Ghosts, Monks, and Bobos.

Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: on the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, revised edition (New York: Free Press, 1962).

Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), xiv+205pp., $23.95.

David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: the New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 285pp., $25.00.

Alasdair Maclntyre, After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory, 2d ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984)

Like ghosts, works of social criticism often come back to their old haunts long after one had thought they were exorcised. Consider Daniel Bell's The End of Ideology. When it was published in the 1950s, its central thesis -- that the grand theoretical systems of right and left had been rendered irrelevant by the successes of a technologically sophisticated, centrist liberalism -- was widely and vocally dismissed by critics on the left. Some of those critics went on to take their criticism to the streets. The Port Huron Statement, the Civil Rights movement, the protest against the Vietnam war, and the emergence of the counterculture all seemed to render Bell's anti-ideological thesis rather quaint. The dawn of the ideological right in the 1970s and 1980s, itself an almost dialectical response and reaction to the excesses of the ideological left, seemed to show the utter obsolescence of Bell's argument. Here, even more than in the heyday of the New Left and S.D.S., the politics of "true believers" reigned supre me, and an ideological program obsessed with dismantling the New Deal was put into practice, diligently, at times ruthlessly. (Even Bell himself started having second thoughts about The End of Ideology: his 1978 masterpiece, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, exhibited an unease about corporate capitalism and New Frontier/Great Society liberalism that did not show itself in his earlier books.)

Yet today, in 2001, The End of Ideology seems to be back with a vengeance: the political center does not merely dominate but monopolizes the scene. The rhetoric of "globalization" confirms the hegemony of corporate capitalism over all aspects of economic life, while the doctrinaire hatred of government and social welfare that characterized the Reagan years has likewise seemed to dissipate. Bill Clinton, the Democrat who likened himself to an "Eisenhower Republican" without a trace of irony or embarrassment, set the tone for his dominant Republican counterparts, politicians like George Pataki, William Weld, and Christie

Whitman, who took every opportunity to distance themselves from the ideological Reagan-Gingrich wing of their party and project an urbane, socially-liberal yet economically-conservative image. After drafting as right-wing a party platform as any in recent memory, the Republican party's year 2000 candidate (and dubious presidential victor) George W. Bush kept portraying himself as a "compassionate conservative," a possibly oxymoronic code word that disowned, at least rhetorically, whatever the party explicitly stood for, but gave the solid impression, at least, that he avoided the extremes. (Bush's subsequent turn to the right after his inauguration has precipitated a strong backlash, not just among the Democratic opposition, but also among moderate Republicans like Vermont's senator James Jeffords, who bolted the party precisely because he felt "the center" betrayed by Bush's bait-and-switch tactics.)

The new centrism is not just an American phenomenon, either. In Britain, Tony Blair has won reelection, despite his sagging popularity, on the grounds that he and his party were equidistant from both Margaret Thatcher and Michael Foot. In Germany, the Social Democrats' Gerhart Schroeder sent finance minister Oskar Lafontaine packing for leaning too far to the left. In Western Europe, only France seems to be exempt from this centripetal movement. Politicians everywhere seem to rush toward the center, cheerily touting the virtues of a vaguely-defined "third way," and in general exhibiting the sort of ideologically-neutral "pragmatic" expertise that Bell thought had vanquished all contenders in the modern political arena.

The move back toward the non-ideological center is not, however, a move back to Bell's 1950s. Politics may have retreated from the grand schemes of the 1960s and 1980s, but culturally and socially the landscape has changed beyond recognition, due in large measure to the transformation of the American economy from an industrial to a post-industrial, information-based one (the subject-matter of yet another Bell book, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society). David Brooks's Bobos in Paradise is, in his own words, a work of "comic sociology" that tries to describe and understand those socio-cultural gaps that yawn between the present age and the 1950s, 1960s, and 1980s, by way of an encomium of sorts to the "new class" of educated professionals that has emerged as a vanguard. Brooks christens them "bourgeois bohemians," or "bobos" for short.

