“Almost everything around us was invented since the patent and copyright laws [were enacted]. Practically all American wealth is built on an invention or discovery. It might be a discovery of a new way of doing things, a new way of analyzing things, or of organizing things. But a lot of them are just different products that didn’t exist before.”
The prolific Christian intellectual Michael Novak, in his interview with Praxis Circle, articulates the pithy insight above about the role intellectual property (IP) rights play in stimulating human flourishing.
In the same video clip, Novak describes the liberties in liberal democracy that unleash human creativity: freedom in moral character, or liberty of soul; political liberty—“free of tyranny and torture;” and economic liberty.
Novak elaborates on economic liberty. This characteristic of the American republic, Novak notes, quickly showed the country that human beings “could create plenty.” The combination of merit-based, democratized IP laws and economic liberty led to a change from wealth based in land to “the wealth of the human mind.”
Common Ground
Some might doubt that the views of a neoconservative Catholic and a conservative, evangelical Protestant align regarding human creativity and IP rights. Considering that Novak went from “a radical left-wing socialist in the 1960s to an architect of [the] neoconservative movement of the 1980s,” as Mark Michalski says in Real Clear Religion, this common ground may seem less remarkable.
Novak’s official biography explains how the liberal who worked for Robert Kennedy and George McGovern came to reject socialism and liberalism, and then worked for President Ronald Reagan, embracing conservatism and free enterprise. I, on the other hand, have always been a conservative Republican. My views on political principles such as property rights stem from the Bible and such thinkers as Francis Schaeffer and William F. Buckley.
Reacquainting myself with Michael Novak’s writings comes after many years working on IP and property rights policies, as well as researching and writing a book about human creativity and ownership from a biblical perspective, and their relation to the American IP system. Admittedly, I hadn’t realized Novak wrote so extensively on invention, creativity, and IP.
In my new book, To Invent Is Divine: Creativity and Ownership, scriptural and theological concepts lay a biblical foundation for the necessity of both creativity and ownership of the fruits of one’s labor if humans are to “create plenty.” Creativity, ownership, human flourishing, and dignity as God’s image bearers constitute common threads in Novak’s and my works. Other fundamental tenets of our views include God’s common grace and humans following the Creator’s example, bringing order and beauty to resources in nature, whether in expressive or inventive creations.
Our common Judeo-Christian worldview leads us to consider God’s truth as true for everyone. That is why every human being and every society possesses the potential to apply laws of nature and put in place human laws that respect and protect essential human rights. That is, inherent human creativity and ownership rights, together, are the means to overcome scarcity and improve the human condition—i.e., flourish as individuals and societies.
Different Frameworks
Novak’s and my treatments of human creativity, ownership, and human flourishing rest on the same biblical principles, though we each have distinct emphases and frameworks. Novak tends to hew closely to the political economy themes at the center of his 1982 blockbuster The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. Those discussions present patents, inventions, and the like in the context of capitalism as it operates in a free democracy.
For example, Novak, in a 1994 speech contrasts the individual inside a corporation in Max Weber’s view with “the distinctive capitalist social invention, the firm held together by voluntary consent and teamwork, and the factor of surprise and novelty introduced by invention, discovery, and the virtue of enterprise.”
Similarly, To Invent Is Divine describes the research and development arrangement at Edison’s Menlo Park laboratories. It comes in the context of discussing God’s common grace and human ingenuity in a biographical sketch of Thomas Edison, citing Edison’s being “credited with ‘the invention of the method of invention.’”
Another example of Novak’s economic liberty theme comes from his contribution, “Invention and discovery generate wealth,” to the 2016 special report produced by the The Washington Times and the Institute for Faith, Work & Economics titled “Faith at Work: Economic Flourishing, Freedom to Create and Innovate.” Novak discusses what makes the “free market” free:
“The free economy” captures only part of the secret—it emphasizes the conditions under which the mind is more easily creative, in the fresh air of freedom. Freedom is a necessary condition, but the dynamic driving cause of new wealth is the initiative, enterprise, creativity, invention—which use the freedom… The spirit of capitalism is far from being entirely materialistic, even miserly. Far from it. This spirit teaches people to turn away from what they now have, to put that at risk, to stop clinging to the safe things of the past, and to set off bravely toward inventing new futures. It is a spirit of risk. It is a spirit of adventure. It is a spirit of creativity.
Both Novak and I refer to Abraham Lincoln’s lecture on discovery and invention for different purposes. In the interview cited earlier, Novak notes how Lincoln placed patents and invention in the development of liberty. My book cites Lincoln’s famous quote—“The patent system… 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”—to show how creativity and ownership mutually reinforce each other and produce human flourishing.
Thus, Novak appreciates creativity and ownership for their roles tied to economic freedom and the flourishing that results. My book emphasizes their enabling us to fulfill divine purposes and calling.
Editor’s Note: Read a review of To Invent Is Devine published by Praxis Circle here.
