Among the
Bourgeoisophobes: Why the Europeans and Arabs, each in their own way, hate
by David Brooks
AROUND 1830, a group of French artists and intellectuals looked around and
noticed that people who were their spiritual inferiors were running the world.
Suddenly a large crowd of merchants, managers, and traders were making lots of
money, living in the big houses, and holding the key posts. They had none of
the high style of the aristocracy, or even the earthy integrity of the
peasants. Instead, they were gross. They were vulgar materialists, shallow
conformists, and self-absorbed philistines, who half the time failed even to
acknowledge their moral and spiritual inferiority to the artists and intellectuals.
What's more, it was their very mediocrity that accounted for their success.
Through some screw-up in the great scheme of the universe, their narrow-minded
greed had brought them vast wealth, unstoppable power, and growing social
prestige.
Naturally, the artists and intellectuals were outraged. Hatred of the
bourgeoisie became the official emotion of the French intelligentsia. Stendhal
said traders and merchants made him want to "weep and vomit at the same
time." Flaubert thought they were "plodding and avaricious."
Hatred of the bourgeoisie, he wrote, "is the beginning of all
virtue." He signed his letters "Bourgeoisophobus" to show how
much he despised "stupid grocers and their ilk."
Of all the great creeds of the 19th century, pretty much the only one still
thriving is this one, bourgeoisophobia. Marxism is dead. Freudianism is dead.
Social Darwinism is dead, along with all those theories about racial purity
that grew up around it. But the emotions and reactions that Flaubert, Stendhal,
and all the others articulated in the 1830s are still with us, bigger than
ever. In fact, bourgeoisophobia, which has flowered variously and spread to
places as diverse as
This is because today, in much of the world's eyes, two peoples--the Americans
and the Jews--have emerged as the great exemplars of undeserved success.
Americans and Israelis, in this view, are the money-mad molochs of the earth,
the vulgarizers of morals, corrupters of culture, and proselytizers of
idolatrous values. These two nations, it is said, practice conquest capitalism,
overrunning poorer nations and exploiting weaker neighbors in their endless
desire for more and more. These two peoples, the Americans and the Jews, in the
view of the bourgeoisophobes, thrive precisely because they are spiritually
stunted. It is their obliviousness to the holy things in life, their feverish
energy, their injustice, their shallow pursuit of power and gain, that allow
them to build fortunes, construct weapons, and play the role of hyperpower.
And so just as the French intellectuals of the 1830s rose up to despise the
traders and bankers, certain people today rise up to shock, humiliate, and
dream of destroying America and Israel. Today's bourgeoisophobes burn with the
same sense of unjust inferiority. They experience the same humiliation because
there is nothing they can do to thwart the growing might of their enemies. They
rage and rage. Only today's bourgeoisophobes are not just artists and
intellectuals. They are as likely to be terrorists and suicide bombers. They
teach in madrassas, where they are careful not to instruct their students in
the sort of practical knowledge that dominates bourgeois schools. They are
Muslim clerics who incite hatred and violence. They are erudite Europeans who
burn with humiliation because they know, deep down, that both
Today the battle lines are forming. The dispute over
The bourgeoisophobes have no politburo. There is no bourgeoisophobe central
command. They have no plausible strategy for victory. They have only their
nihilistic rage, their envy mixed with snobbery, their snide remarks, their
newspaper distortions, their conspiracy theories, their suicide bombs and
terror attacks--and above all, a burning sense that the rising, vibrant, and
powerful peoples of America and Israel must be humiliated and brought low.
BOURGEOISOPHOBIA is really a hatred of success. It is a hatred held by people
who feel they are spiritually superior but who find themselves economically,
politically, and socially outranked. They conclude that the world is diseased,
that it rewards the wrong values, the wrong people, and the wrong abilities.
They become cynical if they are soft inside, violent if they are hard. In the
bourgeoisophobe's mind, the people and nations that do succeed are not just
slightly vulgar, not just over-compensated, not just undeservedly lucky. They
are monsters, non-human beasts who, in extreme cases, can be blamelessly
killed. This Manichaean divide between the successful, who are hideous, and the
bourgeoisophobes, who are spiritually pristine, was established early in the
emergence of the creed. The early 19th-century German poet Holderlin couldn't
just ignore the merchant bourgeoisie; he had to declare the middle classes "deeply
incapable of every divine emotion." In other words, scarcely human.
