Four Great Gifts Italy Has Given America

Now that another several hundred thousand Americans have come back from spending part of their summer in Italy, they may be in a special mood to reflect on what we owe to the great Italian cities: four contributions in particular - a sense of civic beauty; bold and creative individuals; the Stoic ethic of ancient and medieval Rome; and the crucial social role of civic and religious associations. 1. The Italian sense of civic beauty is without peer. What other region of the world can match the profusion of beautiful vistas in Italy’s hilltop cities; magnificent public buildings (such as the City Hall in Siena); sacred spaces (the great churches of Florence); majestic open piazzas from Venice to Rome to Palermo; and virtually every village church in Umbria? All Italy seems to have been designed to lift our spirits with vibrant color, stunning statuary, soaring facades, and tall bell towers.

Moreover, Italy taught America that living spaces need beauty as the heart needs love and the lungs need air. How can a people become noble if they see around them no art idealizing nobility of soul? The effect of post-modernism has been to dehumanize our living spaces, to subtract from our vision the human moral struggle, the human drama. Held down by rusty wires, the wings of the human spirit cannot take flight.

2. The ideal of the bold and creative individual. Great individual personalities of Florentine history – Dante Alighieri, Fra Angelico, Michelangelo, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Filippo Brunelleschi, Luca della Robbia – have indelibly marked American ideals of beauty and majesty. These men of singular accomplishment are the offspring of St. Paul. For Paul learned in inner pain that to follow Christ’s call he had to break from tribe and family, to become a distinctive, possibly solitary individual in order to follow his conscience, thus to join a new, eternal community. What is distinctive about Christianity is not that it is a community, but that it is a unique kind of community. For one thing, it includes the whole human family, not one race, nation, or tribe. Its most distinctive feature is that each individual must “choose” to cling to Christ, and thus to enter into this new kind of community. This Pauline insight spread the sails of autobiography (as in St. Augustine). It inspired the striking individuality of Florentines in virtually every field.

3. The humanistic ethic of ancient and medieval Rome is emblazoned on the ceilings of many palaces, churches, and public halls in Florence, in figures symbolizing nobility of soul; magnanimity; industry; pietas; the honor of self-sacrifice on behalf of the city; honesty; reliability; equanimity; prudence; temperance; self-mastery. Roman civilization was built upon several central human virtues. But Christian Florence added new notes:

In contrast to Renaissance courtly architecture with its intimidating Roman grandeur worthy of great princes and empires, fifteenth-century Florentine churches, chapels, and private palaces employed a small-scale Roman architectural language affirming the dignity of individual citizens and the republican horizontal rhetoric of ordinary citizens as equals before the law (Robert W. Baldwin).

Beneath his statue of David, Donatello inscribed: “Kingdoms fall through luxury, cities rise through virtues. Behold the neck of pride severed by the hand of humility.” So distinct in its aesthetic emphasis on virtue was Florence that Leonardo Bruni, one of the first modern historians, wrote in his Panegyric on Florence (1404):

If the glory, nobility, virtue, grandeur, and magnificence of the parents can also make the sons outstanding, no people in the entire world can be as worthy of dignity as are the Florentines, for they are born from such parents who surpass by a long way all mortals in every sort of glory.

4. Civic associations. Few cultures are more strongly rooted than Italy’s in the extended family and local voluntary associations of the city and the Church. Thus, Florence and her sister cities are the source of a crucial institution of Western freedom – the civic association, such as the confraternities of this saint and that, guilds, foundations to care for the upkeep of a nearby bridge or stretch of road, organizations to help the ill and teach the young. It was not the Italian state, nor even the city council, that took care of citizens’ many needs; rather it was the full galaxy of local associations. It was by the principle of association, not by state command or collectivism, that medieval Catholics built up civil society, and expressed the social nature of humankind. This principle binds together the Christian notions of the individual person and the free society.

In the Christian tradition, the terms “person” and “community” define one another. The true community is one that seeks the full development of each person within it. The fully developed person is one who, in gratitude for its gifts and ennobling traditions, does what he can to build up his community. This mutual interdefinition is not unrelated to the Christian mystery of the godhead: Communio divinarum personarum. The Trinity is, in a sense, the very model of Christian community: the distinctiveness of each Person, the Communion in which all are one. A similar metaphor lies in the liturgy of the Eucharist: out of many grains, one bread; out of many grapes, one wine.

These two inspirations blaze out from the most precious riches of Florence – the distinctiveness of each person (and each work of genius) and the communitarian concerns of the city that nourishes such individuals. Both of these inspirations are visible in every public place, civic and ecclesiastical, in Florence. From such inspirations as these the early Americans learned the art of association, as Tocqueville called it, “the first law of democracy.”

Published in The Catholic Thing August 26, 2008

Cousin Bob

Often enough, we used to get each other's mail. Once on an airplane, I overheard two nuns behind me talking about what a scowl Michael Novak wore on Crossfire every week — he must be a very angry man. I felt like turning around and saying: "Sorry, you mean Robert Novak. I'm Michael Novak. We call each other cousins. Just to pull your leg, he calls himself the Prince of Darkness. In the Hebrew translation, I am the Angel of Light." But of course I didn't turn around, and I didn't say anything. I was honored. We aren't really cousins, Bob and I. Brothers is more like it. But not brothers in the flesh, rather, in affections. I have always loved the guy, especially when he is playing the bad Robert. He sometimes affects being cynical. That was, I have always thought, a protection against his own deep love for this country, and for the honorable profession of politics. He is a stern moralist, not a cynic. He was not taught by nuns, but somewhere he mastered the art of the slap across the wrist in disapproval. He works so darn hard. He was until his illness always on the go — and more often than always (if that is possible), on the telephone. Tirelessly on the telephone. No reporter in our time works harder.

One Christmas eve, I spotted him coming into a church that was then the parish of neither of us. There was a lot of time before midnight mass, so I left my seat to cross over and walk up to his aisle, to give him and his dear wife a greeting. "Merry Christmas, cousin," I said. "Same to you, cousin." He wore the big smile one often saw on his face, when he wasn't playing bad guy.

