Throughout the twentieth century it's been pretty
easy to distinguish between the bourgeois world of
capitalism and the bohemian counterculture. The
bourgeoisie were the square, practical ones. They
defended tradition and middle-class morality. They
worked for corporations, lived in suburbs, and
went to church. Meanwhile, the bohemians were the
free spirits who flouted convention. They were
the artists and the intellectuals ó the hippies
and the Beats. In the old schema the bohemians
championed the values of the radical 1960s and the
bourgeois were the enterprising yuppies of the
1980s.
But I returned to an America in which the bohemian
and the bourgeois were all mixed up. It was
now impossible to tell an espresso-sipping artist
from a cappuccino-gulping banker. And this wasn't
just a matter of fashion accessories. I found that
if you investigated people's attitudes toward sex,
morality, leisure time, and work, it was getting
harder and harder to separate the antiestablishment
renegade from the pro-establishment company man.
Most people, at least among the
college-educated set, seemed to have rebel attitudes
and social-climbing attitudes all scrambled
together. Defying expectations and maybe logic,
people seemed to have combined the
countercultural sixties and the achieving eighties
into one social ethos.
-David
Brooks, Introduction to Bobos in Paradise
Such was the American situation as David Brooks found it when he returned after four and a half years abroad. In Bobos in America, he does an excellent job of demonstrating that this weird convergence of bohemian and bourgeois has occurred among America's elites, and he offers any number of really witty, acerbic observations about the culture that the Bobos have created for themselves. He does less well in assessing what the potential effects of this culture on the nation might be. In fact, as a Bobo himself, he seems relatively unconcerned about, if not oblivious to, the very real societal dangers of the Bobo ethos :
These Bobos define our age. They are the new establishment.
Their hybrid culture is the atmosphere
we all breathe. Their status codes now govern social
life. Their moral codes give structure to our
personal lives. When I use the word establishment,
it sounds sinister and elitist. Let me say first, I'm
a member of this class, as, I suspect, are most
readers of this book. We're not so bad. All societies
have elites, and our educated elite is a lot more
enlightened than some of the older elites, which were
based on blood or wealth or military valor. Wherever
we educated elites settle, we make life more
interesting, diverse, and edifying.
There is simply no more significant human undertaking than the replacement of a moral code. Western morality is the product of thousands of years of thought and experimentation. The idea that the Bobo elite has replaced this traditional morality and that this revolution can be blithely characterized as "not so bad" is sort of irresponsible. It badly weakens an otherwise interesting book.
To begin with, Brooks assesses the WASP establishment of the 1950's. Despite some characteristics which are now unacceptable--exclusivity, anti-intellectualism, male dominance, alcoholism, to name a few--this elite was also frugal, self-disciplined, humble, and, most importantly, endowed with a sense of obligation, both personal and public. The personal sense manifested itself in terms of a code of honor; the public, in an ideal of service to the nation. Brooks cites Edmund Burke's description of the code of the natural aristocracy :
To be bred in a place of estimation; to see nothing
low and sordid from one's infancy; to be taught
to respect one's self; to be habituated to the censorial
inspection of the public eye; to look early to
public opinion; to strand upon such elevated ground
as to be enabled to take a large view of the
widespread and infinitely diversified combinations
of men and affairs in a large society; to have
leisure to read, to reflect, to converse; to be
enabled to draw the court and attention of the wise and
the learned, wherever they are found; to be habituated
in armies to command and to obey; to be
taught to despise danger in the pursuit of honor
and duty; to be formed to the greatest degree of
vigilance, foresight, and circumspection, in a state
of things in which no fault is committed with
impunity and the slightest mistakes draw on the
most ruinous consequences; to be led to a guarded
and regulated conduct, from a sense that you are
considered as an instructor of your fellow citizens
in their highest concerns, and that you act as a
reconciler between God and man; to be employed as
an administrator of law and justice, and to be thereby
among the first benefactors to mankind; to be
a professor of high science, or of liberal and ingenuous
art; to be amongst rich traders, who from
their success are presumed to have sharp and vigorous
understandings, and to possess the virtues of
diligence, order, constancy, and regularity, and
to have cultivated an habitual regard to commutative
justice : these are the circumstances of men that
form what I should call a natural aristocracy,
without which there is no nation.
This is obviously idealized, but the point is that it was aspirational and represented the standard towards which members of the class were expected to strive. But this elite undermined it's own hegemony when, true to it's own political ideology, it became more meritocratic. As educational opportunity and access to the best schools were made more generally available to qualified students from every walk of life, a new meritocratic elite was born.
Perhaps inevitably, this rising new elite set itself up in opposition to the ethos of the Old Guard. Brooks cites a typically perceptive notion of Tocqueville's :
[his] principle of revolutions proved true : as social
success seems more possible for a rising group,
the remaining hindrances seem more and more intolerable.
They were, thus, primed to revolt against the prevailing standards of the WASP elite. Coincidentally, or no, their rise came at a time when the ethos of the bohemians was also ascendant.
