In his newest book, Murray argues that American whites have divided sharply along class lines over the last few decades. Working class neighborhoods, he argues, are falling apart because the working class as a whole no longer holds onto the American “founding virtues” of industriousness (as measured by hours worked), honesty (as measured by crime rates and, yet more improbably for a book published in 2012, rates of legal bankruptcy), religion, and marriage. It no longer holds onto these virtues because the upper-middle class tells poor people that it’s okay to be lazy, dishonest, atheistic and single, while simultaneously telling its own children that they’d damn well better be virtuous. American immorality thus finds its home not in East Coast hamlets of elitism, but in poor, middle America.

The center of the new upper class, meanwhile, is a broad elite, the “most successful 5 percent of adults ages 25 and older who are working in managerial positions, in the professions … and in content-production jobs in the media.” These elites share tastes, preferences, and “growing ignorance about the country over which they have so much power.” Previous elite groups were unable to “impose their will” on the rest of society, but this new elite core is large enough (2.4 million) to pose a problem; in addition, while previous elite groups were “culturally diverse,” today’s is homogenous. We all live in the same places, and suffer from “overeducated elitist snob” syndrome, thanks to which we believe that our tastes and preferences are superior and make us superior. According to Murray, this is the result of an increased market for intelligence, which has led to increased economic inequality and the concentration of the wealthy in elite colleges. The core of the new underclass is men who have no jobs and aren’t in the labor market, single mothers, and “isolates” uninvolved in any secular or religious organization. Murray’s claim that this is genetically based is bizarre, but it’s hard to deny that he’s pointing to a real phenomenon. ^[1]

Murray’s analysis is really about broad classes, as opposed to the extremes that helped his book make the headlines. On his definitions, 20 percent of white American adults are upper middle class or better; 30 percent are working class or worse. The 30 percent is increasingly less likely to: marry, be happy in marriage, be in the workforce, work long hours (for Murray a key sign of “industriousness”), or attend church regularly. They are increasingly more likely to divorce or separate, be born outside wedlock, live with a single parent, be unemployed, be a prisoner, be victims of violent or property crime and be “secular.” The 20 percent evinces none of these trends. ^[2]

Of course, there have always been differences between upper-middle class culture and working class culture. The problem today, as Murray describes it, is that the upper middle class and the working class are increasingly unable to relate to the middle class, or to each other (c.f. Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, John Kerry’s presidential campaign, McCain’s running mate, etc.). These new class differences “affect the ability of [working class] people to live satisfying lives, the ability of communities to function as communities, and the ability of America to survive as America.”

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How can we cure this problem? The mainstream Left answers predictably: “Suddenly,” Paul Krugman tells us, “conservatives are telling us that it’s not really about money; it’s about morals … but is it really all about morals? No, it’s mainly about money”:

So we have become a society in which less-educated men have great difficulty finding jobs with decent wages and good benefits. Yet somehow we’re supposed to be surprised that such men have become less likely to participate in the work force or get married, and conclude that there must have been some mysterious moral collapse caused by snooty liberals. And Mr. Murray also tells us that working-class marriages, when they do happen, have become less happy; strange to say, money problems will do that.

And Murray has claimed that the problem will persist “for reasons that have nothing to do with money and everything to do with culture.” In a Wall Street Journal chat, he re-states his theory that the decline in “social capital” ^[3] is due to “great secularization” and falling overall rates of marriage. Thanks to these cultural changes, the U.S.A. might be in a situation akin to that of Rome, whose “initial downward step… was its loss of the republic when Caesar became the first emperor.” This nation’s “Caesar” is the European model of social democracy, which, Murray claims, relieves people of their freedom and of responsibility for their own lives. Instead of working hard to create anything, Europeans just “while away the time between birth and death as pleasantly as possible.” ^[4] The American alternative “is to say that your life can have transcendent meaning if it is spent doing important things—raising a family, supporting yourself, being a good friend and a good neighbor, learning what you can do well and then doing it as well as you possibly can.” We can overcome the European threat if we re-affirm these intellectual underpinnings of the American Project: people must believe that their work is meaningful, and that having children in wedlock is important. ^[5]

This exchange between the American Left, which responded to Coming Apart bog-standardly, and Murray, who has responded to the Left bog-standardly in turn, epitomizes the stalemate of contemporary political debate. Since World War II, public discussion in America has been pinned down in a war. This war doesn’t have “rockets and missiles, but it is a war nevertheless … a war of ideology, a war of ideas … a war about our way of life. And it has to be fought with the same intensity … and dedication as you would fight a shooting war” (Paul Weyrich). Of course it’s common, and correct, to bewail partisanship in politics, as if only momentary insanity keeps Democrats and Republicans from some bipartisan happily-ever-after. But the “war of ideas” is bipartisan, inasmuch as the field of battle was chosen bipartisanly. The battleground is “America,” at least insofar as our politicians seem sincerely to believe that “America is an idea.” ^[6]

In 1955, President Eisenhower claimed that the Cold War was about “the true nature of man. Either man is … ‘a little lower than the angels’… or man is a soulless animated machine.” Either man is American, or he is Soviet. This rhetoric has dominated the last fifty years; the great victory of conservative politicians and pundits has been their ability to identify the idea of America with themselves. Anything opposed to Americanness is ipso facto of the enemy: as Murray has it, freedom, self-reliance and Christian families are ours; reliance on the state, oppression and nihilism are theirs. Krugman is right to say that Murray focuses on morality or “culture.” But if you accept Murray’s assumptions, that’s inevitable. For Murray, theories that explain human behavior or suffering by reference to money imply that man is Soviet—that is, that human beings are nothing other than their income level. And if you accept Krugman’s assumptions (that human suffering and behavior are best explained by reference to material conditions, that man is, to some degree, Soviet), Murray must look like an armorer for the gilded age factory owners who put machine guns in their buildings pour encourager les ouvriers. The assumptions of each render the other not only incorrect or misguided, but an actively evil enemy.

When a private disobeys an order during a time of war, she can expect, at best, jail time. If she deserts, she can expect much worse. America’s war of ideas enforces this level of discipline on politicians, wonks and scholars. Popular books of policy, science or history might as well come with a battalion insignia: eagles armed for biographies of the founders, two beehives for a social history of oppressed peoples; lions guardant for moral decline, snake courant for economic injustice; argent a chevron sable between three oaks for climate change denial, the same chevron between three smoke stacks for climate change opportunities. Hayek or Keynes? Laissez Faire or Planning? Freedom or equality? Liberty or happiness? Meanwhile, intellectually promising projects rarely make it out of the University library, let alone into the opinion pages. So the world economy turns itself upside down, wages stagnate and real wars (with rockets and bullets) commence.

Murray’s book is full of fascinating and disturbing statistics. Any sane reader will come away thinking that the white working class’s problems are real, dangerous and damaging, and that the only solution to them will require new kinds of work for, expectations toward, and attitudes from, white American men. And in his recent op-ed in the New York Times, Murray himself makes four sensible, concrete, proposals: i) eliminate unpaid internships, which only the rich can reasonably take up; ii) drop the SAT for college admissions and replace it with subject-specific tests; iii) make it illegal to discriminate in favor of Bachelor’s degree holders in employment; iv) replace ethnic affirmative action with socioeconomic affirmative action. If we actually did these things, it would be easier for poor men and women to get their foot in the door for wealthy careers; it might be easier for people to get into college (although subject-specific tests are no less distorted than the SAT); and our society might actually suggest that it cares for the welfare of the poor, regardless of their genetic make-up. These measures should appeal across political lines, whether Republican/ Democrat or “Conservative”/”Liberal.” There’s little to be said against any of them. They should stand every chance.

And yet, Murray concludes they’re all more or less useless, since “the changes that matter have to happen in the hearts of Americans.” In other words, it’s not about money, it’s about morals.

The college is, Delbanco argues, distinctively American. The notion that the late teens are a particularly formative age goes back to the Greeks, but this educational idea was given a particular institutional structure in England and then developed—and, crucially, democratized—in America.

And if early American colleges are often portrayed (as the historian Richard Hofstadter memorably put it) as “precarious little institutions, denomination-ridden, poverty-stricken, keeping dubious educational standards,” Delbanco, unlike most historians of higher education, describes their virtues at least as enthusiastically as their detractors deride them.

What principles animated these little schools, and what purpose did they serve?

The American college dates back to Harvard, which persisted alone for more than fifty years in the British colonies before it was joined by William & Mary and Yale at the end of the seventeenth century. Religion dominated the curriculum (Harvard was founded as a school for the ministry), but not to the complete exclusion of subjects like logic, ethics, geometry, history and natural philosophy. The point was for students to learn to see that what Jonathan Edwards called “the university of things” represented a single truth, as it was the product of a single God. A senior-year course on moral philosophy, usually taught by the college president, served as the culmination of the four years. There is, this curriculum implied, a sort of order to the world, and therefore also a series of studies that can help us make sense of it.

Harvard’s roots can be traced to a single Cambridge college, Emmanuel College, which was a Puritan stronghold in the seventeenth century and supplied more than one-fifth of the college graduates who came to New England in the 1630s. (Hence Cambridge, Massachusetts, whose name was changed from New Towne in 1638.) The Cambridge colleges, like those at Oxford, resembled cloisters; a gate kept the world out, and a great hall fostered exchange within. Teaching and preaching were, for Puritans, closely related activities, linked through their association with a “mysterious force” which the Puritans called grace. The operation of God’s grace leads some Church members to feel themselves drawn suddenly closer to God, just as a similarly intangible force can cause a student to stare rapt at the teacher, his education at least for the moment taking the form of a deep inner change.

These central features of the old religious college—curriculum, community, grace—satisfied the student’s yearning to understand the world and to find his place in it. Perhaps most importantly, college gave students a sense of purpose, and a sense of responsibility to the broader community, which they would re-enter upon graduation. Delbanco insists that, as far as student expectations are concerned, not much has changed in the past few hundred years, diversity and technology notwithstanding: “Now, as then, most students have no clear conception of why or to what end they are in college. Some students have always been aimless, bored, or confused; others self-possessed, with their eyes on the prize. Most are in between, looking for something to care about.” What has changed is the college itself, and its sense of responsibility to its students.

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Two parallel and mutually reinforcing developments transformed American higher education in the last third of the nineteenth century. The first was the rise of electives, associated most strongly with Harvard and its long-serving president, Charles W. Eliot, who took office in 1869 and stayed for forty years. The second was specialization, represented by newly founded universities with graduate schools, like Johns Hopkins, which opened in 1876. The changes started at Harvard and Hopkins, and quickly spread to the rest of the higher education system.

Both developments were the result of a new emphasis on scientific research, imported from Germany by the thousands of American students who traveled to Berlin, Göttingen, and other German universities in the nineteenth century. The new research-oriented professors concentrated on narrower subjects than their old generalist colleagues while at the same time increasing, through their research, the number of subjects that could be taught. By the 1890s, nearly all college faculties had been divided into subject-based departments (like English or History); most top colleges had added research-oriented graduate programs; and some schools required no more than freshman English and perhaps a foreign language before students were free to accumulate credits as they saw fit. The research university has been so successful in America and around the world that we now see it as the norm.

But electives and specialization undermined two key aspects of the old college. The first, and most obvious, was the prescribed curriculum and its implication of an ordered world. The basic principle behind the elective system, as Eliot put it in 1885, is that “a well-instructed youth of eighteen can select for himself … a better course of study than any college faculty.” Yet even a glancing acquaintance with the current campus situation suggests that most college students just pick courses that sound interesting, or satisfy requirements most easily; looking back, they often think it might have been useful, at that age, to have someone older tell them what to study and what to read. Colleges today have given up this responsibility to their students: as Delbanco says, “most are unwilling even to tell them what’s worth thinking about.”

The second aspect of the old college that was undermined by specialization was the sense of community and common purpose that had animated the older colleges. With faculty split into separate departments, each pursuing its own ends, professors now tend to identify more with their fellow historians or biologists across the country than with the economists across the quad. And without any common courses to bring students together, learning becomes an independent, individualized activity that takes place only in the classroom. “As a significant reality in the contemporary landscape of higher education,” Delbanco writes, “the university as community barely exists.”

