Almost twenty years after it first appeared, I review Bobos in Paradise.
What Brooks might have foreseen, but did not, was how this Bobo project would play out as it gathered momentum. In the last two decades, we have witnessed the acceleration of the long-term trend toward expansion of the more abstract-oriented industries, such as finance and entertainment, and a decline of the more concrete-oriented industries, such as manufacturing and mining. As a result, the cultural influence of Bobos has soared. The Bobos became insistently cosmopolitan on issues of immigration and foreign relations, increasingly aggressive in their assault on traditional ideas about gender, and increasingly eager to stifle the speech on campus of those with whom they disagree.
I read Bobos when it first appeared, probably the first time I had heard of Brooks.
I occasionally notice what I think of as “bobo wedge issues,” disputes that divide bo from bo. For example, I live near a regional airport with ambitions to expand. This has set the bourgeois faction’s desire for travel convenience against the bohemian faction’s desire for natural quiet. Which bo you are depends on whether you live in the flight path.
I wonder if there are not more examples of this playing out in 2017 politics.
From a distance, I always wonder how much stifling of speech is actually having to confront the speech of those who disagree and the condemnation of bereft speech and bad ideas. Where are all the flat earth advocates at universities? Isn’t it shameful they aren’t invited? Free? Yes. Well thought? Better.
Uh, lots of popular ideas in universities are at least as bad as a flat Earth, the only difference being that it’s probably been a rather long time since a government enacted actual policy based on Flat Earth theory that actually harmed people.
From proximity (I live on a university campus) I am acutely aware that much of the stifling of speech is done by people with bad ideas who are afraid of having their bad ideas confronted and demolished by well thought out ideas.
In general, people with good ideas don’t stifle opposition; they welcome it. Stifling of opposition is no indicative of ‘weariness of exposure to bad ideas;’ it’s indicative of weariness of having to defend the indefensible.
It’s hard for me to think about the BoBos without viewing them through Hanson’s Forager v. Farmer framework. I think the review would have benefitted from the inclusion of, and analysis from, that perspective.
The big trouble is that different classes require different norms suitable to their different circumstances, but norm argumentation occurs between elites who mostly happen to be BoBos, and trickle-down via mimicry operates on a society-wide level. BoBos don’t recognize themselves as an elite class with elite interests and needs, and so have zero sense of noblesse oblige, and their embrace of centrally planned paternalism is in part a development that arises out of the attempt to substitute (inadequately) for their denigration of the norm-bolsterings institutions and frameworks tailored for lower classes but which are felt to be unnecessarily and irrationally stiffling for a more comfortable and economically insulated class.
As Adam Smith wrote,
Good quote.
William Manchester’s discussion of Victorian sexual attitudes in the first volume of The Last Lion went into some detail on the differences between the middle and upper classes in England and presumably elsewhere in Europe.
The Bobos are also more fiercely anti-nationalistic, and even anti-patriotic. Anybody who supports “America” is now labeled a Nazi. This is probably the single most rage inducing mislabeling of the Democrat radicals.
Or perhaps this issue is the one which most resonates with not fully partisan folk who vote more for reasons other than party.
The campus discrimination against Reps & pro-life folk is also rage inducing to me. While the whole US university world might be about to suffer revolutionary “competency test” alternatives; I’d still like colleges to suffer loss of Federal funds because of their discrimination.
Also, the Bobos today reject “bourgeois bohemians” — they follow in practice, but oppose in speech the bourgeois values. See U Penn vs Prof. Wax … This internal hypocrisy is beginning to be more noticed.
You have to distinguish between “bourgeois” in habits, and “bourgeois-ism”, which is at least a set of norms and bundle of values that undergird classic bourgeois classes, but also potentially an ideology which defends such norms as universally true or “best”, and also potentially a set of “culturally determinist” empirical claims in Sociology regarding which sets of norms and behavior patterns will lead to personal and professional success.
So, the important observation is that BoBos are not self-consciously bourgeois, don’t identify as such, and would probably object to the characterization. They don’t apprehend that their behaviors that enable that personal and professional sucess are part of a bundle with associated values that we can recognize as a pattern associated with “bourgois-ism”.
Instead, they think they are acting out of a combination of rational reflection, common sense wisdom, and personal authentic impulses, and maybe some of them recognize that there is just a lot of imitation of what is perceived to be “normal” or “smart”, that is, what all the high status individuals in their social scene seem to be doing.
Instead, they are self-consciously universalist and cosmopolitan (and often progressive) which means conspicuously multicultural and “publicly non-judgmental”. And that means they will always take offense at any normative assertion or imposition which contains a clear value judgment that would rank or establishing any kind of hierarchy regarding matters involving heritage, identity, nationality, etc.
When Wax specifically defends bourgois-ism with claims that it is optimal for contemporary conditions and thus superior to every other “culture” and set of norms, that definitely triggers that sense of offense above, even among a group of people who almost all are, in practice, actually behaving like the bourgeois in their own lives.
That’s the origin of Charles Murray’s admonition that the elites should “Preach as they Practice.” They do not practice as they preach, and indeed, what they preach turns out to be quite harmful for anyone naive enough to take it seriously and implement those “affiliative” ideas in practice.