The Truths Americans Used to Hold Part I: Where’s the Yeast?

The Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project recently sponsored a conference on philanthropy and the importance of fundamental ideas. In the keynote address, Michael Novak urged the many philanthropists present to attend urgently to the failure of our cultural institutions to teach the young (for the first time in American history) the basic principles of the American Republic—the ten, twelve, fifteen new propositions without which American Exceptionalism cannot be understood and without whose personal appropriation by each generation in succession this exceptional republic cannot stand. That Dietrich von Hildebrand was held up as a model for this conference seemed appropriate. He was a young man so grounded in “first things” that he was one of the very first—often alone—to stand publicly against the Nazi movement. If ever a demonstration were needed of the importance of rock-bottom ideas in times of ideological confusion, hardly a better model that von Hildebrand can be found. Here, in the first of three installments, Novak reflects on “The Truths Americans Used to Hold”—and why it is crucial now to take emergency steps to teach them to the young. Yeast in dough. That is the image our American ancestors saw when they thought about planting the germs of beauty and nobility in their new culture. One only has to look at L’Enfant's original plan for the buildings and parks of Washington, D.C., to grasp how much attention our nation’s founders paid to splendor and simplicity, to virtue and nobility and beauty. The founders’ dream was to build a republic that would live long, prosper, and inspire a noble spirit in its citizens. The public buildings of the capital city as built solidly lift up this dream.

A republic is not worth dying for just because it is prosperous—not if its self-satisfied citizens live like pigs. Nor is a republic worthy just because its citizens enjoy political freedom—not if those citizens dissipate their freedom in decadence, promiscuousness, and self-centeredness. Indeed, no republic will last long that ceases to strive for nobility of spirit, virtue, and self-sacrifice. Put another way, tyranny begins within the mind and the soul. If in that mind and soul there is no moral difference between the truth and the lie, and no moral difference between deeds good in themselves and deeds evil in themselves, then what is the argument for preferring liberty to tyranny? Opinion soundings show that a great many Americans no longer can express, or even recall, the ideas, specific virtues, and moral strivings on the embodiment of which this republic depends for its continuance.

The republic of the United States of America is not just a large bit of real estate, a sweep of territory. It is an idea lived out in real lives. It is a vision of beauty and virtue. This republic is capable of inspiring great love, great inner discipline, and the sacrifice of life itself. America makes one feel that no matter how noble we try to be, there were greater men and women who preceded us and laid out the way. Yet because it depends—to an extraordinary degree—on certain classical virtues, ours is also a republic exceedingly fragile and easy to lose. A single generation that chooses to turn away from freedom’s internal disciplines can, by doing so, blow out the lights and exit from the republican form of government. The price of our freedom is generation-by-generation vigilance and the renewal of intellectual commitment by each successive American daughter and son.

The culture of this republic was born around unusual understandings of what is noble and worth striving for. Our present age seems to have lost—or almost to have lost—those understandings. If we do not regain them, our culture will prove to be a cracked cistern and may run dry. The problem is that the cause of intellectual and cultural renewal is far less clear than the causes of the wealth of nations and political renewal. Less clear, but more important. How can one identify the sources of the beautiful, the worthy, and the noble—the inner secrets of the admirable human life?

A culture grows organically, one person at a time. A culture is not a mechanical contrivance; it is a life-form. Individuals need to be captivated by it and pledged to it, and they need to accept its hard demands, one person at a time. If that culture is lucky, it will produce a few exemplars who will inspire thousands of others by their words, deeds, or public creations. A culture needs individuals who show a particular promise—the promise of helping to revivify the key ideas, virtues, and visions of nobility that, in the first place, generated Western culture and, in due time (as Hannah Arendt dared to affirm), generated Western culture’s most noble experiment, the republic of the United States of America.

In an age torn by rival ideologies—an age in which passions run high, commitments are made that can reach as far as life and death, and a maelstrom of ideas about the future, visions, symbols, and even secular liturgies in vast public places compete for attention—for those who keep their heads, two questions are paramount: Amid all these visions, what is real? And what is true?

These are what the ancients called “the question of being.” The ancients spoke of the convertibility of the true, the real—and also the beautiful: Find one of these, and you begin to touch the other two. These questions also frame what the ancients called metaphysics—an interest not much honored today. Still, the questions remain as urgent as ever: What is real? What is true? Which is the beauty worth clinging to? There also are other questions—not quite questions of metaphysics in the older sense, but related to it—about what is real for a human life and the criteria for sorting out the true from the false and reality from ideology.

For young people, Dietrich von Hildebrand put the question quite sharply: If, as in 1933 or 1938, you are in danger of dying before you become old, what is worth giving your life to?

That is a metaphysics for living, not simply for knowing. Perhaps more exactly, it is ethics—but not in the modern, post-Kantian sense. Because it is not exactly the more limited modern brand of ethics, perhaps I will be forgiven for also calling it metaphysics, although in a large, extended sense. A trustworthy ethics for human living is, in fact, a fairly good entranceway to metaphysics and its more profound questions about being and truth.

Under the marching passions of Nazism and Communism, the young professor von Hildebrand was one of the few men who kept a cool head from the very first—and an anchor buried deep in reality. With his life in the balance, he edited an anti-Nazi newspaper in Vienna and taught and wrote until the Anschluss drove him out—out of the Third Reich, but not out of his beloved metaphysics. Looking at these searing experiences, one understands why von Hildebrand always engaged in a metaphysics for living. For him, in his time, it was a matter of moral survival.

Michael Novak, a member of the editorial board of First Things, holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. His most recent book is No One Sees God.

Published in First Things Online December 16, 2009

Three Precisions: Personal Liberty

Three of the terms used most frequently in Catholic social thought—and now, more generally, in much secular discourse—are social justice, the common good, and personal (or individual) liberty. Often, these terms are used loosely and evasively. Not a few authors avoid defining them altogether, as if assuming that they need no definition. But all three need, in every generation, to recover their often lost precision. Otherwise, the silent artillery of time steadily levels their carefully wrought strong points and leaves an entire people intellectually and morally defenseless. I have tried, in three short essays, to find some precision in these three realities and to define them in terms as dear to the left as to the right—that is, in ideologically neutral ways. If I have failed in that task, perhaps someone can do it better. The more of us who try, the better.

In this, my final essay, I will examine personal liberty.

What Is Personal Liberty?

“By its liberty, the human person transcends the stars and all the world of nature,” Jacques Maritain once wrote. No one has reflected more deeply on the phenomenology of the human person than Karol Wojtyla—John Paul II. The person, in his view, is an originating source of creative action in the world. The human person is able to reflect on his or her own past, find it wanting, repent, and change direction. He or she is able to reflect on possible courses of action in the future, to deliberate among them, and to choose to commit to—and take responsibility for—one among those courses.

Only the human person is free to choose which among his or her many impulses to follow. An animal’s freedom is to do what simple instinct impels. A human’s freedom is to discern a higher, more complex, and more demanding rationality in the field of action. A human person is free to become a gentle master of all his or her instincts, so as to choose appropriately among them. He or she is free, in short, to do what a person ought to do.

In our time, alas, many people have come to think of human liberty as the ability to flow with their instincts, let go of restraint, and do what they feel like doing. Such people like to invoke animal images of their dream of liberty: They are “born free” like a lioness on the African plains or “free as a bird.” They look on animal nature as innocent and unrestrained, separated from social customs, traditions, mores, and moral rules imposed from outside the animals’ own instincts, urgings, and longings. Woody Allen very neatly expressed this sort of impulsiveness when he said, “The heart wants what the heart wants.”