Once, at a program we both spoke for in the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, I heard him tell a classroom of young people why he converted, and how. He didn't initiate this, he was asked. He told the same story he tells in his book, about accompanying his wife to mass and taking personally a question asked by the priest, Monsignor Vaghi (at whose new parish we were both in Christmas Eve attendance). It was a simple question, as all profound things are, about judgment in the light of eternity. It made him look at himself, he said.

We didn't see each other all that often; I don't think we ever did socially. But I find myself thinking of him a lot, sometimes every day. Of course, his work has been ubiquitous. It reminds me of him often.

I have to say, too, that I really love his book, Prince of Darkness. It is a truly good and honest Washington book, wonderfully written in that dry, factual way that sentimental detectives affect in crime novels. Full of details. Full of revelations. He poured a lot of himself into it. It is his best writing ever, and serves as an introduction not only to a dedicated, surprisingly intimate man, but also to the rapidly changing era he worked so hard to understand and to report. The new details in the first chapter — on the Pflame affair — are worth half-a-dozen typical, lazy Washington books written from old columns.

Well, I just heard that Bob at this moment is undergoing surgery for his tumor. When he gets to read this, I just wanted him to know that he was being prayed for minute by minute, and that much affection and gratitude were flowing his way.

Published in National Review Online August 16, 2008

Catholics for Obama?

Not long before he was elected pope (overwhelmingly), Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger sent a public rebuke to the U.S. bishops. He reminded them that the question of abortion must be judged in a far different category from war and capital punishment. War is a question of practical wisdom, he observed, about which prudent Catholics may form opposing practical judgments. Same with capital punishment, which for centuries was rated by the church as just and sometimes necessary. By contrast abortion, Ratzinger wrote, is “intrinsically evil” and “always and everywhere” to be opposed. Many Catholics on the left wing of the Democratic party have never accepted this rebuke. The most some of them will concede is that abortion is a “profound moral question.” Cardinal Ratzinger’s point is that that question was long ago answered: Abortion is intrinsically evil. Never to be cooperated with.

There are other Catholic leftists who are quite anti-abortion. Too often, these wiggle mightily to avoid so strong a condemnation of abortion that they must leave the Democratic party, or, at least, refuse to vote for a politician who cooperates with the evil of abortion. They want, for instance, to vote for Barack Obama, even to campaign vigorously for him.

Well, the Catholic ethic is an ethic of prudence, not an ethic of doctrinaire consistency. It is not an ethic whose rules are those of arithmetic or geometry. Rather, it takes into account all the important matters that bear upon such a decision as which political candidate to support or to vote for. It pays careful attention to each person and each peculiar angle of each rare situation. Catholic ethics is more like a many-seamed garment, with intelligently designed curves and angles, than like a seamless garment, constructed geometrically. It is meant to fit the whole range of human realities.

But it also recognizes that prudence can never be used as a cover for committing an intrinsic evil, such as the killing that occurs in abortion. Typically, one candidate takes a secular stance on abortion: “personally opposed, but not willing to legislate my morality on this issue.” On other issues important to Catholic leftists, however, this candidate may be perfectly willing to legislate his morality, and theirs. Americans are the most moralistic people in the world. Everything we touch tends to be discussed as a moral issue. Except abortion — many want to turn abortion into anything but a moral issue.

Despite the fact that Cardinal Ratzinger, not to mention John Paul II, forcefully reminded Catholics of their duty not to cooperate with the evil of abortion, many Catholic leftists continue to cite the same American bishops who were rebuked by the cardinal and the pope. Why, moreover, do these leftists argue from “the consistent ethic of life”? Under the flag of “consistency” they are able to put virtually every issue dear to them on the scales. The result is to downgrade the real, distinctive, sui generis evil of abortions, which are now performed at a rate of about 1.1 million a year. They put equal emphasis on capital punishment and the “unjust war in Iraq” — the very thing Cardinal Ratzinger said they cannot in good conscience do.

Thus, Catholic leftists need the “consistent ethic” argument to make any case at all in their support of a pro-abortion candidate. Conversely, they must also argue from an “ethic of prudence” in order to justify their peculiar calculation that abortion is not as important as war, capital punishment, and their (highly debatable) claims about the “common good.” Even in its logical form, their reasoning is a tangled mess: “Yes” to a consistent ethic of life when they need it, “No” when they don’t.

In the particular case of Barack Obama, their case is an even greater mess. Bill Clinton, the last Democratic president, frustrated the will of the U.S. Congress by refusing to sign legislation outlawing partial-birth abortion. Even though this procedure means — just before a full delivery — puncturing the head of the infant so that the brains may be suctioned out, Obama, as an assemblyman in Illinois, took the same position here as the Clintons did: in favor of this grim procedure.

Worse still, Obama strongly spoke out in opposition to legislation to disallow abortionists from putting to death infants who survived a first attempt at abortion. At the federal level, this legislation was called the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, protecting the human infant born alive despite a vigorous attempt to kill her in the womb.

There are many pretty words that politicians, some Republicans and some Democrats, use to mask their actual practice in regard to abortion. They call it “a profound moral issue,” and they say they seek to make abortions “safe, legal, and rare” — a particularly adroit example of rhetorically pleasing everybody. In actual practice, though, they manage to keep abortions going just as before.

Senators would never allow themselves such disgraceful compromise if they were speaking about slavery. In the case of slavery, being “pro-choice” is not moral, as Sen. Douglas learned to his sorrow from candidate Lincoln. An irreducible natural right is at stake.

Of course, the Republican party was the anti-slavery party. And, alas, the Democrats of recent times have allowed the Republican party to become the anti-abortion party. For the Democrats, that is a disgrace. As a result, many Catholics have reluctantly had to change parties — or at least to change their voting habits. As a violation of natural right, abortion is even more extreme than slavery.

***

Of course, the abortion question does not affect all Catholics equally. Catholics go on calling themselves “Catholic” long after they have ceased receiving the sacraments or darkening a church door. But abortion does affect some large minority of Catholics to the core of their being.

