The Experience of Nothingness

Michael Novak's The Experience of Nothingness (NY: Harper Colophon Books, 1971) is another find from the dump to be added to the category of The Best Books Are Thin. By way of introduction I should say that until recently, the significance of Novak's book would have been lost on me. Until I exposed myself to films like What A Way to Go and Endgame, I was blissfully under the influence of the consensus trance. It has been a painful awakening and there is no turning back.

Novak wrote this book in 1970, a fact which astonishes me. Back then I was a student in a suburban high school, and everything I was being taught was designed to strengthen the trance which, for my generation, had been initiated and then reinforced by television. The author so clearly saw through it all. Now, 40 year later, I both recognize the importance of his message and through it understand how insidiously the spell of consensus has twisted the "American Dream" into the nightmare that I see it as today.

Before I begin presenting quotations I would like to mention that The Experience of Nothingness needs to be experienced more than once. I found it useful to read the book through completely, at first ignoring the notes. Then, much like watching a film for the second time with the director's commentary turned on, I marked my place in the notes section to facilitate finding the proper place to clarify and enrich the now familiar text.

The experience of nothingness . . . is a vaccine against the lies upon which every civilization, American civilization in particular, is built. . . no man has a self or an identity; in a society like ours he must constantly be inventing selves. . . even the most solid and powerful social institutions, though they may imprison us, impoverish us, or kill us, are fundamentally mythical structures designed to hold chaos and formlessness at bay. . . The experience . . . dissolves the pragmatic solidarity of the American way of life.

Until recently, I was under the impression that this "American way of life" was as good as it gets, and stood as a shining example of what which every other nation on the planet should strive toward.

Many Americans imagine that the conditions of happiness can be satisfied by a balanced diet, suburban living, social status, and success in one's marriage and work. . . Americans smile and assure each other that they are happy, that it is unpatriotic for an American to be discontent. "AMERICA: LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT!" the bumper stickers say. . . In America things were always looking up. . . It seems indispensable to a technological society like ours to be future oriented, forward-looking, fascinated by hope. The illusion of progress is the prop that takes the place of God; many cling to it. Could Americans endure life without ever new frontiers? Our national psyche is ill at ease whenever progress, our most important product, is not evident.

"Hope" was the slogan of our most recently elected president. Are we still hopeful? And what price have we paid for "Progress"?

"The experience of nothingness" is an experience, not a concept. It can be pointed to, described, built up indirectly, but not defined. . . the primary sense of reality is shaped by parents and neighbors (local customs, raised eyebrows), partly by books ("the liberal tradition"), but mostly by cinema, television and records. . . Those whose sense of the meaningful, the relevant, and the real is not entirely shaped by the new media may feel themselves caught between two barbarisms. . . The laissez-faire attitude of American society in matters of the human spirit represents one of the greatest mass betrayals of responsibility by any civilization in human history. . . The young are forced to live through the problems of technological consciousness, problems created by generations who built a rational, efficient society without calculating in advance its effect upon human beings. The apocalypse may come, not by fire or flood, but by mass insanity.

Assessing the situation today I am horrified by the need to ask: what if the effects upon human beings were calculated in advance? I will stop for now and later take up in Part 2. the concept of European nihilism and what Novak describes as the myths of the university.