Keys of This Blood (59 page)

In America, the once self-perpetuating, independent economy was a fact, but it was more. It was the symbol of ultimate protection for those who were lucky enough to live there. But now the American economy depends seriously, even avidly, on the economy of the world around it; and the lives and fortunes of the people who live there depend on what happens in the lives and fortunes of over two dozen other nations. The American Bald Eagle is still the national symbol for high-soaring strength and pride and independent daring. But it is no longer the symbol of uniquely preeminent superpower strength. Pride and daring are not even cultivated as national virtues. One has been besmirched as “imperialistic,” the other has been lampooned as inept. The propaganda of “blame America” has played its part in this. But chiefly this change is due to the new fact that the undertakings of America are no longer those of a “nation under God.” The public consensus is that a wall forbids Americans to think and act as a “nation under God.” But it was that original persuasion that instilled the pride and encouraged the daring.

In the Soviet Union, three symbols reigned supreme. Instead of the Eagle, they had the Russian Bear of incalculable menace. Instead of man-made democracy, they had the man-made Party-State, housed in the Kremlin and dominating all the Russias (and much more besides) from Red Square, Moscow. And with no parallel anywhere, they had the vast stretches of winter snows that were the ultimate guarantee that
Mother Russia could never successfully be invaded—not by Napoleon Bonaparte, who skulked back to France with barely 10,000 ragged survivors out of an invading force of 400,000; and not by Adolf Hitler, who lost three entire armies to those Russian snows. Not by anyone, went the Russian saying. Mother Russia was impregnable.

Now, by contrast, the West has to deal with what appears to be a very friendly, unthreatening teddy bear, who wants to eat our food and be like us. It appears that the professionally subversive Party-State has renounced all wishes to subvert democracy; it actually wants to democratize itself as far as possible. And were the Russian snows to drift even higher and even into summer, they would not affect the invisible invaders that penetrate everywhere and are welcomed everywhere as the new global information and communications networks fall across this region.

In China, too, there was a time not long ago when three symbols spoke everywhere of that nation that is a vast region in itself. These were symbols of its leaders and its people, of its inner strength and of its outward threat.

The Dragon was China's fierce and vengeful exterminating angel; it was the incalculable protector of China as the center of the world, the “Middle Kingdom”; and it symbolized the role of the ultimate dictator of China's fate. The man-made Great Wall told the world that China was separate, self-contained, a place that could not and would not be assimilated into the rest of the world. The long, winding Yellow River mirrored it its ever-flowing waters the perpetuity of the Chinese identity itself. Foreign devils come and go, that river had always said, but China goes on forever.

These days, the Dragon has been transformed into another reality: the diminutive figure of Deng Xiaoping heading the CP of China from behind the guarded walls of Zhongnanhai Compound, where China's emperors once lived and from where he and the dyed-in-the-wool members of the CP intend to maintain control through the classical means of Leninist terror.

Like the Russian snows, the Great Wall is no longer a barrier to information and ideas, or to jet planes and missiles. So weak is that barrier as a symbol now that, just as in an old Chinese legend the tears of Meng Jiangnui washed away that part of the Wall where she found her dead lover, so the tears of hope and suffering shed by China's people can threaten to sweep aside all that Wall has stood for.

As to the Yellow River, it does still flow as surely as it always has. But
for the Chinese mind today, its symbolism has been shunted rudely aside by its practical function. Now it is the key to the flow of goods and services required to satisfy the new capitalist desire among the people. And those who talk about its color breathe not a word about the perpetuity mirrored in its yellow waters. Instead, they see riverine industrialization, on which China's near future will depend; and they see pollution.

As profound as the changes are in those first three of John Paul's crucial regions, it is in Western Europe that he sees the deepest change and the source of the greatest pathos in terms of human destiny. Long before the symbols of identity lost their meaning for the United States, the Soviet Union and China, Europe freely cast away the institutions that housed the symbols of the only identity that region ever achieved as a unit.

Europe never relied on the natural protection of snows, or on the man-made defense of a 1,500-mile wall, or on a river as the symbol of its continuity.

During the centuries when European unity was at its height and vibrant, Europeans housed their hopes and found their believing trust beneath the domes and Gothic spires of the churches they built. They called that whole territory by a kind of family name: Christendom; and in the span of just a hundred years—between 1170 and 1270 alone—they built eighty cathedrals and major churches, the living symbols of the reality in their lives: the Catholic faith.

Europe's protection was centered on its faith. Its identity was provided in the papacy. The unifying principle of its civilization lay in its common acknowledgment of the primacy of the Pope.

That Christendom has ceased to exist. The faith that was once Europe's protection is now dead in those nations. And the papacy is no more a symbol of their identity than the primacy of the Pope is their preoccupation or concern.

While it is true that Christianity is no longer understood as a force to be reckoned with in Europe of the 1990s, it is just as true that Pope John Paul displays no pointless insistence that it should be. This is one of the mystifying traits of his papal policy. In a 1988 address startling to some for its frankness, John Paul told a visiting group of European delegates and students that they did not have to build their new Europe of 1992 and beyond on Roman Catholic principles. He did raise the caution that they should not forget Europe's traditions of civilization and culture. And while the Pontiff knows that was a far cry from standing in their midst as the living symbol of that civilization and that culture, such was not for a moment his intent.

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One fact of geopolitical life John Paul must deal with is that the disappearance of the forces that, until recently, dominated in these four major regions has not resulted in a neutral situation for any of them. And certainly not for the Pope.

