Cultural Globalization

By drawing previously isolated, autarkic, or otherwise independent communities into the global economy, it tends to lead to increased diversity within cultures at the expense of diversity between cultures. You can get sushi in Montreal and poutine in Tokyo, but the result is that serious “otherness” becomes harder to find around the planet even as our own countries — and our immediate surroundings — become increasingly diverse.

- Andrew Potter

La Vie Boheme

I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it.

I am.

- Henry Miller

The insecurity and relative deprivation of the artists’ lifestyle is often described as an advantage over the staid existence of buttoned-down professionals, and in this way artists signal the superiority of their existence over both the poor and the privileged. Says Shappy, a local performer:

I don’t think [yuppies] have any creative gumption. Yes they may take chances on a business deal or an ad campaign or something stupid. . . but they don’t have the balls to put it in play in their own personal lives. And when they see people living I think they’re jealous of the artist’s lifestyle, wishing they could feel like they could be free and live on macaroni and cheese and not have to worry about these accounts and their bills and their credit cards and their SUVs, and their blah, blah, blah. You know, I think a lot of people want to be more bohemian, but they don’t want to take the chance on actually living the life as a bohemian. They’re too insecure without their credit cards.

- Richard Lloyd

conspicuous consumption

The utility of articles valued for their beauty depends closely upon the expensiveness of the articles. A hand-wrought silver spoon of a commercial value of some ten to twenty dollars is not ordinarily more serviceable than a machine-made spoon of the same material. It may not even be more serviceable than a machine-made spoon of some base metal, such as aluminium, the value of which may be no more than ten cents. If a close inspection should show that the supposed hand-wrought spoonwere in reality only a very clever citation of hand-wrought goods but an imitation so cleverly wrought as to give the same impression of line and service to any but a minute examination by a trained eye, the utility of the article including the gratification which the user derives from its contemplation as an object of beauty would immediately decline by some eighty or ninety per cent, or even more. The superior gratification derived from the use and contemplation of costly and supposedly beautiful products is commonly in great measure a gratification of our sense of costliness, masquerading under the name of beauty. The requirement of conspicuous wastefulness is not commonly present, consciously, in our canons of taste, but it is none the less present as a constraining norm, selectively shaping and sustaining our sense of what is beautiful, and guiding our discrimination with respect to what may legitimately be approved as beautiful and what may not.

- Thorstein Veblen

Communist China

Rural America

We have just crossed the meat loaf line in America, that invisible divide in the landscape across which restaurants are far less likely to have sun-dried tomato concoctions and far more likely to have, gravy.

We come across American-made cars and bumper stickers such as: “Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Fords” and “Warning: In Case of Rapture, This Vehicle Will Be Unmanned. We have found an entirely different attitude toward money. A lot of people don’t have much, even though they don’t exactly look poor. Rural America has suffered some appalling economic blows over the past few decades—falling commodity prices, the decimation of small manufacturing plants, farm after farm going bankrupt. While many young people move away, those who remain decide that money is not their god. There is intense social pressure not to put on airs. In many rural precincts, if you had some money and tried to drive a Mercedes, you’d be asking for trouble. If you hired a cook for a dinner party, people would wonder who died and made you queen.

If we’d continued to rural America, we would have entered a giant deflation machine. Gas is somehow fifty cents cheaper a gallon, parking tickets are three dollars, and there are racks and racks of blouses at the Dollar General for $9.99. There are no Saks Fifth Avenues, Neiman Marcuses, or Tiffanys in these rural regions, just Kohl’s and Value City, and it’s nice to be in a place where you can afford nearly everything for sale (when you’re in a city or an inner-ring suburb, you are constantly afflicted with high-end products ridiculously out of your price range).

In many small towns, you can set yourself a goal: Try to spend twenty dollars a person on dinner. You can order the most expensive thing on the menu—steak au jus, seafood delight, “slippery beef” pot pie, whatever—and you probably won’t be able to do it. You can ask the locals to direct you to the nicest restaurant in town; they’ll send you to a Red Lobster or an Applebees. You’ll spy a restaurant that seems from the outside to have some pretensions—maybe a “Les Desserts” glass cooler for the key lime pie and tapioca pudding. But you’ll check out the entrée prices and realize that you didn’t crack that twenty dollar barrier.

- David Brooks

Anticipatory Hedonism

If you study people as they shop, you quickly perceive that the economists’ model of human behavior—in which rational actors calculate costs and benefits doesn’t explain the crucial choices. (Why do some people fall in love with Jaguars but not Corvettes?) Nor does Thorstein Veblen’s model, in which consumers are involved in a status race to keep up with the Joneses. (Do you really think that’s how you select your purchases? And if you don’t, what makes you think everyone else is more shallow and status-crazed than you are? Furthermore, in a decentralizing world, which Joneses are you supposed to keep up with, anyway?

The key to consumption is not calculation or emulation, it’s aspiration. Shopping, at least for non-necessities, a form of daydreaming. People wander through stores browsing for dream kindling. They are looking for things that inspire them to tell fantasy tales about themselves. That apple corer at Crate and Barrel can help you make those pies you’ve always savored; you can imagine the aromas and the smiles when you bring them out for dessert. That drill from Sears can help you build a utility closet; you can imagine the organized garage and the satisfaction of having everything in its place. That necklace is just what your wife would love; you can imagine the joy she will feel when you give it to her.

Often the pleasure that shoppers get from anticipating an object is greater than the pleasure they get from owning it. Once an item ceases to fire their imagination—when it no longer inspires a story about some brighter future—then they lose interest in it, and their imagination goes off in search of new and exciting things to dream about and buy. (Kids can go through this process with dispiriting speed, as anybody can tell you on a Christmas afternoon.)

