The Greatest of All Inequalities

The Greatest of All Inequalities

Published by Michael Novak at Patheos.com on March 24, 2015

In the United States today, an immense amount of research shows that the greatest of all inequalities faced by Americans lies in the marital structure of the home in which they grow up. Robert Fogel may have been the first one to notice it, but recent studies by Charles Murray, Brad Wilcox, Mary Eberstadt, and Mitch Pearlstein, among others, overwhelm older complacencies.

Professor Catherine Pakaluk conveniently summarizes Fogel’s point: “In The Fourth Great Awakening, Fogel argues that the greatest disparity between rich and poor in the 21st century lies in the gradient of ‘spiritual capital’ which is not distributed equally among social classes. Spiritual capital means for Fogel values, ethics, and norms for interacting, which turn out to be enormously helpful for long term endeavors (like career preparation, job perseverance, savings, relationship stability, etc.).”

A conversation I had with a twenty-something Italian American lad on Long Island some years ago taught me a ton about spiritual capital. He had just opened a pizza restaurant along the beach where we lived, near Oyster Bay. When we paid a visit, Karen asked him how he had had the nerve to put up a new pizza place when there were already four along the strip near us.

“Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I’ve already got a permit to add on another big room. My dad owned ten restaurants, I been doin’ inventory since I was nine years old. I know everything about restaurants you need to know. Before I hit forty, I want to own more than ten of them on my own. Then retire early.”

I marveled at the skills he had in his bones, his fingertips, the back of his head. I wouldn’t know how to do any of the practical things he’d have to do to make all this work. He was brought up in it.

Well, it’s the same with kids who have been raised in homes where they learn to write out short words with alphabet magnets on the refrigerator by the time they are three, and are reading children’s picture books to themselves by the time they are five. Before they even get to kindergarten they are far ahead of most of their future classmates.

One of the greatest inequalities among children is how many books are found in their homes. The years of education completed by their parents. The careers their older family has experience in, and can introduce them to. Also the amount of time their fathers spend with them, giving them not only advice and counsel, but teaching them skills and introducing them to new adventures. Not to mention giving them a swift swat on the bottom when they get too far out of line.

Whether one is brought up in a stable environment by an attentive and married mother and father makes a huge difference for one’s advantages and disadvantages in life. The empirical evidence on how much home structure affects lifetime advancement is overwhelmingly strong.

Charles Murray, for one, draws in painful detail the tremendous transformation in family structure that the United States has already undergone. And, as he shows, the problem is not one that breaks down along racial lines. Whites as clearly as any group are “coming apart” along the axis of marriage.

Sadly, owing to this cultural shift even larger inequalities of incomes and career outcomes are now virtually inevitable.

Special thanks to Bridget Littleton and Elizabeth Shaw for research links

Pope Francis and the Three-sided System

Pope Francis and the Three-sided System

Published by Michael Novak at Patheos.com on March 20, 2015

Pope Francis seems to be a subject of unending fascination. Some of my intellectual evangelical friends are saying that Francis may be the most Christlike man since Jesus. Most of my Catholic intellectual friends (two-thirds of them Pope John Paul II Catholics) love his common touch, and see a strong, farsighted intellect underneath his folksiness.

My colleague at Ave Maria University, Economics and Family Professor Catherine Pakaluk, has seen that Francis may have the clearest insight of any recent pope (or theologian) into just how empty so many contemporary minds are of any elementary sense of godliness, or immortality, let alone of the nature of God Himself. Professor Pakaluk may well be right on this.

Pope Francis grasps that every so often he will be granted ten or twenty seconds of television here or there. Well, in a godless age in Europe and among the most influential elites in America, if you want to call attention to the Creator, Endower of rights, and His Jesus on the cross, how would you use your few seconds? On minor subjects, or on the one big one: God’s infinite love and mercy turned toward humankind.

Pope Francis seems to be trying to get through: He urges the world to face God’s mercy! To taste it and see. To test it.

No sin you commit, he says, will ever be too great for God to forgive. In such a terrible century that the world has just suffered, this poor earth badly needs mercy. What an age we have experienced! How many bodies we have seen thrown around like bags of sand. People everywhere need to know that they are still loved by their Maker, and cherished. And we are all forgiven (if we ask), even for our ugliest sins.

 * * *

 In a brilliant recent blog post in The New York Times, Ross Douthat commented on the three kinds of conservative Catholic intellectual leaders in America whom he thought most significant: (1) those whose interests seemed predominantly doctrinal, (2) economic, and (3) liturgical (the Tridentine Mass, etc.). At one point, Douthat listed democratic capitalism, economic conservatives, and libertarians under the “economic” heading. If I could take a moment here, it’s important to distinguish the vision of democratic capitalism from that of libertarianism.

Libertarians tend to stress the “free market.” But democratic capitalists note that the cause of wealth is not markets – markets are millennia old, but have classically been quite static for centuries. What brings wealth is invention, discovery, creativity – as Abraham Lincoln stressed in his Springfield Address and Wisconsin State Fair address in 1859.

Altogether, democratic capitalism envisions the free and virtuous society as a three-sided system: economic, political, and moral/cultural. One of the best papal statements of this three-sidedness is to be found in paragraph 42 of John Paul II’s 1991 Letter to the World, Centesimus Annus (“the hundredth year”). Note how carefully John Paul II lays out the three parts of the system he insisted the Church should support. Note how clearly states that he will not support any system lacking even one of these three sides.

Can it perhaps be said that, after the failure of Communism, capitalism is the victorious social system, and that capitalism should be the goal of the countries now making efforts to rebuild their economy and society? Is this the model which ought to be proposed to the countries of the Third World which are searching for the path to true economic and civil progress?

