Jeffrey M. SHAW. Illusions of Freedom: Thomas Merton and Jacques Ellul on Technology and the Human Condition. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2014. pp. xiv + 193. $23.00 pb. ISBN 978-1-62564-058-1. Reviewed by Patrick F. O’CONNELL, Gannon University, Erie, PA 16541.

In the context of the growing interest that has developed in recent years on the topic of Thomas Merton’s critique of technology, the influence of Jacques Ellul (1912-1994), the French Protestant social theorist and lay theologian, whom Merton first read in 1964 and whom he continued to find a stimulating and challenging voice throughout the remainder of his life, has been frequently noted. Hence the appearance of a full-length comparative study of the thought of Ellul and Merton on technology and freedom is both timely and welcome.

In his thorough, carefully organized survey and analysis, author Jeffrey Shaw demonstrates how the two writers called attention to the dangers of an uncritical acquiescence to technological progress as leading, in the words of his title, to an illusion of freedom that is antithetical to the authentic freedom of the Gospel to which they were both committed. Shaw’s introductory chapter focuses particularly on the meaning of the two key terms: technology – or in Ellul’s French, “technique,” the elevation of efficiency and productivity to the status of normative and determinative standards for the organization of society; and freedom, which is not to be reductively equated with the exercise of individual choices but recognized as the dynamic human capacity for self-realization through self-transcendence, or in Christian terms, through conformity to the will of God.

The following chapter on “Comparative Worldviews” provides brief sketches of the lives – or more specifically the early lives – of the two men, highlighting the similarities of their births in France to non-French parents, the largely rural settings of their childhood, fostering an appreciation of the natural world, their lack of a religious upbringing and their conversions in early adulthood to Christian faith that would be the central source of meaning and stimulus to thought and action for the rest of their lives, for Ellul as an active member of the minority French Reformed Church, for Merton as a Catholic priest and Cistercian monk. This chapter also considers in greater detail Ellul’s concept of technique as a self-directed, self-sustaining cult of material development as an end in itself, and charts Merton’s enthusiastic response to Ellul’s major work The Technological Society, which he called in a 1964 review “One of the most important books of this mid-century” because it questioned the “naïve but perilous” assumption that “our massive technology is fully under the rational control of human intelligence orienting it towards a flowering and fulfillment of man” (36).

The three central chapters of the book look at the issues of technology and freedom from a “Theological Perspective,” a “Sociological Perspective” and a “Political Perspective.” The first considers at length the importance of Karl Barth’s thought for the two men, their critique of the institutional church, and more briefly, their reflections on prayer and contemplation. The next situates their respective thoughts on the theme of self-transcendence in the context of technology and the use of propaganda, examines the importance of Kierkegaard in their work, compares their common commitment to active nonviolence, and analyzes the role of the city as an embodiment of the technological worldview. The chapter on politics looks at the importance of Marx in forming the thought of both men, their critique of both the communist and capitalist systems as found in the Soviet Union and in America, incorporates a brief excursus on Ellul’s affinities with the Catholic Worker movement, with which Merton had a much more direct relationship, and discusses their common search for a “third way” between communism and capitalism, both embodiments of technology-influenced ideologies that severely inhibited the exercise of genuine freedom. A more diffuse sixth chapter on “Literature” includes discussion of the primacy of the word (and the Word) for Ellul and Merton as Christian believers, the debasement of language due to propaganda, the subject of the second of Ellul’s books that Merton read (though this fact is not explicitly mentioned here), Merton’s engagement with Camus, particularly on the topic of communication, and his use of the Prometheus myth as exemplifying the distinction between authentic and false freedom, and concludes by considering some of Merton’s and Ellul’s poetry on the city and its negative effects on human flourishing. The final chapter summarizes what has preceded and is followed by a useful appendix on further reading and an extensive bibliography. 

       While there is much to recommend this study, it is not a completely satisfying treatment of its topic. More explicit chronological specification for Merton’s various statements would have been helpful in making clear to what extent his comments on technology are directly influenced by or engaging with Ellul’s work once he had begun reading him, and to what extent they were already part of Merton’s own critique before encountering Ellul. Not until page 101 is there mention of the fact that W. H. Ferry first introduced Merton to Ellul’s The Technological Society, and there is no discussion of Ferry’s own significant involvement with the debate on technology as part of his work at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, particularly the development of the influential pamphlet The Triple Revolution; nor is there any mention of the two friends’ mutually beneficial exchanges on the topic or of their endorsement of and reliance on Ellul’s work in their contributions at the Gethsemani Peacemakers’ Retreat in November 1964.    

