The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

prudence is a virtue 259part of humanity, the caring for oneself and for one’s best beloved. Sainthood,too, like tobacco and alcohol, Orwell affirms, “is also a thing thathuman beings must avoid.” 24We labor to teach our children and adolescents and our dogs and, yes,ourselves the practical wisdom that keeps them and us from injuring orimpoverishing or failing to develop themselves and others and ourselves. Inthe selling of retirement homes the salespeople speak of the “BenjaminFranklin close.” 25 The salesperson lists with the older person the costs andbenefits, or the balance sheet, of buying into the Scottsdale Royale RetirementCommunity. It has been found that people now old, who have livedthrough the Great Depression or the war or are just old and well off, arefocused, not unreasonably, on prudence. Provide, provide. To close the dealthe salesperson has to acknowledge in the style of an imagined Franklin—it is not the real Ben, by the way—that life is a calculation.The selling technique here is not some improper trick. An imprudentperson, someone who doesn’t know the value of money and how to keepaccounts, is a menace to his friends and family, and to his own developedself. And certainly he is a menace to his need in old age to provide, provide.He may be chivalrous in some sense, courageous and temperate and just,even great-souled, as Aristotle wished, or loving, as did St. Paul. Yet withoutprudence he is a particular kind of fool, not virtuous as a whole. He is tragicallyor comically flawed, as most of us are, more or less, short of KingArthur or Cardinal Pole.Catalunya, around Barcelona, politically in Spain but culturally autonomous,and having its own language and literature distinct from Castilian,is in its own view a nation of sensible businesspeople enchained by fatethese many centuries to a government of aristocratic madmen in Madrid.Catalunya praises above all the virtues seny [“sehn-yuh”], the local versionof prudence. The great Catalan historian Jaume Vicens Vives (1910–1960)declared famously that his region evinced seny, prudence or common sense,combined with rauxa [“rau-shah”], passion or madness, the two “puntscardinals del temperament català.” 26In medieval times, when Barcelona was the chief port of the WesternMediterranean and Catalan was the lingua franca of the Christian fleets,a Catalan poet could think of no higher praise of his beloved than thatshe was “plena de seny,” full of common sense. Robert Hughes tells of a