The answer is obviously complex. If by “capitalism” is meant [i] an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a “business economy”, “market economy” or simply “free economy”. But if by “capitalism” is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not [ii] circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality, and which sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, [iii] the core of which is ethical and religious, then the reply is certainly negative. (CA, 42)

In the anthropology of the church, Catholic social thought sees the human being as a three-dimensioned being. Each human is at once a political animal, an economic animal, and a moral/religious animal (under law). To miss one of these dimensions is to underestimate human richness and complexity. It is to limit humans to less than their full human calling.

In addition to pointing to this three-sided ideal, Pope John Paul II showed his hard-headed realism when he recalled to mind potential evil developments in such an organism – evils that have occurred in the past and could come back again, if we are not vigilant.

The Marxist solution has failed, but the realities of marginalization and exploitation remain in the world, especially the Third World, as does the reality of human alienation, especially in the more advanced countries. Against these phenomena the Church strongly raises her voice. Vast multitudes are still living in conditions of great material and moral poverty. The collapse of the Communist system in so many countries certainly removes an obstacle to facing these problems in an appropriate and realistic way, but it is not enough to bring about their solution. Indeed, there is a risk that a radical capitalistic ideology could spread which refuses even to consider these problems, in the a priori belief that any attempt to solve them is doomed to failure, and which blindly entrusts their solution to the free development of market forces. (CA, 42)

From the perspective of Latin America, Pope Francis has seen more than enough of such deformation – and in much of the rest of the world too. So he does not flinch from seeing many corruptions eating away at the three-sided ideal.

With every year that passes, Francis seems to concentrate more on the theme which Pope John Paul II opened up, that of the “moral ecology” or “human ecology” of diverse cultures. The moral and cultural dimension.

In all cultures, toxic energies are always at work. In some, the toxicity is so great that it chokes the free development of a basic prosperity, creativity, and even daily virtues. It cripples far too many human beings.

 * * *

 I make my own this rich and complex view of both Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis. I am happy with it. It is in the direction of my own lifework.

The Splendor of Being

The Splendor of Being

Published by Michael Novak at Patheos.com on March 17, 2015

I've just returned from a wonderful visit at Walsh University in North Canton, OH, where I spoke at the 40th Annual Philosophy/Theology Symposium. In gratitude to my hosts, I would like to post another excerpt adapted from my remarks there. Before I do that, however, let me highlight briefly the thoughtful reception of the concurrent solo exhibition of artwork by my late wife, Karen Laub-Novak. This on the heels of a feature-length article about Karen’s life and work by art historian Gordon Fuglie, Head of Curatorial Affairs for the Central California Museum of Art, in the current issue of Image magazine. On Karen’s work Fuglie commented, “My favorite graphic is the lithograph, ‘Angel of the Second Elegy,’ [Laub-Novak’s] response to the poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Duino Elegies.’ This is no sweetie-poo Hallmark card angel, but rather possesses something of the majestic terror and awe of the Holy, avoiding literalism and reassuring pictorial attributes.”

Walsh served as the first venue of a traveling exhibition of Karen Laub-Novak’s prints, drawings, and paintings, organized by Fuglie and the Novak estate. For more information, contact gordon.fuglie@charter.net.

                                                                                           * * *

Our tradition teaches us to think of beauty as “the splendor of being.” Why is this? From the point of view solely of nature, that is, what we can know only by unaided human reason, as (let us say) Aristotle did, we can recognize that even the humblest things – a leaf, a snowflake, a single tree in a broad field – stand out from nothingness. These things are here with us, they ex-ist, and the more attention we pay to them, the more radiant in their singularity they become. To exist is not only to be, but always in some way to be beautiful. A singular, unrepeatable existent radiates with flashes of distinctiveness and individuality, its unique form, its own shape, color, and whole panoply of qualities.

For instance, if on a sunlit day on the beach, we put a grain of sand in the palm of our hand and pay attention to it, it becomes marvelous in its colors and its tiny shape. If, on a winter day up north, we pause to attend closely to an individual snowflake that has fallen on the fur cuff of our coat, we can marvel at its own unique and splendid pattern. We can imagine that there’s no other one like it. We can marvel at the incredibly refined detail with which it is wrought.

Normally, for most minds in history, this attention to the fine, intelligent design in all things, even the tiniest ones, has raised heart and mind to the contemplation of the vast power and beauty of the mind that inspired them. Not until the last 200 years did humans imagine that individual beings of such endless beauty could arise from chance, meaninglessness, emptiness, out of nothing. No, intelligence has been exerted, a sense of beauty has been made manifest.

True enough, reason did not always lead men to imagine an almighty, infinite, singular God, a God who is all intelligence, active being, beauty, truth, the good drawing all things unto itself. Not always did the minds of men rise to a personal God. Even less often did the minds of men rise to a God who is creative love, who creates from His own inner love, and who loves each thing that He has created, and in observing it finds it good.

Humans find this out only when the hidden God unveils Himself and makes Himself known through revelation. Even if we do not fully grasp that revelation – “the light shines in darkness, but the darkness grasps it not” (John 1:5) – the beauty and intelligence of everything in creation invite us to believe that what God reveals is true.

Revelation tells us that God is love; and that from the blast of the inner power of His love, He generates a Son; and through their white-hot mutual love, the two generate the spirit of love, the Holy Spirit, the Counselor.

Now let me ask you to do this: ask yourself what, in all the experiences you’ve had, would you identify as the one you cherish most, the one you would like to see expand in your own life, the one that seems most attractive and divine? I am 99 percent certain that you will say it is the experience of love. The love for a guy who loves you, or a girl, the love of your parents, of brothers and sisters, and grandparents, and uncles and aunts. The love between you and your best friend.

