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ricardienneHaven't had one of these in a while:
Bye-Bye, Bootstraps
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: August 3, 2006
In all healthy societies, the middle-class people have wholesome middle-class values while the upper-crust bluebloods lead lives of cosseted leisure interrupted by infidelity, overdoses and hunting accidents. But in America today we’ve got this all bollixed up.
Through some screw-up in the moral superstructure, we now have a plutocratic upper class infused with the staid industriousness of Ben Franklin, while we are apparently seeing the emergence of a Wal-Mart leisure class — devil-may-care middle-age slackers who live off home-equity loans and disability payments so they can surf the History Channel and enjoy fantasy football leagues.
For the first time in human history, the rich work longer hours than the proletariat.
Today’s super-wealthy no longer go off on four-month grand tours of Europe, play gin-soaked Gatsbyesque croquet tournaments or spend hours doing needlepoint while thinking in full paragraphs like the heroines of Jane Austen novels. Instead, their lives are marked by sleep deprivation and conference calls, and their idea of leisure is jetting off to Aspen to hear Zbigniew Brzezinski lead panels titled “Beyond Unipolarity.”
Meanwhile, down the income ladder, the percentage of middle-age men who have dropped out of the labor force has doubled over the past 40 years, to over 12 percent. Many of the men have disabilities. Others struggle to find work. But in a recent dinner-party-dominating article, The Times’s Louis Uchitelle and David Leonhardt describe two men who are not exactly Horatio Alger wonderboys.
Christopher Priga, 54, earned a six-figure income as an electrical engineer at Xerox but is now shown relaxing at a coffee shop with a book and a smoke while waiting for a job commensurate with his self-esteem. “To be honest, I’m kind of looking for the home run,” he said. “There’s no point in hitting for base hits.”
Alan Beggerow, once a steelworker, now sleeps nine hours day, reads two or three books a week, writes Amazon reviews, practices the piano and writes Louis L’Amour-style westerns. “I have come to realize that my free time is worth a lot to me,” he said.
His wife takes in work as a seamstress and bakes to help support the family, as they eat away at their savings. “The future is always a concern,” Beggerow said, “but I no longer allow myself to dwell on it.”
Many readers no doubt observed that if today’s prostate-aged moochers wanted to loaf around all day reading books and tossing off their vacuous opinions into the ether, they should have had the foresight to become newspaper columnists.
Others will note sardonically that the only really vibrant counterculture in the United States today is laziness.
But I try not to judge these gentlemen harshly. What I see is a migration of values. Once upon a time, middle-class men would have defined their dignity by their ability to work hard, provide for their family and live as self-reliant members of society. But these fellows, to judge by their quotations, define their dignity the same way the subjects of Thorstein Veblen’s “The Theory of the Leisure Class” defined theirs.
They define their dignity by the loftiness of their thinking. They define their dignity not by their achievement, but by their personal enlightenment, their autonomy, by their distance from anything dishonorably menial or compulsory.
In other words, the values that used to prevail among the manorial estates have migrated to parts of mass society while the grinding work ethic of the immigrant prevails in the stratosphere.
This is terrible. It’s a blow first of all to literature. If P. G. Wodehouse were writing today, Bertie Wooster would be at Goldman Sachs and Jeeves would be judging a meth-mouth contest at Sturgis. Anna Karenina would be Miranda Priestly from “The Devil Wears Prada.” “The House of Mirth” would become “The House of Broadband.”
More important, this reversal is a blow to the natural order of the universe. The only comfort I’ve had from these disturbing trends is another recent story in The Times. Joyce Wadler reported that women in places like the Hamptons are still bedding down with the hired help. R. Couri Hay, the society editor of Hamptons magazine, celebrated rich women’s tendency to sleep with their home renovators.
“Nobody knows,” he said. “The contractor isn’t going to tell because the husband is writing the check, the wife isn’t going to tell, and you get a better job because she’s providing a fringe benefit. Everybody wins.”
Thank God somebody is standing up for traditional morality.
On the one hand, Brooks is certainly having fun with this -- all those *clever* literary and cultural allusions -- but he is making a serious point, too. Infamous article about middle-age slackers aside, there has been a lot of talk recently about the "disappearance of the middle class" and so forth. But wait, Brooks says: the middle classes deserve to disappear for their moral laxity; they don't want to work, and now they're getting their just due. This is hardly new, really. Isn't the central tenet of capitialism that the wealthy are wealthy by desert and the less wealthy only so because they don't work as hard? What he's fighting, I suppose is the class-warfare tenet that America now essentially is ruled by a plutocratic aristocracy. It isn't an aristocracy, however, because these people actually deserve their positions of wealth and influence due to their hard work.
