The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

214 chapter 17carrying fact. To the contrary, Jesse Byock points out, the “bookprosist” viewof the sagas was to some degree a result of nineteenth-century Icelandicnationalism eager to see the century and a half of saga writing not as merelythe writing down of traditions but as “one of the most powerful literarymoments in recorded history,” in the words of the leader of this view. 4Compare the two-hundred-year dispute over the authorship of Homer.The stories of Joshua or King Arthur are still more clearly “historicalnovels.” The days of yore are doubly so:Miniver cursed the commonplaceAnd eyed a khaki suit with loathing;He missed the mediaeval graceOf iron clothing.Nor of course do we postmedievals live in societies led by literal aristocraciesof fighting men. So why, one might ask, should we go on being governedin our ethics by aristocratic virtues characteristic of such men? True: onlyWalpole among eighteenth-century prime ministers of England was withoutliterally aristocratic blood on a mother’s or a father’s side. 5 And true: the lastBritish cabinet still having a majority of aristocrats was surprisingly late,Gladstone’s of 1892. Thirty years later in Bonar Law’s, there were still equalnumbers of aristocrats and commoners. Thatcher’s of 1979 still containednearly a quarter from the “landed establishment,” though some quite recentlyrecruited to it. But even in that class-haunted nation it is by now a long whilesince real aristocrats mattered. Harold Macmillan’s cabinet of 1957, it was said,had more “old Estonians” (émigré politicians) than old Etonians. 6Centuries earlier the English and then the Scottish aristocrats hadstopped their Homeric bloodletting and had turned to farming, courtmasques, and the gaming table. The proportion of violent deaths for malesover age fifteen in English ducal families—“the king’s brothers,” so the verytop of the social order—is an astonishing one-half for the cohort born1330–1479, dying courageously in the Hundred Years’ War and the Wars ofthe Roses. It falls to about a fifth for those born under the Tudors andStuarts, then to about one in twenty for those born under the Hanoverians,fighting in the ethically restrained wars of the eighteenth century.The mortality rate from war comes back, startlingly, to its medieval levelsfor sons of dukes of an age to serve in World Wars I and II. So compellingis the faith in an aristocratic courage; and so ethically unrestrained is modernwar. 7