The Business of America
Pearson, George H.
"novel" appeared, Israel Aksenfield's Dos Shtern-tichel (The Kerchief) was enthralling "Jewish readers" in the shtetlach of East Europe and wherever else Yiddish was spoken and read. And three: Jews...
...I refer to John Kenneth Galbraith's new book, Assault on Free Enterprise (New York Times Book Review, September 15, 1974...
...The Webbs knew that the way to influence politicians was indirectly...
...It's the author's tone and temper than needs final elucidation: "From Solomon Maimon to Norman Podhoretz, from Rahel Varnhagen to Cynthia Ozick, from Marx and Lassalle to Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel, from Herzl to Freud to Harold Laski and Lionel Trilling, from Moses Mendelssohn to J. Robert Oppenheimer [may the Lord have mercy on us, the Rosenbergs are missing!] and Ayn Rand, Gertrude Stein, and Reich I and II (Wilhelm and Charles)"—but blessedly not Reich III—"one dominating structure of an identical predicament and a shared fate imposes itself upon the consciousness and behavior of the Jewish intellectual in Galut...
...In the words of one critic of this work, "The strongest impression left by Beatrice Webb's memoirs is that she and her husband owed the extent of their influence largely to, among other things, fully understanding and knowing how to make use of, the decisive position which the intellectuals occupy in shaping public opinion...
...I am saying that without the necessary effort at the intellectual level, nothing else will succeed...
...Hayek calls theintellectuals...
...My advice to the business community can be summarized as follows: If you are interested in an ultimate victory you would be well advised to make an all-out effort to determine what influences and directs the course of events...
...Preservation, in this case, means the preservation of an interventionist system...
...They set out not "to organize the unthinking person into a socialist society" but "to make the thinking people socialistic...
...26 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 197...
...Is that a nice way for a college boy to write...
...We were concerned about our money being lost in a sea of government funds and the more substantial disbursements of the much larger foundations...
...Nor did we feel we could change the world by informing or trying to persuade great numbers of people...
...For the purpose of argument, let me assume that the goal of most businessmen is a free enterprise society, although I will not assume that all businessmen will agree on what a free enterprise society really is...
...Now Gans purports to be a "socialist, egalitarian sociologist," but there is something curious about the cultural pluralism which he professes to advocate...
...As Hayek said, "Unless we can make the philosophical foundation of a free society once more a living issue, and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds, the prospects of freedom are indeed dark...
...My emphasis) In sum, what Cuddihy is telling us in his elaborate and often incoherent text, is that the Jew—in his "struggle with modernity"—is unable to cope with the civility society demands as a price for admission...
...This seems to me to be just the reverse of what it ought to be...
...Unfortunately, the lessons of the problematic encounter with modernism in the arts seem to have been as quickly forgotten as those learned from the equally troublesome encounter with Marxism...
...Although his argument for the imminence of such a revival is unpersuasive, Gans does raise the central cultural question of modernity: the problem of the compatibility of liberal democracy and elite culture...
...They examine this [Western] world in dismay, with wonder, anger, and punitive objectivity...
...And no matter how much he tries, no matter what he believes, thinks, says—be he Liberal or Conservative, Rightist or Leftist—he will never grasp the Protestant Etiquette even if he is prepared to practice the Protestant Ethic: he will never be Patriot but Pariah...
...Why then can't we keep them from beingimplemented or get rid of them once they have been implemented...
...But, ironically, it is my observation that it is easier to raise money for political The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1975 25 candidates than it is to raise money for public policy issues, and it is still more difficult to raise money for fundamental research and writing of the kind engaged in by the Webbs—the kind that ultimately determines the prevailing ideology...
...I am not conservative in wanting to preserve what we now have—what we have is government intervention...
...The third possible course was to influence those Professor F.A...
...Most businessmen have a well-thought-out philosophy guiding them in conducting the affairs of their businesses...
...At a time when auteur critics have rediscovered Howard Hawks, an editor of Partisan Review has resurrected the early-works of Dashiell Hammett, and Anna Moffo is packaged as a "superstar...
...It also seems to me to be an inconsistency...
...Anticipating the Tax Reform Act of 1969, we thought it would be frowned upon by the Internal Revenue Service...
...Fewer have been as thorough in conceiving a philosophy on charitable contributions, and this, I think, has serious consequences for businessmen...
...There are those whose feelings about politicians are more adamant than what I've expressed...
...But why do they keep raising their ugly head...
...the fellow travellers of Stalin have long since been succeeded by those of Castro, and then Mao...
...I do not think America is yet prepared for them...
...I'm not saying that efforts at the other levels are not important—they are...
...Cuddihy probably means well...
...Let me try to illustrate this point...
...So we looked for the point of leverage...
...One final remark: England has an honorable place for its eccentrics...
...teachers, preachers, journalists, lecturers, publicists, newswriters and commentators, writers of fiction, cartoonists, artists, and all others who disseminate ideas...
...only additional government intervention would be a socialist imposition on our free enterprise system, or a change from it...
...This wonder, this anger, and the vindictive objectivity of the marginal nonmember are recidivist: they continue unabated into our own times...
...We may dismiss his absurd notion that when the Ostjuden came to New York City they set up a "Lower Side system...
...In 35 years, the New Criticism has long since succumbed to other modes—the New Journalism and the New Sensibility, among others...
...And three: Jews have been reading "fiction" as long as the goyim—probably longer...
...Such a philosophy of "fairness and justice" overrides objections to inadequate programs...
