Among the Bourgeoisophobes
BROOKS, DAVID
Among the Bourgeoisophobes Why the Europeans and Arabs, each in their own way, hate America and Israel. BY DAVID BROOKS Around 1830, a group of French artists and intellectuals looked around and...
...For two centuries there has been this relentless pattern...
...Toynbee acknowledged that Europe's virile, self-assertive days were over...
...And this vulgar materialism, in their view, has not only corrupted the soul of the bourgeoisie, but through them threatens to debase civilization itself and the whole world...
...The other, which might be called the ethereal school, holds that a creative minority can rise above prosaic bourgeois life into a realm of contemplation, feeling, art, sensibility, and spiritual grace...
...To him, ccess comes to those who vorship the golden calf, the idol, the Satanic corrupter, gold...
...He met Hitler in 1936 and came away deeply impressed (the two men hated some of the same things...
...These two nations, it is said, practice conquest capitalism, overrunning poorer nations and exploiting weaker neighbors in their endless desire for more and more...
...Americanization in its widest sense, including the societal and political, means the uninterrupted, exclusive, and relentless striving after gain, riches and influence...
...It could be, as the bourgeoisophobes say, that America thrives because it is spiritually stunted...
...The new movement is embraced...
...The American beast did not know that he was vulnerable to attack (we Europeans have long understood this...
...What America never takes a moment to consider is that, despite its mightiness, it is a young country with much to learn...
...Maybe Bau-drillard, that infuriatingly appre-ciative Frenchman, had it rightwhen he wrote about America,“We [Europeans] philosophizeabout a whole host of things,but it is here that they takeshape....It is the Ameri-can mode of life, that wejudge naive or devoid ofculture, that gives us thecompleted picture of theobject of our values...
...Diplomacy is highly formal, highly elitist, highly civilized...
...When women go out intothe world, they deprive men of their manhood and weak-en their virility...
...The trader, then, is the selfish capitalist who lives a meager, artificial life amidst "pocket-watches, newspapers, umbrellas, books, sewage disposal, politics...
...The entire Arabworld, and much of the rest ofthe world, is obsessed withIsrael...
...They teach in madrassas, where they are careful not to instruct their students in the sort of practical knowledge that dominates bourgeois schools...
...They will go marching off as they always do, naively confident of themselves, yet inevitably unaware of the harm they shall do...
...An honest person might ascribe another's success to a superior work ethic, self-discipline, or luck—just being in the right place at the right time and possessing the right skills...
...The Übermensch possesses force of will...
...So the Europeans are all ambivalence...
...In this, as in so much else, George Bush reflects the meritocratic capitalist culture of which he is a product...
...Complexity is catnip to the etherealized bourgeoisophobe...
...They rage and rage...
...The European Union has a larger population than the United States, and a larger GDP—and its political class has tried to construct an institutional architecture that will enable it to rival America...
...Some Arab countries continue to pursue the low and dirty modernizing path, continue to ape the sordid commercialists and even to accept the presence of American troops on Arabian soil...
...Their history has caused them to renounce military valor (good thing, too) and to regard their own relative decline as a sign of greater maturity and wisdom...
...It was wiser to I accept the decline of their worldly power and embrace the contemplative virtues...
...AsMargalit and Buruma note, “Female emancipation leadsto bourgeois decadence...
...As Catherine Jurca recently wrote in White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel, "As a body of work, the suburban novel asserts that one unhappy family is a lot like the next, and there is no such thing as a happy family...
...Like European and Japanese brutal-ists before them, the Islamists celebrate violence and build a cult of suicide and death...
...It's hard to know, since most of us lack the soul-o-meter by which the cultural pessimists apparently measure the depth of other people's souls...
...Because if the tide of conflict is rising, then we had better be able to articulate, not least to ourselves, who we are, why we arouse such passions, and why we are absolutely right to defend ourselves...
...It threatens, in the words of the supreme ourgeoisophobe, Karl Marx, take all that is holy and make it profane...
