This is the second part of an essay titled “The Wild Places” by the Trappist monk Thomas Merton (1915 – 1968) published by The Catholic Worker in June 1968. It was excerpted in the August-September 2022 Catholic Worker. The first part appeared in this blog, HERE, last Nov. 17. The third and final part will appear in this blog soon. — MCM
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Our frontier mythology
In a 17th-century Puritan book with an intriguing title — Johnson’s Wonder Working Providence — we read that it was Jesus Himself, working through the Puritans, who “turned one of the most hideous, boundless and unknown wildernesses in the world into a well-ordered Commonwealth.”
Max Weber and others have long since helped us recognize the influence of the Puritan ethos on the growth of capitalism. This is one more example. U.S. capitalist culture is firmly rooted in a secularized Christian myth and mystique of struggle with nature. The basic article of faith in this mystique is that you preserve your worth by overcoming and dominating the natural world. You justify your existence and you attain bliss (temporal, eternal or both) by transforming nature into wealth. This is not only good, but self-evident. Until transformed, nature is useless and absurd. Anyone who refuses to see this or acquiesce to it is some kind of a half-wit — or worse, a rebel, an anarchist, a prophet of apocalyptic disorders.
An investigation of the wilderness mystique and of the contrary mystique of exploitation and power, reveals the tragic depth of the conflict that now exists in the U.S. mind. The ideal of freedom and creativity which has been celebrated with such optimism and self-assurance runs the risk of being turned completely inside out if the natural ecological balance on which it depends for its vitality, is destroyed. Take away the space, the freshness, the rich spontaneity of a wildly flourishing nature, and what will become of the creative pioneer mystique? A pioneer in a suburb is a sick man tormenting himself with projects of virile conquest. In a ghetto he is a policeman shooting every Black man who gives him a look.
Obviously, the frontier is a thing of the past. The bison has almost vanished. There are still some forests and wilderness areas, but we are firmly established as an urban culture. Nevertheless the problem of ecology exists in a most acute form. The danger of fallout and atomic waste is only one of the more spectacular ones. There is an almost infinite number of others.
Much of the stupendous ecological damage that has been done in the last fifty years is completely irreversible. Industry and the military, especially in America, are firmly set on policies which make further damage inevitable. There are plenty of people who are aware of the need for “something to be done,” but just consider the enormous struggle that has to be waged, for instance in eastern Kentucky, to keep mining interests from completing the ruin of an area that is already a ghastly monument to callous human greed. When a choice has to be made, it is almost invariably made in the way that is good for a quick return on somebody’s investment – and a permanent disaster for everybody else.
TO BE CONTINUED