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Electives and specialization worked against the old fixed curriculum and the college community, but they were enabled by an even greater change in American higher education: its expansion and democratization. More students in the late nineteenth century meant there could be more professors teaching a wider variety of courses—and those courses would have tuition-paying bodies in the seats. The democratization process actually began before the Civil War, with the proliferation of hundreds of small sectarian colleges, then continued in the late nineteenth century with the founding of new universities and the start of some women’s and black colleges. But the main explosion came in the decades after World War II. Fewer than a quarter-million Americans, or two percent of the college-aged population, attended college at the start of the twentieth century; a number that rose to more than two million by the end of World War II, nearly ten million (roughly one-third of the college-aged population) in 1975, and about eighteen million today. By the late 1940s, as a character in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons says, you could “stand on a streetcorner and spit, and you’re liable to hit a college man.”

The democratization of college in America is, for Delbanco, central to what makes the college distinctively American: everyone should have a shot. That’s why he’s so diligent, after giving the progressive story of expanding opportunity, to show the various ways we’ve stalled or slid backward in the past twenty or thirty years. State investment in public universities has declined so much that some schools, like the University of Virginia, which now gets only 8 percent of its funding from the state, have become basically private. Growth in need-based aid is being outpaced by growth in merit scholarships, which tend to go to students who don’t much need the help. The result is that colleges “have lately been reinforcing more than ameliorating the disparity of wealth and opportunity in American society,” making them more like schools for aristocracy than schools for democracy.

But the deeper problem, according to Delbanco, is that, even if it were fully implemented, the democratization of higher education, with its attendant emphasis on merit, would actually work against the idea of grace. In theory, at least, we now operate in a meritocratic system in which test scores and grades are what get you into college, not skin color or religion or wealth. But this system corrodes the sense of community and civic duty which is necessary to hold a diverse democracy together. What Delbanco is too gentle to say in his own words is that college graduates today think they’re better people than those who don’t go to college, and as a result feel little sense of responsibility to their community or country. As an older sociologist once berated Delbanco (who went to Harvard in the early 1970s) over breakfast, “You and your whole generation are the smuggest, most self-satisfied in the history of the republic. You figured you had earned what you got, whereas when Jack Kennedy went to Harvard, he knew he was there because of his daddy’s money—and when he got out, he felt he ought to give something back!” “Our oldest colleges,” Delbanco laments, “have abandoned the cardinal principle out of which they arose: the principle that no human being deserves anything based on his or her merit.”

To Delbanco’s credit, he eschews a straight celebration of the old college and demonization of the new, admitting that the research university and the democratization of college have been real gains. It is possible in any age to find students and professors who don’t care, just as it’s always possible to find students and professors who are utterly devoted to what they’re doing. Yet Delbanco is willing to assert that there’s a near-palpable “sense of drift” in college life today—which he attributes to the decline of the fixed curriculum (which told students what was worth knowing), the college community (which taught responsibility), and the Puritan concept of grace (which reinforced a sense of civic duty).

Of course, the college idea has not been left entirely behind. In the early decades of the twentieth century, several growing universities, led by the likes of Harvard and Columbia, enacted a series of reforms to preserve something resembling the old college: Yale started its colleges to recreate the small community of the old college; places like Chicago and (most radically) St. John’s designed a core curriculum that all students had to take. Some schools retreated from the elective system, creating small honors programs to foster community and general education requirements that said what all students, at a minimum, ought to know. Delbanco, who teaches at Columbia, thinks that these changes were for the good and that they continue to provide something like a true college experience for those who pass through them. But he doesn’t seem to have much faith that they’ll succeed in bringing back the most important aspects of the older ideal.

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When I was in college (within the last decade), I had the great good fortune to find a true college, in the sense that Delbanco means, tucked away within the larger institutional structure of my school. Two or three dozen of us met twice a week, under the guidance of someone who was technically just an untenured, adjunct professor, to talk about political philosophy. Anyone could come to this series of courses; often some of us had to sit on the floor because there weren’t enough desks. Class never had any agenda other than free discussion—the professor started each period by saying, “Open floor”—but the questions we asked generally circled around one central concern: What is justice?

We weren’t asking about justice in the narrow sense of what should be legal, but rather in the broader yet also more intimate sense of what obligations we, as humans, owed to ourselves, our families, our friends and our communities, and how we might deal with the inevitable conflicts that would arise between those obligations. Whether or not we knew it at the time, we were trying to figure out how a person should live. In a quaint touch that added egalitarianism and earnestness to the endeavor, we addressed each other as Mr. Lundin or Ms. Watkins: in class we were all the same, no matter what friendships or other activities we had going on outside.

“A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard,” Ishmael says in Moby Dick. He’s telling us about the nature of whaling—it provides an education; it turns boys into men—but also about the nature of college. It’s a community of fairly young people engaged in a nearly religious search for something higher, be it a white whale or wisdom. (An older, slightly crazy person is usually leading the way.) My own experience makes me tend to believe Delbanco when he suggests, as a primary solution to the problems facing the American college, that “faculty must care.” No deep, systemic change is necessarily needed for it to happen. After all, I found this frankly life-changing series of courses not at a small northeastern liberal arts college or even an elite private university, but at a big state school in the South, the kind with tens of thousands of students and an athletics program that threatens to swallow the rest of the university whole.

Yet there are at least a couple of icebergs standing in the way. Even—and especially—when faculty care, when they try to teach courses that might force students to think deeply about their own lives, they are not always supported by their administrations. The series of courses that was so important to me and to my classmates has been taught for more than twenty years now, but it has been endangered for at least the last ten. Why should administrators with limited budgets (extremely limited, in the case of a state university fighting for every dime it can get from the legislature) devote funds year after year to relatively small discussion courses, when they could spend the money instead on study abroad programs or new science buildings? There are, after all, lots of students at college these days, and they’re interested in lots of different things.

The logic is sound, which only re-raises the problem that the democratization of college, which many intellectuals claim to support, may be playing its part in the destruction of what we most value about it in the first place. A big college population makes a fixed curriculum and a coherent college community not only impossible but possibly also immoral to maintain. Who are the liberal arts majors to tell the rest of the student body what and how they should learn? How would we like the opposite, which is in fact the more likely and “democratic” scenario?  (The popularity of majors like business and engineering only sharpens this issue: Georgia Tech, in my hometown, might more properly be called the North Avenue Trade School; Stanford, where I go to graduate school, is essentially a high-class vocational school that subsidizes a small liberal arts program.)

Stripped to the basics, a college is a group of people trying to find an elusive thing: what the good life might be. That sort of college might only exist today in a single course, or in a series of courses, or in a few select institutions. But maybe that’s okay. Although Delbanco mounts a strong case for extending this kind of education to as many students as possible, the truth is that it never has been, and probably never will be, for everyone.

Chicago Heights, a new film adaptation of Winesburg set in present-day Chicago Heights, a predominantly African-American suburb south of Chicago, repeatedly reimagines the plight of Winesburgians, dropping Anderson’s characters into a world—the depressed postindustrial suburb—nonexistent in the author’s time but inescapable in ours. In 2010 the Brookings Institution reported that, in the preceding decade, “suburbs were home to the largest and fastest growing poor population in the country. … As a result, by 2008 large suburbs were home to 1.5 million more poor than their primary cities and housed almost one-third of the nation’s poor overall.” It also confirmed that for the first time in America’s history, the majority of all racial and ethnic groups in large metro areas now live in the suburbs. Chicago Heights exemplifies these demographic trends. In 2009, an estimated 24 percent of its residents lived below the poverty line, while the suburb’s black and Latino communities made up about 44 and 30 percent of the population, respectively.

Yet Chicago Heights, and the many American enclaves like it, have done little to displace the persistent stereotype of the rich white suburb. They have yet to make their mark on our movies, our TV, our literature—the vehicles we use to tell the story of ourselves. As one of the first artistic attempts to depict a growing cross-section of American society, the film is a welcome entry in the catalogue of portrayals of American life.

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In a cycle of 22 tales that cohere more than a short story collection but less than a novel, Winesburg, Ohio recounts Winesburgians’ various attempts to find real life and the inevitable passion, sadness and confusion that result. Throughout the book, different characters yield to inexplicable yet somehow recognizable impulses. Walking through the Winesburg streets one night “in a fervor of emotion,” George Willard, the eighteen-year-old reporter who appears in almost every story, lifts up his hands, “thrusting them into the darkness above his head and muttering words … without meaning.” At the end of “Adventure,” Alice’s story, she runs naked through a rainstorm.

Like Winesburg, Chicago Heights opens with an old writer recounting memories that will unfold in a series of intertwined stories. At the end of the opening vignette of the book, the old man is left alone in his room, and we assume that the stories that follow come from his mind. In the film, however, we never leave the old man for long. He occasionally reappears onscreen and his opening reflections are taken up by various characters, as if to remind us that these very different vignettes bespeak a common set of struggles. It is the town preacher Curtis Hartman who most eloquently delivers the old man’s defining idea, the notion that sets the short-story cycle in motion: “When a man takes a truth and calls it his truth, and tries to live his life by it, he becomes a grotesque and the truth he embraces becomes a falsehood.”

As if attempting to heed Hartman’s advice, director Daniel Nearing steeps his film in contradiction, never fully embracing any single reality. The film’s cinematography, mostly black and white, occasionally switches to color as characters look nostalgically at their past—the bright clothing of Elizabeth Walker’s youthful adventures changing into the simple black dress she wears today. The characters also veer between early-twentieth-century diction, often drawn straight from Winesburg, and contemporary colloquialisms. Elizabeth protests to her would-be lover Dr. Reefy that she’s “not a ho.” Another character refers to God (or is it the old writer?) as “the one who made this shit.” Instead of jotting notes with an ever-ready pen like his Winesburg counterpart George Willard, Elizabeth’s son Nathan writes short stories on an Apple laptop.

These anachronisms, and the split personality they give the film, create an uncertainty that evokes the feel of Chicago Heights. This kind of town has yet to be defined by the kind of visual vocabulary that makes us think of cities when we see skyscrapers, farmhouses when we see cornfields, and suburbs when we see lush green yards. Indeed, driving through Chicago Heights—which looks by turns like a run-down urban ghetto, a strip-malled commuter suburb and a corn-fed small town—engenders a vague feeling of confusion. What exactly is this place? By harnessing the contradiction between the film’s contemporary setting and its decades-older source, Nearing manages to replicate this confusion. The town depicted in Chicago Heights might not always look like its namesake—in a nod to Winesburg, Nearing depicts the suburb as more rural and racially homogenous than it is—but the film perfectly captures the feeling of a place pulled in several directions at once.

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Much of the movie is pervaded with a sense of despair and alienation. Chicago Heights resident Wash Williams, whose name is taken straight from Anderson’s book, laments a failed attempt at domestic bliss with his by-then estranged wife: “We got a house and we were going to pay it off after several years.” But whereas in Winesburg the line foreshadows heartbreak, in Chicago Heights such purely romantic troubles remain in the background, reminding us that in today’s America, the saddest love stories are intertwined with subprime mortgages, dreams of building a stable home complicated by variable interest rates.

Wash’s foreclosure evokes anxiety that the world is unfriendly to personal hopes and dreams, a feeling amplified by the film’s cinematography. Characters’ faces are seen from odd angles as if one is peeking into their lives from under a bed or behind a door, creating a sense of alienation no matter how close we get. A vague and oppressive sense of distance from the rest of humanity is one of the thematic threads connecting Winesburg and Chicago Heights, both of which teem with people whose desires and feelings come and go without ever crystallizing into something they can satisfactorily express. After Winesburg loner Elmer Crowley somehow fails to communicate to George Willard his hope that they will become friends, he gives George all the money in his pockets and then, “like one struggling for release from hands that held him,” beats George up, boards a train, and leaves town.