Since at least the time of Jean Jacques Rousseau, when the Industrial Age was still in it's infancy, bohemians, or more broadly, intellectuals, had set themselves up in opposition to bourgeois capitalist society :
The bourgeois prized materialism, order, regularity,
custom, rational thinking, self-discipline, and
productivity. The bohemians celebrated creativity,
rebellion, novelty, self-expression,
antimaterialism, and vivid experience. The
bourgeois believed that there was a natural order of
things. They embraced rules and traditions.
The bohemians believed there was no structured
coherence to the world. Reality could only
be grasped in fragments, illusions, and intimations. So
they adored rebellion and innovation.
These two opposing worldviews tend to break down along business vs. artistic lines, but the divide also occurs between age groups. There just aren't many older bohemians; after all, there's a reason they're called starving artists. Rebellion, antimaterialism and "vivid experience" are the pursuits of youth. Of course, it just so happened that the post-War period saw the creation of one of the largest youth cohorts that any mature society has ever had to deal with. When these two trends, meritocracy and bohemianism combined in one generation they formed a volatile mixture and here is where David Brooks's analysis begins to break down.
Brooks recognizes that the resulting situation is unusual because :
This is an elite that has been raised to oppose elites.
They are affluent yet opposed to materialism.
They may spend their lives selling yet worry about
selling out. They are by instinct
antiestablishmentarian yet somehow sense they have
become a new establishment.
But, because he's missed a key element of bohemianism, he's drastically underestimated how unhealthy this dichotomy is ; that element is egalitarianism. Where bourgeois ideals lead to belief that people rise or fall based on their own intrinsic merit, bohemian ideals lead to a belief that all people, all ideas, all experiences are inherently equal and that differences in achievement among people are based not on inner merit, but on sinister outer forces.. With a little further thought, he'd find that the idea of a meritocracy is irreconcilable with bohemian egalitarianism and that the attempt to reconcile them has created a schizoid elite. Bobos accepted the idea that everyone is equal and then rose above most of the population; imagine the internal pressures at work in someone who's made millions of dollars but believes a homeless person could do his job, if only the breaks had gone differently. The nation today has an economic elite whose economic success disproves their most dearly held ideological beliefs.
The book is at it's hilarious best when he is describing the absurd philosophical constructs that these folks have had to create to try to reconcile their conflicted natures, for instance, "that spending $15,000 on a media center is vulgar, but that spending $15,000 on a slate shower stall is a sign that you are at one with the Zenlike rhythms of nature." Likewise, the Code of Financial Correctness he propounds is a hoot :
Rule 1. Only vulgarians spend lavish amounts
of money on luxuries. Cultivated people restrict their
lavish spending to necessities.
Rule 2. It is perfectly acceptable to spend
lots of money on anything that is of 'professional quality,'
even if it has nothing to do with your profession.
Rule 3. You must practice the perfectionism of small things.
Rule 4. You can never have too much texture.
Rule 5. The educated elites are expected to practice one-downmanship.
Rule 6. Educated elites are expected to spend
huge amounts of money on things that used to be
cheap.
Rule 7. Members of the educated elite prefer
stores that give them more product choices than they
could ever want but which don't dwell on anything
so vulgar as prices.
He concludes :
Marx once wrote that the bourgeois takes all that
is sacred and makes it profane. The Bobos take
everything that is profane and make it sacred.
We have taken something that might have been
grubby and materialistic and turned it into something
elevated. We take the quintessential bourgeois
activity, shopping, and turn it into quintessential
bohemian activities: art, philosophy, social action.
Bobos possess the Midas touch in reverse.
Everything we handle turns into soul.
Now I have no doubt that this is what the new Bobo ethos tries to achieve, but it is just so transparently phony and hypocritical that it seems almost to be symptomatic of a mass mental delusion. Turn on This Old House or the Home and Garden Network for a few minutes; does anyone outside of Bobo culture really fail to find these people laughably pretentious? There is something psychologically unhealthy about a class of people who have to fabricate such patently ridiculous justifications to feel comfortable spending their own hard earned money, but that is where their guilt leads them.
Less amusing, but more troublesome, are the sections on Bobo politics, morality and spirituality. In the realm of politics :
Their political project is to correct the excesses
of the two social revolutions that brought them to
power.
The bohemian sixties and the bourgeois eighties were
polar opposites in many ways. But they did
share two fundamental values: individualism and
freedom.
...
If the sixties and the eighties were about expanding
freedom and individualism, the Bobos are now
left to cope with excessive freedom and excessive
individualism.
That's why the two crucial words in the Bobo political
project these days...are community and
control.
First of all, it's important to note that this is no different than the exclusionary behavior of any of history's prior elites. Freedom got the Bobos where they are; now they want controls put on. Second, the long history of mankind is one of a trend towards greater freedom; do we really want the Bobos stifling it? And should they be viewed as benignly as Brooks views them if their project is to stifle freedom?
