The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

love and the bourgeoisie 133worth this or that sacrifice of Quality. A friend who is a professional lightingdesigner says that the pressure of Prudence Only is something he has to resistall day. He could get a little more profit by doing a little worse job, using thewrong wattage here or there, cutting this or that corner. But he won’t. He’s alighting designer, not a crook.It’s a matter of identity, and makes society possible. We tell jokes aboutdoctors performing surgery on our pocketbooks and about lawyers closingthe curtains and asking us how we want it to come out. But most peoplewould reject a career of doctoring or lawyering if they actually credited thejokes, since most people do not want to be thieves or con men. Law andhealth would collapse if the only careers were such dishonest versions. Politicsthreatens to, always. Cynicism about careers on the Cook CountyBoard or in the Italian Parliament means that the government is in fact leftto the crooks, and republican virtue is put under siege.Blair Kamin, an architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, rails oftenagainst a local architect named Loewenberg for his cookie-cutter skyscrapers.The buildings are so notorious that they have spawned a noun todescribe how they “blight” a neighborhood,“Loewenbergization.” The otherChicago architects are scandalized that Loewenberg will put up a high-risea mere twenty blocks from another that reuses the very same blueprints.Goodness. In Chicago such economizing at the expense of Art mattersbecause the place fancies itself the architectural capital of the known universe.According to Kamin the offending Loewenberg buildings exhibit a“sterile symmetry and unarticulated surfaces that recall the old housingblocks of East Berlin,” “dismal themes,” “overgrown and under-detailed,”“comically bad.” 14You can see that Mr. Kamin does not like Mr. Loewenberg’s work. Towhich Loewenberg calmly replies, “We design to a budget.” Kamin in turnfumes, “That attitude is as cynical as it is lamentable, an abrogation of thearchitect’s responsibility to design for the broader public.” Kamin is tryingto shame Loewenberg, and any architect who might think to imitateLoewenberg, into being professional beyond Prudence Only. Loewenbergand his clients aren’t buying. Kamin and I think they should.The conflict pervades our culture. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenanceis still assigned in the business schools as a deliberation about qualityand rhetoric. But most of what the students are taught there is a variationon Prudence Only.