Among the Bourgeoisophobes, Part 2
by David Brooks
04/06/2002 12:03:00 AM
THE BRUTALIST bourgeoisophobia of the Islamic extremists is pretty straightforward. The attitudes of
European etherealists are quite a bit more complicated. Europeans, of course, are bourgeois themselves, even
more so in some ways than Americans and Israelis. What they distrust about America and Israel is that these
countries represent a particularly aggressive and, to them, unbalanced strain of bourgeois ambition. No European
would ever acknowledge the category, but America and Israel are heroic bourgeois nations. The Israelis are
driven by passionate Zionism to build their homeland and make it rich and powerful. Americans are driven by
our Puritan sense of calling, the deeply held belief that we Americans have a special mission to spread our way
of life around the globe. It is precisely this heroic element of ordinary life that Europeans lack and distrust.
So the Europeans are all ambivalence. The British historian J.H. Plumb once declared that he loved America
(and he was indeed a great defender of the United States), but even his admiration for the country "was
entangled with anger, anxiety and at times flashes of hate." In his infuriatingly condescending and ultimately
appreciative portrait "America," the French modernist Jean Baudrillard wrote, "America is powerful and original;
America is violent and abominable. We should not seek to deny either of these aspects, nor reconcile them."
But Europeans do seek to deny them--because they simply can't remember what it's like to be imperially
confident, to feel the forces of history blowing at one's back, to have heroic and even eschatological aspirations.
Their passions have been quieted. Their intellectual guides have taught them that business is ignoble and striving is
vulgar. Their history has caused them to renounce military valor (good thing, too) and to regard their own relative
decline as a sign of greater maturity and wisdom. The European Union has a larger population than the United
States, and a larger GDP--and its political class has tried to construct an institutional architecture that will enable
it to rival America. But the imperial confidence is gone, along with the youthful sense of limitless possibility and
the unselfconscious embrace of ordinary striving.
So their internal engine is calibrated differently. They look with disdain upon our work ethic (the average
American works 350 hours a year--nearly nine weeks--longer than the average European). They look with
disdain upon what they see as our lack of social services, our relatively small welfare state, which rewards
mobility and effort but less gracefully cushions misfortune. They look with distaste upon our commercial culture,
which favors the consumer but does not ease the rigors of competition for producers. And they look with fear
upon our popular culture, which like some relentless machine seems designed to crush the local cultures that
stand in its way.
To European bourgeoisophobes, America is the radioactive core of what Ignacio Ramonet, editor and publisher
of Le Monde Diplomatique, recently called "The Other Axis of Evil" in a front-page essay. It controls the IMF
and the World Bank, the institutions that reward the rich and punish the poor, Ramonet claimed. American
institutions such as the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Cato Institute promulgate
the ideology that justifies exploitation, he continued. The American military provides the muscle to force-feed
economic liberalism to the world.
They look at us uncomprehendingly when our leaders declare a global assault on terror and evil. They see us as
a mindless Rambo, a Mike Tyson with rippling muscles and no brain. Where the Islamists see us as a decadent
slut, the European etherealists see us as a gun-slinging cowboy. The Islamists think we are too spoiled and
comfortable, the Europeans think we are too violent and impulsive. Each side's view of us is a mix of Hollywood
images (Marilyn Monroe for the Islamists, John Wayne for the Europeans), mass-media distortions, envy-driven
stereotypes, and self-justifying delusions. But each side's vision springs from a deeper bourgeoisophobia--the
prejudice that people who succeed in worldly affairs must be morally and intellectually backward. This article of
faith governs the way even many sophisticated Europeans and Muslims react to us.
AFTER SEPTEMBER 11, there was a widespread fear in Europe and in certain American circles that the
United States would lash out violently and pointlessly. In fact, the United States has never behaved this way. It
was slow to respond to Pearl Harbor; it was too timid in its responses to the USS Cole and other attacks. But to
many Europeans, who must believe in our mindless immaturity in order to look themselves in the mirror each
morning, it was obvious that the United States would shoot first and think afterwards.
These Europeans have assigned themselves the self-flattering role of being Athens to our Rome. That's what all
the talk about coalition-building is about; the mindless American car dealer with the big guns should allow himself
to be guided by the thoughtful European statesman, who is better able to think through the unintended
consequences of any action, and to understand the darker complexities. Much European commentary about
America since September 11 has had a zoological tone. The American beast did not know that he was
vulnerable to attack (we Europeans have long understood this). The American was traumatized by this
discovery. The American was overcompensating with an arms build-up that was pointless since, with his
gigantisme militaire, he already had more weapons than he could ever need.
Furthermore, the American doesn't see the deeper causes of terrorism, the poverty, the hopelessness. America
should really be spending more money on foreign aid (it's interesting that Europeans, who are supposed to be
less materialistic than we are, inevitably think more money can solve the world's problems, while Americans tend
to point to religion or ideas).