...Only today's bourgeoisophobes are not just artists and intellectuals...
...The bourgeoisophobes have no politburo...
...When bourgeoisophobes describe their enemies, they almost always portray them as money-mad, as crazed commercialists...
...The Islamic extremists regardus as lascivious hedonists, and in a backhanded waythey are acknowledging both our freedom and our happiness...
...The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, we love death," declared al Qaeda's Mualana Inyadullah after September 11...
...While the rest of the world was lost in a moral fog, going on about the "cycle of violence" as if bombs set themselves off and the language of human agency and moral judgment didn't apply, the Bush administration, by and large, has been clear...
...He was only echoing Toynbee, who 30 years earlier said, "The United States and Israel must be today the two most dangerous of the 125 sovereign states among which the land surface of this planet is at present partitioned...
...So their internal engine is calibrated differently...
...Somehow the firemen in New York and the passengers on Flight 93 behaved like heroes even though they no doubt lived in bourgeois homes, liked Oprah, shopped at Wal-Mart, watched MTV, enjoyed their Barcaloungers, and occasionally glanced through Playboy...
...And on this, the bourgeoisophobes split into two schools...
...The brutalists urged sons—"the explosive ones"—to revolt against their fathers...
...They look with disdain upon our work ethic (the average American works 350 hours a year—nearly nine weeks— longer than the average European...
...The American was traumatized by this discovery...
...The dim boobies have no idea what sort of instability they are about to cause...
...In 1823 William Faux wrote that "two selfish gods, pleasure and gain, enslave the Americans...
...They look at us uncomprehendingly when our leaders declare a global assault on terror and evil...
...And this drives the hard-core Islamic bourgeoisophobes to even higher states of rage...
...And the American people have supported him, embraced his vision every step of the way—even the people who fiercely opposed his election...
...But the emotions and reactions that Flaubert, Stendhal, and all the others articulated in the 1830s are still with us, bigger than ever...
...Americans and Israelis, in this view, are the money-mad molochs of the earth, the vulgarizers of morals, corrupters of culture, and proselytizers of idolatrous values...
...Where the Islamists see us as a decadent slut, the European etherealists see us as a gun-slinging cowboy...
...François La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, who traveled in the United States in the 1790s, declared, "The desire for riches is their ruling passion...
...But Europeans do seek to deny them—because they simply can't remember what it's like to be imperially confident, to feel the forces of history blowing at one's back, to have heroic and even eschatological aspirations...
...First, they hate thecity...
...And so just as the French intellectuals of the 1830s rose up to despise the traders and bankers, certain people today rise up to shock, humiliate, and dream of destroying America and Israel...
...He can thus be "a mighty . . . hammer" who will smash, "break and remove degenerate and decaying races to make way for a new order of life...
...They are monsters, non-human beasts who, in extreme cases, can be blamelessly killed...
...he had to declare the middle classes "deeply incapable of every divine emotion...
...Cities stand for com-merce, mixed populations,artistic freedom, and sexuallicense...
...The Israelis are driven by passionate Zionism to build their homeland and make it rich and powerful...
...As bin Laden himself notably put it, protesting the presence of American troops on Saudi land: "By God, Muslim women refuse to be defended by these American and Jewish prostitutes...
...They were vulgar materialists, shallow conformists, and self-absorbed philistines, who half the time failed even to acknowledge their moral and spiritual inferiority to the artists and intellectuals...
...Each wave of foreign observers reinforced the prejudice...
...It was slow to respond to Pearl Harbor...
...They are as likely to be terrorists and suicide bombers...
...America, in the bourgeoisophobes' eyes, is the land of Bart Simpson, boy bands, boob jobs, and Baywatch...
...Bourgeoisophobia is really a hatred of success...
...There is no bourgeoisophobe central command...
...In that year the German writer Paul Dehns wrote an influential essay called "The Americanization of the World...
...Maybe they were wrong tothink that America is predominantlyabout gain and the bitch-goddesssuccess...
