The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

28 apologyIn asserting capitalism’s innocence of causing poverty, understand, I amnot simply disrespecting the poor, or elevating material abundance totrumps, or recommending a cold heart. I have emphasized that all ourancestors were poor, that everyone descends overwhelmingly from poorpeople, even from slaves, since almost all societies before the eighteenth centuryhad lesser or smaller numbers of slaves and all such societies were byyour standards and mine astoundingly poor. Try to imagine living on onedollar a day, with the prices of food and clothing and housing as they noware. Imagine, if you wish, an economy with very many such people, and sohaving commercial provision for mats to sleep hundreds abreast on thestreets of Calcutta and for rice-by-the-bowl with pebbles and clay mixed in.It’s still no picnic. Ninety-nine percent of our great-great-great-greatgrandparents lived on a dollar a day, and more than a billion people I saiddo still.I am not disdaining the once and present poor. I am merely repeatingwhat the poor themselves say—that “I been poor and I been rich,” in SophieTucker’s words, “and, honey, rich is best,” for stomachs, for brains, for souls.No one in a favella behind the Copacabana thinks her life is made moreadmirable in a spiritual sense by living in a cardboard box. Only saints andintellectuals can believe such a paradox for longer than it takes the sun to godown over Corcovado. The poor person wants the fruits of capitalism, firstthe material fruits and then the spiritual fruits. The poor are not better thanyou and me. They’re just poorer. We bourgeois do not make them better offby being ashamed of being rich, since it’s not our fault that they are poor,and there is therefore no original sin in our being rich. We should insteadwork to make them rich, too, by spreading the used-up liberal capitalism.The richer, more urban, more bourgeois people, one person averagedwith another, I claim, have larger, not smaller, spiritual lives than theirimpoverished ancestors of the pastoral. They have more, not fewer, realfriends than their great-great-great-great grandparents in “closed-corporate”villages. They have broader, not narrower, choices of identity than the oneimposed on them by the country, custom, language, and religion of theirbirth. They have deeper, not shallower, contacts with the transcendent of artor science or God, and sometimes even of nature, than the superstitiouspeasants and haunted hunters-gatherers from whom we all descend.They are better humans—because they in their billions have acquired thescope to become so and because market societies encourage art and science