On the sixteenth of July, 1969 three mortals sat on the brink of immortality at the apex of a 36-story missile preparing to harness seven-and-a-half million pounds of thrust propulsion in an attempt to seize their place amongst the heavens. Nearly five centuries of unremitting experimentation, of searching and striving, of reaching out beyond the known world and its limits, prescriptions, and inhibitions: all had culminated in this moment. This conquest of space and time, this “giant leap for mankind,” was the apotheosis of the modern West’s mission to master nature through science and technology—launched in 1492, when Columbus sailed that ocean blue. When in a post-flight press conference, Commander Neil Armstrong was asked about the significance of the moon-landing, he hailed it as nothing less than the “beginning of a new age” in human history.
Precisely one lunar cycle following this techno-triumph, 400,000 youths packed into rusted-out Nazi-mobiles descended upon a then anonymous farmville in upstate New York. Their mission: a three-day bacchanalia of peace, love, and LySergic Diethylamide. Billed as an “Aquarian Exposition”—an allusion to the dawning of a new astrological age of heightened consciousness and unity—Woodstock marked the final penetration of Rousseau’s anti-Enlightenment protest into the mainstream of Western civilization. Thus, at the exact moment bourgeois rationalism achieved its greatest conquest of nature, modernity’s most powerful bohemian countermovement emerged seeking instead a return to nature.
But for all the possibilities these two events opened up, they were in fact not new beginnings—but rather, a culmination.
The goal of this Substack is to unravel what I call the Dialectic of Modernity: the theoretical and spiritual battle between the bourgeois mindset that got us to the moon and the bohemian reaction embodied in all those naked, muddy bodies that attended Woodstock. For more than 200 years, these two dispositions defined for us in the West the antipodes of the possible—our so-called “Overton Window.” However, I believe that what we are witnessing today is the end of modernity.
In the early Nineties, lets call it 1992, something completely unexpected happened: these once mortal enemies synthesized into a new being—the Bourgeois Bohemian, otherwise known as the “Bobo.” As their nomenclator David Brooks elucidates in his 2000 study, Bobos in Paradise, “The grand achievement of educated elites in the 1990s was to create a way of living that lets you be both an affluent success and a free-spirit rebel.” A Bobo is basically a hipster who has achieved the American Dream—a Marxist with a bank account, as a favorite songwriter of mine once branded herself. What privilege today means more than anything else is that you no longer have to choose: You can have it all!
The evidence for this is all around us, but can most conspicuously be seen in the culture of Silicon Valley: a place where individuals working on the most advanced technological innovations and making 6-7 figures a year wear hoodies and jeans to an office that includes arcades and napping rooms and are stocked with an endless supply of all-natural, all-organic goodies. The values of business and art, money-making and creativity, progress and conservation, it would seem have been somehow unified. Indeed, there is not one major city in the US that does not have its own state and corporate sponsored “transgressive” Arts District.
This event marks the end of modernity because in the absence of Bo-Bo antagonism that defined the contours of the possible during that epoch, the West has lost the creative tension that once drove us forward. In its place a chaotic stagnation has taken hold, in which all is in constant motion, yet goes nowhere. Everything is now on the table; therefore nothing is. We live in a world of infinite virtual possibilities—at least the Bobos do. And in case you were wondering if you yourself are a Bobo, just answer this one simple question: Which are you more likely to drink at lunch today, Coca-Cola or kombucha?
“Like any class,” Brooks elaborates in his 2022 Atlantic follow up, How the Bobos Broke America, “the Bobos are a collection of varied individuals who tend to share certain taken-for-granted assumptions, schemas, and cultural rules.” They find it natural that after high school one is to leave their hometown, go to college and get a job—wherever in the world an opportunity may present itself. This is because, on average, they possess more individualistic values, and have a more autonomous sense of self; they also see their career as the defining feature of their identity, and hold intelligence as one of the highest markers of worth. However, Brooks contends, “The educated elites didn’t set out to create this reconciliation, it is the product of millions of individual efforts to have things both ways”—a byproduct of what might be called bohemian “openness.”
It is this “code of openness” that most distinguishes them both from our older elites and their lower class contemporaries. Gone are WASP social etiquette, manners, and exclusivity; in its place, elite prep schools now teach the ability to walk into any room, filled with any sorts of person, and be completely comfortable navigating any situation—which, on the face of it, seems radically egalitarian. Gone are all the oblique, byzantine rules and hierarchies that once dictated the minutiae of social life; gone are the borders and boundaries separating class, race, and gender; gone are the irrational and immoral prejudices that prevented a true brotherhood of man. But as Brooks counters, “only the most culturally privileged person knows how to navigate a space in which the social rules are mysterious and hidden.” While an intricately ordered etiquette might be a burden to adopt for those outside it, an unspoken ethos is neigh impossible to learn for those not born into it.
Indeed, for all its celebrated openness, Bobos tend to be remarkably insular. The most politically intolerant county in the US, Brooks claims, is not to be found in some red-necked backwater, but Suffolk County, Massachusetts, the home of that liberal bastion of Boston. The result of this self-segregation is what sociologists call “Super Zips,” in which dense clusters of intelligence and privilege congregate in impenetrable bubbles of self-righteousness and self-satisfaction. While every front lawn in Concord, MA sports a BLM and “In this house we believe…” sign, you’d be hard pressed to find a BL behind any of the front doors.
As Marx rightly instructs (although for the wrong reasons), “The ruling class determines the extent and compass of an epoch, and among other things will rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and will regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age.” And thus we find ourselves engulfed by what Brooks calls this new elite’s “epistemic regime”—their particular vision of truth and the good life. “If you feel seen in society,” Brooks explains, “that’s because the [Bobo] class sees you; if you feel unseen, that’s because this class does not.” As the economic, cultural, and social power of the Bobos has grown, an ideology of countercultural lifestyle instead class has come to dominate mainstream left-wing parties in the West. In response a global backlash has arisen to challenge their hegemony.
The inner kumbaya achieved by the reconciliation of the bourgeois and bohemian seems to have revealed the true nature of modernity: an epistemic emptiness that has drained life of its coherence and meaning.
For all of the talk about “diversity” and “multiculturalism” today, it is becoming clear that the system instantiated by Bobo rule is nothing more than a well-catered costume party. This is because, as Brooks so poetically portrays, “The Bobos are trying to build a house of obligation on a foundation of choice.” Both the bourgeois and the bohemian are embodiments of a conception of freedom and personhood that is antithetical to true community and culture, while encouraging all the worse aspects of economics. It was thought that the incorporation of bohemianism into the bourgeois lifestyle would redeem its deficiencies, when in fact it has deepened them. With this revelation, a space seems to be opening up for something truly new to blossom forth—a true postmodernism.
But as the ancient Greek proverb preaches, “The beginning is half of the whole.” To understand this new end, I believe we must go first back to the beginning. In my next post, I shall explore what set this dialectic in motion in the first place, in order that we may come to better understand what an alternative might look like.