Peace in the Post-Christian Era

Thomas Merton, 1968, from The Inner Experience, published in 2003:

The sense of sin is therefore something far deeper and more urgent than the prurient feeling of naughtiness which most pious people have trained themselves to experience when they violate the taboos of their sect. There is something scandalous about the religiosity of popular piety. All the empty gestures of people who do not do good and avoid evil, but make signs of the good, go through gesticulations which symbolize good intentions, and allay their guilt feelings with appropriate grimaces of piety. All these gestures are performed with scrupulous fidelity and accompanied with the right degree of optimism about God and humanity, but at the same time the most terrible of crimes are accepted without a tremor because they are, after all, collective. Take, for instance, the willingness of the majority of “believers” to accept the hydrogen bomb, with all that it implies, with no more than a shadow of theoretical protest. This is almost unbelievable, and yet it has become so commonplace that no one wonders at it anymore. The state of the world at the present day is the clearest possible indication that the whole human race is full of sin—for which responsibility becomes more and more collective and therefore more and more nebulous.

It has been remarked that the more totalitarian a society is, for example that of Russia or of Hitler’s Germany, the less its members feel any sense of sin. They can commit any evil without remorse as long as they feel they are acting as members of their collectivity. The only evil they fear is to be cut off from the community that takes their sins upon itself and “destroys” them. This is the worst of disasters, and the slightest indication of disunion with the group is the cause of anxiety and guilt.

This is the way our world is going, and in such a world the spirit and the spiritual have no more meaning because the person has no meaning. But it is the vocation and mission of the contemplative to keep alive the spirit of humanity, and to nurture, at least in oneself, personal responsibility before God and personal independence from collective irresponsibility.

Merton's once-censored Peace in the Post-Christian Era shares similar poignant observations on collective responsibility.