But is this not a paradoxical claim? Some people claim to be compelled to follow instinct. They claim to have lost the liberty to persuade their hearts, lost all will to resist, lost all ability to do anything other than what the heart wants. We all know that pull of the heart. But true liberty demands that we open ourselves to other pulls and other persuasions, while listening to the calming voice of wisdom. Experience teaches us, in this way, that human liberty is not constituted by bondage to impulse, even to prolonged and seemingly irresistible impulse. Such bondage describes the liberty of wild animals, but it does not describe the liberty available only to the fully developed human animal—the free person.

Another way of describing this difference is to say that animal freedom is given to us with our instincts. But human freedom must be wrested from our instincts—cultivated, learned by practice, gained slowly by trial and error. For the most part, human freedom is taught to us by spiritual guides, by favorite teachers, by historical narratives, and by the moral example of our parents or loved ones. Animal freedom, with its contradictory impulses, often generates war within the breast. Human freedom derives slowly as we learn to find, within a large number of instincts, the most fruitful inner order that brings not only peace, but also wisdom.

It is not easy, for instance, to learn how to reflect, to gain the inner calm necessary to deliberate, and to find the courage to choose the more difficult path, the more demanding way. To achieve this inner order and (relative) harmony, we need, as it were, bodyguards of the soul: certain firm habits that protect various capabilities of the self.

Let me elaborate. Liberty consists in an act of self-government by which we restrain our desires by temperance and self-control and curb our fears by courage, steadfastness, and steadiness. We do so in order to reflect soberly, deliberate well, and choose dispassionately and justly based on the merits of the case under consideration. Moreover, we seek to act in such a way that others can count on our commitment and our long-term purpose. Such practices of self-government are found in a recurrent and habitual way only in persons of considerable character.

It is the great fortune of the United States that our first president, George Washington, was understood by all who knew him to be the prototype of this sort of liberty. He was a man of character and a man one could count on. He was decisive and self-starting—a leader who, by his very virtues, was worthy of the admiration and affection of his countrymen. He was a model for the liberty the nation promised to all who wished to earn it.

Liberty of this sort does not come from either the positive or the negative actions of the state. Rather, the Constitution of the American republic deliberately allows this liberty scope and clearly depends on its widespread realization. The liberty of self-government must be acquired one person at a time. This personal task is rendered easier when the surrounding public ethos not only teaches it, encourages it, and proffers many examples of it, but also proffers examples of the self-destruction wrought by its absence. In this sense, personal liberty is much favored or much impeded depending on the social ecology of liberty. In any case, the American conception of liberty is one of “ordered liberty”—a liberty of self-mastery, self-discipline, and self-government.

Personal liberty is not well described as “unencumbered” liberty or “rugged individualism,” as “libertinism” or “hedonism” or “egoism,” or as “letting go” or “going with the flow.” Personal liberty is not the liberty of doing whatever one wishes. It is the liberty to reflect on what one ought to do and the liberty to choose to take responsibility for doing it. Here in America, it is the liberty our forebears taught us. John Paul II, speaking of America, referred to this country’s historic contribution of the social ideal of “ordered liberty.”

This is the liberty to which certain liberals in nineteenth-century France looked when they suggested the design for the Statue of Liberty. They meant this statue to stand in contrast with the image of 1789: the prostitute on the altar of the Cathedral of Notre Dame. They decided on a woman as the symbol of liberty (they were, after all, French), but not the loose courtesan of Paris. This Liberty is a sober, serious woman, with one arm raised to hold aloft the torch of light and reason and her other arm cradling a tablet representing the book of the law.

My own favorite expression of this liberty is by Katharine Lee Bates, in the third verse of “America the Beautiful”:

O beautiful for pilgrim feet Whose stern impassion’d stress A thoroughfare for freedom beat Across the wilderness.

America! America! God mend thine ev’ry flaw, Confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law.

The United States of America has given many bad lessons to the world, and as a nation and a culture it has many tragic flaws. But one good thing it has brought into the world is the reborn ideal of ordered liberty: the ideal of republican civic virtue and the idea of freedom as the capacity of women and men, whatever may befall them, to do as they ought. American history has brought us many stories of courage and self-control.

Personal liberty, then, is not an intuitive, but a learned concept—a socially learned concept. It is not so much a personal achievement (although it is that, too; one’s mother or father cannot stand in one’s place) as it is a social achievement—a cultural achievement. It requires an entire cultural ecology to support it, strengthen it, encourage it, and teach it. Accordingly, its embodiment appears more frequently in some cultures than in others, and more strongly in some generations than in others. Personal liberty is a fragile achievement, and a single generation can decide to turn out the lights, surrender, and walk away from it.

It is by this fragile and precious liberty that (in the words of Jacques Maritain) “the human person transcends the stars and all the world of nature.”

As I said at the start, I have tried, in these three short essays, to find the often lost precision in the terms social justice, the common good, and personal liberty and to do so in ways that transcend left and right. I invite your comments.

Michael Novak, a member of the editorial board of First Things, holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. His most recent book is No One Sees God. The three pieces in this series of essays, prepared with the assistance of Elizabeth Shaw and Mitchell Boersma, are derived from Novak’s speech on November 13, 2009 at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture Conference, “The Summons of Freedom: Virtue, Sacrifice, and the Common Good.”

Published in First Things Online December 3, 2009

Three Precisions: Common Good

Three of the terms used most frequently in Catholic social thought—and now, more generally, in much secular discourse—are social justice, the common good, and personal (or individual) liberty. Often, these terms are used loosely and evasively. Not a few authors avoid defining them altogether, as if assuming that they need no definition. But all three need, in every generation, to recover their often lost precision. Otherwise, the silent artillery of time steadily levels their carefully wrought strong points and leaves an entire people intellectually and morally defenseless. I have tried, in three short essays, to find some precision in these three realities and to define them in terms as dear to the left as to the right—that is, in ideologically neutral ways. If I have failed in that task, perhaps someone can do it better. The more of us who try, the better.

In this, my second essay, I will examine the common good.

What Is the Common Good?

A number of years ago, at the Human Rights Commission in Bern, a misuse of the term common good poked its head through the clouds like an Alp. I had prodded the Soviet delegation to recognize the right of a married couple, one of whom was from one nation and one from another, to share residence in whichever nation they chose. The Soviets staunchly resisted the idea—and did so in the name of the common good. The Soviet Union, they insisted, had invested great sums of money and much effort to educate each Soviet citizen, and the common good demanded that these citizens now make comparable contributions in return. The Soviet partner in such a marriage could not, therefore, leave the Soviet state. Individual desires must bow to the common good of all.

Before this experience, it had never entered my mind that anyone could use the term common good to override the rights of free persons. I could understand the willing surrender of one’s own life or lesser goods for the sake of the common good. But the enforcement of the common good as a weapon against individual rights—or, to put it more exactly, against the rights of the free person—had not occurred to me as a subject for such abuse.

This experience taught me to reexamine other often-encountered uses of the term common good. Not infrequently, the common good was invoked against the evils of individualism and self-interest. Several ideologies of the twentieth century had set out to make war on “the atomic individual” and the selfish “decadence” of “individualism.” Instead, these ideologies raised up the nation and the collective will and abandoned the feeling of solidarity with the downtrodden. I remembered a letter written by a young German to Albert Camus on the vanity of Western individualism and (by contrast) the nobility and power of social purpose under one strong leader.