Bobos, for Brooks, are the "new upper class" whose status is fundamentally determined by education, rather than by breeding, inheritance, or belonging to "the establishment." Their signal achievement is to have fused the bourgeois mind-set which dominated the 1950s and, in a different way, the 1980s, with bohemian "counter-culture" values of the 1960s. They are obsessed with success: workaholics, they have no problem with those aspects of the "Protestant work ethic" that emphasize diligence, achievement, and delayed gratification, as long as the gratification is not endlessly delayed, and as long as the achievement can be viewed as something inherently noble and good. They are at odds, however, with the stodginess of the older bourgeoisie: its drive toward conformity, its contempt for eccentricity, its obsession with conspicuous consumption and "keeping up with the Joneses."

Bobos are thus avid consumers (a bourgeois trait), but want their consumption to remain inconspicuous, lest they betray themselves as rich vulgarians (a bohemian trait). They shy away from judging others' sexual "indiscretions" (bohemian), but are puritanical in their zeal against habits like smoking and overeating, on the grounds that they compromise health (bourgeois). They see no problem frequenting high-toned and pricey stores (bourgeois), but prefer those, like Restoration Hardware, that forego ostentation and convey an image of homey, retro practicality (bohemian). They are proud of their intellectual erudition and cultivate it assiduously (bohemian), but do not, as earlier generations of intellectuals did, see themselves as an elite manning the barricades of high culture against "mass society": they move comfortably within that culture, discerning neither difficulty nor moral compromise in understanding the life of the mind as yet another exercise in self-marketing (bourgeois).

While Brooks is under no illusions that bobos are the dominant class - lower middle and working classes dwarf them in terms of numbers - he recognizes that they do exercise considerable cultural power, and have become the class that politicians are most eager to court (e.g., the "soccer moms" of the 1996 campaign). And it is arguable that their values are trickling down to the larger culture: if you are not a bobo, you may very well be a bobo-wannabe.

Throughout Bobos in Paradise Brooks views the bobo nation with a modicum of sympathy, though he is not beyond criticizing their flabby sense of spirituality ("fiexidoxy"), their endemic silliness, and their inflated self-image. He admires the way in which bobos combine sobriety with eccentricity, their ability to temper idealism with a sense of practical limits, and their willingness to adjust individuality to community and vice-versa. He concludes his qualified defense of the bobos' culture by claiming that "if they raise their sights and ask the biggest questions, they have the ability to go down in history as the class that led America into another golden age" (p. 273).

Let's be honest: this is not just hyperbole - this is nonsense. Because Brooks writes with sparkling wit, elegance, and panache, because his observations are droll and pointed in equal measure, and because virtually everyone apt to read the book will exhibit at least some bobo traits, he is likely to persuade his readership that bobos as a class are benign, even admirable and, to a degree, worthy of emulation. Yet for my part I fear he has only seduced himself. Bobos, who generally owe their wealth and position not to meeting any genuine, objective standard of merit or criterion of desert but to the unpredictable wiles of the marketplace and to the exploitation of educational credentials and connections (that is, to sheer good luck and brown-nosing), differ from yuppies only in their reluctance to admit that they are the latest version of the relatively well-heeled, social-climbing arriviste. Their newfound taste for "community" - school uniforms, zero-tolerance for drug use, regular churchgoing, and so on-is toothless, since the community in question consists almost exclusively of other bobos, making it a "lifestyle enclave," the counterfeit gemeinschaft aptly named and skewered fifteen years ago in Robert Bellah's Habits of the Heart. Bobos, I submit, are closet yuppies, which makes them a shade better than flagrant, proud, self-assertive yuppies. But only a shade.