No matter if the propaganda in the press and the cinema mostly favors the pro-abortion side, many Catholics are so close to births and birthing, and so highly value each newborn child, that they will never be led to believe that abortion is anything but intrinsically evil. It’s just plain wrong. There is never any excuse for it (well, virtually never).

Whenever Catholics hear the phrase “consistent ethic of life,” they look for the coercion and self-deception implied in it. It is a made-for-all-purposes excuse. It does not describe the ethics of prudence taught by Thomas Aquinas and favored for many centuries by the Church, and by the Lord Jesus himself.

In addition, those who call the Iraq war “unjust” are entitled to their opinion, but they have no serious Catholic authority. Neither the pope nor the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith nor the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, even when some of them opposed it as imprudent, have ever called the Iraq war unjust.

The other reason for supporting Obama that some Catholic leftists put forward is that very little in reducing abortions has been accomplished by the Republican party in the years since President Reagan. Is that claim true?

Well, President Bush did sign the two acts of legislation that Obama opposed in their state forms, the ban on partial-birth abortion and the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. These acts do not seriously alter the number of annual abortions. But they do establish in law the fundamental principle of the natural rights of infants in the womb. They treat these human individuals as worthy of respect and they defend their rights to live and breathe and continue growing into adults.

Two formidable obstacles have prevented Republican presidents from going farther. The first is heavy resistance from most Democrats (who until recently were driving pro-life Democrats out of party leadership) and some Republicans (country-club Republicans, mostly). The second is furious resistance from the liberal judiciary (mostly country-club liberals) at almost every higher level.

It is mind-twisting for reasonable people to discern how leftist Democrats think Obama will change his abortion stripes, and then go farther than President George W. Bush (boo! hiss!) in promoting a culture of life. Most of those who will vote for Obama do not think Obama is pro-life. Why should a few leftist Catholics?

During the legislative debate in the House, Democrats decided overwhelmingly to just go ahead and vote for the “Born Alive” act. They wanted to repress all debate, lest that issue educate the public dramatically on what real abortions are like. Abortion is best approved of in the dark, not in the light of day, where full and open debate might turn the public against it.

On more and more refrigerators across America, photos of brothers and sisters in mommy’s womb from just a few weeks after conception are already encouraging children more and more to find abortion abhorrent. The young easily identify with their siblings with tiny fingers and toes in the womb, and perceive with dark dread what it would be like if they had been aborted. Children after 1973 are prevented from feeling that they are gifts of God by the large figure blocking that sun — their mother, with the power to have turned thumbs down on their very existence. Children do not feel that they depend on the will of God but on the will of their mother.

I wish Democrats had not ceded the anti-abortion position to Republicans. I hope that those Catholics among them look again at Abraham Lincoln’s Peoria Speech of 1854, brought to our attention in Lewis E. Lehrman’s brilliant new book, Lincoln at Peoria. And I urge my old friends on the Catholic Left to be careful what they wish for, in wishing for Obama. And to make better arguments for doing so.

And, please, to hurry the Democratic party back to natural-rights principles.

Published in National Review Online August 8, 2008

The Flag in the Lapel

Now we know why Obama took the American flag off his lapel. On July 24, in Berlin, he told us. The American flag is too small to contain him. He is not comfortable being an American citizen, only fully comfortable as a citizen of the world. But “citizen of the world” is a utopian, unreal, angelic, inhuman term, an abstraction of the sort that leads to immense bloodshed as human irregularities are hacked off and angularity is loudly planed away. I agree with Pete Wehner’s observation on Commentary's website that one can be a citizen of the United States, but not -- in anything like the same sense -- of the world. One can enjoy the natural rights protected by the U.S. Constitution, but will not find such rights protected globally, not even in France, as Byron York pointed out last month and again on Friday.

The Berlin speech also explains why Obama is more likely to praise an “ideal” America than the real America. He is bewitched by abstractions and lofty ideals. That is how he touches the secret chords of the heart of so many millions, the teenage romanticism of a world without different real interests, without the clashes of culture, the force of political arguments about who gets what, when, and how.

This conflict between global citizenship and pledging allegiance solely to the flag of the United States and the Republic for which it stands, suggests that we go back again to Senator Obama’s ambivalence about the flag in his lapel.

Obama himself said he wore a flag in his lapel after September 11, 2001, but then did not wear it for several years. Why? On reflection, he judged that wearing a flag in the lapel would be an inadequate symbol of patriotism (HT: Byron York, July 1). That Obama did not wear his flag in his lapel is true. Obama not only was not wearing it, but had a policy statement about why he was not wearing it.

Real patriotism, he clarified, is loving the ideals of a country and dissenting from policies not in line with those ideals.

Here Obama points to a huge divide between left-wingers and ordinary Americans. Ordinary Americans do not love a mere “ideal” out in never-never land. They love the land, the soil, the mountains, the plains, the history, the bloody battles, the mistakes, the rises and falls, the real human history of an altogether human people, the particular, imperfect people of the United States. Left-wingers, by contrast, are continually judging the real country harshly. They often judge it so harshly that their attitudes toward their leaders, their neighbors and the real country as a whole sometimes seem almost like hatred for the country itself.

But the United States is still, blessedly, largely a center-right country in this respect. Obama’s stated positions about why he took the flag out of his lapel, and what he means by patriotism, slightly incline a large number to vote against him. Therefore we can count on Obama showing up on more and more stages so thick with American flags you would think you were at a Ronald Reagan rally – and with the stars and stripes starkly visible on the left lapel of his neat, dark suit. That flag will certainly appear in his lapel a great many more times until the first Tuesday in November. A center-right country will demand it.

As for me, I have been wearing a flag in my lapel since September 11, 2001, and with special care ever since American forces took the war to the place whence it emanated, Afghanistan. As long as brave Americans were willing to accept, if necessary, wounds or death on our behalf, I felt a duty to be faithful to them: “This flag’s for them!” And will stay in my lapel until they are out of harm’s way.

Everyone knows silly bravado when he sees it. So let me lay some out. Since Osama bin Laden is out to harm Americans all he can, it seems only right that we should wear a flag to make it easy for him to find us. It would be disgraceful to cower.