...Was it Mencken who said that changing politicians was analogous to changing madams in a house of ill repute...
...Wage and price controls are known to be unworkable...
...I should like to share some of my thoughts and experiences on this matter in the hopes that they might be helpful...
...But our foundation did not consider that approach as being realistic for our very limited resources...
...So, advocates of the free market tend only to fight grass fires that are constantly around us...
...We must re-establish a free enterprise society in order to have one...
...And intellectual fashions are no less free from faddism than are hemlines...
...When we started we were quite concerned about how to spend those dollars effectively toward our goal...
...The reason is that businessmen and others do not turn their attention to the situation until it is bad...
...This is an intellectual war that takes years to fight...
...Now I suggest that we strive to undermine such false underlying concepts which make victories over specific policy programs temporary or of little significance...
...If I could afford enough time on television and the services of skilled advertising experts, I could probably win any key issue, political or otherwise...
...We did not think that political spending would be the most effective use of our income...
...They are, for the most part, dragged in out of time and place of national origin...
...But meaning well is not enough...
...It had been long suspected that popular and high culture were more continuous than diametrically opposed, but the high-minded contempt of popular culture found in Greenberg's essay now seems to have been replaced by its opposite: a peculiar low-minded indulgence masquerading in academic garb as high-minded seriousness...
...Perhaps the most significant of the changes in intellectual fashion has been Popular Culture and High Culture by Herbert Gans Basic Books $10 in the attitude taken by cultural critics toward popular culture...
...This story of the Webbs provides a unique lesson in the influence which a sound, methodical strategy can achieve...
...Belief that government participation is necessary or helpful and that governments are always beneficial must be challenged...
...There exist hundreds of other such specific interferences in the market that are known to be detrimental...
...That's a system...
...But to give Cuddihy his due, we must let him tell it in his own way...
...So the foundation decided to pursue the point made by Hayek in his booklet The Intellectuals in Socialism, or for those who prefer autobiography to theory, by Beatrice Webb in her book Our Partnership...
...Fashions do change, of course—and with a rapidity that is often the surest clue to their significance and depth...
...They did not try to reform politicians...
...and in favor of a policy of "subcultura...
...Saying it well is...
...Besides, we did not see politicians as setting the prevalent ideology, but rather as reflecting it...
...The best example that comes to mind is the almost total acceptance of egalitarian philosophy...
...He argues against a policy of "cultural mobility" (i.e., against encouraging tastes to rise along with class advance...
...The classical statement of high-culture partisanship was made by Clement Greenberg in his famous essay, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch...
...But what we now have is an interventionist society...
...This is a position that I have come to share with my associates, first at the Koch Foundation and later at the Institute for Humane Studies...
...For some, it is what we now have...
...Our foundation and the Institute adhere to that unglamorous, long-run approach which is essential to return freedom to us...
...Investment in Ideas The Koch Foundation is a small family foundation with an annual disposable income of a few hundred thousand dollars...
...and modernism has long since ceased to be contemporary...
...by George H. Pearson (—The Business of America (This essay has been adapted from a speech given by Mr...
...Herbert Gans, professor of sociology at Columbia and sometime film critic for Social Policy, has written a lengthy and detailed "analysis and evaluation of taste," which, in the name of cultural pluralism, defends popular culture against its high culture critics...
...Hayek contends the prevalent ideology is set by the intellectuals...
...Greenberg argued that the art of Picasso, Joyce, Eliot, and others constituted an elite, advanced culture—made possible by a "superior consciousness of history"—whose very existence was threatened by the presence of mass, popular culture, which represented the dialectical opposite of the avant-garde in the historical movement of culture...
...The irony of writing such a book when the cultural situation of the seventies would seem to demand just the opposite sort of "defense" seems not to have eluded Gans entirely—but he argues that, regardless of the current state of culture, the rise of egalitarianism and the decline in the status of intellectuals might prompt a revival of the kind of critique of popular culture that was common in the fifties...
...Unrecognizable names should not deflect the essence of his message...
...It has been 35 years since the first appearance of Greenberg's article...
...Then, once alarmed, only short-run measures seem appropriate...
...It took years to bring this country around to believing that government could solve problems better than the market, and it will take years to get rid of that destructive notion...
...You may come to 'a different conclusion than I, or interpret your findings differently, but I doubt it...
...Unfortunately, the socialists do not fail to recognize and emphasize what the capitalists do not...
...They looked forward to the day when "hosts of young men, well-trained in Fabian economics and administrative lore would be crawling into the political arena...
...Fortunately, cultural criticism, unlike Art Deco, has not yet become an object of the current wave of nostalgia for the thirties...
...ment through socioeconomic mobility...
...Pearson at the Discussion Club in St...
...Without capturing the intellectual community, efforts such as the one made by M. A. Wright, chairman of Exxon, will be turned against us...
...My idea is that we have tended to accept other notions which cause us to betray ourselves...
...Businessmen realize the principles of leverage and long-term investment in business, but not in ideas...
...But there is no end to the increasing number of new fires that spring up daily...
...That is the Jew's "ordeal...
...Book Review/Robert Asahina Invasion of the Body Snatchers • • The emergence of modernism in the arts stimulated new controversies among cultural critics, and the distinction between "highbrows" and "lowbrows" was transformed from merely a descriptive categorization into the weaponry of cultural polemics...
...Louis...
...So for rational reasons and with proof of bad experience we may want to get rid of a specific program but for the "good of society" or some other fundamentally egalitarian concept we must go along...
Vol. 8 • June 1975 • No. 9
