BOBOS: Then there's this Weekly Standard piece also brought to me by A&LD. It's by Peter Augustine Lawler. He gets a ton of mileage from David Brooks' "bobos" concept --bougeois bohemians who have "reconciled the modern conflict between bohemian self-expression and bourgeois productivity"-- a species of Americans who may or may not exist, like the anti-intellectuals below. Lawler wants us to think that human nature is dependent on the existence of death; take that away, we're insectoid animals. Or something. Watch him conjure up a dystopia:

As Walker Percy predicted in The Thanatos Syndrome, we may be able to free ourselves from all the stress of self-consciousness, becoming happy and productive animals who in the right environment are never in a bad mood. We could, in other words, make sociobiology's view of man true by eliminating all those perverse features of human nature that have made this view untrue so far.

Unbridled biotechnology could destroy human nature. The result would not really be a return to nature, but rather the human construction of an unalienated human environment. Biotechnological success would then be, from one view, the decisive evidence for and the final act of human freedom: We will make ourselves into what we imagined natural perfection to be. We will make ourselves fully at home in the world.

So his view is that the coming biotech future will be emotionally statist: nothing but happy, no unpredicatable moods, no emotional progress. But, obviously, opposing biotech and happiness-promoting and death-cheating is technologically statist. I guess agreeing with Lawler comes down to believing that your growth as an individual can be derailed by technology. Which is certainly possible --there are over-medicated souls out there-- but probably doesn't happen in a majority of people. He closes with this line:

Perhaps even our Bobos and our experts can come to understand that a distinctively human life, with all its suffering and limitations, is good, precisely because the longing to love others and God is not an illusion, nor does it finally go unsatisfied.

Why is he trying to convert the bobos? Are they laying siege to his house? If I have a beef with Lawler it's with him assuming we'll all go the same path to enlightenment; there's no reason his struggle-upwards-towards-greatness-until-death people can't exist under the same constitution as "bobo" health-and-beauty cultists, and the rest of us, for that matter. Maybe he's just doing his civic duty to prevent any one group from taking over the national consciousness.

Did you ever think neocons are nerds who thought science fiction was too nerdy to take seriously? And so they get all bent out of shape now because they can't psychologically place new ideas in fictional enviroments to sort of test where they might go? So we end up with weighty philosophical pieces that would probably work better as science fiction. Their writers lack a certain internal fiction-making apparatus. I am probably one step from making a science fictional exceptionalism argument --and I'm already making an unsupportable claim-- so let's nip that in the bud there for the moment.

Lawler also wrote a piece comparing libertarians and compassionate conservatives. And he has a book coming out that this piece seems like a primer for.