“For me the ‘worldly’ attitude which I believe is nefarious is not simply the ‘turning to the world’ or even the total and would-be uncompromising secularism of the ‘honest to God’ set. Still less is it the noble concern for social justice and for the right use of technology to serve the real needs of modern man in his indigence and his despair. What I mean by ‘worldliness’ is the involvement in the massive and absurd mythology of technological culture and in all the contrived and obsessive gyrations of its empty mind. One of the symptoms of this is precisely the anguished concern to keep up with an ever-changing, complex, and fictitious orthodoxy in taste, in politics, in cult, in belief, in theology and what not, cultivation of the ability to redefine one's identity day by day in concert with the self-definition of society. ‘Worldliness’ in my mind is typified by this kind of servitude to care and to illusion, this agitation about thinking the right thoughts and wearing the right hats, this crude and shameful concern not with truth but only with vogue. To my mind, the concern of Christians to be in fashion lest they ‘lose the world’ is only another pitiable admission that they have lost it.”
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander by Thomas Merton,
New York: Doubleday & Co, Inc., 1968 edition, p. 284
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