The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

418 chapter 39about the same across the various avant-garde galleries, but insulated fromcommerce, family-style. The gallery owner is “an educator and confidant.” 5Marian Goodman declared that “the choice of whom to work with goes toone’s spiritual core. It starts with intuition, but it’s important to reflect onhow deep a commitment one feels before one gets involved.” 6 The Profaneis enabled by the Sacred, and the Sacred is the end. The Marxist cycle ofmoney-capital-more money is not correct. What is correct is the cycle ofSacred-Profane-More Sacred.Arjo Klamer himself gives another example of how P and S interact.The charitable organization Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières)was asked whether it would accept a large cash contribution. Well,why not? The P-Only logic of economics says that a contribution relaxes thebudget constraint, making more of the organization’s good works possibleby paying more doctors to work for it. But in fact Doctors Without Bordersturned down the contribution. The problem was that the very meaning ofthe organization was the grace of the gift from the doctors. To make theminto merely paid employees would transform the enterprise into justanother hospital. 7 Likewise a couple of weeks after the Indian Oceantsunami the organization outraged some by turning down further contributionsto its relief work. “As you know, it is very important to MSF that weuse your contribution as you intend it to be used,” Médecins Sans Frontièressaid on its Web site. “This is why we want to let you know that at this time,MSF estimates that we have received sufficient funds for our currently foreseenemergency response in South Asia.” 8Some doctors laboring in the same needful fields sneer at such purity,pointing out that MSF therefore puts its or its contributors’ sacred identityrather than the health of patients at the center of its concern. But the sneeris itself an expression of sacred identity: we are not those moral aesthetes atDoctors Without Borders, but practical, high-volume care providers whounderstand that money is money.Similarly, the Cooperstown museum of baseball will only accept donationsof memorabilia—it never buys them. The Salvation Army in Naples, Florida,returned a $100,000 donation from the winner of the $14.4 millionFlorida Lotto in 2002, since it believes gambling is a sin. The Salvation Armywill not employ even highly competent gays and lesbians, if they are out,since it believes homosexuality is a sin, on the sacred grounds of two prohibitionsin the Hebrew Bible and one in Paul’s letters. The Salvation Army,