The following, will be published in The American Scholar. Copyright Donald N. McCloskey, 1994. Anyone wishing the rest of the article should direct a message saying so to xchange@univscvm.csd.scarolina.edu. (Appologies to Prof. McCloskey for the scanning errors.)
The other way of virtue-talk is plebeian, the way of St. Paul. The peasant suffers yet endures. "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God. . . . Owe no man any thing, but to love one another." Faith, hope, and charity, these three, but the greatest is charity. It is a "slave morality," bending to the aristocratic virtues that Nietzsche and other Hellenizers prized.
The two vocabularies of the virtues are spoken in the Camp and Common Achilles struts through the Camp in his Hephaestian armor, exercising a noble wrath. Jesus stands barefoot on the mount, preaching to the least of the Commoners.
And yet we live mostly now in the Town, we bourgeois or else we are moving to townly occupations as fast as we can manage, trading the old cow for a car. The aristocracy is gone, though some intellectuals wish not. And the prediction that the proletariat at the other end would become the universal class has proven to be mistaken.
Jobs for the two older classes are disappearing. Half of employment in rich countries is white collar, and rising. The very soldiers in capitalist democracies are shufflers of paper. The production of things has become steadily cheaper. A barber or a professor was not much more productive in 1990 than in 1800, for that matter in 400 BC. It still takes fifteen minutes with a pair of scissors to do short back and sides and 50 minutes with a piece of chalk to convey the notion of comparative advantage. But the farmer since 1800 has become more productive in the United States by a factor of 36. We cannot eat 36 times more food, though some of us try, and so the farmer's share in employment has fallen towards nil. A piece of cotton cloth that sold for 40 shillings in the 1780s sold in the 1850s for 5 shillings and nowadays, in the same values of money, for a few pence. The cheapness led spinning out of the home, then weaving, canning, men's clothing, women's clothing, food preparation. Stanley Lebergott recently calculated that food preparation fell 1900-1965 from 44 hours a week to 10. Calculating power itself--adding, multiplying, and carrying--that sold for $400 in 1970 sold for $4 in 1990. Workers on the line in American manufacturing peaked at about a fifth of the labor force after World War II and have since been falling, at first slowly. In fifty years a maker of things on an assembly line will be as rare as a farmer. What is left is hamburger flipping on the one side and bourgeois occupations on the other. It is usual to praise a pagan or a Christian virtue, and then to complain how much we moderns lack it. Shamefully we bourgeoisie are neither saints nor heroes. The age is one of mere iron--or aluminum, or plastic--not pagan gold or Christian silver. The townsfolk are useful, maybe necessary; but not VIRTUOUS. "Why, the very idea. Bourgeois VIRTUE" The bourgeois virtues have been reduced to the single vice of greed.
The intelligentsia thunders at the middle class, but offers no advice on how to be good within it. The only way to become a good bourgeois, say Flaubert and Sinclair Lewis and Paolo Pasolini, is to stop being one. Not having an ideal of bourgeois virtue, or devaluing the ideal by comparison with Christian and aristocratic virtue, leaves us unable to talk about virtue at all. We bourgeois are left without reasons for ethical standards. We are left with What's Profitable: "Yet a great deal of money is made here. Good day, sir."
Ethics courses in business and in medical schools exhibit the dilemma. Some time ago the Harvard Business School was given $20 million to study ethics in the old way, all the ethics that money could buy. Harvard Medical School has waxed ethical, too. The professors staffing the courses believe that ethical questions are matters of crisis. What are the ethics of insider trading? Would Jesus have signed on? What about the transplantation of organs? How would Kant have felt~about that one? Yet aristocratic or peasant virtue cannot offer much help minute-by-minute in being a good bourgeois.
