The Monk Both Sides Called a Liar

In late May 1966, a thirty-nine-year-old Vietnamese monk named Thich Nhat Hanh arrived at a Trappist abbey in Kentucky’s hill country to meet a man he had corresponded with but never seen. He was partway through a tour of the United States, sent to explain to Americans who assumed Vietnam’s war had exactly two sides that it had a third: monks, students, and villagers who wanted the killing stopped regardless of who won. Both governments had already rendered their verdict on that compassion. Generals in Saigon called him a traitor. Officials in Hanoi called him an American tool. Friends warned him that returning home would be dangerous. He did not see Vietnam again for almost four decades.

Thomas Merton, the monk waiting for him, understood exactly what was being said about his guest and did not believe a word of it. After two days of walking the abbey grounds together, Merton wrote an essay titled “Nhat Hanh Is My Brother,” published that year in the magazine Jubilee and later collected in Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice (University of Notre Dame Press, 1968). Merton barely mentions Thich Nhat Hanh’s politics. What he defends is harder to argue in a magazine: that he had met “a perfectly formed monk,” that the visit felt like meeting Vietnam itself, and that “he is more my brother than many who are nearer to me in race and nationality, because he and I see things exactly the same way.”

That is a strange thing to stake a reputation on, for a stranger, in the middle of a war his own church superiors preferred he remain quiet about.

It is also exactly the move missing from most conversations about “empathetic” technology.

Merton could have stopped at feeling. He clearly felt something for Thich Nhat Hanh. But he did not stop there — he made a public argument and spent some of his own credibility defending a specific man against specific slanders, at real cost to himself. Empathy became compassion, something closer to solidarity and justice: a defense with consequences, not just a feeling with a name attached. That distinction, between perceiving someone’s suffering and building the conditions under which their situation actually changes, is the one this essay seeks to recover.

The three words that don’t mean the same thing

Empathy, compassion, and justice belong together, but they do different work. Collapsing them into a single “caring” is where much of technology ethics goes wrong.

Concept	Central question	Ethical strength	Failure when isolated
Empathy	What might it feel like to be this person?	Makes another’s experience morally visible	Selective, exhausting, or easily manipulated
Compassion	What can I do in response to this suffering?	Converts recognition into care and solidarity	Can become private charity that leaves the system intact
Justice	What is owed, and how must power be arranged fairly?	Addresses rights, accountability, structural cause	Can become impersonal, punitive, or blind to particular lives

A rough sequence runs from attention to empathy to compassion to solidarity to justice. But it is not merely a sequence, because justice also makes compassion durable. One act of kindness helps one person survive an unfair system for one more day. A just institution reduces how many people ever have to depend on luck, or on a stranger’s goodwill, to live with dignity. Compassion without justice tends toward paternalism. Justice without compassion tends toward bureaucracy, or worse. Empathy without either is sentiment with no bill attached.

For a technology built to sense or simulate feeling, the question this collapse obscures is not whether this system can recognize a human emotion, but rather what relationships, what social order, and what distribution of power it creates once it is loosed on the world. That is where Merton’s account of the person and Marshall McLuhan’s account of media meet, and where the rest of this argument lives.

What empathy alone cannot reach

Empathy tells you that suffering is present. It does not tell you what would help, and mistaking the first for the second is its most common failure. A platform can register real concern for isolated users and respond with a “wellness” feature that leaves the addictive design, the underpaid moderators, and the data extraction beneath it untouched. At that point, what compassion needs is not more feeling but discernment: who gets to define the problem, whose account of harm counts, and what response actually reduces it rather than merely advertising concern.

Compassion also tends to preserve a gap between the one who helps and the one who is helped, and closing that gap is the work of solidarity — treating the people a system affects as co-designers and rights-bearing participants rather than recipients of a benefit decided elsewhere. The question shifts from how do we help them to how do we act with them and who actually shares the decision.

Beneath both lies a harder fact: injustice is rarely only a matter of bad intentions. It is reproduced through ownership, incentives, opacity, biased data, and unequal power to contest a decision once it has been made — a power analysis that empathy, by its nature, does not perform, because empathy sees the injured person and stops there, while justice asks what made the injury predictable. None of this holds without accountability: mechanisms that let a person understand a decision, challenge an error, and impose real consequences on the institution that made it. Absent that recourse, an “ethical AI” pledge is a promise made by whoever already benefits from the arrangement.

Further out still is institutional imagination — what rules, public goods, and professional norms should exist before the crisis rather than after it, covering due process, fair labor conditions, and real limits on harmful uses, and not only the person-to-person repair that compassion is built for. And underneath everything is a bias built into empathy itself: it runs strongest toward people who are visible, familiar, or narratively compelling, and a viral platform amplifies exactly that bias, so that some harms are seen everywhere while others — racialized surveillance, disability exclusion, precarious data labor, the slow erosion of public discourse — remain almost entirely invisible. Justice is the discipline of attending, on purpose, to whoever the system has rendered easiest to overlook.

