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Bourgeois Culture Isn’t Coming Back
Two law professors, Amy Wax and Larry Alexander, recently stirred up some excitement when they published an op-ed arguing that America should return to bourgeois values. The position they presented was thoroughly conventional on the right, having been reiterated over the decades by Irving Kristol, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Charles Murray, R.R. Reno, and many more. Naturally then, the liberal legal establishment went nuts, denouncing Wax and Alexander as racist xenophobes. A movement was started to take away Wax’s 1L course (because it’s really not fair to force entry-level law students to take classes from a racist xenophobe). It was exactly the sort of silliness we’ve come to expect from liberal academia.
Very little of substance was said by either side in the ensuing debate, with the left mostly repeating, “This is all very offensive,” and the right mostly repeating, “You are emotional and intolerant.” I don’t think the op-ed was offensive, and I agree that the left is emotional and intolerant. Nonetheless, I’m beginning to think that this particular piece of conventional (conservative) wisdom may have passed its sell-by date. It was good advice for someone, somewhere, but it may not apply to our particular time and place, for reasons that this incident itself helps to illustrate.
Whether it’s “protect the guardrails” or “preach what you practice” or “restore bourgeois values,” there is an underlying premise to this argument that may just be incorrect. We are presuming that most Americans (but particularly the prosperous and influential liberals whose behavior we most hope to influence) still share a substantive moral outlook of a sort that could ground healthy cultural mores. Here is what Wax and Alexander’s description of the sort of “guardrails” they would like to see rebuilt:
Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.
That all sounds very nice, but what sort of moral outlook grounded those norms in the period they remember so fondly? First and most important, there was widespread deference to a broadly Judeo-Christian and traditional morality. That supplied the basis for all kinds of derivative social and moral precepts, spelling out the obligations one had as a spouse and a worker and a citizen. Second, the hardships of the earlier 20th century (the Great Depression and the World Wars) instilled a sobriety and discipline in American culture, which helped bolster all those good, Franklin-esque bourgeois values. Prudent advice about working hard and saving money is much easier to sell when a society has fresh, painful memories of experienced hardship. Third, there was still a pretty strong sense of ethno-cultural solidarity among Americans … but especially white Americans.
The importance of this third item (historically) is hard to evaluate. Both the alt-right and the left are inclined to think it very important, while I am sure Alexander and Wax would dismiss it as trivial and very much dispensable. I used to agree with them, but of late I am more uncertain. That is, I very definitely do not wish to help forge an ethno-national sub-culture (and neither do Alexander and Wax!), but I worry that it may have been a more important factor than I previously believed in the rosily-remembered mid-century, and that there may actually be a non-trivial connection between collapse of a common bourgeois culture and the decline in racism. In any event, it would be interesting to see more liberals argue that case intelligently, instead of flinging accusations.
However we rank these three “sources of solidarity,” it’s clear that they’ve all declined dramatically since the mid-20th century. Liberals are offended (perhaps rightly) by the ethno-nationalism, but they’re scarcely less offended by traditional morals, and the foundation of shared hardship is simply a thing of the past. It’s fine to rhapsodize about a common culture with shared bourgeois values, but what if we just don’t have the necessary components anymore? We can’t expect liberals to preach things that they just don’t believe.
A defender of the bourgeois-values camp might object: Are we really sure that affluent liberals don’t have the appropriate beliefs? After all, their on-the-ground lifestyles look pretty bourgeois. What Robert Putnam calls “neo-traditional” marriage (contracted among affluent professionals who establish themselves professionally before marrying, then devote enormous energies to their offspring), is nearly as stable as the “Ozzie and Harriet” model of the 1950s. Affluent liberals love safety, security, and decency in their “safe space” neighborhoods and campuses and workplaces. Why can’t they preach the relevant values to the masses? In the eyes of someone like Charles Murray, affluent liberals just look like hypocrites, nominally holding to a more libertine and subversive moral outlook even as they hoard the goods of bourgeois living for themselves.
I think this view fundamentally misunderstands the ethos of America’s prosperous classes. It’s not really right to call their lifestyles “neo-traditional.” It would be nearer the mark to describe them as “neo-Epicurean.” They don’t really believe in virtue per se; instead they find meaning in a widely distributed range of experiences. Highly-valued commodities include education, fulfilling careers, diverse cultural experiences, intimate relationships, and sex. These are not the highest priorities for tradition-minded Christians or Jews. Our upper classes have left that behind, and are now centering themselves around a kind of neo-pagan good-life philosophy.
