Who Needs God?
By Michael Novak

Michael Novak is the Jewett Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. This is adapted from his chapter in the new collection The Collapse of Communism (Hoover Press).           

An American couple I know adopted a young boy of three or so from Rumania, one of those orphans brought up mass-production style, never held in human arms, fed by a bottle attached to a mechanical apparatus. Isolated from human closeness and all moral training until he left the orphanage, the child is grown now, handsome, smart, winning in his ways—but absolutely incapable of forming a human relationship, only capable of seeking his own will and his own pleasure. He fears close contact with adults, only pretending to affection as necessary. Cleverly narcissistic, he lies, steals, cheats, whatever he needs to do to obtain what he desires. And all the while, smiling, he charms people by his seemingly open manner. 

He has already been arrested once for shoplifting, and his teachers at school, for a time in love with him, have reluctantly had to report the times he has stolen things from his classmates. This engaging boy has learned precisely how to deceive. His parents, serious and devout people, are in despair about his behavior. For he is heading for self-destruction and may, they fear, charm innocent and inexperienced people into accompanying him thereto. 

It so happens the adoptive mother of this boy is an accomplished free-market economist. And she explains that the totally self-centered impulse that moves this child, the preoccupation with his own physical self-interest, at the expense of all other more noble interests, is remarkably like what the economists conventionally discuss as “economic self-interest.” She has even written a lecture to this effect, daring other economists to tell her in what respect the conduct of this narcissistic young man differs from the behavior of their theoretical “economic man.” 

This challenge infuriates the economists, she has found, but they only sputter and do not answer it. When they have had time to reflect upon it, however, they may find that, more than they explicitly recognize in their published theories, the “rational man” they assume to be acting in their theories is not simply a calculator of self-interest but in fact a highly developed humanistic person, of Jewish and Christian provenance or some correlative tradition. For when they write “rational,” they also mean “law-abiding” and basically “honest,” “trustworthy,” and “morally reliable.” They emphatically do not mean a crook, cheat, liar, manipulator, or narcissist with whom it is impossible to have a human relationship.

For economics to work, a deal has to be a deal. A partner one cannot trust brings a high cost in efficiency and a high probability of eventual disaster. For capitalism to function, it requires persons who live out a far richer morality than is exemplified by that unfortunate orphan raised mechanically, evacuated of all moral and emotional sense and made into a pure rational calculator of means and ends. 

This child is incapable of internal self-government. He gets what he wants by vectoring around any resistance he meets, like a robot bumping and bouncing along his way. He lives, in short, in a world essentially like the one in which the Communist rulers of his homeland professed to believe we all live—a world of pure materialism with no God and no transcendent right and wrong.

In this child’s native Rumania, atheistic Communists set out to eradicate centuries of learning, habits, and traditions. The government aimed to erase “bourgeois culture”—religious morality, privacy of property and thought, individualistic behaviors. In the process, it dulled the most distinctive human mark: the primordial endowment of each citizen with a creative and accountable soul.

Their denial of the dignity of the individual, their reduction of human beings to mere material elements, erases the awareness people have of themselves as persons who reflect and who choose, who launch new actions into history, who accept responsibility for their undertakings. Unlike a horse or a cow, a human being is an active agent—inquiring and understanding, deliberating, judging, deciding. In precisely these ways, a human is made in the image of God, to his unparalleled potential glory.

Communism, denying there is a God, aimed to objectify everything and everybody. Its fundamental premise was materialism. Human beings are, well, just meat. Animated for a time, perhaps, but essentially no more than a packet of chemicals. Instruments. Means. The individual should expect to be expended, sacrificed, used up, like a thing.

The anti-religious materialistic theories of Communism had no resonance among the populations subjected to them. Some Communists did end up aligning themselves with this creed, in the belief this placed them on the side of idealistic justice and compassion. But these sentiments of sacrifice and common good were borrowed—from Christianity and Judaism. 

Indeed, Communism’s deepest symbolic resonances emanated from, and traded upon, pre-existing understandings of Judaism and Christianity. Among these are the expectation of a New Jerusalem, and the sacrifice of self for others like the ritual lamb, in the image of the Savior.

