3 Comments

nobody.really
February 14th, 2013 | 9:46 am

In his “More reflections on the culture of the upper middle class,” William Deresiewicz argues that the upper middle class grew up thinking of itself as transgressive, but has now become the Establishment. To truly be transgressive, the upper middle class would need to confront its own assumptions:

Here are some of the pieties that it might undertake to profane…. That the universe coheres in a mystical whole. That it all works out in the end…. The upper middle brow is as committed to the happy ending as is Hollywood. Tragedy is inadmissible: the recognition that loss is loss and cannot be recuperated, that most people’s lives end in failure and emptiness, that the world is never going to be a happy place, that the universe doesn’t love us.

Is Deresiewicz arguing that the upper middle class should reject religion?

Matthew Cantirino
February 14th, 2013 | 11:11 am

I don’t think so. The upper-middlebrow culture he’s referring to doesn’t really “get” (or practice) religion anyway. It sounds more like he’s calling out a certain kind of bourgeois, vague and comfortable “spiritual” trust in the “kindness of the universe,” a kind of echo of 19th century liberalism’s optimism about history and social progress.

Benighted Savage
February 15th, 2013 | 4:57 am

Is Deresiewicz arguing that the upper middle class should reject religion?

Sure sounds like a rejection of most religions, including Christianity, to me. Hard to tell, but perhaps he’s advocating a mix of existentialism and philosophical pessimism: less St. Paul, more H.P. Lovecraft.

Deresiewicz’s call in the final paragraph for a new “new avant-garde’ (or would that be a new new “new avant-garde”?) suggests that he has a firm grasp of the comic.