Thus it all makes sense. Everything begins in and flows from the love that is God Himself, the love that is so dynamic and in such white-hot heat that it generates another force of love, a living person, and the two of them together generate a third. This Trinity in all its beauty diffuses itself through all creation; it is the goodness that wells up inside all loves, making them to be the keen and powerful energies that they are.

Is that not why we say that beauty is the “splendor of being”? The very source of everything that exists is the God who is constituted by love. Everything that exists radiates love. And it also radiates the brilliant intelligence and proportion and singularity infused in it by its Creator. Radiant indeed! Splendor indeed!

All beauty radiates from the creative love that is the source of all existing things.

All images © Karen Laub-Novak and used with permission.

The Green Worm of Envy

The Green Worm of Envy

Published by Michael Novak March 13, 2015 at Pathes.com

Seventy-one percent of Americans told pollsters two things last week: first, that the middle class in this country is paying far too heavy a load of all income taxes. This first point is dead on. The IRS reports that the top 50 percent of income earners paid over 97 percent of all income taxes. A pretty hefty burden, indeed.

That there are many who need help is partly understandable. Think of the scores of millions of elderly, disabled, young unmarried mothers and their children, and the millions currently out of work. Not much in income taxes to be collected there. So, okay, the top half is carrying the lower half. Not such an un-Christian thing to do. It is, in secular terms, a humanistic thing to do.

But the people also told pollsters that “the rich” were paying too little. I have found in all the jobs I’ve ever held that no one (except some Board members who are CEOs) ever thinks they are included in “the rich.” When they say “rich” they mean people who earn more than they do.

Well, in recent years, face it: If you earn more than $175,817, you are in the top 5 percent. The IRS reports that this relatively small circle – 5 percent – pay 59 percent of all income taxes paid. Wow! Five percent pays 59 percent of all federal income taxes. That leaves only 41 percent of income taxes for the next 45 percent of us to pay (if the top half is carrying the bottom).… Forty-five percent to pay 41 percent. Unfair? Fair enough?

The top 5 percent – professional athletes, Hollywood producers and actors, heirs, inventors, investors in start-up companies and new ideas for products, the top business executives, a few bestselling authors, etc. – pay 59 percent of all federal income taxes. They receive a ton of income, they should pay a ton of taxes. And they do.

I find it helpful to keep a little chart in front of me to refresh my aging memory:

Bottom 50 percent (< $36,055): pays 3 percent (or a bit less). Top 50 percent (> $36,055): pays 97 percent. Top 25 percent (> $73,354): pays 87 percent. Top 10 percent (> $125,195): pays 70 percent. Top 1 percent (> $434,682): pays 38 percent.

I have always hated the sin of envy. My family suffered from the envy of others from early on, but not because we were wealthy. We were dirt poor – immigrant children of the mines and mills of soft coal country in Pennsylvania. But my dad was brainy, imaginative, a born leader, and taught us all to work our butts off. Immigrant envy of those a bit more successful is a painful thing when you are young.

My dad taught us not to envy the rich, since they are doomed to unhappy lives. Why? Because if you are rich enough to have what you want, he said, you have no one to blame but yourself for any unhappiness you experience. And you can count on plenty of that in every life. My dad did not believe in equality, he believed in excellence. In that race, those born poor can beat the rich.

From the American Founders, I first learned to despise “utopic thinkers” – and “equality of outcomes” – for intellectual reasons. Madison warned sternly against the utopic thinkers (probably meaning Rousseau), and called equality (of outcomes) a “wicked project.” As I studied Catholic thought for some fifteen years, I saw reasons for its being a hierarchical Church, for resisting egalitarianism, for meditating on how the Lord God did not endow individuals equally (not even in the same extended family). He did not endow the nations of the world with the same natural riches, or geographic advantages, or traditions (undeserved) of virtue and learning and artistic talent.

God is no egalitarian. Nature is blessedly full of variety and “dappled things.”

I read in awe as a young man Leo XIII’s condemnations of the ideal of equality in Rerum Novarum. He said all socialist preaching of equality was against nature, evil, and in vain. He praised the civilizing glories of God-given inequalities of talent, aspiration, and character:

It must be first of all recognized that . . . it is impossible to reduce civil society to one dead level. Socialists may in that intent do their utmost, but all striving against nature is in vain. There naturally exist among mankind manifold differences of the most important kind; people differ in capacity, skill, health, strength; and unequal fortune is a necessary result of unequal condition. (RN, 17)

Again, as assiduous students during their ambassadorial posts in Britain and France, Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson studied the twin evils both of inequalities by birth and station and of the “wicked project” of leveling, whose ultimate symbol is the guillotine. Our Founders faced a weighty historical question: Why did almost all republics in history end quickly? Their conclusion? Envy brought them down. The early republics were nests of envy – between sections of cities, rival dynasties, and bitter personal competitors.

They thought the more creative path for a freshly born republic, conceived in liberty, as Lincoln put it, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, is not “equality” but something quite different: the path of opportunity, liberty to pursue one’s own dreams and personal talents, and personal creativity in serving the common good. Envy is negative. These are positives.

Envy is a more destructive social vice than hatred. It tears apart, pulls away, brings down. It is neither creative nor respectful of disparate outcomes within free societies. Many necessary disparities, as Leo XIII emphasizes, are socially beneficial. As when persons of vastly diverse talents find satisfaction in the work they take up, not envying the work or the rewards of others.

Beauty and Subjectivity

Beauty and Subjectivity

Published by Michael Novak on March 10, 2015 at Patheos.com

Our tradition likes to say, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Here’s how I interpret that. A human subject is a very complex creature. To answer the question “who am I?” is, in a way, to sketch out your own “horizon,” that is to say, all that your consciousness has experienced, understood, and judged to be real about the whole range of its experiences.

