The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

on not being spooked by the word “bourgeois” 81Golden Age painting is supposed to be “some sort of clodlike bourgeoisadhesion to the concrete.” 5 If the supposition were true, it would be hard toexplain the bourgeois enthusiasm for impressionist, or for that matterpostimpressionist, or for that matter abstract expressionist, painting. Beingbourgeois, Schama and I agree, is not the same thing as being stupidly literaland ethically corrupt. That’s the point of my own book, too, as of Schama’s:to celebrate the “bourgeois virtues”—if Schama would but accept the word.Buying, selling, owning and operating, managing, planning, advising,persuading, inventing, designing, inquiring, reporting, educating, researching,exploring, calculating, accounting, defending, prosecuting, judging,curing, helping, regulating, governing in Amsterdam and in New Amsterdam,in market work and in housework, in the seventeenth century andnow, do not automatically produce ethical salvation. But neither do theyautomatically produce ethical damnation. It is a life of navigating betweenthe sacred and the profane.“To be a Dutch burgher,” Schama declares, “meant avoiding being eithergodless or helpless.” 6 I agree. “Money-making, which the Calvinist Churchso detested, was tolerated by distinguishing between proper and improperways of making fortunes, and the concept of wealth as stewardship.” 7 Theleft could here note sarcastically, and accurately, that in the seventeenth century“proper stewardship” included piracy, slave trading, and colonialexploitation.“To be Dutch,” he concludes,“still means coming to terms withthe moral ambiguities of materialism,” now as in the Golden Age. 8 Yes.But coming to terms with the moral ambiguities of materialism is the lifeof any bourgeois person, Dutch or Florentine, American or English, Japaneseor South Asian. The early Medici bankers, two centuries before Schama’sDutch, writes Tim Parks, faced the same problem in ethical mechanics.“Precisely because [Cosimo il Vecchio] cares about his eternal soul he isaware of a fierce tension between the competing demands of the sacred andthe secular. A rich and powerful man who is also a devout Christian mustneeds be anxious.” 9 Such a bourgeois anxiety, Parks notes, would notdescribe the late Medici, by that time aristocratic dukes rather than highbourgeoisbankers.You can’t be rich and be loved, they say. The superstition is that to get richyou have to steal. Even the rich believe it. The anxiety of the rich middlingsort has been famous in social theorizing for a century, since Max Weber’sThe Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, as Schama notes. It was lively