LET US BE (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:

Humanist Skepticism

The Enlightenment's capacity to be self-critical

The literary tradition that sees human folly

A tragic sense of history (Europe watching civilizations destroy themselves repeatedly)

"American" culture, in Merton's view, is losing its inheritance by becoming too simplistic, 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.