Posted on 12/12/2004 2:13:45 PM PST by Valin
BOOK SUMMARY
THE UNIVERSAL HUNGER FOR LIBERTY
By Michael Novak
“With characteristic breadth, incisiveness, and hope, Michael Novak has written a sweeping road map for the 21st century,”writes Carl Gershman, in an apt summary of The Universal Hunger for Liberty. This book is, indeed, an attempt to “map” some of the great landmarks of the coming century, in culture, politics, and economics. It depicts graphically many serious threats to humankind, and especially to liberty, and yet it is a hopeful book. It goes where few have gone before. It may be Novak’s most important book since The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism.
The book’s opening and closing chapters concern the bitter conflicts--and creative possibilities--between Islamic lands and countries like the United States, whose origins lie in Judaism and Christianity. Novak highlights a split between Muslim and Jewish-Christian cultures that profoundly affects ways of thinking even today–a split that occurred as early as the twelfth century, on such central concepts as truth, liberty, and God. Yet he also discerns new resources for dialogue around these concepts, in light of the growing circle of free and prosperous societies around the Muslim world.
It cannot be, Novak notes, that individual dignity is open only to Christians and Jews, and not to Muslims; or that liberty is endowed by the Creator only among Christians and Jews, not Muslims. He argues that Islam, a religion based upon eternal rewards and punishments, must have latent within it a powerful doctrine of human liberty. This theory needs to be drawn out, and applied in many fields. Many grounds for new and serious conversation–not only how to think of liberty and law and truth, but also human rights and human dignity-- have appeared in recent years, on subjects of great importance to the human spirit. This renewed conversation between Islam and the West must be primarily spiritual, even though secular and materialistic concerns are vital and pressing. For the deep spiritual hunger of Muslim populations will be satisfied by nothing less. The same is true of many in the West, especially Americans.
Another point of originality is Novak’s attempt to sketch out four stars of “moral global positioning” for the coming global culture, which will help globalization to avoid the scylla of domination by one powerful culture and the charybdis of cultural relativism. He singles out cultural humility, respect for the regulative ideal of truth, respect for the dignity of the individual person, and human solidarity. These guiding stars make possible international comity without relativism. They establish the framework for a sustainable “moral ecology” for the global community, an ecology at least as important as the biophysical ecology of the planet an ecology that respects each participant in global dialogue and holds each to standards of truth. Novak calls his vision of the new pluralistic global community “Caritapolis.” It is rooted in a type of respect or friendship transcendently beyond any one culture. It looks both toward the global whole and toward the inalienable liberty of individual persons.
A third way in which Novak’s work is distinctive from that of most high-level theoreticians of world culture lies in his steady emphasis on human perversity and sin. In this, he follows the example of the founder of Western realism, St. Augustine (354-431? A.D.), and indeed he takes as his first reference point the latter’s great volume The City of God, one of the two or three books most influential in establishing liberty as the crimson thread of human history.
1. The Three Parts of the Book: Culture, Economics and Politics
Novak divides his book, like Gaul, into three parts: The culture of liberty, the economics of liberty, and the politics of liberty.
His argument begins with the proposition that World War IV was declared with the failed but deadly underground bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. Alas, we took that bombing, not as an act of war, but as a criminal act to be solved by detective work and through the courts. Little did we understand–until the second aircraft curved into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and it became clear that more was involved than a bizarre accident–that we were in fact at war, a long and brutal and worldwide war.
But if a war had been declared, who was the enemy? It turned out not to be a state but a heavily armed and well trained, highly disciplined, international terror network, with roots in a perverted version of Islam. It sprang from a version of Islam in which if there was any conflict between ancient religious injunctions and present political will, political will overruled–in such matters, for instance, as deliberate suicide and the wanton killing of innocents. Claiming to further Islam, the new network of terrorists trampled Islam wherever it blocked their way.