Epicureanism has its attractive points, but it’s not great at ennobling the common man. In any given society, there will be relatively few people who have the wherewithal to live the good life, and to those who don’t or can’t, the neo-Epicurean doesn’t have much to say. It’s inherently an elitist perspective. Since the American ethos contains significant anti-elitist currents, that creates certain problems. Liberals also retain some neo-Marxist commitments that mix rather badly with their breezy affluence. That partly explains why they’re in such a tangle of moral angst, sweating bullets (and throwing temper-tantrums) over every variety of “privilege” and howling over every “microaggression.” They can’t really reconcile their personal philosophy with their broader social commitments.
Nevertheless, the neo-Epicurean ideal isn’t going away. It’s too important for giving meaning to the lives of upper-middle-class Americans. In light of that, urging liberals to “preach what they practice” just isn’t going to help anything. They are preaching what they practice, when they tell everyone to stay in school, do what they love, and explore their sexual identity. That advice just doesn’t work out nearly so well for people with fewer material and social resources. It certainly isn’t a promising foundation for a new bourgeois culture.
Affluent liberals have plenty to answer for, and working through the tensions in their current commitments will be a daunting task. Still, the charge of cultural hypocrisy may actually be ill-founded. They aren’t closet traditionalists who refuse to let the less-fortunate in on the secret. They’re silver-spooned bohemians who honestly don’t have any answers to the question of why non-elite life is still worth living.
I’m not sure how we’re going to navigate this deep cultural divide, but it might help to start with a better diagnosis. We may also need to accept that a common bourgeois culture probably isn’t in the cards for American society, at least not in the near future. Conservatives may still be hanging onto the bricks, but the mortar is just gone.
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I agree that those who display the virtues will do better and this has always been the case. But the ghettos have always been crime ridden. They were before and after. And there have always been those who have been gaming the system. The system may have changed. The gamers haven’t. The mafia arose out of this. They were certainly gaming the system. I just think it was much more prevalent back then and is not captured in statistics. The out-of-wedlock statistics cited above, for instance. My guess is that they are self-reporting. People lie. So I don’t put a lot of credence in the numbers before a certain date.
They try to be non-judgmental. Really hard. They don’t succeed, though. Judginess is more likely to get shifted around than it is to be diminished, it seems. Ergo, stuff like the mommy wars (better-off moms passing severe judgment on what were once minor parenting preferences).
And also stuff like judging your own quite forcibly over traditional matters (such as pregnancy before wedlock), at least among yourselves, even as you “other” lower classes by making a meal of refusing to judge them for the same thing – your own progeny are expected to act fully human; others’, maybe not so much.
Really? I think it would be hard to miss a 75% out of wedlock birthrate in any community.
Definitely. They are insanely judgmental, just not about the traditional faults and foibles.
Again, this is not what matters. We are not seeing a million conservatives associations fail because people have the wrong habits. We’re seeing almost no trying. So we need to think more to the root-
He is, but that’s not all I mean. Both men love, in Murray’s words,
what it is that makes “higher culture” “higher”
So while it’s true he doesn’t just mean highbrow culture, the idea of ordinary people not having moments of this anagnorisis – moments of elevation – appears to leave him morose.
Yes, but that would just make the upper classes cruelly indifferent, not suicidal themselves. It’s not just warm-heartedness about people he treats as lacking, but warm-heartedness about what’s timelessly beautiful about his cultural inheritance, and if your own heart is very hot, you might miss other hearts that, while not warm enough, exactly, are at least above freezing. If the blue elites have a lot of room-temperature hearts, that’s still better than them being totally frozen, and I think despair born from the rare warmth some conservatives have can make it look as if the blues are colder than they are.
If you expect to fail painfully because you have the wrong habits, it’s harder to gin up the courage to try. We tend not to try what we have no reason to believe we’ll be good at.
LOL. It’s about as hard data as you can find. From the birth certificate records.
It would really depend on whether you were part of that community. The statistics cited were for out-of-wedlock and not single parent out-of-wedlock births. It is much easier to notice a single-parent out-of-wedlock arrangement from one that isn’t.