People might browse through things they cannot possibly afford, simply because the pleasure they get from daydreaming in a luxury showroom compensates for the frustration of not being able to buy anything. The shoppers may play a distinctly modern game: They know that Gatorade won’t make them jocks, that Nike sneakers won’t make them jump like Mike. At the same time, they enjoy the fantasies and are happy to play along. Sometimes shopping sets off a dream or a sensation that is actually revealing and true. In Virginia Woolf’s short story “The New Dress,” a woman tries on a dress:

Suffused with light, she sprang into existence. Rid of cares and wrinkles, what she had dreamed of herself was there—a beautiful woman. Just for a second…there looked at her, framed in the scrolloping mahogany, a gray-white, mysteriously smiling, charming girl, the core of herself, the soul of herself; and it was not true vanity only, not only self-love that made her think it good, tender and true.

Woolf beautifully captured the way the woman’s vision has both the quality of hallucination—it exists for a moment, the woman’s cares and wrinkles vanish—but also the quality of truth, because in this moment, the woman sees her truest and best self, which does exist deep down.

People tend to buy things that set off light shows in their imaginations, which fit into the daydreams. For many people, shopping is its own joy, a way of envisioning a better life to come. In his book The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, Colin Campbell calls this desiring/consuming!daydreaming state “modern autonomous imaginative hedonism.” He is describing the hedonism of the not there yet. This is an imaginative hedonism rather than a sensual hedonism: When a person is deciding what to buy, she is not experiencing the good by merely fantasizing about what the experience of the good will be like. This is not an aristocratic Marie Antoinette—style hedonism practiced by people who already have access to everything. Rather, it’s a middle-class Walter Mitty hedonism practiced by people—regardless of their current economic situation who hope to fulfill their ideals someday.

Nor is it entirely benign. Campbell says that shoppers suffer from a “pleasurable discomfort”—pleasurable because they enjoy living in their daydreams, discomforting because shoppers are aware that they remain, in real life, unfulfilled. Still, shoppers are bathed in hope. The products they confront might be trivial baubles or shams, but shoppers get caught up in the romance and spend optimistically if not always wisely. Campbell argues that shopping is not the opposite of working. Shopping is not about instant gratification while work is about deferred gratification. Both activities are part of the same process of pursuing satisfaction.

The magazine stand, the department store, and the mall are all arenas for fantasy. The more upscale you go the more imaginatively evocative the stores become--Cartier is less utilitarian than Dollar General. Lamborghini is more fantasy-oriented than Ford. People with money flock toward things that don’t only serve a purpose but stir the heart. They are drawn by their imagination to move and improve and chase their fantasy visions of their own private heaven. The cash register is a gateway to paradise.

- David Brooks

Serious Play

I was out at the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, recently, and everybody there was dressed for a glacier climb, with boots, rugged khaki pants, and carabiners around their belts with cell phones hanging down. It’s like going into a nightclub where everybody is constantly shoving their endurance cleavage in your face.

Then I drove over to the store where these Microsofties buy this sort of gear, the 80,000-square-foot REI emporium in Seattle. It’s a store that sells leisure stuff to people who spend their leisure hours strenuously, or at least would like to look like they do.

To get there, I drove my rented minivan to downtown Seattle and parked it amidst the muddied-up sport-utes in the RET garage. I walked past the postage-stamp forest the RET people have landscaped as a place for customers to test-ride their mountain bikes. After a trip up the slate-floored elevator, I was on a large front balcony with huge wooden benches. A plaque on each reassures us that the wood used for the bench was blown down in 1995; no trees were murdered in the making of this rest spot. Up above there are clocks that tell the current time atop Mount Everest and the north face of Eiger in the Swiss Alps, in case you want to make a call there.

I walked through the front door and found myself a few steps in front of the ice-ax section. Out in front of me stretched a great expanse of ordeal-oriented merchandise, aisle upon aisle of snowshoes, crampons, kayaks, tents, and parkas, a daunting profusion of equipment options. I must admit I began feeling as if I were suffering from oxygen deprivation. The goal of reaching the coffee shop upstairs at the store’s summit seemed an absurdity. I was like a character in a Jon Krakauer book. Dazed by this bewildering environment, I knew only that I must somehow summon the strength to trudge on.

To my right as I entered there was a museum of outdoor gear, so I could enjoy a little edifying foreplay before I got down to the serious shopping. At the far end of the museum was the climbing wall, at 65 feet the largest freestanding climbing structure in the world.

It wasn’t the salespeople that made my brain spin. I knew they’d be products of Seattle’s culture of hiking shorts macho. They bounce around the store displaying their enormous calves, looking like escapees from the Norwegian Olympic Team. Nor was it my fellow customers that put me in this state. I was ready for squads of super-fit software designers with glacier glasses hanging from Croakies around their necks (because you can never tell when a 600-foot mountain of ice might suddenly roll into town, sending off hazardous glare).

The thing that got to me was the load of requirements. If you are going to spend any leisure time with members of the educated class, you have to prove you are serious about whatever it is you are doing. “Serious” is the highest compliment Bobos use to describe their leisure activities. You want to be a serious skier or a serious tennis player or a serious walker or a serious cross-country skier or even a serious skateboarder. People engaged in any of these pastimes are constantly evaluating each other to see who is serious and who is not. The most accomplished are so serious they never have any fun at all, whereas if you went out onto some field or trail or court and acted happy and goofy, you’d be regarded as someone who is insulting the whole discipline.

Now to be a serious outdoorsperson, you have to master the complex science of knowing how to equip yourself, which basically requires joint degrees in chemistry and physics from MIT. For example, up beyond the ice-ax section there’s a tank where customers try to test and fathom the differences between a dozen different water filters and purifiers. To traverse that spot, you have to distinguish between purifiers made from iodine resin and iodine resin, glass fiber and pleated glass fiber, a ceramic microstrainer and a structured matrix microstrainer.