For example, if you spend a semester in Europe (Italy, say), that journey is almost certain to extend your horizon outside your own country to a field of experiences you probably have not had before. Almost certainly, as you extend the boundaries of your experience, you become aware of changes that also take place in you, the subject. An American, it is well said, discovers more about herself, and unknown dimensions of herself, on foreign shores. Experiences overseas enrich your very being. At least, they do so if you are alert and attentive to what you are experiencing, understanding, judging.

As applied to beauty, I am certain that my own years of travel in Italy – my favorite spots, for instance, such as Venice, Florence, Siena, and Rome – brought me into contact with so many different painters (using so many diverse techniques and styles, having access to varied qualities of pigment, and having studied under different masters), that the cumulative experience changed me and my perceptions greatly. I began to grasp the immense range of Italian painting, from Giotto and Fra Angelico, through Tintoretto and Botticelli, Pinturicchio and Rafael, Caravaggio, Michelangelo and Veronese. I was practically overwhelmed with stimuli I had never before experienced.

After learning a vocabulary of painters in a culture so rich, one can see a lot more in any painting than one ever did before. In short, a change in horizon normally brings about a change in the subject, and a change in the subject normally feeds a desire for still wider horizons, for which one is now readier than before.

Thus my wife, Karen, taught me, again and again, to see things in paintings I had never noticed before, and to show me how much more moving the execution of brushstrokes was on this side of the painting compared with the other side, or from one painter to another. Think for a moment of brushstrokes in Fra Angelico and in Caravaggio. Note also in those two painters the differences in lightness and in dark, in utter simplicity and in chiaroscuro.

One of the distinctive and often overlooked features of studies in the humanities is that these experiences entail changes in the subject. As a maturing student, it is not only the addition of one more book to the list of books you have read that counts, but far more the changes that have occurred in you – in your mind, your emotions, your imagination, the range of what you can now understand that you did not understand before.

It is no wonder, then, that “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Each beholder is an ever evolving subject. Each person is an agent of changing consciousness, able to perceive and to understand an ever enlarging horizon of materials. As the subject changes, so also her ideas of beauty change. What she formerly did not understand and appreciate can a year later bring her almost to tears with its beauty.

Excerpted from remarks to be delivered on Friday at the 40th Annual Philosophy/Theology Symposium at Walsh University in North Canton, OH. This year’s theme is “Human Nature, Grace, and the Interior Life.” The photos above are from an accompanying exhibit of thirty-six works by Karen Laub-Novak, presently on display at Walsh’s Birk Center for the Arts. Photos courtesy of Professor Katherine Brown. For more information on Karen Laub-Novak’s work, see laub-novakart.com.

The Ballad of Richard John – A Reworking and Shameless Borrowing of Chesterton’s “Lepanto

The Ballad of Richard John – A Reworking and Shameless Borrowing of Chesterton’s “Lepanto”

Published by Michael Novak at Patheos.com on March 1

In celebration of the publication of the new biography of Father Richard John Neuhaus by Randy Boyagoda (Image, 2015). As one who worked intimately with Richard Neuhaus since 1965, I want to say how thrilling it is to read this new volume. 

These lines are based on “Lepanto” by the inimitable, incomparable G. K. Chesterton, and were originally delivered to honor Father Neuhaus when he received the Youth for the Third Millennium Award in 1999.

 * * *

Dim drums throbbing on the hills half heard, At one-five-six Fifth Avenue a balding prince has stirred And, risen from his swivel chair and editorial stall, The last knight of America takes weapons from the wall. The last and lingering troubadour (for whom the Pope has rung), That once grew up in Canada when all the world was young. In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid, Comes down along the Avenue a new type of Crusade. Strong gongs groaning as his fax booms far, Richard John of First Things is marching down to war, Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold, In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold, Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums, Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then computer, and he comes. Richard John laughing with his brave hair curled, Rising in his stirrups ’gainst the thrones of all the world, And holding up his head as if the flag of all the free. Love-light of Neo-cons! Pen pal of Schindler’s dons! Death-light to Naked Squares! Paragon of Brian Hehir’s! Richard John of First Things Is riding to the sea.

St. Patrick’s on Fifth Avenue but twenty blocks to north (Richard John of First Things is girt and going forth.) Times Square’s aglitter and the sharp tides shift As the journalists catch breezes and their red sails lift. He fills his pen with deadly ink and he claps his laptop closed; The noise has rung through Gotham; indifferent Gotham dozed. That City’s full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes, And dead are all its innocents, all slain before they rise, As Christian killeth Christian in a well-lit clinic room, And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom, And they abandon Mary, that God kissed in Galilee – The God who stooped to pick up dust and blow into it breath, For they have stomped their feet on life, and made their culture Death. So Richard John of First Things is riding to the sea. Richard John is calling through the blast and the eclipse Crying through the trumpet, the trumpet of his lips, And his trumpet cryeth “Ha! Domino sit gloria!” Richard John of First Things Is pointing to the ships.

ii

The Cardinal’s in his office with his cross about his neck (Richard John of First Things is armed upon the deck.) His prayers are with his brother priest out on the salty sea, The Pope has urged the world around to pray the rosary, To say the beads both night and day for no man can tell how The Christian fleet can conquer Death, whose fleet from prow to prow Now fills the sea around in numbers two to one, And taller, faster, better armed, two guns per Christian gun. And murder’s on the Sultan’s lips and gleam lights up his eyes. In emeralds and silks he thinks, “No Christian is our worth. Put down our feet upon their throats that peace be on this earth.” And so begins October day, and so begins his work, As Richard John of First Things now fires on the Turk. Richard John is hunting, and his hounds they now have bayed – Booms away to Italy the rumor of his raid. Gun upon gun, ha! ha! Gun upon gun, hurrah! Richard John of First Things Has loosed the cannonade.

