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'Values' Update - Is the U.S. Declining Because Americans Abandoned ‘Bourgeois Values'?
[New York] It’s rare for an 800-word newspaper column to generate as much controversy as the one published a month ago in the Philadelphia Inquirer. In it, Amy Wax and Larry Alexander, law professors at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of San Diego, respectively, argued that the collapse of "bourgeois values" ‐ defined by the duo as, among other things, being "neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable," not using bad language, respecting authority, and eschewing "substance abuse and crime" ‐ can go a long way toward explaining what they see as America’s recent socioeconomic difficulties. They believe it accounts for social trends ranging from low male labor-force participation to the opioid crisis.Key to their argument is the idea that some cultures embrace bourgeois values more than others: All cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy. The culture of the Plains Indians was designed for nomadic hunters, but is not suited to a First World, 21st-century environment. Nor are the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-"acting white" rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants. These cultural orientations are not only incompatible with what an advanced free-market economy and a viable democracy require, they are also destructive of a sense of solidarity and reciprocity among Americans. If the bourgeois cultural script ‐ which the upper-middle class still largely observes but now hesitates to preach ‐ cannot be widely reinstated, things are likely to get worse for us all. It’s worth pointing out that this is not a new argument, of course ‐ it’s a mix of, among others, brand-name conservative figures like Richard Nixon and David Brooks and Charles Murray. Conservative critiques of the counterculture ethos, of the reckless individualism of the liberal ideal, have been going on for decades (or longer). Still, the Inquirer column caused an uproar on the Penn campus, and that uproar became a full-blown conflagration when Wax gave a provocative quote to the Daily Pennsylvanian, a Penn student newspaper, for an article about the growing controversy: "Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans," she said, since those countries embody bourgeois values. Posted by: Besoeker 2017-09-10 |
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