X (41)
If modern churches were to symbolize their true faith, they would
take the crucifix from their altars and substitute the three little
monkeys who counsel men to 'speak no evil, hear no evil, see no
evil.'
Racial pride is revealed today to be man's primary collective
sin.
Merton incorporates the second Niebuhr quotation in a journal
entry. This is a good example of how Merton's reading became a
springboard for his own expression:
Someone has come out with the
theory that racial injustice is the product of
individualism. There may be something to it, in the sense
that individualism is a component in the lawlessness and
irresponsibility of a society that has no care whatever to treat other
human beings as if they might conceivably have human needs,
and rights. In a sense, even Nazism was a result of
individualism. Mass society is indeed made up of individuals who,
left to themselves, know they are zero, and who, added together in a
multitude of zeroes, seem to themselves to acquire reality and
power. But this is the negative individualism of the man who thinks he
establishes himself as real by comparing himself with everything that
is not-I. (When you count up enough things that are not-I, you end
up by discovering that even I is not-I.) But, meanwhile, what is to
blame is not individualism but collectivism. Reinhold Niebuhr says
rightly: "Racial pride is revealed today as man's
primary collective
sin."
Conjectures, p. 56.