Not only Leninism and Stalinism but also fascism and Nazism exalted the collective good over the good of the individual and coerced the sacrifice of individual purpose for the sake of the communist, fascist, or Nazi collective future. Even some of my early intellectual heroes, the Personalists, went over to France’s Vichy regime to prevent the creeping spiritual decadence of Anglo-Saxon individualism from advancing onto the continent, and to reassert the primacy of the common good over the individual.

An important point lies embedded here. We often use the words individual and person interchangeably, but there is a distinction to be made. Statist ideologies have set out to diminish the individual in the name of the common good; the Church affirms the dignity of the person. Interestingly, when a state defines its foe as the individual, such statism actually gives the state the sort of opposition that it will more easily defeat and that ultimately will serve the state’s purposes. When the Church speaks of the nobility of the person, it is with the understanding that each person is a unique being endowed by God with a range of gifts—not the least of which is freedom—that enable that person to be an originating, creative source of action.

Statism, in effect, reduces the person to the individual—to a fungible, replaceable piece of the machinery of statist society rather than a unique, free being created by God, responsible for his own destiny, possessing dignity, and commanding respect as such. Persons are the real enemy—the real danger—for statism. Personhood is what the Church affirms, and persons are the strongest opposition to statism.

I also remember my excitement on reading Pius XII’s 1944 Christmas message, with its ringing defense of the human rights of the individual against the crushing weight of collectivism in Europe. Jacques Maritain later marked this message as a turning point in the Catholic defense of the human person in modern history. Henceforth, Catholics were warned to defend not only the common good, but also the individual person. The fruit of this shift was evident in the definition of the common good as set forth in the Second Vatican Council’s 1965 Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes: “the common good, that is, the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment” (Gaudium et Spes, 26).

Prior to Vatican II, a great deal of intellectual effort went into forging new conceptions, not only of the common good, but also of the person. One example is the powerful debate between Charles de Koninck and Jacques Maritain in which Maritain’s position is marked out in his important title: The Person and the Common Good (1947). Just as the council was to define the common good in terms of the fulfillment of the human person, so also, in due course, did the human person come to be defined in terms of caritas, communio, and—with John Paul II—solidarity. In this new intellectual field, it became rather more common to define person in terms of communio and the common good. At the same time, the common good is not achieved until human persons are free to reach their personal callings, and the person is not complete until he or she turns in service to the common good. According to this “new anthropology,” person and community are defined in terms of each other.

In 1961 it was Karol Wojtyla, the young bishop of Krakow, who, in two long letters to the preparatory commission for Vatican II, suggested that these two themes, the person and the common good, ought to undergird all the work of the council. Later, as pope, he described the common good as “not simply the sum total of particular interests; rather it involves an assessment and integration of those interests on the basis of a balanced hierarchy of values; ultimately, it demands a correct understanding of the dignity and the rights of the person” (Centesimus Annus, 47).

It would be rash to think, however, that our search for intellectual precision in the definitions of person and common good are at an end. Let me call attention to two remaining problems.

First, it seems natural to speak of the common good of, say, Europe and the United States in the year 1900 as being advanced over their common good in the year 1800. It seems, furthermore, that considerable progress was made between the years 1900 and 2000 in achieving the common good and the fulfillment of persons, albeit after immense and unprecedented sufferings. Is an achievement of the common good yet higher than that we have today imaginable?

From such considerations we learn that the common good is a temporally analogous concept—a concept driven by a moving dynamism of intellectual reflection and institutional invention. Achieving the common good seems to involve a moving target that is set to ever-higher and wider-ranging standards.

Jacques Maritain taught us to think of setting proximate goals—goals realistically achievable in a relatively short time (if we work hard, and our work is blessed by Providence)—rather than holding only to currently unattainable ideals and so letting the perfect become the enemy of the good.

Futher, Friedrich Hayek taught us that many contributions to the common good are not intended by any one person or group but are the result of practical human actions: One person’s actions adjust to another’s, often over a long stretch of time, and they do so without all the parties to the result ever meeting one another. One example Hayek offered struck me with a certain force, as I had often experienced it hiking in the Alps: a well-worn path that marks out a moderate, rational course while well diagnosing the area’s topography. No one person mapped out the path; it achieved a certain order as the result of the practical intelligence of many persons over time.

Another example occurs to me: President Abraham Lincoln’s Homestead Act of 1862 respected the practical intelligence of each homesteader to develop his own land in his own way, given the land’s possibilities, advantages, and disadvantages. Moreover, it was to each homesteader’s benefit to accommodate and synchronize his own efforts—in planting, cultivating, harvesting and marketing—with those of others, to the mutual advantage of all. No one told the homesteaders what to do. No one preplanned the resulting order. The imperatives of practical intelligence led to a certain mutual adjustment and workable order.

The second point that needs to be defined with more precision is the multidimensionality of the concept of the common good. As part of a Ph.D. thesis, S. Iniobong Udoidem, a scholar from Africa, developed a chart based on the work of Yves Simon. In the chart, Udoidem maps out twelve different usages of the term common good. He distinguishes between the particular and the general common good, the material and the formal common good, and the earthly and the spiritual common good. He also distinguishes between the temporal common good and the eternal, universal common good of all humans, which is union with God. This fine piece of work opens our minds to the full richness—and many demands—of the common good.

Naturally, when questions of practical wisdom are directed to pluralistic peoples, there arise not only many competing ways of identifying the temporal, earthly common good, but also many competing ways of discovering how best to achieve it. In these matters, therefore, to assert that “X” is the common good is not to close the question but to submit it to the competition of ideas, which is essential to a free society. This is why the achievement of the temporal common good—That “sum,” in the words of Gaudium et Spes, “of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment” —requires full measures of civility, of humility, and of the willingness to admit mistakes and learn from them. It is through such acts of self-government, in fact, that we achieve true personal liberty—the subject, tomorrow, of the third of these essays.

Michael Novak, a member of the editorial board of First Things, holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. His most recent book is No One Sees God. The three pieces in this series of essays, prepared with the assistance of Elizabeth Shaw and Mitchell Boersma, are derived from Novak’s speech on November 13, 2009 at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture Conference, “The Summons of Freedom: Virtue, Sacrifice, and the Common Good.”

Published in First Things Online December 2, 2009

Three Precisions: Social Justice

Three of the terms used most frequently in Catholic social thought—and now, more generally, in much secular discourse—are social justice, the common good, and personal (or individual) liberty. Often, these terms are used loosely and evasively. Not a few authors avoid defining them altogether, as if assuming that they need no definition. But all three need, in every generation, to recover their often lost precision. Otherwise, the silent artillery of time steadily levels their carefully wrought strong points and leaves an entire people intellectually and morally defenseless. I have tried, in three short essays, to find some precision in these three realities and to define them in terms as dear to the left as to the right—that is, in ideologically neutral ways. If I have failed in that task, perhaps someone can do it better. The more of us who try, the better.

I will start, today, with social justice.

What Is Social Justice?

What, exactly, is social justice? I have searched many volumes on the subject (Jean-Yves Calvez and Jacques Perrin’s The Church and Social Justice, for instance) and have not found a precise definition. A recent obituary in the Delaware Catholic reported that a nun named Sister Maureen gave her entire life as a religious for social justice. She served as a missionary in Africa for forty-six years, cared for the sick, taught the young, and brought assistance to the suffering and the poor. Are we to gather from this that the term social justice is simply a synonym for living out the beauty of the Beatitudes?

