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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.
Published in General
Solely because of their poor choices? No.
Substantially because of their poor choices? Probably.
At least for the majority.
Ah yes, because no one else here has ever lived in a poor illegal immigrant neighborhood, lost a house in foreclosure, or used a payday loan company … We’re all a bunch of elites who’ve never suffered with having enough money or rubbed shoulders with the poor, and as such, we’re all just talking out of our rears.
98&, according to him-
Seriously. Think harder next time Marci, you don’t know our life stories.
Quit with the bitterness & sarcasm. Nobody accused you of anything. See the smiley appended there? It’s supposed to suggest, maybe avoid this snide attitude.
You might want to think that the lady wanted to show some solidarity with me & a chose the apposite common experience; see, she remembers me! That’s a kind gesture. I think she’s right that we’re a small minority in this discussion. You could possibly leave it at that.
You’re probably wrong in that assumption.
I did not mean to insult you. I apologize if I did.
I’ve been poor too. I grew up with no money in a very wealthy town.
So I will hold my ground, that there is a lot of useless stereotyping in this thread.
You may be right. We might see as people catch up, so to speak.
Oh man. I’ve ridden tons of Greyhounds. But is it better or worse to have ridden grimy public transport in multiple countries?
Re: “A winning strategy for America”, are we talking about winning elections here, or something more than that? Political strategy is obviously a relevant further issue, but in the middle of the deluge you sometimes have to work pretty hard just to hang onto some semblance of truth, and some appreciation of justice. (In the long run, I think this tends to be pretty important for any enduring political strategy, too, though it doesn’t always win elections in the short term.)
I care about Western Civilization and, yes, high culture. I think MFR is right that liberals are doing quite a bit to keep it alive, which matters to me even if their motives are problematic in many respects. When people I have long seen as allies and fellow travelers are prepared to spit on cultural and political institutions in solidarity with the people they see as “their” poor, I can’t go along with that. I’m not helping to cut of our nose, just because a lot of people on the right hate America’s face. Now, that’s not to say that I don’t see any legitimate claims of justice coming from the “orange” camp. But you can’t adjudicate those fairly if your stronger impulse is towards validating the people whom many still see (somewhat sentimentally) as “real” America.
All lives matter, and all of our compatriots’ interests should be important to us. But you don’t get to keep calling the shots forever just because your grandparents helped to win WWII. If middle-class whites have lost cultural cohesion, and neo-Epicureans are now propping up a significant part of our political and cultural heritage, we need to adjust our future strategy accordingly.
You are right about my intention. :)
I think this is part of the political problem we have in this country. Politics is being driven by the stereotyping that marketers apply to selling their products.
I understand how we got from selling our ideals to everyone equally to trying to segment the political parties artificially.
If someone were to ask me, I’d say skip the marketing approach.
Basically the country is divided into two voting blocks, and we will find every type of person as we can identify them–age, income, geography, ethnicity, religion, education, and on–in both parties.
Don’t look for support among people according to some marketing identity. Look for support among people according to a set of ideals.
By the way, applying mass marketing methods to politics has caused a lot of the problems we are looking at today in terms of cultural divisions. We need to stop doing this because it leads to people walling themselves off into tribal factions.
Ma’am, I think all your cues are wrong, without exception! This is new & a bit strange.
All more or less true. To be honest, I don’t believe the left or the right has anything approaching an answer to improving the lives of the poor. Both are holding onto fundamentally incorrect assumptions about the modern world. The left that if the poor had resources (particularly education resources) distributed more fairly, they would do as well as those who are already successful, and the right that everyone can become self-sufficient if only they work hard and make better choices.
Neither side has anything close to even a correct understanding of the underlying problems, let alone any viable solutions. Sales pitches of snake oil are all both sides are offering. Can hardly blame people for finding the left’s snake oil more desirable.
I don’t know about your experience, but taking a Greyhound bus from downtown Chicago on Sunday afternoon is a good way to see poor people doing family things.
Tell me about it! It’s gruesome to hear the chattering classes lob their partisan retorts & ripostes at each other gradually obscuring that there is a real America there, mostly not something anyone can control…
Yup. Both have this much in common: Nobody not in the lower classes ever has to bother to even meet them. Some form of rational control ranging in-between big gov’t to the free market will do it.
