In defense of the Bobo

The sourdough is spectacular, and, at $1.29 for a bottomless cup, the gourmet coffee is a relative bargain. Over the course of the past week, I've gotten into the habit of spending endless afternoons at Panera, the new bakery-cafe franchise on Nassau, nibbling panini while flipping through my course reading. The chain has locations all over Jersey, but they're not just another heartless corporation unconcerned with social justice or old-fashioned yeasty goodness. Not only are all the breads baked on-site, but when they get a little stale (or perhaps even before) they're given away to the needy in a program Panera proudly refers to as "Dough-nation." It's this combination of conspicuous consumption and superficial liberalism that makes Panera, to paraphrase the self-described "comic sociologist" David Brooks, a real Bobo's paradise.

For those unfamiliar with the gifted neologist, in his recent book on the subject, Brooks identified the Bobos as the new cultural elite — the bourgeois bohemians (get it?) who may have once been real counter-cultural rebels, but who have now learned not just to commodify their dissent but to sell it to the highest bidder on eBay. Rich, happy and powerful, the Bobos are breeding, and Brooks reports in the current Atlantic Monthly cover story that their spawn have invaded Princeton.

Like Margaret Mead at a Samoan Bar Mitzvah, Brooks describes hanging around Frist and soaking in the alien culture. What the author finds is that virtually every Princetonian fits the profile of what he calls the Organization Kid. This young I-Banker-to-be, sort of a Bobo Junior, is overworked, but happy; polite, but informal; free-thinking, yet entirely deferential to authority; culturally sensitive almost to the point of political correctness, yet profoundly materialistic and concerned almost exclusively with self-advancement. The Bobo/Organization Kid is the Martha Stewart version of Nietzsche's Last Man — comfortable, inoffensive and entirely without the values that give life meaning.

Reading Brooks' portrait of one's own social class is like staring into a fun house mirror. You laugh, because you can recognize yourself in the image, but the distortion is unmistakable. Nor is Brooks merely introducing this distortion for comedic purposes; the anthropologist of the cultural elite has a major ideological axe to grind. A senior editor at that Kristol Palace of neo-conservatism known as The Weekly Standard, Brooks addresses his enemies with a laudable good humor so often missing on both sides of the culture wars. But make no mistake: the liberal Bobo is Brooks's enemy.

Nowhere is this more clear than at the end of the author's article about Princeton, in which Brooks speaks to conservative politics professor Robert George and one of George's students, a sophomore who presumably shares his teacher's ideological and religious worldview. Now, I'm not going to start a debate with Robert George because a) Robert George is a tenured faculty member in my department and b) in a debate between the two of us, Robert George would win. It is odd, however, that the one non-Bobo who Brooks finds on campus — the one Princetonian who thinks life is about something more than not offending one's compatriots and getting a good offer from McKinsey — happens to be a student of George's. There is one exit from terminal Boboism, Brooks implies, and that door is to your right.

Admittedly, if it is an indifference to all but the most superficial values that makes the Bobo lifestyle so disturbing, then right might be the way to go. It's the Republican party, after all, which endlessly harps about God, character and morality. Yet the same President who called Jesus his favorite political philosopher seems to have skipped the part about giving all one's earthly goods to the poor, not to mention the part about not praying loudly and publicly like the hypocrites and Pharisees do. No, what's needed isn't more values talk, it's more of a real commitment to heartfelt, non-materialistic values. The two are not only different, but often at odds.

The average upper-class liberal of today is neither more nor less materialistic, neither more nor less moral, than the average upper-class conservative — especially when the Clintons are excluded from the statistical sample. The critical difference is that, as Brooks notices, liberals are often uncomfortable talking about moral issues for fear that this might be seen as somehow disrespectful of those with whom we disagree. Brooks may see a sort of post-modern nihilism in this fear of giving ethical offense, but I just see an overly cautious tolerance. Better an over-cautious tolerance, however, than a reckless fanaticism. I'll take a morality that embodies itself in such meek, superficial and often downright silly gestures as Dough-nation or Rainforest Crunch over the shrill moralizing of the religious right any day of the week — and twice on the Sabbath.

But if Brooks wants to meet a left-of-center Bobo unafraid of values and values talk, he knows where to find me: amidst the (sourdough) loaves and (tuna) fishes of Panera. I'll be the one in the back eating a chicken chipotle panini and reading Emerson. After all, man cannot live on bread alone. Michael Frazer is a politics graduate student from Riverdale, N.Y. He can be reached at mfrazer@princeton.edu.