Saturday, June 13, 2009

"To what shall I compare this generation?" (Matt. 11:16)

I wasn't aware someone else had coined a term for it... Bobos: Bohemian bourgeois.
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I've been thinking along these lines - the new bourgeois, the new normal, what have you. Then I find the following from Joshua at Western Confucian which articulates many of my own thoughts on the subject. (Source material: New Oxford Review.)
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"Modern alienation is best visible among the current dominant generation whom popular journalist David Brooks defined as 'bohemian bourgeois,' or 'bobos,'" writes Christopher Beiting in a review of two of Prof. Lawler's books — Human Alienation & Our Biotech Future. Prof. Beiting continues:
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"Lawler generally supports Brooks's ideas, and notes that these people have many good traits: hard work, responsibility, opposition to cruelty, and so on, but a few fatal flaws stemming from the radically democratic culture in which they live. The bobos are atomized, radical individuals with few interests beyond their own comfort, and few social contacts beyond their narrow circles. They lack courage, civic duty, and compassion toward those who do not work as hard as they do. They are full of "spirituality," but hostile to religion -- particularly the notion that God might place any restrictions or restraints on their much-loved freedom and comfort. In particular, they are militantly "non-judgmental" on any moral actions (beyond some selected health-related ones -- smoking is a grievous fault, though sodomy is not), and deeply suspicious of people who are. The problem is that such behavior, with its roots in 1960s-era selfishness, shorn of its communitarian ideas, does seem to be able to produce social stability and economic prosperity. Yet the bobos are alienated and haunted by death, though they have lost the ability to admit it." - Western Confucian

1 comment:

  1. The same term is also used in French but never was it described as well as here.
    Do you think that the Bobos would recognize themselves in that description?
    I am very familiar with this type of persons, and if I were to show this description to one of them I would be told that it is a generalization and I am again judgmental.

    ReplyDelete


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