I once heard a professor at the Catholic University of Ružomberok, Slovakia, say that he thought of social justice as “an ideal arrangement of society, in which justice and charity are fully served. Until then, one cannot say that social justice has been realized.” Does this mean that social justice is a social ideal by which some people measure reality and toward which they strive, progressively, to move society?

American socialist Irving Howe once wrote that “Socialism is the name of our dream.” He meant a dream of justice and equality and (for him) democracy. Is social justice also the name of a dream, but not exactly the socialist dream?

To which genus does social justice belong? Is it a virtue? Is it a vision of a perfectly just society? Is it an ideal set of government policies? Is it a theory? Is it a practice?

Is social justice a secular, nonreligious concept? Many secular sociologists and political philosophers use the term that way, trying to tie it down as closely as they can to the term equality in the French sense, in which the word égalité also means the mathematical equal sign.

Or is social justice a religious term, evangelical in inspiration? Has social justice become an ideological marker that favors (in the American context) progressives over conservatives, Democrats over Republicans, and social workers over corporate executives?

And which writer was the first to use the term? In what context was he writing, and in connection with what social crisis?

The scholar Friedrich Hayek finds that the first writer to use the term was an Italian priest, Taparelli D’Azeglio, in his book Natural Rights from a Historical Standpoint (1883). It is in this book that Leo XIII (1878–1903) first encountered the term. The context was one of the most enormous social transformations in human history: the end of the agrarian age that had begun before the time of Christ, and the fairly abrupt entry into an age of invention, investment, urban growth, manufacturing, and services. No longer did families have an inherited roof over their heads and daily food from their own land. Now they were uprooted and dwelling in cities, dependent for shelter and food on the availability of jobs and their own initiative. Traditional social networks were cut to shreds, and the associations of a lifetime were torn asunder.

Two radically opposed social ideals were propagandized during this period. One was the socialism of Karl Marx and those of similar mind; the other was the radical individualism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. On the whole, the European continent leaned toward the first ideal and away from the second. Leo XIII, in his encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), made it his aim to lean against both.

Leo understood that these new times demanded a new response. The old social order was fading fast, and a new one of some sort was swiftly arising. What shape it would take was not yet clear, however. The pope noted that because the family has always been the most central and intimate institution for handing down the faith, the new fractures and stresses in the family demanded that the Church enter into the battle for the shape of the future. Leo XIII saw that new institutions and new virtues among individuals would be required for the new times. For specific reasons that he carefully spelled out, he feared the socialist state. He also feared the radical individualism that, he predicted, eventually would drive the undefended individual into the custodianship of the state.

It is highly instructive, on the twentieth anniversary of 1989, to reread Rerum Novarum in the light of the events of that year. Certainly those events were fresh in the mind of John Paul II in 1991, when, in his encyclical Centesimus Annus, he repeated the century-old warnings of a growing socialist state:

According to Rerum novarum and the whole social doctrine of the Church, the social nature of man is not completely fulfilled in the State, but is realized in various intermediary groups, beginning with the family and including economic, social, political and cultural groups which stem from human nature itself and have their own autonomy, always with a view to the common good. This is what I have called the “subjectivity” of society which, together with the subjectivity of the individual, was cancelled out by “Real Socialism.” (Centesimus Annus, 13)

I know from the experience of my own family over four generations how stressful the great transformation of society has been. Most of the gospel texts are cast in agricultural metaphors—seeds, harvests, grains, sheep, land, fruit trees—and so resonate with the economic order of most of human history until the nineteenth or twentieth century. My family served as serfs on the large estate of the Hungarian Count Czaky, whose own ancestor was a hero in the turning back of the Turks near Budapest in 1456. My relatives were subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and, as near as I can determine, were not able to own their own land until the 1920s. Men, women, and children on the estate were counted annually, along with cattle, sheep, goats, and other livestock, for purposes of taxation.

My ancestors were taught to accept their lot. Their moral duties were fairly simple: Pray, pay, and obey. What they did and gained was pretty much determined from above. Beginning in about 1880, however, because farms no longer could sustain the growth in population, almost two million people from eastern Slovakia—one by one, along chains of connection with families and fellow villagers—began to migrate to America and elsewhere. Usually the sons left first and sent back later for wives. This was one of the greatest—and most unusual—mass migrations in history, with people migrating, not as whole tribes, but as individuals.

In America my grandparents were no longer subjects, but citizens. If their social arrangements were not right, they now had a duty (and a human necessity) to organize to change them. They were free, but they also were saddled with personal responsibility for their own future. They needed to learn new virtues, to form new institutions, and to take their own responsibility for the institutions they inherited from America’s founding geniuses.

In this context the term social justice can be defined with rather considerable precision. Social justice names a new virtue in the panoply of historical virtues: a set of new habits and abilities that need to be learned, perfected, and passed on—new virtues with very powerful social consequences.

This new virtue is called “social” for two reasons. First, its aim or purpose is to improve the common good of society at large—outside the family especially, perhaps even on a national or international scale, but certainly in a range of social institutions nearer home. A village or neighborhood may need a new well, or a new school, or even a church. Workers may need to form a union and to unite with other unions. Because the causes of the wealth of nations are invention and intellect, new colleges and universities may need to be founded.

In America, new immigrants formed athletic clubs for the young; social clubs at which adult males could play checkers, cards, or horseshoes; and associations through which women could tend the needs of their neighbors. Because many of the men worked as many as twelve hours a day in the mines or the mills, the women conducted much of the social business of the neighborhoods in political and civic circles. The immigrants formed insurance societies and other associations of mutual help to care for one another in case of injury or of premature death. Alexis de Tocqueville was correct, in his Democracy in America, when he called the voluntary forming of associations by citizens to meet their own social needs “the first law of democracy.”

But this new virtue is called social for a second reason. Not only are its aims or purposes social, but also its constitutive practices. The practice of the virtue of social justice consists in learning new skills of cooperation and association with others to accomplish ends that no single individual could achieve on his own. At one pole this new virtue is a social protection against atomic individualism; at the other pole it protects considerable civic space from the direct custodianship of the state.

This definition is ideologically neutral. Social justice is practiced both by those on the left and those on the right. There is, after all, more than one way to imagine the future good of society; and humans of all persuasions do well to master the new social virtue that assists them in defining and working with others toward their own visions of that good.

The breakdown of the old order called for new habits in building new social organisms—associations—to meet new needs. This explains why this new virtue of social justice arose only in the nineteenth century. It also sheds light on one of the most distinguished sobriquets of Leo XIII: “the pope of associations.” These were associations formed according to the new virtue of social justice to serve the common good—the subject, tomorrow, of my second essay.

Michael Novak, a member of the editorial board of First Things, holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. His most recent book is No One Sees God. The three pieces in this series of essays, prepared with the assistance of Elizabeth Shaw and Mitchell Boersma, are derived from Novak’s speech on November 13, 2009 at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture Conference, “The Summons of Freedom: Virtue, Sacrifice, and the Common Good.”