Ethics has turned recently from universal theories to the particular virtues, as in Alasdair MacIntyre, AFTER VIRTUE: A STUDY IN MORAL THEORV, or John Casey, PAGAN VIRTUE: AN ESSAV IN ETHICS, and to narrative in aid of the virtues, as in Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin, THE ABUSE OF CASUISTRY: A HISTORY OF MORAL REASONING or Wayne Booth, THE COMPANV WE KEEP: AN ETHICS OF FICTION. Feminist thinking on the matter, such as Carol Gilligan, IN A DIFFERENT VOICE, or Nel Noddings, CARING: A FEMININE APPROACH TO ETHICS AND MORAL EDUCATION, has questioned the presumption of universal ethics, and in particular the worship of masculine virtues. As Bernard Williams puts it, in the new approach---as new as Aristotle---"morality is seen as something whose real existence must consist in personal experience and social institutions, not in sets of propositions." It is local knowledge, not universal, located in the camp or common or town.
Consider the virtues of the three classes, matched to their character. The "character" might be in the eyes of others, or in its own eyes, or, less commonly, in fact.
The Classes and the Virtues Aristocrat Patrician pagan Achilles pride of being honor forthrightness loyalty courage wit courtesy propriety magnanimity justice foresight moderation love grace subjective Peasant Plebeian Christian St. Francis pride of service duty candor solidarity fortitude jocularity reverence humility benevolence fairness wisdom frugality charity dignity objective Bourgeois Mercantile secular Benjamin Franklin pride of action integrity honesty trustworthiness enterprise humor respect modesty consideration responsibility prudence thrift affection self-possession conjectiveThe point is not to elevate bourgeois virtue over the others in some universal sense. The point is to sidestep universal senses. In some personal and social circumstances, courage is a virtue. (In others it is a vice, as Amelie Rorty has noted.) So is humility. (Likewise.) But when the class left out by the virtue-talk is half the population, on its way to all the population, the vocabulary of the virtues is not doing its job. As Richard Rorty puts it, "detailed descriptions of particular varieties of pain and humiliation (in, e. g., novels and ethnographies), rather than philosophical or religious treatises, were the modern intellectual's principal contributions to moral progress." THINGS FALL APART, or Borges, makes me act ethically towards Nigerians or Argentineans more than does any amount of philosophizing about universal good. A modern society needs poetry and history and movies about bourgeois virtue: integrity, honesty, trustworthiness, enterprise, humor, respect, modesty, consideration, responsibility, prudence, thrift, affection, self-possession.
So far it has gotten poetry and history and movies about the older virtues, looking back on many tower'd Camelot and sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain. The result has been mostly bad, as in the nationalist wars down to 1914 and the ideological wars that followed.
Hellenism, for example, made war into a contest of aristocratic virtues, Hector and Achilles armed with cordite and barbed wire. In his autobiography in 1928 the German classicist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff speaks fondly of a Scottish colleague, who "was a gentleman in the full sense of the word. . . . [He was] proud of his great nation and of the British Empire, as was proper, but also as true patriot ready to give free play to the patriotism and pride of another. United in this frame of mind as good friends," he continues, dreaming of Ilium and glory, "we sent our sons to meet each other in the field." Wilamowitz's son Tycho attained in the trenches of the War "an early death on the field of honour," honorably gassed, perhaps, or suffocated in his bunker, or run over by a truck.
Romantic teutonism, on the other hand, invented a primitive community of equals exhibiting the peasant virtues. The theory is still credited by non-historians. Prince Kropotkin, writing to the Russians in 1901 from a safely bourgeois nation, declared that communism would be "nearer to the folkmote self-government than representative government can ever be," and promised that "owing to the immense productivity of human labor which has been reached nowadays [and how reached, my Prince?]. . . a very high degree of well-being can easily be obtained in a few years by communist work." Ah yes, a few years of communist work.
We are all bourgeois now (for some decades about eighty percent of Americans have identified themselves as "middle class," a consciousness that may of course be false). The ideals of nationalism or socialism do not suit our lives. Those of townspeople, the bourgeoisie, do.
