It’s hard to explain what gets an otherwise normal person on the bohemian track. In a tamed culture, certain people with a gift for the arts are labeled “bohemian” as children and are pushed into that sector. As they learn their craft, they also pick up the lifestyle appropriate to the bohemian part of town, including a certain maliciousness which is considered exciting by normal folks. Everyone in the arts tend to have that side to them, as it’s how they protect themselves.

Yes, even Ayn Rand can be presumed to have had it. Her use of “moocher” could have very well had its origins in her husband (Frank O’Connor) being called “mickey” by someone, and he responding with words such as: “Well, if I’m ‘mickey,’ then you’re ‘minnie’.” Add Cab Calloways’s famous song (sung in the movie The Blues Brothers as the opener) and you’ve got the standard M.O. of how one of her more famous terms got put into Atlas Shrugged.

(Rand might have pulled another one: Sinclair Lewis, a lifelong critic of the Episcopal way of life, might have gotten that way through disagreeable experiences at Yale a hundred years ago. His ditching of his first wife and his remarriage in 1925 to Dorothy Thompson must have gotten the maliciousness out of the types of people he insulted in his books – probably expressed by calling Dorothy “Mr. Thompson.” Rand, a continual supporter of Lewis, might very well have used a batback in Atlas Shrugged with something like this as her fuel: “Do you want to see ‘Mr. Thompson’? Why don’t I show him to you...?”)

The culture at this time is untamed; I need hardly describe it. One reason is that the traditional way of organizing the bohemian sector has been wrecked by the possibility of big money in the artistic field, which calls forth the usual entrepreneurial talent in a market society. Another reason is the culture of America’s contact with that of Europe, and the discovery on the part of Americans that people who would otherwise be businesspeople or professionals are shoved regularly into the artistic and intellectual field in Europe. The successful European characterization of American intellectual and artistic endeavors as ‘mediocre’ can be largely explained through the use of Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage.

But there’s another factor as well, which hinges on something as simple as body type. In America, mesomorphs are encouraged to pursue the physical life, whereas Europe uses standards more cerebral: anyone that has a knack for the books goes into the intellectual field. In the United States, such a man – a mesomorph that is clearly cerebral in orientation – tends to be sized up as a “creep.” (Unless they wear mufti, through the cultivation of a just-folks quality, and combine it with an appropriate excuse as to why they sometimes seem “out of it.”) I’m sure that seeing a bunch of fellows which the untrained American eye would size up as “freakish” being treated – seriously – as great intellectuals all over Europe would have been sufficiently jolting to hurt.

In addition, European bohemians tend to be raised as cruelly as circus performers are, and this shows in their adult writings and discourse. Since this clashes with the traditional Episcopal way of raising an artist, it’s little surprise that the American bohemian sector has an anti- Episcopal bias.

All of these changes have led to a part of American culture which is profoundly wild – heath- like. This began with the importation of (believe it or not) nineteenth-century German intellectual thought – specifically, Nietzsche and the mature Marx. Both were considered truly dangerous in the early twentieth century.

Part of the reason why the culture of America got unhinged in the 1960s was that the full impact of the transference of the European way of selecting intellectuals – purely merit-based – began to be felt. Conventional conservative thought ascribed the troubles of that era to the introduction of mass college education, which led to a huge collection of hangers-on convinced that they were truly “great” simply because they memorized the workings of great intellectuals. In otherwords, higher education for the masses brought the “intellectuale” to United States soil, a creature similar to the “artiste.” Someone that pursued the bohemian lifestyle, but had no inherent talent or self-discipline for their chosen field – a draft-dodger with a new kind of act.

But there were enough European-style, hard- driving bohemians at the time – particularly in the music field – to make the Old Right’s argument fall flat. People can tell if someone is self-disciplined or not, and if self-discipline is seen as an admirable character trait, then the characterization of a certain type of self- disciplined man or woman as a mere “ruffian” is going to ring false.

That’s why the old conservative criticisms of “Brummagen U.” (Russell Kirk’s phrase) fell flat back then, and are now consigned to the dust- covered sections of the bigger libraries. The people that read them were warned that nothing but fool’s gold would result from the democratization of education, which did largely protect them from the charms of the New Left, but there were enough samples that yielded to the tooth like real gold – that did not taste of pyrite – to make the Old Right’s critique implausible. Its reconstruction would take a lot greater depth of argument than was used by the original writers.

Even Kirk bent with the times. Near the end of Decadence and Renewal in the Higher Learning, he had a few good things to say about experimental colleges. Despite the fact that many of them, like Toronto’s Rochdale, turned into little more than drug dens.

And, later, condominiums. Once again, Peter Babbitt was hemmed in.