And it only gets worse. Every item in the store comes in a mind-boggling number of chemically engineered options that only experienced wilderness geeks could possibly understand. And from each product dangles a thick booklet so packed with high-tech jargon that it makes selecting a computer mainframe seem as simple as picking an apple off a tree. For backpacks, do you want a Sun Tooth Tech pack with 500 x 1000-denier Cordura or a Bitterroot Tech Pack with the 430-denier Hexstop trim? Do you want the semi-rigid 12-point Charlet Moser S-12 Crampon Laniers with the heel-clip in the rear or the Grivel Rambo with the rigid drop-forged points and the step-in bindings? Even something as basic as sandals comes in various high-tech versions, loaded with expedition-class straps and high-performance treads, in case you want to climb to Mount Pinatubo on your way to the Alanis Morissette concert.

I was dimly aware of some code of gear connoisseur-ship I should be paying attention to. For true nature techies, some things, like boots and sport utility vehicles, should be bought in forms as big as possible. Other things, like stoves and food packs, should be bought as small as possible. And other things, like tents and sleeping bags, should pack up small and open up big.

But the real reason for the REI store is upstairs on the mezzanine level, where the clothing department is. Because while not a lot of people actually go climb glaciers, there are millions and millions who want to dress as if they do. So most of the foot traffic at RET seems to be up on the mezzanine. T went up to the clothing department looking for a respite from all the high-tech mumbo jumbo of the gear section. There were indeed a few soothing racks of all-cotton shirts in muted colors. But T didn’t have to walk far before I was assaulted by a blaze of cobalt blue glaring off a vast profusion of polyester. It soon became obvious that while in the seventies the polyester people were low-class disco denizens, now they are high-status strenuous nature types. Between me and the coffee shop at the far end of the mezzanine there remained a treacherous field of artificial-fiber parkas, paddle jackets, zip pants, stretch vests, anoraks, and ponchos. And each of them had ominous-sized booklets hanging down, stuffed with dissertation-level technical detail highlighting the state-of-the-artness of each item. I confess at that moment I lost the will to live. I was content just to sit down and let somebody find my lifeless body there amidst the Gore-Tex mountain bibs.

But an inner voice—which sounded like James Earl Jones’s—urged me on, and pretty soon I was slogging through racks and racks of outdoor gear processed from the world’s finest chemical labs: Cordura, Polartec, and all the “ex” fabrics—Royalex, spandex, Supplex, and GoreTex. There were $400 parkas that advertised their core vent kinetic systems and sleeves with universal radial hinges (I guess that means you can move your arms around). There were heavy-denier parka shells, power stretch tights with microfilaments, expedition-weight leggings, fleece, microfleece, and bipolar fleece (which must be for people on Prozac). My favorite was a titanium Omnitech parka with double-rip-stop nylon supplemented with ceramic particles and polyurethane-coat welded seams. I imagined myself sporting that titanium Omnitech thing and suddenly saying to myself, “Here I am in the middle of the forest and I’m wearing the Starship Enterprise.”

Finally I had to puzzle my way through the “performance underwear” section, which was a baffling maze of Capilene and bifaced power-dry polyester with a few Lycra spandex briefs strengthened with MTS2 polyester. And finally, just as I was about to turn into an underwear Luddite screaming out for a pair of honest white briefs, I spied the coffee shop not more than 50 yards away. I made my way toward the side of the store that has the art gallery, with majestic nature photos, and the lecture hall. I made it through the bookstore and past the park ranger station. And there, finally, was a smiling barista offering me a warm brew and a choice from among a multicultural panoply of sandwich wraps. I settled down amidst the Mission furniture they have strewn up there and finally began to realize how wholesome I was feeling.

I looked around the store and there was nothing but healthy people, educated-class naturalists who seemed to work out regularly, eat carefully, and party moderately. They were evidently well informed about their outdoor- gear options, judging by their boots, packs, and shopping bags. Moreover, as they sat there reading Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and such books purchased from the adjacent bookstore, they radiated environmental concern. Here was a community of good stewards, people who were protecting the earth and themselves. Nature used to mean wildness, abandon, Dionysian lustfulness. But here was a set of people who went out into nature carefully, who didn’t want to upset the delicate balance, who studied their options, prepared and trained. If Norman Rockwell were a young man today, he’d head up to this coffee shop to get all this wholesome goodness down on canvas.

- David Brooks

Little Boxes

criminal

All at once Sherman was aware of a figure approaching him on the sidewalk, in the wet black shadows of the town houses and the trees. Even from fifty feet away, in the darkness, he could tell. It was that deep worry that lives in the base of the skull of every resident of Park Avenue south of Ninety-sixth Street—a black youth, tall, rangy, wearing white sneakers. Now he was forty feet away, thirty-five. Sherman stared at him. Well, let him come! I’m not budging! It’s my territory! I’m not giving way for any street punks!

The black youth suddenly made a ninety-degree turn and cut straight across the street to the sidewalk on the other side. The feeble yellow of a sodium-vapor streetlight reflected for an instant on his face as he checked Sherman out.

He had crossed over! ‘What a stroke of luck!

Not once did it dawn on Sherman McCoy that what the boy had seen was a thirty-eight-year-old white man, soaking wet, dressed in Sortie sort of military-looking raincoat full of straps and buckles, holding a violently lurching animal in his arms, staring, bug-eyed, and talking to himself.

- Tom Wolfe

Mergers & Acquisitions

I’m not sure I’d like to be one of the people featured on the New York Times weddings page, but I know I’d like to be the father of one of them. Imagine how happy Stanley J. Kogan must have been, for example, when his daughter Jamie was admitted to Yale. Then imagine his pride when Jamie made Phi Beta Kappa and graduated summa cum laude. Stanley himself is no slouch in the brains department: he’s a pediatric urologist in Croton-on-Hudson, with teaching positions at the Cornell Medical Center and the New York Medical College. Still, he must have enjoyed a gloat or two when his daughter put on that cap and gown. And things only got better. Jamie breezed through Stanford Law School. And then she met a man—Thomas Arena—who appeared to be exactly the sort of son-in-law that pediatric urologists dream about. He did his undergraduate work at Princeton, where he, too, made Phi Beta Kappa and graduated summa cum laude. And he, too, went to law school, at Yale. After school they both went to work as assistant U.S. attorneys for the mighty Southern District of New York.

