I remember so well the founding days of the Institute on Religion and Democracy. We were such a small and humble organization, so few of us, so lightly funded. Yet we had strong hearts, bold ambitions, and lots and lots of good information. As anyone can guess, Richard John Neuhaus was the leading spirit, the intellectual guide. He was still a Lutheran then and loved to nail manifestoes on Cathedral doors, so he nailed up the founding manifesto of IRD, telling how the key democratic ideas of human dignity, equality, fraternity, and liberty flowed from Christian roots and Christian understandings. And he expressed shock—SHOCK—at how many of our local parishes were using materials that attacked democracy, coming out of the National Council of Churches on Riverside Drive, New York. Anti-Democratic materials: materials siding with the Sandinistas; materials siding with violent Palestinian organizations; materials siding with the anti-democratic effort to bring down the fragile democracy in El Salvador.
This flagrant anti-democratic program did not belong in Christian preaching in the churches, IRD strongly felt, first because it was so overtly and purely political and, second, because its politics were so out of keeping with the Christian inspirations that gave birth to democratic institutions and ideas. Many congregants in the pews did not at all appreciate the national offices of their churches, clustered in New York City around the NCC, expending donations from the pews to promote so violent and so misguided an agenda.
Well, IRD got started with a bang. One of our earliest doggedly documented reports was a description of the actual deeds and practices of the violent forces the church elites in New York were nurturing. Suddenly, before we even had a fully functioning office, one of the great television networks—CBS on 60 Minutes—reported on IRD’s efforts, using the information on these anti-democratic movements that we had marshaled. A huge explosion went off in various New York offices of the churches.
It struck me in those days—remembering my Horace—“Mountains will tremble in birth pangs, and out will run a ridiculous mouse” (Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus). I have always thought that the symbol of IRD ought to be a mischievously grinning mouse, because as an organization we were so tiny, and so squeaky-voiced. Whereas the huge buildings in New York we so squeakily called to account were massive, well funded, and elegantly equipped with all the instruments of propaganda. This little mouse did its best imitation of a roar, and those buildings shook.
Well, not literally. But an awful lot of the nation’s denominations decided rather quickly to pull their national offices out of New York City, and bring them back closer to their members in Louisville, Chicago, and Cleveland.
We hadn’t intended it this way, but at our birth, presidential support for democracy came from a surprising direction. Most of us there at the founding of IRD were lifelong Democrats, but in 1980 a Republican president turned against his party’s traditional isolationism, and pivoted forward with a torchlight of support for universal human rights. In his very first few weeks, President Reagan announced at a White House dinner for Margaret Thatcher that Communism was even then about to be swept into the dustbin of history. Pigeons at the opinion pages of The New York Times fluttered noisily into the air, others in the mainstream media called Reagan an ignorant and dangerous man. But then, within ten short years, the Berlin Wall came down, and a little later the whole Soviet Union crumpled into dust. Russia announced that it was beginning to build democracy and capitalism.
Thus, our little Institute on Religion and Democracy, founded in 1981, hit a note of unexpected international resonance. We watched with joy a decade-long and marvelous blooming of new democracies: from the Philippines to Chile to Poland, the Czech and Slovak Republics, and Hungary. Not to mention Russia itself.
Two years later, Diane Knippers, that great woman whom we now honor, became the president of IRD, in 1993. She was the leader who took IRD through its transition from fighting those who were destroying democracy from the outside, to fighting those sickly growths that cling to democracies like barnacles to ships, and steadily spread rot through democratic virtues from within. Even capitalism itself, Diane took from Tocqueville, thrives when it is supported by a culture of virtue, a culture open before the judgment of a transcendent God. Capitalism’s corruption erodes the institutions of democracy.