This is completely correct.
This is also completely correct.
I’ll be going now, as you folks seem to have this handled.
I don’t believe the elites stay married at higher rates for any noble reasons, but simply because things like financial struggles that ruin many marriages aren’t the same level of threats to their marriages. I think the elites are more likely to get married in the first place because they run in circles with more attractive (in the all encompassing sense) potential mates.
Bingo. That, and eliminate government regulation/licensing. Make people have to work and make sure they have every opportunity to work. Then most problems go away.
Midge, this is all a lot of useless objections that refuse to face the question. Nothing that is new can be a matter of habit. Your series of objections, to the effect ultimately of proving that there is nothing new, so stop asking why we don’t try more, has worn my patience out completely.
I’m glad your view of conservatives in all the arenas where they don’t prosper is that they’re a bunch of cowards. Good luck!
I’ll give you this much, you are proving in your own case that habit beats trying something new-
This!
I do not buy this supposed “culture-envy” argument (sorry, @midge). Red state-of-minders blame the blue state-of-minders because we live among the people the Left has destroyed out here in flyover country. I’ve long said the godless secular “humanism” lived by the elites is something the underclass can ill afford, except, I guess, welfare makes it “affordable,” if you don’t count the soul-sucking aspect.
You would think where I live (Colorado), my experience of the underclass would be among the Latinos, but increasingly (and I mean, like, in the last 24 hours), it is blacks who exhibit all the signs of cultural degradation here. And, I’m not talking race (although it will easily be mischaracterized that way), but culture.
Black culture is toxic. Totally destructive to individuals, families, and any possibility of success in life. I see it in the grocery store and at the Kohl’s. I hear it in the way people talk and how they relate to their kids and others. Their absence in church on Sunday morning is notable.
There is no sense of obligation and certainly no sense of accountability to a Higher Power. Have you seen the videos of looting in Florida?? Thou shalt not steal, much?
I realize I’m being completely politically incorrect (I mean, we’re not supposed to notice that the looters are 99.9% black from 14 to 55 years old, right?), but I’m not going to be silent anymore about what I see going on and who I think is responsible: the Left. I’m sure the problems are just as dire among whites in Appalachia. But, the underlying cause is the same. It’s the post-modern, neo-Marxian, German Romanticism anti-reason/emotionalism, Epicurean nihilism… whatever-you-want-to-call-it crap coming from (typically) white left-wing elitists.
It’s shocking and sad how our nation has declined (the character of its people) in 40 years since I was a kid. It is a matter of justice for us to speak the truth about it. The Left has inflated a massive Bubble of Lies, and we’ve got the Pin.
I’m trying to understand what you mean by conservative associations. Can you give some examples?
You’re asking why we don’t try more. I haven’t called anyone cowards that I can see, only normal human beings: I think it rather cruel to set the bar of normal human conduct at “exceptionally heroic” and then call anyone who doesn’t meet that bar a “coward” – exceptional heroism being, well, exceptional, while cowards are exceptional in the other direction, leaving normal people in between.
Anyhow, what do you think the answer is?
Your comment reminds me of something I only recently learned but illustrates the difference in values from years ago. Until the early 1960s most public housing was not open to unmarried women with children. The intent was to discourage immoral behavior. The policies were changed because they were felt to be unfair and lack compassion.
What is it that causes these white elitists to lead less-chaotic lives themselves, then? Merely material prosperity?
Because they themselves live the values they denigrate. “It’s righteous for you black woman in New York city to have your fourth abortion or fourth fatherless child, but that wouldn’t be my choice. Who am I to judge, though.”
They work hard, get a gold-plated education, take responsibility for their children (the few they have), and exploit the victimhood they inspire in others to elevate their social status with their peers.
Oh, and then blame all ills on conservatives — or Donald Trump. Take your pick.
And my point was never one about envy, but that by living those values, by doing traditional, non-“post-modern, neo-Marxian, German Romanticism anti-reason/emotionalism, Epicurean nihilism… whatever-you-want-to-call-it crap” culture, even if you don’t have worthy opinions about what you’re living or why you’re doing it, you are still doing something to keep the non-“post-modern, neo-Marxian, German Romanticism anti-reason/emotionalism, Epicurean nihilism… whatever-you-want-to-call-it crap” culture alive, and passing it down to another generation, even if you should be sharing your lived, non-“post-modern, neo-Marxian, German Romanticism anti-reason/emotionalism, Epicurean nihilism… whatever-you-want-to-call-it crap” values more widely so that they’re passed down to even more people in the next generation.