...Maybe they werewrong to think that wealth inevitably corrupts...
...TheIslamist fanatic and the bour-geoisophobe hate the samethings...
...For, just as the brutalist school of bourgeoisophobia led to Hitler and Saddam, the ethereal school led to Neville Chamberlain and some of the European reaction to George Bush's Axis of Evil...
...BY DAVID BROOKS Around 1830, a group of French artists and intellectuals looked around and noticed that people who were their spiritual inferiors were running the world...
...The brutalist school started in Germany, more or less with Nietzsche...
...This, of course, was the path that led to Mussolini, Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and bin Laden...
...What is Americanization...
...The hero of that book, Alden Pyle, is a well-intentioned, naive, earnest manchild who dreams of spreading democracy but only stirs up chaos...
...He found a world of jazz, football, movies, cars, and people obsessed with lawn maintenance...
...The British historian J.H...
...One, which might be called the brutalist school, seeks to reclaim the raw, masculine vitality that still lies buried at the virile heart of human nature...
...In fact, the United States has never behaved this way...
...This article of faith governs the way even many sophisticated Europeans and Muslims react to us...
...It is a hatred held by people who feel they are spiritually superior but who find themselves economically, politically, and socially outranked...
...Then we could skim swiftly through all the books that bemoan the moral, cultural, and intellectual vapidity of suburbanites, students, middle managers, and middle Americans: Babbitt, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, The Souls of Black Folk, The Lonely Crowd, The Organization Man, The Catcher in the Rye, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, The Affluent Society, Death of a Salesman, Soul on Ice, The Culture of Narcissism, Habits of the Heart, The Closing of the American Mind, Earth in the Balance, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, Jihad vs...
...If you put these six traits together, you have pretty much the pillars of meritocratic capitalist society, practiced most assertively in countries like America and Israel...
...Gain...
...It had no real direct experience of the First and Second World Wars," declared a writer in the New Statesman, echoing a sentiment that one heard across the Continent as well...
...Toynbee denounced patriotism, commercial striving, and the martial spirit...
...It controls the IMF and the World Bank, the institutions that reward the rich and punish the poor, Ramonet claimed...
...They see us as a mindless Rambo, a Mike Tyson with rippling muscles and no brain...
...There is straightforward, left-wing bourgeoisophobia from writers who think commercial culture has ravaged our souls...
...Fourth,they hate prudence, the desire to livesafely rather than court death and hero-ically flirt with violence...
...Maybe it is now time to putintellectual meat on the bones of our instinctive pride,to acknowledge that the American way of life is not onlysuccessful, but also character-building...
...In other words, scarcely human...
...So by the time Osama bin Laden came along, hatred of America was well rehearsed, a finished product just waiting for him to pick it up...
...In the 20th century the Americans' aggressive commercialism was symbolized by the unstoppable spread of jeans, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Disney, and Microsoft...
...But we do know that despite the alleged savagery, decadence, and materialism of American life, Americans still continue to react to events in ways that suggest there is more to this country than Survivor, Self magazine, and T.G.I...
...It is heralded as the wave of the future...
...Nor would you have been able to predict the American reaction to recent events in the Middle East, which also differs markedly from the European one...
...It all adds up to a lot of dark foreboding, and after September 11, it doesn't look that impressive...
...A normal person might look at a rich and powerful country and try to locate the source of its vitality, to human and natural resources, its institutions and social . But for the bourgeoisophobe, people's success is never itimate or deserved...
...A rite of passage for any bourgeoisophobe of this type is the youthful trip to America or to the West, where the writer is nearly seduced by the vulgar hedonism of capitalist life, but heroically spurns it...
...Most of all, it is complex...
...Fifth, they hate lib-erty, the freedom extended even to mediocre peo-ple...
...We do not need ideologues anymore," Oswald Spengler argued, "we need hardness, we need fearless skepticism, we need a class of socialist master men...
...And most Americans seem willing to defend the principles that are at stake here, even in the face of global criticism and obloquy...
