The Odyssey of Michael Novak:
Walsh, Joseph
THE ODYSSEY OF MICHAEL NOVAK Making the...
...Our system is also marked by a high degree of upward available, has much more to say about the meaning of the and downward mobility, and although there are some "reLattimer massacre than Novak allows, as it does of roughly maining pockets" of the needy, still in the "lottery of life" contemporary events in Ludlow, Colorado...
...ing the deep, lived experience of the capitalist and democratic Fundamental shifts are taking place in the way Americans American people against those who would guide American will use the globe we inhabit with the so-called teeming social policy according to abstract norms of progress, equality, masses-Iranian, Mexican, Chinese- whom we once ignored or human betterment...
...that tures to serve as guides to national identity and correct moral regulation and bureaucratization in some form may become as action...
...Novak's concern...
...He reserves his interpretation for a brief chronicled in two recent works, An American Vision and epilogue, artfully allowing the story to tell itself and powerThe Guns of Lattimer...
...by "respectable" English-speaking citizens who were subsequently exonerated by judge 7 5, and jury of similar background...
...moral synthesis of...
...The have looked at Kool-Aid (much cheaper) or perfume (many business class, "which traditionally abhors conflict" and has times as expensive) just as well...
...It contains no cials produced by ad-agency "swingers" glorify instant criterion for judging the emphasis to be placed on the various gratification...
...Only then, however, will he be able to illumidebate...
...brutal labor massacres--provide an occasion for exploring the There are some minor flaws in the story-telling, notably the inner logic in the work of this theologian-philosopher, political attempt to personalize the story by interjecting the romances of activist and social critic...
...and manipulated ness class" should respond in kind, exposing the moral weakthe prosecutor's indictment so that no responsible jury, what- ness implied in the comfortable life style of the activists, ever its ethnic makeup, could hold a whole posse responsible stressing the economic costs involved in the policies they for the murder of any given victim...
...The issues he raises are indeed momentous...
...In other instances these cries are likely to vs...
...The value of his social ethic ever the future, it is clear that the wishes and needs of others lies in correcting the excesses of American liberalism-its will structure everyone's behavior more than ever...
...Its purpose is not to educate and the 1935 Ford attack on strikers at the Dearborn overpass...
...Is it beleaguered leaders, Vision might not merit careful scrutiny only a piece of political pamphleteering...
...paid for their legal defense...
...danger of being overregulated...
...Just as "left-wing" organizations, "public-interest The recent defeat of the new labor relations act indicates groups" and "activists" have used the media to bypass the that the struggle continues...
...citizens on the issues...
...Certainly were it not for the importance of the issues it raises and for the Novak's forays into price economics and American economic illustration it provides of Novak's difficulty in establishing history cannot be taken seriously...
...As Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr...
...THE ODYSSEY OF MICHAEL NOVAK Making the case for capitalism particular it is the story of the killing and wounding in 1897 of 68 peaceful demonstrators in the village of Lattimer Mines near Hazleton, Pa...
...The coal-mine operators Jersey...
...Readers of Novak's two published early novels longer take him seriously precisely because they discern no will recognize the awkwardness here...
...In documentation...
...action, flamboyant visual effects and other production values "Social theory that is merely capitalist or merely socialist is that had immigrated to America primarily from the German tired," says Novak...
...a set of traditional moral American values that he sees the It is at this point, however, that the inadequacies of Novak's business class itself inadvertently undermining...
...His lyrical analysis of American popular culture, institutions-that which in the course of one year arrange Joy of Sport, and of presidential politics, Choosing Our King, significant tax-breaks for themselves, keep their martinis' tax both pointed towards the unconscious ritualistic and symbolic deductible and their cotton mills unhealthy-are not in much elements in American life...
...Meanwhile it will appear to many that corporate and idealists...
...Novak, at least in Vision, shows no taste for reflect- Museum of Modem Art, represents the very best in American ing on such aspects of "times of turmoil...
...It symposium on whether socialism or only capitalism is compat- relies upon heavy shadows, manipulated lighting, baroque ible with democracy Novak took a more thoughtful stand...
...Where we expect much clearer about the standards he uses to separate good from at least some attempt to formulate a standard for distinguishing bad in the "war of ideas" and to judge whether a society has which of the radical ideas, not to speak of the counter-attacks, moved "too far" in one direction or another...
...The socialist alternative, whatethnicity becomes clear when we turn to An American ever its theoretical attractions, has proven itself unworkable Vision (American Enterprise Institute, $2.75...
...morality is central rather than peripheral to the capitalist The American economic system provides economic security dynamic...
...into a compelling nightmare...
...implicitly, limits on the activity of corporate power as well...