The necessary condition for the forward thrust of a successful democracy is a thriving, inventive, creative economy. Capitalism is not a sufficient condition for the strength of a democracy, but a necessary one. And so Diane turned IRD in the direction of defending and nourishing a democratic culture, through its religious and public culture. What are the primary supports of a free and creative system of political economy? Diane diagnosed them as the suffusion of Jewish and Christian commitments and virtues within them. Without those, she thought, democracies grow sickly.
In other words, Diane turned IRD toward “cultural ecology,” or an “ecology of the human.” The physical earth itself depends on a favorable ecology. But so does the inner life of the human race. An invisible gas of relativism, the dry gas of nihilism, chokes off the air supply to human morality, incapacitates it, suffocates it. Without a morality suitable to human upward striving, democracy will slowly die.
Even at Diane’s too-early death in 2005, a new attack was already being launched on the free world’s free and inventive economies, even within the United States. Under economic bad times, envy, that most deadly of all the deadly sins, multiplies like a virus. Region is turned against region, class against class, neighbor against neighbor. By contrast, under conditions of prosperity each citizen of a democracy pursues her own happiness, according to whatever path she chooses, without envying those who choose otherwise, or who happen to gain more wealth.
Fighting envy is the IRD’s main task today. Some of our religious rivals wish to replace democratic capitalism with social democracy. And to that end, they badly misconceive of two great ideals: the common good and social justice.
Our rivals claim that Americans must now make “the common good” the central concern of our society. But into this cry they slip a hidden and deadly poison: They mean by “the common good” more new spending by the federal state, more new regulations by the federal state, and the imposition of ever higher taxes by the federal state.
And yet never in the history of this Republic until now has the federal state spent more trillions of dollars, dollars it does not have, dollars that it must borrow from our children and grandchildren. This trend has proceeded under both Democratic and Republican administrations, but it has now reached its worst point. Never before has the federal state dreamed up more intolerable, irrational, and corrupt regulations—paying off this group by tying that group down with silken regulatory ropes. Attacking Boeing for opening a badly needed plant in South Carolina, for example, in order to pay off labor unions who object to that state’s right-to-work laws.
Overwhelming evidence shows that the pursuit of the common good does not entail statism. It entails a liberated and booming private sector: initiative, invention, and creativity among all our citizens. That is way toward the common good, the common prosperity, the common growth, and common happiness. It is also the way to defeat envy.
The state can be a very good tool of the common good. It was so when Abraham Lincoln put his powerful moral weight behind the Homestead Act and the Land-Grant College Act. By these laws, the federal government gave a title to so many acres of public land to private citizens—but on condition that they work that land for five or more years. And thus improve it, and multiply its value, by their own individual creativity, in their own unique circumstances. Not according to a federal plan.
In addition, the federal government insisted that no new territory could join the federal union unless it set aside a prescribed number of acres for the founding of state universities, as well as of agricultural and mining universities. Lincoln’s insight was that wealth is generated by ideas, by experimentation, by intellectual creativity. (See his address at the Wisconsin State Fair in 1858.) If America were to become a developed nation, Lincoln saw with early genius, it would do so by way of intellect and invention. Not as a slave culture, but as a free culture, becoming prosperous by the creative minds of free individuals. Neither in the Homestead Act nor in the Land-grant College Act did the federal government set out to manage the decisions of the recipients. On the contrary, the federal government set American citizens free, and trusted their creativity, the creativity of ordinary American people. In the old days, our government trusted the American people.
Those who insist that the best way to achieve the common good, and to attain social justice, is to give more resources (and control) to the federal state, had better go looking for some evidence somewhere that undergirds their self-righteousness. They insist that others of us, who do not support the expenditure of more state money, are immoral. Yet the first moral obligation, Blaise Pascal wrote, is “To think clearly.” And with evidence.
The defense of the common-sense ideas that make our Republic work is still the raison d’etre of this humble but amazingly successful organization, IRD. For IRD’s focus even today, we owe so much to Diane Knippers. With IRD’s tiny budget of about $1 million per year, Diane rocked the religious world. She also helped to rock a good many decayed dictatorships, some of which are still tumbling to the dust, by the month. The social ideas of Judaism and Christianity (liberty, fraternity, equality, for instance, and mercy, justice, love, and second chances), once suffused through the liberties of a genuine democratic republic, are today even more potent forces in the larger world, even more so than in earlier times.
