The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

330 chapter 28Biff: Well, I borrowed it from the locker room. He laughs confidentially.Willy, laughing with him at the theft: I want you to return that.Happy: I told you he wouldn’t like it!Biff, angrily: Well, I’m bringing it back!Willy, stopping the incipient argument, to Happy: Sure, he’s gotta practice with aregulation ball, doesn’t he? To Biff: Coach’ll probably congratulate you on yourinitiative! 30Willy—unsuccessful, bourgeois Willy Low Man who aches for somethingbig—can’t coach his eldest son to the role that brother Happy accepts,unhappily, of minor, ethical functionary in capitalism. Biff remains an insolentserf stealing from the lord’s barn, or from the lumberyard where theboys work summers. Yet Willy admires this in Biff. At least Biff lashes out,exercising a faux-aristocratic nerve:Willy: You shoulda seen the lumber they brought home last week. At least adozen six-by-eights worth all kinds a money.Charley: Listen, if that watchman—Willy: I gave them hell, understand. But I got a couple of fearless charactersthere.Charley: Willy, the jails are full of fearless characters. 31To which Willy’s faux-grand-bourgeois brother Ben, “success incarnate,” avery Ben Franklin, speaking from Willy’s imagination, adds, “And the stockexchange, friend!” They all do it, the big guys.Willy can recommend the virtues only piecemeal: courage to stealboldly, but then separately, independently, in contradiction to that precept,justice to refrain from stealing; hope to venture on studying for theregents’ exam, but then separately and unconnectedly the temperance tostick to it.As the economist and feminist philosopher Irene van Staveren notes in apenetrating analysis of the play, “Willy’s dream mixes up different values.” 32Willy and his son would do better if they could live the virtues as a system,out of a character good as a whole—as does indeed Willy’s friend Charley,and Charley’s studious son Bernard, who cannot persuade his friend Biff tostudy for the high-school exam.Robert Hariman notes that the system comes also from formulatingrules, but recommends with Richard Lanham, I have noted, a “toggling”between exemplars and rules. 33 It’s like solving a differential equation orwriting a sonnet or running an experiment. None are rule-bound to the