Toronto: Justice Denied

The hucksters and tourism shills tell us that Toronto is an intellectual city, a city of ideas. Even as I write, its expansive creative class is busy racking up the social capital we’re told is essential to postmodern civic success. In one sense, this is hardly news. The year I arrived at the University of Toronto, 1980, Marshall McLuhan died. His influence was so pervasive that his physical existence had been rendered almost superfluous, a development he would have appreciated. Harold Innis, less well known but arguably more brilliant, had tracked the change, already well under way, of Canada from being a resource basket to a linked series of communications nodes held together by thought. Northrop Frye was still lecturing and would last another decade. All of them had long since put Toronto on any map of ideas worth consulting, long before newsmagazine polls and website ratings. None of us who studied here, living in big shared houses in Kensington or the then less-gentrified Annex, had any doubt about that.

That fact has not changed. But the economic and social conditions of ideas have changed, here as much as elsewhere, putting the city on the brink of a certain kind of identity, and a certain kind of success: a creative-class boom town. My suggestion is that we are thinking about this possibility in exactly the wrong way. The question for Toronto now is not whether ideas can flourish in this place, because demonstrably they do, but what consequences in justice that flourishing will entail. On the edge of new identities and possibilities, what is our idea of justice?

Most recent discussion of “idea cities” has betrayed a strange lack of political awareness. The talk has largely revolved around first the fact and then the consequences of what Richard Florida breathlessly called “the Big Morph.” In The Rise of the Creative Class, his oddly hucksterish 2002 work of bestselling urban geography, Florida noted more than just his central thesis: that a city’s economic success could be accurately correlated with its “Bohemian Index” — the number of “writers, designers, musicians, actors and directors, painters and sculptors, photographers and dancers” to be found in its urban population. He also argued that this group was increasingly indistinguishable from the business leaders and entrepreneurs that a pre-postmodern picture would have seen as the creatives’ natural opponents. Instead of opposing, they were blending. “Highbrow and lowbrow, alternative and mainstream, work and play, ceo and hipster are all morphing together today,” he wrote. “At the heart of the Big Morph is a new resolution of the centuries-old tension between two value systems: the Protestant work ethic and the bohemian ethic.”

The point had already been illustrated at length in 2000 by the journalist David Brooks in his sometimes wry work of amateur social theory (Brooks called it “comic sociology”) Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. The fusion of bourgeois and bohemian — hence the unfortunate bobo, deliberately reminiscent of clowns and monkeys — resulted as a natural consequence of the information age, creating a new upper class, to quote the book’s subtitle. The postmodern information economy, which McLuhan (and Innis before him) had so deftly analyzed, has created, for the first time in history, a situation where ideas are as “vital to economic success as natural resources or finance capital.” Bobos are the natural aristocrats of an idea-based world. If twenty-first-century Toronto, perhaps Canada tout court, was trending away from material resources and toward non-material ones — a think nation, a concept incubator — this was all very good news indeed.

“These Bobos define our age,” Brooks claimed. “They are the new establishment. Their hybrid culture is the atmosphere we all breathe. Their status codes now govern social life.” The images of bobo work and play are now stock-in-trade, if not mere cliché, cultural description: suv-driving, npr-listening, Adorno-quoting upper-middles who live for expensive fair trade coffee and organic baby arugula, and hang a Free Tibet flag over the three-car garage of the house in Berkeley with a three-bridge view (or in Toronto, a lake view, proximity to Starbucks, a radio tuned to cbc, and access to Cumbrae Farms organic beef ).

Such images naturally generate absurdity, especially since cultural habits are always also ethical ones. “The visitor to Fresh Fields is confronted with a big sign that says ‘Organic Items today: 130,’” Brooks wrote. “This is like a barometer of virtue. If you came in on a day when only 60 items were organic, you’d feel cheated. But when the number hits the three figures, you can walk through the aisles with moral confidence.”

Brooks was even more enthusiastic than Florida about the possibilities of the new reality. The bobos, he argued, are an “elite based on brainpower” rather than family ties. In an especially hilarious riff, he dismantles the presuppositions of the New York Times wedding announcement page by arguing that intelligence has replaced pedigree as the basic sign of social distinction. “On the Times weddings page, you can almost feel the force of the mingling sat scores,” he says. “It’s Dartmouth marries Berkeley, mba weds Ph.D., and summa cum laude embraces summa cum laude (you rarely see a summa settling for a magna — the tension in such a marriage would be too great).” And so “dumb good-looking people with great parents have been displaced by smart, ambitious, educated, and antiestablishment people with scuffed shoes.” The resulting smugness and apparent cultural contradictions are, he suggests, like a $5 latte, actually worth the price. “Today the culture war is over, at least in the realm of the affluent,” the book concluded. “The centuries-old conflict has been reconciled.”

Despite the upbeat, almost triumphant tone of these claims, and the swift popularity of the Big Morph thesis, the reality was, as usual, a lot more complex and depressing. Brooks and Florida were both writing before the events of September 11, 2001, changed the political and cultural landscape of the United States. The red and blue zones of the stolen 2004 election — comically rendered by a cartoonist as “Jesusland” and “the United States of Canada” — revealed a nation just as riven as ever, if no longer along the yuppie/hippie lines that had been reliably firm since the time when the yuppies were captains of industry and the hippies were the poets and philosophers of the Concord school. There was no Big Morph, just a redrawing of lines and a shifting of cultural weight: multiple mini-morphs.

Structural injustices, meanwhile, remained as devastating as ever, disparities in wealth growing even more obscene under cover of this cultural-critical sophistication. One critic called Brooks “the idiot savant of social analysis” — great at discerning the telling detail, but wholly unable to see the political meaning of anything. Brooks had it both ways, mocking the bobos even as he celebrated them, laying down pseudo-intellectual cover for the cheerful complacency at their heart. The happy claims for bobo meritocracy, meanwhile, are, over and over, revealed as just a new version of the old lie called the American Dream, which functions mutatis mutandis among the privileged on both sides of the border. Ivy League universities — surely an essential bobo gateway — still support legacy admissions, alumni giving, and private investment: all facts guaranteed to ensure success by lineage rather than talent.

Even in the places where a bobo fusion is arguably real, such as turn-of-the-millennium Toronto, with its Queen Street mix of money and art, its Spoke Club social porousness of media, finance, and the arts, the development was, as many critics pointed out, actually very bad news for the creative types. The bobo fusion, such as it was, deprived them of their natural enemies, not to mention the source of much of their self-image, namely that sacrificing worldly success for creative fulfillment demonstrated moral superiority. Erase that shift in value — project all value on a single scale that blends creativity and wealth — and many formerly successful bohemians are revealed as mere losers. As significantly, the single-value scale eliminated the possibility of satire, something already noted as a casualty of a celebrity culture in which no outrage or indignity is more imaginable than the nightly reality.