The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

43necessary excess?The world is too much with us; late and soon,Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.—WordsworthThe clerisy thinks that capitalist spending is just awful. In 1985 DanielHorowitz argued that the American clerisy had been since the 1920s in thegrip of a “modern moralism” about spending. The traditional moralism ofthe nineteenth century looked with alarm from the middle class down ontothe workers and immigrants drinking beer and obeying Irish priests and inother ways showing their “loss of virtue.” Traditional moralists like the U.S.Commissioner of Labor, Carroll D. Wright, “had no basic reservations aboutthe justice and efficacy of the economic system—their questions had to dowith the values of workers and immigrants, not the value of capitalism.”The modern moralist, post-1920, in the style of Veblen and Mencken andSinclair Lewis, looks down instead from the clerisy onto the middle class.Therefore “at the heart of most versions of modern moralism is a critique,sometimes radical and always adversarial, of the economy.” 1 Horowitz ispolite to his fellow members of the clerisy—Veblen, Stuart Chase, the Lynds,Galbraith, Riesman, Marcuse, Lasch, and Daniel Bell—and does not say thattheir concerns were simply mistaken. He does observe that “denouncingother people for their profligacy and lack of Culture is a way of reaffirmingone’s own commitment.” 2The clerisy doesn’t like the spending patterns of hoi polloi. It has beensaying since Veblen that the many are in the grips of a tiny group of advertisers.So the spending on Coke and gas grills and automobiles is the result