Non-LDS Advocacy of LDS Lifestyle (aka "bourgeois culture")

[smac97]

Professors Amy Wax and Larry Alexander, both tenured teachers of law holding endowed chairs (at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the University of San Diego Law School, respectively), jointly wrote the Philadelphia Inquirer column “Paying the price for the breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture.”  In the column Wax and Alexander articulate the social practices at the heart of middle class America from the late 1940’s through the 1960’s:

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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.

This sounds like it could be a checklist of repeated and ongoing counsel we have been receiving from General Authorities for generations now.

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Did everyone abide by those precepts? Of course not. There are always rebels — and hypocrites, those who publicly endorse the norms but transgress them. But as the saying goes, hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue. Even the deviants rarely disavowed or openly disparaged the prevailing expectations.

Was everything perfect during the period of bourgeois cultural hegemony? Of course not. There was racial discrimination, limited sex roles, and pockets of anti-Semitism. However, steady improvements for women and minorities were underway even when bourgeois norms reigned. Banishing discrimination and expanding opportunity does not require the demise of bourgeois culture. Quite the opposite: The loss of bourgeois habits seriously impeded the progress of disadvantaged groups. That trend also accelerated the destructive consequences of the growing welfare state, which, by taking over financial support of families, reduced the need for two parents. A strong pro-marriage norm might have blunted this effect. Instead, the number of single parents grew astronomically, producing children more prone to academic failure, addiction, idleness, crime, and poverty.

The interesting thing here is that, in the main, the negative aspects of this old-fashioned "bourgeois cultural hegemony" ("racial discrimination, limited sex roles, and pockets of anti-Semitism") were incidental, not integral to it.  That is to say, this "bourgeois cultural hegemony" can shed these ugly attributes and exist and function beautifully.  Perhaps the trickiest part would be sorting out gender-based employment v. stay-at-home issues, but this would be a decision for the individual married couple, not an implicit mandate imposed on them by social expectations.

The response to the foregoing op-ed piece has . . . not been uniformly positive.  See here (quoted here):

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The op-ed triggered an immediate uproar at the University of Pennsylvania, where one of its authors, Amy Wax, teaches. The dean of the Penn law school, Ted Ruger, published an op-ed in the student newspaper noting the “contemporaneous occurrence” of the op-ed and a white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., and suggesting that Ms. Wax’s views were “divisive, even noxious.” Half of Ms. Wax’s law-faculty colleagues signed an open letter denouncing her piece and calling on students to report any “bias or stereotype” they encounter “at Penn Law ” (e.g., in Ms. Wax’s classroom). Student and alumni petitions poured forth accusing Ms. Wax of white supremacy, misogyny and homophobia and demanding that she be banned from teaching first-year law classes.

...

The dean of USD’s law school, Stephen Ferruolo, issued a schoolwide memo repudiating Mr. Alexander’s article and pledging new measures to compensate “vulnerable, marginalized” students for the “racial discrimination and cultural subordination” they experience.
...

Ms. Wax and Mr. Alexander observed that cultures are not all “equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy.” Their critics pounced on this statement as a bigoted, hate-filled violation of the multicultural ethic. In his response, Penn’s Dean Ruger proclaimed that “as a scholar and educator I reject emphatically any claim that a single cultural tradition is better than all others.” But that wasn’t the claim the authors were making. Rather, they argued that bourgeois culture is better than underclass culture—specifically, “the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-‘acting white’ rap culture of inner-city blacks.” The authors’ criticism of white underclass behavior has been universally suppressed in the stampede to accuse them of “white supremacy.”

More here.

I was, you should know, being a bit tongue-in-cheek in the title of this thread.  These law professors are not espousing LDS teachings as such.  They are instead teaching what they call "bourgeois culture," which just happens to align in many ways with LDS culture.  Not perfectly, of course.  We Mormons go a bit beyond the constraints of "bourgeois culture" by continuing to proscribe extramarital sex (we limit not only kids to marriage, but also the activity that leads to kids).  But other than that, the cultural behaviors espoused by these professors seem to be congruent with reducing/avoiding/eliminating much of the dysfunction that is infecting our country.  From the op-ed:

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Would the re-embrace of bourgeois norms by the ordinary Americans who have abandoned them significantly reduce society’s pathologies? There is every reason to believe so. Among those who currently follow the old precepts, regardless of their level of education or affluence, the homicide rate is tiny, opioid addiction is rare, and poverty rates are low. Those who live by the simple rules that most people used to accept may not end up rich or hold elite jobs, but their lives will go far better than they do now. All schools and neighborhoods would be much safer and more pleasant. More students from all walks of life would be educated for constructive employment and democratic participation.

I think that's right.

Thoughts?

-Smac

[USU78]

Knee-jerk lefty anti-white responses or crickets.

Should we be surprised?

[Avatar4321]

I completely agree.

I've been saying since I gained my testimony nearly two decades ago that if we lived the Gospel our society would be transformed

poverty would decrease.

mental health needs would decrease

medical costs would plummet

suicide rates would evaporate

attorneys would have to find honorable jobs

we could wipe out STDs within a generation.

there would be less anger, hatred, violence in the world

[Kenngo1969]

13 minutes ago, Avatar4321 said:

... attorneys would have to find honorable jobs ...

 

Ouch!   Largely, whether most any profession is honorable depends almost entirely on those who practice it.  I've never met Smac97 in real life, but from what limited dealings I have had with him, I am certain that he is an honorable man and a credit to his profession.  Medicine, as an ideal, is a healing, helping profession, but that does not mean that there are not those who, rather than doing what is best for their patients, are, instead, simply in it for the money.

