The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

love and the bourgeoisie 137becomes a bit Dilbertian. I’ve been in such organizations, and so have you.But usually it is not actual prudence, the good of the company, that is servedby on-the-job jerkness. As Dilbert itself shows, ego-tripping and irrationalobsession run a bad business into the ground, and some of the good ones,too. Likewise in Doonesbury, what is funny about Duke, the recurrentHunter Thompson figure, is his single-minded if drug-addled pursuit ofself-interest, set off against the selflessness of his girlfriend Miss Honey.The point is that actual workplaces are not often really like Dilbert’s orDuke’s. Robert Solomon puts it this way: “Is the community we work for awhite-collar version of hell, or is it a community where (despite the earlyhour) we are glad to see our colleagues and get on with the work of theday?” 29 More so as capitalism enriches its workers, and as its workerconsumersrequire to be treated like free citizens, the workplace becomes ahome place. More’s the pity, some have said, for it tempts people away to acomfortable place, the job, the office, to the loss of the home.I say again: look around at your own workplace. In the capitalist Westnow the chances are that it is not a satanic mill in which you labor in noiseand dust and isolation for twelve hours a day. It’s not the carding room of aYorkshire woolen mill in 1830. A recent survey finds that even in I’m-All-Right-Jack Britain half of the workers “look forward to going to work.” Inthe Tough-Guy United States, two-thirds do, and elsewhere in the developedworld still higher percentages. 30 Such employees go to work expecting to betreated like human beings, expecting to be even a little loved. An employeeof modern capitalism is ethically offended when her boss complains aboutthe harmless decorations festooned on her cubicle. Who does she think sheis? Doesn’t she love me? A wholly prudential worker, the economist’s monsterof prudence, or a preindustrial slave accustomed to abuse would beincapable of such indignation and sorrow.The writer Don Snyder tried construction work to survive one winter inMaine: “There were six of us working on the crew, but the house was solarge that we seldom saw one another. ...Once I walked right by a man[without greeting him] in my haste to get back to a second-story deck whereI had been tearing down staging. [The contractor] saw this, and he climbeddown from the third story to set me straight. ‘You can’t just walk by people,’he said. ‘It’s going to be a long winter.’” 31 Consultants on workplace politenessemphasize that saying hello to people is basic. Not saying hello is ofcourse imprudent—you alienate your coworkers by failing in this elementary