Keys of This Blood

by Malachi Martin

  The firing up of the first engine—that rush to material development—was made possible by the worldwide economic-financial hegemony of the United States in the years immediately following World War II. And the force that fired it was the celebrated technological creativity of Americans.

  Once scientific technology was harnessed to American entrepreneurship, the first test orbit into the atmosphere of the good life was successfully achieved. More and better things were produced for every sector of life: for the home, the company, the city, the state, the federal government. American innovations in everything from basic home appliances to convenience and luxury goods, and from agricultural methods to military equipment—not to mention the manufacturing and management systems that were produced along the way—developed a post-war culture that very soon became the envy and the objective of other nations.

  In the world of the early 1900s, such development might have remained very much indigenous to the North American continent. In the postwar world, it could not. The United States was rebuilding Europe and Japan. The American dollar anchored local currencies around the world, and whatever kind of international monetary system prevailed. The United Nations, itself headquartered in the United States, brought new nations out of their ancient cultures and into newly born but materially backward nationalisms.

  “The world,” said Winston Churchill in 1954—not ten years after the end of World War II—“has grown frighteningly small in compass; and astride it stands the American colossus, whose strength and girth none can match, but whose clothes we all wish to wear.”

  The primary purpose of the United States in its technological drive and in its entrepreneurship was economic and financial. The business of America, just as Calvin Coolidge had said in 1929, was still business—balanced budgets; bottom lines in very black ink; a sound dollar.

  Such a primary drive had been at work in the U.S.A. since its founding. The culture of Americans—both as a mosaic of immigrant cultures and as a singularly American creation—grew and adapted itself to the quick transformations that changed the quality of life in the nation from 1900 onward. But it was the immense growth and progress of American industrialization, triggered by World War II and by postwar American entrepreneurship, that brought the United States uninterruptedly and without any jarring changes to the threshold of the technotronic era.

  By 1960, the American “pursuit of happiness” was concretized in the attainment of the “good life.” And “good” referred primarily to life made easy, leisurely and materially pleasurable. It referred to the quality of life that could be achieved with the introduction of modern technological inventions for the individual, the family, the company, the city, the state and the nation. It was much more than “two chickens in every pot and a car in every garage.” There was a profound change in the moral quality of American life.

  By 1960, as well—and largely because the U.S.A. was so deeply involved in the postwar rebuilding of Europe and Japan—the drive for material development had been jump-started in the nations and was sputtering to life around the world. The good life as portrayed in America became the ideal of nations, whether they were in a preindustrial condition or already possessed some degree of industrialization, great or small.

  A lot of fuel was poured into the big new engines of development and entrepreneurship. Worldwide communications—principally television, news networks, and the American film industry—told underdeveloped, undeveloped and developing nations more about the good life than any government brochure. American tourism, which became an important source of annual income and increased wealth for many nations, performed the same task. The increasing importance of the United Nations, and the increasing pace of decolonization of scores of nations in Africa and Asia, emphasized the importance of economic dignity. Undeveloped and underdeveloped nations reclaimed for themselves the right to exploit their own natural resources.

  In what seemed no time at all, the full tilt toward development, American style, became quasi universal. The goods of the good life nourished the urge everywhere to develop à la Américaine. The automobile replaced the camel in Saudi Arabia. The tea merchant posted outside Beit-El-Ajaib in Zanzibar's Stone Town offered his patrons a Kleenex with every plastic container of lemon tea. The drone of village gossip in Tralee, Ireland, was lost in the blare of “Family Feud” and “Wheel of Fortune,” beamed in by satellite. The bark of Alaskan sled huskies was supplanted by the roar of snowmobiles in Prudhoe Bay. Mukluks were replaced by Mars Bars; and the sewer system in Barrow, Alaska (pop. 3,000), was heated at an annual cost of $239 million.

  In the Philippines, in Calcutta, in Glasgow, householders planned wall-to-wall carpeting in Manhattan Blue. In Kuwait, refrigerators were cast in Lagoon Blue. Automobiles in Tropical Avocado purred around Panama City. The flea markets of Europe offered Navajo headbands, American Indian earth-mother ornaments in turquoise and silver, and Levi's jeans. The Cuisinart vied with the laptop computer in the annual budgets of Cairo and Malaysia.

  Even in the late 1980s, when the financial hegemony of the United States had been displaced, and its military hegemony had been successfully challenged by the USSR, the good life American-style continued to be the desired end product among nations, the aim that inspired them to development. Sales of American television programming, which had reached $1 billion by 1987 and was projected at $2.3 billion by 1990, continued to bring the good life as portrayed in “Dallas” and “Falcon Crest” to a widening world of converts. In 1988, meanwhile, American movies—everything from Rambo to Rain Man—brought $1.1 billion to the United States from abroad.

  By that time, the booster engines of development and entrepreneurship had fired the main engine of trilateral global dominance. The United States was joined by Western Europe and Japan in the race for the future. Just as America had had its land rush and its gold rush, so now the world had its development rush. And it was the fast track along which a new breed—pioneers of genuinely global entrepreneurship—would ride hell-for-leather. The old-fashioned American entrepreneur was replaced by a new breed on a new frontier. The new cry wasn't “Gold!” but “Economic Utopia!”

