The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

17anachronistic couragein the bourgeoisieI am not a king, have laid no kingdoms waste....Should I not hear, as I lie down in dust,The horns of glory blowing above my burial? . . .Tell me, as I lie down, that I was courageous.Blow horns of victory now.—Conrad Aiken, “Tetélestai”We talked of war. johnson: “Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier,or not having been at sea....The impression is universal: yet it is strange.” ...Such washis cool reflection in his study; but whenever he was warmed . . . he, like other philosophers,whose minds are impregnated with poetical fancy, caught the common enthusiasm for splendidrenown.—Boswell’s Life, 1778When the old tales of Western courage got written down, their values werealready antique. This is another problem with the Western and masculinistfocus on gut-checks and violence; a problem, that is, beyond its actual, sociologicalantiqueness. The accounts of it that throng our Western culture arephony from the start.After all, it is mainly the civilized—the “citizen-ized,” those of highstanding living in town—who can read and write, and can record thealleged deeds, not the illiterate and rural aristocracy itself, which leaves suchstuff to priests and bards and especially to posterity. The writings of thecivilized Mediterranean had of course audiences mainly nonaristocratic,the Many of the Greek city-states and the plebs of the Roman Republic.And yet the writings taught in the schools to the boys patrician or plebeian