Thomas Merton on Our Complicity with Evil

In the interior silence that contemplation opens, Merton recognizes his own complicity in the injustices of society. While the news-as-scoreboard model invites us to view ourselves as the “good guys” and blame our opponents for the ills of our culture, Merton insists that this binary view is simplistic and false. In actuality, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn famously wrote, “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

Merton takes the evil in his own heart with remarkable seriousness. One striking example is his claim that Hitler is a fruit of the social…