In 1966, Thomas Merton, Christian mystic and peace activist, wrote this meditation on what it means to be sane in a world gone mad with nuclear weapons and war. It is fascinating to note, that any person now active in the military who changes their mind and refuses deployment will be subject to a full psychiatric evaluation. Not so for those who simply follow orders to kill or be killed.
Note: Thomas Merton was writing as a Christian to a mainly Christian audience. But you could just as easily substitute Jew or Muslim or even Buddhist when describing those who might or might not be sane enough to work for peace instead of war.
And I believe that by 1966 Merton was beginning to lose patience. That might explain the sarcastic tone of parts of the entry. And remember by the time of Merton's death in 1968 Viet Nam was just really getting started.
And Eichmann was not really one of the architects of the Final Solution. He just made sure the trains got loaded and ran on time. He never really "killed" anyone himself.
A Devout Meditation in the Memory of Adolph Eichmann
One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the Eichmann trial
was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly
sane. I do not doubt it all, and that is precisely why I find it
disturbing.
If all the Nazis had been psychotics, as some of their leaders
probably were, their appalling cruelty would have been in some sense
easier to understand. It is much worse to consider this calm,
"well-balanced," unperturbed official conscientiously going
about his desk work, his administrative job which happened to be the
supervision of mass murder. He was thoughtful, orderly,
unimaginative. He had a profound respect for system, for law and
order. He was obedient, loyal, a faithful officer of a great state.
He served his government very well.
He was not bothered much by guilt. I have not heard that he developed
any psychosomatic illnesses. Apparently he slept well. He had a good
appetite, or so it seems. True, when he visited Auschwitz, the Camp
Commandant, Hoess, in a spirit of sly deviltry, tried to tease the
big boss and scare him with some of the sight, Eichmann was
disturbed, yes. He was disturbed. Even Himmler had been disturbed,
and had gone weak at the knees. Perhaps, in the same way, the general
manager of a big steel mill might be disturbed if an accident took
place while he happened to be somewhere in the plant. But of course
what happened at Auschwitz was not an accident: just the routine
unpleasantness of the daily task. One must shoulder the burden of
daily monotonous work for the Fatherland. Yes, one must suffer
discomfort and even nausea from unpleasant sights and sounds. It all
comes under the heading of duty, self-sacrifice, and obedience.
Eichmann was devoted to duty. and proud of his job.
The sanity of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense
of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love
and understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world
to preserve it from barbarism, madness, destruction. And now it
begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the
most dangerous.
It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms
and without nausea aim the missile, and press the buttons that will
initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones,
have prepared What makes us so sure, after all, that the danger comes
from a psychotic getting into a position to fire the first shot in a
nuclear war? Psychotics will be suspect. The sane ones will keep them
far from the button. No one suspects the sane, and the sane ones will
have perfectly good reasons, logical, well-adjusted reasons, for
firing the shot. They will be obeying sane orders that have come
sanely down the chain of command. And because of their sanity they
will have no qualms at all. When the missiles take off, then, it will
be no mistake. We can no longer assume that because a man is "sane"
he is therefore in his "right mind." The whole concept of
sanity in a society where spiritual values have lost their meaning is
itself meaningless. A man can be "sane" in the limited
sense that he is not impeded by disordered emotions from acting in a
cool, orderly tier, according to the needs and dictates of the social
situation in which he finds himself. He can be perfectly "adjusted."
God knows, perhaps such people can be perfectly adjusted even in hell
itself.
And so I ask myself: what is the meaning of a concept of sanity that
excludes love, considers it irrelevant, and destroys our capacity to
love other human beings, to respond to their needs and their
sufferings, to recognize them also as persons, to apprehend their
pain as one's own? Evidently this is not necessary for "sanity"
at all. It is a religious notion, a spiritual notion, a Christian
notion What business have we to equate "sanity" with
"Christianity"? None at all, obviously. The worst error is
to imagine that a Christian must try to be "sane" like
everybody else, that we belong in our kind of society. That we must
be "realistic" about it. We must develop a sane
Christianity: and there have been plenty of sane Christians in the
past. Torture is nothing new, is it? We ought to be able to
rationalize a little brainwashing, and genocide, and find a place for
nuclear war, or at least for napalm bombs, in our moral theology.
Certainly some of us are doing our best along those lines already.
There are hopes! Even Christians can shake off their sentimental
prejudices about charity, and become sane like Eichmann. They can
even cling to a certain set of Christian formulas, and fit them into
a Totalist Ideology. Let them talk about justice, charity, love, and
the rest. These words have not stopped some sane men from acting very
sanely and cleverly in the past.... No, Eichmann was sane. The
generals and fighters on both sides, in World War II, the ones who
carried out the total destruction of entire cities, these were the
sane ones. Those who have invented and developed atomic bombs,
thermonuclear bombs, missiles; who have planned the strategy of the
next war; who have evaluated the various possibilities of using
bacterial and chemical agents: these are not the crazy people, they
are the sane people. The ones who coolly estimate how many millions
of victims can he considered expendable in a nuclear war, I presume
they do all right with the Rorschach ink blots too. On the other
hand, you will probably find that the pacifists and the ban-the-bomb
people are, quite seriously, just as we read in Time, a little crazy.
I am beginning to realize that "sanity" is no longer a
value or an end in itself. The "sanity" of modern man is
about as useful to him as the huge bulk and muscles of the dinosaur.
If he were a little less sane, a little more doubtful, a little more
aware of his absurdities and contradictions, perhaps there might be a
possibility of his survival. But if he is sane, too sane ... perhaps
we must say that in a society like ours the worst insanity is to be
totally without anxiety, totally "sane."
copyrighted in 1966. Published by Burns and Oates.
from Raids
on the Unspeakable by
Thomas Merton
No comments:
Post a Comment