  For all its momentum and power and excitement, however, there was trouble from the start in the emergent Utopia. The development produced by the new entrepreneurs was unevenly spread among the nations. At the end of the 1980s almost four fifths of the world population, though tantalized by the good life, had no share in it. From one year and one decade of superdevelopment to the next, most men and women saw no substantial improvement in their economic condition, no solid hope that the bleak landscape of their present lives would not stretch into long and grim tomorrows for their children, and for their children's children.

  On the shores of the Atlantic, John Paul II himself has spoken to the golden-skinned Brazilian youths who still sport carefree on the beaches of Rio and dream of moving to one of the money meccas in the United States or Europe. And he has seen the favellas teeming with families, whose more meager dreams wash down muddy hillsides along with their tiny hovels when the rains come to Rio year after year, every year. The rich remain comfortable. Nothing changes.

  In the middle of the Pacific, John Paul has seen the millionaires who flourish in the Alabang Hills and Corinthian Plaza in Metro Manila, within sight of deathly slums. He knows what it means that the Hacienda Luisita of Philippine President Corazon Aquino's family, the Cojuangcos, still dominates the serfs of Tarlac Province. He understands why revolutionaries like Father Jesus Bolweg, S.J., and his fellow priests and nuns still die in Philippine mountain fastnesses alongside Communist guerrillas. The rich remain comfortable. Nothing changes.

  Among some global entrepreneurs there are signs that a certain well-founded anxiety has replaced the original mechanistic and certainly naive optimism of their vision. Even such an inward-looking and self-concentrated nation as Japan has been forced to consider how “to adapt … to sharing the burdens and responsibilities in the world economy,” as the problem wa
s delicately phrased in 1989 by Keiya Toyonaga, Senior Managing Director of Matsushita.

  Anxiety or no, the movement toward the realization of a global community within a geopolitical framework advances along the track of the good life. Happiness is bought and sold by the new breed of global entrepreneur. But the price of entry is far from common coin.

  It is upon this world that John Paul's Church, with its own supranational organization already in place, has opened its windows. It is this humanly anomalous situation—the situation in which the have-not majority of the human race is being pulled by forces beyond its control toward a destiny not of its own free choosing—that is the focus of much of the Pontiffs attention and impels his crisscross global travels, unparalleled among world leaders.

  It is no surprise to the new pioneers of global development that John Paul II has made a moral appraisal of his contemporaries as people preparing—or being prepared—to become a geopolitical community. Nor can it be a surprise to those pioneers that by “moral” the Pope does not mean their own newly defined set of values measured in the goods of the good life. For all the “updating” that has gone on in his Church, the assessment John Paul makes is provided by that taproot of human morality that reaches into the very soil in which Christianity began.

  When John Paul speaks to his secular peers in the world arena of development about his own moral appraisal, he does not have in mind merely local adaptations of pop jargon, or even noble-sounding phrases ringing out in the midst of fiery conflicts.

  Through their spokesmen demonstrating in Beijing in April and May of 1989, the Pontiff heard the cry of hundreds of thousands of Chinese students that “democracy is as much a moral issue as a political one.” And he understood the wide appeal of the students' reasoned explanation that “moral” in their context meant that “officials must be prevented from exploiting the people and the country's resources.”

  At about the same time, John Paul observed the controversy in Moscow over the Lenin Mausoleum in Red Square, where the mummified body of Vladimir I. Lenin has brought endless queues of viewers for over sixty-five years. “The body should be buried in the ground,” contended Mark Zakharov, director of the Leninsky Komsomol Theater.

  Not so, huffed Central Committee candidate Ratmir S. Babonikov. “Lingering over such issues is simply immoral … Zakharov's proposal is blasphemous and a sign of glasnost gone amok.”

  The Communist daily Pravda sounded the voice of Soviet reason, declaring that “we must not venerate the corpse of Comrade Lenin but his cause.” Not to be outdone, Central Committee member Aleksei P. Myasnikor argued that “what was said by Zakharov about the most sacred thing, Lenin, is worse than incomprehensible.”

  Incomprehensible was the word for it. Given the ethical limits of morality to be expected among young Chinese today; and given the professional atheistic Marxism current in the Soviet Union, John Paul finds the use of such words as “moral” and “immoral” and “blasphemous” and “venerate” and “sacred” emptied of all religious understanding. They have become hollow vessels to be filled with the passions and the intentions of the moment. When the next desperate occasion arises, the same vessels will be emptied again, and filled with other passions, other fleeting intentions.

  John Paul has made it clear enough that in speaking of “morality” and the “morality of nations”—for since the moment of his election as Pope, he has done so constantly in public and in private with great leaders and hopeful pretenders in the emergent geopolitical race—his meaning for those words is identical with the Christian meaning preached and vindicated by the Roman Catholic Church from its beginnings. In fact, John Paul insists that the meaning and the drive and the power of morality cannot be eradicated in the lives of men and women. For human morality itself derives from one most basic fact: Because God created man in his own image and likeness by endowing him with an indestructible principle of being—a principle of being called a soul—in all that mankind does, the important dimension is spiritual, is a thing of man's soul and its spiritual values.