Published in First Things Online December 1, 2009

Remembering 1989

For the ten years beginning in 1982, I had the privilege of serving on the Board of Radio Free Europe (for East-Central Europe) and Radio Liberty (for the vast Soviet Union, including its soft Muslim underbelly in “the 'Stans”). President Reagan declared it the goal of the United States to win the Cold War, not just accept it as our long-term fate. Our job was to report the realities on the ground as accurately as we could. Our listeners loved getting these tastes of reality and they increasingly helped us with every bit of information they could. By late 1988 we had free dial-in capacities from most parts of our two regions. Telephone calls poured in: calls of increasing daily frustration, anger at local injustices, descriptions of the conditions of loved ones in named local hospitals, fresh examples of local official lies, accounts of local outbreaks of protest. Almost half of all hospitals had no hot water; patients were frequently assigned two to a bed; relatives had to bring food to sustain them.

At our spring Board Meeting in Munich in 1989, our key people reported that all signs pointed to the lid blowing off the Soviet Empire before the end of the year. The huge volume of incoming calls and their despairing tone, plus detailed reports from our growing number of stringers in the whole dispersed broadcast area made even our most hardened and jaundiced editors believe that something new was up.

One story our people reported was the appearance of a novelty among street vendors in Moscow: a market in burned-out light bulbs. Why buy burned-out bulbs? To take to the office, unscrew good bulbs to take home, and screw in the useless ones.

As soon as I came home, I wrote up a short magazine article conveying this prediction, and warning readers that, whatever they were hearing from most of the media and university Russia experts, the end was nigh. My pieces usually got into print quickly in the religious journals I chose. This time, no editor would believe me. At least five times the piece came back.

Thus I turned to Steve Forbes at Forbes magazine – he was chairman of the RFE/RL Board, so he understood. I worked my longer piece into three one-page articles, using new information as it unfolded. My intention was to help readers anticipate the coming events and to place each in the unfolding larger narrative. I started off the series on 24 July.

By the spring of 1989 it had begun to be said openly – even Gorbachev said it – that the USSR might have a First World military, but much of the rest of the economy was Third World, even Fourth World, below the level of India. And this could no longer be disguised. Even the manufacture of soap was unreliable. Food shortages were being reported, with worse to come (Russian experts said) during the 1989 winter months. Some experts even predicted famine.

A story was being told (recycled from earlier times) of General Jaruzelski of Poland being summoned to Moscow. When he came back, his secretary noticed a large bandage on his cheek. He said nothing, she hesitated to ask. Finally by day's end she summoned up courage to ask about it.

“The dentist.” he explained. “In Moscow I had to go for a filling.” “But the big bandage?” “You think I open my mouth in Moscow?”

In 1983 President Reagan had called the Soviet Empire “an evil empire.” He did so with express forethought, against the advice of nearly all his important advisors, and to immense hand-wringing by Western journalists.

Reagan knew it was inevitable that some day a journalist would ask Gorbachev if he agreed. When the time finally came, Gorbachev admitted that some of the things done in the 1930s were wrong. From then on, everything the Soviets did was subject to the one thing Communists hated: moral evaluation. Until that time, Communists had disdained “bourgeois” morality and insisted that the only moral good was to advance the progress of Communism, and evil was to resist it. Now everything they did could be scrutinized morally, in language legitimated by Gorbachev himself. “Openness, Glasnost,” was daily becoming a sharper pin in the regime.

The first gigantic explosion against the Empire was struck – where else? – in Poland. The electrifying electrician of the labor union Solidarity inspired a massive outbreak of public protests throughout the nation, and General Jaruzelski was obliged to bow to the parliamentary elections which this time could not be rigged. In August, democracy once again worked its peaceful magic in a stunning transition of power.

The real magic had arrived ten years before, when the new Polish Pope, the young and vigorous John Paul II, had (through his own unrelenting insistence) been invited by an unwilling Polish Communist Government to make a pilgrimage to his native land. When the crowds, sometimes in the millions, gathered round him, a stunning awareness came over them: There are more of us than there are of them. “Be not afraid!,” was the Pope's repeated theme. During the next ten years and more, the Polish people were not afraid.

It turned out that the Pope had a great many more divisions than Stalin. And that the arms of the Spirit are more empowering than military weapons. Alas, many in the West still could not believe that the whole Soviet empire was falling down.

And then the center of the action shifted to Czechoslovakia, where more than 200 courageous writers and priests and physicists had signed a 1977 charter of human rights that landed many of them in jail or got them booted out of their jobs. One physicist with a highly promising future was sentenced to shoveling coal in the basement of an apartment building – he discovered that during most of the day he could read (and pray) and years later told of his punishment’s paradoxical benefit. The future cardinal of Prague (Cardinal Vlk) was sentenced to wash windows on apartments and office buildings – and many later recognized his face on television after his elevation.

By the summer of 1989, under the charismatic leadership of the former prison inmate and dramatist Vaclav Havel, protests in the old part of Prague in Wenceslaus Square, increased in numbers and intensity. If Poland could win a change of regime, why not the Czechoslovak Republic?

Finally, on a day that will live in history, November 9, 1989, the demonstrations reached a climactic point. A young worker in a brewery near the Square stood on a box and urged his fellows to join the protests, and was reported to have declaimed in a dramatic flourish, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness!” Students and poets protesting is one thing, but when workers join the demonstrations, all pretenses of Communism collapse. The government resigned, Havel was acclaimed interim President, and in a matter of days, if not hours, the great ugly wall that had separated Christian Europe into two branches (as the Pope put it) came pounding down, hammer blow by hammer blow, and the roots of Christian Europe were again nourishing a single tree.

Published in First Things Online November 6, 2009

Pope Benedict XVI’s Caritas

It is no secret that in U.S. Catholicism these last twenty or so years there has been an increasingly bitter split between two large factions on matters of political economy. Some tilt left, some right. Some favor a Reaganomic approach to political economy and rejoiced in the boom that lasted thirty-some years. Others favor Clintonomics (which in practice looked a lot like Reaganomics), while others favor something more robustly state-run and state-centered on the order of Obamanomics. In his new Encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, Benedict XVI stressed that the Church should be understood neither as holding a particular ideology about political economy nor as imposing specific practical solutions on individual countries or regions. He does not intend to pronounce upon the disagreements in political economy among Catholics or others. On the contrary, his aim is to put questions of political economy in a larger context, theological and philosophical, dealing with such questions as the role of caritas in theology, and in philosophy sound concepts of the common good, the human person, and human community.

Moreover, in his concrete discussions about current affairs, almost every time Benedict seems to give a point to the left, rooted usually in Populorum Progressio (1967), he takes it back or qualifies it by drawing on lessons learned in between 1967 and 1991, as recorded in Centesimus Annus. His practice follows his intention. He lets both horses run, and does not himself choose to side with either one.

In some ways, this openness seems to be baffling many readers, and making this particular piece of Benedict XVI’s writing come across as uncharacteristically waffly and opaque. It often seems to go in two directions at once. Some sentences are almost impossible to parse in practical terms: What on earth does that mean in practice?

This refusal to indulge in ideology has a great strength that compensates for the above-mentioned weakness. Its strength is that it raises the mind to other dimensions of the truth, and avoids squabbles that belong more to the City of Man than to the City of God.

For instance, this higher perspective enables the pope to link the gospel of life to the social gospel, so to speak. That makes immense practical sense. For instance, in the United States about fifty million children have been aborted since 1973. If those girls and boys had been allowed to live, millions of them would now be in the workforce, helping by their social security taxes to close the deficits in our programs for the elderly. Policies regarding the beginning of life profoundly affect the welfare state as the population ages.

