Keys of This Blood (61 page)

John Paul's moral appraisal of Gorbachev's style of secularism—what the Soviet leader calls his “new thinking”—rests on what the General Secretary himself outlined as the three dominant traits of that thinking: “the lessons of the past, the realities of the present, and the objective logic of world development.”

Excluded totally from these traits is any tradition of reliance on the Creator of this world and the Savior of all men and women. The world as Mikhail Gorbachev thinks about it, at least for public consumption, is a world on its own. It is the world of the professional atheist and of the confirmed materialist. It is a world of bronze skies and dead earth, where man's gaze can find no infinite expanse to roam, and only the realm of endless matter to fascinate him. Let him look for no light from on high for the eyes of his soul, but only for the light that issues from gross matter.

The genius of Gorbachev is that, to a degree it is hard to exaggerate, he makes this view glitter for the secularized minds of Americans and Europeans. For such minds, Gorbachev has become the attendant angel of secularism, who beckons for them to reach as high as they themselves are willing to reach, with him as their guide.

He is their assurance that we are not condemned to suffer in the future
from all those things that have plagued us in the past—from inequality, indignity, dire want of the necessities of life, gross and institutionalized injustice, early and ignominious death. He is their living guarantee that, together, we can reach to the very core of this earth, into every hidden place of this human cosmos. Together we can humanize it all.

We are not necessarily separate pygmy entities, dwarfed by the skies and stumbling on a darkened plain. For Gorbachev will show us how humankind's collective intellect can and will be accumulated within a new—a geopoliticized—form of the present United Nations. On that day of human history, man—the man each one of us is—will be made into a giant, standing as the center and focus of all our human activity as nations and as people. That is the beckoning height of Gorbachev's neo-Leninist reach.

Nor are we alone in this Atlas-like effort to carry the universe on our shoulders. Gorbachev may be the chief attendant angel in this globalist effort. But he points to other angels we must all obey. He points to the objective processes that, unbidden by us, form global channels for history's progress. And he points to the iron logic of history itself. These processes of which Gorbachev speaks are made evident to us in various ways; and they do seem always to point to that iron logic of history he talks about.

As a simple example, the environment of our world is threatened. If that means we must stop using plastic and chlorofluorocarbons, then the iron logic of history demands that we must find better ways to pack our fast foods and dump our trash, and better ways of refrigeration, and better ways to dispense our deodorants. Similarly, our planet cannot support too great a population. If that means we must have fewer people, then the iron logic of history demands that we practice contraception, abortion and even euthanasia.

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 would 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.