Published in National Review Online July 30, 2008

The Shocking Turnaround on Humanae Vitae

I doubt if more laughter has been expended on any point of Catholic teaching than on Pope Paul VI’s letter Humanae Vitae of late July 1968, exactly forty years ago. The much-mocked Pope Paul predicted that “artificial methods” of birth control would end up being personally corrupting and socially destructive. But suddenly something right before our eyes began to be noticed. Mirabile dictu! A host of empirical findings has confirmed the predictions of Pope Paul VI. No one has brought these findings forward as systematically as Mary Eberstadt, in her powerful article “The Vindication of Humanae Vitae” in the most recent First Things. But George Weigel’s book The Courage to be Catholic (2002) got the re-thinking going.

Pope Paul VI made three predictions in 1968: that artificial methods of birth control would make marital infidelity much easier, and steadily lower general moral standards. Further, “a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.” (He did not predict that women might begin to respect themselves less, and to treat sex more cheaply.)

Third, the severing of sex from procreation would tempt governments to regulate childbearing, even through coercion: “Who will prevent public authorities from favoring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective? Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone.” He implied that abortion itself would come to be regarded as the ultimate “contraceptive, and become increasingly common – even coerced.

In general, Pope Paul VI pictured sexuality in philosophical and ethical terms of a certain severity. Husband and wife should work toward “complete mastery” of their physical drives, in order to honor each other the more for doing so. Most couples can in fact do this some of the time, and some most of the time, but few can do it all the time. Looked at merely philosophically, it is a very hard teaching.

Nonetheless, the pope predicted that the lessening of self-control in marriage would spread outwards to the whole of society. Even political regimes would suffer. We would see a slowly growing inability of citizens to trust one another, let alone their government. (Recall Tocqueville’s contrast between the strong marriage bond in the United States and that in the licentious France of 1835.)

In the long years after 1968, many abuses took root in the church. Most of the Catholic West drifted away from Humanae Vitae. In all these years, I recall hearing only one sermon that presented a succinct argument against the corrosive effects of contraception, and offered a special vision of Catholic marital life.

Worse, far worse, many Catholic priests habituated themselves to rarely or never speaking of self-mastery. Most became reluctant to talk about sexuality at all, let alone chastity. In this darkness, a few granted themselves the same leniency their silence granted lay persons. A few brought intense public shame on the Church.

Forty years after Humanae Vitae, Eberstadt and Weigel conclude that it is no longer as easy as it was in 1968 to say that Pope Paul VI was spreading unrealistic pessimism.

There are, to be sure, intrepid philosophers – among them the late G.E.M. (Elizabeth) Anscombe – who present strictly philosophical arguments for the Church’s most ridiculed and resisted teaching. But since human “nature” has lost its fine balance in matters of sexuality, the real muscle in this now unusual vision of marriage lies in prompting philosophy to seek support from theology.

Soon after John Paul II was elected pope in 1978, he stressed the unbreakable unity of body and soul in human persons. We do not merely “have” bodies, which “belong” to us. We are inspirited bodies – looked at the other way, embodied spirits. Body and spirit are perfectly one, not two.

In this way, John Paul II stepped up from philosophy into the horizon of faith: The body of each human person is a temple of the Holy Spirit – that is, of the triune God, the God Who reveals His own identity as a Community of divine Persons. One Communion, each Person distinct. Therefore, we ought to reverence our bodies as the dwelling place of this divine Communion.

That is why Christianity among all the world religions insists that our inspirited bodies, not merely our disembodied souls, shall rise and be with God after death. This is not a religion ashamed of the human body, but one which honors it as a fit dwelling place for God.

Another theological borrowing is that it is as man and woman together that humans most vividly reflect the image of God – the image of that communion which is the inner life of God. It is not man alone; it is not woman alone; it is their communion as one. That is a major reason why monogamous marriage is honored above all other human friendships – the noblest of all friendships, as Thomas Aquinas once wrote of it. (Another reason is that in such a communion the two persons achieve equal respect, their differences intact.)

Obviously, the Catholic way of regarding sexuality is not attractive to everybody. Obviously, too, many Catholics are not living up to it.

Still, the sudden break-up of the ice blocking an honest reading of Paul VI, and the liberated flow of fresh critical thinking, offer grounds for believing that the disparagement of Humanae Vitae is beginning to diminish.

The God Who gave us our sexuality had a great sense of humor, Mary Eberstadt reminds us. To see all the delicious ironies, however, one must first grasp what the whole thing is aiming at. That’s the road Humanae Vitae put us on.

Published in The Catholic Thing on July 29, 2008

Reconciling Evil with Faith

The New Yorker (of all magazines) gave a good number of pages early last month to a quite brilliant book reviewer, James Wood, for a long essay on why he could no longer be a Christian. Stories like his are widespread. They usually cite the natural evils that too often crash upon humans — in China a stupefying earthquake, in Burma a cyclone, elsewhere tsunami, or tornado, disease, flood, or cruel slow-working famine. They then add the evils that humans inflict upon other humans. Virtually every family in America has suffered from painful evils, often bitterly and almost overpoweringly so: A promising young nephew in a major university killed in an auto crash; a wife, husband, or sister wasted slowly and painfully by cancer or some other affliction — drug or alcohol addiction; the Alzheimer's disease of an unrecognizing spouse; nightmares from brutalities suffered under distant dictatorial regimes.

One of the oldest accusations against God in the Bible and in every generation since has been that there is too much evil in this world for there to be a good God. The pain is so intense. The irrationality and seeming cruelty at times seem unendurable.

Of course, ceasing to be a Jew or a Christian does not wipe these evils away. They continue. They roar on. The rejection of God does not diminish evil in the world by a whit. In fact, the turn of Russia and Germany from more or less Christian regimes to boastfully atheist regimes did not lessen, but increased, the number of humans who have horribly suffered, by nearly 100 million. Even under atheist interpretations of science, the vast suffering under ferocious competition for survival, for a vastly longer era than was known, far exceeds the evils earlier generations knew.