Chicago Heights’ residents also deal with their inchoate feelings of dissatisfactions by trying to move on. Reflecting the demographic reversal that has made the inner city, rather than the suburbs, the playground of the relatively privileged few, the characters in Chicago Heights set their sights on downtown Chicago. In both the book and the film, characters seek to move because they think they will be happier, because they want to make a name for themselves, because they are heartbroken and need a change of scenery, because they have run out of money, because they feel the pull of home. Of course, they arrive in the new place with their same selves, their same struggles. As Elizabeth reminds Nathan, “you don’t have to leave Chicago Heights; you have to make Chicago Heights leave you.”

And yet, from the city to the suburbs and back, people keep moving. (It’s no accident that Chicago Heights residents “live under a constant stream of jets from Midway Airport.”) And our migratory patterns will continue changing, given economic necessity, desire—even climate. We will continue to go elsewhere, to other towns or other continents, impelled by forces that, like the characters of both the movie and the book, we may not fully understand. In Winesburg, George Willard goes one night to a field where the town fair had been held and “ghosts, not of the dead, but of living people” surround him:

Here, during the day just past, have come the people pouring in from the town and the country around. … Young girls have laughed and men with beards have talked of the affairs of their lives. The place has been filled to overflowing with life. It has itched and squirmed with life and now it is night and the life has all gone away. … One shudders at the thought of the meaninglessness of life while at the same instant, and if the people of the town are his people, one loves life so intensely that tears come into the eyes.

I was born in Chicago Heights and grew up in neighboring suburbs, but I don’t think that’s a prerequisite—south Chicago suburbanites don’t have to be “your people”—for a similar feeling to arise after you watch the film. Many of us worry that our communities are too transient: even when we stay still, old neighbors are moving out, new ones moving in. Yet like George Willard, we may find ourselves at home even amid our restlessness.

This month, an exhibition of Hirst’s spot paintings opened at every outpost of the Gagosian Gallery empire the world over. It’s a terrific marketing trick, as is almost everything Hirst does. Anyone who visits all eleven galleries (spread among eight cities) will get a free print—and, in spite of myself, I’ve been wondering if I could swing a trip to Athens and Hong Kong next month. As an art exhibit, though, “The Complete Spot Paintings” offers a strange mix of commercial megalomania and aesthetic tedium.

Along with animal vitrines, butterfly paintings, spin paintings, and medicine cabinets, the spot paintings make up one of Hirst’s main product lines. They’re just what they sound like: spots of different colors and sizes arranged in neat grids or concentric circles on white canvases of varying dimensions. The paintings are nicely executed, come with a fine art historical pedigree, and are about as interesting as sod. Even so, the mood in the Gagosian is giddy; bright, easy and interchangeable, the spots give off a pleasant hum, like a tipsy crowd. They’re sort of like late Lichtenstein turned into wallpaper, or an especially ambitious line of bed sheets from IKEA. Beyond the fact that they’re worth millions of dollars, the only Hirstian touch is that most of them are named for the active ingredients in Class A drugs.

Even though he’s been doing these for years, it’s weird to see Hirst come out so flat. Although he has wrung more money and social prestige out of outré tchotchkes than anyone since Cellini, Hirst began his career with some real innovations. He made a name for himself by grafting a layer of Baroque ornament and goth iconography onto the sober bedrock of conceptual art. His first major work, A Thousand Years (1990), consisted of a large vitrine in which thousands of maggots fed on the flesh of a cow’s head, turned into flies, mated, then died in the fires of a bug zapper. All of Hirst’s major themes are already present in this closed loop of flesh and death, disgust and rebirth. The rest of his career has consisted of giving these totems of death a luxury finish before selling them at an immense mark-up.

Hirst’s main influence on this trajectory has always been Jeff Koons. Koons’s early works, like the bronze vacuum cleaners and suspended basketballs (the clear progenitor of Hirst’s vitrines), invested the problem of the commodity fetish with a patina of mystery. They made the ordinary seem uncanny. Koons has since parlayed this feat into a career of making pricey Valentine’s Day treats—balloon animals, puppies, and paper hearts—for Ukrainian oligarchs. Between them, Koons and Hirst have split the highest tranche of the art market into competing domains of love and death.

This still leaves the question of why Koons and Hirst enjoy such enduring public vogue. Back in 1957, Richard Hamilton made a list of the key attributes of Pop Art. It should be popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, young, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous and big business. Hirst and his peers held on to the part about big business, while getting rid of the transient, low-cost and expendable. At its outset, Pop Art took inspiration from the democratic profligacy of postwar life, drawing on the graphic universe of advertising and product design. A generation later, Hirst and co. take their cues from the populist elitism of celebrity culture. They give collectors what they want: efficient merchandising, strong branding and industrial scale—qualities that no doubt remind them of their own entrepreneurial gifts. Beyond that, they give them speed. Koons and Hirst create objects which read as icons. Easily digestible and instantly legible, they are visual snacks. Liberated from the burdens of difficulty and the problems of embodiment, their work leaves its buyers free to indulge their taste for morbid titillation and sentimental self-congratulation without fear of censure or condescension.

Like the winking Tritons and wanking Venuses of Renaissance ornament, Hirst’s embalmed animals and diamond-studded skulls are windows on the fantasy life of power. Imagine the Emir of Qatar ogling the golden calf he allegedly owns in secret, or Miuccia Prada in her palazzo of pickled sheep. Imagine Charles Saatchi sitting like Charles Foster Kane in a Xanadu of butterfly wings and artfully taxidermied doves. The price of these pieces is integral to their public consequence; because of this, they are able to enter the culture like a radioactive dye. Hirst’s greatest moment may have come in 2008, when he staged a $200 million auction of his own work at Sotheby’s on the very day Lehman Brothers collapsed. The coincidence of the sale and the crash turned the start of global financial crisis into a lavishly decorated work of indoor street theater.

Hirst makes work that is tacky and glib; that doesn’t mean it’s empty. It can be dumb, but dumb isn’t always bad; it often indicates a willingness to say the obvious. In an arena as opaque and full of feebly disingenuous protest as the art world, dumb can be a virtue. Works like The Golden Calf, an embalmed calf outfitted with gilded horns and hooves and sporting a solid gold sun-disk, and For the Love of God, a platinum-dipped skull paved with £20 million in diamonds, bring a clarifying bluntness to the disjunction between price and value.

In its material expenditure and visual profligacy, Hirst’s work is a return to the Baroque. Looking at a survey of Hirst’s work is like strolling through collections of the Schloss Ambras, the castle in Innsbruck where the Habsburgs stored all their weird treasures: coral crucifixes and golden salt cellars, paintings of freaks, cripples and madmen, sculptures of skeletons wearing their rotting skin. This kind of collection was called a wunderkammer, or wonder-room. Two kinds of objects predominated: the memento mori or reminder of mortality, and the lusus naturae or joke of nature. The purpose of these collections was ostensibly pedagogical, but what they really did was exalt their owners’ fearlessness and mastery. This is the tradition Hirst’s practice comes out of, as distant from the strictures of high modernism as it is from the pieties of postmodernism. Perhaps by honoring power and reveling in cruelty it comes closer than either to the mood of our times.

Hirst has always benefited from the presumption that everything he did was ironic, but his work is really rooted in a kind of guileless belief disguised as cynicism. He was a rocker, not a mod. The Spot show is disappointing not because it is disingenuous, but because it’s tame. A few years ago, in a conversation with Hans Ulrich Olbrist, Hirst said he wanted to create a work of art that would kill you (think plutonium sculpture) or at the very least would punch you in the face. Now it looks like he’d settle for a kiss on the cheek.

As in the best tradition of Renaissance sub-contracting, Kapoor has found a way to please his audience while exalting the interests of his patrons, and the efficacy of his visual rhetoric stems from the elegance of his solution. As an object, Cloud Gate is undeniably seductive, at once monumental and inviting. It is also willfully opaque. From a distance it looks like a droplet of mercury, blown up to immense size. Up close, it becomes clear that the droplet is arched, creating a passageway on an east-west axis, joining the city to Millennium Park and the lake further on. The space above this passageway has been hollowed out, creating a central cavity, which Kapoor describes as an omphalos or navel. From outside, Cloud Gate retains some Pop resonances—balloon, blood cell, mushroom, donut, UFO—while never succumbing to any one of them. Within the central cavity, though, it becomes a total environment, enveloping visitors in a silvery canopy, and at the same time breaching the boundary between sculpture and architecture.

Curved at every point on its surface, Cloud Gate has the appearance of an impossible object, too smooth to be man-made and too eccentric to come from nature. It barely touches the ground, creating an illusion of uncanny lightness. The mismatch between its exterior and interior—the curving outer surface seemingly sustained by surface tension; the inside, apparently collapsing into a void—also creates a paradoxical effect, pitting internal cohesion against a vacuum. But Cloud Gate’s most spectacular effect has more to do with its skin than its form. Before it was unveiled, all of Cloud Gate’s rivets and sutures were painstakingly sanded away according to Kapoor’s instructions to “remove all traces of the hand.” As a result, the entire surface, polished to a silvery sheen, functions as one unbroken fun-house mirror, reflecting both passersby and the Chicago skyline in similar degrees of distortion while bringing them into a shared visual plane. It’s a surprisingly intimate illusion, causing sky, city and citizenry to meet in the same impossible space.

In the right weather conditions the sculpture seems to vanish in the camouflage of its reflected surroundings. At moments like this, Cloud Gate becomes most fully itself: a dematerialized, disembodied object without mass or substance. It is part Pop symbol and part ineffable, desirable thing, the very image of what Zygmunt Bauman calls “liquid modernity.”

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Cloud Gate’s mirrored surface works in two ways: it makes the sculpture seem weightless while transforming its skin into a screen. Although its shape has a genetic connection to Constantin Brancusi’s elegant form-making, this emphasis on skin over volume has more in common with trends in contemporary architecture and product design. In some ways, Cloud Gate seems like a compilation of the hallmark gestures of today’s most prominent architects, the leaders in what the critic Hal Foster has termed the “global style” in architecture. Its silver skin quotes Frank Gehry’s trademark titanium cladding, and its central void recalls his buildings’ neo-Baroque swirls. Its swooping silhouette also brings to mind Norman Foster’s penchant for big, basic shapes—the translucent domes, shimmering pyramids and shiny gherkins his firm has erected everywhere from Boston to Kazakhstan. Finally, its use of mirrors and concealed supports echoes Renzo Piano’s concern with light construction and Foster’s preoccupation with transparency. Such associations are all the more insistent given Cloud Gate’s position in Millennium Park between Gehry’s Pritzker Pavilion and Piano’s Modern Wing of the Art institute.

But however much it shares in the reigning idiom of neo-modern architecture, Cloud Gatealso draws on the language of industrial design. Not that the two are opposed—both disciplines rely on the same values of lightness, sleekness and transparency to imbue their works with the gleam of the now. No company has been able to make better use of this look than Apple. Apple’s flagship stores, with their translucent walls and staircases, promise a dream of boundless access and unmediated vision, while its products are designed to enclose a maximum of computing power in a minimum fold of material. ^[1] Their curved surfaces and invisible seams obscure the human work that went into their production (Kapoor’s “traces of the hand”), making them seem as if they emerged fully-formed out of a technological nursery. At their best, Apple products seem weightless; they become pure gateways, offering access without boundaries and memory without mass. For the moment they remain unsurpassed as material embodiments of the idea of the digital commodity. And isn’t Cloud Gate something similar, writ large? It translates the language of connectivity and distributed com- puting—present in its very name—into a visual rhetoric of techno-futurity and civic self-confidence, the perfect monument for the age of the iPod.

Cloud Gate is product as advertisement, and its message is the same as the one conveyed by the rest of Millennium Park, which in essence is this: we are not Detroit. Both proclaim that Chicago is not a dying Rust Belt city, but a nexus in the circulation of global capital. Naturally this involves a bit of obfuscation and bluster. Millennium Park enacts this effacement quite literally: it is built over the old Illinois Central Rail yard, which it conceals under acres of expensively engineered garden. Every available inch is given over to corporate sponsorship. You can take a stroll from the Boeing Gallery to the McCormick Tribune Ice Rink, past the AT&T Plaza, through the Chase Bank Promenade and on through the Exelon Pavilions to the McDonald’s Cycle Center and the British Petroleum Bridge. The buildings in the park create a strange impression. They range from the superb (Piano’s Museum extension) to the self-derivative (Gehry’s Pritzker Pavilion) to the hopeless (Gehry’s BP Bridge), but as an ensemble they seem out of proportion to each other and to the rest of the city, as if a collection of architectural bonsai has been arranged in the world’s largest sculpture garden.

