The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

antimonism again 359free contracting and to sacrificing for the community. 20 That is, Americanssince the Founders have admired both modern freedom, the right to be leftalone, and ancient freedom, the right to participate. Americans are bothanarchists and busybodies, mountain men shooting at the FBI and politiciansjailing marihuana users.You see both the liberal and the republican virtues admired, for example,in the small cities of the Midwest. Is this because Americans, especially Midwesterners,and especially Babbitts in their Zeniths, are stupid and bourgeoisand, worst of all, philosophically inconsistent? No, as the post-1929Ludwig Wittgenstein would surely have said, had his attention been drawnto the philosophical problems of the Midwest. The historian CatherineStock writes of how the “old middle class” in the Dakotas weathered theGreat Depression. They held “fundamentally contradictory, but equallyheartfelt, impulses.” That is, they admired values that come into collisionwithout possibility of rational arbitration, “rational” meaning “formulaic,single-valued, monistic, decisive, axiomatic, deductive, ultimate, solving alldilemmas” and all those other neatnesses admired so much by Cartesiansand Kantians and Benthamites.The notion that virtues have to be noncontradictory is a professor’slogic. But it is not reasonable. It confuses, in the style of Wittgenstein before1929, the logic of propositions with the “logic” of the world. In a famousdebate in 1939 Wittgenstein Mark II attacked Wittgenstein Mark I in theperson of the mathematical logician Alan Turing:Wittgenstein: Where will the harm come [from a logical contradiction]?Turing: The real harm will not come in unless there is an application, in whicha bridge may fall down or something of that sort.Wittgenstein:...The question is: Why are people afraid of contradictions? It iseasy to understand why they should be afraid of contradictions in orders . . .outside mathematics....But nothing need go wrong. And if something does gowrong—if the bridge breaks down—then your mistake was of the kind of usinga wrong natural law....“I lie, therefore I do not lie, therefore I lie and do notlie, therefore we have a contradiction [namely, the Paradox of the Liar], therefore[because a contradiction implies in logic that any proposition whatever isvalid] 2 × 2 = 369.” Well, we would not call this “multiplication,” that is all....Turing: Although we do not know that the bridge will fall if there are nocontradictions, yet it is almost certain that if there are contradictions[Turing is referring to the contradictions in pre-nineteenth-century calculus]it will go wrong somewhere.Wittgenstein: But nothing has ever gone wrong that way yet. 21