An unusually religious friend of my daughter volunteered for a year's work among the poor of Haiti. Within weeks, she was so dismayed by the inexplicable suffering of the poor, and their defenselessness, that she abandoned her faith. It demanded too much of her.

This noble young woman's loss of faith did not lessen the poverty and pain of those she worked with. Besides, the reasons for the overwhelming poverty she encountered were not God-made but man-made. (After all, Haiti is by nature a very rich nation.) The secrets of how humans can create wealth have raised up the poor of many countries; somehow, the secrets passed Haiti by. One remedy the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob did add, moreover, is to touch the heart of this compassionate young woman and many others like her, to bring remedial help and, in some cases, knowledge of how to produce economic transformation.

Faith for those who suffer

However that might be, those who suffer most from injustice and oppression seem to find more consolation and dignity in the Jewish/Christian faith than in any other worldview (even socialism). Judaism and Christianity seem very good religions for those who suffer because they bestow on them justice and dignity. The realistic point of Judaism and Christianity is that suffering is a normal part of every human life. Lamentations are a native language. But evil does not mean that God loves us less, or that all is lost, or that good does not win out in the end.

In fact, the poor also delight in the beauties of God's creation. On balance, even with their acute suffering, the poor also feel blessed. They sense the rapture of sunlight flashing across lake or ocean, and soft breezes at sunset, and the great starry sky.

For Christianity, the interpretive key to this world is the cross — the cross on which the Son of God died. For Judaism, it is the long, long exile and pain of the Jewish people. If God has so treated his only son, and also his own people, why should anyone else expect Easy Street? Suffering seeks everybody out. Death certainly does, Christian or not, atheist or not.

Worse, the world seen by evolutionary biology alone is even more rife with suffering, yet rather more merciless. That world is characterized by raw chance, accident and the death of about 90% of all species that have ever lived. Perhaps earthquakes, tsunami, tornado, disease and famine derive from chance, and signify nothing.

Nonetheless, the most disturbing evils are the ones deliberately created by free human beings — the sadistic guards at Dachau, Germany, who took pleasure in humiliating, clubbing and shoving to the earth those they bullied; and, last month, those two pitiable women in Compton, Calif. — a mother and her lover — who were recently found torturing the 5-year-old son of one of them by hanging him up with wires over the door, stabbing into his young body lit cigarettes, and starving him and beating him for months.

These shocking brutalities rock the shallow faith of those whose beliefs are rooted in sentiment and inheritance, rather than in reasoned argument. Many Christians are poorly educated in their religion; their formal schooling teaches them nothing about it. Some seem to think that the point of prayer is to be given everything one asks — or at least the important things. Such an expectation would turn God into a servant of their will.

When Jesus said: "Ask and you shall receive," he did not mean you will get what you pray for, any more than he did that night in the garden of Gethsemane, where he prayed that God would spare him from the agony of the flogging and the crucifixion he would suffer the next day. Jesus meant you will be kept above raging waters by the will of God, and given enough light and strength to transmute the evil you experience into good.

A world of chance?

Rebellion against a suffering world and the God whose great work of art it is is very common. When very sorely tried, many Jews and Christians such as the Psalmist (who again and again lamented the long exile and humiliations endured by his people) and Job (whose faith God tested by adding one affliction after another) have also wanted to throw off God, but a counter-question kept nagging them: Would a conviction that our sufferings are meaningless, and due to blind chance, ease the pain of the poor and the unjustly tortured? Raging against the night seems to be an evasion of reality.

Sustained public conversation about these matters — long, intelligent conversation — can help to diminish mutual misconceptions about the terms of this argument. That conversation could be critical for the future of liberty on this planet. Whether our lives are meaningless, or not, is not a trivial question.

Michael Novak's newest book, No One Sees God, will be published in August. He is also author of The Experience of Nothingness, Belief and Unbelief, and The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism.

Published in The New Yorker July 21, 2008

Our ‘Horrible’ Economy

Everyone says that our economy is “horrible.” Gas for our cars is headed toward $5 a gallon. The stock market has turned seriously downward. Unemployment is edging upward (although the unemployment rate is still holding about even). Yet two basic points make it difficult for this amateur to see just why our current economy is so horrible. For me, the most important issue in any economy of any democratic republic is job growth. In 1976, I wrote speeches for Senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson (D., Wash.), in which the three main priorities of his campaign were identified, in this order, as “Jobs, jobs, jobs!”

The second-most-important thing for a democratic society, to my mind, is that there be consistent economic growth. The reason is that the most destructive of all human social passions is envy. If there is no growth, the only way people have to vaunt themselves is to tear others down. (In nearly all static societies, envy sparks immense social frictions.) In a growing economy, by contrast, people have a chance to stop comparing themselves with their neighbors (and tearing them down). Instead, they can work as hard as they can to meet their own goals. If their own position tomorrow will be significantly closer to their heart’s desire than it is today, then they don’t need to care how their neighbor is doing.

A republic like the United States simply must defeat envy, and focus on a better future for each family. The only way that can be accomplished is by reasonably consistent and gently upward economic growth. Growth is the necessary condition for the pursuit by each of his own happiness. A happy society is a more generous and loving society.

In this light, the U.S. — with a growing GDP from the year 2000 until today, along with a steady growth in the number (and percentage) of people employed — is better off than almost all nations in Europe. Whatever else is happening in the U.S. economy today, these are very good indicators.

U.S. output today is just about 40 percent higher than it was when President Clinton left office. The nominal GDP has grown from $10 trillion at the end of 2001 to $14 trillion at the end of January 2008. In other words, the U.S. has added to its national wealth an equivalent to the whole nominal GDP of China (in 2007, $3.25 trillion). The U.S. today is as big as it was in 2001, plus the whole GDP of China.

At the end of 2001, when President Bush’s economic policies were just beginning to take hold, total civilian employment was just over 136 million. At the end of January 2008, it was 146 million. Some ten million new jobs! Not the greatest, but not bad; certainly not “horrible.” During the last six months, the number of the employed is down 100,000 — not as huge a decrease as everyone has been imagining. The total employment in June was 145.9 million.