...Any decisive effort to change the status quo—to topple Saddam, to give up on Arafat, to foment democracy in the Arab world—will only make things worse...
...Suddenly a large crowd of merchants, managers, and traders were making lots of money, living in the big houses, and holding the key posts...
...Bourgeoisophobes have a simple-minded faith that whatever the problem is, the solution requires complexity...
...They have only their nihilistic rage, their envy mixed with snobbery, their snide remarks, their newspaper distortions, their conspiracy theories, their suicide bombs and terror attacks—and above all, a burning sense that the rising, vibrant, and powerful peoples of America and Israel must be humiliated and brought low...
...You can imagine how the September 11 al Qaeda hijackers must have felt during the visit they made to a Florida strip club shortly before going off to their purifying martyrdom...
...After September 11, there was a widespread fear in Europe and in certain American circles that the United States would lash out violently and pointlessly...
...Each side's view of us is a mix of Hollywood images (Marilyn Monroe for the Islamists, John Wayne for the Europeans), mass-media distortions, envy-driven stereotypes, and self-justifying delusions...
...As Qutb wrote, "The dancing intensified...
...Perhaps, on the other hand, September 11 will cause more Americans to come to the stunning and revolu-tionary conclusion that we are right to live the way wedo, to be the way we are...
...What they distrust about America and Israel is that these countries represent a particularly aggressive and, to them, unbalanced strain of bourgeois ambition...
...Hatred of the bourgeoisie, he wrote, "is the beginning of all virtue...
...They are erudite Europeans who burn with humiliation because they know, deep down, that both America and Israel possess a vitality and heroism that their nations once had but no longer do...
...They will rule [Britain] by their energy but they will deteriorate it by their low ideas and want of culture...
...Adams compared the Jews to a vast syndicate and declared simply, "They control the world...
...Our ^BOr poor country lies in Roman decadence," ^^^ the French conservative poet Arthur de Gobineau lamented in 1840...
...The American was overcompensating with an arms build-up that was pointless since, with his gigantisme militaire, he already had more weapons than he could ever need...
...Maybe the bourgeoisophobes were wrong from thefirst...
...Oswald Spengler worried that Germany would devolve into "soulless America," with its worship of "technical skill, money and an eye for facts...
...Writers of this school argue that the solid capitalist values America once possessed have been corrupted by intellectual currents coming out of the uni-versities—as if the meritocratic capitalist virtues were such delicate flowers that they could be dissolved by the acid influence of Paul de Man...
...MONEY HAS KILLED EVERYTHING...
...The Jewish religion, he said, is "rigid," "scanty," and "sterile...
...Charles Dickens described a country of uncouth vulgarians frantically chasing, as he first put it, "the almighty dollar...
...I could start with the works of the Transcenden-talists, then move through Dreiser, Mencken, Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis...
...Maybe in their hatred we can better discern our strengths...
...it was too timid in its responses to the USS Cole and other attacks...
...The Islamist response to humiliation has been worship of the Muslim man of force...
...It demands subtlety instead of clarity, self-control instead of power, patience instead of energy, nuance instead of restlessness...
...Of all the great creeds of the 19th century, pretty much the only one still thriving is this one, bourgeoiso-phobia...
...They look with disdain upon what they see as our lack of social services, our relatively small welfare state, which rewards mobility and effort but less gracefully cushions misfortune...
...But to many Europeans, who must believe in our mindless immaturity in order to look themselves in the mirror each morning, it was obvious that the United States would shoot first and think after-wards...
...To European bourgeoisophobes, America is the radioactive core of what Ignacio Ramonet, editor and publisher of Le Monde Diplomatique, recently called "The Other Axis of Evil" in a front-page essay...
...Much of the European intellectual response to the American war has less to do with actual evidence than with figures from literature and the mass media...
...Perhapsordinary American life mobilizes individ-ual initiative, and the highest, not justthe crassest aspirations...
