COLUMN

GETTING PERSONAL

Laura Garcia

We live in superficial times. Listening to the average television commercial provides a pretty clear picture of what makes America tick - comfort, status, material possessions, personal appearance, prosperity, a laid-back existence. This sort of self-indulgent, problem-free philosophy of life might seem harmless, perhaps even a little endearing, were it not for the deeply sinister effects it is promoting in the culture of death. All of the most toxic elements of our society feed on the mindless cult of utility that measures everything and everyone with calculator in hand. To cite just one example of this mentality, Richard Doerflinger reports that "The NIH Human Embryo Research Panel's chief ethicist, Professor Ronald Green, proposed [at a recent meeting] that the intelligence and articulate members of a society should vote on whether other members of the [human] species deserve the status of 'personhood.' This judgment should be based on enlightened self-interest: Would a vote to grant personhood benefit the rest of us, or harm us (for example, by preventing us from doing lethal experiments on this human that could add to medical knowledge)?" Even though this cost/benefit analysis would apply equally well to human beings after birth as well as before, "it was accepted by the nineteen members of the NIH panel without a dissenting voice." ("The Gospel of Life: A Symposium," in First Things, October 1995, p. 36)

In the face of such assaults on human dignity, justified and endorsed by our universities' intellectuals, Pope John Paul II eloquently proclaims the primacy of the person, of human values over economic ones. The word "person" appears frequently in the titles of the Holy Father's philosophical and theological writings, and if one can detect an overriding passion in his work, it is to uncover the deep significance of our being made in the image of a personal God. At the start of the Second Vatican Council, Karol Wojtyla told a radio audience that "The Council and the Church ...regard the call concerning the dignity of the human person as the most important voice of our age." As he was scheduled to celebrate Mass the next day in the council hall, Wojtyla announced his intention to offer the following prayer: "I wish to ask God in a special way for one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the gift often referred to as the gift of piety - in essence, the gift of the reverence due each creature for the sake of God." ("On the Dignity of the Human Person," in Karol Wojtyla, Person and Community, tr. Theresa Sandok, OSM, New York: Lang, 1993, pp. 179-180.)

It seems likely that part of the Holy Spirit's answer to that prayer was the election of Wojtyla to the See of Peter some fifteen years later. No one has spoken more profoundly or more eloquently about the value of persons, or about the mission we are called to simply because we are personal beings. The academy today is increasingly schizophrenic on the subject of what a human being is. One faction endorses Madonna's reductionist view ("We're living in a material world, and I am a material girl"). According to this "scientific" model, humans are merely biological organisms, completely determined in their behavior by a combination of genes and environmental forces. Preferential treatment for humans gets vilified as "speciesism"; dolphins get more sympathy than preborn human babies. In contrast (even in contradiction) to this view, some start from our subjective experience of ourselves as free agents, and end up promoting a wildly independent view of humans with extravagant powers to define themselves and the world however they choose. The Supreme Court endorsed this model in its Casey decision, granting persons the "right to define [their] own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."

The Holy Father overcomes this incoherence by bringing together the objective truth about human nature and the subjective personalistic perspective that emphasizes our freedom. This personalist approach presupposes the great truths of the natural law tradition, that humans are rational animals who transcend the merely biological sphere and whose good includes the possession of virtue and truth and beauty. But John Paul looks also to our inner experience, where the primary fact we discover about ourselves is that we are free. Unlike other creatures, we can be said to possess ourselves, and so to be capable of creating ourselves, at least in the moral sense. We cannot manipulate the world or the aspects of our nature that are simply given; our actions must accord with the truth. But we give shape to our character, making ourselves into good or bad persons by our choices. Bringing together these fundamental truths about persons, the Holy Father claims that our rationality and self-awareness exist so that we can be free, and our freedom exists so that we can love. Only free beings can make a free, disinterested gift of self to another. Only creatures who possess themselves can give themselves.

In a society totally clueless about the "vision thing," the Pope offers a radical Christian humanism that could transform the human family into a civilization of love. This is a humanism that acknowledges the fact that other persons are just like me: each is another I. The Holy Father cites with approval Immanuel Kant's formulation of the fundamental moral principle that one should act in such a way that the person is always an end and never a means of one's action. "Vatican II gave classic expression to this conviction when it said that the human being is 'the one creature on earth that God willed for itself' (Gaudium et Spes, 24)" ("The Condition of Culture Through Human Praxis," Person and Community, p. 267). The freedom proper to human beings cannot simply be indiscriminate choosing; it must respect the truth, especially what is true in the sense of what is "fitting" or "appropriate" to persons.

This personalistic approach affords a real advantage in addressing moral questions, where the Church has been accused of promoting a dry, unfeeling legalism. John Paul II presupposes that the good for persons can be discerned in large part from the objective point of view, looking at whether one's actions help or hinder human flourishing, for example. But he persistently turns our attention toward the interior life, toward attitudes, motives, and the orientation of the heart. Thus he explains that contraception is sinful not only because in sterilizing the conjugal act one fails to respect the nature of the sexual urge (which is ordered to procreation), but also because in failing to respect this nature, one fails to properly respect one's spouse, treating him or her merely as an object of use.

For the most pressing moral debates of our time, the choice between treating persons as objects and treating them as ends in themselves is even more obvious. Our collective contempt for others in abortion and fetal experimentation has blossomed into contempt even for our own lives in the debate over assisted suicide. In this disheartening atmosphere, the Holy Father's concern for human dignity could not be more necessary or more welcome. Like St. Paul in Athens, John Paul II in Baltimore last fall left us with an appeal to live up to the truths we already know. "At the center of the moral vision of your founding documents is the recognition of the rights of the human person, and especially respect for the dignity and sanctity of life in all conditions and at all stages of development. I say to you again, America, in the light of your own tradition: love life, cherish life, defend life, from conception to natural death" (Make Room for the Mystery of God, Pauline Books, 1995, p. 94).

With the prayers of this Pope and the help of the Holy Spirit, anything is possible. v

Laura Garcia, a regular Catholic Dossier columnist, is professor of philosophy at Rutgers University, wife of Jorge, mother of four, and one of the most eloquent pro-life speakers in the nation.