The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

a brief for the bourgeois virtues 11Everywhere the ruling class found it could use patriotism to stay in charge,and anyway believed most ardently in its own racism, nationalism, imperialism,and clericalism. The result was a clash of isms in the European CivilWar, 1914–1989, and its spawn overseas. Capitalism was nearly overwhelmedby nationalism and socialism and national socialism, Kaiser Billy to theBaathists.Yet during the late twentieth century capitalism and its bourgeois virtuesresumed their triumphs. Countries which appeared hopelessly poor in 1950,such as Japan and South Korea and Thailand, became under capitalist andbourgeois auspices well-to-do. Countries which in 1950 were relatively richbut still had large portions of their populations ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,such as Britain and Italy and the United States, became richer inhousing and clothing and food. Latin American and Caribbean incomes perhead doubled in thirty years.The worldwide enrichment made possible a cultural and ethical enrichment,too. The breaking of constraints in the 1960s that so irritates neoconservativeswas not the beginning of cultural rot, as the neocons declare. Inrich countries it was the fulfillment of a promise, a spread of freedoms wonby rich white European men a century before. It promised equality now forwomen, blacks, browns, gays, handicapped people, colonial people, ethnicminorities, the poor—in short, for a growing share of the people left out ofpolitics under the previous dispensation. In poor countries it was the beginningof the end for patriarchy and village tyranny. The neocons seem oftento want order at any cost in freedom, rather than freedom achieved in anorderly manner. I say: Hurrah for late twentieth-century enrichment anddemocratization. Hurrah for birth control and the civil rights movement.Arise ye wretched of the earth.True, the 1960s worldwide saw itself as antibourgeois, even socialist,and this intemperance of freedom had costs—small costs in the broken windowsof the Hoover Institution and large costs in the broken economiesof sub-Saharan Africa. It would have been better if every social movementof the 1960s had adhered to nonviolence and self-discipline and mutualrespect, and had therefore joined the bourgeois project down in the marketplace.But in the late twentieth century even sophisticated capitalistscame to recommend a devotion to Prudence Only, Wall Street’s “greedis good.” Bourgeois theorists, in other words, overstressed the virtue ofprudence.