Business as a Calling
Novak, Michael
Business as a Calling RELIGION AT WHOLESALE PRICES Having already christened American capitalism in his previous books, Novak celebrates the wizards of postindustri-al affluence-CEO's,...
...Wealth," Ruskin declared, "is the possession of the valuable by the vali-ant...
...To the contrary, Michael Novak as-serts in his new book that capitalism is heroic by its very nature...
...But that ole-time re-ligion doesn't sell beer, cars, or cruise vacations...
...Or take "creativity," another key-word...
...But in doing so he flouted every principle of fair dealing and philanthropy he had ever espoused, and these, Novak argues, constitute the real core of business life...
...Creativity" has become, not the widespread exercise of craft, but an ad-vertising charm used both to grace such "innovations" as turbo-charged tie racks or to announce "revolutions" in coffee-drinking...
...But Novak's hosannas to "creativity" drown out the noisy historical strug-gles of ordinary people against the ex-propriation of their knowledge and skill...
...The testimonies of workers expose the corporate credos cited by Novak for the rhetorical smoke they usually are...
...Most Ameri-cans who "work in business" are not the shiny, happy people of Novakland...
...It is about a creative form of community...
...In both cases, press releases and generous checks papered over business as usual in the underdeveloped world...
...When prop-erly pursued as a "calling," business opens the gates of heaven to the en-trepreneur and may just slide the camel through the needle's eye...
...The first-a banal but still worthwhile point-is that the "realism" of business is that of the ledger book...
...And for good reason: personal contact might acquaint us with some of the appalling practices that sustain our prosperity...
...Let's pray that people don't become the creepily devoted worker-bees idealized in "total quality man-agement" or the folklore of Wal-Mart...
...Content to wander in this fog, Novak never interrogates the credos, never ventures outside the executive suite, and thus seems to parrot the ideological lexicon of corporate culture...
...In fact, Novak writes, businesspeople "remain very close to other ordinary Americans...
...And by the way, unionized workers are slightly more religious than business elites, even by Novak's dubi-ous standards: look carefully at the chart on page 44...
...Eugene McCarraher The market "may have its martyrdoms as well as the pulpit, and trade its hero-isms as well as war," John Ruskin wrote well over a century ago in Unto This Last...
...The true nihilists of our time are not "new class" mandarins but cor-porate chieftains who beckon us (as their advertising slogans suggest) to break the rules, find your own road, and enjoy a life without limits where you'll be your own rock and know no bound-aries...
...The Novakian capitalist is a bold, generous, even saintly pioneer who lives out an "inner vision" and a "sharing of values" with workers, cus-tomers, colleagues, and "the world in the largest possible definition...
...Capitalism, in Ruskin's view, guar-anteed little more than the possession of material abundance by the few...
...Novak can wag his finger all he wants at advertisers who wage "assaults on traditional values...
...Third, capitalism de-pends crucially on the stimulation and commodification of desire and fantasy...
...By casting the firm as a "community," for instance, Novak artfully obscures the power re-lations inevitably at work...
...Fired by a love of work, determined to improve the world, and emboldened to risk, the businessperson builds com-munity, unlocks creativity, and exhibits a "practical realism" that almost in-variably respects the inscrutable ways of Providence...
...Second, the "leftish sentiments" of many intellectuals such as Paul Tillich or R. H. Tawney were earned, not at wine and cheese parties, but in direct experience of working-class poverty and imperial-ist oppression...
...The entrepreneur answers a call to uplift the poor, promote human rights, foster civic virtue, and endow cul-tural institutions...
...Yet Novak remains so mesmerized by the achievements and glitter of capital-ism that he misses its harsher contra-dictions and mundane foundations...
...Novak asserts that business involves much more than the accumulation of wealth...
...Businesspeople, Novak contends, are among the most religious elites in America, along with athletes and generals...
...Indeed, Novak proudly aligns his book on a shelf of con-temporary success literature that con-tains The Reflective Executive and The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People...
...Yet Ruskin went on to argue that, by making profit the over-riding principle of enterprise, capitalism made martyrdom and heroism impos-sible...
...Yes, Novak concedes, Carnegie secretly supported the brutal suppression of the Homestead strike in 1892...
...Always a romantic, Novak once again demonstrates that his romanticism in-spires both his virtues and his faults...
...Anyone acquainted with the his-tory of labor and technology knows that capitalists (like Novak's hero, Carnegie) wrested the power to design and pro-duce goods and services away from ar-tisans and workers and gave it to a small class of professional, technical, and managerial elites...
...Citing Carnegie's auto-biography and his essay on "Wealth," Novak lauds both the steel baron's lu-crative creation of new technologies and enterprises and his "giving it all away" in support of libraries, schools, music halls, and parks...
...As Novak himself admits, Carnegie fled to Scotland rather than watch the Pennsylvania state militia render Homestead safe for philan-thropy...
...Taking issue both with his usual sus-pects in the "new class" of academics, journalists, and liberal do-gooders, and with many entrepreneurial partisans, Work and the Examined Life Michael Novak The Free Press, $22,50,246 pp...
...Kathy Lee Gifford shed many an outraged tear about Guatemalan sweatshops...
...Business as a Calling RELIGION AT WHOLESALE PRICES Having already christened American capitalism in his previous books, Novak celebrates the wizards of postindustri-al affluence-CEO's, chairpersons of the board, managers, and technicians, all of them daring and "creative"-in chap-ters on business morality, virtue, "cor-porate responsibility," and philanthropy...
...they sit in cubicles, stand at assembly lines, sweat in kitchens, scour toilets, or wait on tables for the low wages and pre-carious benefits provided by the "cre-ative" types...
...Indeed, Novak recog-nizes the sacramental character of material reality-a conviction that he rightly argues should inform any Christian approach to the problems of work, technology, and economics...
...Small enough to be easily portable in briefcases, Business as a Calling is a bre-viary for the information age, complete with anecdotes, adages, success stories, and corporate credos...
...Commerce does not require that we have physical or emotional contact with all with whom we do business," he de-clares...
...Indeed, Scott Adams's Dilbert cartoons convey the feel of con-temporary work life much more reliably than Novak's virtually company-store populism...
...Reflecting on the union of goodness and beauty called kalos, he reminds us that virtue can be aesthetically as well as spir-itually graceful...
...Andrew Carnegie serves as Novak's model capitalist...
...True, inventors and craftsmen often don't possess the organizational skills needed for mar-keting goods in a modern economy...
...Capitalism is not solely about the individual...
...Michael Eisner has yet to acknowledge the conditions of Hondur-an children "creating" Disney prod-ucts...
...And as for the necessity of "practical realism," there are three points worth making...
Vol. 124 • February 1997 • No. 4