The Pope was in his chapel as day and battle broke (Richard John of First Things is hidden in the smoke.) That hidden room in man’s house where God sits all the year, The secret window where the world looks small – and very dear. He sees as in a mirror in the monstrous morning’s breath The crescent of the hostile ships whose culture’s name is Death; They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and First Thingsdark, They veil the pluméd lions on the galleys of St. Mark. Aboard their hostile ships are learned, educated chiefs, Below the decks are prisoners with multitudinous griefs, Infant captives sick and sunless, all a laboring race repines Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines. They are lost like slaves that sweat, and in the skies of morning hung The stairways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young. They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen fleeing on The distant granite pavements of their exile Babylon. And many a one will struggle in his quiet room in hell As a surgeon’s face looks grimly through the lattice of his cell, As he finds his God is silent, as he seeks no more a sign – (But Richard John of First Things has burst the battle line!)

iii

They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the morn From temples where the gods of Death shut up their eyes in scorn And the wind puffs up the Sultan’s sails and his aggressive pride – Oak oars straining on the groaning Christian side. Straining, too, the warriors’ eyes Study foe ahead Closing seas, blood-red skies, At last mad cries of battle rise – …The wind stops dead. Turns, now fills the Christian weal, Clatter down the Sultan’s sails, Back the Sultan’s sailors reel. (Boom! go the Christian guns, let fly the Muslim bow) Below the decks roar sergeants’ shouts, “Row, ye Christian slaves from hell! Row! These lashes tell ye, row!” Slaves have shaken shackles free Swinging chains, girt at the loin, They burst out of the stinking hold As with a clatter and a fury the wild ships of Venice join. Blood flows purple as the flesh grows cold. Undone, Mohammed’s right, As ship by ship yields up the will to fight. Ten thousand turbans float upon the sea As on th’embattled Sultan’s flagship Don Juan slays Ali.

So Richard John goes pounding on the slaughter-painted poop, Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate’s sloop, Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds, Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds, Thronging of the thousands up that labor under sea White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty. Life a Te Deum sings! Praise all the King of Kings! Richard John of First Things Has set his people free!

iv

Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath (Richard John of First Things rides homeward with a wreath.) He sees across a weary past a straggling road in Spain, Up which a lean and foolish knight Quixote rides in vain. Cervantes smiles, as writers smile, and settles back the blade…

And Richard John of First Things rides home from his Crusade. He tells his crews this message, which I mark down in my book: “We’ll turn this thing around, my friends – Just turn your head and look. Our foes are fierce, and o! they boast! But you can tell them now, my friends, In Richard’s eyes, they’re toast!”

And so it is throughout the world Where Richard’s flag’s unfurled, The word goes out from his Crusade, “My friends, BE NOT AFRAID!”

Pius V pronounced these words as Prince Don Juan of Austria entered before him at the Vatican after the victory: “Fuit Homo missus a Deo cui nomen erat Joannes.” I will translate this freely, to reflect our collective judgment about our friend and honoree: In our time of need, “There was a man sent by God whose name was Richard John.”

Emily’s Second Question – Part Two

Emily’s Second Question – Part Two

By Michael Novak at Patheos.com on March 3, 2015 Read Part 1

Picking up again, we recall Emily’s question about the seemingly different messages of the two Testaments:

EMILY: . . . Where God was once fire and brimstone and eternal damnation, Jesus is water into wine, and healing and forgiveness.

GRANDPA: Regarding the Christian Testament, I think casual modern readers of the stories of Christ come up with a much too sweet picture of him as the paragon of “niceness.” That is not the way He suffered and died.

Moreover, Jesus is a fierce Judge of the behavior of others. He is not only as inclusive as some today stress. (In fact the very idea of inclusiveness begins with Him.) But He was also ruthlessly exclusive, insisting that those who rejected His friendship would get the full force of that choice: They would cast themselves, by their own choice, outside of His light, into “outer darkness,” distant from His mercy, love, and warmth forever.

Inclusive. He instructed His disciples to “preach the Gospel to all nations,” to include the whole world in their range of vision and calling.

Exclusive. But Jesus did not shrink from carrying forward the Jewish teaching about personal responsibility. He repeatedly stressed how at the end, the sheep would be divided from the goats, those who chose the good from those who chose against the good. And He did not shrink from warning that those who deliberately rejected the friendship that God invited them into would get their wish.

The Gospels picture Jesus warning that some people are casting themselves into the fires of Gehenna. Note: it is not fair to say that Jesus cast them there. Rather, no one goes to hell who does not reflectively and deliberately choose to turn away from God of her own free choice. And the real fire of hell is the acute consciousness, too late dawning, that you alone have chosen to be where you are, banished, as you chose, from His presence.

Before thinking of Jesus as extremely “nice,” recall these words of His:

The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all law-breakers, and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. So it will be at the end of the age. (Mt 13:41-42)

And if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire . . . where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched. For everyone will be salted with fire. (Mk 9:43, 48-49)

To my way of thinking, Emily, the most terrifying and bitter punishment that could await me in hell is the deep, deep regret that I have chosen my own banishment from the source of all beauty, all joy, all goodness, all truth. To have deliberately and consciously separated myself from all the pleasures and good things of life – from laughter and good red wine. To have sundered myself from communion with all brothers and sisters in the travails and blisses of human life. Not even Macbeth felt such bitter remorse. Hell is being trapped inside oneself. Or as Dante showed in his Inferno, trapped and immobile in the frozen ice of one’s own self-centeredness.

