The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

82 chapter 3in eighteenth-century writing on social ethics, too, such as that of Montesquieuand Adam Smith commending the bourgeoisie. And the anxietyproducingtension between the sacred and the profane has been an obsessionin Christianity since the Sermon on the Mount.A hungry peasant or a well-heeled aristocrat has, as we say, no issues withmoney and consumption. It’s “eat black bread every chance you get” or“endow St. Paul’s with stained glass.” No issues there. But the middenstandlive with the moral ambiguities of materialism. They have so very much ofthat matter, after all, and know how it was earned. Should a tithe for mychurch be reckoned before or after taxes? Is it hubris for Silas Lapham tobuild a vulgar house in the Back Bay? Should Emma Woodhouse persuadeHarriet not to marry a mere farmer?If the bourgeois Dutch nowadays excuse their wealth with good workssuch as the expedition to Srebrenica, so do bourgeois Americans now, whoattend church for this purpose in startling numbers, and who like the Dutchembark on errands of mercy abroad which they sometimes do not have thearistocratic courage or peasant faithfulness to finish. In the great days ofbourgeois Florence and Venice the churches themselves were lusciously decoratedin expiation for the taking of interest and the taking of advantage.Parks instances the tomb and old sacristy in the Church of San Lorenzocommissioned from Brunelleschi and Donatello by Cosimo’s father, thefounder of the bank. 10 The guilt and pride of the bourgeoisie has festoonedour cities.As Schama himself conceded, “The tensions of a capitalism that endeavoredto make itself moral were the same whether in sixteenth-centuryVenice, seventeenth-century Amsterdam or eighteenth-century London.” 11That is the right tactic for reforming our discussions about the rise of thebourgeoisie: namely, to note and analyze its ethical tensions. The mistake isto flee from the very word “bourgeois” because some people use it to mean“bad bosses,” or indeed from the word “ethics” because some people use itto mean “inessential rules of business just short of indictable crimes,” or“morality” because some people use it to mean “puritanical, sex-obsessedhypocrisy.”Schama has a fascinating chapter on housewifery. Why do the Dutchscrub their stoops? Why in Dutch but not in other Germanic languages isthe word for “clean” the same as the word for “beautiful”? The Japanese, bythe way, are similar. Among both people, and not among their neighbors,