The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

god’s deal 443which the feeling of community is the foundation of the social structure. Itaccuses the deliberate egoism of an economy . . . in which each is the enemyof the other, because his advantage is conditioned by the disadvantage orruin of the other, and it demands an economy of solidarity of all, and of joyin work rather than in profit.” 3 The economy in this view is a zero-sumgame. As the economist and theologian Robert Nelson puts it, “If the privatepursuit of self-interest was long seen in Christianity as a sign of thecontinuing presence of sin in the world—a reminder of the fallen conditionof humanity since the transgression of Adam and Eve in the garden—ablessing for a market economy has appeared to many people as the religiousequivalent of approving of sin.” 4I said that self-denial against the alleged egoism of a life in markets is asurprisingly Western idea. We Europeans have been accustomed since thefirst, Romantic Orientalists to thinking of the Orient, not our own Occident,as the place of self-denial—and paradoxically also as a place of wildexcess. We Westerners mix notions of the Buddha with tales of The ArabianNights.We are mistaken. In A Passage to England (1959) the Indian professor ofEnglish Nirad C. Chaudhuri noted the contrast between the Lord’s Prayerrequesting merely our daily bread and the Hindu prayer to Durga, theMother Goddess, “Give me wealth, long life, sons, and all things desirable.” 5One prays as a Hindu to Ganesha the elephant-headed god to overcomeobstacles at the outset of any project: “Bow the head and offer obeisancebefore the son of Gauri ...[to obtain] longevity, desired powers, and prosperity.”The Vedic hymns are filled with passages like the following in ahymn to Agni the god of fire: “I pray to Agni . ..who ...brings most treasure.. . . Through Agni one may win wealth, and growth from day to day,glorious and most abounding in heroic sons.” 6A popular goddess in Hindu households, especially popular withwomen, is Lakshmi, goddess of all wealth, one of whose four arms is portrayedas pouring out gold coins. Contrast Jesus driving the money-changersfrom the temple, and his hard deal in Matthew 19:21: “If thou wilt be perfect,go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt havetreasure in heaven: and come and follow me.”True, the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism recommend that the only solutionto life’s sorrow is the ending of desire. But consider the “Admonition toSingāla,” consisting of a few hundred lines in the canon, described as “the