The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

132 chapter 8traditional, and gemeinschaftlich ways and values coexist with, and eveninterpenetrate, the characteristic ways of the modern world, contrary to amore monolithic understanding of modernization.” 11Brian Uzzi in an elegant 1999 paper in the American Sociological Reviewshowed that borrowing firms did best—saving 3 percentage points on theirborrowings, which is very large on loans costing 6 or 10 percent—when theymixed strong-tie relations with bankers (“X has been our bank for fiftyyears”) and arm’s-length ties. The firms mixed love/faith with prudence. 12You can do this in a big city. Focusing on the alienating, disintegrativeresults of big scale is a problem with the focus, not with the scale. And anywaya French peasant in the twelfth century was as “alienated” from thegoings-on of the upper levels of European Christendom as much as is amodern bourgeois from the goings-on of the upper levels of global capitalism.Yet both the peasant and the bourgeois live in families, have friends, haveprojects. All human communities work with prudence and solidarity. Both.A balanced set of virtues within prudent, economical, capitalist, marketorientedbehavior is not merely a supplement, a nice thing if you happen tohave a taste for it. It’s virtuous, and necessary for a good life. It’s necessaryfor transcendence, which gives life its worldly and its otherworldly value.Business, Michael Novak argues, is a “morally serious enterprise.” 13 By contrast,the Prudence Only behavior celebrated in recent economic fable isbad. Bad for prudent business—consult on this point Arthur Andersen. Badfor a just and faithful life. Bad for children and other beloveds. Most important,bad for the soul. We call it greed.The ethical wholeness matters. When the unionized teachers of Philadelphiaquarreled with the superintendent in the 1990s about reward-byresult,their anger came from the insult as much as from a prudent regardfor their tenure. Are we—we professionals—to be trained with incentiveslike seals? Their indignation cost the school system millions of dollars andits chance to teach the children to read.Professionals are educated to consider something other than pocket-bookprudence. It’s the very meaning of the word “profession,” as distinct from“racket.” I recently was introduced to an architect and told him I was aneconomist. He replied, only half joking, “I hate economics,” and explainedamiably that what he meant is that all day long he has to ask if Prudence is