The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

against reduction 343The fact is irritating to extreme Hindu nationalists, who interpret the faithfulnessof the Christians as mere prudence. To which one replies in Yiddishidiom: Some prudence. 18The Jewish club, too, had prudential advantages, the assurance of credit,say. But, obviously, for merely a Prudence Only club its members would nothave endured exile and worse from Spain, pogroms and worse from Russia,yellow stars and worse from Germany, discrimination and worse fromAmerica. This is not a club any “rational” person would want to join. It’s aGroucho Marx club. Religious and intellectual and social and friendshipgroups we join or are born into can be analyzed in terms of prudence, a little.But not entirely. They have meaning, something that a Prudence Onlyacademic field like demography or neoclassical economics or realist internationalrelations does not acknowledge.As the representative of my Episcopal church I went in 2003 to the installationof a new rabbi for the Chicago congregation of Makom Shalom(“peace place”), which shares our building on South Dearborn Street. It wasvery moving, Hasidic in its joyous frenzy, with those wonderful pentatonictunes and the old words. Sh’ma Yisrael. Baruch adonai. An errant thoughtpopped into my head: “Wow. This is fun! Heh, wait a minute: should I converton the spot to Judaism?”Well, no, not actually, dear. In the way of many arrant thoughts, it wasexceptionally silly. It’s not who Deirdre is. It would be utterly Faithless todo so. I approve of progressive Judaism—the new rabbi was “Reb Alicia,”so you get the idea. And I think I can at least see the point of even an orthodoxJudaism. Speaking of the progressive and nouveau-Hasidic type of aJewish life, I would doubtless get a lot of utility of an instrumental sortfrom joining up—the respect for learning, the self-mocking Yiddishhumor, the according of dignity to market activity, the mysteries of aHebrew very, very far from Indo-European languages, and those tunes.Golly. Sounds like a gas. But no, say I, if I am who I am. Jehovah did notmake a deal with my ancestors—or, rather, only with my spiritual ancestors,not with my literal northwestern European branch of the family, thedaughters of Ursula, Helena, and Velda. Deirdre is from another part of thehuman circus.Viewing humans as mere single preference orderings explains a lot oftheir behavior. I myself have written whole books showing how. You caneven attempt—as David George, Albert Hirschman, Amartya Sen, George