What Does it Mean to be Bourgeois?

Previously writing of the matter of "middle classness" I have stressed the necessary material foundation of middle class existence--its historical basis in independence based on ownership of means of production; as this became less tenable as a basis for thinking about any but a very small portion of the population, social analysts' substituting for the idea of a property-owning "Old" middle class a "New" middle class of dependent professional-managerial employees; and the combination of consumption level, security and opportunity that these two situations were supposed to afford those who possessed those foundations.

The emphasis on the material was because so many of those who discuss the "middle class" are so shabbily evasive about the material requirements of the situation as they make middle classness about having a college degree or an office job or subjective perception of one's standing or professed "values" or some other such thing, a tack which enables them to present the middle class as far larger than it really is for various political reasons--like deflecting any charge that it has shrunk in the neoliberal era. (My own reading of the situation is that the "New" middle class, properly speaking, was never more than a small minority, that notions of a solid and comfortable middle classness as the societal norm in even the post-World War II United States were always a promise and not a reality--that the "wide middle class" we talk about is actually better understood as a "quasi-middle class," enjoying middle class-ish levels of consumption, but not really middle class security or chances to get ahead--and that this quasi-middle class has if anything tended to wither since then, to the point that its members' pretension to middle classness looks very, very threadbare these days.)

However, there is still something to be said of the middle class as a social grouping with distinct attitudes, the more easily pinpointed when one looks at that term connected with but only imperfectly synonymous with middle classness (the more in as we have to contend with that reality of quasi-middle classness), "bourgeois." Generally identified with conventionality, conformism, conservatism--above all, in relation to the economic system and its orthodoxies, namely capitalism and the economic individualism to which it enjoins all of society's members--it means not only an expectation of self-reliance on one's own part and that of others, but that one should have at the center of their life, as an end in itself rather than because of the associated material rewards, concern for self-advancement within a socioeconomic system the bourgeois treats as so natural and eternal that the claim that "society--there is no such thing," if such obvious idiocy as a description of the social world that they may not stand by it when it is presented to them so flatly, very much reflects how they think about the world in practice. At the same time they believe that their non-society--their market-centered non-society--is the best of all possible worlds, not least in its being more than any other a fair and meritocratic allotter of individual outcomes, so much so that they think that no one in this system can reasonably ask for more than "equality of opportunity," with the bar for what qualifies as such equality set so low its existence can seem, often is, mere empty piety; easily incline to seeing practical outcomes as moral outcomes such that what people get monetarily is what they "earn" and "deserve"; and regard those at the top (the words "entrepreneur," "startup," "hedge fund," "billionaire" speak as no others do to their imaginations) as "successful" and as "winners" who attained what they did because of their superior qualities ("intelligence," "talent," "drive," "grit") and "hard work" and are unquestionably worthy of respect, admiration, emulation, while they regard those who are not at the top as "unsuccessful" and "losers" the opposite in every way, failures whose personal faults have received their due, a person's worth summed up in their "net worth". By the same token the bourgeois views calls for modification of any of these outcomes in even the slightest way as not only an attack on their selfishness (for even if only people far richer than themselves are to be taxed under a particular proposal, they fear the tax man may come for those in their bracket next--and that if he doesn't, well, they will be rich someday too, won't they?) but also what passes with them for morality, for they see any such act as a penalty imposed on virtue for the sake of rewarding vice that, given their very low opinion of the human average, and especially of those they deem socially inferior, strikes at the very foundations of civilized life itself.

All that said the unattractions of the "Way of the Bourgeois" seem fairly obvious. The good bourgeois is enjoined to a narrow path of responsibility, restraint, diligence in pursuit of remote and uncertain reward that because of that stress on responsibility, restraint, diligence they are not even allowed to enjoy very much--all as even when they do relatively well their gains are paltry by comparison with what those possessed of genuine WEALTH enjoy (the statistics showing that billionaires are rarer than one in a million, and in spite of the Horatio Alger propaganda few of these really "self-made" in any sense). Indeed, the bourgeois' drive is more often rooted in their horror at the thought of falling into the lower class (and so not only having that much less of everything, but being one of those they despise) than of any real prospect of getting the big prizes.

