House of Eratosthenes

Via Gerard: Review in Frontpage Magazine about Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, by David Brooks. Must be a great book, since it notices what I’ve been noticing for a while; that’s long been one of my favorite litmus tests.

Bobos, or bourgeois bohemians, are, to put it bluntly, the new establishment. Bill Clinton is a bobo. So is anyone else who has the income and power that only fat old men in oil paintings used to have, but who also has the mores, personal tastes, and culture of a 60’s radical college student. This is easy to laugh at, but it is not a superficial phenomenon. Brooks has put his finger on the central weirdness of our current ruling class: they have blithely combined the power and wealth of the old establishment with the cultural and intellectual trappings of its supposed mortal enemy, the counterculture. The two camps that have seemed to be warring for America’s soul since the 60’s have not just reached a detente, they have merged. This is, of course, exactly what you get when you send your best and brightest to universities where bohemian ideals are taught and then release them into a world where the realities of material life inexorably impel them into moneyed positions. As the author puts it,

“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 anti-establishmentarian yet somehow sense they have become a new establishment.”
:
The essence of the bobo lifestyle is being rich while pretending you’re not. Bobos love luxury as much as anyone else with five senses, but because they have been educated in a leftist critique of it, they would suffer damage to their self-image if they openly and honestly imbibed it. Therefore their lives are a peculiar dance, whose subtle application of abstract rules to everyday life would boggle the mind of an ultra-Orthodox Jew, in which they seek to indulge luxury in ways that somehow, according to the bobo code, don’t count.

What this ushers in to our society with disturbing alacrity, is self-loathing, and up there among our highest echelons of private and state authority. The self-loathing comes out in bizarre, secularist but cultish rituals indulged to cleanse some kind of a “soul” — to manifest some inner goodness that isn’t really there.

The Holy One managed to touch on quite a few of these last night.

An American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, notorious for carrying much pork and little beef, held aloft as an emblem of victory nevertheless — even though it isn’t fooling anybody anymore. Tax cuts for “working households,” democrat code words for people who don’t work and don’t have taxes to cut. Oversight led by the Vice President “because nobody messes with Joe.” Renewable energy. Caps on carbon pollution. Socialized health care. Socialized education. Closing down Guantanamo.

Much of it is, of course, what has come to be the traditional “Christmas in February” from democrat Presidents to constituency groups — teachers’ unions, global warming scammers, aparatchiks of the ballooning single-payer healthcare movement. (The unintentional comedy is that in the days ahead this will be referred to as something new and bold, although there is very little in Obama’s first SOTU that isn’t recycled.)

But it’s something else. The euphemisms are carefully chosen. Chosen to make the upper-crusters feel better about themselves, as they toss those crusts to the rest of us. As if they were doing that, at their own expense instead of at the expense of our children. And as if we needed it. Obama, I’m afraid, doesn’t get it…just like any one of the other bobos doesn’t get it. He says “…even in the most trying times, amid the most difficult circumstances, there is a generosity, a resilience, a decency, and a determination that perseveres; a willingness to take responsibility for our future and for posterity.” Somehow, in the bobo mindset, that rugged determination that perseveres, mighty a fire as it may be, requires kindling. It needs to be actuated. It first requires a leviathan government to take our money away from us and give it back to us again.

The “credit crunch” demands more borrowing.

We’re all out of money; the solution is to spend it.

We aren’t living life the way we were intended to; the answer to the problem is a cap-and-trade carbon exchange system, so we can live less life.

It isn’t confined to the federal level either. Cities enact needle-exchange programs. They build skateboard parks, not because of exemplary behavior on the part of the skateboarders, but because of atrocious behavior. Violent thugs are paroled who don’t deserve or merit parole. Once Congress raises the minimum wage, several states raise it still higher — all to show what good people we have in charge running the show. See how good we are! Tomorrow we’ll show you again!

We are buried in bad laws, because a certain generation can’t live with itself.

The catholic church teaches about forgiveness, and most forget that it includes forgiving oneself. Most of the bobo’s (who unconsciously replaced that religion with a new one long ago) can’t shake the feeling that they were right about their ideals, even when reality constantly reminds them that now that they’re elite, they were wrong (then) to judge their elders when they were young. They refuse to acknowledge the destructive nature of lazy, relativist thinking of that generation, so they’ve constantly tried to defend it and atone for it at the same time.

They have not forgiven themselves for their impressionable youth, nor for their (current) enjoyment of the perks of being in the elite, and can’t “move on” without sacrificing something at the altar. That something is anti-PC folks and someone else’s money.

Maybe they’ll figure it out and find that the catholic religion wasn’t as outdated as they first thought. Maybe they’ll find forgiveness doesn’t come from atonement from the productive, and that they’ve now bought into statist ideas that truly are destructive. Trouble is, the catholics get a bad rap for being too prissy and demanding. But I’m sure making the perfect the enemy of the good is a better answer eventually, right?
- wch | 02/25/2009 @ 12:16
So… I’m sitting here scratching my head, wondering why Reason chose to re-publish an eight year old book review. Brooks pretty much nailed it back then, but old news is still old news.
- Buck | 02/26/2009 @ 17:03

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Bourgeois BohemiansWednesday, February 25th, 2009

Bourgeois Bohemians
Wednesday, February 25th, 2009