The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

needing virtues 401to think of himself as being in character really rather splendid—in particular,as being by comparison with the craven multitude notably courageous,”standing alone against the soft and bourgeois conventions of ethics. 25 Or asthe conservative political philosopher J. Budziszewski puts it, describing hisyouthful and nihilistic self, “Like Nietzsche, I imagined myself one of thefew who could believe such things—who could walk the rocky heightswhere the air is thin and cold.” 26“The idea,” said Judge Posner to a interviewer, describing the rocky heightson which he walks,“is that a person is responsible for his own life....We haveno right to blame anyone else for the result because it was ours to make ormuff. This is a philosophy, or psychology ...ofself-assertion, of liberationfrom oppressive frameworks such as that created by religion or other dogmas.”27 Note Posner’s uneasiness about the word “philosophy,” and theconcession in the two-wordedness that he does not have an examined“psychology,” either. Such a life is indeed one of “assertive,” that is, masculine,courage, that most willful of virtues. When alloyed with the othervirtues it constitutes the Kantian/Nozickian regard for the self-ownership ofpeople that Posner and I both admire. But when not alloyed with love or justiceit is precisely a life, as Posner says, of self-assertion, and of self-assertionalone, psychological egoism, one courageous guy against the world, no religionbut that of the self. Consult your local sociopath.Or consult Justice Holmes, whom David Luban summarizes as even inhis legal judgments delighting in force or will “because he sees in it the vitalityand joy that is our salvation from despair,” laughing as a young manlaughs. 28 Albert Alschuler speaks of Holmes’s “aftershave virtues.” 29Remember Holmes on the true and adorable faith which leads a soldier tosenselessly throw away his life. “I believe the struggle for life is the order ofthe world, at which it is vain to repine,” said he on that occasion, and thencarried the Calliclesian/Spencerian/Sumnerian/legal-realist idea into hiscourt. 30 As Trotsky put it in 1921, “ [We Bolsheviks] were never concernedwith the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the ‘sacrednessof human life.’” 31 Such self-assertion in the face of existential angst isthe choice of the antiliberal, the Bolshevik, the Fascist, the faux-despairingRomantic wandering on the rocky heights.Such a politics is, scientifically speaking, sinful. It is the unbalanced virtùof a Satan, and its systematic, institutionalized advocacy by modern Hobbesiansor Nietzscheans is evil. Evil, remember, is systematically institutionalized