I am suggesting, in other words, that we stop sneering at the bourgeoisie, stop being ashamed of being middle class, and stop defining a~participant in an economy as an amoral brute. The bad talk creates a reality. Adam Smith knew that a capitalist society such as eighteenth-century Edinburgh could not flourish without the virtues of trustworthiness or bourgeois pride, supported by talk. Smith's other book, THE THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS, which even no economist reads, was about love, not greed; esteem, not venality. Yet even many economists have learned by now that moral sentiment must ground a market. (Some go on trying to solve the Hobbes Problem, well into its fourth century of irresolution, namely: can a mob of unsocialized brutes be proven on a blackboard to create in the end a civil society? The problem lacks point if people are already French or American.)
The growth of the market, I would argue, promotes virtue, not vice. Most intellectuals since 1848 have thought the opposite: that it erodes virtue. "It was a fundamental principle of the Gradgrind philosophy that everything was to be paid for . . . . be abolished, and the virtues springing from it were not to be. Every inch of the existence of mankind, from birth to death, was to be a bargain across a counter." As James Boyd White puts it in his otherwise admirable JUSTICE AS TRANSLATION, bourgeois growth is bad because it is "the expansion of the exchange system by the conversion of what is outside it into its terms. It is a kind of steam shovel chewing away at the natural and social world."
And yet we all take happily what the market gives--polite, accommodating, energetic, enterprising, risk-taking, trustworthy people; not bad people. In the Bulgaria of old (I am told by Poles who claimed to have seen it) the department stores had a policeman on every floor, not to prevent theft but to stop the customers from attacking the arrogant and incompetent clerks selling goods that fell apart at the moment of sale. The way a salesperson in an American store greets customers startles foreigners: "How can I help you?" It is an instance in miniature of bourgeois virtue. Even an ethics of greed for the almighty dollar, to take the caricature at its face value, is not the worst. For example, an ethics of greed is better than an ethics of slaughter, by patrician sword or plebeian pike. Commercial greed must work by mutual agreement, not by violence. Dr. Johnson said, "There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money." The disdain for modest greed is ethically naive, because it fails to acknowledge that the greed prospers in a market economy only by satisfying the customer.
Donald Trump offends. But for all the jealous envy he has provoked he is not a thief. He did not get his millions from aristocratic cattle raids, acclaimed in bardic song. He made, as he put it in his first book, deals. The deals were voluntary. He didn't use a .38 or a broadsword to get people to agree. He bought the Commodore Hotel low and sold it high because Penn Central, Hyatt Hotels, and the New York City Board of Estimate--and behind them the voters and hotel guests--put the old place at a low value and the new place, trumped up, at a high value. Trump earned a suitably fat profit for seeing that a hotel in a low-value use could be moved into a high-value use. An omniscient central planner would have ordered the same move. Market capitalism should be defended as the most altruistic of systems, each capitalist working, working, working to help a customer, for pay. Trump does good by doing well.
And even from a strictly individual view the bourgeois virtues, though not those of Achilles or Jesus, are not ethical zeroes. Albert Hirschman (who speaks precisely of "bourgeois virtues") recounts the career from Montesquieu to Marx of the phrase "DOUX COMMERCE," quoting for instance William Robertson in 1769: that sweet commerce "tends to wear off those prejudices which maintain distinctions and animosity between nations. It softens and polishes the manners of men." In his play at the dawn of bourgeois power, George Lillo has his ideal of the London merchant, Thorowgood, assert that "as the name of merchant never degrades the gentleman, so by no means does it exclude him." Thorowgood on leaving the office instructs his assistant to "look carefully over the files to see whether there are any tradesmen's bills unpaid." The aristocrat will sneer at such goody-goodness among the bourgeoisie; but after all, in seriousness, is it not a matter of virtue to pay one's tailor? What kind of person accepts the wares of tradesmen and refuses to give something in return, though promised? No merchant he.
