I think this is among the most important observations Thomas Merton ever made:
"The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of the activist...destroys his own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful."
To think he wrote this half a century ago. What would he say now? What would he think of computers, email, cell phones--technologies that were intended to make life easier, and
can, when kept in balance, but in the end have made "the rush and pressure of modern life" worse than ever.
I have seen and spoken to many people who no longer truly take a vacation, because wherever they go they take their work with them. I have seen people use their phones to check messages during the middle of school concerts. I have seen people do it in church. I have seen so many restaurant conversations broken by texting and even phone conversations.
It is not that the technology is bad. It is the way we let it control us. Merton describes this dominant busyness of life as violence. That might sound startling. And he says that giving in to it is to
cooperate in violence. That is not easy to hear. And yet that is why this passage is so important, too.
We have created a society that overly values both work and entertainment, and people use technology to switch off one form of busyness and switch on the other. This is violence. It is violence first of all to the human person, because we cannot either know or become our true selves if we don't have regular periods of reflection free from distraction. Second, the busyness in both work and entertainment serves primarily material purposes, which are endlessly promoted as fulfilling hopes and dreams. The genius of the system is that, even though these hopes and dreams cannot possibly be fulfilled materialistically, the tendency of the chronically distracted is not to doubt the system, but to become willing cogs in the great machine. This is another form of violence to the human individual, and also feeds other forms of violence, such as crime, war, and environmental destruction.
Merton is especially addressing those who devote themselves to making the world a better place in some way. I think of the two groups I am most involved with--those in ministry, and those in environmental education. If the church in the developed world is failing, clearly the answer is not more programs, more bureaucracy, more meetings, more busyness. It is more holiness. And if we are using resources irresponsibly and setting the stage for massive economic and climate disruption, clearly the answers needed are unlikely to come from environmentalists who themselves are addicted to the lifestyle that caused the problems to begin with.
Merton's quote is troublesome, because I know he is right, and I also know that I, too, allow myself to get caught up in too many concerns, projects, and distractions, and that I, too, use resources at an unsustainable pace. In doing so, I am cooperating in violence. The fact that I cannot easily see this violence makes it all the more insidious. I don't say this to beat myself up. I know that I live relatively simply in comparison to the average American, but I also know that I can do still better. I reflect on Merton's quote every so often because I want to keep growing, and it is easy, in an energetically materialistic society, to lose sight of the inner journey that can lead to the fulfillment that materialism will never deliver.
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