Consider, for a moment, Brooks's recounting of bobo consumption habits, and how bobos grade them against those of vulgar yuppies. Spending $10,000 on a Jacuzzi is "decadent," but spending $20,000 for a slate shower stall is "virtuous," both because it is useful and because doing so shows an appreciation for the "simple rhythms of life." Spending $60,000 on a Jaguar is vulgar, but spending $65,000 on a Range Rover SUV supposedly is not, again because all its expensive features are useful and because it betrays an admirably rugged, outdoorsy frame of mind. And so on.

I do not want to deny those who can afford it the occasional luxury, nor do I wish to challenge the idea that since you get what you pay for, it usually makes sense to opt for quality over cheapness. But the sheer heft of the price-tags that Brooks quotes, and the fact that these are not occasional splurges but habitual modes of purchasing, go a long way toward showing up the bobos' pretense that they are anything but self-indulgent. The point of a car is to get you reliably from point-A to point-B (absent any other way of making the trip); the point of a bathtub is to help get you clean. To be willing to plop down over 60K for the former, or 10-20K for the latter is, to my mind, not so much an indication of one's relation to the Zeitgeist, but rather a clear sign that one has too much money. Aesthetics need not be sacrificed to show that one understands that one has better things to do with one's money than to fritter it away on excess, whether in the form of conspicuous luxuries or inconspicuous ego-gratify ing pseudo-necessities. Unlike yuppies, bobos pay lip-service to the virtues of thrift and humility, but this is a simple, self-deceptive conceit. They are kin under the skin.

Equally nonsensical is Brooks's favorable comparison of present-day intellectuals with the '50s circle of "bohemian" intellectuals who clustered around Partisan Review and other like-minded general journals of ideas and politics, including the likes of Hannah Arendt, Dwight Macdonald, Irving Howe, and Reinhold Niebuhr. According to Brooks, what the latter group lacked was metis, the middle-level knowledge named and prized by the Greeks, that mediated practice with high theory. Brooks asks the following rhetorical question:

Is wisdom best attained by sitting in a book-stuffed studio on Riverside Drive, reading Freud and the existentialists, engaging in intense debates with an insular crowd, most of whom live within a few square miles? Or is it gained through broader experience with the world, by putting one foot in the river of mainstream life and then by reflecting on what you found there? (186)

Thus Arendt, Niebuhr, et al. are charged with standing aloof from the "mainstream" of American life, which can mean one of two things: either they were befuddled ivory tower types whose theoretical bent disinclined them from getting their hands dirty in practical matters, or they snobbishly rejected the burgeoning "mainstream" ethos of the Eisenhower-Kennedy years -- that of affluence, acquisitiveness, fake respectability, and guarded ambition.

About the first option, Brooks is simply mistaken. Niebuhr, for instance, was for many years a pastor in a rough-and-tumble district of Detroit before moving on to the loftier precincts of Union Theological Seminary. His earlier experience, surely characterized by metis, influenced his theoretical output to an incalculable extent. Howe's immersion in the culture of European Jews who emigrated to America and New York is given explicit display in works such as World of Our Fathers, but also counts at least as much as a resource for his writing as did his City College education in Marxist factionalism: another "high culture" intellectual "made" by metis. And Arendt, for her part, found it necessary to actually go to Jerusalem for the Eichmann trials. She could have, if she wanted to, reflected on the transcripts in the comfort of her Upper West Side armchair, but she did not. She also had a very direct and practical encounter with the advance of Nazism in her native Germany, which is as "real world" as one is l ikely to get.

Concerning the second option, Brooks is right: they did scorn 1950s bourgeois socio-political complacency. (Howe and Arendt, in particular, would also come to scorn 1960s self-indulgent bohemian radicalism, but let that pass.) But they had their reasons for doing so (good ones, I think), and to dismiss them as thereby being willingly detached from the "mainstream" begs the question. If they would seem to be "kooks" from the perspective of the bourgeois sensibility of their day, I am sure they would have responded "so much the worse for the contemporary bourgeois sensibility." In doing so they would merely be doing their jobs as intellectual critics.

