On Being Alone Together and Together Alone

Thomas Merton, The New Seeds of Contemplation:

Physical solitude has its dangers, but we must not exaggerate them. The great temptation of modern people is not physical solitude but immersion in the mass of other people, not escape to the mountains or the desert (would that more people were so tempted!) but escape into the great formless sea of irresponsibility which is the crowd. There is actually no more dangerous solitude than that of the person who is lost in the crowd, who does not know she is alone and who does not function as a person in a community either. She does not face the risks of true solitude or its responsibilities, and at the same time the multitude has take all other responsibilities off her shoulders. Yet she is by no means free of care; she is burdened by the diffuse, anonymous anxiety, the nameless fears, the petty itching lusts, and the all-pervading hostilities which fill mass society the way water fills the ocean.

Mere living in the midst of other people does not guarantee that we live in communion with them or even in communication with them. Who has less to communicate than the mass-man? Very often, it is the solitary who has the most to say; not that he uses many words, but what he says is new, substantial, unique. It is his own. Even though he says very little, he has something personal which he is able to share with others. He has something real to give because he himself is real.

Where people live huddled together without true communication, there seems to be sharing, and a more genuine communion. But this is not communion, only immersion in the general meaninglessness of countless slogans and clichés repeated over and over again so that in the end one listens without hearing and responds without thinking. The constant din of empty words and machine noises, the endless booming of loudspeakers end by making true communication and true communion almost impossible. Each individual in the mass is insulated by thick layers of insensibility. She doesn't care, she doesn't hear, she doesn't think. He does not act, he is pushed. She does not talk; she produces conventional sounds when stimulated by the appropriate noises. He does not think; he secretes clichés.

Mere living alone does not isolate a person; mere living together does not bring people into communion. The common life can either make one more of a person or less or a person, depending whether it is truly common life or merely life in a crowd. To live in the midst of others, sharing nothing with them but the common noise and the general distraction, isolates a person in the worst way, separates him from reality in a way that is almost painless. It divides him off from his true self. Here the sin is not the conviction that one is not like other people; it is in the belief that being like them is sufficient to cover every other sin. The complacency of the individual who admires her own excellence is bad enough, but it is more respectable than the complacency of the person who has no self-esteem because she has not even a superficial self which she can esteem. She is not a person, not an individual, only an atom. This atomized existence is sometimes praised as humility or as self-sacrifice, sometimes called obedience, sometimes devotion to the dialectic of class war. It produces a kind of peace that is not peace but only the escape from an immediately urgent sense of conflict. It is the peace not of love but of anesthesia. It is the peace not of self-realization and self-dedication but of flight into irresponsibility.