Fear of the machine, revisited
Returning to Reality: Thomas Merton’s Wisdom for a Technological Age, by Phillip M. Thompson, Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, 2013, pp. 112, ST £15.00 (paper), £13.80 (e-book). Reviewed by James G.R. Cronin Technological anxieties haunt our age of hypermodernity as illustrated by a renewed interest in classic publications by authors from an earlier period of neurosis, namely, Ivan Illich (Cayley, 2005), Erich Fromm (2013), Paul Virilio (2009), and Jacques Ellul (Jerónimo et al., 2013). Thomas Merton’s critique of the technological society captured the zeitgeist of technological anxiousness threading through discourses of the New Left in France, Britain, and America during the height of the Cold War. Phillip Thompson, an American interdisciplinary scholar who fuses science with religion and religion with technology, argues that Merton’s mid-century reflections on technology deserve greater critical consideration as part of a wider intellectual history of mid-century techno