The basic inner moral contradiction of our age is that, though we talk and ream about freedom (or say we dream of it, though I sometimes question that!), though we fight wars over it, our civilization is strictly servile. I do not use this term contemptuously, but in its original sense of “pragmatic,” oriented exclusively to the useful, making use of means for material ends. The progress of technological culture has in fact been a progress in servility, that is techniques of using material resources, mechanical inventions, etc., in order to get things done. This has, however, two grave disadvantages. First, the notion of the gratuitous and the liberal (the end in itself) has been lost. Hence we have made ourselves incapable of that happiness which transcends servility and simply rejoices in being for its own sake. Such “liberality” is in fact completely foreign to the technological mentality as we have it now (though not necessarily foreign to it in essence). Second, and inseparable from this, we have in practice developed a completely serile concept of man. Our professed ideals may still pay lip service to the dignity of the person, but without a sense of being and a respect for being, there can be no real appreciation of the person. We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being.
Thomas Merton
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
