Universal Hunger for Liberty - Why Clash of Civilizations Is Not Inevitable

311 Pages·2004·8.64 MB·English

by  Michael Novak

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Increasingly divided and embroiled in conflict-both moral
and mortal-the world needs a positive vision for facing the
challenges that lay ahead. In The Universal Hunger for
Liberty, statesman, theologian, and award-winning author
Michael Novak charts a new course for navigating the mur­
derous confrontations between Islamic states and the West.
In place of ongoing tension and violence, he offers a surpris­
ingly optimistic vision of how to heal our cultural, economic,
and political differences over the next hundred years.
This is not the first time Novak has looked ahead, against
the stream of conventional opinion. In 1982, in The Spirit of
Democratic Capitalism-circulated underground in Poland
and Czechoslovakia, and described as one of those books
that actually changed the world-Novak foresaw the end of
socialism, and its replacement by democracy and capitalism.
The Universal Hunger for Liberty is an even bolder
achievement, which takes the whole world as its stage. In the
writhing of civilizations and cultures bristling with wars,
Novak discerns struggles for personal dignity, and the liberty
whence dignity springs. He poses the possibility of a peace­
ful democratization of the Islamic third world-one based
not on a clash of civilizations, but on a profound under­
standing of our common cause. Novak sees the gold-and­
scarlet thread of history as human liberty; here he finds the
tie that can reconcile the Western democratic tradition with
its erstwhile Islamic foes.
Islam, Novak points out, is a religion of reward and pun­
ishment, and therefore it must have buried within it a pro­
found commitment to liberty. Over many centuries until now,
this buried theory of liberty has not been brought out with
full force nor, based upon it, a full Islamic theory of human
rights, democracy, and personal dignity. It cannot be true
that only Jews and Christians have access to such goods of
the spirit. The world's one billion Muslims also desire for
their children a world of opportunity and prosperity, a world
(continued on back flap)
OTHERB OOKBSY M ICHAENLO VAK
The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Choosing Presidents
The Experience ofN othingness
Free Persons and the Common Good
This Hemisphere ofL iberty
Ascent of the Mountain, Flight oft he Dove
The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Business as a Calling
The New Consensus on Family and Welfare (Editor)
On Two Wings
The Guns ofL attimer
Belief and Unbelief
The Open Church
The Joy of Sports
Unmeltable Ethnics
FICTION
The Tiber Was Silver
Naked I Leave
THEU NIVERSAL
HUNGERF ORL IBERTY
Why theCla shof Civilizations
INso Itn evitable
MICHAENLO VAK
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CONTENTS
Introduction: The Universal Hunger for Liberty
lX
PART ONE � THE CULTURE OF LIBERTY
I Islam: The Early Conversation 1150-1300 3
2 Caritapolis: A Universal Culture of Mutual Respect 23
PART TWO � THE ECONOMICS OF LIBERTY
3 A Philosophy of Economics 51
4 Economic Realism 73
5 Capitalism's Third Wave 93
6 Blue Environmentalism 113
PART THREE � THE POLITICS OF LIBERTY
7 Religion: The First Institution of Democracy 137
8 How the Catholic Church Came to Terms with Democracy 155
9 Can Islam Come to Terms with Democracy? 191
Epilogue: The Caritapolis Perspective
Notes
Acknowled ents
gm
Index
INTRODUCTION
The Universal Hunger for Liberty
It would be nice to think that, in the war against terror, our side, too, speaks
of deep philosophical ideas-it would be nice to think that someone is arguing
with the terrorists and with the readers of Sayyid Qutb. But here I have my wor­
ries.The followers of Qutb speak,in their wild fashion,of enormous human prob­
lems,and they urge one another to death and to murder. But the enemies of these
people speak of what? The political leaders speak of United Nations resolutions,
of unilateralism, of multilateralism, of weapons inspectors, of coercion and non­
coercion.This is no answer to the terrorists.The terrorists speak insanely of deep
things. The anti terrorists had better speak sanely of equally deep things.
But who will speak of the sacred and the secular, of the physical world and
the spiritual world? Who will defend liberal ideas against the enemies of liberal
ideas?
-PAUL BERMAN
(Source: "The Philosopher of Islamic Terror,"
NeYowr kT imMeasg azin2e3, ,20M03a) rch
Bring Down Western Civilization!
World War III ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the col­
lapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The ideas, strategies, and institutions that
had guided the West after World War II proved quite flexible and powerful,
and the free nations emerged from nearly a half-century of on-and-off blood­
shed (the long twilight of the Cold War) as battered but grateful victors. We
were glad to rest a bit.
Then World War IV began with the failed (but deadly) underground
bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. Alas, we took that blow as a
crime, the deed of a nutcase, not at all as a declaration of war. Much else had
