Encountering Personhood in a Modern World

The 20th and 21st centuries have been marked by progressions of every kind; but, though beneficial on paper, these advances do not always provide an unequivocal improvement for mankind.  The advances of the last two centuries are opportunities to bestow needed developments to the human condition: newly articulated recognition of gender equality positions men and women to be equals on the social setting, while technological advances provide the world with better healthcare and means of tilling the earth.  Wealth opportunities exist in a way heretofore undreamt of, and time-saving devices allow for an increased freedom in deciding how one will live.  However, notwithstanding the benefit that progress can bestow, the advances of the centuries pose 5 unique challenges to encountering and living a human life.

The first challenge facing a Christian humanism is the pursuit of wealth.  For most of human history, humans have spent most of their time and resources in providing food and shelter to their families.  Only in the 20th century has household wealth seemed like a possibility, regardless of social status.  Unfortunately, abundant wealth prevents people from identifying permanent values and applying them to modern discoveries.  In their pursuit of wealth, societies become something of a survival of the fittest: despite more overall wealth, the disparity between the rich and the destitute becomes even further apart.  Thus, “buffeted between hope and anxiety and pressing one another with questions about the present course of events, [humans] are burdened down with uneasiness (Gaudium et Spes, 4).”

Technological advances gives humans the ability to see the world with precision like never before.  Unfortunately, this presents the opportunity by which the man as individual becomes eclipsed by man as part of a whole.  The world changes and moves forward “on so rapid a course that an individual person can scarcely keep abreast of it.  The destiny of the human community has become all of a piece, where once the various groups of men had a kind of private history of their own (Gaudium et Spes, 5).”  This is the second challenge facing Christian humanism: the precision with which man can now see the world gives rise to a spiritual agitation in the face of rapidly changing conditions of life.  

It is not only the individual man who becomes eclipsed: man finds his own identity as individual and as coherent place in a historical narrative lost to the abstract society.  The rapidly changing conditions of life impact the smallest communities the hardest: “traditional local communities such as families, clans, tribes, villages, various groups and associations stemming from social contacts, experience more thorough changes every day (Gaudium et Spes, 6).”  Rather than seeing their communities as necessary parts of their own identity and nature, such radical changes in these communities invite an unhealthy analysis, revisiting the fabric of the community makeup (or pretending that the community as such does not matter) as if community were just an arbitrary construction.  This is the third challenge facing Christian humanism: though exposure and greater access to the larger human community (as opposed to individual smaller communal identity) allows “a man's ties with his fellows [to be] constantly being multiplied,” these ties are not always conducive to encountering the person, and do not “however always promoting appropriate personal development and truly personal relationships (G et S, 6).”

The fourth and fifth challenges facing Christian humanism are closely related.  Specifically, they deal with tradition and religion, respectively.  The rapid decline in human identity as person and as member of a specific community “calls accepted values into question, especially among young people… the institutions, laws and modes of thinking and feeling as handed down from previous generations do not always seem to be well adapted to the contemporary state of affairs; hence arises an upheaval in the manner and even the norms of behavior (G et S, 7).”  Thus, communities destroy their own sense of tradition in their attempt at getting with the times.  And, tradition and religion are of the same cloth: what affects one affects the other.  Because of the revolution against tradition, “the denial of God or of religion, or the abandonment of them, are no longer unusual and individual occurrences. For today it is not rare for such things to be presented as requirements of scientific progress or of a certain new humanism (G et S, 7).”  Thus, man can lost not only his own identity, but his relationship with God.

The fabric of the world is oriented towards encounter with Personhood.  Man feels the call to encounter God and experience Him through the created order, beginning with other humans.  In a rapidly changing world, encounter with humans becomes harder and harder, leading ultimately to a barrier in encountering the Divine.  Progress is not a bad thing; like any other tool, it must be used properly and oriented towards encounter with personhood, lest it subvert the created order.