'Bobos in Paradise': From LSD to C.E.O. in a Nation of Bobos
By Janet Maslin
Within the Rousseau-like tableau on the cover of David Brooks's delectable new book of social criticism there lurks one lone denizen of the wild. It looks worried, and it should. The undergrowth has been invaded by meaningful accouterments (laptop, sport utility vehicle, mountain bicycle, steaming beverage mug) and the arrivistes who come with them: the bourgeois bohemians Mr. Brooks calls Bobos. As analyzed here with gleeful wit and bull's-eye accuracy, Bobos are as unnatural as forest creatures get. They are what happens when "the babbitt lion can mingle with the beatnik lamb."
"Defying expectations and maybe logic, people seemed to have combined the countercultural 60's and the achieving 80's into one social ethos," Mr. Brooks surmises in a book that merrily explores the implications of that claim. "We're by now all familiar with modern-day executives who have moved from S.D.S. to C.E.O., from LSD to I.P.O. Indeed, sometimes you get the impression the Free Speech Movement produced more corporate executives than Harvard Business School." But as part of "an elite that has been raised to oppose elites," these individuals have had to undertake cultural and ethical contortions that would give a pretzel pause. A thoughtful as well as an entertaining social critic, Mr. Brooks sets out to untie the knots.
Tracing the tension between bourgeois and bohemian values, from fiery antipathy to peculiar present-day reconciliation (e.g., Kerouac, Gandhi and "Born to be Wild" in corporate advertising), "Bobos in Paradise" acknowledges that it took the information age to throw the two camps into hopeless confusion. With the supplanting of inherited money by "incidental money" ("the kind of money you just happen to earn while you are pursuing your creative vision") came a whopping inversion. Suddenly it was the whiz kids of the meritocracy who made the rules in corporate life, to the point where a pet cockatoo or a water gun at the office might be surer signs of status than a mahogany desk. We have reached the point, Mr. Brooks writes, where "the hedonism of Woodstock mythology has been domesticated and now serves as a management tool for the Fortune 500."
Even if the reader regards such developments with horror, "Bobos in Paradise" offers a tartly amusing, all too accurate guide to the new establishment and its self-serving ways. "Like so much else in this new cultural wave," the author writes of a fashionably enlightened supermarket, this place "has taken the ethos of California in the 1960's and selectively updated it. Gone are the 60's-era things that were fun and of interest to teenagers, like free love, and retained are all the things that might be of interest to middle-aged hypochondriacs, like whole grains."
The author clearly knows whereof he speaks. As is the case with many of his likely readers, he can locate a Bobo (a grating but useful moniker) without looking further than the nearest mirror. On the experience of donning titanium Omnitech Bobo sporting gear, he acknowledges the obvious ("very few of us are actually professional sherpas") and reports this sartorial sensation: "Here I am in the middle of the forest and I'm wearing the Starship Enterprise." On Bobo affectations in home décor: "The old elite may have copied the styles of the European aristocrats or the colonial masters, but Bobos prefer the colonial victims." And: "It is acceptable to display sacred items in an educated person's home so long as they are from a religion neither the host nor any of his or her guests is likely to profess."
The serious underpinnings of this book concern the compromises at the heart of Bobo culture. Particularly when it comes to politics, that essential Bobo slipperiness appears in an unflattering light. "Whether you are liberal or conservative, Bobo politicians adopt your rhetoric and your policy suggestions while somehow sucking all the radicalism out of them," writes the author, who is a senior editor at the conservative Weekly Standard magazine. "The Bobo establishment seems to have no there there. It never presents a coherent opposition." Mr. Brooks ends his book in hopes that his subjects move beyond the narcissism and comfort levels that are so wickedly captured here and closer to the political crucible where Bobo attitudes were born.
"Bobos in Paradise" sometimes repeats itself, especially when it comes to the consumer tastes that express the Bobo value system. Once Mr. Brooks has identified the "never-before-owned hand-me-downs" that Bobos favor in home furnishings or acknowledged "that there is an adventure gap opening up between members of the educated class and their belongings," he needn't dwell so heavily on the particulars. His book also indulges in the occasional glib formulation. ("If your furniture is distressed, your conscience needn't be.")
But he makes up for these lapses with the legitimate insights in which this book abounds, particularly when it comes to dissecting the new puritanism that shapes the Bobos' value system. From citing skimpily dressed joggers for their "nudity in the service of achievement" to noting that we use the word guilt more often about dietary matters than anything else, he delineates a hard-driving secular culture that sees pleasure and discipline as inextricably linked. "At the tippy top of the leisure status system are those vacations that involve endless amounts of agony and pain," he notes, going on to wonder why the ultimate Bobo vacation isn't simply two weeks in wintertime on a Minnesota road crew.
The pièce de résistance here is appropriately self-referential: a section titled "How to Be an Intellectual Giant," which deftly lays down the rules of gamesmanship for aspiring pundits. Nowhere in this slender, knowing book does Mr. Brooks's insight sound more enjoyably hard won. He offers pointers for how to pick a specialty that is likely to be in the news, how to behave on talk shows and how to persuade editors of the instant relevance of a new article. The ambitious Bobo expert will "describe how she can work a pop culture reference into her essay, comparing the Supreme Court to the creature in the No. 1 box office movie of the moment." Her ideas will sound relevant and be easy to illustrate that way.
The book argues that Bobo culture has rearranged the standards for success in the world of letters, much as it has changed everything else: "The days when all you had to do to become an intellectual giant was write a literary masterpiece, such as 'War and Peace' or 'Being and Nothingness,' are gone." In the current atmosphere, success is likelier to mean high-concept visibility, presenting a catchy new idea in a lively format and casting light on what it all means. "Bobos in Paradise"-style.
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Carl
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