Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There

by David Brooks

Each week the paper describes a particular wedding in great detail, and the subtext of each of these reports is that all this humongous accomplishment is a mere fluke of chance. These people are actually spunky free spirits who just like to have fun.

There were local clubs where town fathers gathered to exchange ethnic jokes and dine on lamb chops topped with canned sauces—cream of mushroom, cream of asparagus, cream of leek. (People didn’t worry about cholesterol then, since it had not yet become unfashionable to get sick and die.)

The WASP aesthetic sense was generally lamentable—Mencken said Protestant elites had a “libido for the ugly”—and their conversation, by all accounts, did not sparkle with wit and intelligence.

When Senator Barry Goldwater attempted to play golf at the restricted Chevy Chase Club, he was told the club was restricted. “I’m only half Jewish, so can’t I play nine holes?” he is said to have replied.

Tocqueville’s principle of revolutions proved true: as social success seems more possible for a rising group, the remaining hindrances seem more and more intolerable.

Marx warned that “the more a ruling class is able to assimilate the most prominent men [or women] of the dominated classes, the more stable and dangerous its rule.”

“Romantic literature glorified strong passions, unique emotions, and special deeds. It despised normalcy, foresight, concern with customary affairs, and attention to feasible goals—everything of which the middle class was a daily example.”

But just as in the age of gentility hypocrisy was vice paying homage to virtue, so today among the Bobos rugged gear is comfort paying homage to adventure.

Keats’s dictum “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of the imagination.” I don’t know what that means, but it sounds elevated.

Marx once wrote that the bourgeois takes all that is sacred and makes it profane. The Bobos take everything that is profane and make it sacred.

There are so many academic theoreticians writing about sexual transgressions that orgies must come to resemble an Apache dance at tourist season, done less for the joy of it than to please the squads of sociology professors who have flown in to quote Derrida.

We feel we are less strict with our children, but in fact we intervene in their lives far more than did parents in the 1950s. In Tom Sawyer, for example, Aunt Polly may have tried to civilize Tom with beatings and strict table etiquette, but she also allowed him hours of unsupervised time to wander and adventure. Today we don’t adhere to that etiquette, but we don’t allow much wandering, either. Instead, we shepherd kids from one adult-organized activity to another.

The result is a set of social regulations constructed to encourage pleasures that are physically, spiritually, and intellectually useful while stigmatizing ones that are useless or harmful. In this way the Protestant Work Ethic has been replaced by the Bobo Play Ethic, which is equally demanding. Everything we do must serve the Life Mission, which is cultivation, progress, and self-improvement.

They go into nature to behave unnaturally. In nature animals flee cold and seek warmth and comfort. But Bobo naturalists flee comfort and seek cold and deprivation. They do it to feel more alive and because their life is a series of aptitude tests, and so an adventure vacation becomes one too.