Brief Meditation on Pope John Paul II

Thinking about Pope John Paul II – and the philosopher-theologian Karol Wojtyla - whom I loved and admired. I was always drawn to him because the dignity of the human person is at the forefront of his thought, which is always on my mind as well. The roots of his concern with the dignity of man are not merely theoretical. He grew up in Poland under Nazi occupation. He was the bishop of Krakow, which is to say, the bishop of the diocese where Auschwitz is located – as he himself pointed out as an explanation of his concern with dignity. He lived in communist Poland. Despite the nominal humanism of Marxism, I heard of a person who had lived under communist oppression once express its actual message thus: the basic message you are sent every day is that you have no dignity, you have no worth; your worth is reduced to your labor value or utility to the collective (actually the State and its leaders). This is why I have always been a “liberal.” The individual can’t be reduced like that. The dignity of the  individual has to be the center of any political regime. It is why I came to see the contradiction between this principle – “die dignity of Man is inviolable” as the German constitution puts it (die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar) – and capitalism in its present form as an all-pervasive political and cultural determinant. The city has allowed to market to take over all of the city. We are reduced to our status, wealth, labor power, and such, no different that the man had described his life in communism. Communist propaganda was primitive. Communist propaganda had very little hold over the former East Germans I have known. It was commonly regarded as a joke. The mind control of this regime is light years ahead of anything the Communist rulers were capable of. Like communism – I think much more aggressively and effectively – capitalist life undermines our sense of dignity, of being a unified soul with an independent mind capable of judgment and honestly loving ourselves and seeing others as intelligible objects of love. Even on the progressive left, the ideas that are universally human are debunked in favor of a reduction to category. Colonialism was wrong not because it was a crime against justice, a crime against human dignity. It was wrong because one category of human, white males, oppressed another category of human, people of color, the males of which were oppressing another category, women of color, who themselves often oppressed another category, children of color. But why shouldn’t they if the categories are essential and there is no common humanity, no human family, no human dignity, no Idea of justice to work against it?

   John Paul II worked toward helping people feel their own dignity within inhumane regimes that reduced us to categories, reduced categories to relative value, to do to people what capitalists do to the earth. He was like the Good Samaritan. The fallen “neighbor” was modern humanity.