The Cruel and the Frail

“What is happening in the world today,” Thomas Merton wrote to Czesław Miłosz in 1959, responding to the latter’s book The Captive Mind, “is a wholesale collapse of man’s capacity to love.” Merton did not believe in the cold war’s strident moral opposition between the free and unfree worlds. Whether in the West or in the East, he wrote to Miłosz, “one lives in a state of constant bewilderment and fear.” For Merton, this helplessness was a distinctive condition of man “at the moment of his greatest power over things other than himself,” and there was no easy release from it. But he knew, too, that “the only thing that is to be regretted without qualification is for a man to adapt perfectly to totalitarian society. Then he is indeed beyond hope.”That inadvertent adaptation to a pernicious social reality is a greater danger for many more people today, as they settle deeper into a state of constant bewilderment and fear. The forces of war and authoritarianism are stronger, and now visibly present in established democracies as much as elsewhere. All this has engendered a widespread sense of powerlessness. Efforts to mobilize civil society, nationally and transnationally, against encroac...