The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

140 chapter 9has access to less densely structured textures of meaning, a thinner, lesslove-filled life, than his ancestors. The student reads, let us say, English perfectlyand French and German very well, and can understand a little spokenCantonese. He is married and has a three-year-old daughter—whose feet,by the way, he wouldn’t think of binding. He needs only to complete hisPh.D. dissertation on “The Abstract Forms of Expression and Relatedness inModern Life: A Study of Tönnies and Durkheim” to take up a satisfyingcareer of teaching and research. He has fellow graduate students he will keepas beloved friends for a long life. He stays in touch with his college classmates,and with some of his friends from the neighborhood where he grewup, in Rio Linda, north of Sacramento.In what feature exactly, one might ask Professor Selznick, is the graduatestudent able to enjoy less texture, structure, concreteness in his expressionand relations than his male ancestors? One of his male ancestors was hisimmigrant great-great-grandfather working as a coolie on railway constructionin Nevada—he died in a tunnel collapse at age thirty-one.Another great-great-great grandfather lived in a village in southeast China.He could not read a single character, and left the village once only, feet first,when he died at age forty-four.On the face of it, the graduate student has a more textured, structured,concrete life, and a more uniform, flexible, and abstract one than these men.He has wider experience, a life twice or three times as long, more friends,longer-living relatives, more interesting work, and access to the world’s bestin spiritual experiences—advanced Buddhist thought, for example, or thepiano sonatas of Beethoven.True, he cannot go back to the ignorance of his ancestors. None of uscan, after innocence. We know that the earth is round (p < .05), we knowthat cholera is caused by sewerage in the drinking water, we know that peoplewith good advanced degrees in the humanities are capable of serving asSS officers. We cannot forget so by an act of will. But what of it?Selznick says that “the fundamental truth is that modernity weakens cultureand fragments experience.” Does this mean that moderns don’t have aculture? That can’t be right. Does it mean that the moderns participate inmore villages, so to speak, than their home village alone? Yes: they participatein the village of work, the village of an extended family in which relativessurviving into their eighties are commonplace, the village of a churchor temple, of a professional association, of a square-dancing club, of local