  The framework and organization of the book is more applicable to and so more successful with Ellul than it is with Merton. Thus the category of “Sociological Perspective” works well for Ellul, who was a trained sociologist and whose books largely kept a firm distinction between those that were explicitly religious and those that maintained a more social scientific approach (see 41), whereas including Merton’s reflections on the true and false self and his commitment to nonviolence in this chapter is somewhat awkward and artificial. The category of dialectic fits the Protestant Ellul more readily than the Catholic Merton, for whom an analogical perspective is at least as important as the dialectical; certainly the opposition between community and collectivity in Merton (see 44) operates quite differently than that between necessity and freedom in Ellul. The author often has to modify statements that he makes regarding both men when he turns to consider Merton more specifically, as when he initially declares that “neither Merton nor Ellul are leveling a critique against particular technological products (with the exception perhaps of nuclear weapons), but rather against the processes that compose what they believe to be an all-encompassing technological system” (x), but subsequently states that “Merton’s critique of technology originally centered on the actual products of modern technology rather than on any particular process” (6).

The distinction he makes between the visible and invisible church in his theological chapter, while a common Protestant trope from the time of the Reformation and suited to Ellul’s critique, is quite foreign to Merton’s much more sacramental ecclesiology and one he never uses even when he is criticizing the institutional church. Nor does the author provide any documentary evidence that Merton, like Ellul, “proposed that the church is one of the parties that has been responsible for technique’s growth” (76). He refers to “the commonalities between Ellul’s and Merton’s engagement with Barth” (50) and says that “Merton pays a similar degree of homage to his debt to Barth” (59), but in fact goes on to point out the differences between the foundational influence the Swiss theologian had on Ellul from the beginning of his career and the considerably less formative role that Barth played in Merton’s ecumenical contacts in the final decade of his life. Likewise he makes a claim that Kierkegaard had a comparable influence on Ellul and Merton, but provides no references at all to Kierkegaard in Merton’s writing. He maintains that like Ellul, “Merton demonstrated his belief that the dominant ‘lived morality’ of our time is the technological morality” (80), but then provides a quotation illustrating this conclusion that according to his footnote is in fact from Ellul rather than Merton.               

           There are occasional misstatements that reflect a less than thorough acquaintance with the Merton canon, as when William Shannon’s classic study Thomas Merton’s Dark Path is identified as a collection of essays by Merton (141), or when a passage from Merton’s 1955 “morality play” The Tower of Babel is quoted as coming from his early 1940s poem “Tower of Babel: The Political Speech” (subsequently incorporated in revised form into the play, but not the source of the quoted passage). Such confusions seem due to a misconstrual of references from secondary sources, which are relied on extensively for passages from Merton’s own works throughout the book. A similar problem seems to be responsible for the misattribution of a passage from one of Flannery O’Connor’s essays to her novel The Violent Bear It Away (148). 

No effort seems to have been made to update the discussion by taking into account work on the topic of technology, and on Merton and Ellul specifically, between the time of the work’s initial appearance as a 2012 doctoral dissertation and its publication as a book: the essays in volume 24 of The Merton Annual (2011), made up principally of presentations from the conference on Merton and Technology held at Bellarmine University in 2010, which make numerous references to Ellul, have not been consulted, nor has Paul Dekar’s Thomas Merton: Twentieth-Century Wisdom for Twenty-First-Century Living (2011), which includes in its appendix transcriptions of two important Merton conferences on technology; Phillip Thompson’s Returning to Reality: Thomas Merton’s Wisdom for a Technological Age (2012) is mentioned in the Appendix as “one of the best primers on Merton’s thought on the topic of technology” (183) but is never referenced in the text itself. The lack of an index, another indication of the book’s origins as a dissertation, makes it considerably less useful in providing ready access to various aspects of its subject than it might otherwise have been.

Despite these limitations, Illusions of Freedom provides a stimulating and wide-ranging investigation of how Merton’s thought on issues related to technological development reveals, in the words of the editor of The Ellul Forum, “startling and impressive” (x) similarities to that of Jacques Ellul. The book encourages its readers to draw on the resources provided by the two writers to confront the challenges of technology that have only grown more urgent in the decades since Ellul and Merton formulated their prophetic critique and championed a vision of human fulfillment rooted in inner spiritual transformation rather than in the seductive lure of a way of life that substitutes material convenience and social conformity for the demanding quest for true freedom.