The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

6sweet love vs. interestSo-called Samuelsonian economics is the main sort at American universitiestoday. The only way it can acknowledge love is to reduce it to food forthe implicitly male and proud lover, on a par with the other “goods” he consumes,such as ice cream or apartment space or amusing gadgets fromBrookstone. Screwtape in fact is suspicious of the very existence of “love,”and reinterprets it as interest. God’s “love” for human beings “of course, isan impossibility....All his talk about Love must be a disguise for somethingelse—He must have some real motive....What does he stand to make outof them?” 1A Samuelsonian economist will say, “It’s easy to include ‘love’ in economics.Just put the beloved’s utility into the lover’s utility function,U Lover(Stuff Lover, Utility Beloved).” Neat. Hobbes, who seems to have had in hisown life little to do with love, wrote in this economistic way in 1651: “Thatwhich men desire they are also said to Love. ...so that desire and love arethe same thing. ...But whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite ordesire, that is it which he for his part calleth Good.” 2 Or, the modern economistssay, “goods.” But to adopt such a vocabulary is to absorb the belovedinto the psyche of the lover, as so much utility-making motivation. Aquinascalled it “concupiscent love”—“as when we love wine, wishing to enjoy itssweetness, or when we love some person for our own purposes of pleasure.”3 It can be virtuous or not depending on its object. But it is not thehighest love unless it ascends: “Rare is the love of goods,” David Klemmremarks, “that remains true to the love of God as the final resting place ofthe heart’s desire.” 4