Here a comparison with Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc might be in order. A curving wall made out of a single piece of raw steel, 12 feet high and 120 feet long, it was installed in the middle of New York’s Federal Plaza in 1981. Slightly tilted, the wall bisected the plaza, forcing workers in the surrounding office buildings to navigate around it. From the outset, Tilted Arc became a magnet for free-floating social anxiety. Its critics accused it of attracting graffiti and rats, and imagined that it might be used as a shelter for terrorists intent on attacking the New York County Clerk’s office. (Objections were also raised about its cost, though at $175,000, it seems quaint compared to the $24 million spent on Cloud Gate). After years of litigation, it was finally removed in 1989.

Even with the passage of time, the depth of this hostility remains puz- zling. After all, Tilted Arc was no more abstract or monumental than Cloud Gate. But the message or effect of Serra’s work is almost the antithesis of Kapoor’s. Kapoor’s work privileges virtual experience, while Serra’s insists on sensual immediacy. You photograph yourself in the reflection of the surface Kapoor creates; you plunge bodily into Serra’s tunnels. ^[2] Cloud Gate is about lightness and futurity; Tilted Arc was about gravity and weight, the way the steel wall met the ground and the way it served as its own support. One work seems to have touched down in Chicago out of the sky, while the other burrowed into a particular site. Cloud Gate, designed to obscure the process that went into its manufacture, looks impossibly new. Fashioned out of COR-TEN steel, Tilted Arc looked like it came straight out of the blast furnace and quickly developed a patina of orange rust. Whereas Cloud Gate’s skin conceals its structure (a hidden armature of giant rings supports the steel surface), Tilted Arc insists on structure as form. In short: Tilted Arc adopts the procedures of industry, while Cloud Gate speaks the language of the post-industrial economy.

Let me suggest, then, that this is the underlying reason for the opposition to Tilted Arc. Kapoor’s work, in its lightness and smoothness and breezy populism, figures the frictionless movement of money and ideas which is the promise of the digital economy. Serra’s work, with its hard tectonics and insistence on place, remains rooted in the world of things made by people in physical space. The real anxieties surrounding Tilted Arc had very little to do with vermin and urban blight, and everything to do with the unease engendered by what is perceived as an outmoded socio-economic order. Tilted Arc revealed what Cloud Gate and Millennium Park were built to efface, and that is why it had to be torn down. ^[3]

Kapoor doesn’t privilege the site or demystify structure. he doesn’t do any of the things post-minimalist sculpture was supposed to do in the days when it seemed to be playing an endgame with history. So what? Cloud Gate is a hit. People love it. It’s glamorous and strange and silly. It manages to stay aloof while entertaining a crowd. But what does this brilliant bauble mean in the center of a bankrupt city? And isn’t there something unseemly about being asked, so insistently, to enjoy?

One of the things Cloud Gate’s brilliant surface makes it easy to forget is that it isn’t just a mirror or a void or a gate. It’s also a triumphal arch, and like the rest of Millennium Park, the triumph it celebrates is the triumph of Daleyism—that particular blend of hereditary democracy, crony capitalism and corporate welfare that is Chicago’s gift to the world. It’s the voice of a hollowed-out liberalism, reduced to a nub of empty rhetoric, that celebrates community even as it forces the privatization of public goods, embraces education while shutting down schools, and exalts the middle class as it undermines unions. To the world, Cloud Gate says that Chicago is a city of the future. Under its breath, it whispers who that future is really for.

And this, finally, is the truth Cloud Gate’s quicksilver skin was engineered to deny: that they took our city from us, perverted our ideals, and in return, asked us to wish on a magic bean.

Some combination of unstructured time, expectation of peak experience and uncertainty of purpose are endemic to a number of social types and roles. Obvious examples are monks, soldiers and prisoners. You could also include housewives, tourists and teenagers. Not to mention bohemians, graduate students and aristocratic types living in democratic regimes. Not coincidentally, persons occupying these and similar roles have often met with recurrent bouts of boredom.

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A natural response to persistent boredom is to try to make it go away. The next time you’re bored, stroll over to the psychology section of your library. Or google “boredom cure.” You’ll find a number of helpful suggestions. For example, you could go to a party, or find a hobby. You could exercise, or make some new friends. Getting a job tends to help. Studies show the best thing to do is to attain flow.

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Maybe you don’t want to get rid of your boredom so fast. Perhaps you feel it might contain something worth hanging onto: a longing to pursue something worth pursuing. And this ache for something that connects you to a bigger and deeper tradition of human encounter with the meaningfulness of our time might well be diminished if Adderall and a jog were its fullest answer. If you feel this way, you’re not alone. Many able and talented people have tried to pull off the trick of extracting some meaning out of boredom, of forcing boredom to generate its own kind of interest.

Michael Crowley, for instance, wrote an article for the New Republic on boredom, called “Prison Break.” Crowley talks about how in a society full of BlackBerries, IMs, Twitter feeds and 24-second news cycles, there is little time to let oneself be bored. Media moguls routinely declare war on boredom, announcing its final defeat at the hands of the new entertainment machine.

While acknowledging some downsides to boredom—like war and depression—Crowley goes on to accentuate the positives, such as how in releasing ourselves to boredom we do not seek to pass the time but experience time as time, in its pure passing. Such moments can provide a kind of “spiritual emancipation” that leads to “creative idleness.” At the very least, ruling out boredom as such means ruling out taking time with yourself and the question of who you are or might be. That sort of flight-from-self is a species of self-loathing.

Crowley typically writes about the great political issues of the day, those that should arouse the interest of all citizens. So it was somewhat surprising to find him venturing into a topic that could seem abstruse and, well, boring. I emailed to ask him how the New Republic’s readers had responded.

On June 4, 2006, at 10:51 p.m., Michael Crowley wrote:

I suppose I got interested in the topic because I’m someone who gets bored very easily and had recently been praising the way my BlackBerry (complete with web browser) had been helping me to avoid boredom. Then I started to wonder if this was a good thing. There was also a Time magazine article on the new generation of kids and how wired they are and I think it included a line about how they can’t tolerate boredom. The piece came to be when I mused about these thoughts to a couple of editors who got very excited and started offering up all sorts of literary and cultural references as well as personal anecdotes. I thought it might be a foolish idea but they convinced me otherwise. Feedback has been very good. I think my mother said she thought it was the best thing I’d ever written, which I found surprising, and another very erudite friend called it “perfect.” Mind you I’m not claiming it *was* perfect, only that I did get very favorable feedback. (I actually wasn’t thrilled with it when it shipped off to press, felt it had some leaden lines and space forced me to leave out some of my favorite bits.) I’m not sure what I hoped “to do” with the topic. I just wanted to explore it, to think about it, and I suppose to have some fun with it. One of my regrets was not being able to include more of the funny quotes/observations about boredom in history and literature—there are quite a lot as you know.

I will add that in writing the piece I read a bit of existential philosophy that touched on the subject. And doing so made boredom seem a lot less amusing to me and on some level, really, deeply depressing. The notion, proposed by some (Pascal, maybe? I can’t recall) that life is a series of distractions to avoid confronting our existential state was a real downer (even if I don’t necessarily agree). I hadn’t expected that little philosophical journey at all. But I suppose I’m the wiser for it.

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It turns out that boredom is not necessarily boring. Articles and speeches about its significance earn large audiences. Yet we do not seem to know what to make of it. We are haunted by boredom yet praise it as a gateway into untapped possibilities. We blame ourselves for giving into it yet we feel something would be missing without it.

The idea that boredom can be a weird but wondrous wellspring of meaning is not necessarily a new one. But it is worth returning to, even if thousands of New Republicreaders have been impressed by that thought too. Probably just long enough to tweet it.

In 1998, New Vision Psychic Newsletter explored “the importance of boredom and unpatterned perception,” developing the idea that “to be bored is to be on the verge of being startled awake.” Boredom leaves you alone with yourself, without the safety of a book or TV show to distract you. It hurts, but it is the pain that comes with learning how to feel. It may not be something you like, but part of you still “glories in it. In boredom, worlds open to us.” For those interested in personal exploration of the mystical qualities of boredom, the authors recommend an exercise:

Sit on the ground outside and be bored.

You may have to wait a while for true boredom to settle in. You have to sit long enough for your mind to recognize that running through its lists and endless chatter won’t cause you to automatically reengage in typical activities. Just sit there. Don’t catalog all the things you see, or run through the list of tasks you want to accomplish that day. Just sit and watch, without interpreting. …

As you are sitting there you are probably starting to feel foolish. Children may waste their time doing not much of anything, but adults have things to do. More social patterning. Ignore it. You are not trying to squash that response—being able to recognize social norms and act within them is important. Instead, you are temporarily ignoring the reflex to follow habit. When it suits your purposes, you will again resume those patterns. … What do you think might happen to you, sitting here on the ground doing nothing? The answer: I don’t know. And that’s the frightening part. Once you are truly bored, you are stepping into the unknown. You don’t know what thoughts will occur to you, what your eye may notice, or how you will feel. You are stepping beyond the comfort of habitual patterns of perception. … Breathe deeply, from the diaphragm, and relax. Gently resist the reflex to jump up and get busy with something, or even to continue sitting there but busying your mind with unnecessary thoughts. Just sit, relax, and watch. No rush, no hurry.

Congratulations! You can now begin to be truly bored. You mind is no longer treading familiar paths tramped smooth through endless mental pacing. Your eye no longer knows what to settle upon. You are now in unexplored (or, at least, underexplored) territory. What does your eye begin to notice? You will begin to see a richness of detail surrounding you, a diversity of light and form that you probably haven’t noticed in years. Look at the grasses beneath you. What color are they? Don’t say “green” out of reflex. Look. They aren’t just green. They are every shade from brown to gold to green to darker shades approaching blue. …

You aren’t forming a mental catalog of all these things. You are just noticing, learning to observe without filtering those observations first. … Continue this process with touch, smell, even taste.

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Is it wrong to be bored? On discussion forums for Christian youth, the general consensus seems to be that boredom is a sin. God wants us to take joy in His creation, fulsomely and constantly; to be bored is to close oneself off from the opportunities God grants us. It is to deny Him the glory that comes from our cultivating the creative powers He planted in us. Bored people attack God’s work, even if sometimes this emptiness is a preparation and condition for being filled. These judgments are typically backed up by numerous citations of scriptural passages (e.g. Hebrews 13:5, Ephesians 6:18, Thessalonians 5:18 and Mark 12:30).

Treatises by early Church fathers discuss the sin of acedia, which literally means “lack of care.” It was one of the original eight cardinal sins, before they were downsized to seven and acedia was merged with tristitia (sadness) into sloth. Solitary monks wandering the desert were the most likely to fall into acedia, usually between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., which they called “the demon of noontide.” Monks thought that acedia was particularly bad because ceding to it made other sins more likely, like gluttony. Bored monks thought a lot about lunch. They were also likely to succumb to the worst sin of all, pride. Being bored, they could not understand how others could take pleasure in the activities of everyday life. This left them feeling misunderstood, aloof and superior to everybody else.

You might think that a historical chasm separates the temptations of desert monks from those of young people surfing the internet. If so, you are probably not religious, and you probably have a hard time understanding how boredom could be a cardinal offense against God. For people who think being bored is sinful, the gulf between modern and ancient boredom is nil when measured against eternity. A case in point is Richard Winter’s book, Still Bored in a Culture of Entertainment. Winter advises that if you read the writings of desert monks like John Cassian, you will find that even though they lived outside of modern overloaded sensory environments, they still dealt with boredom. Just like them, many of us experience a noonday slump that may be indicative of a deeper suffering. We, like them, often feel the urge to flee boredom into worldly distractions, which, in turn, make us even more spiritually desiccated. For latter-day victims of the demon of noontide, sin is sin. The culture of entertainment may be the driest spiritual desert Satan has devised as of yet. God’s reward remains the same, eternally.

