A Literary Lion’s Fight for Freedom
By Rod Dreher – Director of Publications, John Templeton Foundation
 |
| Mario Vargas Llosa |
When we think of freedom fighters in our time, the image that comes to mind is often a political, religious, military, or social leader. We would do well to remember that artists such as playwright Václav Havel and novelist Aleksander Solzhenitsyn have been at the forefront of defending liberty against its fiercest enemies in the modern era.
To that list we should add Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, the 2010 Nobel laureate in literature. To be sure, the Nobel committee honored the 74-year-old writer, the most prominent Latin American novelist of his generation, for his profound body of artistic work. Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, later observed that “breaking free... fighting against oppression” is a key theme of Vargas Llosa’s novels. Indeed, many people who may have never read the Nobel laureate’s fiction associate his name with the struggle for the values of classical liberalism—including democracy, free markets, and the rule of law—in a part of the world too long deprived of them.
“Prosperity or egalitarianism—you have to choose,” Vargas Llosa once famously wrote. “I favor freedom. Little wonder, then, that an intellectual of his global standing and convictions would have signed on this past summer as a Templeton Leadership Fellow at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, a Washington-based think tank devoted to promoting the ideals of classical liberalism worldwide.
Vargas Llosa will spend the next two years as a Templeton Leadership Fellow under the Atlas Foundation’s aegis. In that role, the novelist will help bring attention to the often unheralded think tanks who have won the Templeton Freedom Awards, one of a series of annual prizes funded by the John Templeton Foundation and awarded through Atlas to idea-generating institutions working to promote prosperity through advancing economic and political liberty. Explaining his support of Atlas, the late Sir John Templeton said there are plenty of organizations devoted to addressing the effects of poverty, but relatively few working in a forward-thinking way to alleviate the structural causes of poverty by promoting freedom and the rule of law.
In 2009, at a Venezuelan conference sponsored by one of those Atlas-backed think tanks, the Caracas-based free-market advocates CEDICE, Vargas Llosa caused an international row by warning that the country’s socialist dictator Hugo Chavez was in danger of making the country into a totalitarian state. Chavez responded by challenging Vargas Llosa to a debate. The novelist quickly accepted. Chavez abruptly backed down, granting an important moral victory to Venezuela’s beleaguered democratic opposition.
 |
Mario Vargas Llosa and
Atlas president, Alejandro Chafuen. |
Atlas CEO Brad Lips said the impact of Vargas Llosa’s defiance of the dictator has “helped keep alive the resistance” in Venezuela over the past year. The Caracas controversy, he added, is a good example of how having a prominent public figure like Vargas Llosa on board “dramatically increases the publicity and the local credibility of think tanks that do very principled policy research and advocacy in their local markets.”
Atlas president Alejandro Chafuen observed that the late Sir John Templeton not only shared with Vargas Llosa a love of political and economic freedom, but also a sense of hope about possibilities emerging from people of many nations working together for liberty. Chafuen cited Vargas Llosa’s Fundación Internacional para la Libertad as an example of the novelist’s commitment to freedom across and beyond borders. Said Chafuen: “Vargas Llosa sees literature as an essential means to nurture a critical spirit and through his writings, immense talent, and dedication he disseminates the spirit of liberty across the globe.”
“The vision of classical liberalism that Mario Vargas Llosa so eloquently defends was shared by Sir John Templeton,” said Mauro De Lorenzo, vice president of Freedom and Free Enterprise programs at the Foundation. “Sir John believed that the fight against poverty advances mostly rapidly when individuals are free to create and innovate in free competition with one another, without undue government interference.”
What Kind of God Do You Worship?
Is God primarily a Benevolent deity, a comforter whose purpose is to help all of us? Or is he more like an Authoritative figure, one who favors the obedient and punishes the rebellious? Or is he a Critical being, a divine scorekeeper who keeps track of good and evil deeds in this life, and works justice in the next? Is it possible that he’s mostly Distant, a celestial mechanic who set existence in motion, but who doesn’t much involve himself in daily life?
Taken together, these four divine attributes—Benevolent, Authoritative, Critical, and Distant—cover the way most Americans see God. That’s according to Baylor University sociologists Paul Froese and Christopher Bader, whose new book America’s Four Gods: What We Say About God—And What That Says About Us presents survey data and argues that the way one imagines God’s character to be reveals a lot about how one thinks of economics, morals, foreign policy, science, and social issues, among other fundamental aspects of life. America’s Four Gods, which received front-page treatment in the October 7 issue of USA Today, is the fruit of a 2007 Templeton grant for $255,000 to Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion.
“Sir John was convinced that our religious convictions extended far beyond the realm of religion,” said Kimon Sargeant, vice president for human sciences at the Foundation. “The Baylor findings show how deeply religious belief affects all aspects of our worldview—for better and for worse.”
Virtual Prosperity in Kenya
 |
| John Waibochi |
Virtual City, a Kenyan company focusing on using technological solutions to improve small business development, has won the $1 million prize in the Nokia Growth Economy Venture Challenge competition. The contest, sponsored by the global mobile phone giant, required contestants to come up with the best idea for a new mobile product or solution to help people in the developing world. Virtual City’s John Waibochi told Kenya’s The Standard newspaper that his company’s winning idea will help suppliers, merchants and customers use mobile phones to streamline the supply chain.
The million-dollar award from Nokia, presented this past September in London, is intended to be venture capital to help Virtual City translate its idea into reality. It’s not the first time Virtual City has attracted attention and awards for its innovative ideas. In 2007, the company was a winner of the Pioneers of Prosperity Africa Prize, a competition among African entrepreneurs co-sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, among other philanthropies.