A monk who kept facing east

Merton’s account of the person did not stay inside a single tradition, and that matters here, because his most demanding thinking about compassion happened in conversation with Buddhism rather than apart from it.

By the early 1960s Merton had spent years in correspondence with the Japanese Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki, work he eventually published as “Wisdom in Emptiness: A Dialogue Between D. T. Suzuki and Thomas Merton” and later folded into Zen and the Birds of Appetite (New Directions, 1968). What Merton found in Suzuki’s account of Zen was not an exotic alternative to Christian charity but a sharper diagnosis of what gets in its way: the illusion of a fixed, separate self that must be defended, flattered, and proven, which Merton had already named, in his own vocabulary, the false self. Buddhist teaching on anatta, the absence of a permanent separate self, and on karuna, compassion, converged for Merton on a single insight — that the gap compassion is meant to cross, between the one who helps and the one who suffers, is in some sense an illusion to begin with. Genuine compassion, in this reading, is not a feeling one person directs at another from across a distance. It is what remains once the false distance collapses.

That is the deeper argument underneath the Gethsemani story. Merton’s defense of Thich Nhat Hanh was not an act of charity performed downward, from a secure Kentucky monastery toward an endangered foreign monk. It was recognition of a brother, stated plainly and without hierarchy — “he and I see things exactly the same way” — which is a strange sentence for a Catholic priest to write about a Buddhist monk unless one has actually absorbed the idea that compassion does not require the helper to remain above the helped.

The friendship with Thich Nhat Hanh was not an isolated encounter. Two years later, in November 1968, Merton traveled to Dharamsala, India, where the Dalai Lama had lived in exile since 1959, and met him three times over the course of about a week. Merton came away calling it “a warm and cordial discussion” between men he believed shared “a real spiritual bond.” The Dalai Lama would later say Merton was the person who first showed him the real meaning of the word Christian. A month after Dharamsala, on 10 December 1968, Merton died in Bangkok, at a conference of Asian Benedictine and Cistercian communities, killed by a faulty electric fan hours after delivering a talk on monasticism and Marxism. He had spent the final months of his life listening, without defensiveness, to a tradition that questioned the very self his own compassion was meant to serve.

None of this made Merton a Buddhist, and he never claimed to be one. It made him someone who had tested his own account of compassion against a tradition built to interrogate the self at its root, and found that it held, and deepened. That is the standard worth holding technology to as well: not whether a system can simulate warmth, but whether it treats the person in front of it as someone whose reality does not depend on being useful, legible, or profitable to the system observing them.

The common good and the half-built man

Merton’s concern was never machinery as such. It was technological development pursued apart from wisdom, contemplative attention, and what he called the common good. Scholarship on his notebooks and talks, notably Paul Dekar’s study in The Merton Annual, identifies four recurring criteria in Merton’s writing on the subject: does a technology honor the human person rather than treat them as raw material or a measurable output; does it serve the common good rather than only the short-term interests of its owners; does it protect physical, social, and what Merton called psychic health; and does it withstand scrutiny from outside the circle of experts who built it, rather than asking to be trusted on their word alone.

That last criterion had a specific occasion. On 5 June 1966, in a talk titled “The Christian in a Technological Age,” Merton cited an essay by Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the US nuclear navy, titled “A Humanistic Technology” (Nature, 20 November 1965), in which Rickover argued that a technology’s foreseeable harms ought to be weighed before deployment rather than excused as unintended consequences afterward. Merton, no admirer of the military establishment Rickover represented, still found the argument worth borrowing: even a man who built warships understood that capability without foresight is not progress.

Merton’s deeper worry ran beneath any single criterion. He diagnosed a culture of distraction and instrumental reason in which people risk losing contact with reality, with one another, and with their own depths — the same false self that Suzuki’s Zen had helped him name more precisely. If a platform constantly rewards performance, prediction, and marketable self-presentation, people may grow steadily more legible to the systems studying them while becoming less present to themselves and to each other. The danger was never that machines might become too human. It was that human beings might be pressed to live like machines: optimized, surveilled, evaluated, and never quite at rest.

The environment is the message

Marshall McLuhan supplies the argument’s other half. His claim that the medium is the message, from Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964), means that a technology should not be judged only by the content it carries or the purpose its makers state for it. It should be judged by the new scale, pace, and pattern it introduces into how people associate and act.

Media, in McLuhan’s account, extend human capacities: the wheel extends the foot, print extends the eye, and contemporary AI extends memory, language, and pattern recognition. But every extension also alters the environment in which people think and relate, and McLuhan’s real question about any new technology is what it makes normal before anyone has decided whether it is good. A writing assistant may help someone draft or translate. Its deeper message may be a changed environment in which authorship, expertise, and the expectation of a human reply are quietly reorganized. A facial-recognition system is framed as a tool for identification; its wider message is the normalization of continuous surveillance. A recommendation engine offers personalization; its environmental effect is to reshape attention and let opaque rankings decide what a shared conversation even is.