Such paragons of the aristocratic work ethic as Paris Hilton aside, perhaps it is true that the nouveau riche are starting to outnumber old money at the present. Isn't this the quintessential cycle of capitalism, though? Some people work (or cheat) hard to build up their fortunes, and their children live the life of ease and inactivity. My generation is supposed to be the most shiftless and self-entitled yet: don't worry, David -- within a generation or so all will be put "to rights" as far as the upper classes are concerned.
Of course, as he makes clear with that oh-so-hilarious-and-au-courrant final comment, this only really affects the men. Those upper-class women are still just spending their husbands' hard-won money on interior decorating and designer clothing to impress the help.
I know that this isn't really his main point: what Brooks really wants to draw our attention to is the moral decline of the middle and lower classes. And I think he correct in his essentials: the old bourgeoisie work ethic is disappearing. But I've read Weber and I found him convincing; it seems clear to me that this does come from a decline in traditional Protestant Values. I've been sort of hoping for a decline in those, actually, and really, I can't blame these middle-aged men. (Brooks somewhat misrepresents their cases, in fact: they did not simply stop working, but lost their jobs and have given up looking). Why should anyone spend his life working a 9-5 meaningless job for two weeks of vacation a year? That horrifies me. It's all very well to talk about laboring in one's Vocation: a vocation to medicine, to teaching, or to the law, or to computer programming, fine. But a vocation to staffing a call-center? To stocking shelves at Wal-Mart?
Education I think is the culprit. When you start thinking about it, you do wonder why you are wasting what little time you have. If you want us to be happy with menial jobs, you can't teach us Plato and Thoreau -- has anyone ever envisioned himself as a man of bronze in the ideal republic? But bring back Horatio Alger and vocational schools and perhaps you can train a new generation to be happy. And I'm surprised that Brooks, who is usually so quick to decry the 'feminization' of society that leaves no place for male needs and innate programming, isn't pointing out that there are fewer and fewer places for the lone man to be active and, well, 'manly.' Perhaps that will be next week's column: our society is geared towards female dominance at the expense of male morals.
It's a bit irritating, to, that while he will exult in the continued immorality of wealthy women, he only indirectly praises the way that these middle-class wives are fulfilling their duties to their families in sticking by their men. Although this must be one of the few times in history that a conservative commentator isn't blaming us (yet) for the decline of society.
So I hope someone gets a hold of a transcript for the recent Rowling-Irving-King interview. I really want to know exactly what Rushdie asked and what she answered.
Bye-Bye, Bootstraps
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: August 3, 2006
In all healthy societies, the middle-class people have wholesome middle-class values while the upper-crust bluebloods lead lives of cosseted leisure interrupted by infidelity, overdoses and hunting accidents. But in America today we’ve got this all bollixed up.
Through some screw-up in the moral superstructure, we now have a plutocratic upper class infused with the staid industriousness of Ben Franklin, while we are apparently seeing the emergence of a Wal-Mart leisure class — devil-may-care middle-age slackers who live off home-equity loans and disability payments so they can surf the History Channel and enjoy fantasy football leagues.
For the first time in human history, the rich work longer hours than the proletariat.
Today’s super-wealthy no longer go off on four-month grand tours of Europe, play gin-soaked Gatsbyesque croquet tournaments or spend hours doing needlepoint while thinking in full paragraphs like the heroines of Jane Austen novels. Instead, their lives are marked by sleep deprivation and conference calls, and their idea of leisure is jetting off to Aspen to hear Zbigniew Brzezinski lead panels titled “Beyond Unipolarity.”
Meanwhile, down the income ladder, the percentage of middle-age men who have dropped out of the labor force has doubled over the past 40 years, to over 12 percent. Many of the men have disabilities. Others struggle to find work. But in a recent dinner-party-dominating article, The Times’s Louis Uchitelle and David Leonhardt describe two men who are not exactly Horatio Alger wonderboys.
Christopher Priga, 54, earned a six-figure income as an electrical engineer at Xerox but is now shown relaxing at a coffee shop with a book and a smoke while waiting for a job commensurate with his self-esteem. “To be honest, I’m kind of looking for the home run,” he said. “There’s no point in hitting for base hits.”
Alan Beggerow, once a steelworker, now sleeps nine hours day, reads two or three books a week, writes Amazon reviews, practices the piano and writes Louis L’Amour-style westerns. “I have come to realize that my free time is worth a lot to me,” he said.
His wife takes in work as a seamstress and bakes to help support the family, as they eat away at their savings. “The future is always a concern,” Beggerow said, “but I no longer allow myself to dwell on it.”
Many readers no doubt observed that if today’s prostate-aged moochers wanted to loaf around all day reading books and tossing off their vacuous opinions into the ether, they should have had the foresight to become newspaper columnists.
Others will note sardonically that the only really vibrant counterculture in the United States today is laziness.