...22 June 1979: 367 I N SPITE OF distortions like these, An American Vision is not has swung too far in a regulatory direction, might need to without some critical and ethical perspective...
...The time has come for him to be But Novak now makes a surprising move...
...it opens up tion, infiltration and media propaganda at every step of the arguments and debates...
...Others, like Andrew Greeley, Peter Berger and Richard I suspect that the film which made the development of this Neuhaus, who share Novak's distaste for moralistic activists new style possible is the one that is now usually acknowledged have begun to formulate a social ethics that also attempts to to be the American classic, Citizen Kane, which was made at "get beyond" capitalism and socialism...
...involve- cluding some within the business community) fought to make ment in the Vietnam war and his celebration of ethnicity vs it that way by dint of unrelenting pressure and bitter struggle...
...In a recent Commentary style is a naturalized version of German Expressionism...
...But instead of creating the world of thinking feels like a str...Ljacket...
...One is tempted to ask how many gallons of tural values are dependent on capitalism-is being assaulted ginger ale one needs to commute to work or, for that matter, to by a new class of adversary intellectuals...
...In times of turmoil," radical attacks on the prevail- binds capitalists as well as their critics...
...East-European ethnic-Catholic experience, his Lonergan- Novak's brief closing commentary is far less satisfactory, trained intelligence, .and political engagement...
...Strikingly different in content and tone, fully communicating the dignity of the miners and their these two publications-the former a paean to American families in the face of degrading conditions and the economic, capitalism...
...would undermine the economic basis of our political values: "strong central planning, backed up by agencies of enforceWHY Novak should divert attention from economics to ment cannot be democratic...
...A gallon of milk costs $1.49...
...on wealthy nations and on the wealthy within nations to keep On the surface, at least, Novak's philosophy appears com- what they have will increase...
...But whatproposals for substantial change...
...that the sky may indeed be a limit...
...Their ideas shaping up in American culture...
...At the least Novak cerns as their vehicle to power while ignoring the real world of ought to show himself aware of that possibility and even more costs and constraints that the businessman and the average to articulate the basis on which he judges "too far" or "not worker inhabit...
...Here Novak appears to be fantasy and mythology that it had in Germany, this style was reaching beyoind polemics for a critical perspective on both here used to transform the objective world of everyday reality the business class and its various adversaries...
...is jobs and overwhelm their cultural mores and folkways...
...Even the same game of political manipulation...
...in American intellectual life...
...Nonetheless it is typical of the Screen rhetorical excess that abounds in Vision and in some of his recent journalism...
...the latter a documentary account of one of its most political and police powers aligned against them...
...In The Experience of Nothingness (1970) Novak laid down the basis of his ethics when, interpreting Aristotle, he urged THE INADEQUACY of Novak's social ethic as a guide to each person "to invent his own identity" by discerning from political policy becomes even more apparent when one his "impulses, pleasures, pains, instincts, reactions" the judges it in the light of broader global and environmental "hidden, inner springs of his own spontaneities...
...Just as it previously hired climate of ideas...
...Others continue to hope that Novak's early promise terstate highways and whose citizens are as secure, or insecmight yet mature into ann integrated...
...Wyoming...
...reminds us in economists, psychologists and artists to sell its products, it The Age of Jackson American history has always been characmust now subsidize its own think-tanks and enlist on-leave terized by the struggle of democracy to limit the power of the academics and unemployed Ph.D's in a "war of ideas" to tell business class...
...they believe him vey the victims' world, generally forgotten today even in those guided only byy his impulses or by a need for newer and larger same coal fields whose slag heaps are criss-crossed by inaudiences...
...The "activists" have then it was the vast growth of the American economic pie, wrapped themselves in a mantle of smug righteousness on fueled by the dominant position of America in the world issues like pollution, health and safety...
...His defense of business interests against the new plaints about bureaucratic insensitivity towards their special adversarial class, he argues, is not a matter of conservativism needs and problems...
...There may be some proverbial, intuitive, mythic analysis has been the myths, folkways and rituals of American awareness underlying his judgment which he has yet to make culture too long passed over by intellectualist social planners clear...
...If the assertion of market-place freedom against facturers of musk oil and presto cookers will think about this government planners and watchdogs is a part of the American interpretation of their best, interests...
...Furthermoralism and its self-righteousness, its tendency to run more, with the environmentally-induced shrinking of the ecoroughshod over the sometimes inchoate responses of those nomic pie-domestically and internationally-the pressures whom it sees as clients, not equals...
...Novak's passionate opposition to U.S...
...No doubt the triggers were advocate, and, in general, extolling the cultural and humanispulled at Lattimer by people inflamed by ethnic antagonism...
...Here he de- the eventual assimilation of the immigrants...