...It inculcatesvirtues that account for American success: a certainability to see problems clearly, to react to setbacks ener-getically, to accomplish the essential tasks, to useforce without succumbing to savagery...
...Flaubert thought they were "plodding and avaricious...
...Naturally, the artists and intellectuals were outraged...
...Bourgeoisophobia is not Herman's theme, but his book does such a magnificent job of surveying two centuries of pessimistic thought that most of the key bourgeoisophobes are quoted...
...America, many Europeans feel, has no experience with the Red Brigades, the IRA, the Basque terrorists...
...The 19th-century Teutonic philosopher Houston Chamberlain said of the Jews that "their existence is a crime against the holy laws of life...
...It paralyzes brute action, and justifies subtle gestures...
...The hall swarmed with legs...
...So the Jews were quickly established in the bour-geoisophobe imagination as the ultimate commercial people...
...In this and many other aspects of the war on terrorism, the American leaders and the American people have been stubborn and steadfast...
...Meanwhile, the ethereal bourgeoisophobes were emerging in Paris and later London and the United States...
...American institutions such as the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Cato Institute promulgate the ideology that justifies exploitation, he continued...
...Today's bourgeoisophobes burn with the same sense of unjust inferiority...
...The dispute over Palestine, which was once a local conflict about land, has been transformed into a great cultural showdown...
...Because, as Henry Steele Commager once noted, no country in the world ever succeeded like America, and everybody knew it...
...These two peoples, the Americans and the Jews, in the view of the bourgeoisophobes, thrive precisely because they are spiritually stunted...
...the mindless American car dealer with the big guns should allow himself to be guided by the thoughtful European statesman, who is better able to think through the unintended consequences of any action, and to understand the darker complexities...
...A great place to read bourgeoisophobe writing is Arthur Herman's The Idea of Decline in Western History...
...Then there is the conservative pessimism that purports to be a defense of the heroic bourgeois culture America embodies while actually showing little faith in it...
...They had none of the high style of the aristocracy, or even the earthy integrity of the peasants...
...They have no plausible strategy for victory...
...President Bush, a man derided as a typical philistine cowboy, has framed the challenge in the most ambitious possible terms: as a moral confrontation with an Axis of Evil...
...Salvation instead is found in the will to power...
...They could not afford both...
...This is not the reaction you would have predicted if you had based your knowledge of America on the extensive literature of cultural decline...
...That's what all the talk about coalition-building is about...
...Friday's...
...Hölderlin's countryman Werner Sombart later wrote a quintessential bourgeoisophobe text called "Traders and Heroes," in which he argued that there are two basic human types: "The trader approaches life with the question, what can you give me...
...But then it collapses, and the never-finally-disillusioned bourgeoisophobes go off in search of the next anti-bourgeois movement that will inspire the next chapter in their ever-disappointed Perils of Pauline journey...
...He predicted (in 1926) that they would choose welfare states—and be forced to accept being "dwarfed by the overseas world which [Europe] herself had called into existence...
...And once the bourgeoisophobes had experienced the basic spasm of reaction, they soon settled on the Americans and Jews as two of the chief objects of their ire...
...Americans have no experience with Afghanistan...
...Even more than that, it has become abundantly clear since September 11 that America has ascended to unprecedented economic and military heights, and it really is not easy to explain how a country so corrupt to the core can remain for so long so apparently successful on the surface...
...Women are supposed to stayhome and breed heroic men...
...The events of the past several months have cast doubt on a century of mostly bourgeoisophobe cultural pessimism...
...Social Darwinism is dead, along with all those theories about racial purity that grew up around it...
...The attitudes of European etherealists are quite a bit more complicated...
...What's more, it was their very mediocrity that accounted for their success...
...Their intellectual guides have taught them that business is ignoble and striving is vulgar...
...It is precisely this heroic element of ordinary life that Europeans lack and distrust...
...This Manichaean divide between the successful, who are hideous, and the bourgeoisophobes, who are spiritually pristine, was established early in the emergence of the creed...