Yup. At least the left has a traditional relation to the lower classes, for all the good it’s done. The right not only does not try, but puts up every oligarchic moralistic fence in the way of any cross-class solidarity it can think of.
These forms of retreat add up to the largest threat that the hatred & class divides of the old world will end up overtaking America. Sometimes I think, well, the new world has a good few centuries, but then the old world came back & took control of things again…
Titus, you make no sense to me. This is roughly how the conversation seems to me to have gone.
Titus: The problem for MFR’s “orange America” is that nothing has been done or built for them; they’ve been marginalized and left out. What institutions are there for them, besides the empty distributors of material “benefits”?
Rachel: There are churches, and the churches with which I have associated want very much to bring anyone and everyone into their pews.
Titus: The poor don’t want churches. What other sorts of institutions are there for them?
Rachel: There are community events and sports leagues and cultural resources and all those things that matter a lot to the life of my family and to neo-Epicurean liberals. Many of those things are really quite accessible to any interested party.
Titus: Your cultural events have nothing to do with anything. You are completely missing the point. The poor are left out. The parties have lost them. No one is really reaching out to them. No one wants to try.
Look, in our present arrangement, the people can have bread. They can have circuses. They can have fancy cultural experiences, and they can have God. If they don’t want any of that, I can’t see how the right diagnosis is, “No one cares or is willing to do anything for the poor.” I think the sources of our moral and spiritual malaise run pretty deep here, and we’re not going to be able to address them through a combination of breast-beating and excoriating the neo-Epicurean elites. I maintain that all of these cultural resources do matter, and we won’t be able to maintain them by losing ourselves in the wilderness in solidarity with the poor.
I wouldn’t be so sure that single mothers feel welcome in Church, and that goes double for single mothers who are on welfare or collecting benefits of some kind. Twenty years ago, I worked for Merry Maids, and my partner was a single mother. She had three kids with two fathers, neither of whom she was ever married to, neither of whom had any involvement with the kids. She was a very hard worker, and was doing everything she could to get her act together. Once, when we driving, she spoke wistfully about how she missed going to Church. I immediately started to explain that she would be welcome in Church; she put her hand up, and said absolutely nothing. She just kept her hand up. And I realized, sadly, that she probably had a point, and that in many cases she might not be as welcome in Church as I was suggesting she would be.
I come from a very religious background. I know a few people, like my parents, who are very sincere. And then there are a lot of people who go to Church when their kids are young because they believe it will instill discipline in the kids, but stop once the kids grow up, because they view Church as just another positive thing to do for their kids, and many of them probably wouldn’t appreciate lots of single mothers and their kids showing up at the Church social. I attended Catholic school with many kids whose parents didn’t even bring them to Church when they were kids, but those parents paid for Catholic school because they wanted to give their kids a good education: they didn’t care a fig about Christianity, and I promise you: they could not be counted on to be welcoming to the poor.
Not directly about your disagreements with Titus, but I’ll note that I think there is something to the fact that it is uncomfortable for the divorced to go to churches filled with married couples.
I often wonder how much of the correlation runs in this direction, rather than the assumed one. That is, you aren’t really that much more likely to stay married if you are regularly attending church, but that once you divorce, you stop attending church.
These are not claims of facts, just my open musings.
Frank, when you say that no one understands the problems of poverty, does that include you? Or do you think you have some answers? It’s a straight question, not rhetorical.
I think the poor are alienated. Short word, complicated thing. The moral and cultural and spiritual impacts of modernity can be pretty bruising. And have been, in their various ways, for centuries now!
Of course that big-picture diagnosis isn’t meant to cut off lower-level diagnoses, but I do think the populist rage is just unhelpful. (To put it mildly.) Sure, there’s a certain satisfaction in being able to blame someone for your cultural messes, but if the anger obscures more than it illuminates, and makes it harder to reach for solutions, you should be ready to dial the indignation down.