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But you needn’t be religious to render harsh judgments against bored people. If “sin” has too much divine baggage, perhaps “moral failure” better captures the kind of badness boredom represents. In this case, your boredom is not an offense to God. It is a confession of your inability to lead a life animated by your inner resources.

Sometimes this way of thinking about boredom is associated with the rise of a disciplined, rationalized, bourgeois work ethic in modernity. Immanuel Kant, for example, talked about boredom as a threat to the autonomous performance of duty. Samuel Johnson complained about how it reduced his personal productivity. Anti-bourgeois writers, like Paul Lafargue (who was Karl Marx’s son-in-law, incidentally), took the opposite approach, celebrating the “right to be lazy.” Be that as it may, appealing to the historical novelty of moralized boredom will likely not help very much when your mother tells you that bored people are boring. Ask John Berryman:

Dream Song 14

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) “Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.” I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as Achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

As a sin or as a sign of moral failure, boredom is not a very attractive pose. There are, however, certain forms of life within which boredom counts as a virtue. For what if you believe (rightly) that the world is in fact objectively boring? Wake up, eat, work, shit, sleep. Repeat. Reproduce. Die. A monotonous cycle of mechanical repetition, endlessly repeated, devoid of significance or purpose. If that is how the world is, then boredom would be precisely the correct attitude to adopt towards it. N’est-ce pas?

People who spent their time in the Factory in the 1960s or in mid-seventeenth-century Parisian salons seem to have thought so. They prided themselves on being bored with the ordinary world. Regular people are regular, and the appropriate response to such people is boredom.

If you think boredom is a virtue, then you probably believe that the right way to treat a boring world is to be bored with it. That may be the only way to prove that you yourself are not boring. Schopenhauer is the metaphysician of virtuous boredom: “Boredom is a direct proof that existence is itself valueless. For boredom is nothing other than the sensation of the emptiness of existence.” Baudelaire drew a portrait of a social type devoted to living out this attitude of aloof superiority: “The dandy is the man who shocks others but is never shocked.” Indeed, there is a kind of moral competition that follows from the aspiration to ethical superiority in boredom. One strives to be more bored than everybody else in the room. At the same time, one takes care to never be boring to others. La Rochefoucauld was an expert commentator: “We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those whom we bore.” Iggy Pop was an expert performer: his song, “I’m Bored,” captures his ability to be bored while simultaneously being scandalous—an integral part of his coolness.

I’m bored.
I’m the chairman of the bored,
I’m a lengthy monologue,
I’m livin’ like a dog.
I’m bored.
I bore myself to sleep at night.
I bore myself in broad daylight coz.
I’m bored. I’m bored. I’m bored.

You can watch Pop performing this song on YouTube, as he writhes about displaying both his shirtless chest and his inconsolable boredom. If you are attracted to this conception of boredom, then you will likely feel some degree of pressure to be bored by this video.

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Boredom as an aristocratic pose of aloof superiority draws its recruits from the dispossessed, the exiled, or, most often, from those who wish to make themselves into exiles. Boredom becomes a mark of distinction, failing to be bored a sign of baseness, Baudelaire’s “anywhere out of the world” the motto.

This is boredom as a negative and reactive virtue. Is there a positive ideal it could enable and a constructive mode of existence it could animate? Yes. The ideal is modernity and the mode of existence that of the modern artist.

This at least was the position Baudelaire took and it resonates today in places like Chicago’s Café Ennui. “Modernity” for Baudelaire was not primarily a designation for a historical period. It was an aesthetic aspiration. An artwork is modern to the extent that it gives expression to the momentaneous upswelling of an event. A classical work aspires to give voice to the timeless, the enduring, the venerable. A modern work sensitizes its audience to the “contingent, the fleeting, the ephemeral.”

The modern artist lives therefore in constant conversation with boredom. Every lyrical emergence of modernity is a moment won from and doomed to sink back into a desert of ennui. Much as the medieval saint’s holiness was linked with his capacity to be particularly pained by the prick of pride and the ancient warrior’s nobility was connected to the fact that shame brought him the greatest of all suffering, the modern artist’s creativity is tied to his acute sensitivity to boredom. The thought that there might finally be nothing new to be seen, no more modernity to be created and enjoyed, terrifies him. This is why his life can be defined by the search for “the new!” He is always and everywhere anxious about its absence.

The opening poem of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil, “To the Reader,” offers probably the most terrifying portrait of this version of boredom. It asserts that, of all the evils, boredom—not pride, not cowardice—is the vilest of all. “Among the vermin, jackals, panthers, lice, gorillas and tarantulas that suck and snatch and scratch and defecate and fuck
in the disorderly circus of our vice, there’s one more ugly and abortive birth.” In contrast to other vices, boredom “makes no gestures, never beats its breast.” Boredom does not call attention to itself. It slowly saps away “the soft and precious metal of our will.” From here, normal boundaries are erased as victims cast about in search of something to make them feel alive. Anything is better than nothing, including violent and forbidden fantasies: “It’s BOREDOM. Tears have glued its eyes together. This obscene beast chain-smokes, yawning for the guillotine.” Even if you think you have escaped its energy-sapping, “world-devouring” yawn, you are wrong: “You know it well, my Reader. You — hypocrite Reader — my double — my brother!” Baudelaire’s boredom is a terrible truth that the poet is able to face and incorporate into his existence, which others secretly know but hypocritically evade.

The Flowers of Evil is one of the seminal poetic engagements with boredom—as it unfolds Baudelaire transforms boredom into something to be owned rather than subdued. The book progresses from the early, shocking portrayals of ennui as a monster to be overcome toward later poems where boredom is represented as an internal component of a creative life.

Only when we drink poison are we well—
we want, this fire so burns our brain tissue,
to drown in the abyss—heaven or hell,
who cares? Through the unknown, we’ll find the new.

The poets and heroes depicted in the early poems of Baudelaire’s collection strive to rise above boredom, to somewhere untouched by its draining powers. Baudelaire calls this place “The Ideal.” These ancient types prefer to fight dragons in the clouds rather than the boredom of everyday life. Baudelaire’s ennui is intended to name a new monster, one which requires a qualitatively different kind of struggle:

We imitate, oh horror! tops and bowls
in their eternal waltzing marathon;
even in sleep, our fever whips and rolls—
like a black angel flogging the brute sun
Strange sport! where destination has no place
or name, and may be anywhere we choose—
where man, committed to his endless race,
runs like a madman diving for repose!

This is not the challenge of defending a sacred position or glorifying a god whose divinity is already secured. It is the weird effort to find a position worth defending in the first place; the odd poetic challenge to represent the moment of divine birth in process and on the move, as it arises out of the boring muck. The search is not for a secure resting place—the Ideal. The search is for something worth searching for.

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Boredom offered Baudelaire a figure for his conception of artistic virtue. The artist is that person willing to follow the unpredictable operations of the imagination for their own sake, wherever they may take him, even (especially) beyond standard moral and social conventions. The artist crosses boundaries. And so does boredom, smoking his hookah, dreaming of the gallows, releasing himself to unacknowledged desires.

This depiction of boredom as the price of creativity has resonated from the Latin Quarter to the present. This is especially true in latter-day bohemias such as Wicker Park, Haight-Ashbury and West Queen West, which are rapidly gaining new membership. The number of independent artists, writers and performers in Toronto has more than doubled in the past ten years. From 1998 to 2003, Chicago added 131 restaurants and 208 fitness centers. Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project entry on boredom includes the note: “in 1757 there were only three cafés in Paris.”

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Baudelaire did not think of modernity in chronological terms. However, his modernism registers a decisive historical turn. In his poetry and criticism, being modus, à la mode,nouveau was recast as a positive quality rather than a vain curiosity. As it turned out, this shift in values may have defined a great historical transition; a shift away from a life of upholding traditions toward one focused on generating new knowledge, new feelings and new practices.

You might assess your boredom as part and parcel of this historically novel attempt to lead a modern life, a life devoted to modernity. The history of the European words for boredom is striking in this regard. The English “boredom,” for example, is a recent invention. And nobody knows its derivation or etymology. It appeared from out of nowhere, a new creation for a new age. “Melancholy,” “spleen,” “sloth” and “acedia” have been around for much longer, going back to the classical and early Christian periods. But “bore” does not appear in English until the 1760s. One of the first known usages of “bore” refers to an individual as a “French bore,” meaning a French person who suffers from boredom. “To bore” first appears in 1768 in a letter describing being “bored by these Frenchmen.”

This was also the same period in which the first usages of the word “interesting” appear, in the modern sense of “that’s interesting!” Just as people began to worry about being bored, they started to talk about their desire to experience interesting things for the sake of their interestingness (as opposed to their morality, nobility or holiness). An era begins where “the interesting vs. the boring” come to define spectrums of evaluation, such as the way we judge historical events or determine the value of personal qualities.

The French “ennui” and the German “Langeweile” are more venerable. But something new happened to them at the same time that “boredom” and “interesting” were emerging. The French concept had arisen from the Latin “in odio habere,” “in odio esse.” “Ennui” was used earlier than “bore,” the first known English usage coming in 1667: “we have hardly any words that do fully express the French ennui.” It signified both a sense of disgust brought on by some concrete cause and a sense that the soul lacks some gratifying content. Yet until fairly late it lacked much resonance with the experience of empty time, central to the concept of ennui today. This sense, however, was always primary in the German “Langeweile,” with its clear linguistic connection to time: “the long while.” But originally “Langeweile” was just an everyday description of objective time passing slowly. Only later did it become associated with subjective suffering. From these divergent starting points, “Langeweile” and “ennui” underwent reciprocal transformation, approaching one another from opposite directions and finally fusing (though their historical residues sometimes still give them different accents).

Between 1931 and 1961 occurrences of the word “boredom” increased ten-fold, according to sociologist Orrin Klapp, together with a plethora of related words and concepts. Here is a list Klapp compiled: acedia, anhedonia, apathy, arid, banal, banality, blasé, burn-out, chatter, chatterbox, chitchat, chore, cliché, cloying, dismal, doldrums, drag, dreary, dry, dull, dullness, effete, enervation, ennui, flat, glazed eyes, hackneyed, harping, ho hum, humdrum, inane, insipid, insouciance, irksome, jade, jaded, jejune, languor, lassitude, listless, long-winded, monotony, museum fatigue, pall, platitude, prolixity, prosaic, prosy, repetitious, restless, restlessness, routine, rut, sameness, satiety, soporific, stagnant, stagnation, sterile, stuffy, stupefying, surfeited, tedium, tedious, tiresome, torpor, trite, trivia, uneasiness, uninteresting, verbosity, weariness, wearisome, world-weary.

The Eskimo’s language enables a fine-grained appreciation of snow. The language of the ancient Greeks made it possible to analyze anger in minute detail. English today permits similarly penetrating descriptions of boredom.

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Why does modernity lead to boredom? One answer is implicit in Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History” essay, which locates the decisive moment when boredom became a generalized condition of life at the fall of the Berlin Wall. These events marked the end of history in the sense that the live competitors to liberal democracy—socialism and communism—were now off the table. Things of course go on and modern societies face ongoing challenges, such as terrorism. But nobody seriously imagines that the major world powers or significant elements within them will adopt the main tenets of Islamic extremists. Without a living moral challenge, there remains plenty to do, like development work in Africa. But this kind of thing amounts to an interesting way to spend one’s time and a way to make oneself into a more interesting person at cocktail parties. Not a great moral confrontation the outcome of which is genuinely in dispute. What is left is a world finally purified of everything but the interesting and the boring.

Other answers go further back, linking the rise of boredom to the rise of Enlightenment science, industrialism and bureaucracy. These valorized quantitative calculation over qualitative experience, turned workers into interchangeable commodities and made human beings into cogs within organizational machines. Moderns had to invent a new word, “boredom,” because their hyper-mechanistic, quantitative, rationalized world bored into their daily existences in newly penetrating ways. When these sorts of experiences become the normal stuff of daily life, as one of David Foster Wallace’s characters puts it, “the word invents itself. … The name springs up under cultural pressure.” Even if our experience of boredom seems to carry us off into a world of eternal sameness, the diffusion and depth of that experience is through and through historical.