Holderlin's countryman Werner Sombart later wrote a quintessential
bourgeoisophobe text called "Traders and Heroes," in which he argued
that there are two basic human types: "The trader approaches life with the
question, what can you give me? . . . The hero approaches life with the
question what can I give you?" The trader, then, is the selfish capitalist
who lives a meager, artificial life amidst "pocket-watches, newspapers,
umbrellas, books, sewage disposal, politics." The hero is the total man,
who is selfless, vital, spiritual, and free. An honest person might ascribe
another's success to a superior work ethic, self-discipline, or luck--just
being in the right place at the right time and possessing the right skills. A
normal person might look at a rich and powerful country and try to locate the
source of its vitality, to measure its human and natural resources, its
freedom, its institutions and social norms. But for the bourgeoisophobe, other
people's success is never legitimate or deserved. To him, success comes to
those who worship the golden calf, the idol, the Satanic corrupter, gold.
When bourgeoisophobes describe their enemies, they almost always portray them
as money-mad, as crazed commercialists. And this vulgar materialism, in their
view, has not only corrupted the soul of the bourgeoisie, but through them
threatens to debase civilization itself and the whole world. It threatens, in
the words of the supreme bourgeoisophobe, Karl Marx, to take all that is holy
and make it profane.
Some of the more pessimistic bourgeoisophobes come to believe that the worst is
already at hand. "Our poor country lies in Roman decadence," the
French conservative poet Arthur de Gobineau lamented in 1840. "We are
without fiber or moral energy. I no longer believe in anything. . . . MONEY HAS
KILLED EVERYTHING." (A great place to read bourgeoisophobe writing is
Arthur Herman's "The Idea of Decline in Western History." Bourgeoisophobia
is not Herman's theme, but his book does such a magnificent job of surveying
two centuries of pessimistic thought that most of the key bourgeoisophobes are
quoted.)
And once the bourgeoisophobes had experienced the basic spasm of reaction, they
soon settled on the Americans and Jews as two of the chief objects of their
ire. Because, as Henry Steele Commager once noted, no country in the world ever
succeeded like
So the Jews were quickly established in the bourgeoisophobe imagination as the
ultimate commercial people. They were the bankers, the traders, the soulless
and sharp dealmakers who crawled through the cellars of honest and noble
cultures and infected them with their habits and practices. The 19th-century
Teutonic philosopher Houston Chamberlain said of the Jews that "their
existence is a crime against the holy laws of life." The Jewish religion,
he said, is "rigid," "scanty," and "sterile."
The American bourgeoisophobe family, the Adamses, contained more than its share
of anti-Semites. Brooks Adams lamented that "
It's actually amazing how early
Each wave of foreign observers reinforced the prejudice. Charles Dickens
described a country of uncouth vulgarians frantically chasing, as he first put
it, "the almighty dollar." Oswald Spengler worried that
In the 20th century the Americans' aggressive commercialism was symbolized by
the unstoppable spread of jeans, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Disney, and Microsoft.
FOR THE bourgeoisophobe, then, the question becomes, how does one confront this
menace? And on this, the bourgeoisophobes split into two schools. One, which
might be called the brutalist school, seeks to reclaim the raw, masculine
vitality that still lies buried at the virile heart of human nature. The other,
which might be called the ethereal school, holds that a creative minority can
rise above prosaic bourgeois life into a realm of contemplation, feeling, art,
sensibility, and spiritual grace.
The brutalist school started in
The brutalists urged sons--"the explosive ones"--to revolt against
their fathers. They romanticized insanity as a rebellion against convention.
They looked back nostalgically to the crude, savage, and proud men of Homeric
legend, Germanic history, and Norse myth. They looked for another such hero to
emerge today, a virile warrior who would demolish the stale encrustations of an
overcivilized world and revive the raw energy of the species. "We do not
need ideologues anymore," Oswald Spengler argued, "we need hardness,
we need fearless skepticism, we need a class of socialist master men."
This, of course, was the path that led to Mussolini, Hitler, Saddam Hussein,
and bin Laden.