A mere ad hominem brief against 1950s culture-criticism is not quite what Brooks intends. It is the type of social critic that the typical "high intellectual" was that he wants to take down a peg. Brooks is suspicious of those who read "the great books" from on high, then traipse down the mountainside, tablets in hand, to "enlighten" not the masses but their fellow intellectuals. He writes:

[With] all due respect to people like Niebuhr and Arendt, many of the best and most influential books were written by people who were not considered intellectuals in their day: Jane Jacobs, William White, Betty Friedan, Rachel Carson, even Digby Baltzell. In some way these writers and journalists had more in common with today's pundits and worldly commentators than with the intellectual mode Edward Shils defined. These people serve as better models for us today than the highbrows who self-consciously detached themselves into the realm of high culture, capital-letter ideas, and bohemian alienation. (188)

Almost every assertion in this paragraph is dubious. Both Niebuhr and Arendt, like John Dewey and William James before them, managed to write both in a scholarly mode and for a "general intellectual" audience -- i.e., a "journalistic" one. Niebuhr's pieces for the Christian Century and Arendt's for The New Yorker are cases in point. (Does that mean that even they were not "real" intellectuals by the standards of "their day"?) The difference between, say, Silent Spring and Eichmann in Jerusalem is thus not one of kind but of degree, and I would claim of rather slight degree. Is Jane Jacobs, whose works on the city incorporate a lot of what can only be called "philosophical" reflection and judgment, less "highbrow" than Arendt, who likewise brought philosophy to bear on current events? Is Friedan really less alienated from American society than Niebuhr was? (Many neoconservatives felt comfortable with Niebuhr's political thought -- wrongly, I think -- in a way that would be inconceivable with respect to Friedan 's.) Is William Whyte's Organization Man in an utterly different universe of discourse from C. Wright Mills's White Collar and The Power Elite, simply because the latter is somehow devoted to "capital letter ideas" (and scholarly footnotes) in a way that the former is not? Weren't all the above authors regularly reviewed in The New York Review of Books, which was every bit the province of "eggheads" as Partisan Review? Brooks's distinctions collapse under the sheer weight of their arbitrariness. As for Brooks's implicit nod to "today's pundits and worldly commentators" as role-models for bobo public intellectuals, I think it speaks for itself. Any intellectual, "highbrow" or not, aspiring to the level defined by "today's pundits" -- by the motley cast of Meet the Press or The McLaughlin Report, the professional chatterers on CNN or FOX news, or the chic charlatans who wax indignant in columns posted on www.salon.com -- really ought to consider a change of vocation, not to mention a rigorous examination of con science.

Throughout Bobos in Paradise Brooks seems to marvel at the way in which bobos combine bourgeois with bohemian virtues. I think it more accurate to claim that they have synthesized their most flagrant vices. Bourgeois and bohemian cultures, antithetical as they may be in some respects, nonetheless share certain key assumptions and values. They are both acquisitive (the former of goods, the latter of experiences); they are both radically individualistic (the former exemplifying "utilitarian" and the latter "expressive" individualism, to use Bellah's typology); they both view economic, social, and political life as instrumental means toward an essentially aesthetic end (differing only on the details of that end and on how to tailor the means to fit it); and so on. Viewed this way, the bohemian and the bourgeois are symbiotes: the bohemian is parasitic upon the institutions of bourgeois society (both as something to rebel against and as a source of potential patrons), and the bourgeois cultivates the bohemian as a kind of foil, someone who can be counted upon to deliver the occasional therapeutic shock -- and, more importantly, someone who can be exploited as part of the bourgeois quest for ever-expanding markets.