...It is their obliviousness to the holy things in life, their feverish energy, their injustice, their shallow pursuit of power and gain, that allow them to build fortunes, construct weapons, and play the role of hyperpower...
...McWorld, just about every word ever written by Kevin Phillips and Michael Moore, and just about every novel of the last quarter century, from Rabbit is Rich through The Corrections...
...Plumb once declared that he loved America (and he was indeed a great defender of the United States), but even his admiration for the country "was entangled with anger, anxiety and at times flashes of hate...
...Arms circled arms, lips met lips, chests met chests, and the atmosphere was full of love...
...But each side's vision springs from a deeper bourgeoisophobia—the prejudice that people who succeed in worldly affairs must be morally and intellectually backward...
...Of insincere smiles and love handles...
...Jews "love life more than any other people, and they prefer not to die," declared Hamas official Ismail Haniya on March 28 amidst a rash of suicide bombings...
...The disc jockey put on "Baby, It's Cold Outside...
...They use the samewords, they utter the sameprotests...
...The hero is the total man, who is selfless, vital, spiritual, and free...
...They m become cynical if they are soft 1 inside, violent if they are hard...
...Second, they hate themass media: advertising, tele-vision, pop music, and videos.Third, they hate science andtechnology—the progress of tech-nical reason, mechanical efficiency,and material know-how...
...They conclude that the world is diseased, that it rewards the wrong values, the wrong people, and the wrong abilities...
...It was a land, he wrote, "hollow and full of contradictions, defects and evils...
...Gain...
...In 1998 bin Laden declared war on "the crusader-Jewish alliance, led by the United States and Israel...
...If I pulled from my shelves all the books about the moral backwardness of the enterprising middle classes, I could stack them to the ceiling...
...As Arthur Herman notes, the human ideal Toynbee described looks a lot like ^' Toynbee himself: "diffident, sensitive, religious in a contemplative and otherworldly sense, a man who shuns the world of violence and barbarism to pursue the 'etherealiza-tion' of himself and society...
...Sixth, they despise the emancipation of women...
...They romanticized insanity as a rebellion against convention...
...This is not the predictable reaction of a decadent, commercial people...
...We should not seek to deny either of these aspects, nor reconcile them...
...The Europeans should therefore turn inward...
...His lecture tours were lucrative, and his picture was on the cover of Time magazine...
...But to anybody familiarwith the history of bourgeoisophobia, it isstriking how comfortably Muslim ragemeshes with traditional rage againstmeritocratic capitalism...
...The pessimism falls into several categories...
...Much of the reaction, in short, has been straight out of Graham Greene's novel The Quiet American...
...No European would ever acknowledge the category, but America and Israel are heroic bourgeois nations...
...They looked back nostalgically to the crude, savage, and proud men of Homeric legend, Germanic history, and Norse myth...
...America should really be spending more money on foreign aid (it's interesting that Europeans, who are supposed to be less materialistic than we are, inevitably think more money can solve the world's problems, while Americans tend to point to religion or ideas...
...America is violent and abominable...
...And they look with fear upon our popular culture, which like some relentless machine seems designed to crush the local cultures that stand in its way...
...Instead, they were gross...
...Their passions have been quieted...
...Sometimes you get the impression that the only people who took the images of Rambo, the Lone Ranger, and Superman seriously were the European bourgeoisophobes who needed clichés to hate...
...Dehns asked...
...In the bourgeoisophobe's mind, the people and nations that do succeed are not just slightly vulgar, ^ not just over-compensated, not just undeservedly lucky...
...The brutalist bourgeoisophobia of the Islamic extremists is pretty straightforward...
...This was at a church social...
...Freudianism is dead...
...Islamist extremists romanticize the brutal warrior, just as the German bourgeoisophobes did, only the Islamists wear robes and clutch Korans...
...In an essay in theNew York Review of Bookscalled “Occidentalism,”Avishai Margalit and IanBuruma listed the traitsthat enrage al Qaeda andother Third World anti-Americans and anti-West-erners...