I freely admit that the economy under Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton did even better. Under Reagan (1981-89) and Clinton (1993-2001), the U.S. added more than 35 million new jobs. This was a stupendous accomplishment. Yet under President George W. Bush, the total number of employed civilians has risen much less dramatically, by ten million new jobs.

How did Reagan and Clinton do so much better? Reagan offered drastic changes in the tax rates paid by inventive, productive, and entrepreneurial citizens. (The tax revenues then received by the U. S. Treasury soared to all-time highs, most of these paid by the top half of income earners.) There followed the largest growth in new small enterprises in American history, and with them the largest single jump in the number of employed citizens. (Most new jobs are created by small businesses, not large, and by new industries — e.g., computers, cell phones, and fiber optics — not mature ones.)

When Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, he inherited a tremendous “peace dividend” from the enormous effects of the great events of 1989 and 1991, the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the change of governments in Central Europe and Russia. By contrast, when President Bush was elected in 2000, he was less than a year away from a devastating military blow against the American homeland — which knocked several American industries (transport, tourism, restaurants and hotels, financial markets, etc.) to the floor.

There is much more to be said about the current economy, and how unprecedented it is in its level of GDP and employment. But there is much bad news as well. The refusal to drill for new oil in the United States, and to build new refineries and new nuclear reactors, has left America colossally dependent of Middle Eastern powers (and also Venezuela), whose wealth supports international terrorism against the free world. We are both depriving ourselves of independence, and subsidizing with enormous sums those who would like to destroy us.

This stupid policy has also led to Americans’ paying $4.50 at the pump per gallon of gas, with prices in the near future heading toward $5 or more. Yet bad news sometimes has a few good consequences, too — not enough to take the pain away, but enough to ignite hope.

For example, the high price of oil is causing some Americans in the global economy to compare anew the cost of transport against other costs. Some are reconsidering whether it might soon be cheaper to produce closer to home. The high price of a barrel of oil is also making new forms of exploration for oil and production cost-effective.

Again, $4.50-per-gallon gasoline is forcing Americans to change their driving habits, not to mention their car-buying habits. The driving patterns of teenagers are also likely to be cut back. And $4.50 gas has changed the political balance in the country. An ever-larger majority of voters is chanting: Drill now, drill here.

Look ahead. People buying futures contracts based on the price of oil as they expect it to be down the line, on condition that no new supplies come on line, are soon going to have to be careful lest new drilling and new refineries move from drawing boards to reality. Buyers of futures cannot afford to be wrong. They will quickly have to alter their projections about future supplies and future costs. Thus, the price of future barrels of crude can fall quickly, long before new gas starts flowing from new wells. Futures markets live and die by future expectations. The future price of gasoline can drop more rapidly than pipelines and refineries can be built.

As for buyers in a bear market, such markets have long been a textbook ideal. When prices are low is a great time to start buying. When the market starts upward again, returns will come in quite handsomely. The inner feeling of going upward is wholly different from the inner feeling of going downward. In my many years, I have known up and I have known down. Up is better.

Published in National Review Online July 17, 2008

A Secretary, a Speaker, and a Priest

Since the arrival of my first DVD in the mail, I have been a convert, one might say, to Netflix. Opting to test out the availability of films through the service, my first request was for The Ninth Day, a German film set in Dachau and Luxembourg. Not only did was the request fulfilled, but the film must be described as one which takes one’s breath away, and keeps one deathly silent. I had read the short autobiography upon which the movie is based, Priestblock 25487: A Memoir of Dachau, and was put in some awe by it. What an amazing equanimity of spirit on the part of the author, Father Jean Bernard! What ruthless honesty about his own weaknesses, and quick vignettes about all the horrors. The autobiography offers a rare glimpse of the horrors faced by the religious at Dachau (virtually everybody in his barrack (and some others) was a Catholic priest, though some were clergy of other religions, especially Protestant.) Anecdotes related the abominable actions of the German guards, formerly religious men, as they raged with insults and violence. One night, the movie relates, Father Bernard (Henri Kremer, in the movie) is pulled from his building. One predicts that he will be hung on a cross by a rope strung through the bonds tying his hands behind him, left suspended in agony above the snow during the icy night, as happened to others. Instead, he is told he has been released. The Gestapo in Luxembourg wants to use him to persuade his “recalcitrant” bishop to go public with a letter distancing the Catholics of Luxembourg from the Pope by making the Church the official church of the Nazi Party — and to begin by showing that the Church does best “cooperating” with the Party. Father Bernard is given nine days to complete this mission, and if he fails, he must go back to the horrors of Dachau. Further, if he flees to Switzerland or elsewhere, all the priest-prisoners from Luxembourg will be put to death, perhaps on crosses.

His Gestapo handler is a young man who had come within two days of being ordained as a priest before concluding that he could affect history more and make the world better by giving himself to Nazism rather than to the Church. The worldly secretary to the bishop is a willing ally of the Gestapo. The Catholic bishop has refused to have anything to do with the Nazi occupiers, and has never once even gone outside his residence to chance being forced to meet with them. Meanwhile, he keeps the cathedral bells tolling loudly for several minutes every day, and the people take comfort from the strength of this resistance.

You really will want to see this movie for its own sake, as well as for the light it sheds on the real human interactions between church and state under totalitarianism. One will see what faith calls for in these extremities.

On a lighter note, I picked up two summertime novels that I have found both gripping and full of information I am glad to acquire. The first is the Newt Gingrich novel (with William R. Forstchen), Pearl Harbor: A Novel of December 8. The novel is particularly good at inserting us into the Japanese side of the war, by devices that take us back into personalities, families, schools, and habits of thinking that help us to sense what was in the minds of the Japanese. It is a novel full of the historical details that historians love.

The second, Dragon Fire, is a book I have been waiting to run into for several years now. During the Clinton administration, my wife and I were invited to fly back to Washington with Defense Secretary William S. Cohen and his astute, gracious, and beautiful wife, Janet. The secretary told us how worried he was by the new biological and chemical weapons becoming available on the world market, and how easily they could fall into the hands of tiny rogue cells of operatives, and cause unbelievable destruction in American cities. At one point, as the plane flew above the clouds, he held up a pitcher and said, “Imagine this filled with anthrax. Let loose in a subway or anywhere like that, it could put hundreds into agonizing death throes.” He said he had decided to put vivid examples of what he had learned about international terrorism into a novel — it was the only way to get people to face the reality.

