Social Justice Isn't What You Think It Is

by Michael Novak

  Further, Lincoln was also among the first to highlight the dynamic role of knowledge and know-how (now often called “human capital”) in the creation of new wealth, which undergirds the high spirits that drive free societies forward. For instance, on a cold winter day in February 1859, in Jacksonville, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln delivered a “Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions,” in which he described, starting with the time of Adam, six great advances in the history of liberty. The last of these great steps, Lincoln held, is the law of copyrights and patents. His lecture gives the best account I have ever read of the reasons why the United States, in a brief Constitution of just 4,486 words, includes a clause guaranteeing the right of inventors and authors to royalties for patents and copyrights. In this clause is embedded the single mention of the term “right” in the entire body of the Constitution. Until I read Lincoln on this point, I had never encountered anyone who gave patents and copyrights such high importance.

  On that cold February day on the Illinois prairie, you must imagine Lincoln, tall and gangling, gazing across the stove-heated room, with a sweep of his hand summoning up a vision of that first “old fogey,” father Adam:

  There he stood, a very perfect physical man, as poets and painters inform us, but he must have been very ignorant, and simple in his habits. He had no sufficient time to learn much by observation, and he had no near neighbors to teach him anything. No part of his breakfast had been brought from the other side of the world, and it is quite probable, he had no conception of the world having any other side.2

  By contrast with this naked but imposing Adam, able to speak (for he names the animals) but without anyone to talk to (for Eve “was still a bone in his side”), Young America, Lincoln noted, the America of 1859, was awash with knowledge and wealth. Whereas the first beautiful specimen of the species knew not how to read or write, nor any of the useful arts yet to be discovered, “Look around at Young America,” Lincoln said in 1859. “Look at his apparel, and you shall see cotton fabrics from Manchester and Lowell, flax-linen from Ireland, wool-cloth from Spain, silk from France, furs from the Arctic regions, with a buffalo robe from the Rocky Mountains.”3 On Young America’s table, one could find:

  Besides plain bread and meat made at home . . . sugar from Louisiana, coffee and fruits from the tropics, salt from Turk’s Island, fish from New-foundland, tea from China, and spices from the Indies. The whale of the Pacific furnishes his candle-light, he has a diamond-ring from Brazil, a gold-watch from California, and a spanish cigar from Havanna.4

  Not only did Young America have a sufficient, indeed more than sufficient, supply of these goods, but, Lincoln added, “thousands of hands are engaged in producing fresh supplies, and other thousands, in bringing them to him.”5

  Here, then, is the question Lincoln posed: How did the world get from the unlettered, untutored backwoodsman of the almost silent and primeval Garden of Eden to great cities, locomotives, telegraphs, and breakfast from across the seas? He discerned six crucial steps in this grand historical adventure.

  The first step was God-given: the human ability to build a language.

  The second step was the slow mastering of the art of discovery, through learning three crucial human habits—observation, reflection, and experiment—which Lincoln explained this way:

  It is quite certain that ever since water has been boiled in covered vessels, men have seen the lids of the vessels rise and fall a little, with a sort of fluttering motion, by force of the steam, but so long as this was not specially observed, and reflected and experimented upon, it came to nothing. At length however, after many thousand years, some man observes this long-known effect of hot water lifting a pot-lid, and begins a train of reflection upon it.6

  Given how arduous it is to lift heavy objects, the attentive man is invited to experiment with the force lifting up the pot lid.

  Thousands of years, however, were needed to develop the habit of observing, reflecting, and experimenting, and then to spread that art throughout society. Some societies developed that habit socially, and some did not. Why, Lincoln asked, when Indians and Mexicans trod over the gold of California for centuries without finding it, did Yankees almost instantly discover it? (The Indians had not failed to discover it in South America.) “Goldmines are not the only mines overlooked in the same way,” Lincoln noted. Indeed, there are more “mines” to be found above the surface of the earth than below: “All nature—the whole world, material, moral, and intellectual—is a mine, and, in Adam’s day, it was a wholly unexplored mine.” And so “it was the destined work of Adam’s race to develop, by discoveries, inventions, and improvements, the hidden treasures of this mine.”7

  The third great step was the invention of writing. By this great step, taken only in a few places, then spreading slowly, observations and reflections made in one century prompted reflection and experimentation in a later one.

  The fourth great step was the printing press, which diffused records of observations, reflections, and experiments in ever-widening circles, far beyond the tiny handful of people who could afford handwritten parchment. Now such records could be made available to hundreds of thousands cheaply. Before printing, the great mass of humans

  were utterly unconscious, that their conditions, or their minds were capable of improvement. They not only looked upon the educated few as superior beings; but they supposed themselves to be naturally incapable of rising to equality. To immancipate [sic] the mind from this false and under estimate of itself, is the great task which printing came into the world to perform. It is difficult for us, now and here, to conceive how strong this slavery of the mind was; and how long it did, of necessity, take, to break it’s [sic] shackles, and to get a habit of freedom of thought, established.8

  Between the invention of writing and the invention of the printing press, almost 3,000 years had intervened. Between the invention of the printing press and the invention of a modern patent law (in Britain in 1624), fewer than 200 had passed.