Europe, with its failure to keep population at a level of growth, or even bare replacement is condemning its welfare state to accelerating death.

Here is one of my favorite practical passages in this encyclical. The sentences read more like bureaucratic jargon than like Benedict’s usually profound and warm pastoral way of putting things. Still, they reinforce some of the most important gains for Catholic social thought over the past 115 years:

By considering reciprocity as the heart of what it is to be a human being, subsidiarity is the most effective antidote against any form of all-encompassing welfare state. It is able to take account both of the manifold articulation of plans—and therefore of the plurality of subjects—as well as the coordination of those plans. Hence the principle of subsidiarity is particularly well-suited to managing globalization and directing it towards authentic human development. In order not to produce a dangerous universal power of a tyrannical nature, the governance of globalization must be marked by subsidiarity, articulated into several layers and involving different levels that can work together. Globalization certainly requires authority, insofar as it poses the problem of a global common good that needs to be pursued. This authority, however, must be organized in a subsidiary and stratified way, if it is not to infringe upon freedom and if it is to yield effective results in practice. (57)

Within this section, and several other places in the encyclical, a pattern begins to emerge whereby Benedict XVI makes a point important to the political economic left, and then qualifies it in terms important to the political economic center and center-right.

For example, regarding his concern to help the welfare state, the pope first advises that “more economically developed nations should do all they can to allocate larger portions of their gross domestic product to development aid, thus respecting the obligations that the international community has undertaken in this regard.” He then immediately frames this suggestion within the limits of subsidiarity and personal accountability: “One way of doing so is by reviewing their internal social assistance and welfare policies, applying the principle of subsidiarity and creating better integrated welfare systems, with the active participation of private individuals and civil society.” (60)

As for global government, we see Benedict XVI again call for a true world political authority:

To manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis; to avoid any deterioration of the present crisis and the greater imbalances that would result; to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration: for all this, there is urgent need of a true world political authority, as my predecessor Blessed John XXIII indicated some years ago.

But he is quick to define this authority in terms of restraint and of adherence to the core principles of Catholic social thought:

Such an authority would need to be regulated by law, to observe consistently the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity, to seek to establish the common good, and to make a commitment to securing authentic integral human development inspired by the values of charity in truth. (67)

For myself, though, I love best the starting point in caritas. When I was a young man, I wanted to write a book about the centrality of God’s unique form of love, called caritas rather than the more common, down-to-earth amor, in the architecture of the theology of Thomas Aquinas. I loved his little treatise on charity (the poor English translation of caritas), and often taught seminars on it. And in recent years, prompted in part by challenges from my friend and sometime sparring partner David Schindler of the John Paul II Institute in Washington, I have been developing the caritas underpinnings of my own understanding of democracy, capitalism, and a Republic of Virtue.

The free society is differentiated into three interdependent systems, the polity, the economy, and the moral/cultural institutions of human life. Each of these different types of freedom (political, cultural, and religious) is needed by the other two, in order to be held to the protection of true freedom. You can find essays of mine on this point beginning from at least 1995 at my website.

I have been trying to steer Catholic social teaching in this direction—beginning with my own thinking—for a long time. So watching Benedict XVI write about caritas so beautifully brings me immense satisfaction.

In all candor, however, if we hold each sentence of Caritas in Veritate up to analysis in the light of empirical truth about events in the field of political economy since 1967, we will find that it is not nearly so full in its veritas as in its caritas.

For instance, the benefits for the poor achieved through the spread of economic enterprise and markets (capitalism is for some too unpleasant a word to use) should be more resoundingly attended to. In 1970, for instance, the mortality age of men and women in Bangladesh was 44.6 years old, but by 2005 it had risen to 63. Think what a joy and what vigor such increased longevity means to individual families.

Similarly, infant mortality rate (deaths per 1000 live births) in Bangladesh in 1970 was 152, or 15.2 percent. By 2005 this average had been brought down to just 57.2, or a little less than 6 percent. Again, what pain this lifts from ordinary mothers and fathers, and what joy it brings. There is surely more to do to raise health standards for Bangladeshi. But the progress just in this past thirty years is unprecedented in world history.

There are many more omissions of fact, questionable insinuations, and unintentional errors strewn through this encyclical. The staff work has been rather poor.

Every deficiency of veritas injures caritas. That is the beautiful and powerful linkage in this encyclical.

Michael Novak, a member of the editorial board of First Things, holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. His most recent book is No One Sees God (Doubleday, 2008).

Published in First Things Online August 17, 2009

Lack-of-Progress Report

After six months in the Oval Office, Pres. Barack Obama has a lower job-approval rating than did ten of the last twelve presidents at the same point in their presidencies. Rasmussen reports that the daily tracking poll of the president’s popular standing shows eleven points negative: Twenty-eight percent “strongly approve” and 39 percent “strongly disapprove.” The support for his signature issue, health-care “reform,” is falling by the day. The more that Americans learn about it, the more revulsion they feel against it. His big stimulus bill has not delivered what he said it would. A giveaway stimulus is the Democrats’ usual alternative to tax cuts, on the theory of “increase demand” as opposed to “increase supply.” Unemployment in a few important states has now soared to 17 percent, and nationally it has risen close to 10 percent. Further, while Obama still ranks high in personal popularity, his numbers have fallen from percentages in the high 60s down to the low 50s, and are still dropping. His policies are much disliked: unimaginably high deficits, ever-greater state controls over industry after industry, a certain preference for raw leftist ideology over the needs and feelings of ordinary people.

For instance, Obama showed a cool insouciance recently in telling a televised citizens’ forum that some older patients must hereafter consider whether the health care they are now receiving is really helping them, and perhaps begin to reconcile themselves to giving it up. This means condemning themselves to an earlier and perhaps more painful death. Is complete government control, even of the time of death, supposed to be “reform”?

In a recent dust-up between an African-American Harvard professor and a local Irish-American policeman (of high reputation), Obama made the foolish mistake in a press conference of defending his “friend,” the black professor, and calling the local police (in the person of this one cop) “stupid.”

The great class division in American life is no longer between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat (since there is no longer any proletariat, only one huge middle class). It is now between the highly educated elite and the ordinary people of family and neighborhood and common work. So, in calling the cop stupid, Obama pulled the veil back on his own Harvard arrogance. A huge public outcry forced him to step back and telephone both men in order to make peace. To make himself seem like an ordinary guy (the cop, not the professor), he even invited both men to the White House to have “a beer.” Too late! This sudden flash of self-revelation about his own class consciousness was exactly what everyone had suspected for some time.

It was the sergeant who suggested having a beer together (not wine and cheese), and he was the coolest of the three in ordering a Blue Moon. (Blue is the color of cops, and Moon is real, real cool.) I gave the first two rounds to him. Then, in the third round, watching his dignity and unblinking integrity (with the strength of tens of thousands of policemen standing behind him), I gave him round three running away.

This iron-jawed Sergeant Crowley is the man they called racist and hotheaded and stupid. They got the wrong man. They made the wrong charge. The president and the professor came out of this with lower universal esteem, the sergeant with higher, far higher.

Thus, once again, below the president’s honeyed, highfalutin ways of speaking, there is revealed a pretension that is becoming insufferable, a sense of moral and class superiority in office, which he has not yet earned. Moreover, when he is on his own, without speechwriters, Obama is surprisingly unimpressive. He is rambling, fairly boring, error-prone, evasive, and not well-informed.