A third answer about the boredom-modernity connection highlights the rise of individualism. The focus is often on the Romantic search for self-expression and the attendant desire for intense, autonomous personal experience as a bedrock of meaning against the depersonalizing forces of modern life. Saul Bellow’s character Charlie Citrine summarizes it well:

For me, the self-conscious ego is the seat of boredom. This increasing, swelling, domineering, painful self-consciousness is the only rival of the political and social powers that run my life (business, technological-bureaucratic powers, the state). You have a great organized movement of life, and you have the single self, independently conscious, proud of its detachment and its absolute immunity, its stability and its power to remain unaffected by anything whatsoever. … To be fully conscious of oneself as an individual is to be separated from all else.

All of these versions of the boredom of modernity share a common structure. There was a world before the advent of boredom. This world was richer, fuller, more in tune with the flow of time, defined by challenges that unquestionably matter. And then there is the world with boredom, defined by the contrast between the boring and interesting. This world is somehow truncated and emptied of meaning. It is concerned more with personal experience than trans-personal meaning. Its people are points on a grid, its landscape is homogenous, and its basic values settled.

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But being bored can be thought of as ending history in a different and more positive sense. When you are deeply bored, historical questions fall away. You stop asking about whether we live in modernity or post-modernity, how industrialism has affected the human situation, whether community is possible in an age of bureaucracy, or whether there remain any great historical challenges after the fall of Communism. These disappear as so many external distractions. They become evasions from listening to your boredom. All that is left is you, your situation and the strange and wondrous fact that there is something there at all. And that this could potentially matter to you.

This is the mystic’s boredom, boredom as a mood that tunes us into the importance of being there. Martin Heidegger was the great philosopher of this revelatory potential of boredom. He gave a lecture course on “The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics” in which nearly half the term was spent on the phenomenology of boredom. He asked his students to “awaken” a mood of deep boredom. He claimed that doing so would enable them to authentically ask the fundamental questions of metaphysics: namely, the questions about the significance of the world, finitude and solitude. In a mood of deep boredom, these are living questions, not simply academic ones borrowed from schools, books or history.

Together Heidegger and his students worked to awaken deep boredom from within more superficial everyday boredoms, like the boredom of being stuck in an airport terminal. These types of boredoms are mostly attempts to evade the metaphysical question contained in boredom. As you cycle through your iPod playlist and shuffle through magazines at the airport, you are trying to drive away your boredom. As the day flies by at the ballgame and the night disappears at the party, you are finding ways to avoid tuning into your boredom with yourself. Yet trying to find something to occupy yourself with while you wait means that you are the sort of creature for whom time can be significant. Heidegger invites us to release ourselves to a boredom that raises the question of how anything could matter in the first place:

Boredom is still distant when it is only this book or that play, that business or this idleness, that drags on. It irrupts when “one is bored.” Profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference. This boredom reveals beings as a whole.

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Heidegger might lead us to conclude that there is something about boredom that is in the end too slippery to pin down. That boredom is a little pocket of mystery left for people living in a world obsessed with the eradication of mystery.

This has not been the approach of American businessmen and politicians, for whom it is now conventional wisdom that our way of life depends on constant transformations in consumption styles and behaviors. There may be limits to population growth or to our material needs, but the imagination is unlimited—it is the most renewable of resources. Some such thought has led contemporary economists to a surprising new research topic: bohemians and bohemian neighborhoods. These are now to be seen not as dangerous nests of unproductive human waste but as hotbeds of innovation, the analogue on the consumption side of the economy to R&D labs on the production side. Steady, dependable, focused laborers animated by the Protestant work ethic have been supplanted as the heroes of economic development by the cultural descendants of the outsiders who patrolled the Latin Quarter in mid-nineteenth-century Paris and the dirty hippies whom Mayor Daley took on with a vengeance at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Today, Mayor Daley II actively courts people very much like those his father ordered to be beaten into submission. Rustbelt cities like Cleveland and Pittsburgh are falling over one another to convert spaces previously devoted to industrial production into promenades for flanerie, punctuated by movie theaters, ethnic restaurants and pubs with incredibly diverse selections of beer. The quest for novelty and the flight from boredom is not simply an individual spiritual challenge or even the aggregation of many individual problems; it keeps our iPod designers, video game engineers and bartenders employed.

Something is missed in this way of relating to boredom, however. For the boredom busters of the world do not linger at all with the experience, do not give it any time to build, develop and challenge them. The next time you are bored, ask yourself: Am I sinning? Am I stunting my moral growth? Am I exercising a necessary virtue? Am I experiencing the precondition of creativity? Am I releasing myself into the temporality of existence? You will find no simple answer to these questions, but the very fact that you’ve stopped to pay attention to your boredom may be important. We might say that today boredom provides the background to any truly creative endeavor; for more than one artistic spirit, it has presented itself as the ultimate challenge. Boredom in this way provides its own antidote; perhaps every new thing has boredom to thank.

So I was surprised this spring when, in response to the release of Brides- maids, so many newspapers donned headlines like “Women can be funny, too” (or, for the more quizzical critics at Gawker, “Women can be funny too?”) and “The first Genuine ‘female’ Comedy.” The tone of these articles was that of a war-torn country unable to recall what peace looked like.*

* To read more, subscribe to The Point.

To illustrate her point, Chua describes her own parenting techniques: she never allowed her daughters to earn less than perfect grades (an A- or second place was unacceptable); even on vacation she forced them to endure three-hour piano and violin practice sessions without food or bathroom breaks (once, when her then three-year old daughter disobeyed, she made her stand outside in freezing weather); she used threats and extortion to force them to excel (when her younger daughter resisted learning a piano piece, Chua “threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years”). The only extracurricular activities she allowed her daughters were those in which they could win a medal (and that medal had to be gold)—“loser” activities like crafts, theater, television, sleepovers and dating were forbidden. Chua never mentions corporal punishment, but she does think it perfectly acceptable to call one’s children fat, lazy, stupid or worthless—so long as it is done out of love and for the children’s own good. She once told her older daughter she was “garbage.”

Chua knows such methods might horrify Western parents, who believe that children should be allowed to pursue their own passions. But she argues that the indulgence of the Western approach is misguided; parents who do not sufficiently push children to realize their full potential end up secretly disappointed in them, or, worse, unable to admit their disappointment to themselves. “Chinese” parents have an entirely different mindset; since they know what is best they can push and prod their children to achieve it.

Chua’s own career reads like an advertisement for the parenting style she champions. The eldest of four daughters, she was raised by “extremely strict” Chinese immigrant parents and yet “had the most wonderful childhood!” Not only was she not scarred for life, but she graduated first in her high school class of 350, went on to study at Harvard, and has taught at Duke and Yale. She has written books on free-market democracy and the formation of empires, and was reportedly paid a six-figure sum for her memoir. Her two daughters appear to be well on track to replicate their parents’ success (Chua’s husband, Jed Rubenfeld, is a fellow Yale faculty member and the author of best-selling mysteries): in addition to getting straight A’s, her daughters have won numerous musical competitions, and at fourteen one won a competition to play at Carnegie Hall.

The purported moral: if we follow Chua’s parenting methods, our children will also be successful, rather than losers with high self-esteem. The evidence, she implies, is incontrovertible—straight A’s, gold medals, admission to the Ivy League. You can’t argue with success.

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The responses to “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” were predictable. Chua was denounced as a “monster” and a “menace to society.” One reader compared her to a cannibal: “Chua’s voice is that of a jovial, erudite serial killer—think Hannibal Lecter—who’s explaining how he’s going to fillet his next victim.” Many were convinced that Chua’s parenting methods amounted to criminal child abuse:

In my ideal world, Child Protective Services agents would swoop down on the Chua household and whisk her poor kids off to a foster home while coppers slapped her in cuffs. Amy Chua is not only a sick, demented woman and a terrible mother, she’s a prime example of why East Asian cultures are so hopelessly fucked up.

More reasonable critics rehearsed familiar arguments. Many claimed that Chua’s approach is lacking in one way or another—it neglects to emphasize essential social and leadership skills, does not foster creativity or passion, inhibits critical thinking and defines success too narrowly. Children raised this way may grow up to be responsible, hard-working and successful hoop jumpers—doctors, lawyers, engineers and accountants—but not leaders, creators or “mold breakers” who have the ingenuity and audacity to rise to eminence or change the world. Others argued that for these children “success” comes at the cost of happiness. Fun, pleasure and joy are devalued; life appears as nothing but toil. Children who are taught to privilege academic success are more likely to suffer from stress and depression. Chua herself admits she is “not good at enjoying life”; she left the fun parts of parenting to her husband.

Asian Americans raised by parents like Chua have been especially vocal about the psychological damage that her methods inflict. “Parents like Amy Chua are the reason why Asian Americans like me are in therapy,” writes one blogger. What appears as discipline or “tough love” from one perspective often appears as abuse from another. This often leads to gridlocked conflict, unwillingness to empathize, festering resentment and long-lasting family strife. “I’m horrified that she’s American-born and hanging on to this,” the blogger continues, “when most of us are trying to escape it.”

The intense hostility underlying even the most measured responses suggests that Chua has touched on real ethical questions. Critics deeply ensconced in our current meritocracy question only the efficacy of her method; the New York Times, for example, asked: “Does strict control of a child’s life lead to greater success or can it be counterproductive?” But this kind of question simply assumes that success is the highest goal in life, and that the value of a particular style of parenting is to be measured in terms of it. On the other hand, asking, “Will this approach lead to happiness?” also fails to get at the true challenge that Chua poses, since it simply presupposes that the goal of raising kids is happiness. What the controversy surrounding Chua demonstrates, however inadvertently, is that parenting techniques are always grounded in basic assumptions about the way things are and what matters to us. And they are always guided by some answer to the most fundamental of ethical questions—how to live?

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Chua is wrong to call her parenting ethos “Chinese.” Her parenting methods actually belong to a very specific culture (Confucian), class (middle), and experience (immigration). I know, because I was raised according to the same ethos, although I had the Korean, West Coast, lower-middle class version.

Every ethos needs a hero—someone who perfectly embodies its highest virtues. In my family mythology (as my mother tells it), that hero was my father. Here was a man who came from nothing, but through native intellect and sheer force of will managed to reinvent himself as the proverbial self-made man. He was a “country boy” by birth, the second son of a farmer too poor to buy him eyeglasses to see the blackboard at school, or to bribe the teacher to seat him in the front of the class. Still, he managed to earn top marks on the national college entrance exam and win a full scholarship to the best university in Korea, where, inexplicably, he chose to study German Idealist philosophy. For a time, he was something of a dissident, and dreamed of becoming a philosopher. But at the age of 30, he left Korea and came to America with a wife, a two-year old daughter (me), two suitcases and $200. He did menial labor by day and attended a vocational school at night; my mother worked in a garment factory. But my father’s intelligence, skill and confidence were so evidently exceptional that he was hired on the spot by the organization where he has now worked for nearly forty years, first as a computer programmer, then as a systems analyst and eventually as a top-level manager. (Today, at the age of 70, he still cannot bring himself to retire.) We moved from our roach-infested quarters in Koreatown to a second floor walk-up in a nicer neighborhood, bought a brand new Chevrolet Impala, and never looked back. He shot from one promotion to the next, and by the time I was nine, a long-anticipated son was on the way, and we were increasingly well-off. My mother would brag, “We came to America with two bags and $200. Look at your father now. He drives a Lexus.”

The point of life was success, and success could be achieved through monomaniacal hard work. Happiness was beside the point. At best, happiness was the incidental by-product of success and respectability.

That was the core of my parents’ ethos, the same ethos taken for granted by Chua. It isn’t some Chinese wisdom imported to a new culture; rather, the Tiger Mom parenting ethos was born out of a specifically American experience—that of its Asian middle-class immigrants. Historically, Asian cultures have been intensely hierarchical, but the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century undermined many traditional social hierarchies, paving the way for a new middle class to emerge. Within that middle class, social status is achieved through a meritocratic free-for-all in three areas: academic credentials, competitive accolades and career achievements. Those members of the new middle class who emigrate are precisely those most committed to a meritocratic ethos. Having forsaken all inherited social status, their status in their adopted country is entirely a matter of academic, competitive and professional success. And success, they have to believe, can be achieved through sheer effort.

