Will It Liberate?
Novak, Michael
We give the name of socialism to a political regime in which the ownership of the means of production is removed from individuals and handed over to higher institutions whose concern is the higher...
...Each day in their model Nicaragua, the consequences of their shallow lucubrations become less revocable and more degrading...
...The assumption is often stated or implied among critics of liberation theology that its proponents are motivated first by their Christianity and that "Marxian analysis" is merely a device they use to frame their propositions regarding social matters...
...To date, the great majority of the quarter million refugees from Sandinista Nicaragua are of the peasant "class" exalted by the liberationists...
...and the great literary witnesses against the peculiar vanities that nurture socio-economic totalism: Conrad, Zamyatin, Koestler, Orwell...
...John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger have WILL IT LIBERATE...
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...There are more than two million street vendors, artisans, and small manufacturers who must work "informally" (that is, illegally) because they cannot cut through the red tape of the Peruvian government...
...With the help of their tutors, students at Thomas Aquinas College read the original works of these teachers...
...By 1983 it was still possible for a somewhat mellowed Gustavo Gutierrez to refer to the dated, impressionistic number-crunching of the sociologists who most influenced him as "studies of the most rigorous scientific exactitude...
...an uncritical adoption of Marxian predilections...
...Whatever the intentions of the liberation theologians, their silence about the hard realities they helped bring about in Nicaragua is every bit as conspicuous as their earlier insouciance regarding Marxist oppression elsewhere...
...They are the books that made our civilization...
...Of men whom one would expect to be loyal to a tradition far more supple than what Raymond Aron once called the "Marxist Vulgate...
...The draft of their charter was sewn with a less-than concrete jargon familiar to students of modern totalitarianism: Insofar as operational politics is concerned, the very notion of "revolutionary consciousness" will include as an intrinsic component the notion of power being held by the people—the latter being led by the proletariat—and of effectiveness as an indispensable element in the gradual attainment of power...
...There is no easy access to credit, no easy entrance into closed markets, no easy way to incorporate small businesses, no tax relief for local capital investment...
...And Novak sustains an exemplary balance in his own critique, concentrating on "basic concepts" and certain poses (class struggle, hostility to private property, labor theory of value, bizarre geopolitical schemata, and the like), with frequent expressions of sympathy for the "concerns" of the liberation theologians, for their manifestations of Christian spirituality, and for their apparent mellowing amid the recent transitions of several Latin American dictatorships toward democracy...
...They delight in vigorous and rational arguments with each other and with their teachers...
...They are the best...
...But there is at least part of an answer buried in a passing reference Novak makes to "unhistorical neodoxy...
...Newman, Einstein, Dante, Kant, Aristotle, Homer, and the College patron, St...
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...How on earth, then—at just the time when most secular intellectuals had come to reject or ignore Marxism—how did this anemic system of gnostic attitudinizing grab the fancy of an influential minority of Roman Catholic clerics...
...Yet they are silent...
...Juan Luis Segundo, S.J...
...almost all (95 percent) of Lima's public transportation (buses and taxis) is "informal,"and 60 percent of Lima's food is distributed "informally...
...Its students don't read textbooks or take notes on lectures...
...Most of them are dead...
...Despite an almost instant condemnation of "Christians for Socialism" by the Chilean bishops, the group's ideas John R. Dunlap teaches English at Santa Clara University...
...Segundo's estimation, the various forms of liberation theology have one thing in common: "the view that man, on a political as well as an individual basis, [should] construct the Kingdom of God within history now...
...And as Christians, no doubt, they must all attend to that most difficult injunction of their faith: to love one another, regardless of the other's asininity...
...In Fr...
...Many of the teachers you know by name...
...This entails the elimination of any and every kind of idealism in visualizing the "Christian element," because our focus is concentrated on the historical terrain of the actual revolutionary struggle...
...it needs the painstaking creation of concrete institutions, legal and social, to release the creative energies of the poor...
...They may be the four most precious years of your life...
...And the Catholic tradition emerges as the solid ground on which the buildings of truth and happiness are erected...