...Fourteen years after that, the disillusioned Russian writer Mikhail Pogodin lamented, "America, on which our contemporaries have pinned their hopes for a time, has meanwhile clearly revealed the vices of her illegitimate birth...
...Much European commentary about America since September 11 has had a zoological tone...
...and spread to places as diverse as Baghdad, Ramallah, and Beijing, is the major reactionary creed of our age...
...They looked for another such hero to emerge today, a virile warrior who would demolish the stale encrustations of an overcivilized world and revive the raw energy of the species...
...They argued that people in decaying cultures should not try to reclaim their former economic and military power...
...The vast array of bourgeoisophobes—Yasser Arafat's guerrilla socialists, Hamas's Islamic fundamentalists, José Bové's anti-globalist leftists, America's anti-colonial multicul-turalists, and the BBC's Oxbridge mediacrats—focus their diverse rages and resentments on this one conflict...
...Gain...
...The American bourgeoisophobe family, the Adamses, contained more than its share of anti-Semites...
...In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche has a character declare that he is turning his back on the whole world of degenerate "flea-beetles," the ones who spend their lives "higgling and haggling for power with the rabble...
...The hero approaches life with the question what can I give you...
...Many people in manylands define themselves in oppo-sition to the United States...
...The early 19th-century German poet Hölderlin couldn't just ignore the merchant bourgeoisie...
...I no longer believe in anything...
...Matthew Arnold worried that global forces would Americanize England...
...is how the English philosopher Morris Birbeck summarized the American spirit a few years later...
...Gain...
...Most Americans can see the difference between nihilistic terrorism and a democracy trying fitfully to defend itself...
...The land of money and guns...
...By 1904, people around the world were worrying about American cultural hegemony...
...They look with distaste upon our commercial culture, which favors the consumer but does not ease the rigors of competition for producers...
...Just as the American people patiently persevered through a century of fighting fascism and communism, there is every sign they will patiently persevere in the conflict against terrorism, which is really a struggle against people who despise our way of life...
...Because the strikingthing is that, for all theircontempt, the bourgeoiso-phobes cannot ignore us.They can’t just dismiss uswith a wave and get on withtheir lives...
...Furthermore, the American doesn't see the deeper causes of terrorism, the poverty, the hopelessness...
...He added, "Since I was a boy I have been at war with and harboring hatred towards the Americans...
...Sayyid Qutb, who is one of the intellectual heroes of the Islamic extremists, toured America between 1948 and 1950...
...He signed his letters "Bourgeoiso-phobus" to show how much he despised "stupid grocers and their ilk...
...They tried to modernize, and they failed...
...But the imperial confidence is gone, along with the youthful sense of limitless possibility and the unselfconscious embrace of ordinary striving...
...Gain...
...The Islamists think we are too spoiled and comfortable, the Europeans think we are too violent and impulsive...
...Maybe they were wrong to think that 90 percent ofhumanity is mad to seek money...
...Though Toynbee despised the United States, his books sold well here...
...Today the battle lines are forming...
...Artists and intellectuals, the "creative minority," should lead until "the majority is drilled into following the minority's lead mechanically...
...We Americans have our own bourgeoisophobes, of course...
...We are without fiber or moral energy...
...Later, the English historian Arnold Toynbee argued that the Jews, with their "consummate virtuosity in commerce and finance," had infected Western civilization with a crass materialism...
...At one point Qutb found himself at a church social...
...In 1805, a British visitor observed, "All men there make [money] their pursuit...
...Henry Adams protested against the interlocked power of "Wall Street, State Street and Jerusalem...
...The American military provides the muscle to force-feed economic liberalism to the world...
...These Europeans have assigned themselves the self-flattering role of being Athens to our Rome...
...Europeans, of course, are bourgeois themselves, even more so in some ways than Americans and Israelis...
...Then there is the right-wing variant that says it has made us spiritually flat, and so turned us into comfort-loving Last Men...