...The national consensus Novak democratic process, so too the business class must now learn refers to existed if at all only in the 1950s and early '60s...
...Here he interprets the massacre and its aftermath ought to look closely at the latest stage in his odyssey-his almost solely in ethnic or racial terms: English-speaking citiemergence as champion of the moral superiority of American zens conditioned by fear and cultural distance to regard immicapitalism...
...difficult to find a gallon of anything in a supermarket that costs Here Novak writes a kind of contemporary morality play in as little as a gallon of gas...
...his ure, as the American working class generally...
...The connecting thread of Novak's social enough...
...That may be the case...
...And the business class has always fought back its story to the public...
...There are times in An American Vision when Novak seems Taking their work in general these theorists all mistakenly to recognize that the conflict he is describing between the imply that transcendence-starved, utopian dreamers create business and adversarial classes is not just a matter of "ins" "big" government, whereas they would do well to give more and "outs" in the game of American politics, but of long- attention to the needs of corporate capital for transportation, range, philosophic importance...
...Now "the busi- business-labor negotiations more amicable...
...THERE is no doubt in my mind that Novak is carried away here and does not mean to advocate indoctrination by the business class uncritically...
...Forming a committee" is our favorite national pastime...
...A merely socialist or capitalist way of films of the twenties...
...In An American Vision Novak sees himself articulat- omnipresent on spaceship earth as the oxygen we all inhale...
...Instead he simply movies...
...and bought Common weal: 366 them their guns...
...But this is a minor connection between his earlier social, political and religious blemish which does not interfere with Novak's ability to concriticism and his recent rightward turn...
...The shape of these relations is unclear, and no The virtue of Vision lies in its insistence that American's existing ideology -liberalism, conservativisma, socialism, critics take greater account of the nation's strengths in devising radical democracy-has a monopoly on solutions...
...These films have the Fortunately there is no reason to assume that this partisan tightest plots, the neatest twists, the snappiest dialogue and the pamphleteering is Novak's best or final word on the conflict of snazziest style of any that were made in Hollywood...
...liberalism: at some future time the pendulum, which today signal the first painful contractions of the economic-pie and Commonweal: 368 corporate determination to lose no part of it to the less well off People: The Role of Mediating Structures in Public Policy, here or anywhere...
...More important is the experience, so also are the anti-corporate impulses within possibility, which Novak ignores, that this assault on stable trade unionism, populism, Progressivism and the New Deal...
...Enjoying ready transport goods like milk and soft drinks to the supermarket...
...Sometimes corporate cries for patible with the traditional economic goals of American deregulation and increased freedom will be legitimate comliberalism...
...Education is too diffuse and un- The business class fought unionization with guns, intimidaspecific...
...Novak now perceives these same people, or at least ity of a technological society to regain the offensive in their their younger cousins, using environmental and safety con- continuing struggle for increased freedom...
...pricing, for instance, he urges us to remember that "it is An American Vision tells a very different story from Lattimer...
...The drive of the economically privileged to maintain their Fraternal rather than paternal exercises of authority are characwealth and power, capitalizing on ethnic antagonism where teristic...
...depended paid them to crush the miners' new-found strength...
...One hundred of Hazelton's business and professional men did not band together as a sheriffs posse out of JOSEPH L. WALSH reaches philosophy at Stockton State College in New race hatted or on their own initiative...
...Novak is quite explicit about what he as violently as it has needed to-witness Lattimer, Ludlow, means by the "war of ideas...
...In access to the media, these intellectuals seek to chain the hands fact, the whole exercise is naive and irrelevant-Novak could of "our system" with excessive rules and regulations...
...At the very least, Novak and the neoconser- they all advocate decentralized societies that limit the function vatives with whom he is presently aligned ought to recognize of central governmental authority while imposing, at least the difference...
...But the citizen-deputies were in place not as a chorus in an Contrary to its critics' assertions, our system is not primarily American-ethnic Greek tragedy as Novak suggests, but be- characterized by selfishness and a competitive "rat race...
...Samuel Huntington and Zbigniew Brezinski, neoconservaBOO HOO FOR HOLLYWOOD tives in the Carter administration who were formerly affilaited with the corporate financed Trilateral Commission, have both STUDIO STUDIES, PART TWO hinted that less rather than more democracy might be ne,cessry to insure social stability in the years ahead...
...It differs from catechetical instruction...
...intended as a summary of the moral value of American capitalism and as a plan of counter-attack for its supposedly WHAT ARE WE to make of this tale of capitalism's woes...
...ideas...
...In defending oil company himself a a commentator of substance on American politics...
...grants as dangerous foreigners threatening to take away their The Guns of Lattimer (Basic Books, $10.95, 276 pp...
...Both groups however...
