The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

solidarity regained 141politics, of a women’s reading group, of a bridge club, of a service organization,of hospital volunteers, of a local coffee house, of Giants fans, of Berkeleyites,of Californians, of Americans, of world citizens passionately awareof our shared big blue marble. What is wrong with that?What exactly has humanity lost from such “fragmentation”? It should beeasy to gather actual evidence on the amount of fragmentation and especiallythe amount of “loss” if it is so very pervasive a feature of modern capitalistlife. The evidence needs to be comprehensive in its accounting andserious in its history. It should not be a notion generalized from Durkheim’sanomie or from a professor’s whinge against his bourgeois neighbors.The century-and-a-half-old premise among anticapitalists is that wehave through capitalism lost a good world worth keeping. But evidencehas in fact been assembled by generations of social historians since 1900against the German Romantic idea of a Black Forest homeland for a noblepeasantry—a peasantry which allegedly benefited from more densely texturedstructures of meaning than we moderns can muster.The evidence is overwhelming. The historians have found that theGemeinschaft of olden times was defective. The murder rate in villages in thethirteenth century, to take the English case, was higher than comparableplaces now. 2 Medieval English peasants were in fact very mobile geographically,“fragmenting” their lives. 3 The imagined extended family of “traditional”life never existed in England. 4 Or, to turn to other instances: Thesweetness of the old-fashioned American family has been greatly exaggerated.5 The Russian mir was neither ancient nor egalitarian, but a figment ofthe German Romantic imagination. 6 Vietnamese peasants did not live intranquil, closed corporate communities. 7Love, in short, is arguably thicker on the ground in the modern, Western,capitalist world. Or at any rate it is not obviously thinner on the groundthan in the actual world of olden and allegedly more solid times. The feministNancy Folbre remarks that “we cannot base our critique of impersonalmarket-based society on some romantic version of a past society as one bighappy family. In that family, Big Daddy was usually in control.” 8Robert Bellah and his coauthors of The Habits of the Heart (1985) repeatthe tale of lost solidarity. It is one of their main themes. “Modernity,” theysay without offering evidence—why seek evidence for so obvious a truth?—“has had . . . destructive consequences for social ecology . ..,[which] isdamaged . . . by the destruction of the subtle ties that bind human beings to