Well, the need has been desperately urgent, not for one year or ten, but for fifty, sixty, seventy, a hundred years. If, when thought is needed, nobody does any thinking, if everyone assumes that someone else is thinking, then it is clear that no one is thinking either for himself or for anybody else. Instead of thought, there is a vast, inhuman void full of words, formulas, slogans, declarations, echoes–ideologies! You can always reach out and help yourself to some of them. You don’t even have to reach at all. Appropriate echoes already rise up in your mind-they are “yours.” You realize of course that these are not yet “thoughts.” Yet we “think” these formulas, with which the void in our hearts is provisionally entertained, can for the time being “take the place of thoughts” — while the computers make decisions for us.
Nothing can take the place of thoughts. If we do not think, we cannot act freely. If we do not act freely, we are at the mercy of forces which we never understand, forces which are arbitrary, destructive, blind, fatal to us and to our world. If we do not use our minds to think with, we are heading for extinction, like the dinosaur: for the massive physical strength of the dinosaur became useless, purposeless. It led to his destruction. Our intellectual power can likewise become useless, purposeless. When it does, it will serve only to destroy us. It will devise instruments for our destruction, and it will inexorably proceed to sue them . . . . It has already devised them.
Thomas Merton, OCSO
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, pp. 73-74