These two awesome résumés collided at a wedding ceremony in Manhattan, and given all the school chums who must have attended, the combined tuition bills in that room must have been staggering. The rest of us got to read about it on the New York Times weddings page. The page is a weekly obsession for hundreds of thousands of Times readers and aspiring Baizacs. Unabashedly elitist, secretive, and totally honest, the “mergers and acquisitions page” (as some of its devotees call it) has always provided an accurate look at least a chunk of the American ruling class. And over the years it has reflected the changing ingredients of elite status.

When America had a pedigreed elite, the page emphasized noble birth and breeding. But in America today it’s genius and geniality that enable you to join the elect. And when you look at the Times weddings page, you can almost feel the force of the mingling SAT scores. It’s Dartmouth marries Berkeley, MBA weds Ph.D., Fulbright hitches with Rhodes, Lazard Frères joins with CBS, and summa cum laude embraces summa cum laude (you rarely see a summa settling for a magna—the tension in such a marriage would be too great). The Times emphasizes four things about a person—college degrees, graduate degrees, career path, and parents’ profession—for these are the markers of upscale Americans today.

Even though you want to hate them, it’s hard not to feel a small tug of approval at the sight of these Résumé Gods. Their expressions are so open and confident; their teeth are a tribute to the magnificence of American orthodonture; and since the Times will only print photographs in which the eyebrows of the bride and groom are at the same level, the couples always look so evenly matched. scholar who teaches philosophy there. The remaining marriages on the page are mixed marriages in which a predator marries a nurturer. In this group the predator is usually the groom. A male financial consultant with an MBA from Chicago may marry an elementary school teacher at a progressive school who received her master’s in social work from Columbia.

These meritocrats devote monstrous hours to their career and derive enormous satisfaction from their success, but the Times wants you to know they are actually not consumed by ambition. 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. The weekly “Vows” column lovingly details each of the wedding’s quirky elements: a bride took her bridesmaids to get drunk at a Russian bathhouse; a couple hired a former member of the band Devo to play the Jeopardy theme song at the reception; another read A. Milne’s Christopher Robin poems at a ceremony in a former du Pont mansion. The Times article is inevitably studded with quotations from friends who describe the bride and groom as enchanting paradoxes: they are said to be grounded but berserk, daring yet traditional, high-flying yet down to earth, disheveled yet elegant, sensible yet spontaneous. Either only paradoxical people get married these days, or people in this class like to see themselves and their friends as balancing opposites.

The couples tell a little of their own story in these articles. An amazing number of them seem to have first met while recovering from marathons or searching for the remnants of Pleistocene man while on archeological digs in Eritrea. They usually enjoyed a long and careful romance, including joint vacations in obscure but educational places like Myanmar and Minsk. But many of the couples broke up for a time, as one or both partners panicked at the thought of losing his or her independence. Then there was a lonely period apart while one member, say, arranged the largest merger in Wall Street history while the other settled for neurosurgery after dropping out of sommelier school. But they finally got back together again (sometimes while taking a beach vacation at a group home with a bunch of people with cheekbones similar to their own). And eventually they decided to share an apartment. We don’t know what their sex lives are like because the Times does not yet have a fornication page (“John Grind, a lawyer at Skadden Arps with a degree from Northwestern, has begun copulating with Sarah Smith, a cardiologist at Sloan-Kettering with an undergraduate degree from Emory”). But we presume intimate relations are suitably paradoxical: rough yet soft, adventurous yet intimate. Sometimes we get to read about modern couples who propose to each other simultaneously, but most of the time the groom does it the old-fashioned way—often, it seems, while hot-air ballooning above the Napa Valley or by letting the woman find a diamond engagement ring in her scuba mask while they are exploring endangered coral reefs near the Seychelles.

Many of these are trans-conference marriages—an Ivy League graduate will be marrying a Big Ten graduate—so the ceremony has to be designed to respect everybody’s sensibilities. Subdued innovation is the rule. If you are a member of an elite based on blood and breeding, you don’t need to carefully design a marriage ceremony that expresses your individual self. Your high status is made impervious by your ancestry, so you can just repeat the same ceremony generation after generation. But if you are in an elite based on brainpower, like today’s elite, you need to come up with the subtle signifiers that will display your own spiritual and intellectual identity—your qualification for being in the elite in the first place. You need invitations on handmade paper but with a traditional typeface. Selecting music, you need Patsy Cline songs mixed in with the Mendelssohn. You need a 1950s gown, but done up so retro it has invisible quotation marks around it. You need a wedding cake designed to look like a baroque church. You need to exchange meaningful objects with each other, like a snowboard engraved with your favorite Schiller quotation or the childhood rubber ducky that you used to cradle during the first dark days of your Supreme Court clerkship. It’s difficult to come up with your own nuptial wrinkle, which will be distinctive without being daring. But self-actualization is what educated existence is all about. For members of the educated class, life is one long graduate school. When they die, God meets them at the gates of heaven, totes up how many fields of self- expression they have mastered, and then hands them a divine diploma and lets them in.

- David Brooks

Useful Vacations

You’re sitting in an outdoor cafe in the Piazza della Serenissima in one of those stone Tuscan hill towns, and you’ve just finished 20 minutes of rapture while touring a gemlike little basilica far off the normal tourist paths. You’ve pulled a few iron tables together to accommodate the urbane couples you met inside, and as you sip drinks that back home would qualify as cough syrup, you begin trading vacation stories. Somebody mentions a recent journey to the Göreme Valley of central Turkey and the glories of the caves the Hittites carved into the volcanic mud-ash, when suddenly a gentleman wearing a shirt with an enormous number of pockets leans back and interjects, “Ah, yes. But the whole Cappadocia region has just been ruined by all the tourists.”