"What America never takes a moment to consider is that, despite its mightiness, it is a young country with much
to learn. It had no real direct experience of the First and Second World Wars," declared a writer in the New
Statesman, echoing a sentiment that one heard across the Continent as well. America, many Europeans feel, has
no experience with the Red Brigades, the IRA, the Basque terrorists. Americans have no experience with
Afghanistan. The dim boobies have no idea what sort of instability they are about to cause. They will go
marching off as they always do, naively confident of themselves, yet inevitably unaware of the harm they shall do.
Much of the reaction, in short, has been straight out of Graham Greene's novel "The Quiet American." The hero
of that book, Alden Pyle, is a well-intentioned, naive, earnest manchild who dreams of spreading democracy but
only stirs up chaos. "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused," one of the
characters says about him. Much of the European intellectual response to the American war has less to do with
actual evidence than with figures from literature and the mass media. Sometimes you get the impression that the
only people who took the images of Rambo, the Lone Ranger, and Superman seriously were the European
bourgeoisophobes who needed cliches to hate.
When the etherealized bourgeoisophobe goes to practice politics, he instinctively dons the pinstripes of the
diplomat. Diplomacy fits his temperament. It demands subtlety instead of clarity, self-control instead of power,
patience instead of energy, nuance instead of restlessness. Diplomacy is highly formal, highly elitist, highly
civilized. Most of all, it is complex. Complexity is catnip to the etherealized bourgeoisophobe. It paralyzes brute
action, and justifies subtle and basically immobile gestures, calibrations, and modalities. Bourgeoisophobes have
a simple-minded faith that whatever the problem is, the solution requires complexity. Any decisive effort to
change the status quo--to topple Saddam, to give up on Arafat, to foment democracy in the Arab world--will
only make things worse.
We Americans have our own bourgeoisophobes, of course. If I pulled from my shelves all the books about the
moral backwardness of the enterprising middle classes, I could stack them to the ceiling. I could start with the
works of the Transcendentalists, then move through Dreiser, Mencken, Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair
Lewis. Then we could skim swiftly through all the books that bemoan the moral, cultural, and intellectual vapidity
of suburbanites, students, middle managers, and middle Americans: "Babbitt," "The Man in the Gray Flannel
Suit," "The Souls of Black Folk," "The Lonely Crowd," "The Organization Man," "The Catcher in the Rye," "The
Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism," "The Affluent Society," "Death of a Salesman," "Soul on Ice," "The
Culture of Narcissism," "Habits of the Heart," "The Closing of the American Mind," "Earth in the Balance,"
"Slouching Towards Gomorrah," "Jihad vs. McWorld," just about every word ever written by Kevin Phillips and
Michael Moore, and just about every novel of the last quarter century, from "Rabbit is Rich" through "The
Corrections." It's a Mississippi flood of pessimism. As Catherine Jurca recently wrote in "White Diaspora: The
Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel," "As a body of work, the suburban novel asserts that one
unhappy family is a lot like the next, and there is no such thing as a happy family."
The pessimism falls into several categories. There is straightforward, left-wing bourgeoisophobia from writers
who think commercial culture has ravaged our souls. Then there is the right-wing variant that says it has made us
spiritually flat, and so turned us into comfort-loving Last Men. Then there is the conservative pessimism that
purports to be a defense of the heroic bourgeois culture America embodies while actually showing little faith in it.
Writers of this school argue that the solid capitalist values America once possessed have been corrupted by
intellectual currents coming out of the universities--as if the meritocratic capitalist virtues were such delicate
flowers that they could be dissolved by the acid influence of Paul de Man.
It all adds up to a lot of dark foreboding, and after September 11, it doesn't look that impressive. The events of
the past several months have cast doubt on a century of mostly bourgeoisophobe cultural pessimism. Somehow
the firemen in New York and the passengers on Flight 93 behaved like heroes even though they no doubt lived
in bourgeois homes, liked Oprah, shopped at Wal-Mart, watched MTV, enjoyed their Barcaloungers, and
occasionally glanced through Playboy. Even more than that, it has become abundantly clear since September 11
that America has ascended to unprecedented economic and military heights, and it really is not easy to explain
how a country so corrupt to the core can remain for so long so apparently successful on the surface. If we're so
rotten, how can we be so great?
It could be, as the bourgeoisophobes say, that America thrives because it is spiritually stunted. It's hard to know,
since most of us lack the soul-o-meter by which the cultural pessimists apparently measure the depth of other
people's souls. But we do know that despite the alleged savagery, decadence, and materialism of American life,
Americans still continue to react to events in ways that suggest there is more to this country than "Survivor," Self
magazine, and T.G.I. Friday's.
