The End of Bourgeois Values
How America’s shift from Protestant work ethic to post-Christian consumer culture unraveled the values that once defined its middle class.
It’s no secret that America’s working classes - more broadly, those without college degrees and professional jobs - have been living increasingly socially dysfunctional lives. This was documented well by Robert Putnam in Our Kids and Charles Murray in Coming Apart.
Just as one example, America has the highest share of its children living in single parent households of any country in the world. This has profound negative consequences for our country.
One popular culprit for this is a decline in adherence to “bourgeois values” or bourgeois culture. We see these values described well in Amy Wax’s controversial Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed on the subject:
Too few Americans are qualified for the jobs available. Male working-age labor-force participation is at Depression-era lows. Opioid abuse is widespread. Homicidal violence plagues inner cities. Almost half of all children are born out of wedlock, and even more are raised by single mothers. Many college students lack basic skills, and high school students rank below those from two dozen other countries. The causes of these phenomena are multiple and complex, but implicated in these and other maladies is the breakdown of the country's bourgeois culture.
That culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow: Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.
Failure to valorize and adhere to bourgeois values is part of the conservative theories about the “culture of poverty.”
Bourgeois values are a modernized and secularized version of those of Max Weber’s Protestant ethic. For a deeper exploration of America’s traditional Protestant ethic, see my essay from last year:
Bourgeois values is actually a good term for them because they are associated with the bourgeois economy, that is to say, capitalism, particularly capitalism as it existed prior to roughly the Great Depression.
The problem is that America is now a post-bourgeois country, both economically and culturally. This poses significant challenges to those, such as myself, who want to both reduce social dysfunctions like drug abuse and generally elevate the health, flourishing, and productivity of our people.
I will trace this American post-bourgeois shift across three dimensions:
From a Protestant to a post-Christian culture
From a bourgeois to a managerial economy
From a production to a consumption based society
From Protestant to Post-Christian
America was 98% Protestant at the time of the founding and deeply embodied an Anglo-Protestant, Calvinistic culture. While Weber’s Puritans were the English Puritans, not the American ones, his analysis does broadly describe the austere, self-controlled, industrious, energetic, and expansionistic American culture that tamed the continent and perhaps more than any other built the modern world we live in today.
These values and behaviors were ultimately rooted in religion. As that religion dissipated, so did those values. French writer Emmanuel Todd views this collapse of Protestantism as a crisis for the West. I previously wrote an essay that went into some detail on his views.
Todd divides the story arc of religious decline through three states: active, zombie, and zero.
In the active state, people still attend church and practice Christianity, living out the habits and values of their religion.
In the zombie state, regular church attendance and genuine belief are lost, but the habits and values of religion remain.
In the zero state, not only do people no longer believe of practice religion, but the habits and values of religion have disappeared.
Todd does not give specific dates for America, but implies that the active state ended by around 1900. The zombie state lasted from around 1900 to 1965. Then there was a transition phase from zombie to zero state that ended in 2015. Todd identifies the legalization of gay marriage as the definitive sign of our arrival at a religious zero state.
Seen in Todd’s framework, bourgeois values are the values of zombie Protestantism. They are post-religious but continue forward the habits and values of American Protestantism. It’s notable that the period in which Wax says bourgeois values reined supreme, the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, fits well with this framework. (Church attendance was high in the 1950s, but religiosity was shallow).
It should not be surprising that as we’ve transitioned towards a religious zero state, bourgeois values have decayed and finally collapsed. Public discourse often overemphasizes sexuality, overshadowing other cultural shifts. If you look at the post-2014/15 world that I label the “Negative World” and Todd calls the zero state, we see things like the rapid proliferation and cultural normalization of gambling, the legalization and social acceptance of drugs (and the opioid crisis), and widespread adoption of tattoos. The elimination of usury laws, the proliferation of payday loan stores, the growth of consumer debt, and more predate this but not by a huge amount. Along with this we also see a decline in the work ethic properly so-called, one that affects both white and blue collar workers. The growth in the number of prime working age men who are not in the labor force or school is an example of this. And of course we have declining family formation and birth rates.