Noticing this latter feature of contemporary bourgeois culture is Brooks's great achievement: failing to notice its deeper significance, not to mention its dire awfulness, is Brooks's great oversight. Bobo culture and bobo society is not exactly a grand Hegelian synthesis, since the ability of bourgeois society to transform everything into a fetishized commodity is not aufgehoben but retained in a superficially new, hip form. The bobo is at home in what the political theorist Benjamin Barber has called "McWorld" -- the global capitalist marketplace -- even as she or he claims to stand aloof from it. As Thomas Frank and The Baffler have persistently and presciently reminded us, dissent can be commodified, and bohemian nonconformity co-opted by and absorbed into the late-capitalist culture of consumption, with relative ease.

Bobodom is indeed Bell's nonideological world, but as nightmare rather than utopia. But is there, now, a cultural third way between the bourgeois and the bohemian? Can one escape the homogenized, self-congratulatory emptiness of the bobo McWorld?

Perhaps. Morris Berman's The Twilight of American Culture sees, in a way that Brooks's Bobos in Paradise does not, the vacuity of the American vanguard class's ethos, and proposes a way both to escape it and to preserve the cultural heritage it is in danger of obliterating. It is an extremely cranky book, much like Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind and Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism, but unlike the latter two cannot be read (correctly in Bloom's case, incorrectly in Lasch's) as yet another windy neoconservative screed. And just as Brooks conjures up the shade of Bell's The End of Ideology, Berman tacitly invokes the specter of a very different work of social criticism, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue.

In an early essay of his, "The End of Ideology and the End of the End of Ideology," MacIntyre cited Bell's book as itself a specimen of ideological mystification. MacIntyre maintained that while Bell and his fellow liberals were correct to note and criticize the ill effects of "big idea" politics, whether of the far Right or the Communist Left, they failed to perceive that their own desideratum of an idea-less politics of value-neutral managerial skill, painless interest brokering, corporate facilitation, and top-down social/economic engineering was both a big idea and a rather bad one. MacIntyre devoted a chapter in After Virtue to developing these concerns. Supposedly, the ideal of social science is to provide value-neutral skill to the managerial elite of liberal individualist society, who can then use it to generate the prosperous, satisfied, and agreeable nation that they and, presumably, all liberal democrats desire. But social reality is recalcitrant to such analyses. The intentions of people and the a ctions they generate are vague and unforeseeable, and resist being incorporated into a deterministic system of law-like generalizations. Life is inevitably unpredictable. Thus the cult of "managerial expertise," even as it extends its reach throughout the worlds of business, government, and education, is marked by failure and long-run collapse; more importantly, it masks the reductive, essentially manipulative view of all social relations that animates the modern world.

If MacIntyre is right about this, bobos should be worried. Their economic position in society is secured by their being what Robert Reich called "symbolic analysts" -- the expert clarifiers and manipulators of meaning for wealthy and powerful mandarins -- and their self-congratulatory self-image rests on their belief that their expertise will help make the world a "better place" for everyone else (thus justifying all the Range Rovers and slate shower stalls they purchase). But if MacIntyre is right, the claim to expertise is groundless and the benevolent self-image a delusion. He is saying, in effect, that the jig is up.

After Virtue was, however, subtitled "a study in moral theory" rather than in sociology. MacIntyre is impressed (or, rather, alarmed) by the fact that there seems to be no consensus in modern societies on specific moral issues (abortion, capital punishment, war, poverty, etc.), or on the reasons cited to support a given moral position (The greatest good for the greatest number? Respect for Human Rights? Obedience to God's will?), or even on how one could determine whether these reasons are adequate or not. Consequently, moral discourse vacillates between violent, dogmatic shrillness and spineless, relativistic indifference -- between talk radio and Oprah, in a manner of speaking. If MacIntyre is right, then we live in a time of great moral incoherence, complicated by the fact that we do not recognize it as such -- we continue to think that we use moral terms and make moral judgments in a reasonable and intelligible manner. How can he make good on such a counterintuitive thesis?