This network grew up around intelligent leaders who had divined the key weaknesses of advanced societies and invented a new form of warfare –asymmetric warfare–that turned their own weaknesses into strengths, and the strengths of the advanced societies into weaknesses. Using secrecy, they would use the most destructive but compact weapons of the advanced world to strike their most open, undefended urban complexes. This terrorist network could not survive without the support of some states and the complicity of others, but it did locate for its training camps many vast regions of the third world in which there was no state control at all. The network had a vast appetite for supporting funds and technical assistance. It even needed havens in which its wounded soldiers could recuperate.
Withal, the terror network had nothing to offer the vast Muslim populations–neither prosperity nor human rights. The governments that embraced a form of politically radical Islam became immensely unpopular with their citizenry–not only Afghanistan and Sudan (which broke into open civil war) but also Iran, where vast restlessness is reported among young people in the streets. Moreover, great turmoil rose in the souls of many Muslims. As one colonel of the Sudanese resistance, a former professor of Mcgill University asked in 2002, “Why must 21st century Muslims go back to the 11th century, instead of the 21st, for a correct interpretation of the Koran? I want to be a devout Muslim, but I do not want to go back to the 11th or even the 7th century to do so.” Many are seeking an Islam that embraces human rights, democracy, and a society of economic opportunity. They can see the rest of the world. They do not see how those good things contradict the essence of Islam.
One failure of western democracies, however, is their own unrelenting secularity. Despite the thesis common to social scientists of the mid-20th century that progress entails secularization, by the end of that century ethnic and religious vitalities, far from fading away, erupted almost everywhere. And secularism as an ethic has proved less and less satisfactory. Just as its systematic “non-judgmentalism” has no resources for halting the downhill slide of cultural decadence (so evident at such extravaganzas as half-time at the Super Bowl), its resources for nourishing the human spirit in its depths have been shown to be virtually nil. Worse than that, secularism has begun to show its own totalitarian tendencies, outlawing dissent from its creed and punishing all who do not conform to its own code of correctness. Judaism and Christianity have found it easier to adapt to democracy than democracy has found it to adapt to religion. And secularism has very little positive and actually religious to say to Islam. Secularism, however great its achievements, is not the answer to our current perplexities.
In a word, the problem we face in the coming century has profound cultural, economic, and political aspects to it, and all of these have a religious aspect. Difficult as it is for non-religious people to see (or perhaps to credit) this aspect, some success in empathizing with it is indispensable.
2. An Outline of the Book.
At the end of his Introduction, Novak supplies a brief outline of the rest of the book, which is worth recreating here, before elaborating on some of his major points afterwards:
First come two chapters on the culture of liberty. The first of these opens with the concrete question we are bound to address after the beginning of the war on terrorism: What shall be the nature of our long-term conversation with Islam? The second sets forth the main theoretical focus of this book, the transcultural concept of Caritapolis. Perhaps I have not here succeeded, or not succeeded well enough, in setting forth a concept that allows the many human civilizations to be engaged on the long path toward friendship, at one stage or another, with others who are radically different. But if I have written enough to suggest to another thinker, perhaps in another civilization, how to do it better, then I will consider myself a fortunate author. I only know that the task needs to be done. Normally, civilizational advancements must first be thought out before they can be achieved.
Part 2 addresses certain economic conditions of liberty, against the universal cry of pain that some two billion of the Earth’s six billion population still suffer under poverty, which is nowadays (as never before) unnecessary. By now, the secrets of how to create enough new wealth so that a firm material base can be put under every family and person on Earth are well known, and have, in fact, been reduced to system and practice. If whole peoples are content to remain in poverty, of course, they may do so–so long as they do not blame others for their plight. But if they wish to exit from poverty in a sustained and systematic way, over a period of twenty or thirty years, they can certainly follow the examples, say, of China and India, which are taking great strides in that direction today, just as the nations of East Asia did earlier, and others before and after them.
The topics treated in Part 2 include: a philosophy of economics; economic realism, as in China and India; the third wave of capitalism (in Catholic nations); and–as a bridge from economic to political questions–environmental realism, or what I call “blue environmentalism.”