In addition, President Obama seems to be unable to admit error, to apologize, or to voice what all can see to be true. “Calibrated” is a word he often hides behind, as when he brushed off his insulting remark about the Cambridge policeman — as if he, President Obama, did not use an inexcusable insult. No, the president’s words were wrong, not just imprecisely “calibrated.” Try to figure out the correct calibration of “stupid.”

President Obama no longer persuades.

First published in National Review Online August 4, 2009

What on Earth Is Caritas?

The Catholic sense of the world as a gift of God’s love is the central theme of the pontificate of Benedict XVI. For him, caritas means the love proper to God’s own inner life, dispersed throughout The City of God. Yet that City, St. Augustine stressed, is under constant siege by the self-centered, egoistic City of Man, characterized by lies and self-deceptions. That is why Benedict’s new encyclical tightly links caritas to veritas. You can’t have the one without the other. This approach touches on the American experience by its evocations of St. Augustine. No other religious writer so much influenced the realism about man expressed, say, in The Federalist, and in the choice of friendship expressed in the name of Philadelphia. Therein are foreshadowed both “the City on the hill” and the assertion that men are far from being angels. Indeed, men called to form “a Republic of Virtue” are deeply in need of checks and balances, divisions of power, and other practical methods for limiting the great evil of which humans are capable. To this point, Benedict prefers to stress God’s love, rather than the division of powers, open competition, and other checks and balances upon men’s destructive appetites.

Still, against the invisible gas of relativism Benedict does good work in showing the link between the pursuit of truth and a workable democracy. Civilization is conversation — that is, a close listening for the truth in the words of the other, and a bit of suspicion about one’s own undetected blindness. If such conversation in the pursuit of truth is blocked up by indifference, thugs will emerge to enforce consensus. Relativism was a prelude to tyranny in the century just passed. It can always return.

In its practical recommendations about political economy, however, this encyclical appears to be riding two horses — the russet horse of those who think the state is the main road to the common good, and the pale horse of those who think the strictly limited state should spur a thousand free initiatives and civic actions as a surer carrier toward the common good.

But as the pope takes pains to remind us, Catholic social thought does not provide technical solutions and does not prescribe specific programs and policies. On these, Catholics of left, center, and right can continue to disagree. Still, the pope’s own practical reflections on political economy and current perplexities help to sharpen the arguments. Here, too, the parts of the encyclical that most clearly bear the familiar marks of Benedict’s own caritas are the ones most likely to endure.

Published in National Review Online July 23, 2009

A Vision for a Civilization of Love

In 2003, Michael Novak made observations on the essential role that caritas plays in a just civilization. These observations carry particular importance following the release of Caritas in Veritate, the Vatican’s latest social encyclical. “Michael Novak's Recipe for a Civilization of Love” / His "Caritapolis" as the City of the Future

KRAKOW, Poland, JULY 17, 2003 (Zenit.org) — John Paul II has called democratic nations to overcome materialism and consumerism and to erect a "civilization of love."

In response to this call, Michael Novak, the George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute, has developed a series of lectures which he entitles, "The Caritapolis."

The lectures are a primary component of the curriculum for the "Tertio Millennio Seminar on the Free Society," held every July in Krakow. The seminar brings American and Eastern European students together to discuss the challenges of building a global system of freedom and prosperity.

In an interview with ZENIT, Novak described some of the important features of the caritapolis.

Q: What role does charity, caritas, play in the caritapolis? How does it shape its institutions?

Novak: Caritas is to will the good of the other. If we imagine a civilization based upon caritas, we must be careful to think realistically. For caritas shows itself as mercy to sinners, and it is love aimed at the real, not the apparent, good of the other.

It must be based upon realistic judgments rather than illusions, appearances and sentimentality. With its real conception of human nature, a civilization of caritas is necessarily a civilization acutely aware of, and provident for, human sinfulness.

Caritas has an active role in shaping the institutions of a society. Let us consider the problem of wealth. Well into the modern period, wealth was defined in one of two basic ways: land -- which allowed the owner to draw upon the produce of many -- or gold, silver, precious stones and other treasures.

The rhythms of nature dictated whether local communities experienced famine or plenty; trade was relatively slight and the vast majority lived only at subsistence level. Money itself -- in the form of pieces of gold, silver or other metals -- was in relatively fixed supply. In these circumstances, economics seemed to be a zero-sum game often leading to war and anarchy.

However, the aim of the economic system today is the development of wealth that comes from commerce and industry. This requires peace, rather than war, and respect for law, where commercial and industrial contracts can be carried out and international trade can raise the standards of living of all.

The focus on the creation of wealth bridles human passions providing a new focal point. It has the advantage of bringing to the powerful and the passionate, in an orderly way, the very fruits that under the old system individuals had been seeking through anarchic and warlike means.

Q: Describe the economic system and ideals of the caritapolis. What are its aims?

Novak: First, caritas must direct economic systems to liberate the poor of the earth from the prison of poverty.

Second, it must have institutions that rest upon, and nourish, voluntary cooperation.

Third, an economy of caritas will respect the human person as the originating source of human action, the "imago Dei," "homo creator," the chief cause of the wealth of nations.

Fourth, it must provide the necessary cause for the polity of caritas, whose best approximation in history so far is democracy under the rule of law.

Fifth, the economy of caritas must take realistic precautions against the besetting economic sins of all eras and times, but particularly its own.

Sixth, it must be based upon the presupposition that humans often fail in love, and only rare ones among them base all their actions thoroughly upon realistic love. Caritas must guide institutions in a realistic, not utopian, aim of establishing a free society.

Q: What role does the concept of social justice play in the vision of the caritapolis?

Novak: Social justice rightly understood is a specific habit of justice that is "social" in two senses.

First, the specific skills that it calls into exercise are those of inspiring, working with, and organizing others to accomplish together a work of justice. These are the elementary skills of civil society, the primary skills of citizens of free societies, through which they exercise self-government by "doing for themselves" -- without turning over to government -- those things that need to be done.

The second characteristic of social justice is that it aims at the good of the City, not at the good of one agent only. If we hold that free persons are self-governing, that is, able to live by internalized rules or good habits, they need only a fair and open system of rules in order to live well. In the free society, these rules enable them to act more creatively, intelligently and productively than in any other form of society.

While the free society will never be able to guarantee the outcomes desired by those who speak of "social justice," it does bring more rewards to all, on all reward levels, than any known system.

The aim of justice ought never to be a particular individual but the City, the society, at large. To recapitulate: Social justice rightly understood is that specific habit of justice, which entails two or more persons acting, one, in association and, two, for the good of the City. Understood in this way, social justice can be practiced in caritapolis to great effect.

Q: Can a caritapolis be constructed at the global level or is it only achievable at a local or national level?

Novak: Caritapolis can be constructed at the global level. Central to its development is the agreement upon universal human rights that respect the dignity of the individual person. If in fact the nations of the world ever come to a universal culture of respect for human rights, it will be a world that is much closer to respecting the dignity of the individual person, and at least in that way demonstrating solidarity among all peoples.

The forces of globalization -- political, economic and moral-cultural -- confront us with the need to think through an adequate human ecology.

What are the common habits that are practiced in free societies across the globe and that contribute to human flourishing? Many have not yet been fully imagined, and there is not even a catalogue of the ones we know, but I would offer four cardinal virtues of human ecology.

