While living in Greenwich Village in New York City at the start of the twentieth century, Randolph Bourne surrounded himself with intellectuals, revolutionaries, and artists. Unsatisfied with American culture- namely, the puritanical morals, sentimental literature, and the obsession with dated traditions- these thinkers began to live a more bohemian lifestyle, free from the shackles of capitalism and consumerism. Bourne wrote extensively criticizing the masses for blindly falling into the predetermined positions society had set out for them. He called on people to experiment with life, to try to be an individual and fulfill their true potential. He called on people to look at everything with a suspicious eye, and to cast off the dated and flawed traditions of the old generation. Yet despite his good intentions, Bourne failed to offer any real solutions to the problems he perceived. Living a privileged life, he did not need to worry about where to get his next meal, leaving him free to sit in his ivory tower, criticizing the faults of society. He has insights to the faults of the bourgeoisie because that is where he came from, and in his writings, he addresses fellow privileged people, encouraging them to reject the culture as he has, while conveniently not offering any solution for the working class.
Bourne had the freedom and the privilege to live what he calls “the life of irony.” He described this as a “pleasant challenging of the world.” Ironists force society to look at their beliefs, their styles, their professions, and their faith from an outside perspective. They put on the costume an opposing viewpoint in order to show those people what they look like. This forces the person to defend and justify their beliefs. The statement that honest hard work will bring about success “becomes a ghastly irony in the mouth of an unemployed working man.” He believed that irony would flush out old and useless ideals that were destroying the very fabric of American culture. Once ironists waged the war on American ideals, only the strongest and most valid viewpoints would remain standing. Bourne saw a need for more ironists, more people to take up the task of “stimulating thought and action.”
That being said, if all uncorrupted minds were busy “stimulating thought and action,” who would be left to do all the thinking and the acting? Bourne admits, although dismissively, that “without people and opinions for his mind to play on… irony withers and faints.” Ironists need other opinions to “expose” because they do not have any opinions of their own. They are intellectual parasites, feeding off the minds of others, refusing to stop until people are too afraid to believe anything at all. Bourne stated the ironist has “lost his egotism completely,” and rightly so. The ironist is certainly not self-centered; in fact he is anything but. He constantly dwells on the thought processes of others, and nothing else. He is thus “kept clean from hate and scorn,” leaving one to not be able to help but see this way of thinking as cowardly.
Bourne advocated an experimental life where one threw off the shackles of society's expectations, ignoring the traditional track of education and a career. He rejected rationality, saying that it implied “a world that is too good to be true,” yet living the experimental life implies an even more idealistic world where one only has to be “aided by good fortune and opportunity.” He refutes the idea that the experimental life puts “one at the mercy of chance,” saying that “the dice of the experimenter are always loaded.” For Bourne the dice were indeed loaded, loaded with excess money and ability to write well enough to get published. One can even use Bourne's own rationale against him, critiquing his other viewpoints by putting them in the mouth of another person. Just as the adage of hard work leading to success sounds absurd in the mouth of a working man, so does the concept of the experimental life. When living hand to mouth, one does not have the time or leisure to “experiment” with different approaches, testing “possibilities for the enhancement of happiness.” When survival is involved, the tried and true method is the only viable option.
His writing is littered with contradicting evidence and ideas. He bemoaned rationality, yet praised pragmatism. Yet, is pragmatism not rational? What could be more rational than a practical, step by step addressing of issues? While what Bourne was criticizing is the practice of blindly and stubbornly following a path that one rationally assumes will help them reach their end, who in their right mind, when encountering an obstacle, does not try to adapt their plan to get around that obstacle? It is difficult to ascertain just what it was he is advocating. He criticized the practice of setting goals and following dreams, merely because in the pursuit of those dreams, one can encounter “a series of surprises.” Instead, he suggested that one ask “whether something good is not sure to come whichever way the dice fall.” Where does one find situations so fool proof? Anything is worth trying with that kind of safety net, yet it was Bourne who criticized others for perceiving the world as “too good to be true.”
Randolph Bourne had wonderful and inspiring ideas on how to live, providing valid and well constructed criticisms on where it was that American culture had gone wrong. He provided the perfect model for decedents of the bourgeoisie who did not want to fall into the monotonous and shallow life of their fathers. However, Bourne did not address the true problems of society. His boredom with society took precedence over his disgust with capitalism. He was more concerned with the next generation of artists than he was of the next generation of the oppressed and impoverished working class. Much of his writing was frivolous grumblings about the upper middle class and the choices, or lack thereof, which they made in their lives.
