Rarely does a book make me laugh out loud. But “Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There” did. It also seduced me into that often unwelcome practice of reading parts at other people.
The author, David Brooks, is one of the cleverest journalists in captivity. He brings to his writing a sharp eye for social detail and an ability to generalize provocatively.
Brooks’s title coins the word “Bobo,” the first two letters of “bourgeois” and “bohemian.” The author’s thesis is that these two formerly separate groups in America have come together to form a new social class, the Bobos, who combine the characteristics of each.
Theirs is a hybrid culture that combines the creativity and anti-establishment spirit of the 1960s with the ambition and worldly success of the 1980s. Brooks admires this combination and even sees Bobos as defining a new generation.
If this sounds to you like pop sociology, you are right. But there’s enough to it for the book to hold some credibility. And, while defining this new latté culture, the author skewers its style and values, often hilariously.
In a chapter on intellectual life, for instance, Brooks advises an ambitious young person how to rise and make it among the fashionable thinking classes. In passages marked with often subtle irony, he tells the aspiring intellectual how to navigate through the shoals that can easily shipwreck a career. The passage where he evaluates the praise a young writer might receive for an op-ed piece in a prestigious newspaper deserves quotation in full:
“To accurately measure how much people really like her work, our young intellectual will be wise to develop a praise deflation formula. If someone says he liked a piece, that means he saw it but didn’t read it. If he says he loved the piece, that means he started it and made it at least halfway through but can’t remember what it was about. If he calls it brilliant, that means he finished it. It is only when a reader offers the following highest form of praise that the writer knows for sure the person is being sincere: ‘That was an absolutely outstanding piece; I’ve been saying the same thing myself for years.’”
Not surprisingly, what David Brooks says about columnists also caught my attention. Being offered a column seems like the pinnacle of success for a journalist, he suggests. “But, while a dozen people get riches and fame from column writing, thousands do it in wretched slavery – compelled like circus animals to be entertaining once or twice a week. The ones who succeed in that line of work have a superb knowledge of one thing: their own minds.”
As a possessor of neither fame nor riches, let me disassociate myself from Brooks’s generalizations. Though it might prove romantic to imagine so, I do not work in wretched slavery but thoroughly enjoy the freedom to share my experience with readers. Nor do I feel like an entertainment-providing animal compelled to titillate readers each week. And, more important, I struggle like everybody else to attain some self-knowledge.
But back to the main thesis. Brooks sees the new educated class as having succeeded the WASPS with the latter’s mix of solid values combined with privilege and prejudice. However, the new ascendency does not feel as secure about its place in society: a career crash can reduce them to nothing, a fate that people whose status was based on fashionable names did not have to fear.
And yet, looking at the larger picture, Brooks sees ours as a time of social peace. The two sides in the culture wars, one of them represented by the sixties, the other by the eighties, have reconciled and have “created a new balance.”
Though much amused by it, I approach all of this material with some detachment because a Bobo I am not. Nor, I suspect, would many other members of the older generations qualify for this name.
Not having been either a bourgeois or a bohemian disqualifies me from the start. Beyond that, I fail to merit inclusion on at least two other grounds. In both politics and spirituality my values stand in strong contrast to those in the Bobo class.
In politics, they favor the muddled middle while I still take a passionate approach to political life. With disregard for changing fashion, I continue to vote for parties rather than merely for persons. In spirituality, I want a faith that affirms God and the supernatural rather than nature and feeling good about oneself.
When you have lived as many decades as I have, it’s hard to believe in constructions like Brooks’s. Yes, staying open to new ideas is important for older people like me. However, fads are fads and some of us are not about to surrender our hard-won ability to label them such, no matter their power to amuse.
Richard Griffin