The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

378 chapter 34but he might as well have been defending himself when he wrote that “it isnot at all certain that a merely moral criticism of society may not be just as‘revolutionary’ . . . as the politico-economic criticism which is fashionable atthis moment....Two viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can youimprove human nature until you change the system? The other, what is theuse of changing the system before you have improved human nature? . . .The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining oneanother.” 22Charles Dickens himself had been of course nothing like a socialist—theidea and the word barely existed—and was ignorant of how an economyworked except in publishing and the theater. His ideal, notes Northrop Frye,“would have to be an intensely paternalistic society, an expanded family.” 23Marx called his sort of view Feudal Socialism, “half lamentation, half lampoon;half echo of the past, half menace for the future,” with “total incapacityto comprehend the march of modern history.” 24 Orwell the socialistasserts that Dickens “had not the vision to see that private property is anobstructive nuisance.” Orwell, like Marx, was at least consistent in his disdainfor property, being notably, even self-destructively, careless of creaturecomforts. 25But Orwell approves of a Dickensian ethic of decency. “‘If men wouldbehave decently the world would be decent’ is not such a platitude as itsounds.” 26 Orwell’s word “decency” can be thought of as justice, with a littlehope, a modicum of love, a nonfanatical faith, a temperance restraining onefrom using guns and torture to get one’s way. Lionel Trilling noted thatOrwell praised, too, aristocratic virtues in their bourgeois dress c. 1910, theBoy’s Own magazine ideals of sportsmanship, gentlemanliness, duty, andphysical courage, though Orwell the socialist “must sometimes have wonderedhow it came about” in a capitalist society. 27 No systems, and certainlynot the system of the seven virtues.