But I try not to judge these gentlemen harshly. What I see is a migration of values. Once upon a time, middle-class men would have defined their dignity by their ability to work hard, provide for their family and live as self-reliant members of society. But these fellows, to judge by their quotations, define their dignity the same way the subjects of Thorstein Veblen’s “The Theory of the Leisure Class” defined theirs.
They define their dignity by the loftiness of their thinking. They define their dignity not by their achievement, but by their personal enlightenment, their autonomy, by their distance from anything dishonorably menial or compulsory.
In other words, the values that used to prevail among the manorial estates have migrated to parts of mass society while the grinding work ethic of the immigrant prevails in the stratosphere.
This is terrible. It’s a blow first of all to literature. If P. G. Wodehouse were writing today, Bertie Wooster would be at Goldman Sachs and Jeeves would be judging a meth-mouth contest at Sturgis. Anna Karenina would be Miranda Priestly from “The Devil Wears Prada.” “The House of Mirth” would become “The House of Broadband.”
More important, this reversal is a blow to the natural order of the universe. The only comfort I’ve had from these disturbing trends is another recent story in The Times. Joyce Wadler reported that women in places like the Hamptons are still bedding down with the hired help. R. Couri Hay, the society editor of Hamptons magazine, celebrated rich women’s tendency to sleep with their home renovators.
“Nobody knows,” he said. “The contractor isn’t going to tell because the husband is writing the check, the wife isn’t going to tell, and you get a better job because she’s providing a fringe benefit. Everybody wins.”
Thank God somebody is standing up for traditional morality.
On the one hand, Brooks is certainly having fun with this -- all those *clever* literary and cultural allusions -- but he is making a serious point, too. Infamous article about middle-age slackers aside, there has been a lot of talk recently about the "disappearance of the middle class" and so forth. But wait, Brooks says: the middle classes deserve to disappear for their moral laxity; they don't want to work, and now they're getting their just due. This is hardly new, really. Isn't the central tenet of capitialism that the wealthy are wealthy by desert and the less wealthy only so because they don't work as hard? What he's fighting, I suppose is the class-warfare tenet that America now essentially is ruled by a plutocratic aristocracy. It isn't an aristocracy, however, because these people actually deserve their positions of wealth and influence due to their hard work.
Such paragons of the aristocratic work ethic as Paris Hilton aside, perhaps it is true that the nouveau riche are starting to outnumber old money at the present. Isn't this the quintessential cycle of capitalism, though? Some people work (or cheat) hard to build up their fortunes, and their children live the life of ease and inactivity. My generation is supposed to be the most shiftless and self-entitled yet: don't worry, David -- within a generation or so all will be put "to rights" as far as the upper classes are concerned.
Of course, as he makes clear with that oh-so-hilarious-and-au-courrant final comment, this only really affects the men. Those upper-class women are still just spending their husbands' hard-won money on interior decorating and designer clothing to impress the help.
I know that this isn't really his main point: what Brooks really wants to draw our attention to is the moral decline of the middle and lower classes. And I think he correct in his essentials: the old bourgeoisie work ethic is disappearing. But I've read Weber and I found him convincing; it seems clear to me that this does come from a decline in traditional Protestant Values. I've been sort of hoping for a decline in those, actually, and really, I can't blame these middle-aged men. (Brooks somewhat misrepresents their cases, in fact: they did not simply stop working, but lost their jobs and have given up looking). Why should anyone spend his life working a 9-5 meaningless job for two weeks of vacation a year? That horrifies me. It's all very well to talk about laboring in one's Vocation: a vocation to medicine, to teaching, or to the law, or to computer programming, fine. But a vocation to staffing a call-center? To stocking shelves at Wal-Mart?
Education I think is the culprit. When you start thinking about it, you do wonder why you are wasting what little time you have. If you want us to be happy with menial jobs, you can't teach us Plato and Thoreau -- has anyone ever envisioned himself as a man of bronze in the ideal republic? But bring back Horatio Alger and vocational schools and perhaps you can train a new generation to be happy. And I'm surprised that Brooks, who is usually so quick to decry the 'feminization' of society that leaves no place for male needs and innate programming, isn't pointing out that there are fewer and fewer places for the lone man to be active and, well, 'manly.' Perhaps that will be next week's column: our society is geared towards female dominance at the expense of male morals.
It's a bit irritating, to, that while he will exult in the continued immorality of wealthy women, he only indirectly praises the way that these middle-class wives are fulfilling their duties to their families in sticking by their men. Although this must be one of the few times in history that a conservative commentator isn't blaming us (yet) for the decline of society.
So I hope someone gets a hold of a transcript for the recent Rowling-Irving-King interview. I really want to know exactly what Rushdie asked and what she answered.
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no subject
Date: 2006-08-03 04:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-03 06:32 pm (UTC)David Brooks has been dropping too much acid. He should slow down.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-03 07:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 12:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-21 12:19 am (UTC)