THE RIGHT BOOKS

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.

CW

About the Author

Chilton Williamson Jr.

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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.