Returning to Reality

Thomas Merton's Wisdom for a Technological World

Thompson

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781621894964
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book synthesizes the diverse reflections on technology by monk and spiritual writer Thomas Merton to develop a compelling contemplative critique of the threats and challenges of nuclear war, communication technologies, and biotechnologies that may alter what it means to be human. At the core of his critique, Merton opposes a technological mentality that favors processes of efficiency and utility at the expense of our ultimate purpose, a quest for the wisdom to guide us to the divine source of our being and reality. To counter this modern idolatry, Merton's insights offer a path of reflection, balance, and community. More specifically, Merton offers some constructive approaches and healing possibilities through a balanced approach to work, a careful and intentional managing of technology, and an accessing of the recuperative dimensions of nature. In its conclusion the book brings the insights of these chapters together for a final reflection on how to maintain our humanity and our spiritual integrity in a technological world.

Chapter 1

A Contemplative Critique

In the past the man has been first, in the future the system must be first.

Frederick Winslow Taylor,
The Principles of Scientific Management (1911)

The intimate connection between technology and alienation is and will remain one of the crucial problems we will need to study and master in our lifetime. Technology . . . bestows the greatest amount of wealth and power upon those who serve it most slavishly at the expense of authentic human interests and values, including their own human and personal integrity.

Thomas Merton,
“Answers for Hernan Lavin Cerda”

Contemplative Wisdom

Thomas Merton asked in one of his essays, “Can contemplation still find a place in the world of technology and conflict which is ours? Does it belong only to the past?”1 This is a fair question. After all, Merton conceded that, “our technological society no longer has any place in it for wisdom that seeks truth for its own sake, that seeks the fullness of being.”2 For some of his contemporaries, contemplation was irrelevant in the modern world. Merton was criticized for avoiding an active role on the front lines of issues like civil rights or the Vietnam War. One of his sparring partners on this point, through a series of letters, the theologian Rosemary Radford Reuther, chided him that young monks were leaving the monastery in 1967 because their vocations “would not be expressed in that corner of ‘this world’ that calls itself ‘monastery.’”3 Merton responded that he was still part of that external world; he was not living in a “sixth century virgin forest with wolves,” but amidst farms and managed forests. Moreover, he had neither forfeited his humanity nor his range of interests. Monks were not “hothouse plants, nursed along in a carefully protected and spiritually overheated life of prayer.” Rather the contemplative life “implies openness, growth, development.” A monk should not be restricted to narrow horizons and esoteric concerns that would “condemn him to spiritual and intellectual sterility.”4

While the problems of the world were also a problem for a monk, Merton had a broader and less partisan view of current issues since he was not directly engaged in the affairs of the world and was not committed to “particular interests.” From his vantage point, he could see the forest and the trees.

Now its seems to me that if a monk is permitted to be detached from these struggles over particular interests, it is only in order that he may give more thought to the interests of all, to the whole question of the reconciliation of all men with one another in Christ. One is permitted . . . to stand back from parochial and partisan concerns; one can thereby hope to get a better view of the whole problem and mystery of man.5

From this broader contemplative perspective, he could more accurately diagnose the problems and develop a prescription of spiritual resources for recovering wisdom in the contemplative tradition. The path towards wisdom began with listening and waiting, “not knowing what is next.” And whatever wisdom was for Merton, it was not a simple formula. He declared, “I am not in the market for the ready-made and wholesale answers so easily volunteered by the public and I question nothing so much as the viability of public and popular answers, some of those which claim to be most progressive.” While he “did not have clear answers to current questions,” he did have serious questions and this was the launch point for the search for wisdom.6

Probing carefully and avoiding easy answers, Merton crafted a contemplative critique of technology. The first foundation for his critique was to recognize the source and end of our existence. For Merton, man’s deepest need was the “direct and pure experience of reality” that was a “living contact with the Infinite source of all being.”7

The path to connection could take a number of routes. One path was the teachings of the Christian hermits of the fourth century in the Egyptian desert also known as the Desert Fathers and Mothers. They rejected the “shipwreck” of the late Roman world. They decided to no longer “drift along” passively accepting the values of their world. They rejected the false, formal self fabricated by their society and sought their “own true self in Christ.”8

This path required a fundamental contemplative move, to reject the false self of the ego, the “superficial, transient, self-constructed self.” This was done by purging the old self through a life of “solitude and labour, poverty and fasting, charity and prayer.” If properly followed, the desert hermit achieved clarity of vision and rest in God. Through this form of “purity of heart,” they intuitively became aware of being anchored in God through Christ.9 In this “purity of heart,” they also were tied to others through the “primacy of love.” This love was not merely a sentiment or a doing good to others as if they were objects. The identification in love was much deeper; it required a complete inner transformation that produced a deep connection.

Love . . . means something much more than mere sentiment, much more that token favors and perfunctory alms deeds. Love means an interior and spiritual identification with one’s sisters and brothers, so that they are not regarded as an “object” to “which” one “does good.” . . . Love takes one’s neighbor as one’s other self, and loves him or her with all the immense humility and discretion and reserve and reverence without which no one can presume to enter into the sanctuary of another’s subjectivity. From such love all authoritarian brutality, all exploitation, domineering and condescension must necessarily be absent.10

The path to “purity of heart” suggested some of the key features of a contemplative. The key insight from this tradition was the return to a form of simplicity that had been polluted or blocked “by the accumulated mental and spiritual refuse of our technological barbarism.” The Desert Fathers reminded us that we could bypass this blockage and return to a very “practical and unassuming wisdom that is at once primitive and timeless.”11

If the Desert Fathers provided guidance for an internal spiritual quest, there still remained the issue of how we related to nature and salvation history in a technological world. On these issues, Merton relied on the teaching of the great seventh-century Eastern Christian saint, Maximus, on theoria physike (contemplation of nature). At the threshold of the contemplative life, theoria physike allowed the uniting of the hidden wisdom of God with the hidden wisdom in each person. God’s communication of this wisdom was communicated through the divine purpose of material reality, the spirit of scripture, and the inner meaning of history revealed through the salvation offered by Jesus. In this wisdom quest, the contemplative united body and soul, sense and spirit, resulting in a “resplendent clarity within man himself.” This clarity was a divi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Chapter 1: A Contemplative Critique
• Chapter 2: Avoiding the Nuclear Apocalypse
• Chapter 3: Reforming the Information Age
• Chapter 4: Choosing to be Human or Transhuman
• Chapter 5: Some Balm for Gilead
• Conclusion
• Bibliography