Across the street from the train station there’s Cafe Procopio, which, the takeout cups inform you, was named after a 17th-century Parisian meeting place for artists and intellectuals. There probably still aren’t a lot of artists and intellectuals in Wayne, but now there are a lot of people who want to drink coffee like one. West of town there is a Fresh Fields grocery store selling Mayan Fungus Soap, tree-oil mouthwash and vegetarian dog biscuits. Like so much in Wayne’s cultural wave, Fresh Fields has taken the ethos of California of the 1960s and selectively updated it. Gone are the ’60s things that were of interest to teenagers, like free love, and retained are those things that might be of interest to middle-aged hypochondriacs, like whole grains.
Suddenly, the old categories no longer make sense. Wayne used to be a classic bourgeois suburb. The bourgeois were the square ones. They defended tradition and middle-class morality. They worked for corporations and went to church. They were always being attacked by those on the other side of the cultural divide, the bohemians, for being uptight and boring. The bohemians were the free spirits who flouted convention. They were the artists and intellectuals–the beats and the hippies.
But now if you look around Wayne, and the rest of America, you see that bourgeois and bohemian styles are all mixed up. Bankers sit in coffeehouses listening to alternative music. Massive corporations like Apple and the Gap cite Gandhi and Jack Kerouac in their ads. Upscale furnishing stores feature chopping tables copied from the farms of French peasants. The styles say “A Year in Provence,” but the prices say Two Decades Out of Medical School.
And this isn’t just a matter of fashion accessories. If you investigate people’s attitudes toward sex, morality, leisure time and work, it’s getting harder and harder to separate the anti-establishment renegade from the pro-establishment company man. Most of us have rebel attitudes and conformist-success attitudes mixed together. The people who dominate the new Wayne and the rest of our national culture are both bourgeois and bohemian. Or to take the first two letters of those words, they are Bobos.
For my book, “Bobos in Paradise,” I spent a few years investigating this Bobo culture that began in upscale America and now spreads out across the country. Again and again I found the same thing: bohemian attitudes from the hippie 1960s have merged with the bourgeois attitudes of the Yuppie 1980s to form a new culture, which is a synthesis of the two. For a time we had a culture war between people who loved the Woodstock ’60s and people who loved the Reagan ’80s. But while the culture warriors were arguing with each other, regular Americans were adopting attitudes and lifestyles from both. The people who dominate our culture now are richer and more worldly than the hippies, but more spiritualized than the stereotypical Yuppies. Our attitudes toward work, sex, pleasure, ambition, politics, intellect and even God are shaped by this weird synthesis between the bourgeois and the bohemian.
In some sense, this Bobo culture is the final resting spot for the baby-boomer generation. All their lives, the boomers have been on a journey to find some sense of balance, and a set of rules and standards to live by that would be both liberating and yet rooted.
The boomers were born into a world–in the late ’40s, ’50s and early ’60s–that was still dominated by the WASP aristocracy. The boomers flooded into colleges in the 1960s and rebelled against all that. The 1960s were about many things, some of them silly and some of them, like civil rights and Vietnam, serious. But at its core the radicalism of the 1960s was a challenge to the WASP notion of success. The bourgeois WASPs floated on a swell of affluence, so the bohemian radicals rejected materialism. The bourgeois admired politeness, so the student leaders were raw. The bourgeois pretended to be chaste, so the students pretended to be promiscuous.
The hardest of the hard-core ’60s radicals believed the only honest way out was to reject “success” altogether: drop out of the rat race and retreat to small communes. But that sort of utopianism was never going to be popular, especially among boomer college grads. And as time went by, the Information Age economy kicked in and these educated boomers found the riches of the universe at their feet.
The whole thrust of the Information Age economy has been to reward education with dough. A lot of the boomers who in college regarded themselves as anti-materialist now find themselves rolling in stock options. Moreover, the New Economy is structured so that the boomers could make all this money without really abandoning their artistic/rebel roots. In this era, ideas and knowledge are at least as vital to economic success as natural resources and financial capital. The intangible world of information merges with the material world of money, and new phrases that combine the two, such as “intellectual capital” and “the culture industry,” come into vogue. The people who thrive in this period have one foot in the bohemian world of creativity and one foot in the bourgeois world of the marketplace.
So now the boomers must confront the anxieties of affluence: how to show–not least to themselves–that even while climbing toward the top of the ladder they have not become all the things they still profess to hate. Some once had question authority bumper stickers on their vans, but find themselves leading management seminars. In college they read sociologists who argued that consumerism is a sham; today they’re out shopping for $3,000 refrigerators.
These boomer elites don’t despair in the face of such challenges. Founding Web-page design firms, they find a way to be artists and still drive a Lexus. Building gourmet companies like Ben & Jerry’s or Nantucket Nectars, they’ve found a way to be dippy hippies and multinational corporate fat cats. Turning university towns like Princeton and Palo Alto into entrepreneurial centers, they have reconciled the highbrow with the high tax bracket. Dressing like the dot-com jockeys in worn chinos, they’ve reconciled undergraduate fashions with upper-income occupations.