Confronted with the events of September 11, Americans have not sought to retreat as soon as possible to the
easy comfort of their great-rooms (on the contrary, it's been others around the world who have sought to close
the parenthesis on these events). President Bush, a man derided as a typical philistine cowboy, has framed the
challenge in the most ambitious possible terms: as a moral confrontation with an Axis of Evil. He has chosen the
most arduous course. And the American people have supported him, embraced his vision every step of the
way--even the people who fiercely opposed his election.
This is not the predictable reaction of a decadent, commercial people. This is not the reaction you would have
predicted if you had based your knowledge of America on the extensive literature of cultural decline. Nor would
you have been able to predict the American reaction to recent events in the Middle East, which also differs
markedly from the European one. Just as the French anti-globalist activist Jose Bove, heretofore most famous
for smashing up a McDonald's, senses that he has something in common with Yasser Arafat (whom he visited in
Ramallah on March 31), most Americans sense that they have something in common with Israel in this fight.
Most Americans can see the difference between nihilistic terrorism and a democracy trying fitfully to defend
itself. And most Americans seem willing to defend the principles that are at stake here, even in the face of global
criticism and obloquy. In this, as in so much else, George Bush reflects the meritocratic capitalist culture of which
he is a product. While the rest of the world was lost in a moral fog, going on about the "cycle of violence" as if
bombs set themselves off and the language of human agency and moral judgment didn't apply, the Bush
administration, by and large, has been clear.
IN THIS and many other aspects of the war on terrorism, the American leaders and the American people have
been stubborn and steadfast. Just as the American people patiently persevered through a century of fighting
fascism and communism, there is every sign they will patiently persevere in the conflict against terrorism, which is
really a struggle against people who despise our way of life.
Maybe the bourgeoisophobes were wrong from the first. Maybe they were wrong to think that 90 percent of
humanity is mad to seek money. Maybe they were wrong to think that wealth inevitably corrupts. Maybe they
were wrong to regard themselves as the spiritual superiors of middle-class bankers, lawyers, and traders. Maybe
they were wrong to think that America is predominantly about gain and the bitch-goddess success. Maybe they
were wrong to think that power and wealth are a sign of spiritual stuntedness. Maybe they were wrong to
treasure the ecstatic gestures of rebellion, martyrdom, and liberation over the deeper satisfactions of ordinary life.
And if they weren't wrong, how does one explain the fact that almost all their predictions turned out to be false?
For two centuries America has been on the verge of exhaustion or collapse, but it never has been exhausted or
collapsed. For two centuries capitalism has been in crisis, but it never has succumbed. For two centuries the
youth/the artists/the workers/the oppressed minorities were going to overthrow the staid conformism of the
suburbs, but in the end they never did. Instead they moved to the suburbs and found happiness there.
For two centuries there has been this relentless pattern. Some new bourgeoisophobe movement or figure
emerges--Lenin, Hitler, Sartre, Che Guevara, Woodstock, the Sandinistas, Arafat. The new movement is
embraced. It is romanticized. It is heralded as the wave of the future. But then it collapses, and the
never-finally-disillusioned bourgeoisophobes go off in search of the next anti-bourgeois movement that will
inspire the next chapter in their ever-disappointed Perils of Pauline journey.
Perhaps, on the other hand, September 11 will cause more Americans to come to the stunning and revolutionary
conclusion that we are right to live the way we do, to be the way we are. Maybe it is now time to put intellectual
meat on the bones of our instinctive pride, to acknowledge that the American way of life is not only successful,
but also character-building. It inculcates virtues that account for American success: a certain ability to see
problems clearly, to react to setbacks energetically, to accomplish the essential tasks, to use force without
succumbing to savagery. Perhaps ordinary American life mobilizes individual initiative, and the highest, not just
the crassest aspirations. Maybe Baudrillard, that infuriatingly appreciative Frenchman, had it right when he wrote
about America, "We [Europeans] philosophize about a whole host of things, but it is here that they take shape. .
. . It is the American mode of life, that we judge naive or devoid of culture, that gives us the completed picture of
the object of our values."
Because the striking thing is that, for all their contempt, the bourgeoisophobes cannot ignore us. They can't just
dismiss us with a wave and get on with their lives. The entire Arab world, and much of the rest of the world, is
obsessed with Israel. Many people in many lands define themselves in opposition to the United States. This is
because deep down they know that we possess a vitality that is impressive. The Europeans regard us as
simplistic cowboys, and in a backhanded way they are acknowledging the pioneering spirit that motivates
America--the heroic spirit that they, in the comfort of their welfare states, lack. The Islamic extremists regard us
as lascivious hedonists, and in a backhanded way they are acknowledging both our freedom and our happiness.
Maybe in their hatred we can better discern our strengths. Because if the tide of conflict is rising, then we had
better be able to articulate, not least to ourselves, who we are, why we arouse such passions, and why we are
absolutely right to defend ourselves.
weeklystandard.com.
Again, thanks to Westi on RWET
Message 17371451 |
