John Paul agrees with Mikhail Gorbachev’s view that such global processes as these are every day gaining a new momentum, and that, in their very acceleration, they are affecting world politics. What better proof, says Gorbachev in substance, that we have only to follow the mute but clear indications of these objective processes? History’s logic will then take over. By such means will we arrive at happiness and fullness of life.
What better proof, responds John Paul, that Gorbachev’s “new thinking” is not simply the secularism of the West? It is not mysterious or angelic or seductive, either. And, above all, it is not new. It is dialectical materialism, the same dialectical materialism that has been a major force in the world since it was elaborated and adapted by Karl Marx as the rationale and justification for his godless ideology of Communism, and finally incorporated into the sociopolitical machinery of Leninist Internationalism.
Ours is not a philosophically enlightened age. Our forefathers would have recognized Gorbachev’s dialectical materialism as readily as John Paul does. But presented as Gorbachev offers it today—as a seeming gift placed at the feet of the secularist West—Leninism can be accommodated as easily as any other humanistic ideal. For it passes the only acid test required: It makes no religious and no moral demands that secularists have not already consented to follow.
To use an expression common and congenial to secularists of the United States and Europe, the “human values” of Gorbachevism are no more and certainly no less than the “human values” vindicated by Humanists, Internationalists and Transnationalists in the capitalist West.
For John Paul, there is a basic human fallacy crippling the regnant secularism of the West and of Gorbachevism. The prevalent idea (erected into a principle nowadays) is that a wall is to be maintained at all costs—at the cost of liberty itself—between church and state, between religion and public life. The Wall—capitalized frequently in order to personify it as a legal entity much like America—is more sacred than motherhood and apple pie. But, the Pontiff argues, the idea that we can be related to the world and not related to God is as false as the idea that we can be related to God without being related to the world.
In other words, given every substantial and constitutionally guaranteed freedom and human justice, there is no concomitant guarantee that human life will not be morally vacuous, spiritually degraded and culturally vulgar. The values of freedom and liberty have to be guaranteed by higher values. You cannot practice a system of politics without the spirituality of religion any more than you can exercise a spirituality that is not political—even in a thoroughly humane and civilized society. “Once bread has been assured,” Russia’s religious philosopher Nicholas Berdyayev commented, “then God becomes a hard and inescapable reality, instead of an escape from harsh reality.” For, as John Paul points out, it is not enough for the individuals of a public institution to practice godliness in private (prayer, adoration, good works, etc.); their institution as an institution must acknowledge God and institutionally explicate that godliness. Holiness is the aim, not only of individuals, but of human institutions. All this, of course, is rejected by the current secularism.
To give the United States and its imitator capitalist nations their due, John Paul readily points out that capitalism itself has generated a third power force, which is gaining momentum and favor among the nations. It is a force at least as seductive as Gorbachev’s neo-Leninism, a force we know as the open-market economic system of the West nations.
“The creative drive of the people,” President Bush told the Hungarian government in July of 1989, “once unleashed, will … bring you a greater treasure than simply the riches you create. It will give each one of you control over your own destiny—a Hungarian destiny!”
Just as Pope John Paul’s words to his beloved Poles in 1979 echoed in all the nations of the Soviet empire, so the words of this Chief Executive of capitalist democracy echoed around the desolate capitals of the satellites in local variations. “A Polish destiny!” “A Czechoslovak destiny!” “A German destiny!” “A Bulgarian destiny!” “A Romanian destiny!”
Between 1979 and 1989, in fact, times and leadership had changed in the Soviet Union; and in the West, as well. And Mikhail Gorbachev had gone to the United Nations looking for a handshake and a deal. Now he had what he wanted. Following his own precepts of objective processes and the iron logic of history, Gorbachev had rejected classical Marxist economies. He had done so for one simple and nonideological reason. The closed-market economy of the Soviet Union and its satellites had long since failed. That economy had merely insulated the Party-State from the vibrant market forces in the rest of the world and forced the economies of the East nations into grinding inefficiency and regional impoverishment.
The objective process at work for Gorbachev, therefore, was and remains the urgent need to find solutions to his economic crisis. The iron logic of history impels him to develop a market system compatible with his own aims. A market system that is open—but, as he says, “socialist.” A system that will be more “humane and more productive” than the failed Marxist-Leninist system. But it must be a system that will not—cannot, he insists—mean adoption of capitalist democracy. It will be “socialist.”
It is obvious to John Paul that, as a geopolitical grand master, Gorbachev understood from the outset he would have to pay a price in order to sever his neo-Leninism as an ideology from the debunked economics of Leninist Marxism. It is also clear to the Pope that Gorbachev had calculated well in advance the top price he would be willing to pay.
The first installment of that price was the small change of bureaucratic reform essential to sweep away ineptitude, corruption and institutionalized inertia. The next installment was a little steeper. State planning would have to allow important inroads to private initiative—to personal ownership and private exploitation for profit.
