The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

character(s) 349The part that is priestly supports our temperance and proper pride of intellectualcreation, when we need those. And so forth.These are stereotypes, not always, I repeat, sociological facts. They aremyths, self-images, ideologies, true or false class consciousness. C. S. Lewis,who was a close student of medieval literature, noted that “the Knights inFroissart’s chronicles had neither sympathy nor mercy for the ‘outsiders,’the churls or peasants. But this deplorable indifference was very closelyintertwined with a good quality. They really had, among themselves, a veryhigh standard of valor, generosity and honor.” 6 Compare the Icelandic talesof the Vikings, such as King Harald the Stern, so nobly, courageously dyingfrom a gold-tipped arrow lodged in his throat at Stamford Bridge—butwith an appalling career behind him of mercilessness toward monks andpeasants and women.“The voice of the peasant,” Lewis continues, should be discounted whenit recommends for a knight a life as “cautious” and “close-fisted” as thechurl. But “the habit of ‘not giving a damn’ grows on a class. To discount thevoice of the peasant when it really ought to be discounted makes it easier todiscount his voice when he cries for justice or mercy. The partial deafnesswhich is noble and necessary encourages the wholesale deafness which isarrogant and inhuman.” It’s how an ethos is built, for good or ill. And noteLewis’s own implied ethic of noblesse oblige: one is to attend to the voice ofthe peasant not out of an egalitarian humility that one should “answer thewitness of God in every man, whether they are the heathen . . . or ...do professChrist,” but out of a downward-looking pity.But consider: any one of the four columns could be an ethical way for ahuman to live. Read the columns. An aristocratic and proletarian andpriestly set of virtues is conceivable, and each has had a long run in our culture.Once each column was all the rage, the prestigious form of life to somegroup of opinion makers. But so also is the third, bourgeois set conceivableas a good way to live. And it matches better now who we mostly are, mostof the time, 9–5, Mon–Fri—though since 1848 it has not had much prestigeamong those practicing the fourth column.The bourgeois virtues, derivable from the seven virtues but viewable inbusiness practice, might include enterprise, adaptability, imagination, optimism,integrity, prudence, thrift, trustworthiness, humor, affection, selfpossession,consideration, responsibility, solicitude, decorum, patience,toleration, affability, peaceability, civility, neighborliness, obligingness,