If You Want Peace and Justice ...

The familiar bumper sticker says, "If you want peace, work for justice," a quote from Pope Paul VI. Well, yes, but I think it goes deeper than that. "If you want peace and justice, work for harmony," I'd put it.

By "harmony" I mean the word as used by the Prince of Wales in his recent book Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World. It's basically a book to warm the cockles of any environmentalist's heart. Prince Charles says we are so out of harmony with the natural world, and so out of balance within our own collective human psyche, that we don't begin to comprehend how out of whack we really are.

I don't want to put words in Charles's mouth, and I don't claim to be wise enough to know how far beyond his meaning my thoughts lie. Yet I increasingly believe he'd agree: We have injustice and war because we are fundamentally off-center within our own human nature, when taken in its very complex totality.

Many ills are byproducts of our deep disharmony, I think. Take sex in its most negative aspects. Look at how many abortions there are each year. Look at how many single-parent households and broken homes we have. How many rapes. How many unmarried childbirths intentionally sought by misguided teens. How much time we spend debating supposedly "settled" issues like women's "right" to contraception.

And look at how het up we all get over hot-button, non-sexual issues, like whether the children of illegal immigrants deserve a legal path to a college education and U.S. citizenship — or, again, whether addictive drugs or gay nuptials or carrying a concealed weapon should be legal.

The plain fact is that we fundamentally disagree about so many things. Some of us "go to war" over them, putting on display our entrenched disagreements about what is, or is not, right or just.

Sociologist Charles Murray's most recent book says, via its title, that we are "coming apart" class-wise. The mores and lifestyles of the "new lower class" are today dangerously different from those of the (safely ensconced within their socioeconomic bubble) "new upper class."

Seemingly, the upper-crusters' ethos isn't so different from America's long-celebrated "founding virtues," to use Murray's term, while the bottom-dwellers' lives ways have "come apart" from our once-universal American mores. Crime, welfare dependency, opting out of the workforce, single parenthood, dropping out early from the educational trajectory — all these are symptoms of how our socioeconomic bottom-dwellers no longer find our "founding virtues" — industriousness, basic honesty, marriage, and religious faith — of great value.

But I think we non-bottom-dwellers live lives of incongruity, too. I call ours a "bikini-wax world." At the beach, women wear bikinis that are (warning: frank talk ahead) too tiny to conceal all of their pubic hair. So they pay someone to wax away the offending hair.

In a world of less incongruity, there might be a thorough covering up of the pubic region at the beach, or there might be brazen nudism in which everything is bared and no body fur need be removed. What with now-obsolete women's bathing dresses and the occasional nudist beach, we've seen both in our cultural history. And there are comprehensible philosophical underpinnings for both.

For teeny-weeny bikinis and paying good money for Brazilian wax treatments, though, not so much. Go ahead and try: give a comprehensive philosophical justification for bikini bottoms that conceal some, but not all, of nature's hairy endowments.

In a bikini-wax world, seemingly incompatible ideas simply coexist. It's no longer OK to go braless today — that's ostensibly "skanky" — but it's OK to let your bra straps show — that's ostensibly not "skanky."

Or, in a graver realm, it's OK to privately oppose abortion on moral grounds, but it's not OK to impose your beliefs on anyone else.

I contend our bikini-wax society has lately become obsessed with fighting — and yet, at one and the same time, with avoiding fights.

Notice how oriented toward clashes our popular culture has become. Look at just about anything on TV and, when sex isn't front and center, it's usually fighting, in one guise or another, that's on tap.

And yet ... as individuals we often decline to stand and deliver for what we believe in, i.e., a particular moral code. On issues concerning sexuality, social justice, war, the environment, and much else, many of us opt out of the debate entirely. Different strokes for different folks, we say. Your truth is not my truth, and there's no absolute truth anyway.

Except when we get het up over something. There's the actual truth, we think then, and there's also what the other side of the discussion falsely believes.

But both sides feel the same way, of course. Bothe sides think they alone have a handle on the truth.

A world of such incongruity is a fractionated world. In such a fractionated world, I believe, there's no real road to either justice or peace, unless and until we get back into some semblance of natural-societal-intrapersonal harmony.

Thomas Merton, Deep Ecologist

Thomas Merton
(1915-1968)

Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was a Trappist monk who — according to Fr. Daniel Berrigan, who should know — became the conscience of the peace movement of the 1960s.

He was not only that. He was one of the most prolific Catholic writers of the 20th century.

A collection of Merton's writings on the natural world, When the Trees Say Nothing: Writings on Nature, shows that he was also, in his own way, a "deep" ecologist — recognizing (says Wikipedia of deep ecology) the inherent worth of all living beings, regardless of their instrumental utility to human needs. Merton wrote:

It is not Christianity, indeed, but post-Cartesian technologism that separates man from the world and makes him a kind of little god in his own right, with his clear ideas; all by himself. ...

What a miserable bundle of foolish idiots we are! We kill everything around us even when we think we love and respect nature and life. This sudden power to deal death all around us simply by the way we live, and in total “innocence” and ignorance, is by far the most disturbing symptom of our time. ...

A phenomenal number of species of animals and birds have become extinct in the last fifty years — due of course to man’s irruption into ecology. There was still a covey of quail around here [his abbey near Bardstown, Kentucky] in early fall. Now I don’t hear a single whistle, or hear a wing beat.

The Abbey of Gethsemani at Trappist, Kentucky, was Merton's home for the last 27 years of his life, where he looked for and found God "beyond all and in all." There was for Merton no contradiction between the "beyond" and the "in":

I want not only to observe but to know living things, and this implies a dimension of primordial familiarity which is simple and primitive and religious and poor. This is the reality I need, the vestige of God in His creatures.

"The vestige of God in His creatures": It's what I mean when I talk of "this sacramental earth"!