The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

170 chapter 12A woman can have a stoic courage in the face of the pain of chemotherapyyet lack the hope that makes it work. Physicians are finding that encouraginga lucid, realistic hope is therapeutic. The mind and body areconnected. Jerome Groopman of Harvard Medical School argues that“Hope ...does not cast a veil over perception and thought. In this way, it isdifferent from blind optimism: It brings reality into sharp focus.” 10 Hope isnot about fooling ourselves—or at any rate no more about fooling ourselves,after innocence, than are any of the other virtues. Hope, though areligious virtue, is not necessarily about religion.Comte-Sponville is quite correct to note that “all the barbarities of this[twentieth] century were unleashed in the name of the future, from Hitler’sthousand-year Reich to Stalinism’s promise of brighter and better tomorrows.”11 But such a remark contradicts his assertion that the only plausibleobject for hope is God, and shows the illogic in his case against countinghope among the great, if dangerous, virtues. La révolution or das deutscheVolk were plainly objects of hope. Yet they are equally plainly not God. Thatis one reason we need to keep hope firmly in view, because when unbalancedby the other virtues, it produces evil, such as revolutionary socialismor revolutionary fascism.Comte-Sponville attacks hope, then, as utopian, “the seductions of hopeand the dangers of utopia.” One can certainly agree that damage has beendone in the world by hopeful “utopic” theorists, as the tenth FederalistPaper skeptically put it. And the theorists did so especially after 1789. In thesame way a hopeful religious utopianism did damage in Europe for a thousandyears before 1789. 12 Such, for example, was Oliver Cromwell’s rejectionin the 1650s of the faithful precedent of the rule of law in favor of a hopefulvision of a city set upon a hill, and his arbitrary rule. But Hope does damageprecisely because it takes all the future as its imaginative object and itsethical end. When unbalanced it justifies any number of broken eggs tomake the imagined omelet. Hope is one of the characteristically humanvirtues—and when alone and unbalanced it is one of the characteristicallyhuman vices, too. The barbarities of the twentieth century were hopesgranted. Be careful what you hope for.Comte-Sponville declares that “faith and hope have left us; we live withoutthem.” 13 I do not think so. He and you and I do not in fact live withoutfaith and hope. No one does for long, not really, or else she goes offand hangs herself. Comte-Sponville confuses God with the numerous other