Will it liberate? Questions about liberation theology.

Will It Liberate? Questions about Liberation Theology 

THE ENGLISH WRITER E. M. Forstersaid there are two kinds of people in the world: those who say there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don't say that. Nonetheless, I will say there are two kinds of people in the world, with respect to understanding the social order. The first are those whose earliest and deepest perception is that there is something arbitrary, fragile, and potentially threatening about the way society is ordered. The second kind of person perceives a natural and assured ordering of things, beginning with parental authority, and only later emerges into an adolescent awareness that the way things are and the way people say things must be "ain't necessarily so.'

My impression is that Michael Novakis the first kind of person. The impression is reinforced by his new book, Will It Liberate? Questions about Liberation Theology (Paulist). It is a book both brilliant and wise. It is brilliant in exposing the ways that liberation theology, which typically employs Marxist analysis and frequently backs Marxist-Leninist causes, leads to very bad consequences for the proor whom the liberationists claim to champion. It is wise in its understanding that a humane social order begins with a salutary fear of the inhumanity to which humanity is prone. This latter truth comes as no surprise to those who know that the beginning of all wisdom is the fear of God. The fear experienced in the encounter with the Absolute is related to the fear of power in the hands of mortals who, unlike God, are perfect neither in justice nor in mercy. Being mortals ourselves, we know the ways of man. And, if we do not know it from knowing ourselves, we know it from even the most cursory reading of what people have done to one another.

Novak is not content to debunk thearguments and proposals of the liberationist. He wants to understand their controlling presuppositions, and especially why they are possessed by such deep hostility to liberal, "bourgeois' democracy. One reason, I suggest, is that people emerging from the certitudes of childhood respond differently to the recognition of the world as radically incoherent, nonrational, and potentially threatening. One understandable response is to try to put things back in order, to re-establish the old securities. Enrique Dussel, a prominent liberationist philosopher, tells us that the controlling image for the utopia he seeks is that of the infant suckling at his mother's breast. Thus also Rousseau's romance with nature, Marx's kingdom of freedom, and Benjamin Barber's current communal vision of "strong democracy.' There are comparable conservative yearnings for a return to, say, the Christendom of the thirteenth century. To be sure, such conservative yearnings have not produced the heaps of corpses resulting from the ragings of the left. But all these responses aim to banish the ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the dark night of the world as it is.

DEATH IS among the nastier bumpsin store for us. The first of our two kinds of people knows this from the start. The second, if he moves on from adolescence to adulthood, comes to understand it. But many deny it, turning politics into an immortality project. The course of wisdom is not to deny our fears but to let our lesser fears be relativized by the greater and worthier fear of God. That fear is beyond the reach of all our projects and is relieved only by submission to a grace that is given despite ourselves. Something like that, Novak suggests, is what is meant by liberal democracy's assertion that it is "under God.' The political is not ultimate but, at most, penultimate. The alternative is for politics to become what some have called the immanentization of the transcendent. The alternative is liberation theology.

Although they would be scandalizedto think so, many secularists are liberation theologians of a sort. For them, a political vision that does not satisfy everything satisfies nothing; if it does not supply a total meaning, it is meaningless. Not for them is a social order attuned to reasonable and perduring fears, to the tempering of bloody mindedness, to the warding off of brutish chaos, to the limiting, checking, and balancing of power bent to the wrong. This, they say, is a merely "procedural' rather than "substantive' understanding of politics. They fail to understand the substantive truth that the procedure is work enough for all the energy and ingenuity we can muster. They fail to understand that the courage to sustain the procedural is premised upon transcendent promise of a substantive right ordering of the world that is beyond our contriving. Reinhold Niebuhr's way of putting it is still as good as any: "Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.' The fear of that inclination in ourselves and others is the beginning of political wisdom. Maybe everybody can come to understand that, but the first kind of people, people like Michael Novak, seem to understand it better.