MacIntyre sought to do so by showing how a "catastrophe" struck Western ethical discourse in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a calamity that also partly explains why people might have come to believe the mythology of value-neutral social science and managerial expertise in the first place. In that era, philosophers and moralists jettisoned the idea of a human telos, an end or goal proper to human beings as such, which could be discovered by rational reflection on "the good life" and embodied in the practices and institutions of socio-political communities. In its place, this "Enlightenment Project" substituted the chimerical idea of universally available and necessary moral principles (Bentham's principle of utility, Kant's Categorical Imperative) which would stabilize moral judgment in a world that is otherwise characterized by massive disagreement about the requirements of virtue and the contours of a worthy life. We life in the aftermath of its failure, a world in which ethical appeals carry no i ntrinsic force, and in which they often serve as a mask for manipulation and subterfuge. Hence the prevalence in modernity of the rich aesthete, the expert manager, and the therapist as dominant character-types (note also how all three are congenial occupations for bobos). We are so accustomed to their hegemony that we do not notice how they are key symptoms of the degradation of moral practice and theory alike.

MacIntyre did not flinch from asking the question: "What, then, is to be done in the face of such wholesale moral collapse?" His answer was: not much -- or, rather, that any large-scale efforts to escape the ethically-barren (post)modern world generated by "the Enlightenment Project" would themselves necessarily be co-opted by it and forced to operate in a manipulative, aesthetic-managerial-therapeutic mode. What was needed was a form of local piecemeal resistance, a preservation of the tradition of the virtues from "the barbarians" who "have been governing us for some time now." In the famous concluding sentence of the book, he counsels us to wait "for a new--doubtless very different--Saint Benedict."

It is difficult to believe that Morris Berman was not familiar with MacIntyre's counsel (although no reference is made in The Twilight of American Culture to any of MacIntyre's work). Invoking St. Benedict, MacIntyre alludes to the tradition of Medieval Monasticism as a way of renouncing the follies of modernity and preserving the best of human culture. Berman makes this turn to monasticism explicit, and gives some concrete advice on how such a turn will be "doubtless very different" from that made at the end of the classical period and the fall of Rome.

Berman realizes that he has his work cut out for him: the end of the cold war and the recent collapse of Asian "miracle economies" in Japan, Korea, and Indonesia have led to a mood in America that is relentlessly self-congratulatory, to say the least. But Berman is commendably unmoved: socially, culturally, and politically, America is a mess. The gap between rich and poor is at its widest point since the 1920s, indicating that its economic success story is misleading at best and meretricious at worst. The late-capitalist culture of consumption has "colonized" all of social life, which reflexively defines value exclusively in terms of selling and buying. Attempts to smooth over the conflicts generated by a commercial culture, or to crisis-manage the malignant side-effects or "externalities" generated by an unfettered economy, are afflicted with the problem of diminishing marginal utility. Social Security is Berman's star example of a form of social engineering soon to be swamped by events beyond its control. A dd to this an absolutely astonishing degree of functional illiteracy (it is dumbfounding that the richest nation in the world ranks 48th out of 150 members of the United Nations in literacy), the willful narcissism and stupidity of mass entertainment and the popularity of vapid "New Age" superstition, and a profound, widely-distributed sense of nihilistic despair about life, and MacIntyre's conclusion about the reigning "barbarians" seems amply confirmed.

Berman, like MacIntyre, contends that America's socio-cultural "problem" is resistant to large-scale efforts of political action and reform. Such efforts are likely to be co-opted by the masters of commerce, packaged, sold as "lifestyle options" (e.g., boboism) and thus drained of their critical and effective power. Working within "the system" to change it will, in the long run, only change you, and for the worse. The only way to effectively challenge Barber's "McWorld" is to drop out of it, at least some of the time -- to cultivate, in MacIntyre's words, those "local forms of community" in which the practices that define a good, worthy, humane life can be preserved in the milieu of the present "dark age." In this sense, the example of medieval monasticism is instructive.