  That fact is so basic that it holds true for all man does, even for what he does economically and financially.

  Moreover, because God created all men as one family, there is a radical unity, a unity at the base of all human activity that makes each individual his brother's keeper. On the other side of that coin of caring is the parallel fact that, because God gave the material cosmos and all things in it into the custody of the family of man, all men and women have a basic right to what they need for the sustenance of life and for their reasonable prosperity and enjoyment.

  However, because God found it necessary to send his only son, Jesus of Nazareth, to sacrifice his life by dying on a Roman cross, there must be a significant condition of man's soul and being—a condition of spirit—that needs repairing and help. There must be an evil let loose among mankind that can only be thwarted by Jesus' saving power as God's Son. There must, in other words, be actions of men and women that need forgiveness through Jesus, because they offend against God's laws about the family unity of mankind, and about the right of all individuals and groups to their due share of the earth's goods.

  The Christian meaning of human morality has always come from these beliefs. And from these beliefs come John Paul's moral assessments. What is morally good, says this Pope, in one voice with all the popes who have preceded him, respects those laws of God about the family unity of mankind and about individual rights. What is morally bad breaks those laws, and is called sin.

  Because it was only to Simon Peter, the chief of his Apostles, and to Simon Peter’s lawful successors in the Holy See, that Jesus confided the Keys of his moral authority, the Roman Catholic Church has always claimed—and, under John Paul II, claims today—to be the ultimate arbiter of what is morally good and morally bad in human actions. Those Keys, sanctified and strengthened in the blood of Jesus himself, are the symbol and the substance of John Paul’s insistence upon a moral assessment of the world he travels and monitors so closely.

  Among people who adapt such words as “sacred” and “blasphemy” to the problem of what to do with Lenin’s corpse, there will be difficulties in accepting the moral content of the Christian vocabulary as it has always been used by the Roman Church, and as it is used by Pope John Paul everywhere he goes.

  How much more difficult, then, is the fact that in the present context of the emerging global community—in the context of what the pioneers are doing economically and financially and ideologically in the family of man—John Paul is talking about something beyond the moral assessment of individuals. He is talking about structures, about the moral assessment of structures that not only have been built, but are already expanding rapidly according to a blueprint that will guarantee the mutual interdependence of nations in a global system of economics and governance.

  What sort of moral critique can a Christian—pope or otherwise—make of a structure? And what sort of secular mover and shaker will listen to him if he does? After all, except in a purely metaphorical way—and probably just to feed human emotions—how can a Roman Catholic or anyone else assert that a structure is sinful? That a structure commits a sin? That a structure is guilty of a sin?

  Let’s face it: Even atheists know the Church teaches that sin is, first and only, personal. It involves the choice of individual will in a man or woman who freely and knowingly violates God’s revealed law. In strict theological language, as anybody will tell you, there is no such thing as collective sin; the sin of a group. Much less, then, can a structure—whether formed of stones and wood, or of bureaucratic arrangements—be said to commit sin, to be sinful, to be in a state of sin.

  John Paul may be the fourth in the line of revolutionary popes that began with John XXIII. But he will brook no such arguments about sinful structures. And in that, his theology is one with that of every pope who came before him. In insisting that slavery as an institution was a moral evil that would explode, the Church of the fifteenth and sixteen
th centuries was making a moral assessment of a sinful structure and of the huge harm that would come from it. In insisting that Leninist-Marxist institutions constituted a moral evil that would provoke untold misery for millions of people and that should not be connived at by the West, John Paul is at one with every pope since Pius IX in the nineteenth century, who kept up steady warnings of the danger and harm such institutions would bring in their train for everybody.

  World-class theologian that he is, John Paul understands more than the theological precedents of history. His “sinful structures” argument is based on unchanging solid principles; and it proceeds with inexorable logic.

  As Christians and Roman Catholics, he insists, we not only can but must speak of “sinful structures” when we find that such structures are created by men and women who are inspired uniquely by economic, financial, political or ideological gain. For in acting out of such motives alone, the builders of such structures violate at least the First Commandment, which forbids the worship of false gods.

  When money, ideology, class or technological development dictates exclusively how we behave, then we are in effect worshiping idols, just as surely as if we were to set up a golden calf in the Sinai of our world, ascribe omnipotence to it, and give it our obeisance and adoration.

  In that sort of situation, at least one and probably two sinful intentions are operative: an all-consuming desire for profit; and the thirst for power. In fact, as these human attitudes and propensities are built into the structures of our society, they are not merely operative; they quickly become absolutized. They dominate our thoughts, our intentions and our actions. They become the household gods on the mantels of our structures.

  The structures themselves, therefore, are rooted in the personal sins linked to the choices and the concrete acts of the individuals who design and introduce those structures, consolidate them, promote them, build their lives on them, define success in their terms, and make those structures difficult to remove.