The third installment was tougher still; for it had to be paid in that most guarded currency of the Party-State: political sovereignty within and outside the Soviet Union. Without local control in all of the caged but never-dead sovereignties of captive nations—Poland, Hungary, and all the rest—there would be no economic innovation, no industrial competition, no fruitful production. Without some “liberalization” of internal USSR politics, there would be no way out of old-line Stalinism.
In fact, as John Paul knows, Russian sovereignty itself is not excluded from Gorbachev’s calculations. “Our Party,” Gorbachev told the Nineteenth All-Union Conference of the CPSU on July 1, 1988, “should in every respect be a Leninist party not only in content but also in its methods.” Those methods already included Lenin’s original idea of a government rooted in “the people’s approval,” and in state authority accumulated on the basis of soviets—some variation, in other words, of Lenin’s concept of people’s councils.
Thus, when over 300,000 Soviet miners in the Ukrainian coalfields went on strike in July of 1989, Gorbachev declared himself “greatly inspired” because they were “taking things into their hands thoroughly.” And indeed the miners received unspecified promises of profit sharing, industrial management and shipments of food, clothing and other scarce consumer goods. The miners even went so far as to ask that Gorbachev scrap Article Six of the Soviet Constitution, which establishes the CPSU as the “leading and guiding force” in Soviet society. Still, said Gorbachev, the negotiations were “demanding … but good and constructive.” Sure enough, by February 1990, that sacred cow, Article Six of the Soviet Constitution, was apparently sacrificed at a contentious meeting of the Communist leadership in the Kremlin. The CPSU will not, it was decided, have the monopoly in Soviet political power.
But the moment did come when Gorbachev made clear to the world the price he would not be willing to pay. Neither the Soviet Union nor the Warsaw Pact nations would be transformed into capitalist democracies. He has gone out of his way, in fact, to warn that under no circumstances would that be included in his deals with the West or with anyone else. “This w
ould be very dangerous,” he has said, rattling the sabers of conflict again, “and would merely revive the enmities of a former time.”
The reference was obviously to the Cold War, to the bitter forty-five years of contention between East and West. And it was aimed squarely at the political and entrepreneurial leaders of the West, who are intent on their tripod balancing act—and therefore on stability, peace and expansion of trade. Gorbachev may not be a born capitalist; but he clearly knows where the capitalist heart lies, and he seeks to establish a de facto convergence between his East and the West, made possible by as wide an application as possible of the West’s techniques in economics and industry.
When John Paul thinks of that convergence, he is thinking of much more than a mere fit or working convenience, a mere matching of needs and abilities. For in all frankness, both capitalism and Leninism have serious problems for which one or the other has developed some solutions.
Capitalism in its current libertarian form makes individual freedom its driving force. Leninism makes government control the driving force, but such control has proved to be inept for economic and industrial development.
Capitalist countries have not been able to correct the inevitable maldistribution of goods and services, or the dislocations that freewheeling markets cause. Hence, they move toward government control through such “safety nets” as welfare and related social remedy measures, environmental regulation, education subsidies, housing subsidies and other easements.
Soviet Leninism has not been able to limit the damage done by total government control. Hence, Gorbachev must lead the USSR and its former satellites into a system that will harmonize the economic needs of the system and the professional Leninist aim of the system.
There are more than a few such headings under which a deficiency on one side has been met by a solution—acceptable or not—on the other side. But when John Paul thinks and talks about convergence, such are not in his mind. He is thinking of the logical convergence that does arise between the two because both reject any religious or “faith” basis for human aspirations and activity.
The weakness and vulnerability of the West is thus laid bare for John Paul. Basing their stand on no absolute rule of morality, acknowledging the dominion and will of no divine person as the reason for or against this decision or that condition, not asking for divine protection from errors, Western negotiators are now locking minds and wills with a man who wears a supple mask that makes him look like them and talk the language they use. Any mention by them of what in the West are called human values—the dignity of the individual, human rights, democratic freedoms—can be and has already been matched on Gorbachev’s lips by soaring expressions matching all of theirs.
The suppleness of that mask affords him almost endless opportunities to overcome Western suspiciousness. Permitting the apparent “democratization” of the USSR’s former satellites, allowing (almost) a thousand flowers of criticism and self-opinion to bloom in public in the Soviet Union, apparently withdrawing from Afghanistan, opening up Moscow to the golden arches of McDonald’s—the list is endless—Gorbachev seems to be giving endless pledges of his good faith and his attachment to those “human values” the West touts as its very own norms of acceptable human morality. In the meanwhile, the Soviet president offers his Western counterparts the heady wine of fresh markets, banking and brokerage and joint venture possibilities, and an end to the yearly waste of dollars on the defensive and offensive shield of the West.
