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The Educated Elites: Chapter Analysis

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Words 998
Pages 4
Joshua Miranda
Fr. Johnson
AP English Language and Composition
8 August 2014

"The educated elites didn't set out to create this reconciliation. It is the product of millions of individual efforts to have things both ways. But it is now the dominant tone of our age."(Brooks 43) When David Brooks returned after four years abroad he noticed some peculiar things: "throughout the twentieth century it's been pretty easy to distinguish between the bourgeois world of capitalism and the bohemian counterculture." "But I returned to an America in which the bohemian and the bourgeois were all mixed up."(Brooks 10) The information age has brought us many things such as: the cell phone, email, and the personal computer, but it also put a new blend of …show more content…
That was small seed that gave way to the rise of the meritocrats, and eventually the Bobos. The WASP were so caught up in their pride they did not realize what was going on until it was too late. That is the curse of power you think you are above everyone, however you don’t realize that there are clever people who will do anything to achieve that same …show more content…
There aren't a lot of statistics in these pages. There's not much theory. Max Weber has nothing to worry about from me. I just went out and tried to describe how people are living, using a method that might best be described as comic sociology. The idea is to get at the essence of cultural patterns, getting the flavor of the times without trying to pin it down with meticulous exactitude. Often I make fun of the social manners of my class (I sometimes think I've made a whole career out of self-loathing), but on balance I emerge as a defender of the Bobo culture. In any case, this new establishment is going to be setting the tone for a long time to come, so we might as well understand it and deal with it.” (Brooks 12) Brooks, overall, wrote Bobos in Paradise to show that there is a new social class brewing and someday it would explode onto the scene. He backed up this claim by explaining the history of the two classes, where they started to mesh, their influence in society, and their spiritual beliefs. He not only uses textual evidence, he also uses his experiences to show the Bobo influence. Brooks’s tone, as he described in the line above, is a mix, he does go out and describe what he see but, he does use numbers to show how the bourgeois have influenced the Bohemians and vice versa with what furniture stores are now starting to

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