Further proof that Thomas Merton is as relevant today as he was when he wrote this — during the McCarthy Era of the fifties:*
“A mass movement readily exploits the discontent and frustration of large segments of the population which for some reason or other cannot face the responsibility of being persons and standing on their own feet.
Thomas Merton: “Here is the great temptation of the modern age, this universal infection of fanaticism, this plague of intolerance … which flows from the crippled nature of man who is afraid of love …”
“But give these persons a movement to join, a cause to defend, and they will go to any extreme, stop at no crime, intoxicated as they are by the slogans that give them a pseudo-religious sense of transcending their own limitations.
“The member of a mass movement, afraid of his own isolation, and his own weakness as an individual, cannot face the task of discovering within himself the spiritual power and integrity which can be called forth only by love.
“Instead of this, he seeks a movement that will protect his weakness with a wall of anonymity and justify his acts by the sanction of collective glory and power.
“All the better if this is done out of hatred, for hatred is always easier and less subtle than love. It does not have to respect reality as love does. It does not have to take account of individual cases. Its solutions are simple and easy.
“It makes its decisions by a simple glance at a face, a colored skin, a uniform. It identifies an enemy by an accent, an unfamiliar turn of speech, an appeal to concepts that are difficult to understand. He is something unfamiliar. This is not ‘ours.’
“This must be brought into line – or destroyed.
“Here is the great temptation of the modern age, this universal infection of fanaticism, this plague of intolerance, prejudice and hate which flows from the crippled nature of man who is afraid of love and does not dare to be a person.
“It is against this temptation most of all that the Christian must labor with inexhaustible patience and love, in silence, perhaps in repeated failure, seeking tirelessly to restore, wherever he can, and first of all in himself, the capacity of love and which makes man the living image of God.”
— Adapted from Disputed Questions, “Christianity and Totalitarianism,” Thomas Merton
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*Mind you, the book, comprising a few essays, wasn’t written about Sen. Joseph McCarthy and or other American political leader of the time.
Still, it’s from an essay about totalitarianism and speaks to how weak people (who fear love and are “afraid to be persons,” Merton says) lap up the lies of political leaders and find meaning in misguided mass-movements.
As in the Trump Era.
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H.T. Beth at Louie Louie
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