Alas for the hegemony of the bourgeois culture
Another thing people are drawing up battle lines over:
Not all cultures are equal.
That’s the assertion made by Amy Wax and Larry Alexander, law professors at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of San Diego, respectively, in a Philadelphia Inquirer opinion piece that also goes on to rail against modern culture, including — but not limited to — “inner-city blacks,” birth control and the “anti-assimilation attitudes” supposedly “gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants.”
The editorial attributes modern America’s decline to the eschewing of “the hegemony of the bourgeois culture” of the 1940s, ’50s and early ’60s, which preached marriage before children, family values and respect for authority — in contrast what the authors call today’s idle, sloppy, divorce-prone and anti-authoritarian youth. The piece was published earlier this month but didn’t cause a stir until recently, when students — who are just now returning to campus — noticed and began calling it racist, and saying its language is dangerous, especially in light of the recent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., which left a woman dead.
I read the piece. It’s surprisingly silly. There’s probably some truth in it but it’s very incomplete, at best, and as an argument it’s just shallow. Ho hum – a couple of conservatives write a silly editorial in a newspaper. Not really worth battles if you ask me.
Official university reactions have been limited.
A San Diego spokeswoman said that the institution hasn’t heard from students objecting to the piece — possibly due to students preparing for move-in day and not being on campus yet — and that the university is committed to “contributions from all religions, cultures and points of view.”
“While we recognize and protect the First Amendment right to freedom of expression, we are mindful that diverse points of view may be upsetting to some who do not agree with opposing perspectives,” Pamela Gray Payton said in an email. “We continue our work to ensure that members of our campus community feel safe and supported as we discuss and debate the urgent challenges facing our world.”
Penn took a similar approach.
“The views expressed by the op-ed authors are their own, and are not a statement of Penn Law’s values or policies,” law school spokesman Steven Barnes said. The dean of the law school, Ted Ruger, agreed, although he kept his direct criticism to one sentence.
“Institutionally and collectively we must permit every student and faculty member to speak, but we need not remain silent or imply endorsement of all views,” Ruger wrote in an opinion piece for The Daily Pennsylvanian. “And so, while debate continues, it is important that I state my own personal view that as a scholar and educator I reject emphatically any claim that a single cultural tradition is better than all others.”
Nevertheless the soldiers of Twitter are exchanging fire.
Read it. As you say: yeah, maybe there’s some stuff in there that’s not wrong, if interpreted in certain ways, but it’s mostly just shallow and preachy. Lots of people who faithfully followed the “old precepts” have been blindsided by the hollowing-out of the middle class, as the era of the capitalist robber barons returns. And they seem oblivious to the fact that the most powerful and prominent citizen of the US at present is hardly a poster child for the “bourgeois values” they pine for.
But Steve, bourgeois values never apply to the upper classes. They nominally apply to the bourgeois themselves but their most rigourous application is to the proletariat.
Bernard, quite. Bourgeois values are beneath the ruling elite (the Trumps, Kochs and, yes, Clintons) of this world. The Bourgeois love the thrill of flouting their own values (as long as they don’t get publicly humiliated) – I guess there is some sort of frisson from the fear of being caught at it. The proletariat have no such leeway or luxury.
I wonder if Prof Ruger would concede that some cultural traditions are worse than others. Anyone is welcome to attempt to convince me that Saudi culture is equal to liberal democracy.
Bernard Hurley,
What do you mean by ‘rigorous application’. In my experience members of the proletariat are no more interested in bourgeois values than the upper classes.
@4: “In my experience members of the proletariat are no more interested in bourgeois values than the upper classes.” — as was observed by that perceptive moral philosopher, Alfred P. Doolittle (who referred to it as “mi’ll class morali’y”).
RJW, it’s not so much that the proletariat accept bourgeois values, although the popularity of TV programs such as “Benefit Street” and the sort of stories published in the UK popular press suggests that many do, but that they are overwhelmingly the victims of the application of such values.
I am reminded of the man who berated the headmaster of a top public (= private outside the UK) school for not expelling a “scholarship boy”, presumably from a poor background, for stealing his son’s pencil. After a long diatribe about how “that type of person” gets away with too much he added “It’s not the pencil, you understand, it’s the principle. For goodness sake, I can get any number pencils at work.”
Bernard Hurley,
Yes, the sting is in the tail.
I think it’s more a case that in some circumstances members of the proletariat accept some bourgeois values, education, for example. My working class parents nearly bankrupted themselves by sending their two sons to a private school. Like many parents of baby boomers (I’m 71) they wanted their children to have collar and tie jobs.
Considering what tradesmen charge these days, I might have been more prosperous as a plumber.
I didn’t notice much snobbery at my school btw. Some of my classmates were the sons of millionaires. I’ll be bold and suggest that class distinctions are less rigid here in Australia than the UK although our celebrated social mobility is faltering after a generation of neoliberalism.