...It's actually amazing how early America, too, was stereotyped as a money-grubbing commercial land and Americans a money-grubbing people...
...If we're so rotten, how can we be so great...
...In his infuriatingly condescending and ultimately appreciative portrait America, the French modernist Jean Baudrillard wrote, "America is powerful and original...
...They are Muslim clerics who incite hatred and violence...
...When the etherealized bourgeoisophobe goes to practice politics, he instinctively dons the pinstripes of the diplomat...
...This isbecause deep down they know thatwe possess a vitality that is impressive.The Europeans regard us as simplisticcowboys, and in a backhanded way they areacknowledging the pioneering spirit that motivatesAmerica—the heroic spirit that they, in the comfort oftheir welfare states, lack...
...I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused," one of the characters says about him...
...Brooks Adams lamented that "England is as much governed by the Jews of Berlin, Paris and New York as the native growth...
...The second inflaming passion is humiliation— humiliation caused by the fact that in the 1960s and 1970s, many Arab and Muslim nations tried to join this bourgeois world...
...It paralyzes brute action, and justifies subtle and basically immobile gestures, calibrations, and modalities...
...Through some screw-up in the great scheme of the universe, their narrow-minded greed had brought them vast wealth, unstoppable power, and growing social prestige...
...Americans are driven by our Puritan sense of calling, the deeply held belief that we Americans have a special mission to spread our way of life around the globe...
...Since September 11, there has been agreat deal of analysis of the roots ofMuslim rage...
...For the bourgeoisophobe, then, the question becomes, how does one confront this menace...
...It's a Mississippi flood of pessimism...
...It is romanticized...
...Some new bourgeoisophobe movement or figure emerges—Lenin, Hitler, Sartre, Che Guevara, Woodstock, the Sandinistas, Arafat...
...Some of the more pessimistic bourgeoisophobes come to believe that the worst is already at hand...
...He told his countrymen that Hitler sincerely desired peace...
...Confronted with the events of September 11, Americans have not sought to retreat as soon as possible to the easy comfort of their great-rooms (on the contrary, it's been others around the world who have sought to close the parenthesis on these events...
...Diplomacy fits his temperament...
...They were the bankers, the traders, the soulless and sharp dealmakers who crawled through the cellars of honest and noble cultures and infected them with their habits and practices...
...Europeans would have to choose between spending their money on comfortable welfare states and spending it on militaristic "war-making states...
...Contemporary Muslim rage is further inflamed by two additional passions...
...One is a sense of sexual shame...
...Maybe they were wrong tothink that power and wealth area sign of spiritual stuntedness.Maybe they were wrong totreasure the ecstatic gesturesof rebellion, martyrdom,and liberation over thedeeper satisfactions of ordinary life...
...Hatred of the bourgeoisie became the official emotion of the French intelligentsia...
...They experience the same humiliation because there is nothing they can do to thwart the growing might of their enemies...
...Maybethey were wrong to regard themselves as the spiritualsuperiors of middle-class bankers, lawyers,and traders...
...This is because today, in much of the world's eyes, two peoples—the Americans and the Jews—have emerged as the great exemplars of undeserved success...
...Marxism is dead...
...And no people in the European experience ever achieved such sustained success as the Jews...
...Complexity is catnip to the etherealized bourgeoisophobe...
...In fact, bourgeoisophobia, which has flowered variously David Brooks is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Just as the French anti-globalist activist José Bové, heretofore most famous for smashing up a McDonald's, senses that he has something in common with Yasser Arafat (whom he visited in Ramallah on March 31), most Americans sense that they have something in common with Israel in this fight...
...When Hitler came along, Toynbee was an enthusiastic appeaser...
...He has chosen the most arduous course...
...She is not a state, but rather a trading company...
...Through their arrogance and viciousness, they were responsible for capitalism, godless communism, and the Holocaust, and so had contributed to Europe's decline...
...Stendhal said traders and merchants made him want to "weep and vomit at the same time...
Vol. 7 • April 2002 • No. 30
