Summary Of Bobos In Paradise By David Brooks

Bobos in Paradise

Bobos is the term that author David Brooks uses to label the new rising upper class of today's society. Bobos are the creation of two merging social groups; the bourgeois and the bohemians. There has been a traditional clash between the bourgeois world of capitalism and the bohemian counterculture. "The bourgeoisie were the square, practical ones. They defended tradition and middle-class morality. They worked for corporations, lived in suburbs, and went to church. Meanwhile, the bohemians were the free spirits who flouted convention. They were the artists and the intellectuals – the hippies and the Beats." (p. 10). But these separate worlds have merged into one. This merging is what the book is all about, the new
As you take a closer look into the bobo culture, you begin to see something very stunning. The bobos have adopted some of the bourgeoisie ideals and incorporated them with the bohemian lifestyle. This new educated elite has invented a "way of living that lets you be an affluent success and at the same time a free-spirit rebel."(p. 83). An example of this is the CEO in a causal polo shirt at board meetings, or the broker on Wall Street covered with tattoos. This was unheard of before the age of the bobos. These changes are not only evident in the work place but also in their everyday lifestyle as well. A bobo cannot just press a pair of pants; they have to practice the Feng Shui of Ironing, where "a wrinkle is actually 'tension' in the fabric," and "releasing the tension by removing the wrinkle improves the flow of ch'i."(p. 59) Even entire towns were changing. In a chapter titled "Consumption," Brooks tells speaks of a town called Wayne, Pennsylvania, 13 miles west of Philadelphia. Once upon a time, Wayne was such a square, white-bread kind of town that it was impossible to find an espresso, let alone any good faux-peasant bread. In the age of the bobos, the town has changed. Boy has Wayne got a bakery for you, "one of those gourmet bread stores where they sell apricot almond or spinach
In the end, it is still unclear whether the bohemian and the bourgeois are truly reconciled in this new bobo age. It seems, rather, that the bohemian has really co-opted the bourgeois. A case in point is Brooks' fine description of bobo religion, which he calls "flexidoxy."(p. 242) It is not merely an anything-goes relativism, rather it is a "hybrid mixture of freedom and flexibility on the one hand and the longing for rigor and orthodoxy on the other."(p. 256) Put another way, religious bobos immerse themselves in the communities and traditions of their religion but pick and choose what they will believe and how they will practice it. Brooks observes of such spirituality that "somehow it is rigor without submission" and "orthodoxy without obedience." Such thorough refusal to submit and to obey is perhaps the best example of an unrecognized tension between the bohemian and the bourgeois in the Bobo world. It is also evidence that perhaps Brooks' declaration of reconciliation is too hastily made. The bobos appear to be really bohemians with a simulacrum of the bourgeois rather than a genuine reconciliation of the