In his essay "The Bourgeois Interior," Professor John Lukacs argues that, in the past three hundred years, the people who have made the most significant and important contributions to society have come from a bourgeois upbringing.
All of the caterwauling and bombastic hyperbole emanating from both sides of the political spectrum would lead one to believe that there are significant differences between the two major political parties. Actually, those differences are ephemeral at best because both parties are the product of the same tradition, i.e., classical liberalism. The truth of the matter is, we’re only debating the degrees or variations of issues.
We should also understand it was classical liberalism that introduced modernity to “universality, rationality, individualism, objectivity, and abstract idealism” that, in turn, provided America’s cognoscenti with the intellectual where-with-all to comprehend and define the utopian future.
The late Sam Francis coined the term, “managerial elite,” to describe those folks that inhabit the dank and dusty labyrinths situated in the depths of “foggy bottom,” and other august sanctuaries, and it is their responsibility, as modernity’s clerisy, to plot a course that will guide us to their much desired “New World Order.” Their primary tool is economic Globalization and the American political class is all for it, and you, dear citizen, better get use to idea.
You may, if you like, argue against President Bush’s “conservative” judges, though I think the pusillanimous Republicans will eventually cave in to the minority Democrats in the Senate (old habits are hard to break), or you may demonstrate in favor of “women’s rights” or against abortion-on-demand, if that provides any political or moral succor, but the only agenda that our benefactors are interested in is Globalization.
We are late to the game, as so many Americans are aware. “Jobs are leaving the country,” our erudite and observant pundits have iterated on numerous occasions. But, actually it’s a little worse than that.
Economist, essayist, and former Reagan appointee, Paul Craig Roberts, commented in a recent essay,
By turning domestic production into imports, outsourcing increases the trade deficit. America pays the import bill by turning over the ownership of her wealth, and the income streams that wealth produces, to foreigners. Thus, Americans not only lose jobs and careers, but also the ownership of their companies, real estate, and corporate and government bonds. The incomes from these lost assets pass from Americans to foreigners.
So, not only are we losing jobs and careers, but also foreign investors are now able to influence the American government and business, while American capital is in Pakistan, India, and China chasing real cheap labor.
None of this bodes well for the American citizenry. If there is hope it lies with the American bourgeoisie. In an important and brilliant essay titled "The Bourgeois Interior," Professor John Lukacs argues “Instead of the Modern Age we could speak of the Bourgeois Age,” that for the past three hundred years those people (poets, writers, scientists, theologians, and inventors) who have made the most significant and important contributions to society have come from a bourgeois upbringing. And, while Lukacs points out that the bourgeoisie were mocked and derided by both the aristocracy and leftist intellectuals, their first and foremost desire was to be “free citizens.”
The good professor tells us “the first mention of the word (bourgeois) occurs in France in 1007.” And, the word meant city dweller. Lukacs points out, “The bourgeois kind of ‘urbanization’ was a later phase in the evolution of human consciousness, it marked the beginning of the ‘internalization’ of the human condition.” He also informs his readers that the words “self-pity, self-love, self-confidence, disposition, ego, egoism, conscience, apathy, and sentimental (just to mention a few),” made their appearance in England and France two or three hundred years ago, and indicate an awareness “of the interior landscape of their minds.” Because of the bourgeoisie, the modern concept of family, hearth, and home was seared into the Western psyche.
“The family: the home.” Dr. Lukacs writes, “If we, in our situation, have any kind of nostalgia at all, it is for this: the security, and for the freedom, of the Bourgeois Age, for its inner security, and for its inner freedom, for a kind of life that some of us have once known and that others among us can still imagine.”
Given man’s nature, there was a down side to the concept of the bourgeoisie. His annoying “eagerness to rise in the world,” instilled a pernicious selfishness that the bourgeoisie continue to deal with to this day. It is, Lukacs points out, their “worst characteristic.” The up side is the “emulation not merely of aristocratic habits but of the classic virtues.” Which the professor defines as “moderation and prudence and a kind of humanism that was cautious in its demophilia; they include the cult of justice, temperance, and of reason.”
Professor Lukacs defines the interiority of the bourgeois mind as the “most precious heritage of the Western civilization of the last five hundred years.” He argues that the “idea mongering philosophers and writers of the nineteenth century” understood what “ideas” can do to man but failed to comprehend “the more complex problem of what men can do to “ideas.”
Perhaps, it is here, where the American bourgeoisie will rise to their finest hour. We are deeply inculcated with the theme of family and home, freedom and security, and we may not cede these long cherished ideals easily. Not without a resistance that may ameliorate the more misanthropic aspects of the “New World Order,” or better yet, extirpate the idea altogether.
In the end, I think (and I am open to criticism) we must re-embrace the founding principles, return to a federated, constitutional republic, reject economic determinism as a way of life, and understand that there is a transcendent God who has provided a beautiful and mysterious place to live. We must understand that modernity’s concept of internationalism (E.F. Schumacher was right, “small if beautiful”), is devoid of anything but the most base and fractious impulses, and has resulted in war, death, greed, and misery on a scale unprecedented in human history. That “Globalization” is nothing more than the effort of international corporatists, those men who have eschewed the idea of the nation/state while embracing “the Marxist dream of the global state,” to manipulate the marketplace by reducing the economic circumstances of the American bourgeoisie.
Perhaps, Thomas Fleming, the editor of Chronicles magazine and author of the recently published The Morality of Everyday Life, is correct when he wrote, “A global state could only be a global hell from which there would be no escape.”
It remains to be seen if the American bourgeoisie will rise up, the hour grows late, but there is always hope.
robertcheeks@core.com
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