REAL WESTERNERS
“Our ability to see ourselves objectively and to criticize our own actions, our own failings, is the source of a very real strength. But to those who fear truth, who have begun to forget the genuine Western heritage and to become immersed in crude materialism without spirit, this critical tendency presents the greatest danger. Indeed, it must seem perilous to those who cultivate a simultaneous complacent certitude of might and right in order to destroy without hesitation the ideological enemy. Wait until we have completely lost our European humor (from which American humor is derived), and we will be in a posture to blast Russia or China quite seriously off the face of the earth, unable to see the grim joke that in so doing, we are also destroying ourselves and anything good that was left for us to “save” by war. It is precisely the dogmatic humorlessness of the self-designated realists that is the greatest danger. They are the ones who have shrugged off practically all that was left of Europe in our society. I for one mean to preserve all the Europe that is in me as long as I live, and above all, I will keep laughing until they close my mouth with fallout.” Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.
Here’s what I think Merton is getting at:
The weakness of Western society lies in its inability to see itself “objectively and to criticize our own actions, our own failings.” In other words, we’ve lost our sense of humor, which is the source of “a very real strength.” Beware of a culture, a society, that has lost its ability to laugh at itself. This is not to say that we laugh at our violence, our endless propagation of harm, our collective capacity to dominate and oppress those on the underside of power. It’s quite the opposite. What empowers and enables the harms of Western society is a certain quality and atmosphere of anxiety. We are afraid to take a look at ourselves, to see the faults that are painfully obvious to cultures and societies outside of our own. So we continue to descend into all that destroys the Beloved Community because we have lost our sense of humor, taking ourselves far too seriously, and ascribing exaggerated, inflated glory, honor, and prestige to our institutions, societal norms, and, most of all, our reasoning/sensibilities. We traded our greatest strength (our sense of humor) for our greatest weakness (pride). We “make our plans,” imagining we can engineer our way… another Babel for the ages, and “God laughs.” The question is, can we laugh along?
Because of this, I'm with Merton. If there is anything to preserve of Europe, let it be the inheritance of laughter.
If we are to be Westerners, let us be true Westerners who:
Celebrate humanist skepticism
Inherit the Enlightenment's capacity to be self-critical.
Constantly revisit our literary tradition that bears witness to human folly.
Most importantly, let us always be able to gaze upon (with honest attention) the tragedies of history (Europe watching civilizations destroy themselves repeatedly) and draw lessons from them.
Paraphrasing Simone Weil, it’s better to contemplate our collective stupidity than to ruminate on our sin.
"American" culture, in Merton's view, is losing its inheritance by becoming too simplistic, humorless, a dead binary (good guys vs. bad guys, democracy vs. communism, or what have you… all us/them dualism).
We are “forgetting to be modest” (Camus)… losing our sense of humor, becoming “humorless" in the truest sense… this is dangerous. Let us laugh and recognize the absurdity of the comedy we perpetuate. Comedy is our friend who reconciles the absurd and moves us toward confession, for the healing of our collective body.