I’ve been reading from A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from His Journals, which is filled with beautiful, contemplative, sometimes playful writing. But just now I ran across something typically brilliant and insightful but unexpectedly blunt. He wrote the following on 9 September 1961:

I fear the ignorance and power of the United States. And the fact that it has quite suddenly become one of the most decadent societies on the face of the earth. The body of a great, dead, candied child. Yet not dead: full of immense, uncontrolled power. Crazy.

If somebody doesn’t understand the United State pretty soon–and communicate some of that understanding to the United States–the results will be terrible. It is no accident that the United States endowed the world with the Bomb.

The mixture of immaturity, size, apparent indulgence and depravity, with occasional spasms of guilt, power, self-hate, pugnacity, lapsing into wildness and then apathy, hopped up and wild-eyed, inarticulate and wanting to be popular. You need a doctor, Uncle!

The exasperation of the other nations of the world who know the United States thinks them jealous–for what they don’t want and yet what fascinates them. Exasperation that such fools should be momentarily kings of the world. Exasperation at them for missing their great chance–this everyone finds unforgivable, including America itself. And yet what held the United States back was a spasm of that vestigial organ called conscience. Unfortunately not a sufficiently educated conscience. The conscience of a ten-year-old boy, unsure of his parents’ standards–not knowing where approval or disapproval might come from!

I think Merton probably wrote this in response to the news of 4 September 1961, when the U.S. founded its Agency for International Development (USAID). Certainly it doesn’t sound like such a bad thing. And I’m sure that it seemed like a good idea at the time. Ultimately, this agency intended to reduce poverty and grow economies in impoverished parts of the world. This seems like a really nice thing to do, except for the fact that it wasn’t an altruistic drive. The idea was not foremost to help those countries to realize their own social, political, and economic aspirations but to replicate U.S. social, political, and economic entities in order, on the one hand, to create markets for U.S. exports and, on the other hand, to cockblock the U.S.S.R. and the spread of communism.

The reality, however, is probably that USAID actions, while doing some good on the surface, I’m sure, ultimately interacted with the ghosts of European imperialism and colonialism to inspire levels of resentment, at least in some areas, that played a significant role in the development of extremism that roared at the U.S. with the voices of weaponized airplanes on 11 September 2001.

To Merton’s “mixture” of ailments that leave Uncle Sam in need of a doctor, I would add the dangerous mixture of arrogance and ignorance.