The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

the storied character of virtue 273Indeed, coaching itself has no formulas, or else great coaches would be adime a dozen. 8 Ted Williams’s book, The Science of Hitting, offers preceptsfor life as much as for “the single most difficult thing to do in sport”—hitting a major-league fastball. 9 To achieve in hitting you need to witnessand then to imitate Williams’s swing, among the wonders of mid-twentiethcenturysports. But you need to do it, and keep doing it, supported by aboy’s myth of excellence. It was a story Williams told to himself, a story ofhis ethical character, not a decision-making formula. The story kept him atbatting practice until his hands bled.The character thus formed I say applies to more than baseball. In 1995 ata conference organized by the rhetorician Herbert Simons I heard a paperby Linda Brodkey about teaching writing called “Writing on the Bias.” Brodkeytold how she learned to write by watching her mother sew. Her motherwas a gifted seamstress and could cut cloth “on the bias” to give a dress agraceful drape. The daughter learned to write—and she writes well—bytranslating the virtues of dressmaking into the virtues of writing. 10Likewise I learned how to do academic tasks—actually any task—bywatching my mother do carpentry or sewing or cooking or learning Greekirregular verbs, witnessing the virtues of hope and courage operating inthem. Try learning to sew or write or hit a major-league fastball by followingthe categorical imperative, or the greatest happiness of the greatestnumber. Try learning with those ideas to be “good” in any sense. They don’twork.We build our characters story by story. In the romantic comedy writtenand directed by Harold Ramis, Groundhog Day (1993), the Bill Murray character,a self-centered jerk of a TV weatherman, is condemned to relive hisFebruary 2 of 1992 over and over and over again. At first he sins deliciously,indulging in tablefuls of food for example, three hot fudge sundaes, a bigstack of pancakes, a plate full of bacon. “Don’t you worry about love handles?”Not if after the intemperance the clock is always turned back to a new6:00 a.m. of the very same Groundhog Day, to the same bright chatter of awake-up show predicting c-o-l-d in Punxsutawney, PA. Phil’s motto is toeat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow will be today all over again.He is the only person on the scene who remembers all his yester-todays.So by reliving the day he can correct each false move in achieving pleasure,as in his attempted seduction of his TV colleague, the Andie MacDowellcharacter. He learns, for instance, that she always orders sweet vermouth on