Michael Novak has recently retired from the George Frederick Jewett chair in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute and is a member of the editorial board of First Things.
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Comments:
I would love to hear some reasoning behind your condescending, jingoistic dismissal. Where is the reasoned criticism?
Mr. Campbell's hatred and anger are thinly disguised. He still is angry because his side finished second in the Cold War, and he cannot resist the urge to call names in order to sooth the pain of his loss.
Moreover, look again at the bit about Abe Lincoln and university creation incentives. Is Novak really opposing all government intervention?
If you are a Christian, then you are supposed to be a moralizing idealist. If this is not an imperative for Christians, then there is also no obligation for Christians to oppose abortion in the event that it interferes with the "business that needs to be done" in one's daily life.
This is perhaps also a place to call for some opinions to be voiced on the recent violence perpetrated by the state against peaceful "Occupy Wall Street" protesters in Oakland. I do not see how this situation differs from the kind of repression that has recently been roundly condemned when carried out by regimes hostile to U.S. interests in the Middle East.
If not for the government-designed system to guarantee mortgages (Fannie and Freddie) and government threats (strongest in the 1990s) to banks that didn't write enough mortgage loans to low-income people, the quality of mortgage loans would've been much higher, and the housing supply would've been much smaller. Government purposely absorbed great financial risk to push home ownership, and they created the bubble. If the market had been allowed to work normally, then any dip in housing prices would've been much smaller and much more easily absorbed. That's if government hadn't interfered so heavy-handedly in the housing market to start with, and didn't transfer so much of the consequent risk to taxpayers (by way of Fannie and Freddie.)
The way you can tell that the politicians are to blame is by how vociferously they blame others.
I guess you are not old enough to remember the Robber Barons; the monopolies, the company store; the horrors of laissez faire capitalism. The wonders of your robust private sector.
A nation is not just an individual writ large. We live in a savage world, and it is occasionally necessary for nations to do savage things to survive in it. To refrain from doing so is to invite destruction on the citizens to which the nation owes protection. In addition, since dictatorship is the natural state of Middle Eastern cultures, and attempting to make them democratic results only in anarchy or even worse dictatorship, it is arguably more moral to support the dictatorships with which we can do business than to try to "convert" them to democracies.
I'm not familiar with the specifics of the Oakland OWS riot, but to compare U.S. domestic riot control to the horrendous brutality evinced by Assad or Gaddafi is at best silly, at worst willfully blind to moral distinctions.
Jimbo's plea on behalf of unions is more Soviet disinformation. By the 1930's, long after the reign of the so-called "robber barons" and company stores and all the rest, most unions in the United States had come under the influence of communists doing the bidding of the Soviet Union or the mafia. See Klehr, Haynes and Anderson, "The Soviet World of American Communism", including copies of numerous documents contained therein. Sadly, many unions continue to be guided by communists and fellow travelers. The true makeup and nature of many unions preclude them from being considered part of any "common good" if for no other reason than they embrace the most evil form of tyranny ever unleashed on man.
May I suggest that it be considered required reading for all members of the USCCB, and also the priests, sisters, plus the sundry parish committees.
You mischaracterize the situation. The principal reason the US is involved in the Mid-East is over access to its oil. John Bolton, a leading neo-conservative, just said so on television the other day. On the basis of this motive, the US regularly engages in conduct that any principled Christian can only condemn as mass-murder in the service of theft.
