II. The End of Modernity
The Bobos
In 1992, America elected the first black leader of the Free World—a white man from Hope, Arkansas named William Jefferson Clinton. Clinton’s ascendancy was seen by observers on both sides of the aisle as the culmination of the cultural changes fomented in the 1960s and 70s. The left saw it as a sign of progress, the right as a symptom of decline. They were both wrong. In fact, it was a harbinger of stagnation.
In my last post, I explored the origins of what I call the Dialectic of Modernity. I will now show what I see as the result of this historical paradigm.
Traditionally, the word “dialectic” simply meant conversation or debate. It was a tool developed by Socrates in order to expose contradictions in thought by which one could move closer to the Truth. In modernity, however, this term turned into a full on metaphysical principle that was held to be the driving force of History. Contradictions were not just exposed for the individual through their conversations with friends and acquaintances (and sometimes enemies), but for entire epochs, whereby every individual’s consciousness was thought to be transformed in accordance with this progressively unfolding and elevating process.
My use of the word falls somewhere in the middle of these two senses. While I am employing dialectic in the Hegelian sense (history as a battle between competing propositions, a “thesis” and its “antithesis,” that reconcile in a “synthesis”), I do not mean to imply that this necessarily entails progress. What results from this process could in fact be far worse.
However, I do believe that history generally moves in such a way: a transformational, epoch-making thesis is introduced, giving rise to a reactionary antithesis. An era’s possibilities then become delimited within this sphere (cf. “Overton Window”), until they have exhausted themselves. As an individual, though, I believe that how we engage with and react to the available options is not metaphysically determined by history, but dialectical in the originary sense. It is up to us how much we allow our souls to be affected/infected by our zeitgeist.
The Dialectic of Modernity was a battle between two novel forms of individuality that arose out of a change in thinking that occurred in the West circa 1500 or so. The resulting thesis and antithesis can be summed up by the terms bourgeois and bohemian—or less arcanely, the businessman and the artist. They were embodiments of the philosophies of two of modernity’s most influential thinkers, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. For more than 200 years, these opposing ideals fought for supremacy over the soul of Western civilization. But as we reached the fin de millenaire, something unprecedented occurred: these adversaries synthesized into a single form. This union, however, did not beget some higher Truth—it short-circuited the mechanics of modernity.
As Neocon turned Neo-Dealer David Brooks documents in his 2000 study, Bobos in Paradise, in the early 1990s, something completely unexpected came about:
Most people, at least among the college educated set seemed to have rebel attitudes and social climbing attitudes all scrambled together. Defying expectations and maybe logic, people seemed to have combined the countercultural 60s and the achieving 80s into one social ethos.
The “Bobo” of Brooks’ title is a portmanteau made up of the identities of our two antagonists: bourgeois and bohemians; the paradise they inhabit is the garden of earthly delights made possible by modern technology, globalization, and multiculturalism. With this synthesis of Locke and Rousseau, modernity reached Nirvana—not in some mystical beyond, but right here on earth, in these United States of America.
After a mid-decade stint in Europe, Brooks came back to a surprising scene. All the categories he had grown up with, products of the bourgeois-bohemian divide, seemed to have collapsed in on themselves. Countercultural radicalism had moved from the underground to center stage and was displacing all the traditional norms of propriety and class. Out were bourgeois self-mastery and discipline; in was bohemian self-expression and creativity. The pulpit no longer preached purity, manners, order, and beauty, but gritty authenticity, autonomy, and self-realization. But unlike their anarchic ancestors, these new bohemians weren’t opposed to making money and engaging with the finer things in life. They just were only willing to do it on their own terms. And their goal was to reshape the system in their own image.
As Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain confessed to his private journal right before his self-inflicted shotgun blast to the head:
We can pose as the enemy to infiltrate the mechanics of the system to start its rot from the inside. Sabotage the empire by pretending to play their game, compromise just enough to call their bluff. And the hairy, sweaty, macho, sexist dickheads will soon drown in a pool of razor blades and semen, stemmed from the uprising of their children, the armed and deprogrammed crusade, littering the floors of Wall Street with revolutionary debris.
Brooks describes this new cadre as “the reconcilers” because they found a way to unite what had once been seen as an unbridgeable abyss—they turned business into an art, and art into a business.
Although the attempted reconciliation between these once mortal enemies did not work out so well for Cobain, it has now become the ruling ethos of our ruling class. Transgression is the new norm. Despite the Bobos continuing to conceive of themselves as democrats and outsiders, as Brooks’ subtitle (The New Upper Class and How They Got There) makes plain, they in fact occupy most all of the major seats of power and determine the character of what is consider acceptable in our cultural discourse.
Setting aside all the other issues that this world-historical development has conjured up (the culture war, cancel culture, transhumanism, Donald Trump), perhaps the most troubling is that the fusing of these once inimical dispositions has robbed the modern world of the creative tension that was its driving force. By reaching Nirvana, we have escaped the cycle of birth, death, and re-creation. Some have argued that this is the “End of History” as such. I however believe it to simply be the end of modernity—which the daily expansion of the Overton Window in all directions would seem to confirm.
The question is what comes next?