While the specifics of what our society looks like are contingent, now that we’ve arrived at a definitely post-Christian culture, we should expect that the bourgeois values associated with zombie Protestantism would largely disappear. And they have.
It’s true that there are still high levels of church attendance and religious belief in America. And of course, as people like Tom Holland have documented, there’s still a lot of Christian influence on Western values. Nevertheless, we did hit a watershed moment sometime circa 2015. As I wrote last year in the essay linked above, even American evangelicalism itself is culturally post-Protestant.
In this environment, restoring bourgeois values is a challenge to say the least.
From a Bourgeois to Managerial Economy
Apart from religio-cultural changes, there was also a profound change in the economic structure of the country. This is related to James Burnham’s idea of the managerial revolution.
As I said, the bourgeois economy was a capitalist economy, but it was pre-managerial, dominated by business owners. Prior to the advent of the railroads, and especially the boom of the second industrial revolution, the American economy was dominated by homestead type agricultural households. Other business was almost exclusively in the form of small sole proprietorships or partnerships that were linked together via market transactions.
After the Civil War there was a revolution in size and scale in America. Large industrial concerns replaced much of this small scale infrastructure. This led to the development of modern management (bureaucracy) as we know it. Cities exploded in size as well. Big corporations and big cities meant government got big and managerialized as well.
Still, until the early part of the 20th century, the large industrial concerns that emerged were still in many cases run by a founder or controlling shareholder. And America still had many smaller, independent businesses such as shops. Until 1920, the majority of Americans also still lived in rural areas. The “family farm” was still arguably the way a plurality of Americans lived.
All of these people, from industrial titans to small shopkeepers to farmers, were a kind of bourgeoisie. They owned their own business or livelihood, of whatever scale. This began to breakdown in the 1920s, through the Depression and then the war. In the post-World War 2 era, America had transitioned from being a nation of people who worked for themselves, to a nation of people who worked for others. While this was a slow gradual shift that can’t be dated to specific moment in time, I’d argue that there’s a significant difference between in 1920 (still primarily or heavily bourgeois) and 1950 (predominantly managerial).
Sociologist C. Wright Mills described this transformation in his book White Collar (1951).
Democratic property means that man stands isolated from economic authority; class property means that, in order to live, man must submit to the authority which property lends its new owner.
The right of man ‘to be free and rooted in work that is his own’ is denied by the transformation of property; he cannot realize himself in his work, for work is now a set of skills sold to another, rather than something mixed with his own property. His work, as Eduard Heiman puts it is ‘not his own, but an item in the business calculation of somebody else.’
The centralization of property has thus ended the union of property and work as a basis of man’s essential freedom, and the severance of the individual from an independent means of livelihood has changed the basis of his life-plan and the psychological rhythm of that planning. For the entrepreneur’s economic life, based upon property, embraced his entire lifetime and was set within a family heritage, while the employee’s economic life is based upon the job contract and pay period.
Secure in his world, the old entrepreneur could look upon his entire life as an economic unity, and neither his expectations or his achievements were necessarily hurried. In his century, he had the chance to feel that his effort and initiative paid off, directly, securely, and freely. Some entrepreneurs no doubt continue to experience that old feeling, but the bourgeois rank and file is today locked in a contest against all of big capitalism’s ‘secondary modes of exploitation,’ and many of them fail. For the population at large, the idea of going to work without an employer is an unserviceable myth. For those who nevertheless try it, it is frequently a disastrous illusion.
This applies to blue collar as well as white collar workers.
The person who no longer owns his own “means of production” but is dependent on others, on the system for his livelihood is post-bourgeois, whether he is part of the managerial class or the working class.
As Mills notes, this produces not just an economic but a psychological shift in the people. Among other things, it produces a loss of a sense of agency, as people feel at the mercy of large, impersonal forces and institutions they cannot understand or control. Post-bourgeois attitudes are very different from bourgeois ones. The transition to the managerial from the bourgeois economy opens the door for bourgeois values (the Protestant ethic) to be replaced.
This way for this was paved by a third transition.
From Production to Consumption
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