Sociology concepts and applications

Bobos in Paradise

Who is a Bobo? David Brooks thinks that anybody, who is mixed up, could be a possible Bobo in this new millenium. You're a Bobo if you're an intellectual with your very own market niche. You are a Bobo if you are a "compassionate conservative." You are a "Bobo" if your orthodoxy is flexible ("Flexidoxy" type). You are a Bobo if you are a bourgeois and a bohemian too (Bourgeois bohemian). In American coffee shops and smart magazine ads, Bobos are now models. Not beatniks or Babbitts anymore but some of each; since a Bobo is an anti-elitist elite; they stand for the dream of virtue crowned with success!

"Bobo" is David Brooks' compound of bourgeois and bohemian -- an acronym for America's new emerging class of the millenium. That's how David Brooks took on the new upper class in his "Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There" (published by Simon & Schuster, 2000).

When and how did the Bobos emerge? David Brooks explained in a fascinating way: First they were baby boomers. They entered high school, then college and became hippies and yippies. They lived together, then went to work and transformed themselves into dinks (double income, no kids). Then they began to make money and became yuppies (young upwardly mobile urban professionals). Now they run multibillion-dollar dot-coms that didn't even exist five years ago and they have a new nickname-- that is Bobo. "Bobos in Paradise" is a tragic book, although Brooks branded it as "comic sociology."

No! It definitely is not a simple book of laughter. A Lot of what Brooks said in this book is to be taken seriously. With his good sense of humor and an incisive wit, Brooks depicts the origin and the growth of Bobo culture (a culture which according to Brooks has "fused the sixties and the eighties on one side and those who reject the fusion on the other"). He is right to show that materialism still rules the day, but it is wrapped in earth tones and handmade soaps. He is also right when he points out that the "the hedonism of Woodstock mythology has been domesticated and now serves as a management tool for the Fortune 500."

Brooks relates some interesting social history while poking fun at Bobos. He says the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) establishment died in the sixties when the old-boy college admissions system gave way to tests. This began to produce a "meritocracy," which has come to power only in recent years and is beginning to impose its values and social code on the country.

his gave birth to the cult of the Bobos. Brooks says, "These Bobos define our age. They are the new establishment. Their hybrid culture is the atmosphere we all breathe. Their status codes now govern social life. Their moral codes give structure to our personal lives."

The tragic paradox of the whole book lies in the mindset of the author himself. Brooks eventually is also a "mixed-up" Bobo which he admitted in an interview with Gwen Ifill of the "News Hour" ("Yeah, I consider myself a Bobo with bad grades. If I had studied harder, I could have got into Harvard, and really made all the money and had the really big kitchen"). Of course he starts his book jeering at the Bobos (and continues to do that for about 47 pages). He ridicules and caricatures the new bankers who sit in coffeehouses listening to alternative music, He scoffs at the artsy and the rich types, who love Starbucks and Pottery Barn, bookshelves and Crate & Barrel and whose chopping tables are copied fashions from the farm of French peasants -- a type whose anxieties include how to spend money without betraying the bohemians

Till there it is okay. But the problem starts when Brooks attempts to give authenticity to this newfound culture with all its new sense of taste and style. He starts appreciating the Bobo culture because of its "sober" bourgeois achievement, which takes into it the creative, and the spontaneous element of the sixties. On one level he scoffs at those Bobos who think $ 10K outdoor Jacuzzi is crass but $20K slate shower reflects simple rhythm of life. Yet on another level he appreciates this new upper class style which is based on the display of sufficient taste to know what the best is and to choose it -- whether the best coffee, the best food, the best building materials, or whatever. He has his full support for them who find that it is not okay to spend extravagantly on something for display along; it is okay to spend extravagantly on something that is useful in enhancing one's authentic personality.