This is no longer a time of systematic ethical speculation, for such speculation implies time to reason, and the power to bring social and individual action under the concerted control of reasoned principles upon which most men agree.
There is no time to reason out, calmly and objectively, the moral implications of technical developments which are perhaps already supperseded by the time one knows enough to reason about them.
Action is not governed by moral reason but by political expediency and the demands of technology — translated into the simple abstract formulas of propaganda. These formulas have nothing to do the reasoned moral action, even though they may appeal to apparent moral values they simply condition the mass of men to react in a desired way to certain stimuli.
Men do not agree in moral reasoning. They concur in the emotional use of slogans and political formulas. There is no persuasion but that of power, of quantity, of pressure, of fear, of desire. Such is our present condition and it is critical!
Bonhoeffer wrote, shortly before his death at the hands of the Nazis, that moral theorizing was outdated in such a time of crisis — a time of villains and saints, and of Shakespearian characters. “The villain and the saint have little to do with systematic ethical studies. They emerge from the primeval depths and by their appearance they tear open the infernal or the divine abyss from which they come and enable us to see for a moment into mysteries of which they had never dreamed.”
And the peculiar evil of our time, Bonhoeffer continues, is to be sought not in the sins of the good, but in apparent virtues of the evil. A time of confirmed liars who tell the truth in the interest of what they themselves are — liars. A hive of murderers who love their children and are kind to their pets. A hive of cheats and gangsters who are loyal in pacts to do evil. Ours is a time of evil which is so evil that it can do good without prejudice to its own iniquity it is no longer threatened by goodness. Such is Bonhoeffer’s judgement of a world in which evil appears in the form of probity and righteousness. In such a time the moral theorist proves himself a perfect fool by taking the “light” at its face value and ignoring the abyss of evil underneath it. For him, as long as evil takes a form that is theoretically “permitted,” it is good. He responds mentally to the abstract moral equation. His heart does not detect the ominous existential stink of moral death.
Thomas Merton, OCSO
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, pp. 53-54
(emphasis added by webmaster)
