I can’t remember hearing the word “bourgeois” much in my youth, let alone using it. I think I heard it only on the lips of Judy Funnie—the beatnik sister of Doug in the Nickelodeon cartoon series of the same name. She frequently used it to describe—with contempt—her family and their conventional American lifestyle. But the cartoon’s creators clearly meant for the viewer not to take the criticism seriously: the Funnies were a decent, affectionate family, much more attractive than the melodramatic Judy in her black beret and sunglasses.
How things have changed. Today the word bourgeois has become so familiar to youth that its slang form, “bougie” (pronounced “boo-zhee”) has entered their vernacular. It seems to describe people who relish, often ostentatiously, the material comforts that wealth can buy. Some call others bougie in disgust. Some accept the label with pride, since they see nothing wrong with enjoying “the finer things in life.” Yet many continue to be unsure what it means, or whether it’s good or bad.
What exactly is going on with our conflicted attitudes toward being bougie? To answer that question, perhaps we should look into our culture’s older and more conflicted relationship with the original term, bourgeois.
Egotistical Materialism
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Sign up and get our daily essays sent straight to your inbox.The Oxford English Dictionary of 1991 tells us that a bourgeois (“boo-zhwa,” the French version of the English “burgher”) was originally a citizen of a town, as distinct from peasants and aristocrats living in the country. Not being farmers, the “bourgeoisie” (“boo-zhwa-zee,” the class of all bourgeois people) were often merchants or men of similar trades. They formed what Aristotle called a “middle class,” between the poor peasants and the nobles with enormous inherited wealth; the moderate wealth of the bourgeoisie, Aristotle thought, preserved them from both contempt for the poor and malice toward the rich. Such people were few in ancient and medieval times; but with the coming of the modern economic revolution, they grew and became a force in political life. The French Revolution was driven in great part by them, as was much of the economic and social transformation of Europe in the nineteenth century.
These transformations naturally called forth strong reactions from representatives of other classes. Alexis de Tocqueville, a French aristocrat, noted of America’s largely middle-class democracy, that it honored “the passion for wealth” and did not produce men of “great ambitions.” Compared to an aristocrat born into old money, the self-made bourgeois does not have “very extensive resources,” a fact that “confines [his] desires within fairly narrow limits.” He might become extraordinarily wealthy, but to do that he must work so hard, and for so long, that he ends up spending the energy of his youth, leaving his “imagination extinguished.” He then exchanges “lofty” goals for “easy enjoyments,” “vulgar tastes,” and “mediocre desires.”
A still more famous critique of the bourgeoisie was that of Karl Marx, the self-proclaimed spokesman for the proletariat working in the factories owned by the bourgeoisie. Since the rise of the bourgeois market economy, he complained, “all [our] relations are subordinated in practice to the one abstract monetary-commercial relation.” We value each other for our wealth, compete for it, and reduce even sublime human experiences like love to utility. Bourgeois society “has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest. . . . It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.”
As Toqueville and Marx suggest, the problem of bourgeois society is that it can enable what we today call “atomistic individualism”—an excessive concern for one’s own affairs and ignorance of one’s fellow man. It can promote crass materialism and the belief that happiness consists primarily of physical comfort; and it can facilitate disdain—or at least indifference—for anything that is not of practical or material value. One might call these attitudes together “the bourgeois spirit,” and having them may not be far from what it means to be “bougie.”
But does that spirit necessarily taint everything in bourgeois society?
Bourgeois Virtues without a Bourgeois Spirit
Not even Marx could deny that there is much to commend in the market economy. The railroads, bridges, public buildings, and other engineering feats it has made possible are “wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals.” We who lack Marx’s socialist dogmatism can also appreciate that market economies have nearly eliminated grinding poverty from the world, giving more people the leisure to aspire to lofty, altruistic goals if they wish. The threat of poverty and death may inspire some to live uprightly—to be ready, at any moment, to meet whatever judgment they may face after this life; but for many others, maybe most, fear for one’s life leads them to forget truth and goodness and focus solely on their own survival.
Tocqueville similarly acknowledged that bourgeois culture fosters many virtues. “A man who raises himself by degrees to wealth and power contracts habits of prudence and restraint.” Bourgeois public opinion “particularly condemns the bad morals that distract the human mind from the search for well-being and trouble the internal order of the family, so necessary in business.” It places special value on the entrepreneurial courage to take risks, and it stigmatizes idleness.
Could we have such benefits of bourgeois life without its vicious spirit? In fact, Marx and Tocqueville thought we could. But their proposals for how to do so differed radically, in keeping with their very different theories of the reasons behind bourgeois society’s problems.