Sure enough, not many pages into his novel, a high official in the Defense Department is put into an agonizing death in the kitchen of his own home by the most ingenious of methods. He alone had refused to be inoculated by the vaccine required to resist anthrax poisoning. Someone must have known that, and used that knowledge. But who?

If you like to learn things even in times of relaxation, in fast-paced and vivid books, try these.

Published in National Review Online June 27, 2008

No One Sees God: An Interview

What is the point of your book? My experience has shown me that self-knowledge has a huge impact on what one thinks about God. If God is within you, you can gradually become aware of that and reflect on its implications. If you are certain that God means nothing in your life, then you interpret your life quite differently. Steven Pinker, for instance, says he is a materialist, and in his world God has no importance. One would expect that each of us must answer the question “Who am I, under these stars, with the wind upon my face?” Whether you can find God within you depends a lot on how you answer that question.

In these matters, no one has knockdown proof. We make the most reasonable judgment we can, but practically everyone can see how easy it would be to come to the opposite conclusion. In actual life, many believers become atheists, and many atheists become believers. Each does this on the basis of evidence that makes a new and powerful impression on her.

No one catches direct sight of God. Our knowledge about him comes from weighing our own experience of life—including our experience of the natural world, the experiences of conscience, such experiences as the inner drive within us to ask questions (even from the time we were children), the pleasure of acts of insight, and reflection upon what we really do when we make judgments that something is true or good or beautiful. What suppositions are we making about existence, even in the simple act of judging that something is true or good (or better) or real—not an illusion or a fantasy.

This book begins self-discovery but leads well beyond a narrow, constructed sense of self.

There are many books about belief and atheism flooding the marketplace today. Where does your book fit?

It will probably struggle to find the special audience it needs: committed to reason and liberty, and by the accident of certain human experiences able to sympathize both with those who know God and those who find nothing there. And to see the benefits of reasoned conversation between such seemingly opposite tendencies.

At times in my life I have been driven toward atheism, wanted to become an atheist. Was left in the dark about God, felt nothing, nada. But none of the various sorts of atheism I encountered (and these were many) seemed intellectually satisfying. All felt—to me, at least—like dodges. Any line of questioning that brought pressure on atheism was simply defined out of existence or at least treated as irrelevant. For example, the question “Why is there something, not nothing?” was ruled out as a question that cannot be answered by science, therefore meaningless. That is much too easy. And so with other questions.

Many of the books responding to the new atheists emerge from evangelical or other traditions that root their belief in feelings, sentiments, or experiences of conversion. I have never found this approach helpful in my own case. I want to go as far as reason will take me. This is the principal difference between my book and others. I seek a reasoned path, a way rooted in reason—a path through the very structure and constitution and methods of human understanding.

To my mind, our understanding of God emerges from our questions about our own understanding.

It certainly seems like our conscience comes from a light over which we are not master, a light greater than ourselves, which often faults our own behavior down to its roots far below the surface of our rationalizations. It certainly seems as if the questioning of our own long-held assumptions, and the relentless probing of our comfortable beliefs about ourselves, comes from somewhere within ourselves—but greater than ourselves and not subject to our own self-deceptions. Thinkers since Plato have discerned this, quite rightly—you can test it in your own experience.

So mine is a book about reason’s path to God. Whether at this task reason succeeds—or fails.

The thing that makes me most curious: Why do you find atheism unsatisfying? Take the typical atheism of a university professor or of the literary world. Why doesn’t it grab you?

To me it seems a contradiction to insist that all things flow from blind chance and then to go on calling oneself a rationalist. Irrationalist on the big questions, rationalist on the things amenable to science, and something like “emotivist” on matters of practical choice and ethics. In the perennial inquiries of the human race, this mix doesn’t add up.

I can understand why atheists invent a heroic image for themselves—Bertrand Russell’s Prometheus, or Dylan Thomas’ raging against the night, or Sisyphus, or even Milton’s Lucifer refusing to “serve.” But all this seems to be striking a literary prose to cover up the emptiness of meaning in human life.

Out of a kind of commonsensical rebellion against doubletalk, which confuses the sensible fellow, the rough-hewn Lincoln sees something more down to earth and matter of fact about nodding toward “the better angels of our nature.” In what some see as mindless bloodletting, he sees in the dead at Gettysburg a noble meaning, in keeping with the history and destiny of humankind. Sensing a touch of the divine in oneself is, in this way, and for most people down through history, the default position of the human race. For most folks, things seem to add up better that way. But it remains possible to think most people wrong.

Do you think atheism (secularism?) is on the upswing? I was surprised by the title of your last chapter: “The End of the Secularist Age.”

The idea was suggested to me by two writers, on opposite sides of most issues, who both have a knack for reading the times: Irving Kristol in America and Jürgen Habermas in Germany. Kristol observes that while secularism keeps marching through the institutions of daily life, the core of its living beliefs is spent, dead, unfruitful. Any movement that deprives most human beings of any meaning in their lives is eventually self-doomed.

Professor Habermas writes that the events of September 11, 2001, shocked him into recognizing that secularism represents a small island in the midst of a turbulent sea of religion all around the world. Even in the developed world, as in the United States, religion thrives. Certain sectors of European society seem to be an exception. And how long can they hold out?

However this may be, others have noted that secular couples almost everywhere tend to have few children (sometimes none), and thus bring a demographic crisis upon themselves. Further, secular societies seem to enervate the inner self-confidence of whole cultures and make them think that they are unworthy of survival in the face of dynamic, rapidly growing, even violent rivals. In a different vein, secular societies show a pronounced tendency toward moral relativism and have no common means of discriminating moral decadence from “liberation” or distinguishing moral progress from decline. If there is no God, there still remain rational standards. But the question “Why be rational?” gets harder and harder to explain to the wayward.

Judaism and Christianity down through millennia have proved to be adept at generating Great Awakenings in entire cultures. It is not clear that any secular society can do so.

