Bourgeois Suburban Morality

The bourgeois suburban utility of life is an ecosystem. One that exists for an accessible pleasantness, for niceness, and for comfort. It’s within reach and demands only a slight amount of strain to knock it into one’s hands. It’s a culture, but it’s hardly cultured, since it can only glare at things one dimensionally. It’s careful not to scratch too hard, as a deeper understanding starts creating restlessness due to a sense of obligation to something beyond. Instead, it only resolves to lurk around the perimeter to make its assessment.

Comfort, the bastard child of actual pleasure, is what most people are striving for in our society. This is because actual pleasure does a similar thing as truth. It disrupts comfort if you dig for it, because pleasure and pain are inextricably linked. The bourgeois suburban ecosystem denounces pain and, as a result, has to avoid true pleasure when possible. It promises to sand away the sharp prickly edges to make it more user friendly. With this reduction can come the elimination of essence though. This is the moralized approach of the bourgeois suburbanite: to maintain the overall pleasantness of life.

Within this, fascination, mystery, and transcendence are discouraged though as they create too much friction with the world. The only real outlet then is fashion and living with irony and camp. The compartmentalization of the self becomes a critical exercise to maintain the inevitable incoherence. We are content to know that we aren’t alone in this and that it seems to be an overall effective approach.

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These are some thoughts I jotted down in 4/22/20. It is influenced by some of the things I was reading at the time, including: John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, and Gille Lipovetsky’s Hypermodern Times. It started as a reflection on aesthetics.