Marx thought the bourgeois economic revolution’s problem was that it did not go far enough. It weakened the hold of religion, the family, and other associations on people’s mores; but it left those institutions fundamentally intact, and even defended them. Marx wanted to eradicate them, especially Christianity and its defense of the dignity of the individual, which Marx (wrongly) equated with atomistic individualism. The incomplete bourgeois revolution, he argued, perpetuated social structures that held back human progress.
Tocqueville, by contrast, championed religion as that which could preserve bourgeois society’s virtues from wealth’s power to corrupt them. Belief in God and the “immortality of the soul” keeps one from the “pernicious” belief “that all is nothing but matter.” Such philosophical materialism would drive men to pursue material well-being with an “insane ardor,” enervating their love of immaterial ideals, shrinking their minds, and thus diminishing their intelligence, without which not even material progress can happen.
Tocqueville especially commends Christianity for its strict moral code that urges people to go beyond their own comfort, and even the laws of justice, to help their neighbors who are in need—“to do good to those like oneself out of love of God.” An American of Tocqueville’s day might have talked the bourgeois language of self-interest and profit, but he did so in a deeply altruistic, un-bourgeois way, “sacrificing his particular interests to the admirable order” that God had made. “[C]onstantly forgetting [himself] to work . . . for the happiness of all,” he expected “no other recompense than the pleasure of contemplating” God’s love in heaven.
Marx’s solution to bourgeois selfishness—destroying religion and the family—would make selfishness worse. Religious institutions urge men to use what material wealth they have for others, and they satisfy men’s souls with God lest they make money their god. The family similarly teaches its members to put others’ needs ahead of their own preferences; it also gives flesh to the mystery of divine love through the spouses’ love for each other. As the Marxist movements of recent decades have eroded religion and family life in the West, it is no wonder that selfishness is spreading as well. Marx criticizes the bourgeoisie for fostering “egotistical calculation;” but as Tocqueville could have warned him, Marx’s philosophical materialism inevitably led to the same error. Only he who believes in a transcendent spiritual realm, superior to matter, can defend universal ideals like truth and justice, the foundations of altruism.
As others have noted, Marx’s materialism is so thorough that he even “takes pains to distance himself from those who engage in a discourse of justice, and makes a conscious attempt to exclude direct moral commentary in his own works.” In the very place where he describes the communist utopia, he depicts not a biblical eschaton of people loving one another, but little more than a paradise of comforts that seem quite bourgeois: where I can “do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind.” Marx’s theory did not presume that bourgeois society’s materialistic spirit was a problem; it reaffirmed it. As Marx’s twentieth-century follower, Herbert Marcuse, put it in One Dimensional Man, Marxism’s goal is merely to secure man’s “fulfilled vital needs.”
The way to enjoy the benefits of bourgeois society while escaping the bourgeois spirit is what Tocqueville suggested: to embrace the spirit of true altruism that we learn in religion and family life.
Regaining Harmony between Our Material and Spiritual Lives
Marxism is no solution to selfishness and superficiality. It exhorts people to shun “crass materialism,” but it rationalizes and encourages the very spirit that underlies that materialism. The way to enjoy the benefits of bourgeois society while escaping the bourgeois spirit is rather what Tocqueville suggested: to embrace the spirit of true altruism that we learn in religion and family life.
The problems to which wealth can lead are the result not of anything in wealth itself, but in our tendency to use it as though it could give ultimate happiness. We can make money our ultimate end, or we can make it a means for reaching virtue: for supporting our families, communities, and neighbors who have less than we do. But the pull of money on the heart is very subtle, and we easily keep more for ourselves than we need, almost subconsciously. To order our relation to it rightly we must get help from the Being who made us and knows our hearts better than we do; he alone can keep us from adoring wealth, by giving us himself to love instead.
Neither legislation, nor executive orders, nor a political revolution will instill that love of God in the population, although they may create better or worse conditions for it. That love will only come when individuals have a free change of spirit—a conversion. For everyone, that conversion will require living justly, according to the laws of our nature that God established—especially the other-serving laws of the family against which the self-serving cult of material well-being chafes. It will require living modestly, buying only what one needs to maintain a decent lifestyle. For some people, it may even mean renouncing private property and a natural family of one’s own: only that level of attachment to God will satisfy their hearts in this life. Such sacrifice will also give an invaluable witness to everyone else that, no matter how satisfying material prosperity may be, God can satisfy us even in complete poverty.
Combining outward prosperity with interior detachment from wealth, manifested in generous charity toward one’s neighbor, made the modern West a force for good in the world. The breakdown of that harmony of man’s material and spiritual life is at the root of the decadence of the West, and of the global order that depended on it, as greed slowly poisons dealings between individuals and nations. Let us therefore beware the selfishness of all materialism, bougie or Marxist. Far more satisfying and meaningful is the unostentatious, constant gift of oneself to others, which, slowly but effectively, inverts the materialistic values of this world and brings true happiness.
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