In the United States and Europe—in all the market economies of the West nations, in fact—Pope John Paul sees one mentality, a single persuasion. In its broadest lines, he sees the same mentality reflected in the words and actions of Poles and Hungarians, Romanians, East Germans, Czechoslovaks and Bulgarians—and, not surprisingly, of the Soviets themselves—as they grapple with the newfound liberties Gorbachevism has so far proffered to them. He detected the same persuasion in the student protests of 1989 in Beijing's Tiananmen Square; and it obviously stood behind the policies of Beijing's central government. It is, finally, a persuasion that has always been shared by several of the aspiring globalist groups that have the Pope's attention—by New Agers, Mega-Religionists and Humanists, to be sure; and in most concrete terms by Internationalists and Transnationalists.

So common is this persuasion, in other words, that John Paul identifies it as one principal force molding the society of nations today. There are a lot of arguments about this force, but no single name for it has been agreed upon. Those who exalt this mentality and defend its qualities against all comers give it such general names as “secularism,” or “realism,” or “hard-headed practicality.” Critics refer to it by another set of names. “Materialism,” “secularism” and “this-worldliness” are used frequently. Those who condemn this persuasion outright see it as “neopaganism,” “godlessness,” “apostasy,” and even as “Satanism.”

By whatever name it may be defended or attacked, there is very little difficulty in recognizing this force—the power of this persuasion—as an operating influence in individuals and in corporate groups. And there is no difficulty, either, in identifying the obvious preferences and phobias that are the constant companions of those who are guided by this mentality.

If there were a motto for this point of view, it would be something like “Let experience be your guide.” Your only guide.

Those who live by this motto—or, in any case, by its meaning—display a constant and fundamental preference in every area for the experience of living. In the practical business of daily life, in the grind or excitement of daily work and in the daily dream and quest for prosperity, concrete experience is acknowledged to be superior to any principle or rule that might come by any other means—no matter what the source. That is
about as far as preferences extend. Experience is about it. Phobias, on the other hand, are around every corner.

The primary phobia is for all principles and rules that come from any source outside one's own experience. It is a rule of experience itself, in fact, that one must refuse to be guided by any rule or any principle one hasn't seen demonstrated with one's own eyes, and preferably in one's own life. “What goes around comes around” is all right as a principle, for example. Every person and every group over the age of three has seen that one work in terms of experience, and it has practical applications.

But a rule or principle such as “Seek first the Kingdom of God” or “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” is not hardheaded and practical. In fact, anyone of this persuasion will tell you that such rules and principles are “abstract” and “impractical.” The few who still speak in philosophical terms condemn such rules and principles as “aprioristic.”

For people—individuals, groups and nations—who share this persuasion, the judgment of what is true depends, as everything does, on their own experience. How they must act in order to be “morally good” in their own eyes, and in order to be successful in the business of living, cannot be deduced from “abstract” principles. And it cannot be announced by pope or prophet, priest or philosopher. It can only be concluded by individual or common—but always concrete—experience.

At its highest reach, this supreme deference to experience means that, in and of itself, only mankind has the ability to avoid defeat and despair. In and of itself, only mankind has the ability to create salvation, right here. And, if that brand of salvation isn't the Paradise of the Bible, or the Heaven of Christians, it does hold the promise of greater or lesser relief from pain and want. In fact, it holds the promise of material circumstances as favorable as can be fashioned.

Given such a reigning phobia for absolute rule and principles, and given the companion phobia for any authority proclaiming absolute rules and principles, it must be clear that secularists do not defer to the Bible of Christians or Jews, or to the Koran of Islam. But they don't rely on personal whim either. Unpredictable happenstance does not govern secularist behavior. Accumulated experience does that.

The accumulated experience of a nation is to be found in its national documents, in its national story, in its folklore and in its traditions. All of that, working in combination with presently lived experience, provides a set of lessons and practical values for the members of each nation and for each nation as a whole.

Within that setting, organized religion may well have a valuable function,
provided that none of the moral precepts or doctrines of organized religion be insisted upon as the absolute rules and principles that must govern human behavior. Indeed, in order to be a useful element in preserving what secularists call the “soul” of a nation, religion must join art and literature in adjusting to the concrete level of experience.

Thus, Humanist Schuyler G. Chapin can safely speak of the arts as “vital to sustaining our national existence,” despite our “present greed-oriented, anti-intellectual society” in America. But no good secularist would say the same of organized religion as long as it insists upon its absolute rules and principles, and upon its recourse to absolute authority—even if that authority is God's.

Historian Arthur Schlesinger put organized religion neatly in its place within the secularist scheme of things. Americans must save themselves, Schlesinger wrote, “at whatever risk of heresy or blasphemy … sustained by our history and traditions”; for “the American mind is by nature and tradition skeptical, irreverent, pluralistic and rationalistic … relativism is the American way.”

It is typical of our age of global communications that the most accurate, and the most poignant, description and praise of the secularist phobia for religion and religious authority has come out of China. Astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, born and bred in the long day of Mao Zedong's rule, came to international notice during President Bush's 1988 visit to mainland China, when it was widely broadcast that the President had included Fang on his list of honored dinner invitees and the Chinese authorities had excluded him from that honor. A known dissident in Communist China, Fang saw the handwriting on the wall and soon took refuge in the American Embassy in Beijing, where he remained until the summer of 1990. He now resides in England.

The year before, in 1987, Fang wrote a canticle to the highest ideals of secularism. Man, he said in that work, is not made to be under the control of “overbearing power.” Man has within him his own power, “the moral law within.” Governed by that power alone, man must take to science as the only path worthy of his dignity. As one would expect, Communism and its absolutes fare no better than religion under the pen of Fang Lizhi. “Science has only disdain and disgust for the curses by totems, for the barbarities, the addiction to lies, and the worship of the nonexistent—all such constitute the bulwarks of political dictatorship.” In Fang's mind, the “nonexistent” lumps the ideology of Marxists and the faith of believers in one heap of contemptible things.