The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

462 chapter 44new urban universities, transferred the attitude to cities. “The ideals ofChristian society as formulated in earlier centuries,” explains Lester K. Little,“had come to include high regard for creative work, and so the problem ofthe legitimacy of the merchant’s activities generally, as well as of the profit hemade, turned largely on the question of whether what he did could properlybe considered creative work.” 5 “God’s work was, of course, creation,” writesJacques Le Goff on the matter. “Any profession, therefore, which did not createwas bad or inferior.” 6 Little and Le Goff explain how the rise of urbanscholasticism in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries changed this, from atleast a Christian point of view. The Church became for a while, Le Goffnotes, “an early protector of merchants.” 7 From an aristocratic point of view,of course, nothing changed: until the dominance of the bourgeoisie, anynonmilitary work, manual or intellectual, continued to be dishonorable.Now we work. In an ideal world would capitalist work be necessary?I believe so, contrary to a widespread belief among the clerisy that goodwork and capitalist work are inconsistent with each other. People followingJesus, true, would as I said make the good, plain pottery that an economy ofmoderation would demand and spend a lot more time with their kids. Theywould not pursue the illusory immortality of work. But the plain pottery—and therefore more time with the kids, since getting the fancier Wedgwoodchina would require more hours of work—would still be produced mostefficiently, I have claimed, in a market-oriented, free-trade, private property,enterprising, and energetic economy, as in fact it was in the Lower Galilee ofJesus’ time.Choosing the system of natural liberty over the alternatives would makeus richer, not poorer, in sacred things. In a competitive economy of enterpriseJosiah Wedgwood invented thin-walled cups and teapots for the commoners,which formerly he had exported to the tsarina and her court. Thecommoners used them in turn to invent high tea for the rich and the sacredcuppa for the poor.Imagine everyone was an active, believing, even holy and ascetic Christian.What then would be the ideal economy to house such unusual people?One way to imagine it is to look at the actual economic history of religiouscommunities, from early Christians in the cities of the Roman Empire to thepresent-day Amish of Kalona, Iowa. Such data are not free of confounding