After a few minutes someone else at the table relates some fascinating bits she learned from the tour guides while on an eco tour of southern Belize. “It really hasn’t been the same since electrification,” the man with all the pockets laments. You have come face to face with a travel snob. There are a certain number of sophisticated travelers who wear their past destinations like little merit badges. Their main joy in life comes from dropping whopping hints that everywhere you are just going they went to long ago when it still meant something. It’s hard to know where such people get the time to go all these places, unless some evil philanthropist pays them to go around the world making other travelers feel inferior about their cultural repertoire. They are masters of the insufferable question. “Didn’t the Atabeg of Damascus stop there in 1139?” one of them will ask at the mention of a certain faraway oasis before peering around the table with a hopeful expression, as if everybody else were going to jump in to confirm that little bit of data. They seem to spend their evenings boning up on obscure ethnic groups: “The Mobabi tribe once fished there, I believe, until the Contutis pushed them further upriver.” And needless to say, they merge with that other atrocious population segment, language snobs: “I suppose you can get by with a little Chinook?” They don’t say, “I know” such-and-such a language. They’ll say, “I have a little Portuguese” or “I have a few of the romance languages, of course,” in that faux offhand manner that makes you want to stick the person’s head in a vise and squeeze it until the eyes pop out.

Unfortunately, few people act on this noble impulse, even though they know that when such a person appears, the Vietnam syndrome is not far behind. This is the psychosis that causes people to steer all their conversations to a single destination: their life-altering trip to Vietnam.

The travel braggart begins slowly. Just a few sly hints about his vast cultural capital. Then as the conversation goes along, he gets a little more voluble. He is biding his time, sucking you in. There will be a ray of hope when someone else in the group starts talking about Mount Everest. Ah, he’s been Tibetted, you’ll think. Surely he can’t be so smug around someone who’s been to Tibet. But, of course, he was doing Tibet before Into Thin Air.

And then it begins. He’s describing his journey up the Ho Chi Minh Trail or the rail trip from Hue on the crowded non-air-conditioned train. He starts describing all the odd glories of North Vietnam, the aroma of camphor, the flurry of bicycles. Suddenly you realize you are in a quagmire. There will be much suffering. There is no way now to withdraw from the conversation with honor.

“I never knew that feeding geese could be such a spiritual experience,” he will be saying while passing around photos of himself standing with a group of locals amidst the rice paddies near My Lai (he’s the one in the sunglasses). He’ll be describing a former VC whose oxcart he rode on up the Red River Valley. In his stories he always depicts himself as a masterful Dr. Livingstone, but you know that when he walked into a village, the locals saw him as this big flapping wallet with dollar bills flying out. If this person were suddenly found dead with a dozen butter knives up his nose, it would be like an Agatha Christie novel; everyone would have a motive.

I suspect that what keeps us from finishing off the travel braggart is that none of us is pure. All of us in the educated class are travel snobs to some degree. It’s just that while we are snobs toward the hordes of fat tourists who pile out of vast buses and into Notre Dame, he is snobbish toward us. He’s just a bit higher on the ladder of sophisticated travel.

The code of utilitarian pleasure means we have to evaluate our vacation time by what we accomplished what did we learn, what spiritual or emotional breakthroughs were achieved, what new sensations were experienced? And the only way we can award ourselves points is by seeking out the unfamiliar sights, cultivating above-average pleasures. Therefore, Bobos go to incredible lengths to distinguish themselves from passive, nonin dustrious tourists who pile in and out of tour buses at the old warhorse sights. Since the tourists carry cameras, Bobo travelers are embarrassed to. Since tourists sit around the most famous squares, Bobo travelers spend enormous amounts of time at obscure ones watching non- tourist-oriented pastimes, which usually involve a bunch of old men rolling metal balls.

Since tourists try to move quickly from sight to sight, the hard-working traveler selects the slowest possible means of transportation. Bobo travelers tour the Loire Valley by barge, looking down on the packs who zip through in cars. They cruise through New Zealand by bike, dismissive of those who take the train. They paddle through Costa Rica on a raft, feeling superior to those who jet past on airplanes. If tourists seem to be flocking to one sight, Bobos will make sure they are at another. “While most tourists in Tanzania go to Serengeti National Park to see the wildlife, the Selous Game Reserve is bigger and less disturbed,” writes Natural History magazine editor Bruce Stuts in fine cultivated-traveler mode. It doesn’t even matter if the Selous Game Reserve has less to see than the Serengeti. The pleasure the Bobo traveler derives from doing the more industrious thing more than compensates.

Lewis and Clark didn’t return from their trip and say, “Well, we didn’t find the Northwest Passage, but we did find ourselves.” But that is the spirit of Bobo travel. Our travel dollars are investments in our own human capital. We don’t just want to see famous sights; we want to pierce into other cultures. We want to try on other lives.

But not just any other lives. If you observe Bobo travel patterns and travel literature, you will detect a distinct set of preferences. The Bobo, as always, is looking for stillness, for a place where people set down roots and repeat the simple rituals. In other words, Bobo travelers are generally looking to get away from their affluent, ascending selves into a spiritually superior world, a world that hasn’t been influenced much by the global meritocracy. Bobos tend to relish People Who Really Know How to Live-people who make folk crafts, tell folk tales, do folk dances, listen to folk music—the whole indigenous people/noble savage/tranquil craftsman repertoire.