What people say is important. So is what they do. Both communicate to the next generation.
Some universities are willing to graduate English majors who’ve never read Shakespeare! I’m not sure were talking about the same thing when we say “traditional culture.” Been to an “art” gallery lately?
And it’s not just the humanities. The “doings” of lefty elites will only redound to the benefit of their (few) children. Their policies despoil generations.
The solutions to the underclass problems are always the same: more money, or education. Way back in the 70s, Edward Banfield wrote in “The Unheavenly Cities” that the classes were not defined so much by how much money, but how far sighted they were. A common problem with the underclass was the need for immediate reward. School takes years to see the results, yet, the liberal answer is more and longer schooling. Banfield recommended shortening education to about the 10th grade, getting rid of the minimum wage, and getting these children into the working world, where a weekly paycheck was more rewarding than waiting 12 years for a diploma.
When a child from the ghetto enters school, chances are they already have learned to look for fast rewards and are poor at waiting. His book is in pdf online, and while it was controversial, he made a lot of sense. There are people who will never save a dime for the future, and those that will. It is also true as far as putting children after marriage.
I’d like to see more preaching like Wax’s.
We are more pro-life now than we used to be, and the pro life people did not give up.
Welfare is like a slavery, and it can rob a person of happiness and spiritual fulfillment.
I’d make it 8th, but let’s not quibble. Education needs to be cleansed of the post-modernists, from top to bottom.
That is a very interesting graph. There must be cultural phenomena rather than merely the official War on Poverty legislation (which started in 1964). That seems to have accelerated something that was already on the rise.
Another very interesting point is the mid 90s. There is a dip for all three demographics that is strong but very brief for Hispanics and Whites while being less dramatic but longer-lived for blacks.
Could it be the Welfare Reforms of that Gingrich congress? Again it seems to slightly predate that legislation. Maybe it was midnight basketball!
I can buy that, and probably should have made clearer that I was speaking in terms of judgements about others’ compliance with traditional “bourgeois” values.
We are talking about the same thing, more or less – Shakespeare, Da Vinci, Palestrina, JS Bach, the usual traditional fare. A lot of blues still love this stuff. Oddly, many of the blues who do love this stuff also love stuff we don’t consider traditional fare. So you’ll have blues who unironically love Brahms and traditional Ugandan music, as if one were no greater an achievement than the other, which tends to tick some conservatives (though not others) off.
It does seem that those blues interested in preserving Western tradition (and in my experience there are many) are less interested in preserving the hierarchy of what’s-better-than-what. But that hierarchy would also be pretty useless without actual cultural content to fill it, one reason to cooperate with blues interested in preserving that content even when their hierarchy is weak or strange.
There are English majors who haven’t read Shakespeare. There also remain many who have, as well as non-English-majors reading and acting in Shakespeare plays. Preserving the culture involves interest in seeking out the culture, even when it’s not all where it should be, I’d think. I agree it certainly would be better if blues were less standoffish about sharing the bits of traditional culture they’re still interested in with those unlike them politically.
We seem to be getting awfully good lately at stating the description/breadth/depth of the problem – on many fronts. I still think we have an obligation – to those near and dear, at least – to model our beliefs and priorities. Perhaps we can still plant seeds as we encourage ourselves and each other to:
“aspire to live a tranquil life, to mind your own affairs, and to work with your [own] hands, as we instructed you, 12that you may conduct yourselves properly toward outsiders and not depend on anyone.”
[1 Thessalonians 4:11-12, NABRE, HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.]
Sorry, my wording was confusing. You seem to be focused on music and the arts as “culture.” I’m talking about customs, habits, taboos, expectations… the rest of it in addition to the humanities.
And I certainly don’t see the “blues” as defenders or promulgators of the “traditional” humanities. Even Camille Paglia would argue with that notion. But, she’s an unusual lefty. She likes dead white men.
It’s one thing to be a musician performing with the symphony. It’s another to insist that African drum circles share equal time with classical compositions in elementary education. These are the people we’re supposed to work shoulder-to-shoulder with to save the West? We’re doomed.