As author David Brooks tells it, when he went to a guest ranch in Montana in the 1980s, before going off on horseback he would be given a ten-minute safety lecture on how not to get killed riding a horse. Now when he goes to the same place, he might receive a seventy- minute talk about the spirituality of horses and the Zen of the riding experience.
That difference points to a change in values among members of the new American generation of well-educated affluent young men and women. These are the people whom Brooks calls Bobos, a name he has coined from the first two letters of “bourgeois” and “bohemian.”
His book “Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There” is a fascinating and often hilarious look at the new elite of American society. This is the generation that has combined the radical spirit of the rebellious 1960s with the establishment mentality of the 1980s. The result is a group of ambitious younger people determined to be both successful and creative at the same time.
In an effort to explain their values, David Brooks devotes a whole chapter to the spiritual life of Bobos. A surprisingly large part of this section focuses on the state of Montana because of its attraction for these new seekers. The author calls the impulse to go there “The Soul Rush” as distinguished from the Gold Rush to California in the middle of the nineteenth century.
But Brooks makes fun of this movement because it ignores the real Montana in favor of a place that is largely a Bobo fantasy. For instance, he says that “two million people voyage up to the Glacier National Park alone each year and get all spiritual in the face of its grandeur.” Meantime, these visitors have little sense of the actual life of Montana and its people, especially in the freezing temperatures of winter.
Bobos grew up enjoying unprecedented personal freedom and a wide gamut of choices. They learned to value “endless innovation, self-expansion, and personal growth.” That upbringing makes them resist religious authority, anyone that tells them what to believe and how to act morally. They show themselves ready to admire leaders like Pope John Paul II, but without accepting his supernatural beliefs or sexual ethics.
Thus many members of the new elite want orthodoxy without obedience, religion without faith. Often they opt for a cafeteria spirituality that allows them to pick and choose among the offerings of the faith traditions. Looking for a symbol of such detachment, Brooks calls the remote control “the ultimate weapon of personal choice.” It allows the viewer to surf through five hundred television channels without opting for any single one.
At the same time many Bobos do not feel satisfied with this approach. They “pine for simpler ways of living, looking backward for the wisdom that people with settled lives seem to possess.” For them, the question is how to combine freedom with roots. Is it possible, they wonder, to hold on to their treasured personal liberty yet find something that gives them greater stability?
Many in this generation are looking for connections with other people and with communities. Spiritual individualism, they have discovered, goes only so far: all of their varied experiences “may dissolve into nothingness if they don’t surrender to something larger than themselves.”
The same approach that suits the search for ultimate meaning does not produce lasting satisfaction. That is why many younger people profess a new appreciation of traditions, rites, and rituals that they might once have considered obsolete.
They also may have found ultimately empty the kind of spirituality that does not bring with it any obligations. The Human Potential movement, so popular starting with the 1960s, with its focus on personal navel gazing, has been revealed as unable to produce a full life. Instead, many people have discovered that a sense of community is a vital part of human development.
That realization offers a reason for placing new value on institutions developed by society to promote important values. Neighborhoods, churches, bowling leagues, book groups – social inventions like these help people find roots that provide a sense of personal place.
Mind you, the Bobo idea, however clever and entertaining, remains pop sociology. While incisive and often brilliant in its social satire, the book discussed here inevitably leaves out a lot of reality. But what David Brooks says about spirituality is worth thinking about.
Richard Griffin