Therefore, Bobos are suckers for darkly garbed peasants, aged farmers, hardy fishermen, remote craftsmen, weather-beaten pensioners heavyset regional cooks— anybody who is likely to have never possessed or heard of frequent flier miles. So the Bobos flock to or read about the various folk locales where such “simple” people live in abundant hills of Provence, Tuscany, Greece, or the hamlets of the Andes or Nepal. These are places where the natives don’t have credit card debts and relatively few people wear Michael Jordan T-shirts. Lives therefore seem connected to ancient patterns and age-old wisdom. Next to us, these natives seem serene. They are poorer people whose lives seem richer than our own.

The small things—an olive grove or a small chapel take on greater meaning to a Bobo on vacation. Ideally, Bobo travelers want to spend a part of each day just savoring. They’ll idle away at a trattoria so far removed from the crush of events that the natives don’t even feel compelled to have an opinion about Bill Gates. They will swoon over some creamy polenta or a tangy turtle soup and even educate their palate with some dish that prominently features bone marrow. They will top off their coffee cup with cream squeezed straight from the cow and enjoy the sturdy obesity of the peasant woman in the kitchen, the picturesque paint peeling off the walls, the smiles of the other diners who seem to be welcoming them into their culture.

The pace of life is so delicious in such places. But the lease on the vacation rental only goes for two weeks, so Bobo travelers had better do their spiritual development quickly. Most Bobos come up with a few serendipity techniques that will allow them access to a few moments of authentic peasant living. Hovering on the edges of local weddings often works. Exaggerating their genealogical connection to the place while conversing with the locals is another winning tactic: “Actually my grandmother’s second husband came from Portugal.” If done correctly, these techniques can allow the Bobo pilgrim to have 6 unforgettable moments a morning, 2 rapturous experiences over lunch, 1.5 profound insights in the afternoon (on average), and .667 life-altering epiphanies after each sunset.

- David Brooks

Permissable Pleasures

Our new elite of bobos have constructed new social codes that characteristically synthesize bourgeois self-control and bohemian emancipation. Now we have a new set of standards to distinguish permissible pleasures from impermissible ones. We have new social codes to regulate the senses.

To get a firsthand glimpse of these new codes, go down to your local park in the summertime. You’ll see women jogging or running in sports bras and skin-tight spandex pants. Imagine if the Puritans could get a load of this! Women running around in their underwear in public. They’d pull out the tracts on Sodom and Gomorrah. Even a cosmopolitan historian such as Edward Gibbon would take a first glance at these women and begin speculating about the decline of empires. But look at the bra joggers more closely. It’s not wanton hedonism you see on their faces. They’re not exposing themselves for the sake of exhibitionism. Any erotic effect of their near nudity is counteracted by their expressions of grim determination. They are working out. They are working. They’re building their muscles. They’re setting goals and striving to achieve them. You never see them smile. On the contrary, some of them seem to be suffering. These near-naked young women are self-discipline personified—no pain, no gain— and the reason they are practically naked, they will tell you, is that this sort of clothing is most practical, most useful for strenuous exercise. What we see at the park is near nudity, but somehow it’s nudity in the service of achievement. Dionysius, the god of abandon, has been reconciled with Prometheus, the god of work.

The Bobos take a utilitarian view of pleasure. Any sensual pleasure that can be edifying or life-enhancing is celebrated. On the other hand, any pleasure that is counterproductive or dangerous is judged harshly. So exercise is celebrated, but smoking is now considered a worse sin than at least 5 of the 10 commandments. Coffee becomes the beverage of the age because it stimulates mental acuity, while booze is out of favor because it dulls the judgment. You can go to the beach near naked in a skimpy bathing suit and that is normal, but if you neglect to put on sun block to protect against skin cancer people are astonished. It is admirable to eat healthy, but we use the word guilt more often in connection with unhealthy foods— high fat, high sodium, or high calorie—than in any other context. Contemplative pleasures like taking a long bath are admired, but dangerous pleasures like speeding on a motorcycle are disdained, and driving without a seatbelt is positively immoral. Sports that are aerobic, like cross-country skiing and Rollerblading, thrive, while sports that do little to improve cardiovascular health, like pool, bowling, and Ping-Pong, are low class. Even an afternoon spent playing with the kids is thought to be “a good thing” because we are invariably helping the little ones improve some set of skills (watch the Bobo parents taking part in their kids’ “play”) or at least we are building better relationships or self-esteem (“Good job! Good for you!”).

We Bobos have taken the bourgeois imperative to strive and succeed, and we have married it to the bohemian impulse to experience new sensations. 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.

It’s perfectly fitting that the two leisure-time institutions that have thrived during the Bobo age are health clubs and museums. Both places offer sensual satisfactions in uplifting settings. At health clubs you can enjoy the pleasure of an ennobling muscle burn—you get off the Stairmaster, exhausted and sweaty after 35 minutes of pure exertion, and admire your virtuous self in the floor- to-ceiling mirrors. Meanwhile, at museums you can luxuriate in a sensual cornucopia, enjoying the colors and forms of the paint and materials, while being edified by informative Acoustiguides, scholarly texts on the walls, and the wonderful bookshop downstairs. Health clubs and museums have become the chapels and cathedrals of our age, the former serving to improve the body, the latter the mind.

It’s also fitting that we Bobos have taken the ultimate symbol of Dionysian release, the party, and merged it with work. A couple of years ago in the New Yorker, James Atlas published an essay called “The Fall of Fun,” which pretty accurately captured the transformation of the literary party scene and shed light on educated-class parties as a whole.

Next to the writers, poets, and essayists of earlier decades, Atlas argued, today’s creative types are a pretty tame bunch. He recalled that the literary giants he admired during his student days at Harvard drank and caroused with abandon. “My gurus were the famously hard-drinking literati of an earlier epoch: a shaky hung- over Robert Lowell chain-smoking mentholated Trues at a seminar table in the Quincy House basement; a drunken Norman Mailer brandishing a bottle of whiskey and baiting the crows in Sanders Theatre; Allen Ginsberg toking up at a Signet Society dinner and chanting his poems to the hypnotic accompaniment of a harmonium. Postwar poetry was a hymn of excess.”