...previously been able to "concentrate its efforts rather nar- Nor can one seriously contend that the American business rowly on its own products and their benefits to consumers" class has traditionally abhorred conflict and contented itself because it commanded broad public support, can no longer sit with making good products while supported by a friendly back in gentlemanly fashion...
...a fictionalized character who resembles Novak's Slovak There are many former admirers of Michael Novak who no grandfather...
...I'm not talking only about Kane's stylistic ger Than Necessary and in Berger and Neuhaus's To Empower innovations, though they are of course crucial and contributed 22 June 1979: 369...
...Now that is a radical idea...
...Novak posits swing back...
...tic achievements of democratic capitalism...
...today to some organized workers not because it functions, Novak in fact appears to be less interested in the merits of lottery-like, according to imaginary rules of fair play, but the business case than he is continuing his attack on moralistic because anti-corporate unions and moralistic intellectuals (inintellectuals...
...Our cause the economic power on which their comfort and status culture nourished teamwork and associational activity...
...The films that seem so strong now are the ones we declares himself a combatant on the corporate side of "the war might least expect to: the low-budget thrillers, private-eye of ideas" and ignores any responsibility for formulating stand- films and psycho-dramas, those routine studio products of the ards that might apply to all...
...It consists neither in indoctrination way, quite consciously at war with a large part of the climate of nor in the transmission of propaganda...
...Montana and elsewhere (the grand- Admittedly the marketplace sometimes produces "serious infather of former Governor Scranton of Pennsylvania led a equalities" but correcting these with "central planning" similiar posse in Scranton in 1877...
...Nonetheless, they need to be rethought because of changes in the practical are on the right track in seeking to formulate a social norm that world...
...One wonders what conglomerate manu- its history...
...level of ethical judgment...
...To do so he may are legitimate and by what criteria, at precisely this point in his have to return to perennial questions about proper social ends, discussion we get exhortations about the value of propaganda, individual claims and responsibilities, and active participation over the slower, clumsier methods of education, argument and in public life...
...do such people really work for the capitalist or components of a people's experience at any given juncture of the adversarial class...
...There is a still largely inchoate, through growing, social ethic is essentially this personal ethic writ large-the awareness in the American psyche that the cornucopia, like the evocation of the "hidden, inner springs" of peoples and cul- frontier, is closing...
...VioNovak at what he has come to do best: articulating the experi- lent confrontation was perhaps inevitable, if not necessary, ence and aspirations of 'segments of American society not Novak suggests, in order to exorcise these fears and allow for adequately noticed...
...everyone is equal" except in "good luck and bad luck...
...It may "brightest and best," who, in Novak's view, pursued their also be the case, however, that corporate forces are simply elitist values at the expense of others' (Vietnamese and ethnic) using the current anxiety generated by the increasing complexculture...
...In each generation," Novak information, capital accumulation and secure overseas insays, the "fundamental ideas and symbols of a civilization vestments as the more fundamental causes...
...J Novak tells the story in a JOSEPH L. WALSH straightforward, narrative-documentary fashion, relying on contemporary newspaper acTHE IRREPRESSIBLE Michael Novak continues his odyssey counts and some subsequent historical reconstruction for detail through America's social institutions, an odyssey and verisimilitude...
...day which the French call le film noir...
...In Greeley's No Big- RKO in 1941...
...or spurned...
...Homestead, Pennsylvania...
...nate, and not just be carried along by, the turbulence he correctly perceives...
...Yet it is quite in keeping with what one would N MY LAST column I was explaining why I thought some of expect in a contracting world economy where it has been the filmmaking done at RKO in the decade after World precisely democratic expectations that have limited corporate War II, and seen again this spring in a retrospective at the freedom...
...hired them in order to break an effective strike...
...TV commer- social ethic as a political norm become apparent...
...they state issues with economy, the rebuilding of Europe and Japan and the artifidramatic appeal to the news media and have played upon the cially low price of imported oil and gasoline, that made deep moral concern of the American people...
...which "our system"-whose democratic political and cul- ginger ale $1.98...
...picts the struggle of immigrant Slavic and Italian coal miners An interpretation of this kind is belied by Novak's own during the 1890's for a modicum of economic justice...
...liberal homogenization" in The Rise of the Unmeltable Novak tells us that now the pendulum has swung "too far" Ethnics always have as their prime targets America's in the anti-corporate direction...
...If Novak is going to ing tradition may be launched, sometimes for good, some- deal with the large issues of social change addressed in Vision times for ill, he says, and "such attacks and counter-attacks he has to raise his powerful intuitive gifts to some comparable constitute `the war of ideas...
...A brief work, and undesirable in practice...
Vol. 106 • June 1979 • No. 12
