The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

284 chapter 24ordinary citizens of New Haven were persuaded to (as they believed) tortureother people to extreme pain and death. 17The ordinariness of the Germans—and let it be noted, the Austrians andPoles and Hungarians, among others—who served as Hitler’s willing executioners,for example, disappears if we are looking for some essence of evil.Albert Speer, Hitler’s official architect and from 1942 minister of production,was a very saint of Prudence Only, an echt efficiency expert. But he wasmerely a more extreme version of ordinary Germans. He resembled ordinaryDutch and French people watching placidly out the window at Jewsand Gypsies, homosexuals and socialists, being marched efficiently away.Compare ordinary Swedes trading peacefully with Hitler. Or ordinaryDanes working with their usual efficiency in Hitler’s war machine. Or ordinarySwiss accommodating the banking needs of Nazi officials. Or, when itcomes to that, ordinary Britons and Americans supporting their governments’refusal to accept Jewish immigrants.If we search always for the titanic we miss the banal evil, the unbalanced,uncompleted virtues, of our own, small, ordinary, local lives. In mainlinechurches nowadays the very words “evil” and “sin” are taboo, except on Sundaymornings, and then they appear not in the sermon, but only in the olderhymns and rituals—and for special occasions in the rhetoric of conservativepoliticians. The Oxford English Dictionary notes dryly that evil as “theantithesis of good” is “now little used.” “Deliver us from evil,” you say inprayer—but you certainly do not mean your participation in the institutionsof sin. You in such a pageant are (surely) a sweet old Dr. Jekyll, and far awayand far below is some terrifying, alien, evil, and above all rare Mr. Hyde.In the view of virtue ethicists from Aristotle to Annette Baier, on the contrary,we are all capable of sin, and get into it daily. This is the secular meaningof the Christian conviction that we are born in sin. It is the Greek andChristian sense of tragedy persisting in our culture—opposed recently byan evangelical enthusiasm for a rapture in which we, at least, will be saved.Sin in the Greek and orthodox Christian view is not radically foreign, somethingSatan made me do just this once, or something that only satanicpeople from the red or the blue states do, Anthony Hopkins playingDr. Hannibal Lecter. Compare in this connection, by the way, Dr. Faustus,Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Strangelove, Dr. Roger Chillingworth, the learned ifevil physician, husband to Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter; or, in CharlottePerkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the “scientific” Dr. John X,