As for the riots in Oakland, if, as you admit, you are uninformed about the details, then you are in no position to accuse anyone who draws moral parallels between them and the government repression in the mid-East of being silly or willfully blind to moral distinctions. It is, by your own admission, you yourself who are currently blind to some crucially relevant facts in assessing the matter.
many people don't get that our founders constructed us as an implicit theocracy (judeo-christian). our theocracy just incorporates God's law which promotes justice, equality of opportunity, individual, God given rights (not as a collective), and agape love in the relations of man. this foundation, as conceived in our founding documents, naturally limits and amends our savage nature. it has been effective (not perfect) in checking our statist impluse to control and enslave ourselves (although, recent years have seen the system erode rapidly.)
certainly islam understands our civil society as a competing theocracy, so from their point of view, we are the "Great Satan" and we must be converted or subverted. their endevours in that vein are thus no surprise, to me at least.
and thanks for a rare mention of one our greatest conservatives, a. lincoln, who was probably the last president to make original contributions to our philosopy. since then, the corruption of statism, with few exceptions, has held sway, the result being the soft tyranny we have today.
When you can envy a healthy monk--who's taken a vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience--because he has more creature comforts than you do, then your envy is NOT a sin. But until then, it is. As Lincoln said, you don't raise up the poor by dragging down the rich. If they stole the money, prosecute them, but otherwise leave them alone, leave them to their own anxieties. They have them. They just have different ones.
Novak wrote about 'ecology of culture' but not about natural law. He wrote about interventionist foreign policies, but not about the place of the US Constitution in executing those policies. He wrote about curbing that great and wicked attitude, envy, but not about respecting the right of another state to maintain its sovereignty.
Novak wrote that the preaching in some churches way back when was wrong on two counts: 1, because churches shouldn't be so overtly political, and 2, because overtly political churches should be preaching Novak's overt politics. (Or am I misconstruing? Pardon me.)
(Novak: "This flagrant anti-democratic program did not belong in Christian preaching in the churches, IRD strongly felt, first because it was so overtly and purely political and, second, because its politics were so out of keeping with the Christian inspirations that gave birth to democratic institutions and ideas.")
Thus far, I liked best of all what Ed said about Thomas Aquinas in relation to regime change and the common good. And, I like natural law thinking on the principle of subsidiarity, whether in relation to domestic action (like the founding of universities) or foreign affairs (like intervening in the governance of another soveriegn state).
I have looked into the Oakland situation, and my point stands. Anyone who compares a few arrests and some tear gas to opening fire on crowds and torturing demonstration leaders to death is fundamentally unserious. And comparing Wall Street to Saddam, Assad, Mubarak, or Gaddafi approaches abject idiocy of both the moral and the intellectual variety.
And I do not deny in the least that we are in the Middle East for oil. That does not in the slightest change the fact that Middle Eastern cultures are brutal, corrupt, and primitive and that democracy simply doesn't work there. Have you any evidence at all to the contrary? Again, my point stands. Since dictatorship is the only possibility in the Middle East, and oil is a vital national interest (No blood for oil makes a nice slogan. Chant it to the people who would suffer and die in an economic, social, and political collapse caused by a sudden cutoff of oil), our government has a duty to support the dictatorships that are most conducive to the flow of oil. If the Arabs, Persians, "Stanis," etc start acting like civilized people, we can treat them as such. In the meantime, we do what we must.
De Tocqueville saw this very well. As he said in his speech to the National Assembly of 12 September 1848
“There is one thing which strikes me above all. It is that the ancien régime, which doubtless differed in many respects from that system of government which the socialists call for (and we must realize this) was, in its political philosophy, far less distant from socialism than we had believed. It is far closer to that system than we. The ancien régime, in fact, held that wisdom lay only in the State and that the citizens were weak and feeble beings who must forever be guided by the hand, for fear they harm themselves. It held that it was necessary to obstruct, thwart, restrain individual freedom, that to secure an abundance of material goods it was imperative to regiment industry and impede free competition. The ancien régime believed, on this point, exactly as the socialists of today do. It was the French Revolution which denied this.”
In other words, the ancien régime believed in Original Sin ; Liberals do not.