First, we must possess cultural humility, that is, an awareness that one needs the help of other cultures to see events and circumstances more clearly; for while no one culture possesses the truth completely, all of us stand under the judgment of the truth.

Second, we must have respect for the regulative idea of truth, for within this framework people respect one another's fairness in reasoning and judgment and may submit opposing judgments to the light of evidence.

Third, we must recognize the dignity of the human person, that each person is worthy of respect because he or she lives from the activities proper to God.

Fourth, we must uphold human solidarity, the special virtue of social charity that makes each individual aware of belonging to the whole human race, of being brother or sister to all, and of living in "communio" with all other humans in God.

These four pillars of caritapolis -- cultural humility, the regulative idea of truth, the dignity of the human person, and human solidarity -- guide both the global and the local community.

Q: What does it mean that culture is prior to economics in the caritapolis?

Novak: The dynamic force moving economies forward toward prosperity is the human mind, heart, and will; the Holy Father made precisely this point in "Centesimus Annus."

Economic success depends upon sound habits of initiative, risk taking, creative imagination, and a practical talent for turning dreams into realities. Culture develops these habits -- trustworthiness, courtesy, reliability and cooperativeness -- that are the marks of successful business activities, generating bonds of trust and loyalty among co-workers in the same firm, and between the firm and its suppliers, customers and pensioners.

Capitalism is not a set of neutral economic techniques oriented toward efficiency. Its practice implies certain moral and cultural attitudes, requirements and demands. Cultures that fail to develop the required habits cannot expect to eat broadly of capitalism's fruits.

Economic prosperity, especially in the developing world, depends on the subjective commitment of millions of individuals to a new way of life: They must look around, see what needs to be done, and take the initiative to do it themselves; they must work, invest, take risks, solve day-to-day difficulties, and bring new realities into being. That is, they must practice economic creativity.

The concepts of self-government and human freedom, inherent in a healthy culture, develop in us the moral character to act well in the economic sphere of society.

Q: Do the ideals of caritapolis have precedent in the Catholic theological and social tradition?

Novak: Yes, they do. Let us take social justice as an example. When Leo XIII described in "Rerum Novarum" the tumultuous changes then churning through the formerly agrarian and feudal world of pre-modern Europe, he saw the need for a new sort of virtue -- a reliable habit of soul -- among Christian peoples. He wavered between calling it justice or charity, social justice or social charity.

By the time of "Centesimus Annus," 100 years later, John Paul II had brought that nascent intuition into focus in the one term "solidarity." What is meant by solidarity, then, is the special virtue of social charity that makes each individual aware of belonging to the whole human race, of being brother or sister to all others, of living in communion with all other humans in God.

© Innovative Media, Inc. Reprinting ZENIT's articles requires written permission from the editor.

Stick-to-it-iveness and Grit

The following is Michael Novak's response to the symposium question "Does focusing on failures in the 'system' undermine the psychological basis for economic recovery?" in the Spring 2009 Issue of In Character Magazine: Grit. Read other responses to the symposium here. The entire issue is available online at www.incharacter.org People who are inventors, discoverers, and uncoverers of new ways are a different breed: overtime economic activists, creators of new wealth, launchers of small businesses (of which some become quite large).

When such entrepreneurs look at economic realities, they see something quite different from what economists see. Economists measure the past; creators make new futures.

Even when economists forecast the future, they must base their projections on accomplished fact, on things as they have been. Economic creators see things that do not yet exist. They anticipate new proximate possibilities and have the know-how to make nonexistent things come to be.

What makes economic creators tick? What gets their juices flowing?

Creators see reasons why things that aren’t yet can soon be. They are willing to risk their whole welfare — all their savings, most of their resources — in order to bring these practicable visions into existence.

What gets their juices running is a dream of changing (if only by so little) the present direction of things. By their own creative and risk-taking actions they create goods and services that have not yet been brought to market. They imagine new realities that others do not yet see. Many entrepreneurs leave higher-paying, more secure jobs at major corporations for the pure joy of creating something new. Money is not usually their primary aim, but comes in second or third to enjoying freedom of action and practical invention.

What about skeptics? Of these they meet plenty. “If it could be done, it would have been done already.” “You’re going to lose your shirt!” Behind almost all successful people there stands a loving, trusted mate who tells them they are wrong.

Perhaps that is how people in business come to learn that, in the end, it all comes down to their individual unyielding will and their own thick skin.

Determination, perseverance, and that wonderful American quality (and term) “stick-to-it-iveness”: these must be strong enough to endure opposition, even failures, and audacious enough to see in every failure a new creative possibility.

Entrepreneurs are both idealists and realists. They would like to be loved, but most of all they want to create. Genuine appreciation from others warms up their willingness to bear the cold winds of reality. But they are fairly accustomed to following their own judgments, overcoming adversity, and trusting in their dreams.

And yet. Their judgment about timing may be chilled by official hostility. Ignorant opposition arouses the creators’ well-practiced paranoia about the millions of ways in which what they are trying to do can fail. Official unfriendliness raises risks.

Even so, opposition makes the competitive animal within them stir. Fierce opposition only hardens its feral will to prove to the opposition who is more in touch with reality.

If stick-to-it-iveness is a wonderfully American word, there is also a four-letter Anglo-Saxon word for what it takes: grit. A lot of people in business get pushed back into corners. From there, curled like tigers, they eventually lunge forward.

As I read the narrative our nation is now living through, the White House and its surrounding cast seem woefully ignorant about economic activists, ignorant, resentful, and seething with punitive desire.

So there is some reason for concluding (even tentatively) that the reflexes of unchecked presidential power in Washington will blow through the nation like an ill wind. One senses in it a pestilential and destructive lust to destroy the entrepreneurial class, whose prestige and success they resent.

Some leftists have expressed publicly the wish that the “rich” will be taken down a couple of pegs, so that the “poor” may be lifted up a few. Actually, there seems to be more passion in the fervor to bring down the rich than practicality about how to lift up the poor.

Will economic activists react to this ill wind by hunching down and hibernating until the winter passes? Or will they flip the bird and give our new and inexperienced administration some lessons in reality?

• There cannot be employees without employers, that is, creators, risk-takers, activists of a quite different sort than neighborhood organizers.

• There cannot be profits without expanding, thriving businesses.

• There cannot be growing government revenues unless businesses keep leaping into existence and putting out those cheering notices: Employees Wanted.

It is a small price to pay for a good society to experience in its midst growing numbers of ever wealthier, ever more successful creators of new wealth raising with themselves new employment. The poor can scarcely rise without growing numbers of the “rich.” Arithmetically, greater “disparities” of wealth are an unavoidable consequence. Ten percent of a $200,000 income amounts to $20,000, but 10 percent of a $20,000 income amounts to only $2,000.

The more new wealth created, and the more payrolls mount, the more securely is the common good achieved. As Winston Churchill said, “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York recently noted that the top 40,000 income earners in his city pay 50 percent of the city’s taxes. If even 10 percent of them (4,000) move to another state, the city’s shortfall in revenues will hurt a lot.

• The “rich,” then, are the price that a city must pay if it wishes to make life better for all its citizens. Even the rich contribute to the common good. (“I’m shocked, shocked!”)

• Economic creators prefer to be recognized as good and indispensable citizens. If you want fewer of them, show contempt for them.

• Having more small businesses is the cheapest way to generate more jobs for the poor and middle class.

Published in the Spring 2009 issue of In Character Magazine: Grit