The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

possible objects of Hope and Faith, showing in particular the atheist’s stonyinability to grasp that these other objects, in which he does believe, are psychologicallythe same as the God in which he proudly does not. Similarly in1902 Bertrand Russell declared that a free man’s worship was to be erectedon “the firm foundation of unyielding despair.” 14 One wonders why; butespecially whether: Russell was miserable as a child, but as an adult gave fewsigns of despair, yielding or not.In a similar Schopenhauerian vein, Romantically attractive now fornearly two centuries but still dubious, Comte-Sponville declares that politicsis a matter of “will . . . not hope.” 15 I think not. Will and prudence act tobalance and complete hope, as do faith and the other virtues. Politics, like theeconomy, is a field for the exercise of all the virtues together, and the vices.The will itself is a mixture of courage and temperance. The unsystematicand one-by-one conception Comte-Sponville has of the virtues shows uphere. He does not see how virtues talk to each other.Comte-Sponville in the end simply doesn’t want hope and faith in hisbook. But after all they are part of human life, and keep barging in. The reasonthey do so—and here is something to be learned from the Frenchclerisy’s three-century-old distaste for religion—is that faith and hope arethe verbal virtues. They require the symbolism of words. The invention oflanguage and with it metaphor and other art made theorizable an imaginedpast and an imagined future. “The peculiar power of the human mind,”wrote Stuart Hampshire, following his master Spinoza, “is the power tothink about its own states and processes, and, by this reflective thinking, tomodify them.” 16 The cave painters of Lascaux, or the earlier painters ofrocks in Ubirr in northern Australia, to give the usual interpretation, madehopeful images of the animal bodies they hoped to kill and the animal spiritsthey kept faith with. We cannot be sure of the details of their hope andfaith precisely because we lack their words.The other virtues can flourish without speech, even in nonhumans.Think of White Fang in the team, or finally at home in California, exhibitingcanine courage, justice, prudence, love, and even perhaps temperance,though I suppose that one is a little hard to see in a dog. Aristotle notedthat “in a number of animals we observe gentleness or fierceness, mildnessor cross temper, courage, or timidity, fear or confidence, high spirit orlow cunning, and, with regard to intelligence, something equivalent tosagacity.” 17 against the sacred 171