These were artists living the bohemian way. Atlas described the booze-filled gatherings of the old literati, the smoky parties, the embarrassing scenes, the bitter feuds, and the ensuing divorces. Even the diaries of austere Edmund Wilson are filled with adultery and lewd drunkenness; Edmund found himself one day doing a threesome on a couch. Many of these people, in fact, caroused themselves to an early grave. Delmore Schwartz died at fifty- two; John Berryman killed himself at fifty-seven; Shirley Jackson died at forty-five; Robert Lowell died at sixty, relatively old for his group.

But nowadays people who drink and carouse that way are likely to be greeted with medical diagnoses—alcoholism, drug addiction, depression. Even in what used to be the bohemian quarters, as James Atlas eloquently testifies, the days of booze and brawling are over. Now parties tend to be work parties; a glass or two of white wine, a little networking with editors and agents, and then it’s home to the kids. Almost nobody drinks at lunch anymore. People don’t gather around kitchen tables staying up nights imbibing and talking. Everybody is healthier, more orderly, and more success oriented.

The same pattern has been acted out in other circles. Journalists used to be smoking, drinking vulgarians. Now, next to the writers, poets and essayists of earlier as the older reporters never stop reminding us, the campaign buses are filled with mild college grads sipping bottied water. Nobody gets drunk at journalist parties, and anybody who did would be regarded as a loser. Academic social life, the articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education tell us, is drier and tamer than it was two decades ago. Even Hollywood, which should be the epicenter of hedonism, is overrun by health consciousness, career consciousness, and (relative) moderation. More Bobos pass out business cards at parties than pass out under the table.

When it comes to alcohol consumption more generally, we are probably living through the most abstemious era since Prohibition, maybe in American history. In our age all the old terms are fading away—sours, slings, high- balls, fizzes, nightcaps—despite a little self-conscious nostalgia at the cigar and martini bars. On cable I recently stumbled across an old episode of Match Game ‘73. Six celebrities were asked to complete the phrase “half,“ and the contestant had to guess how they had filled in the blank. He guessed “half-drunk.” That was a good answer because four of the six celebrities chose either “half-drunk” or “half-crocked.” Today if the same Match Game question were asked, the most common answer might be “half-and-half.”

One of the reasons the old bohemians were so wild and free was that they were rebelling against square bourgeois mores. But once the bourgeoisie assimilated the liberated culture of the 1960s, there was not much left to rebel against. Once bohemian symbols were absorbed into the mainstream, they lost some of their countercultural panache. The novels of Henry Miller seemed cool when they offended middle-class librarians, but they don’t seem so daring now. Nude performance art may have been a thrilling statement once, but it lost its cachet when it became titillation for the tourist trade. When drugs were discovered by disco kids from Queens and yuppies from Wall Street in the seventies and eighties, naturally they seemed less like mind-expanding tools and more like grubby playthings. Living for pleasure no longer makes the same rebellious cultural statement it once did.

Moreover, playtime in the earlier decades seemed more like release. People were stuck in boring jobs, so wanted a little revelry at night. Creative types felt themselves stuck in a boring society, so wanted to up-end the rules. But for Bobos work is not boring. It’s challenging and interesting. So maybe it’s not surprising they should make play more like work. Bobos are reconcilers, after all, so maybe it is inevitable they would strive to blur their duties with their pleasures, making the former more enjoyable and the latter more tame.

- David Brooks

Winning

Some people find their purpose by taking a competitive attitude to life. In the movie Wall Street the main character Bud Fox challenges Gordon Gekko’s lust for more and more money, asking: ‘How much is enough?’ Here is Gekko’s answer:

It’s not a question of enough, pal. It’s a zero-sum game. Somebody wins, somebody loses.

The reply will touch a familiar chord with anyone who knows how the big names of the eighties think, talk and write. In the first chapter of his second book, “Surviving at the Top”, Donald Trump reports on what has happened since his first book by writing of his ‘victories’ and of the lessons that have taught him ‘not to take the winning for granted’. A few pages on, he compares himself with ‘a professional prize fighter’. Later, in a more introspective mood, he remarks:

I’m sometimes too competitive for my own good. If someone is going around labeling people winners and losers, I want to play the game and, of course, come out on the right side.

Thorstein Veblen, the crusty turn-of-the-century American sociologist of Norwegian stock who wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class would have smiled at the way in which people like Trump displayed their wealth, buying absurdly luxurious yachts in which they seldom had time to sail, or palatial country residences they rarely visited. It was Veblen who coined the term ‘conspicuous consumption’ to describe consumption that has the purpose of displaying one’s wealth, and thus enhancing one’s relative status. Veblen held that, once needs for subsistence and a reasonable degree of physical comfort have been satisfied, the motive that lies at the root of the desire to own is ‘emulation’ — the desire to equal or surpass others. Property becomes ‘the most easily recognized evidence of a reputable degree of success as distinguished from heroic or signal achievement. It therefore becomes ‘the conventional basis of esteem’. Conspicuous consumption, if it is to be effective in enhancing the consumer’s fame,must be ‘an expenditure of superfluities…it must be wasteful.’ The canons of ‘pecuniary taste’ dictate that ‘marks of superfluous costliness’ are indications of worth, and goods will be unattractive if ‘they show too thrifty an adaptation to the mechanical end sought’. The result is a striving that can never be satisfied:

…the end sought by accumulation is to rank high in comparison with the rest of the community in point of pecuniary strength. So long as the comparison is distinctly unfavorable to himself, the normal, average individual will live in chronic dissatisfaction with his present lot; and when he has reached what may be called the normal pecuniary standard of the community, or of his class in the community, this chronic dissatisfaction will give place to a restless straining to place a wider and ever-widening pecuniary interval between himself and this average standard. The invidious comparison can never become so favorable to the individual making it that he would not gladly rate himself still higher relatively to his competitors in the struggle for pecuniary reputability.

if, by nature or by socialization, men are more likely to engage in this striving for status than women, that is at once their burden, and their means of escaping the need to face questions about the meaning of their lives. They can go on accumulating wealth since, as Veblen adds:

In the nature of the case, the desire for wealth can scarcely be satiated in any individual instance.