In the end, though, Communist atheism led easily to unspeakable acts of cruelty, because it insisted no human has any worth apart from contributing to the triumph of the Party. If a man will not contribute to the Collective Will, he is without value and may be disposed of. First, though, some utility may be squeezed from him. If necessary, squeeze hard. 

Against Communists who tyrannize, one cannot appeal to morality, or natural law, or bourgeois decency. One cannot appeal to the figure of Christ or to the commandments of God. Communists have their orders; they overcome their feelings and do what is required to turn a man into a means for the Party’s ends. Feelings can be trained, as can minds. 

What is an individual man, after all? “Truth” and “honor” are just empty words. Human liberty is a sham because we are slaves to “dialectical materialism.” God is just a neural reflex. There is no transcendent order that binds our conscience or limits our will. 

True materialists deny any standard of truth, moral integrity, and goodness by which humans are every moment being judged. For the materialist, there is in man no internal source of dignity. For the right cause, as numerous twentieth-century materialists demonstrated, all and anything can be done—even murder, torture, betrayal, and extermination. 

Paradoxically, however, ruthless materialism ended up leading a great many of its victims to God. For under the systems of imprisonment, torture, and public confession established in places like the USSR, citizens discovered evidence of the presence of God at the core of their own beings. The prison literature of our time is full of such testimonials.

The typical pattern went like this. In the process of administering one of the more than 20 different degrees of torture listed in the KGB handbooks, the tormentor would at some point tell his victim that there is no point in resisting. “Why put everybody through the pain? No one will ever know what happens here. It has no significance. Neither your resistance nor your confession will affect the outcome of History. Just be pragmatic. Write what I request. Why not? Bourgeois prejudices? You are too intelligent for that. No one is ever going to know what you or I will do here. Consider yourself a forgotten man. Be practical. Sign now. There is no such thing as truth. It is only a matter of making a decision. The sooner I can go home the better for me—and for you.”

At this point, a light would often go on in the victim’s head. “My torturer is claiming all the power. But he is actually confessing something else. There is something he wants from me that he does not have. So he does not have all the power. What he needs is this: that I should conform. He needs my will. He needs my denial that there is any such thing as truth. Only then will his philosophy be confirmed. As long as I remain faithful to my own beliefs, my existence unsettles him. I will not tell a lie. So long as I can hold out for that principle, my existence shows him that his philosophy is false.

“Of course, he will overwhelm me. He can break me with pain. He can take away my mind and my liberty with drugs. But the real power in this relationship is mine. He cannot get what he wants unless I freely give it to him. It is not enough for him to force me, to destroy me—that would be only an instant’s work. I am beyond his reach in the sanctuary of my consciousness, in my fidelity to the light.”

Along this harsh path, thousands of victims came to know themselves at a depth they had never experienced before. When their bodies ached with pain from beatings, and from the application of electrical current, and from being contorted for hours in positions of excruciating pain, they learned that the light of truth inside themselves, to which they were trying to be faithful, cannot properly be said to be part of themselves.

Their initial view was that they were being faithful to themselves, clinging to their own minds and wills. When the pain became intense enough, however, they realized that they were not really suffering for themselves. If that were so, why not just surrender and make the pain go away? Why not be pragmatic?

Rather, it seemed certain that in being faithful to the truth and calling up stubborn courage, a person was answering to something that did not belong to himself, something that called from outside, something not reducible to him. His mind and will became focused in a direction contrary to everything good for his own bodily comfort. Why was he working against his own self-interest, narrowly considered?

The answer:  Because the light in my mind is something I participate in, it is not reducible to me. This light approves of my liberty and grows brighter with my own acts of responsibility to it. This light seems to be what people mean when they speak of God. From it, strength emanates, and with it one feels better and truer than with anything else in the world. And even more comforted, despite the wracking pain and weariness. There is nothing arcane in this. Simple people have often seen it more clearly than sophisticates.

In the act of fidelity to the light—the resolve not to be willingly complicit in any lie—a man becomes aware of a dimension of his being never before glimpsed with such clarity. He develops a powerful personal dignity. And this cannot be taken away from him without his consent. Later he may weaken and give in. But he does not have to fight later, only now. He needs only to concentrate during this staccato second, one second at a time, on the light within.