Part 3 addresses the political ideas, habits, and institutions required by the free and virtuous society. I conclude this part with two chapters on two major religions of the world, Catholicism and Islam.
The first of these, chapter 8, describes the long struggle of Catholic peoples to come to terms with the principles and institutions of democracy, and in the end to lead the third wave of democratization around the world.
The last chapter describes the turmoil at the heart of Islam these days, the struggle between the politicized heresy that some call “Islamism” (as distinct from the noble religion of Islam), and that far larger majority of Muslims who wish to live in dignity, free from the oppression of secret police and unchecked tyrants, in societies of economic opportunity and prosperity. It is a struggle whose outcome deeply affects us all.
After September 11, 2001, we are all–we Americans, especially, but all the free world–implicated in that struggle. For 9/11 was a barbarous, misguided way of announcing: “See, political Islamists can be technically proficient, and strike a professional 21st-century blow to prove that we are not a people of the past.” Yet if political Islamists truly wish to enter into the 21st century on equal terms, why can’t they master the secrets of democracy and universal human rights, rather than the horrid earlier-century secrets of terrorism and assassination?
There is an alternative to terror. It is called, in the political order, democracy. In the economic order, it is called the dynamic enterprise economy. Also called (by Guy Sorman of France) “barefoot capitalism,” and by others “the ownership society,” it empowers poor people from the bottom up, as in China and India and a hundred other places.
Since the heart and dynamism of this new, non-traditional economy is insight, a creative idea for how to develop a new product or a new service, I prefer to name it after a word signifying the human head: in Latin caput, the root for the word that Karl Marx spent a lifetime denigrating, capitalism.
By whatever name you call it, a dynamic economic sector is the poor’s best hope of escaping the prison of poverty. It is the only system so far known to human beings to take poor people and make them, quite soon, middle class, and some of them even (horrors!) rich.
Some will take this as a too-optimistic book. Well, optimism can be a very creative force, and I am not opposed to it. But St. Augustine was no optimist; he was the father of political realism. He had far too keen a sense of human sin, and duplicity, and inconstancy–including his own–to be an optimist by a kind of cheap grace. He had enough realism to be wary of optimism, even to expect the worst. But he also had enough respect for the power among humans of the City of God to be ready always to be surprised by real grace–by, as George Washington had many occasions to remember with gratitude, from his many long months of retreat after retreat–the “signal interpositions of Providence in our feeble condition.” To those who do all that is in them, even in the darkness of discouragement, good things often enough draw them closer to what they most love. The sometimes obscured, patient power of the Creator draws all things to Himself.
As we come forth from Him, so we are drawn back to Him. It is not only Muslims who believe that. Jews and Christians do, too. And if the truth be told, so do most secular liberals, who regularly evince much more optimism about the possibilities of “progress” than anything in their metaphysical commitments entitles them to.
“The God who gave us life,” as we have already quoted Thomas Jefferson, “gave us liberty at the same time.” The Creator valued liberty mightily, and ranked it next to life itself. The universe He constructed through the mechanism of evolution contrived, at every one of the millions of turning points in the eons after the Big Bang, to form this fair earth, and make it habitable by human beings capable of human liberty. The slightest changes in the Big Bang’s carbon content, or in a million other hazards of evolution, would have made such beings inconceivable.
These breathtaking facts allow us (it would seem) some faint reason to believe that this narrative of liberty will not be finished until it has suffused every society on earth. And since the point of giving us freedom was to give us friendship, it would seem that the possibilities of Caritapolis–the City of Friendship–are still calling out to us from up ahead, in the gloom, in the wind, and for the whole world.
The Universal Hunger for Liberty: Why the Clash of Civilizations Is Not Inevitable
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1291146/posts
Yes. I'm pushing this book.
From the two article it sounds like it is worth reading. I had been holding the other article waiting for time to read it. I just finished reading both articles.
Not done with this book yet, but if I were to make a criticism of it the lack of concrete proposals would be it. Still good food for though.
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