The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

5love and the transcendentLove reaches up to God.In The Four Loves (1960) C. S. Lewis contrasts “need-love” like that of asmall child for its mother with “gift-love” like that of a mother for her smallchild and “appreciation-love” like that of a mother and child for each otherin maturity. Need-love expresses a need and dependency; gift-love a desireto serve in fulfillment of one’s identity; appreciation-love an admiration,satisfied to view the face forever. Lewis observed that eros, one sort of lovefor human beings, “transforms what is par excellence a Need-pleasure [thatis, mere lust or chemistry] into the most Appreciative of all pleasures,” as thelover grows to see the beloved as desirable in himself. 1But the point would apply to the love of any need-pleasuring thing thatone comes to savor in a nongluttonous way, as one “appreciates” wine. Suchelevation of the form of love can accompany market-using consumption.Not all consumption is unloving. Even a consumption-scorning academiccan get a sense of this if she will fondly bring to mind her variorum editionof Paradise Lost in her professional library, or her new centrifuge in herlaboratory.Yet the need-love for earthly things is of course dangerous. The theologianDavid Klemm summarizes Augustine so: “Most people . ..become attachedto their objects of desire, and in this way are in fact possessed by them,” needingand dependent. 2 It is, Klemm says elsewhere, “a window-shopping of thesoul in which I lose myself in desires for shallow and untrue goods.” 3 But“those who use their private property for the sake of enjoying God becomedetached from their goods and thereby possess them well,” paradoxically. 4 The