The honesty of a society of merchants, as in that much maligned model of the mercantile society, the small Midwestern city, goes beyond what would be strictly self-interested in a society of rats. A reputation for fair dealing is necessary for a roofer whose trade is limited to a place of 50,000. One bad roof and he is finished in Iowa City, and so he practices virtue with care. By now he would not put on a bad roof even if he could get away with it, and behaves like a growing child internalizing virtues once forced on her. A woman at a cocktail party who told the story of the bad roof (redone for free, at the roofer instigation) refused to tell his name. A rat would have ruined the businessman to improve the story. After all, the woman's own reputation wasn't at stake.
A potent source of bourgeois virtue and a check on bourgeois vice is the premium that a bourgeois society puts on discourse. The bourgeois must talk. The aristocrat gives a speech, the peasant tells a tale. But the bourgeois must in the bulk of his transactions talk to an equal. It is wrong to imagine, as modern economics does, that the market is a field of silence. "I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following. . . . What news on the Rialto?"
For one thing, talk defines business reputation, as at the Iowa City cocktail party. A market economy looks forward and therefore depends on trust. The persuasive talk that establishes trust is necessary for doing much business, and is why co-religionists or coethnics deal so profitably with each other. Avner Greif has explored the business dealings of Mediterranean Jews in the Middle Ages, accumulating evidence for a reputational conversation. In 1055 one Abun ben Zedaka of Jerusalem, for example, "was accused (though not charged in court) of embezzling the money of a Maghribi trader. When word of this accusation reached other Maghribi traders, merchants as far away Sicily canceled their agency relations with him." Reputational gossip, Greif notes, was cheap, "a by-product of the commercial activity [itself] and passed along with other commercial correspondence." A letter from Palermo to an Alexandrian merchant who had disappointed the writer said, "Had I listened to what people say, I never would have entered into a partnership with you." With such information, cheating was profitless within the community.
Old Believers in Russia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries held a similar position, as Alexander Gerschenkron once pointed out. The Old Believers refused to adopt the late seventeenthcentury reforms in the Russian church, and were in other ways far from progressive. Yet because of their peculiarity they were able to establish a speech community within the larger society. Old Believers on the northern River Vyg, for example, were able in the early eighteenth century to become major grain merchants to the new St. Petersburg "by utilizing their connections with the other Old Believers' communities in the southern parts of the country." Sir William Petty observed at the time that "trade is not fixed to any species of religion as such, but rather to the heterodox part of the whole." Any distinction will do. Quakers were great merchants in eighteenth-century England. The overseas Chinese, segregated from the rest of the population (and therefore able to talk inexpensively with each other about breaches of contract among their own), are more successful in trade than their cousins at home.
The aristocrat does not deign to bargain. Hector tries, and Achilles answers: "argue me no agreements. I cannot forgive you./ As there are no trustworthy oaths between men and lions,/ Nor wolves and lambs have spirit that can be brought into agreement." The Duke of Ferrara speaks of his last, late duchess there upon the wall, "Even had you skill/ In speech--(which I have not)--to make your will/ Quite clear to such an one . . . . / --E'en then would be some stooping; and I choose/ Never to stoop." The aristocrat never stoops; the peasant stoops silently to harvest the grain or to run the machine; the bourgeois stoops metaphorically to make his will quite clear, and to know the will and reason of the other. The aristocrat's speech is declamation, and his proofs are like commands, which is perhaps why Plato the aristocrat and some Western intellectuals after him loved them so. The proof of the . . .
(for more of this essay, send a message to xchange@univscvm.csd.scarolina.edu) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- | Daniel R. McCloskey For subscription and | | Editor-in-Chief advertising information | | The Exchange: Culture Reason Style contact Brian Czernik at | | 641 Henderson, #3 711 15th SE, Cedar Rapids| | Columbia, SC 29201 Iowa, 52403. (319) 365- | | (803) 256-4707 2491. Sample issues $5. | | xchange@univscvm.csd.scarolina.edu Fax available. | ----------------------------------------------------------------------
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