firstthings6 - The Monday Morning Memo

My friend Steve King

sent an email this week

recommending a book:

“Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines is a literal and

philosophical trek through the Australian Outback

in search of the Aboriginal “songlines” — paths used

by their totemic gods when they sang the world

into existence in Dreamtime. The book was an unlikely
and controversial bestseller. This is Chatwin’s first chat

with his trekker-guide, a Russian named Arkady:

The Aboriginals had an earthbound philosophy. The earth gave life to a man; gave him his food, language and intelligence; and the earth took him back when he died. A man’s ‘own country,’ even an empty stretch of spinifex, was itself a sacred icon that must remain unscarred. ?

“Unscarred, you mean, by roads or mines or railways?”

“To wound the earth,” he answered earnestly, “is to wound yourself, and if others wound the earth, they are wounding you. The land should be left untouched: as it was in the Dreamtime when the Ancestors sang the world into existence.”?

“Rilke,” I said, “had a similar intuition. He also said song was existence.”

“I know,” said Arkady, resting his chin on his hands.
“Third Sonnet to Orpheus.”

“‘Highly educated, curious, ironic, wittily countercultural, X people tend to underdress for social occasions,’ Fussell wrote. ‘They know the best wine stores and delis. They have risen above the muck of mainstream culture to a higher, hipper sensibility.’ The chapter about X people was insufferably self-regarding, but Fussell was onto something.

Every once in a while, in times of transformation, a revolutionary class comes along and disrupts old structures, introduces new values, opens up economic and cultural chasms. In the 19th century, it was the bourgeoisie, the capitalist merchant class. In the latter part of the 20th century, as the information economy revved up and the industrial middle class hollowed out, it was X people.

Seventeen years later, I wrote a book about that same class, Bobos in Paradise. The bobos didn’t necessarily come from money, and they were proud of that; they’d secured their places in selective universities and in the job market through drive and intelligence exhibited from an early age, they believed. X types deemed themselves as rebels against the staid elite. They were—as the classic Apple commercial had it—“the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers.” But by 2000, the information economy and the tech boom were showering the highly educated with cash. They had to find ways of spending their gobs of money while showing they didn’t care for material things. So they developed an elaborate code of financial correctness to display their superior sensibility. Spending lots of money on any room formerly used by the servants was socially defensible: A $7,000 crystal chandelier in the living room was vulgar, but a $10,000, 59-inch AGA stove in the kitchen was acceptable, a sign of your foodie expertise. When it came to aesthetics, smoothness was artificial, but texture was authentic. The new elite distressed their furniture, used refurbished factory floorboards in their great rooms, and wore nubby sweaters made by formerly oppressed peoples from Peru.

The bobos have coalesced into an insular, intermarrying brahmin elite that dominates culture, media, education, and tech.”

- David Brooks, How the Bobos Broke America, The Atlantic, Sept 2021