In the field of morality the Bobos are really conflicted. Brooks writes of them :
They have an ability to not react; to accept what
doesn't directly concern them. They tolerate a little
lifestyle experimentation, so long as it is done
safely and moderately. They are offended by concrete
wrongs, like cruelty and racial injustice, but are
relatively unmoved by lies or transgressions that
don't seem to do anyone obvious harm. They prize
good intentions and are willing to tolerate a lot
from people whose hearts are in the right place.
They aim for decency, not saintliness, prosaic
goodness, not heroic grandeur, fairness, not profundity.
In short they prefer a moral style that
doesn't shake things up, but that protects the status
quo where it is good, and gently tries to forgive
and reform the things that are not so good.
This is a good morality for building a decent society,
but maybe not one for people interested in things
in the next world, like eternal salvation, for
example.
This attitude of easy approval on Brooks's part is simply outrageous. Peel back some of the pretty words and you find a Bobo morality which accepts adultery, divorce, abortion, homosexuality, euthanasia, and a host of other vices which they enjoy indulging in, but which have torn the fabric of society asunder, with particularly damaging effects on the less privileged, the very young, the very old, in short, everyone but the Bobos. It is also a morality which hypocritically excuses real harms as long as intent is good. This is the mindset that gave us the New Deal and the Great Society, sets of programs which assuaged liberal guilt but utterly disserved the very constituencies they were supposed to help. Disguised as toleration and altruism, Bobo morality serves only the Bobos; it is supremely selfish. And, though I'm charitable enough to assume it's an incidental effect and not the purpose of their "morality," it has served to lock the underclasses into an endless cycle of poverty, ignorance and social pathologies, removing them from the economic competition with the Bobos and their children.
In describing the burgeoning content-free religion of the Bobos, Brooks cites Francis Fukuyama's book The Great Disruption :
Instead of community arising as a byproduct of rigid
belief, people will return to religious belief
because of their desire for community. In other
words, people will return to religious tradition not
necessarily because they accept the truth of revelation,
but because the absence of community and
the transience of social ties in the secular world
makes them hungry for ritual and cultural tradition.
They will help the poor or their neighbors not because
doctrine tells them they must, but rather
because they want to serve their communities and
find that faith-based organizations are the most
effective ways of doing so. They will repeat ancient
prayers and reenact age-old rituals not because
they believe they were handed down by God, but rather
because they want their children to have
proper values, and because they want to enjoy the
comfort of ritual and the sense of shared
experience it brings. In a sense they will not be
taking religion seriously on its own terms. Religion
becomes a source of ritual in a society that has
been stripped bare of ceremony, and thus a
reasonable extension of the natural desire for social
relatedness with which all human beings are
born.
This, of course, is the great insight of the Nazis and the Communists : that by providing social forms and rituals and activities which make the citizenry feel that they are a part of something, you can co-opt them into even evil pursuits. Modern religions are increasingly willing to adapt their doctrines to suit their least serious adherents. They are left with the structure of religion, but it has been drained of any substance. The great term that Brooks borrows from a rabbi in Montana is "flexidoxy." Religion is so flexible that it no longer requires anything of practitioners beyond participation, good will, voluntarism and charity. An organization which takes no cognizance of the soul, merely asking that parishioners engage in certain activities, is a religion in name only.
Nor is Brooks content simply to justify the Bobo destruction of millennia worth of morality, religion and social structure, he slips into the classic error of hubris when he asserts :
In truth it is hard to see how the rule of the meritocrats
could ever come to an end. The meritocratic
Bobo class is rich with the spirit of self-criticism.
It is flexible and amorphous enough to co-opt that
which it does not already command.
Are we really so dense as a species that we will never learn from past errors? Every ruling class believes itself to be inevitable and eternal; I call your attention to the Thousand Year Reich. The Bobos are perched on a three part pendulum swing : a triumph of moral permissiveness over responsibility; of merit over entitlement; and of the economically powerful over the lower classes. None of these is unique, though it may be unusual to have them all occur simultaneously. How reasonable is it to assume that none of the three currently vanquished but historically resilient forces will swing back the other way? Mightn't all three even swing back?
Take just one trend that must be troubling to anyone who envisions an Age of the Bobo : they don't reproduce themselves. The ugly truth at the core of Bobo schizophrenia is that Bobos are still overwhelmingly drawn from the same severely limited socio-economic and racial groups that have historically dominated Western society. They are still predominantly white children of the middle and upper classes. However egalitarian their rhetoric, the product of Bobo "meritocracy" is as unequal as any elite has ever been. But a quick look at demographic trends reveals that they are also a rapidly declining segment of the population. When whites are no longer even a plurality in this country will meritocracy survive the competing demands of groups which, for whatever reason, do not succeed in open competition? or will the affirmative action programs that Bobos now support, largely out of guilt, be used to keep their children, few as they may be, out of the educational opportunities and institutions which guarantee entree to the elite?
David Brooks is so bent on self-congratulation and celebration of his
own cohort that he fails to consider any of these rather serious issues.
The result is a book that wittily describes a fascinating and important
social phenomenon, but is willfully oblivious to the negative consequences
of the social revolution it's author posits. It's a funny book, but
inadequate to it's purposes.
(Reviewed:01-Oct-00)
Grade: (C)