This hybrid Bobo culture has transformed sector after sector of American life. For example, up until recently business people cared less about seeming interesting and more about projecting an image of gravity and importance. But now corporate boardrooms echo with the language of the Age of Aquarius. In fact, if there’s one place where ’60s radicalism is still vibrant, it’s the business world. Now it’s the management gurus and the CEOs who talk about smashing the status quo and crushing the establishment. It’s consultant Tom Peters who raves, “Destruction is cool!” It’s Lucent Technologies that adopted the slogan “Born to Be Wild.” It’s Burger King that tells America, “Sometimes You Gotta Break the Rules.”
Bobos have invaded the business world and brought their countercultural mental framework with them. Next year’s cost projections? They’re insanely great! The product pipeline? Way cool! How’d the IPO go? It cratered. When they get their pictures taken for the business magazines, they’ve got an obligatory wacky accouterment in view: a Super Soaker water cannon, a bungee cord, a snowboard with a favorite Schiller quotation on it.
Executives used to be suspicious of eggheads and intellectuals. But the new Bobo business people pretend to be a cross between Ken Kesey and Jean-Paul Sartre. Today corporate reports will have little quotations from Emile Zola on top. And companies are transformed along Bobo lines internally as well. In 1967 Kenneth Keniston completed “Young Radicals,” a study of the 1960s counterculturalists in which he observed that “in manner and style, these young radicals are extremely ‘personalistic,’ focused on face-to-face, direct and open relationships with other people; hostile to formally structured roles and traditional bureaucratic patterns of power and authority.” That’s an excellent summary of the management philosophy that prevails today in corporate America–and, oddly, it works as a profit-maximizing tool. Social critics used to argue that hippie culture would undermine the capitalist culture, but instead the merger of the two has unleashed an unprecedented period of business innovation and productivity.
The Bobo culture also shapes our spiritual lives. The boomers were born into an America that worried it was growing too conformist and too group-oriented. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, books like “The Organization Man” and “The Lonely Crowd” called for a little more individualism and self-expression. “We hope for nonconformists among you,” the theologian Paul Tillich told a commencement audience in the early 1960s.
The boomers didn’t need to be told twice. They hit the road in search of transcendent experiences and pure freedom. But the problem with that kind of spiritual freedom is that it never ends. It’s fine for the search, but it precludes the possibility of a destination. Furthermore, individualistic spirituality is very hard to pass down to your kids. And so even many of the people who are at first enthusiastic about New Age self-exploration have found themselves returning, sometimes reluctantly, to the institutionalized faiths they rejected–doing so for the sake of the kids.
The Bobo boomers have not surrendered their love of individual choice and freedom, but now are more likely to be looking for bonds of community and social order. Few social critics today think America is too group-oriented and orderly. On the contrary, most writers today call for more community, more group cohesion, deeper bonds. There’s a sudden appreciation of the settled, bourgeois ways.
While I was researching in Montana, I read about a rabbi who describes his style of Judaism as “Flexidoxy”–a perfect word to describe Bobo spirituality. It starts with flexibility and freedom, the desire to throw off authority and live autonomously. But it also suggests an opposing impulse toward orthodoxy–a desire to ground spiritual life within tangible reality, ordained rituals and binding connections that are based on deeper ties than rationality and choice.
So progressive in many of their attitudes, the Bobos are spiritual reactionaries. They spend much of their time trying to save and preserve, looking backward wistfully at peasant and native cultures–people who possess a wisdom that we peripatetic, opportunity-grasping Bobos seem to lack.
On the whole, Bobo culture is wonderful. The boomers have made towns like Wayne more interesting places to live, with better food and more diverse lifestyles. But of all the reconciliations the Bobos make, this spiritual fudge is the most problematic. Can you still worship God even if you take it upon yourself to decide that many of the Bible’s teachings are wrong? Can you still build community bonds if you know you’ll probably move if a better job comes along? Can you establish ritual and order in your life if you are driven to experiment with new things? The boomers are trying to build a house of obligation on a foundation of choice.
The result won’t be some Decline of Rome cataclysm. It’s more likely to be an enervating national shallowness. All these fudges and compromises mean you don’t want to delve too deeply. You aim for decency but not saintliness, civility but not truth.
It’s hard to imagine a Bobo Last Judgment. That’s too grand. Instead, for the boomers maybe there’ll just be a Last Discussion. One day we Bobos will return home from work and find the Angel of Death sitting on a stool in the oversize kitchen, sipping decaf from one of the ceramic mugs that were on sale at the crafts fair in Santa Fe. The Angel of Death will say how much he admires the Mediterranean tiles we had installed above the Viking range. He’ll add that the day of reckoning has arrived, but instead of sending us to heaven or to a fiery hell, he’s going to let us remain forever within our newly renovated great room with its California casual chairs. Merchant-Ivory films will play perpetually on the VCR and every radio station will be set to National Public Radio. And then after a final nibble on his biscotti, he will depart, fading into the distance and taking our Range Rover with him. And we baby-boomer Bobos will have finally reached the end of our long strange journey.