This new immigrant ethos not only shapes Chua’s parenting, but pervades her whole approach to living. We can see what distinguishes this ethos—its fundamental commitments and values, its benefits and shortcomings—through Chua’s basic attitudes toward education, culture and work.

Education is highly valued by the Tiger Mother, it is true, but its value is purely instrumental. It is a means to an end, not an end in itself—a path to success rather than something worth doing for its own sake. Even higher education is not seen as an apprenticeship in the examined life, but as a series of hoops to jump through on the way to a successful career. Hence the strangely mercenary approach to school: what matters is not learning but grades. This is why Chua focuses less on the intellectual and ethical growth of her children than on their academic marks. My parents were the same: they did not care what I was learning, or even whether I was learning anything at all, as long as I was earning A’s. We can imagine how admissions decisions would be handled if someone like Chua were to get on the admissions board at Harvard or Yale or any other highly selective institution (skateboarders and drummers need not apply).

The Tiger Mother also does not see work as a valuable end in itself, but only as a means to two other ends—success and respectability. The demand for success reflects the traditional expectation that children will eventually support their parents in old age. The demand for respectability reflects the notion that a child’s choice of career will bring honor or shame on the family as a whole. From this point of view, the common American belief that young people should be free to do what they love seems to be the height of ingratitude and selfishness. The idea of a calling, of devoting oneself to work that one loves and finds intrinsically rewarding, is foreign to this world. Instead, work is seen through a strict hierarchy of professions—with medicine, law and engineering at the top—and there is intense pressure to choose a profession that reflects well on one’s parents. This is why Chua’s father is an engineer, why she herself is a law professor, and why her daughters are on track to replicate their success. My parents were the same way: my brother has followed my father’s career; my sister is a doctor; I was supposed to be a doctor too.

The Tiger Mother is no philistine per se, utterly indifferent to culture and fine arts. But neither does she value culture for its own sake. Instead, her attitude exemplifies what Hannah Arendt called “cultural philistinism,” the use of art and culture by the middle classes to distinguish themselves from those beneath them: “In this fight for social position, culture began to play an enormous role as one of the weapons, if not the best-suited one, to advance oneself socially, and to ‘educate oneself’ out of the lower regions.” This attitude towards art and culture plays out in Chua’s household. Her daughters were not allowed to choose what to do with their free time; their activities had to be the kind that would look good on a college application (“Not just any activity, like ‘crafts,’ which can lead nowhere—or even worse, playing the drums, which leads to drugs”). They had to do music instead of drama (you can’t win a medal for your performance in a play). They could not choose which musical instruments they would play (for there is a strict hierarchy of musical instruments, with violin and piano at the top and percussion clearly at the bottom). This attitude also explains Chua’s devotion to the cult of virtuosity: the point of a musical performance is not to express oneself or to create something beautiful but to demonstrate the kind of technical proficiency that wins competitions.

My parents had humbler origins than Chua’s. Her parents went to MIT and earned advanced degrees; her father is a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. Although my parents went to the best universities in Korea, they essentially had to start from zero when they immigrated; in America we were definitely closer to the lower end of the middle-class spectrum. But my family was no exception to the universal rule that the middle classes need to distinguish themselves from those one step below. The distinction between blue collar and white collar work was paramount. The ideal was to secure a “desk job” that would keep you from getting your hands dirty, provide a steady salary, good health benefits and a comfortable, respectable life.

Instead of Chua’s upper-middle class focus on cultural achievements, my parents focused on bourgeois consumerism. Chua traveled with her daughters to foreign countries and took them to museums; she lists 39 cities, including London, Paris, Nice, and Rome, that her daughters had visited by the time they were 12 and 9. My parents never took me to a museum and they thought traveling was a waste of money. We never took trips that required us to fly anywhere—vacations had to be within driving distance. Instead, my parents spent money on objects. A brand new house in a brand new neighborhood was the ultimate purchase. “Used” houses were inferior. To buy a used car was unthinkable. Luxury sedans—a Benz or a Lexus—were a non-negotiable necessity (we did live in Southern California). When I dared question this mentality, my mother patiently explained, “The kind of car you drive shows the world the kind of person you are.”

When it came to academic achievement, the sights were not set as high. My parents did not save money for our college educations. The ideal was to win a scholarship to a big-name university—as my father had done—but short of that we were expected to go to the University of California. UC Berkeley was considered “just as good” as Harvard or Yale. UCLA was second best. An above-average student who made mostly A-’s and B+’s without much effort, I went to UC Irvine, which ranked a distant third or fourth. At least I didn’t end up at UC Riverside. The sense was that, “It would be great if you were to win a scholarship to Harvard—your father did something like that—but if not, UC Irvine is good enough.” My parents would never have paid for me to go to a private liberal arts college no one in their social milieu had ever heard of. What would be the point?

Nor were the sights set as high for professional success. My parents never questioned the value of success, but their understanding of it evolved over time. There was a strange tension between their abiding faith in American meritocracy and their growing but hazy awareness of the limits of that vision. They arrived in America thinking the apex of success was to be a doctor, engineer, lawyer or top-level manager. They spent their lives climbing to the pinnacle of their social milieu, but when they got to the top the clouds parted and they saw that they were surrounded and overshadowed by peaks they never knew existed. And they were tired of climbing. They came to realize that higher mountains were out there—the Harvards and Carnegie Halls of the world—but felt that they were out of reach, and there was no point in wanting the impossible. At a family dinner, my father even prayed that my husband and I would have “ordinary lives.” In retrospect, I think the prayer was directed to me, as if he had been saying, “Don’t aim for greatness. Be content with success in a respectable middle-class profession.”

Unlike Chua, I rebelled. Early on, my parents wanted me to become a doctor, lawyer or engineer, and I had enrolled at UC Irvine as a biology major. But after a year and a half, and without consulting my parents, I got off the pre-med track and hopped a freight train heading nowhere: I chose to study not what was prestigious or respectable but what I loved (literature and philosophy). My parents stopped paying for my education, and I had to work as a temp and teaching assistant to put myself through the rest of college and graduate school. When I finally got my Ph.D., I asked my mother, “Are you proud of me now?” Her response was, “We never asked for that.” This has not been good for
our relationship.

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Precisely because I was raised in a Tiger Mom world, but rebelled against it, I understand where Chua is coming from, but I can also see what remains invisible to her. Being a Tiger Mom is not just a matter of using harsh parenting techniques to ensure that children live up to their potential. It involves seeing one’s whole world—one’s work, prospects for happiness, family ties, sense of obligations, sense of self, etc.—from the perspective of an immigrant drawn to America’s meritocratic mythology. And this makes conflicts between Tiger Moms and their children almost inevitable.

The situation of a person born into poverty in a war-torn country obviously differs from that of a person born and raised in conditions of (relative) prosperity. For the Asian immigrant who has left everything behind and has nothing to fall back on except his or her own efforts, “succeeding” is an all-consuming compulsion. Straight A’s, gold medals, promotions and Nobel Prizes are not simply the rewards of one’s hard work but evidence of one’s worth. They are not goals which, having been reached, can be enjoyed in and of themselves. Specific achievements are never enough; they do not slake but rather fuel the desire for success.

It is this urgent quality of drivenness that the children of Asian immigrants may not feel in their bones. Simple desire for success they can understand; what is alien to them is their parents’ desperate compulsion toward it. The child raised with a community of intimates who value her for herself will find it bizarre to stake her sense of personal esteem on public affirmations of success. What matters to my father is not that he works in software development, but that he is in a senior position. My siblings and I, on the other hand, are more defined by the kind of jobs we chose (physician, computer programmer and humanities professor). Success matters, but the specific job matters more.

Tiger Parents often live in isolation from the culture of their adopted country, and foolishly expect their children to do the same. But children pick up ideas the same way they pick up germs: inevitably and incessantly. Floating around them are messages like: “Be yourself”; “Do what you love”; “Have fun”; “Follow your bliss”; “Believe in yourself.” And when well-meaning people ask Tiger Mothered young adults whether, for all their success, they are truly happy, the question can be profoundly disquieting; for the first time, their most basic assumptions are thrown into doubt.

Asian families are notorious for their bitter feuds and decade-long estrangements. The high drama, the suicides, estrangements and disownments show that what is at stake is the whole way of being of the family, that is, everything that gives the family its identity and raison d’être. In a Moscow restaurant—what better setting?—Chua’s daughter smashed a glass on the floor and rebelled, not just against her mother’s discipline but in protest against her family’s whole ethos: “I hate the violin. I hate my life! I hate you, and I hate this family!”

I have an aunt who has not spoken to her mother (my grandmother) for more than forty years, as long as I have been alive. They will go to their graves before they make their peace. I know a Korean American young man who, after years of kowtowing and deception, finally blew up at his parents and told them what he really thought and how he really lived; they responded by disowning him and telling friends and neighbors he was dead.

As absurd as it may appear from the outside, the histrionics make sense as a response to a Manichean logic that sees the world as an arena of non-stop competition that sorts humanity into winners and losers. Since children’s success or failure brings honor or shame directly on their parents, parents have every reason to mold their children by any means necessary. But headstrong mothers breed headstrong daughters, and it is understood that one fights fire with fire. So Tiger Parenting can generate conflict far beyond anything Chua describes: public meltdowns; destruction of property; displays of self-mutilation; and violence involving knives, kitchen utensils, gardening tools and household appliances. Such tactics are not only perfectly appropriate, but proofs of one’s mettle. Whoever has the most impressive and forceful display of emotion prevails.

When the “Asian” style of parenting fails, it does so in the saddest and most self-destructive ways. My cousin slashed her wrists in the bathtub where her mother found her lying in a warm mix of water and blood (she survived). At Cornell, thirteen of 21 suicides between 1996 and 2006 were Asians or Asian Americans (who constituted only 14 percent of the student body at the time). In this country, Asian American women have the highest rates of suicide. It is irresponsible self-deception to maintain that the children of Tiger Moms suffer no ill effects from the way they are raised.

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I have lived and left behind the Tiger Mom way of life, and I am convinced that Western ways are better. In contrast to Tiger Mom parenting, Western parenting rightly recognizes that childhood is a time to be treasured for its own sake, that we should “let kids be kids.” Accordingly, Western culture is filled with works of art that exalt and celebrate the intrinsic worth and dignity of childhood—from William Wordsworth to A. A. Milne. In Winnie the Pooh, Christopher Robin says, “What I like most of all is just doing nothing.” The tragedy at the end of the book is that Christopher Robin has to go to school: “No one else in the forest knew why or where he was going, just that it had something to do with twice-times, and how to make things called ABCs, and where a place called Brazil is.”

But I also think Western ways of parenting are in trouble. The ideas that commonly guide parents today are actually debased and derivative versions of an ethos that has been reduced to clichés (e.g., “Be yourself”; “Do what you love”; “Live your own life”). Rather than simply attacking Chua and reaffirming Western ways of parenting, the task before us is to recover and articulate our own ethos.

At its best, the Western style of parenting aims to help children live authentically, that is, to take on the responsibility to decide for themselves what to do and how to live. My understanding of the world is inauthentic to the extent that I have simply inherited it from my parents or absorbed it from the people around me, without having made any responsible effort to measure it against my own experience. My discourse is inauthentic if I accept and repeat what others say without trying to understand through my own effort what it means or whether it is true. Inauthentic understanding and discourse are dominated and governed by the dictatorship of “the everyone” or “the they,” as the German philosopher Martin Heidegger writes:

We enjoy ourselves and have fun the way they enjoy themselves. We read, see, and judge literature and art the way they see and judge … we find “shocking” what they find shocking. The they, which is nothing definite… prescribes the kind of being of everydayness.

