The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

antimonism again 357John Gray describes Berlin’s “rejection of the species of rationalism forwhich the dilemmas of practice are in the end illusory” as “agonistic liberalism.”In Berlin’s thinking, Gray explains, “conflict and rivalry enter intothe ideal of liberty itself.” 14 Gray is perhaps overestimating Berlin’s theoreticalambition, but anyway the Gray/Berlin point is a good one. No formulacan summarize the stories of varied human lives, nun and soldier, Frenchand Chinese. Even the Greek ideal of “human flourishing” is a little suspect,since it subordinates a person’s choice to a universal judgment of what’sgood for her, and it was articulated by men who disdained and oppressedthe non-Greek, the nonfree, the nonmale.On the contrary, says Berlin, leave her alone to invent herself, as a squaredancer or opera lover. The song “Achy Breaky Heart,” words and musiccomposed by Don Von Tress, might not be as Good from the point of viewof a critique of judgment as the aria “Che gelida manina,” composed byLuigi Illica, Giuseppe Giacosa, and Giacomo Puccini. An imperious Hellenewould like to intervene, to resist the closing of the American mind, andimpose taxes on square dancers to pay for subsidies to opera. But lettingpeople alone to invent themselves in their music is a good in itself, saidBerlin—Isaiah, or Irving.Isaiah is not here advocating the Romantic commandment “Be thy essential,earnest, sincere self.” Freedom is not merely an approach to a preexistingideal self. On the contrary, such “positive freedom” has often excused tyrantshelping us to find our ideal selves in front of the Inquisition or down in room101. What is being recommended by agonistic liberalism is “the goodness ofchoice,” as Gray puts it—not necessarily to be understood as autonomy, thatis to say, courage, but as self-creation, that is, hope and faith.The nun creates herself as cloistered and obedient, the opposite of anautonomous Romantic hero. Yet hers is in its own way a glorious life, a gloryI have witnessed in five close friends among Catholic nuns. In a famous passagein Anarchy, State, and Utopia Robert Nozick lists thirty-six namestogether with “you, and your parents”: Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Taylor, CaseyStengel, The Lubavitcher Rebbe, and so forth. He asks, “Is there really onekind of life which is best for each of these people?” 15 Gray declares similarly,“The virtues of the Homeric epic and of the Sermon on the Mount are irreduciblydivergent and conflicting, and they express radically different formsof life. There is no Archimedean point of leverage from which they can bejudged.” 16 That’s right.