Naturally it is desirable that those walking this path "not think too much" about what is asked--demanded--of them as against what they are likely to get, and indeed they are constantly dissuaded against this by those who stress "confidence" and "faith"--confidence and faith that one will be one of those winners at the top, somehow--and that those who must reckon with where they have actually got never question the promises made them. If they are not a billionaire, or even a millionaire, or even making minimum wage (especially if they are not even making minimum wage), they must be conditioned to think first, foremost and preferably last of how they personally went wrong--or if they must lay blame anywhere else, do so upon "safe" objects (like the "welfare queens" they are sure exist, and the "limousine liberals" coddling them, that must be why they're not a billionaire yet).

All this, in turn, conditions everything else--their sticking with the herd and groveling before rank and Authority, their ideas on family and religion and education and culture and much, much else. (A man, they think, must have a family, but in spite of all the cant about family always put work first--because a family's purpose is above all to "tie him down" and compel him to "work hard," keeping him on that narrow path that provides the only possible justification for his existence on Earth. One must have religion--or at least religiosity--because whether or not he actually believes, or can, "faith" is so important for getting along. One must admit the need for education as helpful in success, somehow, and think much of their children going to "good schools" and enjoin them to high academic achievement--but regard educators as second-rate people at best and intellectualism with distaste and distrust. One must grant the need for recreation, but more grudgingly, suspect "outside interests" as competing with one's "real job," and steer clear of what they are told are "childish things," such that somehow it is all right for a grown man to spend vast amounts of time and money as a fan of a football team, but not for him to play the latest edition of John Madden.) This outlook conditions, too, the manner of their stomaching the endless betrayals of self, moral compromises, indignities, hypocrisies inseparable from this mass of contradictions and repressions all this entails. (If playing by these rules isn't making him happy--if it makes them that sitcom stereotype of the unapproachable grouchy middle-aged dad who yells all the time--well, that's just how life is, and it is the sin qua non of mature responsible adulthood to accept every one of those misery-making standards unquestioningly, 'cause reasons, for, as is so often the case, their extreme, Panglossian, optimism about the system in the abstract goes along with an equally extreme pessimism about the chances of individual happiness in this world, to the point of merely speaking of the idea eliciting from them an ironic sneer.)

Of course, thanks to the narrowness, to the betrayals and compromises and indignities and hypocrisies and evident misery entailed, the package is such that in spite of the most intensive indoctrination of everyone from birth on up in this system of thinking and acting, many resist the expectations pressed upon them by their elders and society at large. Those who would "work to live" rather than "live to work," and still more those who would "walk the paths of Bohemia," necessarily do so. Likewise the fascination of that latterday form of aristocratic existence that is "celebrity" and the "fantasy careers" directed at achieving it reflect the desire, as widespread as it is natural, for something freer, easier, more humanly varied and satisfying--as a figure such as Upton Sinclair was able to point out a century ago writing of America in the Roaring '20s, with its attraction if anything grown since. The desire for an alternative is evident, too, in the desire to "drop out" of the fittingly named Rat Race altogether that few dare act upon, though the evidence is that more are doing so all the time in an age in which, as the burgeoning underemployment of college graduates, and the collapsing purchasing power of the wages of even those who do land "the good job" testifies, the effort expected of the would-be member of the middle class keeps growing, while the likelihood of actually being middle class keeps shrinking.

Indeed, looking at the endless invective that the courtiers of power and flatterers of the respectable in the media fling at the younger of the working-age age cohorts (the much-maligned "millennials," and after them Generation Z) it is clear that their perception of a lack of "proper bourgeois virtue" on their part is the cause. Refusing to draw the glaringly obvious conclusion that their reserve toward bourgeois ways comes from the fact that that whole way of life is just not working for them, even to the extent that it had for earlier cohorts, said guardians of morality merely insist upon adherence to the Old Ways as they pour out abuse showing them to be as lacking in wit as they are in humanity--and never noticing all the while how remote their intolerance is from the rhetoric of "freedom" and "choice" of which they make so much, or the undercurrent of crab bucket mentality and plain envy evident in their verbal assaults on anyone who would want anything else or more out of life.