In contrast, what is authentic is what is our own—what we have that we have made our own. My understanding and discourse is more authentic the more it comes out of my own experience, thought and judgments. My life is more authentic the less it is dominated by “the everyone” and the more it is governed by my own understanding, concerns, desires, tastes, goals, etc. One of the clearest articulations of this idea of authenticity comes in Leo Tolstoy’s novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Tolstoy tells the life of a man who becomes successful and respectable by ignoring his own moral intuitions and living according to the bourgeois values of “the everyone”:

As a student he had done things which, at the time, seemed to him extremely vile and made him feel disgusted with himself; but later, seeing that people of high standing had no qualms about doing these things, he was not quite able to consider them good but managed to dismiss them and not feel the least perturbed when he recalled them.

Tolstoy doesn’t tell us what exactly Ivan Ilyich did; he doesn’t denounce this or that immoral act. The point is that Ivan let his own sense of good and bad be overruled by the dictates of common opinion. The tragedy of his life is not that he failed to achieve something, but that the ideals he did succeed in reaching were not truly his own. The novella has often been read as a condemnation of the bourgeois ethos whose highest values are success and respectability. It has also been read as an indictment of conformism. While both these readings are plausible, at the deepest level the novel is about inauthenticity. What is wrong with Ivan Ilyich’s life is not just that it was guided by a narrow and superficial set of values, but that Ivan simply accepted those values without questioning them.

The ethos of authenticity undergirding Western parenting can be seen in Western attitudes toward art, education and work. Unlike in the Tiger Mother ethos, art and education are seen as ends in themselves, rather than means. Both are considered essential for cultivating an authentic engagement with the world—which involves casting aside the opinions of the “everyone” in favor of developing one’s own. This ideal of authenticity even guides Western attitudes toward work, especially the notion that children should be free to choose their own career, which reflects the old Western idea that work should be experienced as something we are personally called upon to do. No one else can decide what my calling is; only I can find the work that is properly my own.

Grafted onto these attitudes is the sense that in life it is possible to aim at something higher than success. Success is good, but more important than success is greatness. In this ethos there is a peculiar place of honor for people who were great without being successful. Vincent van Gogh failed as an art dealer and as a Christian missionary before finally cutting off his ear, being put in an insane asylum and killing himself at the age of 37. He was not a success, but success seems petty next to his greatness as an artist. This aspiration to greatness is absent from every instrumental attitude to art, education and work. Nothing great has ever been achieved by people who see such things solely as instruments for achieving success and respectability.

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Chua is perhaps at her most “Chinese” when, in response to her husband’s argument that children don’t owe their parents anything, she remarks, “This strikes me as a terrible deal for the Western parent” (my italics). On a gut level, she can’t think of the relation between parents and children in terms other than debt and obligation, so her husband’s objections simply make no sense. My mother once said, as if she were speaking of life on Mars, “Here [in America] the parents are the slaves of their children.” What she saw of American parenting violated her deepest sense of the natural order of things. Despite having lived in America for nearly forty years, the country remains for her a baffling world in which all that is good and right and proper is turned on its head.

The nature of the differences between Asian Americans and their immigrant parents entails that conflict cannot be resolved through the channels taken for granted by Western families, such as negotiation and reasoned dialogue (like I said before, colorful and sustained displays of emotion and violence are the more effective and accepted means of getting through to the other). Once, when I had a particularly bad argument with my mother—we hadn’t talked for months—a concerned relative of my husband’s asked, “Why can’t you just sit down at the table and talk things through?” What he couldn’t fathom was that that would have been impossible. To sit down at the table with me would have been, for my mother, an admission of defeat. Ahab and Moby Dick do not sit down at the table and talk things through!

Westerners tend to think of disputes in terms of the metaphor of perspective: each person has a standpoint which gives them a distinct perspective, and each perspective offers a clear but limited view of the world; no one perspective is comprehensive, so disputes can be resolved by exchanging opinions and finding the grains of truth in many different points of view. Tiger Parents, on the other hand, tend to think of disputes in the metaphor of a path: there is one true path that their children ought to follow, and any deviation from that path is a sign of error or delinquency. Americanized children cannot accept the basic terms in which their parents think, since those terms deny that different opinions have any legitimacy. The parents in turn cannot accept the terms in which their children think, since that would be a deviation from what they regard as the rightful path. To regard other ideas as “different perspectives” would be to admit their own way of thought might be in error.

These differences are made all the more irresolvable by the fact that Tiger Parents perceive the conflict between parents and children as a battle of wills in which there can be only winners and losers (to compromise is to lose). Hence the title of Chua’s book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. When Chua “retreated” in the face of her daughter’s meltdown, she suffered a tactical defeat. But the basic terms in which she thinks of parenting didn’t change. She may have lost one skirmish but she still thinks of parenting as a war of attrition. In the case of one daughter, hostilities apparently commenced when the girl was only three: “I was determined to raise an obedient Chinese child … if it killed me.” When her daughter dared to defy her—by refusing to play the piano or come in out of the cold—Chua realizes, “I had underestimated Lulu, not understood what she was made of. She would sooner freeze to death than give in.” However, Chua quickly rallies: “But Lulu had underestimated me too. I was just re-arming. The battle lines were drawn, and she didn’t even know it.”

Asian American fiction is filled with fantasies of conflict resolution. After a series of misunderstandings and personal crises, the mother and daughter have a meeting of hearts which allows them to better understand and appreciate one another. It turns out that the mother (or grandmother) was right after all; but at the same time, the mother learns to give autonomy and respect to the daughter. This typical narrative is pure wish fulfillment; the underlying fantasy is that differences are all a matter of misunderstanding. Stories like these appeal to Asian Americans because they articulate exactly what we want, which is to believe that real reconciliation is possible. But the fantasy, understandable as it is, obscures the depth of the differences at issue and fails to appreciate what it is that makes real-life reconciliation so difficult.

Some children do live more or less according to their parents’ ethos. I know a Chinese American student who came from a family of doctors and was happy to follow in their footsteps and enroll at Harvard Medical School. But many Asian Americans can imitate their parents only by suppressing their real values. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer believed that most human beings are doomed to be unhappy but that nature nevertheless produces a few people who are genuinely happy, who serve as “decoys” and who make people even more miserable by creating the illusion that happiness is possible. The children who genuinely adopt their parents’ ethos, like this Chinese American legacy doctor, are the Schopenhauerian “decoys” of the Asian American community.

The easiest alternative is to pretend. Keeping up appearances while sneaking around behind our parents’ backs is a long and cherished tradition within the Asian American community. The most resourceful children, typically daughters, know there are many shades of acceptable pretense. It is simple enough, for example, to put on a show of obeisance in the presence of one’s parents and then turn around and do whatever the hell one pleases as soon as they are out of sight. Some families have a kind of “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Or one can simply lie. What may appear as “Asian” hypocrisy and sneakiness from the outside is often the only solution to a desperate situation: parents are appeased; children get some breathing room; harmony reigns; everyone wins. All it takes is a little creativity. I have a Korean American friend whose boyfriend moved in with her for two years without her parents’ knowledge or consent. This meant that for two years her boyfriend could never answer the phone, for fear that it might be her parents calling. Whenever her parents visited, they had to evacuate his possessions and erase all trace of his presence from their apartment. She explained, “It’s better that way. They didn’t need to know. They didn’t want to know. Why stir up conflict? Later we got engaged and then married. So it all worked out.”

But pretending has its limits. Usually it works for a while and then one has to start making decisions that can’t be hidden. Dan Choi, the gay Korean American lieutenant who challenged the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, has said that the hardest thing about his experience was coming out to his family (his father is a Baptist minister). After enduring relentless pressure from his mother to marry a Korean girl, he had no choice but to come out; he told her, “I am not going to marry a Korean girl, nor am I going to marry a White girl. I am gay.”

Sometimes you have to rebel, even if it means cutting yourself off from your parents. Obviously this isn’t ideal—you end up with no family. I know from experience: I finally stood up to my mother two years ago and I haven’t seen or spoken to any member of my family since. (Although I have exchanged e-mails with my father and siblings, and my mother and I are now “friends” on Facebook.)

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A real reconciliation would have to begin with a reframing of the conflict. The conflict between Tiger Parents and their children may not be a battle between right and wrong but a collision between right and right. What is ultimately at stake is the differences between two êthea—two visions of what it is right to do and good to be. The ancient Greeks had a name for this kind of collision between right and right: tragedy. Tragedies are stories that dramatize conflicts between two sets of values, each of which is worthy of respect. The Greeks saw that such conflicts tend to end unhappily when both sides refuse to listen to or respect the other. But not all tragedies end unhappily; some end with reconciliation.

The Oresteia, for example, is about the conflict between the old and new gods, the new gods who dwell on Mount Olympus and the ancient goddesses known as the Furies, the hideous and bloodthirsty spirits of revenge. The conflict between the gods stands for the collision between the êthea of kinship and citizenship—between traditional codes of honor and revenge that united blood kin, and the rule of law that united citizens in a polis. Aeschylus shows that reconciliation is possible if the new gods of the polis reserve a place of honor for the old gods of the family, and if the old gods are also transformed, in the sense that the code of honor and revenge is retained and yet expanded beyond individual families to encompass the whole city. The sense of kinship had to be extended beyond blood relatives to include the Athenian citizenry as a whole, and the emotions once vented on those who attacked blood kin had to be redirected toward those who attacked Athens. The Oresteia shows that conflicts between different values do not have to end unhappily. Old and new values can be transformed in a way that maximizes the harmony and minimizes the conflict between them. The new gods no longer seek to defeat or repress the old gods, and the old gods are transformed in a way that lets them still be honored and respected.

Perhaps something similar can happen in the conflict between Tiger Parents and their children, and, on a deeper level, in the collision between the êthea of “Chinese” and “Western” styles of parenting. For example, Amy Tan, the author of The Joy Luck Club, has said in interviews that her parents didn’t want her to become a writer: “My parents told me I would become a doctor, and then in my spare time I would become a concert pianist.” But after she became a successful writer, her parents supported her. For Tan, reconciliation did not come through heart-to-heart talks that cleared away misunderstandings. It was just that her rebellion ended up taking a form that was consistent with her parents’ values. As for the Korean American young man I know who was disowned and declared dead by his parents: after a period of estrangement, he was successful enough as a music producer to buy his parents a big new house. All was forgiven, and he was “undisowned” by his parents. He wasn’t dead after all.

In the areas of education and work, at least, it seems there can be some compromise. Children can reject their parents’ understanding of education and work and follow their passions as long as they end up in a place that the parents can respect on their own terms. If Tiger Parents can see that doing what one loves can also lead to success, then there can be a reconciliation between the ethos that regards work as a means to success and the ethos that regards meaningful work as an end in itself. Like the old gods in the Oresteia, the parents’ values can be honored and transformed at the same time.

Of course when it comes to certain conflicts (e.g., when parents want their children to marry within their ethnic group, or when parents of gay children want them to stop being gay) no compromise is possible. Yet the children of Tiger Parents do not have to choose between pure acquiescence and total rebellion. Their task is to find and extract what is worth preserving in the Tiger Parent ethos, and to transpose and incorporate it into a hybrid Asian American ethos.

By discussing Tiger Parenting openly, Chua’s book may actually help Asian Americans take a first step in this direction. For she is actually not a traditional Chinese mother. By publicly discussing what in traditional cultures is simply taken for granted, she does what a true traditionalist would never do: she justifies herself on the basis of arguments, and exposes herself to the indignities of debate. She herself remarks, “I think that writing this book is an extremely ‘Western’ thing to do. I don’t think Chinese people would do it. I disobeyed my mum. My mum said, ‘Don’t write it!’” Just as she once defied dinner-party politesse by announcing to guests that she called her daughter “garbage,” she has now defied the polite and mendacious relativism that claims every style of parenting is “special in its own way.” What is most shocking in Chua’s book is not what she says but that she says it.

Much of the power of a traditional culture comes from the assumption of an authority that does not need to be articulated or justified, so it is refreshing to hear someone willing to argue for an autocratic style of parenting, and to do so in public. By making a case for the Chinese style of parenting, Chua opens, perhaps inadvertently, a much-needed dialogue, not simply about different parenting styles, but about the underlying assumptions on which they are based—assumptions about how to live, the proper relation between parents and children, and what we should aspire to as human beings.

And for that, I thank her.

Things have changed. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the socialist project no longer has much political credibility.*

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