The Rawness

…given that I identify with a few too many of these behaviors.

(Yes, I know I am the millionth person to link to this site in the past few weeks. Bite me.)

A lot of the behaviors described on this site can also be found discussed in more depth in the book Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There by David Brooks.

If you want to know more about the book Bobos In Paradise, this review by Robert Locke covers it pretty well. The opening paragraphs from the review:

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.”

Brooks describes in great detail the bobo lifestyle, which one can visualize most easily by thinking of its characteristic locales: Greenwich Village, NY; Berkeley, CA; Boulder, CO; Cambridge, MA; Georgetown, DC; Austin, TX; Portland, OR; Seattle, WA; Santa Fe, NM; Ann Arbor, MI; Madison, WI; Athens, GA; Wilmington, NC; Missoula, MT; Burlington, VT; Princeton, NJ, South Beach, FL. This is the world of cappuccino and Volvos, Sierra Club memberships and private schools. Bobos love to live in places that have artiness as their mythical identity but seven-figure real estate prices as their reality. Brooks calls these latte towns or neighborhoods.

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.

They employ a number of strategies to this end. For example, the cult of the Absurdly Expensive Ordinary Object, in which the bobo pays $75 for a gardening trowel or $3.50 for a cup of coffee. The first item escapes the stigma of yuppie materialism, which bobos despise, because gardening is a) environmentalist and b) manual labor, and the second because it is only a cup of coffee, after all, and therefore cannot possibly constitute a luxury. Another strategy can be called the Magical Power of Progressive Association: anything, however luxurious, that is somehow associated with progressive politics is thereby purified of the despised taint of consumerism. Thus the fattiest ice-cream on the market, Ben & Jerry’s, survives this usual bobo no-no (they are usually health nuts who eat whole-grain bread) by donating a portion of its profits to approved leftist causes. There is also the Magical Power of Primitive Cultures and other magical powers associated with sports, art, wilderness, tools, and other things. Tools are especially valuable because they enable bobos to play at manual labor and thereby deny their class status. None of this comes cheap. As the author says, “A person who follows these precepts can dispose of up to $4-$5 million annually in a manner that demonstrates how little he or she cares about material things.”

Bobos extend this pseudo-modesty to their social relationships. They talk about the nannies and servants they frequently have as if they are close personal friends and it is merely an odd quirk that these servants have to commute two hours each way from the slums of L.A. to the bobo’s house near the beach. Because they love to appropriate peasant clothing like clogs and the Latin American poncho, they are the first ruling class in history to aspire to dress like its servants. But of course bobos would never dream of dressing like the real American working class, in polyester pantsuits, designer jeans, and big hair, because then they would run the risk of resembling a lower social class that they could actually be mistaken for. They only posture at belonging to proletariats that are sufficiently foreign or archaic that no one could make this error. Similarly, they love to decorate with old farm implements and industrial artifacts, but would never dream of doing their office to look like a real contemporary working-class environment like the inside of a McDonalds.

Anyone who has noticed the way American leftism runs on sentimental fantasies about the poor will find this pattern familiar. The bobo style can be described as the concepts of liberalism, aestheticized into pretty visual images.

When bobos run corporations, as they increasingly do, they do so in an “anti-hierarchical” manner with respect to everything but the actual salaries. Salaries are not supposed to be the point of work anyway, since we are all creative visionaries now, not wage slaves. This is of course the perfect way to stop employees from asking difficult questions about whether all this anti-hierarchy translates into their paychecks. Bobo corporate boardrooms look like garages and nobody wears a tie or has a fixed desk. Commercials for the company’s products have alternative-rock soundtracks. Prosaic items like shampoo are sold as tools for achieving new-age spirituality. And, as Brooks notes of that quintessential bobo company Ben & Jerry’s, “Ice cream companies now possess their own foreign-policy doctrines.”

Note that what bobos really despise is not consumerism as an actual way of life, the way people who genuinely renounce it like nuns, the Amish or the U.S. Marines do, but consumerism in the abstract, which offends their exquisitely refined ideological sensibilities. Bobos have ideological sensibilities as subtle as wine-tasters. They have been educated in an elaborate leftist critique of how money makes you its possession, not the other way round, and commodifies you, et cetera et cetera, and have responded by mastering the art of faking one way culturally to feel good about themselves while living the other way in the real world. If a $500 sweater is made in Tibet, a place that represents purity and anti-consumerism, then this anti-consumerism in the ideological significance of the thing neatly cancels out the materialism of buying it, and the bobo is home free. One almost imagines an enterprising shaman could make a living running around in a 4-wheel drive vehicle (the bobo standard in flat suburban areas) blessing their household establishments like a Shinto priest in Japan blessing a new automobile assembly line. The problem, of course, is that this would make the whole thing explicit, and this rank cultural con game could never survive the light of day…

Basically, if you enjoy the website Stuff White People Like, I recommend reading the rest of Locke’s review of Bobos In Paradise, and of course the actual book Bobos in Paradise.

Recommended Products:

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

 Loading ...