The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

the myth of modern rationality 437important in discussions of discrimination by race or gender. But turnaboutis fair play. How much does P matter by itself? For some cases, admittedly,P is overwhelmingly important. If you are trying to explain covered interestarbitrage in the foreign exchanges, or the seizing of a profit of $400 millionin the portfolio of Chase Manhattan, I advise you to forget about S, prettymuch. Love and faith are not going to explain covered interest arbitrage orgigantic banking opportunities. Prudence will. On the other hand, if you aretrying to explain voting or ethics or marriage or church attendance, you willfall into what Michael Polanyi in a similar connection once called “voluntaryimbecility” if you simply ignore S and its interactions with P.In 1952 a woman who wanted a divorce was wrong-footed from the start,though entitled to alimony if she could catch him in a hotel with his mistress.No longer. S has changed, and the change has had financial implications.It’s not merely that some curve has shifted, as the economists want toput it. No-fault divorce interacted very strangely with the market, andended up hurting a good many women. Or maybe not so strangely, a feministmight say.Most economics, and most anthropology/sociology, is persuasion aboutthe quantitative mixture of prudence and solidarity, the Profane and theSacred, that matters for any particular case, and about how exactly theyinteract. The right-wing evolutionists of the 1970s, especially E. O. Wilson,were enthusiastically received by economists like Becker. The left-wing evolutionists,especially S. J. Gould and Richard Lewontin, were enthusiasticallyreceived by the Union of Radical Political Economists. The debate was at thepolitical level a matter of P vs. S. (At the scientific level it is perhaps betterdescribed as P vs. P +ε, the [large] error term ε reflecting nonprudent evolutionsof spandrels and five fingers merely stumbled into. But we’re talkingcrude intellectual politics here.) The noneconomists see the world as S,largely. The economists want the world to be P Only. The world isn’t buying.The current debate between evolutionary psychologists such as StevenPinker of MIT/Harvard or Ralph Messenger of David Lodge’s fictional Universityof Gloucester and a group of sophisticated doubters such as NoamChomsky and Jerry Fodor raises the issue again. Are we nice to each otherbecause of some hidden, and scientifically undocumented, long-run prudenceof evolution which hardwires particular moral precepts? Or are wenice because we subscribe to the Sacred ethical texts of our culture writtenon a practically blank slate?