This matches a remark that Michael Lewis reports in Liar’s Poker. When he was a rising bond trader at Salomon Brothers, one of his colleagues said to him:

You don’t get rich in this business, you only attain new levels of relative poverty. You think Gutfreund [Salomon Brothers’ chief executive] feels rich? I’ll bet not.

Indeed, John Gutfreund’s wife, Susan, famous for her exotic dinner parties reportedly once concluded an account of the problems of getting proper staff for their New York and Paris residences by complaining: ‘It’s so expensive to be rich!” In Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe ridiculed the lifestyle of people like the Gutfreunds. In one devastating scene the bond trader Sherman McCoy and his wife, Judy, are invited to a dinner on Fifth Avenue, six blocks from where they live. Judy’s dress made walking impossible; a taxi is out of the question too:

What would they do after the party? How could they walk out of the Bavardages’ building and have all the world, tout le monde, see them standing out in the street, the McCoys, that game couple, their hands up in the air, bravely, desperately, pathetically trying to hail a taxi?

So the McCoys hire a limousine and driver to drive them six blocks, wait four hours, and then drive them six blocks borne, at a cost of S197.20. But this does not ensure happiness:

the driver couldn’t pull up to the sidewalk near the entrance, because so many limousines were in the way. He had to double-park. Sherman and Judy bad to thread their way between the limousines…Envy…envy…From the license plates Sherman could tell that these limousines were not hired. They were owned by those whose sleek hides were hauled here in them. A chauffeur, a good one willing to work long hours and late hours, cost $36,000 a year, minimum; garage space, maintenance, insurance, would cost another $14,000 at least; a total of $50,000, none of it deductible. I make a million dollars a year — and yet I can’t afford that!

Acquisition without limit is another form of escape from meaninglessness. But it is an escape-hole that suggests a fundamental lack of wisdom. By ‘wisdom’, I mean the product of reflection with some intelligence and self-awareness about what is important in life; ‘practical wisdom’ adds to this the ability to act accordingly. The goal of emulation described by Veblen cannot possibly satisfy a reflective mind, and seems not even to satisfy those who do not reflect on what they are doing.

As Veblen suggests, behind the desire for acquisition lies a competitive urge. Already in the seventies, Michael Maccoby, who had studied both psychoanalysis and social science, sensed the rise of a new style of business executive. After interviewing 250 managers from twelve major American corporations, he concluded that for many of these executives, business life was about winning — for themselves, for their unit, or for their corporation. He wrote a book about what he had found, and called it after the new style of executive: The Gamesman. But the book was no celebration of the rising competitive executive dedicated to winning. Instead it contained a warning that if life is regarded simply as a game, then eventually a time will come when it ceases to matter:

Once his youth, vigor, and even the thrill in winning are lost, [the gamesman] becomes depressed and goalless, questioning the purpose of his life. No longer energized by the team struggle and unable to dedicate himself to something he believes in beyond himself, which might be the corporation or alternatively the larger society, he fmds himself starkly alone.

Michael Milken seems to have been a classic example of a supreme winner who gained little satisfaction from winning. When Milken was at the height of his success, a legend around the financial world with a personal fortune of a billion dollars, one of his colleagues told Connie Bruck: “Nothing is good enough for Michael. He is the most unhappy person I know. He never has enough ... He drives everything — more, more, more deals.” In 1986 one longtime buyer of Milken’s junk bonds told Bruck that “there seemed to be less and less joy in Milken — something that had been part of him in the early years — and more compulsion.”

In a critical study of the emphasis on competition in Western society, Alfie Kohn found that many sporting competitors report feeling empty after achieving the greatest possible success in their chosen sport. Here is Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry:

even after you’ve just won the Super Bowl — especially after you’ve just won the Super Bowl — there’s always next year. If “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing” then “the only thing” is nothing — emptiness, the nightmare of life without ultimate meaning.

Harvey Ruben, author of a book called Competing and an enthusiast for competition, concedes that: “The discovery, ultimately, that “making it” is often a hollow gain is one of the most traumatic events that the successful competitor can experience”. Stuart Walker, a sailing boat racer and another author of a book about winning and competing, says:

Winning doesn’t satisfy us — we need to do it again, and again. The taste of success seems merely to whet the appetite for more. When we lose, the compulsion to seek future success is overpowering; the need to get out on the course the following weekend is irresistible. We cannot quit when we are ahead, after we’ve won, and we certainly cannot quit when we’re behind, after we’ve lost. We are addicted.

Again, why did Ivan Boesky risk everything for a few million dollars, when he already had more than he could ever spend? In 1992, six years after Boesky pleaded guilty to insider trading, his estranged wife Seema broke her silence and spoke about Ivan Boesky’s motives in an interview with Barbara Walters for the American ABC network’s 20/20 program. Walters asked whether Ivan Boesky was a man who craved luxury. Seema Boesky thought not, pointing out that he worked around the clock, seven days a week, and never took a day off to enjoy his money. She then recalled that when, in 1982, Forbes magazine first listed Boesky among the wealthiest people in the US, he was upset. She assumed he disliked the publicity, and made some remark to that effect. Boesky replied:

That’s not what’s upsetting me. We’re no one. We’re nowhere. We’re at the bottom of the list and I promise you I won’t shame you like that again ever. We will not remain at the bottom of that list.

- Peter Singer