The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

396 chapter 37Since he seemed to believe that a good person can do no harm, anything he didto me was by definition good, since he considered himself a good person. SinceI was not yet a good person [that is, not yet a Schiffer-certified analyst], anythingI did was by definition bad, and wrong. He had no need of ethics, since he automaticallydid the right thing. He quoted a phrase that Freud had used in a letterto the American psychiatrist James Putnam, about ethics being self-evident.Freud claimed that he had never done a bad thing in his life. 9Concerning the blessed Sigmund: never mind humility.For example, it was not bad of Freud to violate Justice, as Masson documentsin another book, by lying about the actual sexual abuse of girls bytheir fathers in fin-de-siècle Vienna in order to go on collecting money fromthe fathers to have their daughters analyzed as having the “false,”“imagined”memories of abuse. Never mind justice. And it was not bad of Freud toabandon his principle that mental patients must be voluntary, and toapprove of compulsory analysis of patients at a Swiss mental hospital, inorder to spread the fame of psychoanalysis. Never mind faith. Never mind.Our prudential tastes are finalities.The central dogma of modernism, the literary and ethical critic WayneBooth has noted, is “the belief that you cannot and indeed should not allowyour values to intrude upon your cognitive life—that thought and knowledgeand fact are on one side and affirmations of value on the other.” 10 Notethe ethical self-refutation embodied in such a rule of method. He instancesBertrand Russell as one in whom “passionate commitment has lost its connectionwith the provision of good reasons.” 11 As Russell himself noted inquite another connection, self-reference leads to cycling self-contradiction.“All Cretans are liars,” quoth the Cretan.Russell the aristocrat and mathematical philosopher applied low andsometimes no standards to his opinions about ethics and politics andeconomics. His friend Santayana describes Russell during the Great Warexploiting his retentive memory without ethical reasoning: “This information,though accurate, was necessarily partial, and brought forward in a partisanargument; he couldn’t know, he refused to know everything; so thathis judgments, nominally based on that partial information, were reallyinspired by passionate prejudice and were always unfair and sometimesmad. He would say, for instance, that the bishops supported the war becausethey had money invested in munitions works.” 12 George Orwell noted oncethat only intellectuals could believe such a hare-brained “realism.” “The