...The assembled Catholic bishops issued a document (oddly tinged with Marxian rhetoric) which decried the conditions of the poor in Latin America and called for drastic public policy changes...
...Gutierrez, for example, declaims against "capitalism," the standard devil-term of the liberation theologians...
...With their faith in dogmatic theology shaken, the liberation theologians found a substitute in what Novak calls an "old-fashioned dogmatic faith in social science...
...And he had a good point...
...You can be part of this exhilarating community for four years...
...Having graciously assumed good intentions on the part of the liberation theologians, Michael Novak has paid them a further honor more gracious than any received from their liberal admirers in the North: he has taken the trouble to call their intellectual bluff—and to invite them to get serious about serious matters...
...Novak has taken on an awkward chore: to engage in argument those who, to the extent they take their Marxism seriously, are inclined to reject argument itself as "bourgeois intellectualism...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1987...
...Most of them have every column published in full...
...But how seriously do they take their Marxism...
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...Works that are difficult but rewarding...
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...But there is one question noticeably muted among the many asked in Will It Liberate?—although there is enough in the book to suggest a partial answer...
...WILL*BUCKLEY*KILPATRICK*HARVEY*SOBRAN*KIRKPATRICK EVANS&NOVAK*RUSHER*HART*YODER*F'ODHORETZ*RABINNITZ*LAMBRO *SHELTON*DE ORE*KELLEY*WRIGHT*LOCHER*MAC NALLY*STAYSKAL* It's an ALL-STAR conservative t...
...Of course, Gutierrez, Miranda, Segundo, Dussel, and the rest—at the time (1970s) of their most influential writings—could not have known much of recent critics like Rydenfelt or Shafarevich or Sowell or Kolakowski or Paz or Voslensky, all of whom Novak cites in his own criticism...
...Novak declines to judge the intentions of the liberationists, but he does point to effects, again with mild understatement and a wry play on Marxist jargon: "the cause of liberation theology has already been wounded, perhaps mortally, by the praxis of liberation theologians among the Sandinista ruling class...
...Like their teachers, they demand the whys of life...
...For Novak, however, the moral imperative is to discover concrete ways for Latin America "to promote economic activism among its impoverished millions...
...The question is muted, and one may shudder to think how intricate a sufficient answer might be...
...QUESTIONS ABOUT LIBERATION THEOLOGY Michael Novak/Paulist Press/$14.95 John R. Dunlap There is a small Catholic college in the mountains of Southern California unlike anything in your experience...
...But as Novak makes clear throughout this book (especially in a chilling historical essay on the death-obsessed "inner will of socialism"), ideas have consequences, and it is reasonable to expect good people who have fostered bad ideas to acknowledge responsibility for the bad consequences...
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...socialism is the reverse.—Polish joke ichael Novak dates the emergence of liberation theology with the second meeting of CELAM (the Latin American Episcopal Conference) at Medellin, Colombia, in 1968...
...But it was a few more years before the fire sparked by the Medellin document had spread among clerics throughout the continent...
...As they find them, the chilling fog of skepticism lifts...
...CMSERVATIVE =RI= Box 29 SA • Hampton, Iowa 50441 44 * * * * * * City State Zip * ********************************* Now all this fuss, no doubt, is appropriate to the Pope and the Cardinal as pastors of the Church and to Novak as a careful thinker applying a rigorous method of analysis...
...We give the name of socialism to a political regime in which the ownership of the means of production is removed from individuals and handed over to higher institutions whose concern is the higher good...
...Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man...
...Thomas Aquinas, are among the permanent faculty...
...In Novak's theology, Latin America does not need utopian schemes...
...Yet in his native Peru, the empirical reality (common to Latin America) is that state regulation strangles the economic liberties of the lower "classes...
...I understand I can obtain a * : full refund on unused portion at any time...
...Or brought to fruition...
...But Michael Novak notes a few other items they have in common: a pervasive vagueness and abstraction...
...The following year, in Santiago, Chile, a group calling themselves "Christians for Socialism," which had been organized under the tutelage of Fidel Castro, met at their first convention "to probe more deeply into the concrete experiences of Christians who are actively involved in the revolution to liberate Latin America...
