A hope rooted in faith

The Universal Hunger for Liberty

Why the Clash of Civilizations Is Not Inevitable

Michael Novak

Basic Books: 282 pp., $26

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MORAL philosopher Michael Novak takes up questions of concern to many contemporary Western thinkers: Are the civilizations that arose from Judaism and Christianity inevitably in conflict with those that arose from Islam, or are reconciliation and cooperation possible?

To Novak, George Frederick Jewett Scholar in religion, philosophy and public policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., the answer is a hopeful but qualified yes.

In his new book, “The Universal Hunger for Liberty: Why the Clash of Civilizations Is Not Inevitable,” Novak asserts that liberal democracy and modern capitalism rest on the foundations of Judaism and Christianity. Because Islam shares with those two faiths the traditions of the prophet Abraham, Novak believes that Muslims could join their cousins in faith in adopting the liberating benefits of self-government and the productive capacity of the capitalist economic system.

On the other hand, Novak notes that when the concept of an individual’s right to liberty was gaining ground in the Western world at the height of the Arab Muslim civilization about 1,000 years ago, Islamic scholars and teachers did not regard that as a positive good. So, while he hopes from his Western vantage point that a deadly and prolonged clash of civilizations is not inevitable, his own analysis leaves room to conclude otherwise.

Much of his grounds for hope stem from his intense belief in the power of religion to bring order and benevolence to human affairs. For most of the last century, sociologists have labored in the shadow of Max Weber, who in his 1920 “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” posited that ascetic Calvinism was a great spur to the development of capitalism in the West.

Novak instead mines his Roman Catholic tradition, in which he finds a richer bed for capitalism to flourish, especially in its emphasis on caring for one’s fellow human beings. Although he acknowledges that the French Revolution shocked Catholicism into hostility toward democracy for much of the 19th century and beyond, he argues that contemporary Catholicism, as articulated in the writings of Pope John Paul II, is much more hospitable to it.

In fact, it is Novak’s nuanced explication of his own religion’s relationship with the contemporary that is the most useful part of “The Universal Hunger for Liberty.” When he discusses other religions and traditions, he is often polemical and dismissive. The Protestant tradition he finds “thin,” and the philosophers of the Enlightenment -- a word he dislikes because it refers to the spreading of light after a period of darkness -- lack a religious base, making their ideas inadequate to the challenges of today. He dismisses “liberation theology,” an appeal to the aspirations of the poor that swept Latin America in the mid-20th century, as doing nothing to improve their lives. Only dynamic capitalism can do that, he writes.

Novak offers praise for globalization but is unhappy about the spread of the more vulgar aspects of popular and American culture, most notably in mass entertainment. Yet he does not address whether mass culture is the inevitable twin of economic globalization. Nor, he confesses, is he an expert on Islam, which makes his book the less useful. What he has produced instead is a treatise of hope based on his own contentment with the consolations of religion.

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Anthony Day is a regular contributor to Book Review.