The secularist approach to human problems that is shared by both sides has placed them both in this precarious position. For what secularism kills off is the force of moral obligation to an authority believed and held to be outside the human conscience and to all human consciences, superior to the human conscience as such, and provided with sanctions to enforce the moral law or penalize its violation. Secularism allows of no such absolute. “One cannot but regret,” John Paul stated quite trenchantly during his January 1990 annual state-of-the-world address to the Vatican diplomatic corps of 120 ambassadors to the Holy See, “the deliberate absence of every transcendental moral reference in governing the so-called developed societies.” That one word “deliberate” evoked a momentary buzz of comments among the otherwise decorous body of diplomats. God and his moral law, John Paul was telling them bluntly, have been deliberately omitted from your councils of state.
There is, therefore, a spiritual blindness, a myopia in things of the spirit and of God—this is John Paul’s conclusion. It gets worse, according to the Pontiff. For that profundity of blindness to the moral dimension of human life brings on, as a consequence, a darkening of the mind’s clarity, so that the practical and highly important judgments Americans have to make when tangling with a Master Juggler of Gorbachev’s skill will be off the mark, awry, and unbalanced by unimportant elements. The February 1990 marriage of Susan Eisenhower, granddaughter of Dwight D. Eisenhower, to Roald Sagdeyev, adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev, evoked in millions the conviction that “the Cold War is really over.” Maureen Dowd, reporting the day’s events in Moscow on February 7, 1990, when the Kremlin Politburo decided to relax its monopoly on Soviet political power, wrote in The New York Times that in Washington that day, “some people were thunderstruck. Others were numb, unable to absorb one more remarkable blow to Communism…. So today the reaction was mostly muted wonder at the events in Moscow.”
Unknowingly, Peggy Noonan, speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and President Bush, put her finger on the effect of that darkened perception of the American mind. “We may have exhausted our capacity for surprise and delight when we watched children in Tiananmen Square quoting Jefferson and children in East Berlin taking pick-axes to the Berlin Wall as East German guards smiled for the camera.”
Neither surprise nor delight is required by those who have to do with Gorbachev and Gorbachevism. On the other hand, those emotions are the logical reactions of people who have become eyeless in the Gaza of Mikhail Gorbachev. And the danger is that once the passing delight and surprise are over, when cold reality sets in, the spiritual blindness and the chains of this moral prison holding down the human spirit will finally become too much. Men may well be tempted to shake and topple the very pillars of their material and earthly confinement and thus perish, unless a loving Father of all creatures still loves man so much that he will not abandon man in his self-made secularist prison and the darkness of his own unaided mind.
“All has been foreseen by God,” John Paul comments. “The Father of all of us has arranged human affairs so that they end with man being saved from himself.” For today men do need such a saving. “The growing secularism tends to obscure more and more and ultimately to negate man’s natural creaturely values … which God’s redemptive plan recognizes and empowers.” Without those values, human society would disintegrate.
19
Forces of the “New Order”:
The Two Models of a
Geopolitical House
In the shifting ground of human affairs today, the most surprising new contours are provided by two leaders, John Paul II and Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev appears as the active agent of changes to which the West is reacting, while John Paul II gives all the impression of one who, not in mere reaction, is riding herd over these active and reactive participants. Why these two leaders should be able to exercise these key functions is a source of puzzlement to those who are not aware of the two men’s importance; and to those who sometimes fail to appraise correctly and appreciate the reason for their prominence.
These two men are the only two among world leaders who not only head geopolitical institutions but have geopolitical aims. Geopolitics is their business. Now, the precise nature of the shift in world affairs is geopolitical. Alone among leaders, these two men have firsthand acquaintance with the geopolitical. But for the vast majority of onlookers and for many in government, geopolitics is merely a way of speaking about the mutual relationship of different systems of politics. Thus, the gargantuan change being
effected in the shifting ground escapes them.
The term “geopolitics” is a relatively recent invention. It is composed of two Greek words, meaning “earth” and “political system,” which the ancient Greeks never combined.
Those Greeks were very aware of the relations between different states and nations, each with its own political system, each being what the Greeks called a politeia. They saw all of these as constituting a loosely connected arrangement of differing political entities. Whether the relationships between them were based on peaceful trading or on signed alliances and associations, or on subjugation and imperial domination, the Greeks’ fundamental notion of internationalism was that it involved different politically structured systems. One state, one politeia, might dominate several others. Several states might group together in offensive and defensive alliances or in straight commercial and industrial partnership. But there never was a moment when the same political structure was accepted and established in what originally were politically different states. Nobody ever proposed that the same politeia be shared freely by the different states and nations.
This was the limited extent of their internationalism. Late in their history, some few individuals lauded and tried to practice the ideal of the cosmopolitis, the citizen of the world, the individual who felt “at home” in any and every one of the political systems of the day. But this was seen as an individual whimsy, a romantic and somewhat exotic experience, not as a desirable condition of mankind in general, and certainly not as embodying a political ideal to be striven for. They never even conceived of a cosmopoliteia. They never conjoined a word for “earth” or “world” with the word for “political system.”
Until the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, this internationalism provided the only framework within which relationships between different nations and states were considered.
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