304 pages Basic Books Publication Date: September 2004 Hardcover ISBN: 0465051316

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September 2004
The Universal Hunger for Liberty: Why the Clash of Civilizations Is Not Inevitable
By Michael Novak

As the United States pursues a "forward strategy of freedom" in the greater Middle East, Michael Novak has written a searching examination of the desire for liberty that stirs not only Christians and Jews but increasingly many Muslims as well. Recognizing that liberty is endowed in all human beings by the Creator, Novak traces the hundred-year growth of terrorism in dictatorships that have little regard for human dignity and personal liberty. He considers the conversation the West must have with Islam regarding the culture, economics, and politics of liberty, but he also notes the self-destructive tendencies of secularism in western democracies.

Michael Novak is the George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy and the director of social and political studies at AEI. His numerous books include The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1982); On Cultivating Liberty: Reflections on Moral Ecology (1999); and On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding (2001). This summary is adapted in part from the introduction to The Universal Hunger for Liberty.

This book is an attempt to "map" some of the great landmarks of the coming century in culture, politics, and economics. It graphically depicts many serious threats to humankind, and especially to liberty, yet it is a hopeful book.

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, concerning 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--the deep spiritual hunger of Muslim populations will be satisfied by nothing less. The same is true of many in the West, especially Americans.

Novak sketches four stars of "moral global positioning" for the coming global culture, which will help globalization to steer between the twin dangers of domination by one powerful culture and 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 and one 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, and it looks toward the global whole and toward the inalienable liberty of individual persons.

Novak's work is distinctive from that of most high-level theoreticians of world culture in his steady emphasis on human perversity and sin. In this, he follows the example of the founder of Western realism, St. Augustine (354-430 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.

Culture, Economics, and Politics

Novak divides his book into three parts: the culture, economics, and politics of liberty.

His argument begins with the proposition that a new worldwide war 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, brutal, and global 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 practiced a form of 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 and former professor of McGill University asked in 2002, "Why must twenty-first century Muslims go back to the eleventh century, instead of the twenty-first, for a correct interpretation of the Koran? I want to be a devout Muslim, but I do not want to go back to the eleventh or even the seventh 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 in Novak's view, however, is their own unrelenting secularity. Despite the thesis common to social scientists of the mid-twentieth 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 "nonjudgmentalism" has no resources for halting the downhill slide of cultural decadence (so evident at such extravaganzas as halftime 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 shown 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 short, Novak sees the problem we face in the coming century as having profound cultural, economic, and political aspects, and all of these as having a religious aspect. Difficult as it is for nonreligious people to see (or perhaps to credit) this aspect, some success in empathizing with it is indispensable.

An Outline of the Book

After an introduction 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. Novak attempts to set 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. After all, civilizational advancements must first be thought out before they can be achieved.

Part two 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 along with others before and after them. Part two topics 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 Novak calls "blue environmentalism."

Part three addresses the political ideas, habits, and institutions required by a free and virtuous society, concluding with two chapters on two major religions of the world, Catholicism and Islam. The first of these, chapter eight, 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 Novak asserts that 9/11 was a barbarous, misguided way of announcing: "See, political Islamists can be technically proficient, and strike a professional twenty-first-century blow to prove that we are not a people of the past." Yet if political Islamists truly wish to enter into the twenty-first 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 termed (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, nontraditional economy is insight, a creative idea for how to develop a new product or a new service, Novak names 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 best hope for poor people to escape 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 an overly optimistic book. Novak is certainly not opposed to optimism, which he sees as a very creative force. 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," wrote 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.

 This book summary is available in Adobe Acrobat PDF format.