The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

244 chapter 20(wanting to swing on one, any one, anything to shatter that superior, simperingcomposure). “He believed that a gentleman does not say unflatteringthings out of another man’s hearing” (you wine sack, with a dog’s eyes, witha deer’s heart). “My grandfather was a life-long champion of what he called‘French manners’” (extremely well-bred). “You were more generous with afriend than you were with yourself” (fearless, generous). “Any form of selfpitywas anathema; he was someone who never wanted to be seen as a victim”(today this strange coming left me still a man. Give me my guns).“Overand over again he had to win [his wife’s] favor” (as gentle to a pure womanas King Arthur).Like a Greek aristocrat in the Iliad, Gerschenkron’s most unbelievablething was courageous talk. On April 11, 1968, at a tumultuous meeting of theHarvard faculty in the face of a student takeover of University Hall, he gavea twenty-minute oration without notes calling his colleagues to arms—well, at least to action (in a rude society nothing is honorable but war).Always be the best, my boy, the bravest / and hold your head high above theothers. “My grandfather didn’t command armies or lead governments orwin pennants,” Dawidoff concludes, “but he was big, big in his qualities.” 8A bourgeois aristocrat.Gerschenkron was, as we say, quite a guy. His aristocratic courage lookedbetter than the cowardice of many of his colleagues at the time. The nextyear he was visiting the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. A Princetonadministrator gave a seminar at the institute suggesting that the universitygrant all the demands of the black students. When the institute fellowspressed him on the point, the administrator burst out in vexation, “Well,after all, the black students have the guns.” Into the stunned silence followingthis remark, Gerschenkron, with more learning than originality,dropped, in his Russian accented basso profundo, “Ven I hear the vord ‘gun,’I reach for my culture.”But there can be ethical mischief as well as good in the gendered fantasyof courage. Screwtape explains,Think of your man [whom we devils are trying to corrupt] as a series of concentriccircles, his will being the innermost, his intellect coming next, and finallyhis fantasy. You can hardly hope, at once, to exclude from all the circles everythingthat smells of the Enemy [viz., God]: but you must keep on shoving allthe virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy, and all thedesirable qualities [that is, desirable to devils, therefore sins from God’s point of