That reframes the question an ethics of AI has to ask. Not only is the output biased, but also what human faculty is being extended, what capacity is quietly being outsourced until it atrophies, who controls the environment a technology creates, and who can opt out of it and who cannot.

Where the two monks meet

Merton and McLuhan diagnose different, complementary dimensions of the same problem.

Merton asks	McLuhan asks	Combined question
Does this honor the person’s dignity and interior life?	What environment and habits does this medium create?	Can a person remain free and attentive inside this system?
Does it serve the common good?	How does it reorganize relations at scale?	Who gains power, who loses agency, and how are the gains distributed?
Does it cultivate genuine encounter?	What does it amplify, and what does it numb?	Does it deepen judgment, or replace it with abstraction?

Merton supplies the moral center: the person, contemplative attention, the common good, and a settled suspicion of technological idols. McLuhan supplies the cultural diagnostic: media are environments, and their strongest effects are structural rather than intended. Together, they resist two opposite errors — solutionism, the assumption that more capability automatically means more human flourishing, and fatalism, the assumption that because a technology is powerful, its social shape is therefore inevitable. Their shared alternative is the harder one: the conscious, democratic, and morally serious shaping of the environments new technology creates.

A justice-centered framework, applied

Take a live example: an AI system screening job applicants.

Question	Empathy	Compassion	Justice
Who is affected?	Listen to lived experience, especially from those most exposed to harm	Notice concrete vulnerability	Map every affected group, including workers, nonusers, and future applicants
What is the harm?	Understand the fear and humiliation of rejection by a system no one can explain	Seek immediate relief and support	Identify structural cause, unequal burden, and rights at stake
Who decides?	Hear voices usually ignored	Include affected people with care	Ensure real participation, transparency, and public oversight
What changes?	Better human understanding	Concrete repair for the person harmed	Rules, incentives, and institutions change

Empathy asks what it is like to be rejected by a system you cannot see inside, when your employment determines your housing and your family’s stability. Compassion asks what explanation, correction, or human review is owed once the system gets it wrong. Justice asks whether automated screening belongs in that setting at all, whether the training data encode decades of past exclusion, whether an applicant can appeal, and who profits from a labor market this system quietly tilts.

The missing links become visible only at that third question: public participation, worker voice, independent audit, real remedy, and the willingness to simply refuse a use that undermines the dignity of the people it touches.

What this asks of anyone building the thing

1. Treat empathy as a starting instrument, not a finished ethic. It tells you where to look, never what to do.
2. Let compassion do more than comfort. Ask what changes, not only who was consoled.
3. Practice discernment before designing a response — whose definition of the problem is being used, and whose is not.
4. Build solidarity by sharing the decision, not only the concern.
5. Read power before reading intentions. Injustice survives on incentive and opacity more than on malice.
6. Install accountability that a person without resources can actually use.
7. Design institutions before the crisis, not in apology after it.
8. Attend on purpose to the harms that never go viral.
9. Ask Merton’s question of the person, and McLuhan’s question of the environment, together, before asking whether the output looks fair.

My Recommendation 

Design and govern technology so that it increases people’s capacity for truthful attention, mutual recognition, and shared power — not merely their capacity to predict, persuade, and extract.

That, in the end, is the whole content of what Merton did at Gethsemani in 1966. He did not run a sentiment analysis on a stranger’s face. He spent two days in a stranger’s actual company, recognized a brother where his own government had told him to see a threat, and then spent his name defending it in print. A system that can only simulate the first half of that — the recognizing — while remaining structurally incapable of the second, the defending, has not built compassion. It has built a very convincing rumor of it.

---

Sources: Thomas Merton, “Nhat Hanh Is My Brother,” Jubilee (1966), collected in Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice (University of Notre Dame Press, 1968) — text via Englewood Review of Books; Jim and Nancy Forest, “When America Met Thich Nhat Hanh” (2021); Thomas Merton Center, “Thomas Merton and the Dalai Lama”; Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite (New Directions, 1968); Thomas Merton and Daisetz T. Suzuki, “Wisdom in Emptiness: A Dialogue Between D. T. Suzuki and Thomas Merton”; Paul Dekar, “Thomas Merton on Technology,” The Merton Annual, vol. 17; Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964).

---

Nota Bene: I write for people of any faith or none. For the family sitting in the pew on a Sunday morning with kids who really don’t want to be there. I am not a traditional academic. Rather, I am a public thinker and technology futurist, drawing on my roots in cultural history, society, and technology. Today, I explore how technology, society, and ethics come together to shape a future where People, Planet, Purpose, and Prosperity thrive for everyone. That is the whole of it. See more in the “How I Write and What I Use section on my website.