...a primitive notion of "capitalism...
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...continued to spread, flaming up in the writings of the new liberation theologians...
...Issues cartoonists...
...That's capitalism...
...His method of advancing that imperative is to counter the ideological contentions of the liberationists with empirical observations...
...It's New *It's Weekly *It's RIGHT ON...
...I n Will It Liberate?—a tightly organ- 1 ized collection of eleven essays, seven of which are new for this book—Novak frames a series of questions whose effect is to expose these and other obscurities in liberation theology...
...But well before the liberationists let fly their Marxian polemics, there already had been the sympathetic criticism of C. Wright Mills...
...and to form a legal corporation, the cost in bribes and fees is five times the average worker's annual earnings...
...After Gutierrez, the most prominent liberation pioneers included the Uruguayan Juan Luis Segundo (Theology for Artisans of a New Humanity), the Argentine Enrique Dussel (History and Theology of Liberation), the Brazilian Hugo Assmann (Theology for a Nomad Church), the Mexican Jose Miranda (Communism in the Bible...
...t any rate, that's a charitable image to give in partial answer to an embarrassing question: the naive cleric who—vaguely suspicious of modernity's achievements and caught up as well in Latin American habits of dependency—embraces modernity's whim-wham...
...NOW, every week receive a 32 page tabloid Atdevoted to nationally-distributed newspaper 39 .* columnists, with a conservative appeal...
...Novak alludes now and then, with characteristic kindness, to a certain naivete among the liberation theologians, in particular to their apparent innocence of Marx's most trenchant critics...
...It takes from seven to fourteen years to acquire government authorization to build a home...
...The smugness of an earlier "unhistorical orthodoxy"--an attitude that played down empirical analysis and critical reflection—made some energetic members of the Church patsies for "unhistorical neodoxy," including Marxism...
...Novak's principal concession to the liberation theologians is that economic conditions in Latin America are absurd and appalling: the favelas and the barrios exist, sprawled out from the extravagance of well-heeled landholders and corrupt bureaucracies...
...Against liberation theology, Novak posits in nuanced detail a "creation theology," which acknowledges human wit and inventiveness as the real source of economic value and which promises not to bring the Kingdom of God on earth but "only to press the imperatives of that Kingdom—truth, love, justice, liberty and beauty—into daily life as yeast in stubborn dough...
...a displacement of empirical issues "from the realm of practical reason to the realm of pure definitional logic...
...Wounded...
...All these were available to the scrutiny of the liberation theologians—not to mention a suggestive biographical and historical record: Marx's foul temper, Lenin's demonic cynicism, and, already by 1970, more than 80 million human lives violently snuffed out under Marxist-Leninist prescriptions...
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...By the time of Vatican II, the standards in much of Catholic higher education and seminary training had become crusty and brittle, so that after Vatican II manysemi-educated Catholics, cut loose suddenly from a tradition they barely understood, had little by which to measure their heady encounters with a modernity they understood even less...
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...In 1971 Gustavo Gutierrez, a Peruvian priest commonly taken to be the father of the movement, published his Theology of Liberation, a book inspired by "Marxian analysis...
...the devastating critiques of Bohm-Bawerk, Weber, von Mises, Hayek, Schumpeter, Voegelin, Arendt, Aron...
...ice/ 4. • 111 111111111110 [ 11014 111111101111111Milin AMMO Or write: Thomas J. Susanka Director of Admissions Box 104 THOMAS AQUINAS COLLEGE 10000 North Ojai Road Santa Paula, CA 93060 Financial aid program • Bachelor of Arts degree Fully accredited, Western Association of Schools & Colleges Coeducational THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1987 43 both taken issue only with "certain aspects" of liberation theology, observing that Latin American clerics who rail against "imperialism" are oddly sanguine about the ideological imperialism they foster with their German categories...
...Because the students at Thomas Aquinas College study the best, their minds grow free and strong...
...More than a quarter century ago, shortly before Vatican II, a young Michael Novak had complained of "unhistorical orthodoxy" among his fellow Catholics...
Vol. 20 • May 1987 • No. 5