We can and should do certain things to help the poor, but yes, there will be limits to what is possible, because nature is what it is and we’re not totalitarians. But you don’t chuck your civilization in the garbage just because people are alienated. I care very much about, for instance, people overdosing on opioids, but I’m still taking my kids to the art institute, without apologies. And I don’t believe that’s irrelevant to keeping civilization alive.
Titus, we definitely do not agree on either (3) or (4). I think it’s extremely important to maintain and transmit our cultural heritage. This is not just a question of preferred pastimes. And I have watched a great many people I know and very much like, toss principles and personal relationships and other commitments on the pyre of populist rage. It seemed obligatory to them, because The Poor. Much has already been lost this way.
How much of that is the perception of the church versus having actually gone into a church and experienced shunning? It obviously depends on both the denomination and particular congregation, but my experience was that far from being shunned and condemned, single mothers were treated as heroes for not having had an abortion. Heck, having a child out of wedlock was such a non-issue that I had a youth pastor who kept his job when his own 16 year old got pregnant.
I find it an interesting contradiction in perception that single mothers assume that churches will hate and shun them, when I’ve been in churches that fall all over themselves to make them as welcome as possible. (Frankly, that suggest to me that the mothers have a better sense of morality than some churches, but then, I’m a judgmental jerk.)
I have no answers, but I do believe I have a slightly better handle on the problem than either side of the political aisle. It is a complicated subject that I am considering turning into a post. It is controversial though, and I hesitate to even bring it up with as quickly as these threads turn acrimonious.
I think culture matters, but I increasingly believe culture is lagging indicator. I realize that’s not a popular opinion.
People not being nice at church seems like the kind of ordinary human problem that will always exist to some extent, which doesn’t admit of widespread of systemic solutions. We’re simultaneously trying to maintain some traditional morals, and be welcoming to people who haven’t followed them. Christians are supposed to hate the sin and love the sinner, but that’s hard to do and people don’t always get it right.
I’m not dismissing this as a non-problem, but it’s the kind of problem that always exists and will never really be solved this side of Heaven.
Agreed, but I think that goes back to the point about our underclass is choosing to disassociate with cultural structures that help make their lives less dysfunctional. There’s a widespread attitude of “I can’t do that because that’s for rich/good/white people” without ever having tried. I’ll definitely grant your point about the “I can’t get married because I can’t afford to replicate Chelsea Clinton’s wedding” attitude among the poor — I remember the shocking conversation I had at 19 with a coworker. I said “I can’t imagine being a parent at 19”; she replied, “I can’t imagine being married at 19.”
I don’t know, if I had to guess, it’s probably the former, but when she held her hand up, I was forced to think about the Church people I knew, and I doubt most of them would have welcomed her. My parents would be nice to her: my parents are nice to everybody, because they take Christianity seriously, but there are lots of people in Church who don’t. The epicurean lifestyle Rachel describes is not just a purview of upper class liberals: lots of people go to Church for the sole reason that they think it will be good for their kids. Their kids. They could care less about anybody else’s kids, and a single mother with significant dysfunction in her background would be viewed as a threat to their kids.
I realize that there are all kinds of different Churches, and my experience is not universal, thank God. But I don’t blame single mothers for having some trepidation about getting involved in a Church-in many cases, their fears are well founded. And I don’t think it is quite accurate to say, “Oh, well, we all have to deal with people who aren’t nice to us.” That is true, but some people have to deal with it a lot more than others, and a single mother walking into a Church filled not with Christians but with epicureans will have to deal with an extraordinary amount of unpleasantness. I don’t blame them for being wary.
I was a Greyhound rider for a while also. In some corridors, Amtrak gets an unusual mix of customers, too.
I don’t think that’s because of the specifics of funds for weddings. I’ll grant that women are looking more in romance and relationships than men are by default, but let us admit that women have an interest in playing the field, just as men do.
The wisdom of it is a separate question.
This was a case of us comparing our lives at 19. I had just gotten married; she had just given birth. We both thought we were too young to live the life the other one was. That is one hundred percent a cultural thing, and frankly, I have no clue how to change that culture beyond allowing life to punish her behavior by cutting off all government subsidies, both direct like Medicaid and indirect like head of household tax filing.