Why We Went into Iraq and Should Have Stayed There

 

Two part series published on Coming Down to Earth blog at Patheos.com Part 1 Part 2

Why We Went into Iraq and Should Have Stayed There — Part One

Published by Michael Novak on February 24, 2015

More than once in the last couple of years others have continued criticism and even insisted that I apologize for being in favor of the Iraq War in 2003. There are very strong moral reasons why the United States went into Iraq in 2003, and why it was strategically sound to do so (despite the wise caveats of many experienced leaders, most notably Pope John Paul II). Because the pope had publicly described me as one of his half dozen lay friends around the world, and because I loved him, it was exceedingly difficult, and painful, for me to put our friendship at risk.

As I said many times in those days, I was glad our pope opposed even the hint of a Muslim-Christian religious war. I was also glad our president recognized the moral and strategic duty to halt Saddam Hussein’s many violations of the peace treaty he signed in 1991.

In 1990, after Saddam Hussein boastfully and violently invaded Kuwait, a coalition of thirty-nine nations formed to remove Saddam’s forces from that small country.

That phase of the war ended swiftly in early 1991. U.N. Security Council Resolutions obliged Iraq to meet certain stringent conditions, including providing a list of all locations where it housed chemical weapons and allowing U.N. inspections of those sites, as well as the establishment of no-fly zones over certain Shiite parts of southern Iraq and the Kurdish zone in the north.

Over the next ten years, alas, Saddam Hussein’s violations of the truce escalated. The U.N. continued issuing formal resolutions warning him to stop. Saddam thought these threats meaningless and pressed on.

An inventory of Saddam’s weapons was prepared, and he was obliged to keep records as he destroyed them. U.N. inspectors began discovering, however, that stores of botulin, sarin, anthrax, and mustard gas had disappeared. As U.N. Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix told The New York Times in November 2002, “The production of mustard gas is not like the production of marmalade. You’re supposed to keep some track of what you produce.” There was no reliable account of what was where, and no satisfactory documentation of the weapons’ destruction was submitted.

Then on September 11, 2001, nineteen Middle Eastern terrorists hijacked four airplanes, their tanks full for transcontinental flights, departing from three major U.S. cities. As we and our friends all watched in horror, the first plane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, and then the second into the South Tower, with fuel tanks exploding on impact into huge, orange fireballs. The towers collapsed, floor by floor, with office workers and many brave firemen inside.

Once again, a large international coalition formed, this time to shut down the campsites in Afghanistan where legions of future terrorists were training. Most of Afghanistan was liberated quickly. The cruel and violent Taliban were driven into the southern Himalayas. Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden fled with them.

Bin Laden disappeared into the mountains, but with the more habitable parts of Afghanistan liberated, the bulk of the American forces was about ready to leave. Meanwhile, video began emerging from Iraq, showing not only the use of chemical weapons on Shiite villages in the south, but also various poisonous gasses used on animals for experimental purposes.

When I was in Rome in early 2003, Italian military intelligence briefed me on weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) being prepared in Iraq. Everyone already knew of short-range missiles aimed at Israel, so I assumed the WMDs consisted of the arsenal of chemical weapons inventoried after the war of 1991.

During the Clinton administration, we learned of expanding new capacities and methods for terrorists to commit mass destruction using chemical and other biological agents. Defense Secretary Cohen warned of the possible deadly release of small but potent amounts of chemicals in public transportation systems. And after September 11, 2001, no U.S. president could ignore Saddam Hussein’s apparent interest in such weapons. The man sworn to protect and defend the United States had to confront an ugly fact: another attack on U.S. soil, executed by lone operators in one or more American cities at the same time, was not impossible.

Should the president imagine the likelihood as closer to 100 percent, or closer to 0 percent? Either way, no president could avoid a decision. Having experienced Saddam Hussein’s megalomania in Kuwait, and again in his repeated use of chemicals against Shiite villages in his own country and flagrant defiances of the U.N., how would you assign the probabilities? In my judgment, then as now, any president who did not act against Saddam Hussein would be held responsible for any further destruction in the U.S. by Middle Eastern terrorists.

But there are still deeper reasons why it was right and good for the allied coalition to liberate Iraq in 2003. We will review these in part two, to come.

Why We Went into Iraq and Should Have Stayed There – Part Two

Published by Michael Novak on February 27, 2015

The U.S. made huge mistakes after launching troops into Iraq in 2003. But the hugest mistake of all was getting out prematurely and immorally in 2011. 

I am not interested in adjudicating the question of who is to blame for the pull-out. Bush, Obama, and the Iraqis themselves may all share responsibility. But that is beside the point I want to make. 

At the time when we recklessly pulled out the defensive force of 50,000 that U.S. commanders determined to be the minimum allowable to maintain stability, the Second Iraq War had been won. After many mistakes and dead ends, violence had stunningly abated and stability had been won. A vibrant civil society had blown back to life. This stability was so surprising to many that Vice President Biden in early 2010 called it “one of the great achievements” of the Obama [!!!] administration. 

As I noted in The American Spectator in 2007, victory left behind vast tangible benefits. Under Saddam, independent media had been banned. And yet in free Iraq after only three years there were fifty-four TV stations, 114 commercial radio stations, and 268 independent print organs. 

With great bravery and under constant threats, Iraqi citizens carried out two free elections in succession. Iraq’s new constitution recognized religious liberties – not all such liberties, not sufficiently, but far in advance of the constitutions of many other Muslim countries. 

Then, the unnecessary withdrawal of that residual force of 50,000 well-equipped and battle-hardened Americans left Iraq undefended against a future return of Al Qaeda – or, as events turned, an enemy far worse in size, ambition, bloodthirstiness, and massive cruelty: the Islamic State, ISIS. Without U.S. forces sufficient to provide a swift and deadly counterattack to drive ISIS back and into oblivion, that monster grew and keeps growing ever faster today.