  The fifth great step was the discovery of America. In the new country, committed to liberty and equality, the human mind was emancipated as never before. Given a brand-new start, calling for new habits, “a new country is most favorable—almost necessary—to the immancipation [sic] of thought, and the consequent advancement of civilization and the arts.” The discovery of America was “an event greatly facilitating useful discoveries and inventions.”9

  The sixth great step was the adoption of a Constitution, Article 1, section 8, clause 8 of which recognized a natural right of authors and inventors. Among the few express powers granted by the people to Congress, the framers inserted this one: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”

  The effect of this regime was not lost upon the young inventor and future president. “Before then,” Lincoln wrote, “any man might instantly use what another had invented, so that the inventor had no special advantage from his own invention.” Lincoln cut to the essential point: “The patent system changed this, secured to the inventor, for a limited time, the exclusive use of his invention, and thereby added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius, in the discovery and production of new and useful things.”10

  “The fuel of interest added to the fire of genius!” Ever the realist, Lincoln knew what is in the human being: to be a genius is one thing, to be motivated is quite another, and then to be supported in this motivation by a wise regime is an unprecedented blessing. By contrast, a regime that does not secure natural rights depresses human energy. Natural rights are not mere legal puffs of air; they formalize capacities for action that in some societies lie dormant and in others are fueled into ignition.

  The United States, Lincoln believed, ignited the practical genius of its people, among the high born and the low born alike, wherever God in his wisdom had implanted that genius. In the same year as his lecture, 1859, Lincoln himself won a U.S.
patent (number 6469) for a “device to buoy vessels over shoals.” That patent is not a bad metaphor for the effect of patents on inventions: to buoy them over difficulties.

  The great effect of the patent and copyright clause on world history was a remarkable transformation of values. During most of human history, land had been the most important source of wealth; in America, intellect and know-how became the major source. The dynamism of the system ceased to be primarily material and became, so to speak, intellectual and spiritual, born of the creative mind. Lincoln’s motive in favoring the Homestead Act and the patent clause (and both together) was to prevent the West from being dominated by large estates and great landowners, so that it might become a society of many freemen and many practical, inventive minds. And so it has. More than 6 million patents have been issued in the United States since the first patent law was passed in 1790.

  Implicit in Lincoln’s Jacksonville address are several assumptions about the nature and meaning of the universe. Lincoln saw history as a narrative of freedom. He believed devoutly that the fact that the Creator of all things had made human beings in his own image—every one of them, woman and man—was provident. History, he thought, is the record of how human beings have gradually come to recognize their true better nature and have striven to make it actual, both in their own lives and in the institutions of their republic.

  Thomas Jefferson wrote that “the god who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time,” and, while Lincoln did not actually say that our God wishes to be adored by men who are free, he sacrificed much, very much, so that this nation might have “a new birth of freedom.” That horrifying bloody project, that new birth of freedom, cost some 40,000 dead and wounded in a single day, and multiples of that in the sum in many other bloody battles. All that, Lincoln said at Gettysburg, fell under the will of the Almighty:

  We can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. . . . It is for us the living, rather, to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.11

  The universe is so created that it positively calls forth human freedom. To that call, it is the sacred duty of humans to respond, even at enormous cost.

  Some seven score and two years after Lincoln’s address in Jacksonville, there came an international echo of his beliefs from an unlikely quarter, in a worldwide letter published by Pope John Paul II in Rome, on May 1, 1991: Centesimus Annus. No doubt John Paul II had few opportunities to encounter Lincoln’s writings. What Lincoln and John Paul II did share was an ability to notice common, ordinary phenomena which other people tended to overlook. Lincoln’s humble ruminations on how common things like covered pots behaved over a fire set a historical precedent for the pope’s commonsensical reflections on the relation of land to wealth over so many centuries. Poland is a land of farm after farm, of great landholders and small. The pope recognized that the primary form of wealth had been land for a thousand years. But by 1991 the cause of wealth had changed: “In our time, in particular, there exists another form of ownership which is becoming no less important than land: the possession of know-how, technology and skill.”12 The wealth of the world’s most economically advanced nations is based far more on this type of ownership than on natural resources. This is the same insight Lincoln had come to.

  “Indeed, besides the earth,” observed the pope, “man’s principal resource is man himself. His intelligence enables him to discover the earth’s productive potential and the many different ways in which human needs can be satisfied.”13 The pope’s words seem cousin to Lincoln’s words: “All nature—the whole world, material, moral, and intellectual—is a mine” echoes “the destiny of Adam’s race” is “to develop, by discoveries, inventions, and improvements, the hidden treasures of this mine.”