In fact, according to Berman, twenty-first-century Americans have the advantage over their medieval counterparts in their ability to understand and endorse, rather than just transcribe, the cultural resources that they seek to preserve. The monks transmitted enough of classical Greek and Roman culture to generate the Renaissances of the twelfth and sixteenth centuries without championing that culture. While they saw it as an important part of being learned, they ultimately thought it a distraction from the proper task of scriptural exegesis and spiritual contemplation. Contemporary "monks," however, know what they are doing, and believe in it. When Michael Moore makes films like Roger and Me that succeed almost accidentally, and do not tempt him into making more lucrative commercial "product," or when Earl Shorris endeavors to bring the Clemente course "great books" curriculum to a small band of the poor and marginalized in New York, or when Don Jose Arizmendi creates an economic cooperative in Spain that act ually succeeds in creating a humane and viable "third way" between bureaucratic state socialism and rapacious unfettered capitalism, they embrace the monastic option of bracketing the corrupt wider culture and doing what is worth doing, whether it proves "successful" or not. They turn their backs on the task of shoring up a crumbling social edifice, leaving it to collapse on its own, and devote themselves to carrying on the true legacy of Western Civilization. A multitude of little, brave deeds will keep the flame alive.

While I think Berman's analysis of our predicament is largely correct, and his proposed solution the right one, I have two misgivings about his project, one minor, the other major. The minor quibble has to do with Berman's characterization of contemporary monasticism as preserving the values of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which is threatened by those cultural forms, so prevalent in our day, that celebrate unreason and easy belief, and dismiss disciplined inquiry into the truth of things as power-mongering and ideological mystification. Berman has read Horkheimer and Adorno, and is well aware of the ways in which the Enlightenment has been perverted, its dreams of emancipation transformed into a Weberian nightmare of bureaucratic control and Foucaultian surveillance. He is also well aware of the positive contributions made by poststructuralist and deconstructionist critics of the Enlightenment such as Derrida, Lyotard, and Deleuze. They have done much to demystify the cult of technical expertise and disinterested managerial "objectivity." But their epigones have gone overboard. To expose fake objectivity for what it is one needs to affirm genuine objectivity, and to unmask scoundrels and liars one must be committed to standards of truth and rationality that are not mere appendages to brute power. Berman concludes, perceptively, that the cynical postmodern belief that everything is ideology, that everybody has a hidden agenda, lends itself to a kind of academic indifference to the real political world, a posture which in turn is nicely co-opted by the image-merchants of McWorld obsessed with making the quick buck.

While Berman's distaste for postmodern diffidence is, I think, laudable, he makes the same mistake that Jurgen Habermas and other "modernist" critical theorists make: the confusion of rational criticism as such with "the Enlightenment project." As MacIntyre and others rightly maintain, that project is inextricably linked with the attempt to provide universal, necessary, and ahistorical principles that serve as foundations to all cognition, and which are available to all individuals capable of reflection. This attempt to make an end-run around tradition -- to bypass received practices and authorities and appeal to "the autonomous rational subject" as if she or he neither had nor needed a historical conceptual inheritance -- has failed, if MacIntyre's argument is correct, and if one takes Berman's own tale of cultural decline at face value. But it is not true that rational criticism was unknown before Voltaire and Diderot. Socrates was not an enlightenment philosophe, and did not endorse their suspect epistemol ogies, but nevertheless stood for the very rational integrity that Berman champions so passionately. Socratic elenchus, for example, does not require any commitment to a foundationalist view of "universal reason": one can start the dialectic anywhere, with anyone, and generate a clearer view of what anything, from Courage to Piety to Justice, really is. The fact that one must start from traditions, from within a given, historically contingent set of beliefs and desires, does not mean one is stuck there, imprisoned in the schemata of language, hemmed in by one's horizon or conceptual scheme. The relativistic, or even nihilistic belief that one is so imprisoned is intelligible only against the questionable Enlightenment epistemological assumption that without incorrigible foundations we are cognitively adrift. The task of preserving rational inquiry and criticism thus swings free from the Enlightenment project, and we would be well advised not to view the mission of "monks" to be that of extending it.