An admirable secular humanism still thrives among us—but it does seem limited only to smallish enclaves. It is difficult to foresee it capturing multitudes. Besides, the examples of those atheist societies that have tried to fashion ceremonies, liturgies, and vast demonstrations (to make atheism discernible to the imagination and sensibility of peoples) are not encouraging. Secular humanism seems better suited to a few strong individuals and to fairly rarefied groups among the elite than to a culture as a whole. It founders on its own perception of the meaninglessness of human life. It offers only the meaning that individuals can put into it—and as easily pull out.

No One Sees God is available in bookstores August 5, 2008.

Published in First Things Online June 24, 2008

New Atheists, Old Realities

As far as I can see, the New Atheists have been slowly executing a strategic retreat. Many seem to admit that there is not now, and can never be, a knock-down proof for atheism. Many seem also to be admitting that, no matter what their skeptical friends write, belief in God is not only here to stay, but also seems to be rooted in human nature itself. It may even provide an evolutionary advantage. Thus, the line of defense they have more and more frequently retreated seems modest and open-minded. As their reply to the question, “Is there a God?” their new answer is perfect for a bumper sticker: “I don’t know, and you don’t know, either.”

This is a mistake. The New Agnostic holds that the burden of proof is not on him; the burden is on others to “prove” to him that there is an object “out there.”

But the evidence about God is not to be sought “out there.” It does not reside among other classifiable, sensory objects in this universe. The question about God is essentially a question about one’s own personal identity. Do you yourself, Mr. Agnostic, find evidence within your own inner life (in a way that can be replicated by others) that your identity is not fully known until you admit that you participate in a life much larger than your own, drawing you toward becoming more fully developed and greater than you are? In a Light more powerful than the light of your own conscience? The question is about you.

Those who discover such evidence can claim to know that God exists within them, not simply to believe it. They hold that to find this evidence is the norm, not the exception; it is the default position of human beings. That is why the emergence of the religious impulse is to be expected in every generation. That is why a personal tie with God keeps being rediscovered in every era in human history, in virtually every culture.

There are two chief inner experiences that lead humans to the knowledge that in order to understand their own human nature adequately, they must come however slowly to recognize that they already participate in a divine nature, whose demands upon them as they currently find themselves are quite severe.

Consider first the “prison literature” of the twentieth century. In the prisons of officially atheist regimes, Fascist and Communist, there were many who were thrown into their cells at a time when they thought themselves to be atheists. Only slowly did some discover that there was an inner demand in them, a demand that they not become complicit in the lies of the regime; they must not sign their names to the lies put in front of them. On this imperative to stay honest, even at the cost of great pain, rested their entire integrity. If they had compromised that, they would have become part of the universal depravity insisted upon by the regime: “There is no truth but the truth of the Party.” They would have become like their jailers.

But why did they come to hold that this inner drive for absolute honesty was essential to their own human identity? Their senses of touch, hearing, seeing, smelling, and tasting may have ached with pain and violation. They may have been without any feeling of assistance from anybody, human or divine. Even their ability to give reasons for what they were doing might have collapsed, because the pain was so great and the terror of death so acute. The arguments of their torturers may have come to seem evident to them – and yet some deeper inner light drove them to refuse to lie.

What is the source of that light within them, which refused to let them surrender, even when their bodies could bear no more? They experienced that source as something greater than any part of their own body or mind. Yet that light seemed integral to their own self-identity.

This is the evidence that led Sharansky, Valladares, Mihailov, and an unknown number of others to perceive that they in fact lived in a spiritual community larger than their own ego, a community with all other humans struggling to preserve their integrity under threat of pain, and more than that. They also experienced by a kind of connaturality a mysterious Other (incorruptible and insistent) within them, more important than their own bodies and their own temporal life.

Such persons felt inwardly that, if they were not faithful, their moral failure would matter to that Other, in a wholly different way than it would matter to their jailers. Their moral surrender would be interpreted by their jailers as yet more evidence that everybody, just like themselves, had a price at which they would surrender. In such a surrender, their own integrity would die, and so would the real presence of God.

A second bit of evidence within myself (evidence that I participate in a wholly other, inconceivable Source of light) is my own insatiable drive to ask questions. Nothing finite satisfies me. There are always more questions to be asked. No existing concept seems final. In fact, this unrelenting drive lies at the basis of the scientific impulse. But it arises also in our intellectual lives outside of the habit of science. It arises within the habit of being faithful to reason, even in areas where science itself cannot go.

Ought I to marry this particular person? Ought I to take this job, make this work the center of my life’s pursuits? Is this the right institutional home for me, the community best designed to keep me asking questions and growing morally stronger?

One can make such choices intelligently, with good reasons. On the other hand, one may fail to anticipate realistically later twists of fortune. Later, one can blame oneself for having been more blind than one ought to have been. One can deeply regret past choices. In brief, science itself is not the only use for reason; in practical life, reason is also extremely important.

Here, some philosophers observe that people deploying practical reason live as if in the presence of an objective Observer. This Observer cannot be deceived by a person’s own self-deceptions. This Observer keeps pushing one to become more honest with oneself. And this Observer is not “out there,” but within. This Observer is sentinel not only over our scientific reasoning, but also our practical reasoning.

This, too, is evidence that we live in God, and He in us, at the very center of our identity. Within us is the Light, Judge, Merciful One, Brother, Inspirer, Prodder, Driver at the heart of our existence. Without becoming aware of this dimension of our own honesty and unlimited drive to understand, we cannot properly understand ourselves. We think ourselves smaller than we are.

“I searched for Thee everywhere, my God,” wrote St. Augustine in his mature, pagan, often profligate years. “When I found Thee, Thou wert within.” And later: “Thou wert closer to me than I to myself.”

The New Agnostic may not know, not yet, but a great, great number of us do know – yes, know – that the best drives within us do not come from our finite, sensory selves. We participate in them as an inner light all unbidden. Sometimes even as a torment. These inner drives are much greater than ourselves. They teach us that we are open to the Infinite.

Published in The Washington Post/Newsweek June 20, 2008