The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

alancing courage 249company, what he lacked in the end were the rest of the pagan four. Havingone of them is not enough.Or three out of four. When in 1937 Winston Churchill praisedMussolini as having “amazing qualities of courage, comprehension, selfcontrol,and perseverance”—that is, Courage, prudence, temperance,and courage again, with faith—he was praising, as an aristocrat raised atHarrow and Sandhurst would, an almost balanced set of the paganvirtues. Churchill said once that if he had been an Italian he would havebecome a Fascist. Yet presumably even he found the Justice of ItalianFascism a trifle deficient. 23In other words, courage needs other virtues to be a virtue. Temperance,for example, self-control. From Achilles the berserk warrior to Tony Sopranothe New Jersey mob boss, any society needs its men to exercise “impulse control.”The problem with men, especially young men, is the excess of courage.Cardiff City’s football hooligans are of all social standings, including at leastone millionaire and one former professional footballer. The lads who on theday of the game mob the Swan and Anchor, surrounded by British police onthe alert, are not always young and unemployed. What they share is anaddiction to courageous violence, admittedly more common among youngmen with time on their hands than old men with jobs. What Eric Hoffercalled true believers are the young, courageous men who make up thestormtroopers in every violent upheaval, good or bad.Perhaps it’s biological. In any case the virtù of young males requires elaboratesocialization to check and channel. In East Africa not long ago a groupof young male elephants, orphaned by poachers, engaged in what can onlybe described as gang banging. There is film of one particularly bold teenagertossing clumps of grass and mud at a rhinoceros, over and over again, challenginghim to unequal battle. The teenagers became a nuisance also to thehumans in the neighborhood, and the problem was solved at last by laboriouslymoving the worst offenders hundreds of miles into a herd led bymature female elephants, as elephant herds are. The boys stopped theirRebel Without a Cause behavior and became temperate members of the elephantinecommunity. Doubtless they were happy, too, makarioi, and wellfavored, flourishing, eudaimonikoi.Temperance itself is not an unalloyed good. “In some people,” Footreminds us, “temperance is not a virtue, but is rather connected with timidityor with a grudging attitude in the acceptance of good things.” 24 A related