ISIS announces its plans every day. It proposes a complete genocide of the Christian populations of the Middle East – through death (preferably by crucifixion), or through forced submission (dhimmitude), or conversion. The more public its announcements of military conquests to come, and the more ruthless (and unpunished) its public beheadings, the more voluminous its stream of bloodthirsty recruits. 

Some writers have announced that persons like me, who supported the Iraq War in 2003, should be doing penance. Do they still not see that a premature departure of U.S. troops in 2011 cleared the way for an endless succession of cruel barbarians like Al Qaeda and ISIS, one after another? 

The souls of hundreds of millions of Muslims worldwide are being divided by pressures to return to the barbarism of the seventh century, and by heartfelt desires for peace, compassion, prosperity, and the protection of human rights. As one young group of Muslim guerrilla fighters in Africa (fighting a Taliban-like regime) told me ten years ago, “It cannot be that the rights of every other group in the world matter, but not human rights among Muslims.” 

How, they asked, can we turn hundreds of millions of young single men from lives of nihilistic violence and destruction, toward lives of prosperity, freedom, and respect for the dignity and rights of all humans? Their own human rights have been abused for generations by tyrants and their various secret police forces. The human rights of Muslims have been among the most neglected in the world.

A German Middle East expert pointed out another social reality. Polygamy leads to millions of passionate young men living in loneliness and despair. No wonder they dream that paradise will bring seventy-two sloe-eyed virgins of their own – on condition that they die martyrs while killing infidels. 

The issue in Iraq was never merely bringing Saddam Hussein to trial for his hundreds of thousands of crimes – dropping poison gas on whole communities, gruesome tortures, horrific prisons. The greatest issue of all was changing the life prospects of Muslim young people, especially young males. All over the world, young males commit the majority of acts of violence and destruction. For some decades now, two-thirds of all military violence on earth has occurred among Muslim males of various factions. As many historians report, this wave started gathering force long before World War II. 

For several valiant years, despite serious mistakes and failed strategies, the Allied Coalition finally grabbed the attention of young Iraqis and their leadership, who began to turn in a new and constructive direction. 

Then our government abandoned those brave citizens who risked their lives to build a dignifying and prosperous democracy. We abandoned them, unprotected, to the tender mercies of ruthless nihilists. That was an awful betrayal. 

It was a betrayal, too, of all those American heroes who gave their lives and limbs so that Iraqis might live with dignity and freedom. 

And so now, in 2015, what should we do? Just surrender to ISIS? Just sit back and wait for still more violent and blood-lusting young men to attack the world, wave after wave? Shall we just stand by as all the Christians of the Middle East are exterminated? That does not seem to me the Christian or the brave thing to do. Certainly not the resolute course of action worthy of our creative and dynamic ancestors.

Emily’s Second Question: Why do we read the Old Testatment?

Emily’s Second Question

Published by Michael Novak at Patheos.com on February 20, 2015

EMILY: There is a huge shift between the Old Testament and the New Testament. Where God was once fire and brimstone and eternal damnation, Jesus is water into wine, and healing and forgiveness. Why, then, do we continue to read from the Old Testament?

GRANDPA: Emily, my reading of the Old Testament and the New Testament does not see them that way. For one thing, I can’t really understand Jesus without understanding His own religious commitments, and the teaching that marked His whole life as handed down to Him by Joseph and Mary.

God made a Covenant with the people of Israel and has never broken that Covenant. Humans have, but He hasn’t. I think of it this way: if Yahweh had broken that first Covenant, what right would Christians have for relying on the new Covenant He made with them? We Christians need constantly to be rereading the Jewish Testament (as I prefer to call it – since “Jewish” is to me more familiar and neighborly, not as distant as “Hebrew”). We need to reread it often in order to go deeper into the mind of Christ.

Emily, I’m not sure I’m on the right track here. You’ll have to tell me directly whether I am getting at what you wanted me to, or completely missing the mark. I’m probably relapsing into my classroom manner again. But you’ll have to forgive me, at least part of the time, for being myself.

An old but quite good introductory book for Catholics on how to read the two Testaments is The Two-Edged Sword by John A. McKenzie, S.J. McKenzie points out a constant motif of the Jewish Testament: the mercy of Yahweh, the love that He shows for Israel, His long and enduring patience, His desire to take the people of Israel under His wing as a mother hen gathers her chicks.

As I read the Jewish Testament – but I am no expert in it – the earliest parts of it are addressed to peoples near the beginning of civilization, and the authors write in very bold and often hyperbolic images as if to make a difficult point in the most vivid terms possible. How could early peoples even conceive of God as “Spirit and Truth”? Most peoples of the world, aware as they were of God’s presence, thought of Him as an idol of gold or of bronze, or perhaps like the Mayans, as a huge overpowering serpent, or as a fearsome jaguar of the night, and so on. The Jews alone reached a much higher conception of God. I feel you’ll agree with me that “Spirit and Truth” is less material, less crude than thinking of God as a thing – a stone idol, a snake, a jaguar.

“Spirit and Truth” is more like the intelligence that shines through the universe, more like the light in things which science seeks to uncover through hypotheses, testing, and bodies of theory. The light is always greater than the theories, and so science keeps advancing.

If you read the Jewish Testament as teaching a special people over many, many generations, one patient step at a time, you will detect significant shifts in the image of God presented by the prophets for popular understanding. They show that God loves humans and chooses them to be His friends – but they must choose to accept or to decline His offer of friendship.