IX
X INTRODUCTION
.,
been planned for New York during those days, as we later discovered, but it
failed to happen: the bombing of the Federal Building and the UN building,
and the blowing up of the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels.' We didn't grasp
the full war we were in until the smoky inward collapse of the Twin Towers
on September 11, 2001.
The target of the 1993 and the 2001 attacks on New York was exactly
the same: the World Trade Center. As we will see in the final chapter, the
two quite different attacking groups used language borrowed from the same
Islamic heresy, a politicized 20th-century version of a sect founded about
1750 in Saudi Arabia. According to this doctrine, the whole world was
made so that it might bow to Allah, under the sword of political extremists
of Islam. Far from accepting the separation of church and state, these ex­
tremists insist that the unity of religion and politics is simpler, purer, bet­
ter-and mandatory.
Far from honoring the conscience of the individual, this twisted political
sect (a perversion of Islam) reduces human beings to self-destructive instru­
ments of a cause. They use to their own purposes the submission of all hu­
mans under Islamic law (the sharia law of early Islamic centuries), such as the
law enforced by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Far from seeking to bring Mus­
lim populations under the protection of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights and into the vortex of the economic development that is rap­
idly removing poverty from other regions, these extremists want to bring
down the decadent West.
On September 11, 2001, the United States decided almost instantly that
the best defense against terrorism is a good offense. In a lightning war, the
same U.S. military that Arab extremists had come to ridicule, saying that it
always lost heart when blood was shed, took just 40 days to remove the
Afghan regime that had mothered the hijackers of9/1 l. Eighteen months
later, Coalition forces took 42 days to sever the regime of Saddam Hussein
from its bloody and barbarous rule over Iraq.
A bold (and much-criticized) U.S. administration had risked its entire fu­
ture, including its hope of reelection in 2004, on doing what it judged nec­
essary, even after France, Germany, Russia, and China refused to join hands.
It judged that Iraq had not kept its solemn obligations to disarm under the
Peace Conditions accepted in 1991. It judged that Iraq was deeply involved
in sustained support for many terrorist groups2 and may even have been im-
INTRODUCTION XI
plicated through at least one Iraqi secret service agent in the first bombing
of the World Trade Center in 1993.3 (There was no equivalent evidence
about the attack of 2001.4) It judged that there was an unacceptable risk of
Saddam Hussein colluding with Al Qaeda by secretly supplying an active cell
with small quantities of biological or chemical agents or a suitcase of "dirty­
bomb" nuclear material.5
President Clinton's defense secretary, William Cohen, had spent his last
years in office warning against a horrifi� chemical or biological attack on
American cities, put in place by lone agents carrying small but deadly quan­
tities. By 1998 he was warning against the dangers of Saddam Hussein as a
supplier of just such agents. The year before, in a television interview, he held
up a five-pound bag of sugar, saying, "This amount of anthrax could be
spread over a city-let's say the size of Washington. It would destroy at least
half of the population of that city." Then he pulled out a small vial, enough
to hold a small amount of the nerve agent VX. "VX is a nerve agent. One
drop from this particular thimble as such-one single drop-will kill you
within a few minutes."6
Many in the Arab world both dreaded and cheered the removal of Sad­
dam Hussein, an anti-Islamic dictator who had slain more Muslims than any
man in history. He had killed, in total, more than two million, not only in
his long, bitter, incompetent war with Iran but also through the torture,
murder, and massacre of his own people in Iraq. Some dreaded this event be­
cause outsiders had to do it, but cheered it because it had to be done.
And so the United States embarked upon an almost impossible task, cer­
tain to require decades-the task of raising the sights of the nearly one bil­
lion persons concentrated in the fifty-six Islamic countries of the world so
that they might live in greater dignity and freedom than ever before. Presi­
dent George W Bush encouraged them to envisage Islamic societies in which
individuals might begin at last to live under the protection of something like
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. "Surely," the proposition was
put forward, by many Islamic voices as well as by the president, "a modern
and faithful Islam is consistent with individual dignity and political liberty.
Surely, a modern Islam is consistent with nonrepressive, open, economically
vital societies." Much evidence has emerged since 2001 of turmoil deep in
the soul of many serious women and men in far-flung Islam. For them as for
us, there is reason for anxiety and reason for hope. The outcome is in doubt.