But according to Christian tradition, these ideas are unintelligible and almost arbitrary without continual and unbroken reference to these roots and understandings, and without the unbroken unity of followers who insist on seeing equality and freedom as the consequence of being continually united to these roots and understandings.
God, if man properly cooperates with God, chooses when liberty and equality are to thrive in such and such a place and time. We don't just borrow "Christian ideas" for the sake of a whim to make "America" or the world better. Why? Because it suggests we prefer America to God; we prefer to make God a mere means to our political end, versus making God our end, with the possibility (not the certainty) that a good political end will come of it. Whatever the case, our FIRST concern is offering right reverence to FIRST THINGS and to a Tradition which sees this reverence as primary. God never promised us America. So if a better America or a better world comes, it will come when He wills it and not when we will it.
In fact, right reverence (when the object of reverence is right and not simply arbitrarily chosen) may even put the believer in a political/economic/moral situation that is far worse than the situation he might have been in if he were not a believer. What Novak prescribes is not "right reverence" but "useful reverence," in which the common good is defined as "initiative, invention, and creativity among all our citizens. That is way toward the common good, the common prosperity, the common growth, and common happiness. It is also the way to defeat envy." Tragically, the question that gets left out of Novak's formula is this: What are the proper objects of initiative, invention, creativity? Does Novak intend to construct an America in which a mere liberated "initiative, invention and creativity" are themselves the objects?
This reminds me of what Obama said in one United NAtions address: "the questions is not WHAT are aims are, but HOW we pursue our aims." In other words, "let's not ask questions about WHAT the good is; let's rather let the good be defined as HOW one might approach the good." Procedure here becomes a substitute for the good itself, in which the thing we now call the good is a consequence of a system of liberal "fair play" and not a thing we reason about and reason to.
C.S. Lewis was wiser than Novak when he urged that history ought to be judged by truth and not truth by history, i.e., not truth by whatever arbitrary spirit of "initiative, invention and creativity" happen to be historically dominant. Initiative, invention and creativity are FOR THE TRUTH, and not merely FOR THEMSELVES.
-- I think a local gov't shutting down a new slum-in-creation, because the people there are such slobs that they attract rats, and are problematic drinkers and drug users, seems reasonable.
As usual, if a gov't decides to act, and is resisted, the gov't uses force.
Gov't is the human agency which is the org that DOES use force, hopefully against lawbreakers and against those for whom it is just to use force.
No other organization should be using force, unless the gov't has become tyrannical, and the people are using force in revolt -- as in the Middle East.
Capitalism, too, depends on the force of gov't to define and protect property rights, for individuals, as well as to enforce contracts. Like the contract of students who borrow money for college, or homebuyers who borrow money to invest/ speculate in housing, or banks who borrowed money in order to lend it. And when one side breaks their agreement, there must be some "justice" (a grey area).
The Bush-Obama Democratic party bailouts for the rich yet irresponsible Wall Street bankers were a terrible travesty of gov't -- taxing the workers, including those of the future, to pay off the failed gambles of the rich. I, too, am enraged by using force to take from the many to give to those few, already rich.
But I also oppose forcefully taking from the innocent hard-working rich, of which there are very many under capitalism, in order to give to the not-hard working not-rich. Using gov't force, in taxes or otherwise, to take from the innocent responsible, including many Christians, in order to give gov't benefits to the irresponsible, including many anti-Christians, is not justice, neither social nor any type. It is based on the elite manipulating envy to gain power for the gov't, which is almost always controlled by the already rich and powerful. And such gov'ts, at best, leave the workers alone enough to become rich.
Gov'ts can never help the poor thru "charity", because the money collected by the gov't is thru force.
All who support the gov't "doing more good", support using force towards those ends -- they support "the (good) end justifies the (force) means".
All capitalist deals are designed to be "win-win". All gov't funded programs, based on tax collections, are "win-lose". It should be no surprise that "win-win" is so often better than "win-lose".
