To the Editor:

As a student of American culture and personality, and of the history of ethnic groups in American life, I am extremely impressed by the astuteness and sensitivity of Michael Novak’s observations on the nature of American national character [“Needing Niebuhr Again,” September 1972]. Mr. Novak’s ready handling of the cultural and historical panorama of American life attests to the fact that no single discipline (mine is psychoanalytic anthropology) possesses special wisdom or territorial rights in the understanding of any problem. Mr. Novak’s particular position on the periphery has allowed him to perceive, and criticize, what most take for granted, let alone disparage. . . .

Mr. Novak speaks as a convert to ethnicity, and as in all conversions, he expends great energy repudiating one past in favor of another. Having been ashamed of his Slovak-ness, he makes a defiant about-face, proclaims the fierce pride of ethnicity . . . and proceeds to denude, undress, and demythologize America with a vengeance. His odyssey of writing thus comes to resemble closely that of the newly Judaized Herbert Gold or the newly black LeRoi Jones. Nothing too good can be said of the newly invented past. . . . Having reconstituted a culture for himself, Mr. Novak now formulates and discovers a theology and a polity: the former, a Weltanschauung to justify the particulars; the latter, a guide to action based on the new ideology. Hence Reinhold Niebuhr, theologian and social philosopher. Is it mere coincidence that the vicissitudes and choices of Niebuhr’s life are largely replicated by those of his disciple, Michael Novak? One could readily read Mr. Novak’s present essay and substitute his name for Niebuhr’s.

I have followed Mr. Novak’s writings from the early days of radical politics of the 1960′s through his disillusion with the American Dream and his emergence as eloquent spokesman for ethnicity. He ends his own essay with a quote from Niebuhr that is surely the moral of his story: “ ‘. . . To such faith the generations are bound to return after they have pursued the mirages in the desert to which they are tempted from time to time by the illusions of particular eras.’” Significantly, to Niebuhr in his last years “such faith” was far closer to traditional Judaism and Catholicism than to Protestantism; surely such resonance with Niebuhr is not unrelated to Mr. Novak’s return to the dark and mystical warmth and security of Catholic tradition, over against Protestant individualism and aridity. . . . Mr. Novak’s final solution is a pragmatic, naive separatism. “In domestic politics, Niebuhr is correct in his advice that we ask of any group: What’s in it for you? He is also correct in his estimation that justice is approximated not through a ‘conscience constituency’ but through restraints upon the interests of each and every constituency.” . . .

If Mr. Novak has repudiated “the idea of a common culture”—if I may borrow a phrase from Norman Podhoretz—and substituted a restrained Hobbesian war of all against all, he has joined in the ever-increasing ranks of those who must resort to denial and projection in order to salvage a self-esteem threatened by a past they had abandoned, a present that would neither accept them nor which they in good conscience could accept, and a future that, despite its seeming openness, was foreclosed by a conspiracy of guilt and the danger of success. It is out of these depths that Mr. Novak so hauntingly writes. . . .

Howard F. Stein
Meharry Medical College
Nashville, Tennessee

_____________

Michael Novak writes:

It is fascinating to read about oneself, as understood from afar, especially since Howard F. Stein is so plainly well-intentioned.

There are, properly, quite a few “ifs” in his analysis. Alter one, or two, or three of them, and the tower of cards collapses.

1. I have not abandoned the notion of a “common culture.” But one of the best ways to strengthen the common culture is to see with full clarity the exact location of interests and powers within it. It is good for each group to be generous, forgiving, compassionate, disinclined to quibble, willing to go the extra mile. But it is in everybody’s common interest that such generosity be done in full and exact consciousness, against which there is no later appeal.
2. I do not believe that a Hobbesian battle between interests and powers is either a good description of the American past or a good prescription for the American future.
3. From 1963 to 1965, I probably read more of Reinhold Niebuhr’s writings—including every magazine article available at Harvard and Union libraries—than anyone alive. I intended then to write a book about him. That interest is not recent.
4. I did not write The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics out of inner need but out of reluctant conviction that it needed doing—and that, perhaps, just because I didn’t need to do it, I was a good person to take it on.
5. In my own eyes, there has been a remarkable consistency and secure underpinning in all my work, including the fiction. Each year’s activities have brought out new “sides” of my assault upon my ultimate ambitions. I have never wanted to reject any of my past, near or far, but to keep in contact with it. Each stage of it suddenly becomes recoverable in new and surprising ways from new vantage points.
6. The political solution I propose is not separatism, but unity based as much on the values, aspirations, and needs of lower-middle-class whites as on those of the poor, the black, and the young.

_____________