Nobody wants to be called a yuppie these days. As a social phenomenon, the yuppies, with their power suits and moussed hair, are now looked back upon with about as much affection as the Hitler youth. They were pushy and arrogant, yet they seemed to be everywhere. So where did they all go? David Brooks ventures an amusing answer in Bobos in Paradise, in which he defines and describes a new social class, the 'bourgeois bohemians', or bobos. A bobo combines the solid fiscal sensibility of the village burgher with the daring lifestyle choices of the left bank. Brooks thinks bobos reconcile the great social cleavage of the 1960s between the squares and the counterculture.
Bobos in Paradise is a very funny, entertaining book, and it's highly readable. Brooks is a very clever salesman -- much more so than his brutally honest predecessor in 'comic sociology', Paul Fussell, whose 1983 book *Class* is a much more pointed analysis of the American social system. Fussell heartlessly dissects and illustrates his three major classes, i.e. upper, middle and lower, all of which he sees as roiling moshpits of status consciousness and envy. Brooks is much less brave: as a self-professed bobo, he only tweaks his upper-middle-class, book-buying, bobo audience, satirizing bobo sensibilities yet carefully avoiding any violations of serious bobo taboos. He's good at seeming to be a bad boy.
But bobos aren't upper-middle class, you protest! Doesn't Brooks himself identify them as the nation's new 'upper class'? .... Fussell, wherever he is these days, would chide Brooks for missing the ways in which bobos are in fact achingly middle class.
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Fussell nails down the primary distinction between uppers and middles: uppers don't care what other people think of them; middles, on the other hand, inhabit a very universe of social insecurity, made manifest in slavish devotion to correct tastes and trends. In fact, I'd argue very little has changed in the overall American class structure since Fussell wrote Class, except that the upper-middle class have simply decided they'll ape bohemian egomaniacs instead of upper-class twits. This is not insignificant, in that the upper middles dictate much of the nation's popular culture, but it doesn't mean the bobos have supplanted the real upper class, either.
Brooks is also very, very kind to bobos in assuming they're so generally beneficent, and that they're likely to be such a stable, self-perpetuating phenomenon. When times are good, it's easy for people to spend their money trying to appear socially correct and even trendy. But these bobo characteristics don't seem very deeply rooted.
Brooks's chapter on bobos' spiritual lives exposes their deracination. Brooks makes a facile identification of a 'civil society' that exhibits 'social cohesion' with true spirituality. But bobos can't re-root themselves in the spiritual depths of a genuine faith by acquiring a few of its liturgical accoutrements. Buying a 1950s-style toaster doesn't transform your life into Ward and June Cleaver's -- it's just a toaster, in the end. In the same way, the bobos who collect congenial bits of ritual from a variety of religious traditions don't get any closer to God, even if it does make them feel vaguely better.
It's only self-denial that opens up the depths of true spiritual commitment. From Brooks' description, this crucial little nugget is completely indigestible to bobos, whose personal autonomy must override any demands from another power, no matter how high. The only rein upon this autonomy, predictably, is peer pressure -- in bobos' case, their abhorrence of appearing intolerant or 'fanatical'.
To be fair, Brooks realizes all this, and tries to show how bobos might sidestep this dilemma. He calls the bobo spiritual compromise 'choice reconciled with commitment', and suggests that 'maybe it can work'. Later, though, he admits that 'the thing we [bobos] are in danger of losing is our sense of belonging'. But belonging to what? At this point Brooks retreats, like a good bobo must, from pressing the issue deeper. It would be too dangerously fanatical to ask gauche questions about whether or not God, well, exists -- and if so, if he can make any demands on us.
As Brooks admits, '[bobos] prefer a moral style that doesn't shake things up' (p. 250). But this is again a hopelessly middle-class validation of the status quo. When conventionality and nicely-judged social respectability trump belief, then choice wins, commitment loses. Committed believers are therefore anathema to the bobo ethic. Bobos are afraid of any power that might upset their little worlds, since deep down they know those worlds float untethered on a shallow sea of trivial lifestyle choices.
Herein lies the most serious criticism of boboism, which Brooks turns tail and scampers away from: it is shallow, especially when confronting questions of life, death and eternity. Bobos too will die, no matter how many decaf lattes they drink, no matter how often they get in tune with nature's rhythms on their eco-holidays.
So is the bobo way of life here to stay, like Brooks thinks? I doubt it. Their upper-middle class sensibilities will surely long be with us, but who knows what fashions they'll adopt when their current bohemian trendiness goes stale? For now, though, they're infesting America much as the yuppies once did, and Brook's entertaining book at least gives us the chance to chuckle about it.
