Speaking to the third world: essays on democracy and development.

Speaking to the Third World: Essays on Democracy and Development

AS A REMONSTRANCE against the aggressive cant of Third World spokesmen seeking to assign the burden of their people's misery to prosperous Western countries, Speaking to the Third World: Essays on Democracy and Development (American Enterprise Institute, 1150 17th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036; $3.95), by Peter L. Berger and Michael Novak, is successful enough; as a defense of "economic development'--which is to say, of the modern world--it is, for the most part, shallow in its facile optimism, amounting in places to smugness. Is it really true, as Michael Novak argues, that "the will of God . . . seems rather suddenly to call for development'? If so, are secularism, abortionism, Playboyism, feminism, consumerism, and yuppieism also attributable to the will of God for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries?

Like many professional optimists calling to us from the soapboxes of neoconservatism, Novak believes that the worst manifestations of the modern temper can be surgically separated from the best ones: that what he calls "productive ethics,' answering what he describes as the "moral obligation' of nations to develop, can be incorporated into the traditional ethical system that prevailed until, roughly speaking, the end of the eighteenth century. Perhaps there is no theoretical reason why such should not be the case, yet reality itself is discouraging.

According to Peter Berger, the United States--a country "brimming over with economic, social, and cultural vitality' --represents "the only revolution in the world today that can credibly promise economic development, political liberty, and respect for the dignity of human beings in their infinite variety.' In reality, our economic "vitality' consists of a trillion-dollar deficit and a huge trade imbalance; our social "vitality' is provided by pushy feminists, and our cultural "vitality' by homosexual theater and The New York Times Book Review; while our "respect for the dignity of human beings in their infinite variety' has recently resulted in immigration "reform' the certain result of which will be, for starters, to swamp America with millions of the Mexican proletariat.

Yet, in another respect, Berger's point is well taken: The United States is the inspiration of the world, whether that world loves us or hates us. All too frequently, of course, it hates us, and for no better reason that that, where we have succeeded, it has failed. And yet there is a "productive ethic,' and, rather than rant against the damage done in the past by colonialism and "exploitation,' Berger advises the nations of the Third World to search within their wide variety of indigenous cultures for its germ, with the intention of cultivating it assiduously when found. In "Underdevelopment Revisited,' Berger assesses revisions made in the prevailing view of the developing countries since the publication of his book Pyramids of Sacrifice in 1974 and concludes that, while capitalism has not proved a universal success, socialism has been entirely discredited. In "Speaking to the Third World,' he urges a combination of culturally specific traditions with the universalist values of democratic capitalism as a realistic pormula for satisfactory development.

As for Michael Novak's contributions, "Democracy and Human Rights' and "Democracy and Development,' their argument boils down to the proposition that the Catholic ethic isn't Protestant enough. What Novak appears to be groping toward is a neoconservative answer to the liberation theology of the Left, which may indeed be an answer but is scarcely an improvement: "From my point of view, the traditional Catholic teaching was adapted to the Ancien Regime. That regime was led, both in Europe and in Latin America, by three social classes chiefly: the landed aristocracy, the generals, and the clergy. Under that regime, it was imagined that the wealth of the world was finite; there was no question of development and, clearly, the social order was not democratic. . . . The social teaching of the Catholic Church must, in any case, teach the virtues and help create the institutions of democracy and economic dynamism. These are new but vitally important tasks' ("Democracy and Human Rights').

The obvious facts that the Catholic Church is not itself a democratic institution and that spiritual, rather than economic, dynamism is its appointed and self-acknowledged end ought to preclude such facile conclusions. Whatever the peripheral effects of its teachings, did the Church really seek to inclucate the "institutions of feudalism' in the Middle Ages, or "mercantilist dynamism' in the eighteenth century? Novak is quick to praise what he calls ""the pluralistic personality'' as "a distinctive modern type.' But surely a wonder of the present-day Church is that it embraces people a great number of whom are unified solely by their adherence to Rome, remaining, in their customs, dress, and habits--including their economic habits --nearly infinitely diverse. There are matters about which neither church nor state has anything to teach the other; and when, as has occasionally happened, the jurisdictions of the two have been confused, it has usually been the Church that has had the most to lose.