustrated, and disenchanted. Endless cycles of reform become demoralizing. Slowly, public life loses its soul.

C.S. Lewis foresaw this danger in The Abolition of Man (1943). He warned that modern education was producing “men without chests”—people whose intellects were trained but whose hearts and imaginations were left stunted. For Lewis, the “chest” was the bridge between reason and desire, the seat of rightly ordered emotion. Without it, intellect becomes cold and manipulative, and passion becomes lawless. A society of such people may be clever, but it can’t be wise.

Jacques Ellul, writing in The Technological Society (1954), extended that warning into the public sphere. For Ellul, the rise of technique—his word for the pursuit of efficiency as an end in itself—wasn’t just a social development but a spiritual revolution. Once efficiency becomes the highest good, it subtly reshapes every value beneath it. Wisdom is displaced by calculation; virtue by utility. Politics begins to speak the language of administration: “targets,” “deliverables,” “stakeholders.” As Ellul saw, this isn’t mere semantics—it’s the reprogramming of moral vision itself.

In such an environment, those who break through are often those who reject the purely managerial tone, even if they are themselves technocrats at heart. They may be reckless or demagogic, but they sound alive. They speak with conviction rather than calibration. They remind people what passion and belonging feel like. And in a desert of meaning, people will drink whatever’s offered—even if it’s poisonous.

Cicero understood this long ago. In De Oratore, he argued that eloquence isn’t ornament but a moral art—the means by which a people are moved toward virtue or ruin. The orator persuades by delighting; he makes goodness desirable. Augustine saw the same truth through a Christian lens: hearts are converted not by information but by delight. The demagogue mimics that power, offering counterfeit delight, while the technocrat disdains it altogether. Yet without moral eloquence—without the art of uniting truth with delight for the good of others—public life loses its pulse. It becomes incapable of forming the imagination of a people.

Renewal of democratic life, then, can’t come through better data or cleverer systems. It must begin with the recovery of moral eloquence and storytelling. The greatest leaders—Abraham Lincoln, William Wilberforce, Václav Havel—weren’t merely administrators but moral storytellers. Their words drew on a shared moral grammar, often rooted in the biblical imagination, to call their societies towards the good. Their eloquence revealed and inspired.

When Lewis warned of “men without chests,” he wasn’t scorning intellect; he was warning against intellect severed from moral imagination. Ellul described the same danger in modern technocracy: the brilliance of expertise without the wisdom of community, the order of systems without the warmth of meaning. What our politics lack isn’t information but moral eloquence—the ability to speak about the good in ways that move both mind and heart.

If democratic life’s to renew itself, it’ll need formation as much as reform: leaders who can think clearly but love deeply, who’ve got roots as well as résumés.

Here, the Church still has a calling. It can’t rival the state in scale or the market in speed, but it can do what neither can: form souls in depth. It can teach patience and reverence in a culture obsessed with performance, reminding us that persons aren’t problems to be solved but mysteries to be encountered.

That alternative must also be rhetorical. If public life is being drained of moral eloquence, the Church’s task is to speak again in a way that joins truth to beauty and conviction to love. The Church at its best doesn’t persuade through marketing or management; it persuades through story, symbol, and sacrament. Its language—rooted in Scripture, prayer, and worship—teaches humility, gratitude, and wonder. Moral eloquence isn’t about ornate speech but about speech that forms the heart as it informs the mind. It’s rhetoric as moral formation.

At its best, the Church speaks not in the idiom of management but of mercy. It tells the story of a God who became man not to optimise the world but to redeem it. That story gives meaning to suffering and dignity to labour; it roots politics in love rather than control. The Church’s words and liturgies can re-enchant the moral imagination of a people, reminding them that truth isn’t just to be known but to be loved.

If politics has become a desert, perhaps the Church’s task is to plant gardens—to create spaces where conversation can be honest, beauty is valued, and hearts are retrained to delight in the good. It can’t on its own restore trust in democracy—that’s not its vocation—but it can help rebuild the moral ecology in which trust might again grow—by recovering a language capacious enough to hold both grief and hope.

Because the desert is real. But the Church still knows where the living water flows.