The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

392 chapter 36a masterless samurai, a sword for hire. Taken from an actual event in1701–1703, the play tells how the forty-seven elaborately avenged an insult totheir dead master. So much is Western, if from the modern Western pointof view startlingly thorough. In order to get into a position where they couldstrike back, for example, some of the rōnin pretended to be honorless,inconsequential, not-to-be-feared men for nearly two years. That’s not quitethe quick Romantic revenge followed by quick Christian remorse, diluted atlast to quasi apologies, “if I have offended anyone,” which the averageAmerican nowadays takes as good behavior.And the rōnin, after redeeming their honor on the one account, andbecoming wildly popular with the masses, then submitted to the collectivesuicide ordered by the shogun. They satisfied the claims of the circle of giriand then also of chu, honoring their master and then also obeying theirnation. Strange stuff from the perspective of Western notions ofheroic/bourgeois/Christian/Romantic individualism—though again onecan see a parallel in Greek tragedy and Roman tradition.In the end, though, the virtues are not precisely universal. The thoughtfulchapter in Peterson and Seligman on the matter concludes that “there is astrong convergence across time, place, and intellectual tradition about certaincore virtues.” 16 I am of course very ready to believe this. But the chapter—andthe rest of the book, which is light on psychological data outsidethe here and now in the West—does not entirely persuade.William Reddy has made a persuasive case against universality, withapplications to non-Western societies and to the Sentimental Revolution inEurope itself after 1770. He says that emotions, at least, if not virtuesexactly, are “overlearned cultural habits,” like language or customs, varyingradically from place to place and from time to time. 17 George Washington,for example, wept on many public occasions, as when he took leave of hisarmy in 1783. Yet in 1972 Edward Muskie lost his bid to become the Democraticnominee for president because he wept in vexation at a Nixoninspiredcalumny on his wife. Different times, different definitions ofmanly virtue.Ethics is a local narrative. Well, so what? In science generality mustsometimes be sacrificed to applicability. It makes no sense to try to explainthe fauna of a pond in Vermont always at the mechanical and atomic level