Wednesday, August 30, 2017

"Scandal Erupts over the Promotion of ‘Bourgeois’ Behavior"


Were you planning to instruct your child about the value of hard work and civility? Not so fast! According to a current uproar at the University of Pennsylvania, advocacy of such bourgeois virtues is “hate speech.” The controversy, sparked by an op-ed written by two law professors, illustrates the rapidly shrinking boundaries of acceptable thought on college campuses and the use of racial victimology to police those boundaries.

On August 9, University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax and University of San Diego law professor Larry Alexander published an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer calling for a revival of the bourgeois values that characterized mid-century American life, including child-rearing within marriage, hard work, self-discipline on and off the job, and respect for authority. The late 1960s took aim at the bourgeois ethic, they say, encouraging an “antiauthoritarian, adolescent, wish-fulfillment ideal [of] sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll that was unworthy of, and unworkable for, a mature, prosperous adult society.”

Today, the consequences of that cultural revolution are all around us: lagging education levels, the lowest male work-force participation rate since the Great Depression, opioid abuse, and high illegitimacy rates. Wax and Alexander catalogue the self-defeating behaviors that leave too many Americans idle, addicted, or in prison: “the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-‘acting white’ rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants.”

(Link to more)

8 comments:

edutcher said...

Back in the hippie dippy days, one of the worst things you could call one of the "beautiful people" was middle class.

Nothing changes.

Remember how often Democrat politicians like Halo Joe Biden told you they were fighting for the middle class?

ricpic said...

The plan is so patently obvious. Ban "hate speech," which is to say the expression of any belief to the right of Maoism, and you've successfully killed America.

And the jackal professoriate scum will probably succeed. Why? Because people don't appreciate how glorious the mansion they inhabited was till it's been torn down. Including great people like all of you (me too). But what good are tears, right Archy? Toujours gai kid, toujours gai.

The Dude said...

Nuke U of P from space. Salt the earth. Time to show Maoists what a real cultural revolution looks like.

Fr Martin Fox said...

I remember reading a book about this almost 20 years ago, in the seminary, about how terrible it was to impose "middle class values" on poor people.

edutcher said...

Padre, you just made my point.

Sixty Grit said...

Nuke U of P from space. Salt the earth. Time to show Maoists what a real cultural revolution looks like.

You really don't have to. It's in the heart of West Philly and you take your life in your hands every time you get off the Market-Frankford El.

I speak from experience.

ampersand said...

Someone named Dan Spinelli penned the article at the Daily Philadelphian, a relative perhaps? To be fair the article itself is reportage rather than editorializing.

ndspinelli said...

amper, No relation.

William said...

Sen. Moynihan made the point that when whites had the same rates of illegitimacy as blacks then America would be on the skids.