[Avatar4321]

2 minutes ago, Kenngo1969 said:

Ouch!   Largely, whether most any profession is honorable depends almost entirely on those who practice it.  I've never met Smac97 in real life, but from what limited dealings I have had with him, I am certain that he is an honorable man and a credit to his profession.  Medicine, as an ideal, is a healing, helping profession, but that does not mean that there are not those who, rather than doing what is best for their patients, are, instead, simply in it for the money.

btw I'm an attorney too

[The Nehor]

Come comrades! Now that the bourgeois have been destroyed the proletariat will arise at last. Power to the People!!!!!

[Avatar4321]

26 minutes ago, The Nehor said:

Come comrades! Now that the bourgeois have been destroyed the proletariat will arise at last. Power to the People!!!!!

you know, I've known what those words mean for years but they still sound completely made up to me.

[Kenngo1969]

1 hour ago, Kenngo1969 said:

Ouch!   Largely, whether most any profession is honorable depends almost entirely on those who practice it.  I've never met Smac97 in real life, but from what limited dealings I have had with him, I am certain that he is an honorable man and a credit to his profession.  Medicine, as an ideal, is a healing, helping profession, but that does not mean that there are not those who, rather than doing what is best for their patients, are, instead, simply in it for the money.

 

1 hour ago, Avatar4321 said:

btw I'm an attorney too

I thought you were, but I was trying to remember if perhaps I had confused you with someone else.  If it's not too much IRL info, what, and where, do you practice?

[The Nehor]

57 minutes ago, Avatar4321 said:

you know, I've known what those words mean for years but they still sound completely made up to me.

Yep, they are so fun to play with.

[Avatar4321]

2 hours ago, Kenngo1969 said:

 

I thought you were, but I was trying to remember if perhaps I had confused you with someone else.  If it's not too much IRL info, what, and where, do you practice?

MN and I'm actually trying to start one. Jobs are scarce here so creating one is the best option.

 

 

[smac97]

6 hours ago, Avatar4321 said:

btw I'm an attorney too

I did not take the previous remark as any sort of slight against myself, or even as a real condemnation of the legal profession. Attorneys are understandably, or at least should be, fairly self-deprecating. Our profession involves resolving disputes between parties, but it also allows for plenty of opportunities for vexatious or other inappropriate conduct. Hence the proliferation of lawyer jokes. In an ideal world, (such as during the Millennium), it is my hope and expectation that attorneys will not be needed in the same way they are needed now.

[BlueDreams]

While I'm certainly less reactionary to the opinion piece, I do get why people could have some serious problems with it. I have problems with it. For one, this article and articles like it have this tendency to airbrush history. The problems of these eras get an honorable mention while the positives are over glorified. They remind me of fluffy historical romances, where some person is transported to some more "chivalrous" time, finds the one man who's chivalry also allowed her some leeway and recognized personhood, and brushes over the disease factors, maternal death rate, and the inherent dangers of that era. The image that's being painted in essence is part fantasy. The airbrushing also proscribes this as a practical fix-all to all social woahs of our time. This to me is an oversimplification of the problems facing today. 

It also doesn't go over the inherent weaknesses of the cultural system it is suggesting. And there are problems. For example, staying married "for the kids" can lead to maintaining dysfunctional family systems for the sake of an image. It also means that a lot of familial problems are driven underground or left unacknowledged as problems in the first place. I am not saying that the world they're painting wouldn't be nice or have positive results. 2-parent households of an equitable partnership are great for raising children. Waiting till marriage to have said kids is also particularly helpful. But there are problems and the culture that overly promotes this can end up leaving those problems at times poorly addressed. 

The way that it suggests promoting said culture also means that anyone who doesn't fit that mold gets the shaft. I have found myself feeling particularly bad for my clients who were raised in areas with this "bourgeois" culture (or upper-middle mormon utah culture to be exact) but didn't fit it themselves. The contrast could lead to weird complexes, exacerbating some of their problems to an extreme that didn't need to be there. Even for myself this bourgeois culture had its difficulties. Though having a "bourgeois" culture in my later teens gave space for healing and realizing there was a different possibility out there for me....it also left me feeling extremely different and unrelatable to those around me for years. I sometimes still feel that way. Their final suggestion means that a large chunk of the american experience and peoples would suddenly feel alienated or find little connection to the stories found in media, arts, and other avenues of expression. Because they weren't leave-it-to-beaver enough. 

That leads me to my last problem. Most families and households simply can't rewind to a 1950's family structure and approach to living. It's just not possible. Even if all the single-parent households married, that wouldn't lead to a 2-parent household...it would lead to a blended family with more parents and possibly children to work into the structure. You can't un-have kids, undo time, and revert to an era that simply doesn't belong in this one. Not even the church can promote its ideal in the same way it did in the 50's/60's....because doing so can alienate people from the gospel. I've watched it happen before. I've felt it in my own life. Our message is finding ways to be more inclusive or to better acknowledge that many won't fit a mold. This article doesn't give the possibility. What it proscribes to me feels like crippling homogeneity. A world that I simply can't fit into....even though I plan to have that 2 parent household, kids conceived in marriage, got the education for my current employment, don't do drugs etc. But some of it I don't want to fit. I have seen several of these values taken to an extreme that doesn't allow for much civil disobedience, acknowledging severe fault in leaders, inability to critique or critically look into situations/ideas, suppress creativity and innovation, find value outside the box, etc.

The world she paints is not the LDS lifestyle I currently live. It fits a specific type of LDS lifestyle...one bred more out of culture than doctrine. 

 

With luv,

BD