  The pope goes on:

  Whereas at one time the decisive factor of production was the land, and later capital—understood as a total complex of the instruments of production—today the decisive factor is increasingly man himself, that is, his knowledge, especially his scientific knowledge, his capacity for interrelated and compact organization, as well as his ability to perceive the needs of others and to satisfy them.14

  Similarly, where Lincoln had written “but Adam had nothing to turn his attention to [but] work. If he should do anything in the way of invention, he had first to invent the art of invention,” the pope writes:

  At one time the natural fruitfulness of the earth appeared to be, and was in fact, the primary factor of wealth, while work was, as it were, the help and support for this fruitfulness. In our time . . . work becomes ever more fruitful and productive to the extent that people become more knowledgeable about the productive potentialities of the earth and more profoundly cognizant of the needs of those for whom their work is done.15

  Washington, Madison, and Lincoln held that the American regime, measured by “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” would blaze a trail for other nations. Under John Paul II, important portions of America’s “new science of politics,” after much testing, have at last been ratified by what is now the most widely held body of social thought in the world. This practical intellectual influence may stand as an important contribution of American civilization to world history.

  In this new era, observes Fred Warshofsky, a journalist-historian, “creativity, in the form of ideas, innovations, and inventions, has replaced gold, colonies, and raw materials as the new wealth of nations.”16 The remarkable “new technologies, new processes, and new products that constitute intellectual property now form the economic bedrock of international trade and national wealth.”17 As more and more nations take halting steps on the path of democracy and free markets, they will increasingly need the fire of invention, the fuel of interest.

  Centesimus Annus hit Rome like a sonic boom on May 1, 1991. Even the first fleeting sight of John Paul II’s new encyclical led commentators around the world to predict that it would lift the worldwide terms of debate on political economy to a new level. Immediately evoking praise from both the left and the right, this encyclical seemed, to some at least, to be the greatest in the series of which it is a part. In reply to questions raised about political economy and free social institutions by the events of 1989, it is a classic restatement of Christian anthropology.

  Earlier in his career, the pope had done significant work in phenomenology, particularly in his book The Acting Person. The title of that book is a key to the nuanced approval that the pope later gave to capitalism rightly understood, rooted in the creative mind of the human person. It is such a capitalism, bounded by law, which he recommends to his native Poland, other formerly socialist nations, and the Third World. This approval surprised many commentators. The London Financial Times, probably basing its story on leaks from one faction among those preparing the document, had predicted the ringing endorsement of a socialism more advanced than that of European socialist leaders, such as Neil Kinnock, Willy Brandt, and Felipé Gonzalez. Pope John Paul II’s Christian anthropology, plus his acute observation of the way the world works, led him to other conclusions.

  The success of Centesimus Annus is due, in any case, to its philosophical profundity. From the beginning of his pontificate, the pope thought in a worldwide framework, appealing to the bond of human solidarity. But he also thought deeply, not only broadly. He rooted his social proposals in his anthropology of the acting person and creative subjectivity. This enabled him to criticize every existing ideology, including democratic capitalism. Of the three great ideologies that put their mark upon the twentieth century, National Socialism f
ailed first, then Communist socialism. From Eastern Europe, from the Third World, many were asking the pope: What next?

  John Paul II proposed a tripartite social structure composed of a free political system, a free economy, and a culture of liberty. After living through the great political debate of the twentieth century, he favored democracy; after living through the great economic debate, he favored capitalism rightly understood (that is, not all forms of capitalism). He was not satisfied with the way things were. He warned that a formidable struggle awaits us, in building a culture worthy of freedom. If we have the politics and the economics roughly (but only roughly) straight, how should we live? How should we shape our culture? These questions are now front and center.

  Background Reflections

  Soon after his election to the papacy in 1978, his Polish countrymen began to recognize that Karol Wojtyła was their international tribune. As long as a son of Poland sat on the chair of Peter, the Communist rulers of Poland found themselves in a glaring international spotlight. The Iron Curtain no longer hid their movements. Although they attempted to crush the labor movement Solidarity, they could not.

  For the ten long years until 1989, a certain space for civic activity—intense, intellectual, practical—opened up within the bosom of the totalitarian society. Citizens in other Eastern European nations took heart. Poland was the first to nurture an independent people, spiritually free of communism, able to negotiate with the Communist leaders as equals—even better than equals. Once Solidarity broke the mask of totalitarian conformity, democratic movements began to grow in boldness throughout that empire which many finally dared to call evil.

  In the days when he was the young Archbishop of Krakow, attending the Second Vatican Council in Rome, Wojtyła first came to international attention for a speech he gave before the Council on Religious Liberty. The American echoes in that speech were widely noted, for at the time a strong statement on religious liberty was high among the priorities of the American bishops. Then, from his first days as pope, John Paul II spoke often about liberty of conscience, going so far as to call it the “first liberty.” Gradually, too, he came to understand that the American meaning of liberty—ordered liberty, as he came to call it (liberty under law, liberty under reason)—does not mean libertinism, laissez-faire, the devil take the hindmost. At least one American bishop played an important role in drawing the pope’s attention to the vital difference in this respect between the American Revolution and the French Revolution.