He nonetheless makes those He loves to suffer. He tests their love. He does not offer them only sweetness. He offers also bitter myrrh, and often at the center of your life. Why would God be this way? Well, the prophets seem to say, He is. His ways are not our ways. As McKenzie’s title shows, often the Bible cuts like a sword. It gives pain as much as comfort.

My parents warned me not to spoil our children too much or make life too easy for them. “You have to teach them how to bear pain,” my father said. “You have to let them learn from mistakes. You have to let them go off on their own, even when you fear they will hurt themselves.”

Why God allows so much suffering in our lives is a really serious problem, one the Book of Job asks us to consider, without quite giving a fully satisfactory answer. The point is, even God recognizes the problem. To grapple with this problem is one very good reason for reading the Jewish Testament.

A further point we learn from the Jewish Testament is sketched vividly in Norman Podhoretz’s The Prophets, namely, a grand ethical vision of the human capacity, even in pain, for reflection, deliberation, and responsible choice.

In short, the Biblical vision teaches the human being that, beyond anything else, she is a moral agent. She will bear many burdens, she will experience many joys, she will taste many pleasures, and she will feel the whip of many pains. But throughout she will be called by One who loves her, to respond in her life with the zest of a free creature, noble endurer of misfortune, and grateful participant in the many pleasures the Lord has put on the table of human life. She will be called by One who loves her, to act as a noble, valiant woman. As did her ancestors.

2016: What We Stand For

 2016: What We Stand For

Published by Michael Novak at Patheos.com on February 17, 2015

My first three priorities for 2016 are jobs, jobs, jobs. And if you are with me on that, then let me specify that the only way to get new jobs and more employees – is to get more job-creators, entrepreneurs, employers. You can’t get more employees without getting more employers. And most new jobs – about two-thirds – are created by small businesses.

So it is incredible to think that the number of new small businesses started under Democrats (my old party), in the last reporting year, was the lowest since the early 1970s. And it ranked the U.S. – the former world leader for many years – twelfth among all nations.

That’s not the way it was when I was young. Democrats favored new small businesses too. They were loud and clear on job creation. That changed. But then Reagan and Clinton led an expansion that saw nearly 40 million new jobs created. It was an intense bipartisan effort. No longer.

The next president has to make an immense, multiyear effort to get hundreds of thousands of new entrepreneurs starting new businesses, and help small businesses regain a prosperous climate to grow in. He has to tear away the crushing burdens that the Democratic Senate voted for over the past eight years. He has to liberate job-creators.

I would strongly support a president whose goal is to promote the right economic ecology to grow 12 million new jobs in the next eight years. Twelve million new jobs may sound like a lot. But it isn’t as many as Reagan saw bloom under his eight years (16 million) or as Bill Clinton helped bring about (almost 23 million). But it sure would help turn this country around.

Right now, this country desperately needs a course correction. Twelve million new jobs is an indispensable start.

This nation also needs a new foreign policy – and a new arms policy. This policy must be founded on three pillars: (1) human rights; (2) a dynamic, quickly growing economy, which is in itself a great threat to any nation’s foes; and (3) the steady build-up of a military capable of containing seventh-century politico-Islamic barbarism in the Middle East; brutal Russian aggressions in Crimea and Ukraine; and increasingly frequent Chinese military probes in Asia. “Our country is in danger, but not to be despaired of.”

In human rights matters (and that is where U.S. foreign policy best begins), my dear friend Michael Horowitz points out that human trafficking is the slavery issue of our time, and the enslavement of millions of women and girls in the U.S. and around the world raises the same moral imperatives that the mass enslavement of Africans did 150 years ago. Despite this, there has been no commitment to end modern day slavery, even though it is the world’s fastest growing area of crime and a $10 billion per year U.S. “industry.” Most horrific, it is largely based on victimizing girls who are first captured at an average age of 13-14 years.

The Republican Party fought to win the first emancipation of slaves in 1863. It should step up again to lead the way to emancipate the victims of human trafficking.

Second, Republicans must and will get this country moving again. Moving forward. Moving confidently. It must lead the world economically. A strong and exceedingly creative economy is the best foreign policy and defense policy. It made the Soviets lose heart.

Third, build a military adequate to meet today’s grave threats – in some ways graver and larger than in the twentieth century. Politico-Islamism, plus Russian might, plus ambitious and heavily-armed China are not the junior varsity. They have made American leaders look like the JV.

We need brave and free Democrats to join us. But conscience demands that we remind Democrats how many of them agreed to pull out from Iraq that last small but formidable military force of 50,000. That force would have acted as a secure base for a rapid build-up, if necessary, to prevent a hidden group like the mad and bloodthirsty young men of ISIS from even daring to raise their heads.

Recall the ancient maxim: If you want peace, prepare for war. Be so strong that bullies cringe from attacking. Our nation’s leadership has seemed to have forgotten that sturdy principle. Seemed totally at sea and confused, in fact.

But let’s also come down to earth. A lot of ordinary people aren’t much interested in arguments about national policy. They pay as little attention to technical national issues as they can. What they worry about – next to jobs – are the outfits their teenage daughters are wearing, and the coarsening language of all our children.

That is why it is best to speak a language of family and neighborhood. That’s where most people’s hearts live. Reagan’s slogan (does anybody remember it?) was “Family, Work, Neighborhood, Peace, and Freedom.” Most people get that right away. That’s where they are. That’s what they love most, and most care about.

* * *

That’s what I want to come out of 2016. A party committed to family, work, neighborhood . . .

And human rights (especially the abolition of human trafficking) . . .

And military strength . . .

And peace.

Shout out these six battle cries, Republicans!

That way, you’ll have my enthusiasm and my vote. And my gratitude for rescuing our country from its rapid downward spin.