The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

24 apologyHumans make their consumption meaningful, as in the meal you sharewith a friend or the picture frame in which you put the snapshot of yourbeloved. It is not obvious that consuming in Midtown Manhattan is lesspurposeful than consuming in an anticapitalist North Korea or in an antibourgeoishippie commune. Isn’t it more purposeful, speaking of thetranscendent? The grim single-mindedness of getting and spending in a collectivistvillage is not obviously superior to the numberless levels, varieties,and capacities of Paris or Chicago. Vulgar devotion to consumption alone ismore characteristic of pre- and anticapitalist than of late-capitalist societies.I claim that actually existing capitalism, not the collectivisms of the leftor of the right, has reached beyond mere consumption, producing the bestart and the best people. People have purposes. A capitalist economy givesthem scope to try them out. Go to an American Kennel Club show, or anantique show, or a square-dancing convention, or to a gathering of themany millions of American birdwatchers, and you’ll find people of no socialpretensions passionately engaged. Yes, some people watch more than fourhours of TV a day. Yes, some people engage in corrupting purchases. Butthey are no worse than their ancestors, and on average better.Their ancestors, like yours and mine, were wretchedly poor, engagedwith getting a bare sufficiency. It does not have to be that old way. In 1807Coleridge quoted an economist of the time, Patrick Colquhoun, assertingthat “poverty is ...a most necessary . . . ingredient in society, without whichnations . . . would not exist in a state of civilization. . . . Without povertythere would be no labor, and without labor no riches, no refinement.” Thiswas a standard argument against the relief of poverty, joining eight otherancient arguments against doing something about poverty—the eight are arecent count by the philosopher Samuel Fleischacker. 49Coleridge sharply disagreed with Colquhoun’s pessimism. A man ispoor, he wrote, “whose bare wants cannot be supplied without such unceasingbodily labor from the hour of waking to that of sleeping, as precludes allimprovement of mind—and makes the intellectual faculties to the majorityof mankind as useless as pictures to the blind.” 50 Can such waste be necessaryfor a high civilization? Coleridge didn’t think so.In 1807 the debate was still unsettled. Is a class of exploited people necessaryfor high civilization, as Colquhoun, or Nietzsche, claimed? Or is thedisappearance of such a class as a result of material progress exactly how weget a mass high civilization, as Coleridge, or Adam Smith, claimed?