Man’s Modern Isolation

I mentioned elsewhere that JPII began his pontificate by going backwards, in a sense.  He refrained from plowing straight ahead, and instead began his writings from a place of reclaiming Man’s correct anthropological makeup.  Incorrect foundations only allow for shaky constructions, and JPII was not blind to the faulty construction of the modern world.  The Social Contractors gave rise to both Marxism and Capitalism, which in turn canonized the societal position that culture, the polis, and law was an imposition on Man’s freedom, and a necessarily limiting factor on his personhood and subjectivity.  The truth, however, is quite the opposite: culture and the polis are not artificial constructions but necessary features in the civilized and humanized world.  Only by starting from this precept can we hope to avoid the pitfalls our society designs for us.

The modern world is caught in an apparently un-reconcileable pull between Man’s physical needs and his immaterial subjectivity.  “In the modern world,” writes JPII in Redemptoris Missio, paragraph 8, “there is a tendency to reduce man to his horizontal dimension alone. But without an openness to the Absolute, what does man become? The answer to this question is found in the experience of every individual, but it is also written in the history of humanity with the blood shed in the name of ideologies or by political regimes which have sought to build a “new humanity” without God.”  This “new humanity” without God is focused solely on the physical attributes of Man, upon fulfilling his needs and even stockpiling beyond his needs.  And, in the new anthropology of modernity, why should he not?  The Social Contractors posit that everyone is out to take his goods, anyhow, and only refrain from doing so because they are afraid of being cast into the brutal and violent state of nature, if they get caught.  

Now, it cannot be said that Man’s physical needs are optional, or even secondary to his life.  JPII admits this in an address given in Poland: “We know full well that material means are a necessary condition for human existence and its ‘humanization.’  Used in the right measure, they help make people’s lives truly human.  The lack of such a measure reduces people to a level of life beneath that worthy of a human being.”  So, we are right to recognize that human flourishing requires no small amount of physical and material means.  However, he continues one: “We must, however, very precisely distinguish that which is merely a condition for a truly human life from that which is decisive for such a life… Culture (in the authentic and full sense of the word, and not as a set of substitutes and pretexts) is constituted through human praxis to the extent that through it people become more human, and not merely acquire more means.  In this regard, the contemporary situation of the humanum carries a dramatic challenge.  Alongside societies and people who have an over abundance of means there exist societies and people who suffer from a lack of them, from an insufficiency of means.  It goes without saying that we should work toward a just distribution of goods.  This is a self-evident principle.  A departure from the realization of this principle is a threat to the humanum.  One might ask, however, whether the threat is not greater where an over abundance of means, a superfluity of what people have, obscures who they are and who they ought to be (p. 268-69, Person and Community).”  In reducing Culture and the state to a means to an end, that end being more physical means for individual and isolated survival, Man actually becomes less himself.

We could speak on and on about the materialistic society, but in truth it is no real difference from any other time in history.  Man has always been greedy, and the effects of Original Sin always orient him towards that which is not God.  However, when we recognize the pitfalls of our own society, we can make the effort to sidestep them and not perpetuate them.