The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

158 chapter 10twentieth century fits even modern history poorly. And it was not favoredby most of the ancients in theory. Cicero lambastes the Epicureans—theancient Mediterranean’s version of Max U economists—as “those men whoin the manner of cattle [pecundum ritu, literally, “by the rite of the cattle”]refer everything to pleasure” and who “with even less humanity ...say thatfriendships are to be sought for protection and aid, not for caring.” He callsthem “men abandoned to pleasure,” who “when they dispute about friendshiphave understanding of neither its practice nor its theory.” 25Adam Smith, allegedly the inventor of a theory that made do withoutlove, did not in fact follow such an odd theory in his work or in his life.Smith and his friends thought of sympathy as creating a trusting society asby an invisible hand, in the way that prudence created an efficient one, anargument stressed by the economist Jerry Evensky. 26 As Daniel G. Arce M.put it, citing Evensky, “It is the coevolution of individual and societal ethicsthat leads to the stability of classical liberal society.” 27 Pahl concludes that“sometime in the eighteenth century friendship appeared as one of a newset of benevolent social bonds.” 28 It was not in modern times but in theolden times that the life of man was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.This is no paradox. When a poor man can buy as much for his penny asa rich man, though he have fewer pennies, he is not required to doff his hatto get his daily bread. He does not need to pretend to be an ally of thebutcher or the baker. This frees him when the occasion arises to be a realfriend, an equal. Allan Silver notes that “the intense loyalties, coexisting withthe frank expectation of reward, found in codes and cultures of honorbefore commercial society” were not nice and were not good for real, that is,bourgeois, friendship. Samuel Johnson described an aristocratic “patron” inhis Dictionary as “a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid in flattery,”in the fashion of Lord Chesterfield. Johnson found the relationshipwith his paying bourgeois readers more satisfactory: “No man but a blockheadever wrote, except for money.”In a world governed by honor one makes friends to keep from beingassaulted, Cicero’s “protection and aid.” In a world governed by markets onebuys protection, one hopes, anonymously with taxes or with fees to one’scondominium association, and then is at leisure to make friends for the sakeof real friendship. Modern capitalism—though we must not suppose, asmany people do, that markets did not exist before 1800—was supported by,and supported in turn, a trust in strangers that still distinguishes prosperous