Barrett's The Illusion Of Technique

Solzhenitsyn, Skinner and freedom of the will: these are the people and the problem with which William Barrett begins and ends The Illusion of Technique. It might seem that Solzhenitsyn and Skinner are a rather odd pair upon whom to base a discussion of the problem of freedom of the will. For Barrett, however, there are no two better contemporaries around whom to develop his primary thesis that freedom can and in fact must be made real in a society of extreme technology. While Skinner is a writer in the relatively free United States, he nonetheless expounds the virtues of total social control and conditioning; whereas Solzhenitsyn, a writer from the totalitarian Soviet Union, argues for the absolute spiritual freedom of human beings. "Clearly," notes Barrett, "we live in a strange time." Now it might seem that an equivocation has taken place on the word "freedom," for clearly Skinner speaks of a political freedom while Solzhenitsyn has in mind philosophical freedom. But this is just the point that Barrett wishes to make, namely that the two types of freedom must finally collapse into one notion. Our views of political freedom, he claims, directly influence our views of philosophical freedom and vice versa. It is with that belief that Barrett proceeds to investigate the nature of technique and the importance of human freedom for our contemporary world. The great danger in our century, according to Barrett, is that whereas "[f]ormerly determinists argued for a metaphysical realjity that remained invisible behind the scenes; in our century they have not only brought it onto the scene, but also made it dominate the action, as they seek to shape society by its light."