Meanwhile, the ethereal bourgeoisophobes were emerging in
The Europeans should therefore turn inward. As Arthur Herman notes, the human
ideal Toynbee described looks a lot like Toynbee himself: "diffident,
sensitive, religious in a contemplative and otherworldly sense, a man who shuns
the world of violence and barbarism to pursue the 'etherealization' of himself
and society." Toynbee denounced patriotism, commercial striving, and the
martial spirit. Artists and intellectuals, the "creative minority,"
should lead until "the majority is drilled into following the minority's
lead mechanically."
Though Toynbee despised the United States, his books sold well here. His
lecture tours were lucrative, and his picture was on the cover of Time
magazine. When Hitler came along, Toynbee was an enthusiastic appeaser. He met
Hitler in 1936 and came away deeply impressed (the two men hated some of the
same things). He told his countrymen that Hitler sincerely desired peace. For,
just as the brutalist school of bourgeoisophobia led to Hitler and Saddam, the
ethereal school led to Neville Chamberlain and some of the European reaction to
George Bush's Axis of Evil.
SINCE SEPTEMBER 11, there has been a great deal of analysis of the roots of
Muslim rage. But to anybody familiar with the history of bourgeoisophobia, it
is striking how comfortably Muslim rage meshes with traditional rage against
meritocratic capitalism. The Islamist fanatic and the bourgeoisophobe hate the
same things. They use the same words, they utter the same protests. In an essay
in the New York Review of Books called "Occidentalism," Avishai
Margalit and Ian Buruma listed the traits that enrage al Qaeda and other Third
World anti-Americans and anti-Westerners. First, they hate the city. Cities
stand for commerce, mixed populations, artistic freedom, and sexual license.
Second, they hate the mass media: advertising, television, pop music, and
videos. Third, they hate science and technology--the progress of technical
reason, mechanical efficiency, and material know-how. Fourth, they hate
prudence, the desire to live safely rather than court death and heroically
flirt with violence. Fifth, they hate liberty, the freedom extended even to
mediocre people. Sixth, they despise the emancipation of women. As Margalit and
Buruma note, "Female emancipation leads to bourgeois decadence." Women
are supposed to stay home and breed heroic men. When women go out into the
world, they deprive men of their manhood and weaken their virility.
If you put these six traits together, you have pretty much the pillars of
meritocratic capitalist society, practiced most assertively in countries like
America and Israel. Contemporary Muslim rage is further inflamed by two
additional passions. One is a sense of sexual shame. A rite of passage for any
bourgeoisophobe of this type is the youthful trip to America or to the West,
where the writer is nearly seduced by the vulgar hedonism of capitalist life,
but heroically spurns it. Sayyid Qutb, who is one of the intellectual heroes of
the Islamic extremists, toured America between 1948 and 1950. He found a world
of jazz, football, movies, cars, and people obsessed with lawn maintenance. It
was a land, he wrote, "hollow and full of contradictions, defects and
evils." At one point Qutb found himself at a church social. The disc
jockey put on "Baby, It's Cold Outside." As Qutb wrote, "The
dancing intensified. . . . The hall swarmed with legs. . . . Arms circled arms,
lips met lips, chests met chests, and the atmosphere was full of love."
This was at a church social. You can imagine how the September 11 al Qaeda
hijackers must have felt during the visit they made to a Florida strip club
shortly before going off to their purifying martyrdom.
The second inflaming passion is humiliation--humiliation caused by the fact
that in the 1960s and 1970s, many Arab and Muslim nations tried to join this
bourgeois world. They tried to modernize, and they failed. Some Arab countries
continue to pursue the low and dirty modernizing path, continue to ape the
sordid commercialists and even to accept the presence of American troops on
Arabian soil. And this drives the hard-core Islamic bourgeoisophobes to even
higher states of rage. As bin Laden himself notably put it, protesting the
presence of American troops on Saudi land: "By God, Muslim women refuse to
be defended by these American and Jewish prostitutes." The Islamist
response to humiliation has been worship of the Muslim man of force. Islamist
extremists romanticize the brutal warrior, just as the German bourgeoisophobes
did, only the Islamists wear robes and clutch Korans. Like European and Japanese
brutalists before them, the Islamists celebrate violence and build a cult of
suicide and death. "The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, we love death,"
declared al Qaeda's Mualana Inyadullah after September11. Jews "love life
more than any other people, and they prefer not to die," declared Hamas
official Ismail Haniya on March 28 amidst a rash of suicide bombings.
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.
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David Brooks is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
© The Weekly Standard, 04/15/2002, Volume 007, Issue 30.