My second gripe is more severe. Berman advises those considering the monastic option to forego any allegiances to "institutions," and to go it alone as "individuals." Institutions will inevitably co-opt the creative soul: the group will invariably stifle the individual. As soon as an act of resistance in institutionalized in the modern or postmodern world, it is taken up into the network of corporate manipulation and commodified. Thus if it succeeds in articulating dissent and righteous anger, it fails. Better to follow the example of a Thoreau or John the Baptist, and make one's statement for one's own sake, crying out in the desert. Groups corrupt, and the absolute group of corporate, bureaucratic society corrupts absolutely.

Berman's suspicion of institutions is not baseless, but I am inclined to ask whether they are dispensable for anyone committed to the monastic project. The solitary anchorite (St. Anthony, St. Jerome) is often an admirable figure, but on closer inspection such "individualists" have a reserve of courage and patience only because of a deep, prior formation in a community of a very special kind, one which has in some manner institutionalized the ways in which their distinctive kinds of practical wisdom are handed down. Medieval monasticism, whatever its defects, could not have succeeded as the agent of civilizational renewal were it not for the institutional monastic orders -- the Benedictines, the Franciscans, the Dominicans -- that permitted and encouraged the copying of manuscripts and the preservation of Greece and Rome in a kind of cultural cold storage. (And this is truer of those Islamic institutions -- libraries, centers of education, and the like -- that were even more instrumental in initiating the twe lfth-century revival of learning in the West.) Moreover, "the individual" as an ideal type is not necessarily more noble than "the organization man." They may, in our time, be one and the same. MacIntyre has argued that modernity tends to nurture "bureaucratic individualists," who, because they care for nothing other than their own narrow self-interest, easily fit into the bureaucratic ethos, eager to manipulate others (and easy to manipulate themselves). Only certain kinds of individualists are likely to become "monks," and these characteristically exhibit deep convictions and a sense of identity forged by certain kinds of institutions. Thoreau would never have retired alone to Walden Pond were it not for his earlier associations with Emerson and the Boston Transcendentalists (not to mention the prosperity of his father's pencil factory). And they, in turn, were made possible by the nurturance of Harvard University and the Congregational and Unitarian churches. Institutions cannot be escaped.

The problem therefore is not with institutions per se but with those institutions likely to self-destruct by drifting into self-oblivion and kitsch. It is here, perhaps, that religious communities have an important role to play, one that curiously is not "doubtless very different" from that played by the religious orders of the Middle Ages. Serious Jews, Muslims, and Christians have institutionalized certain resources in their traditions that might enable them to recognize that which is worthy in "Western Civilization" but will also alert them to its perversion in and by the various projects of modernity and postmodernity. They have institutionalized various means of resisting the cultural decline that Berman laments, and have been quite effective in nonviolently bringing the powers to heel (consider Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement, which would surely have fizzled out were it not for the institutional backing of the African-American Churches). Secularists would be well advised to devise anal ogous institutions to these religious communities if they are as worried about the American Twilight as Berman is; religious people would be equally well advised to treasure and protect their own extant institutions. Only if some such institutions flourish, either above or below ground, can we hope to sustain those practices and forms of thought that define the achievement of the West -- or, indeed, of humankind. Only such institutions can serve as an adequate defense against the onslaught of the bobo troops, conscripted into mercenary service in the armies of the new "global" economic order, whose military virtues are a combination of acquisitive greed, willed ignorance, and smug self-absorption. Lonely individuals, however noble they may be, do not stand a chance against a culture of such sublime ugliness.

Michael J. Quirk teaches in the Adult Division at New School University and Hofstra University. He is working on a collection of essays, The Rule of Practice.