The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

30 apologyvirtues would have made us better people than in the world we have lost. Asa system it has been good for us.Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of Britain and the British Commonwealth,sometimes repeats the usual claim of religious leaders, unsubstantiated,that “the dominance of the market [has] had a corrosive effect on thesocial landscape” and that “the institutions of civil society . ..have becomeseriously eroded in consumption-driven cultures.” He is mistaken. It is amistake for one thing to think of bourgeois life as “consumption-driven,” ifone means that spend, spend, spend is necessary for its survival. An aristocrator a peasant will spend, spend, spend when he can, yet his life consistsof more. So too the bourgeois. Since capitalism took command, the sociallandscape has been enriched, not eroded, as many modern sociologists havediscovered—at any rate those who have looked into the matter rather thanaccept nineteenth-century German romanticism and twentieth-centuryCatholic nostalgia. 61But Rabbi Sacks gets it right when he tells us “It is the market—the leastovertly spiritual of contexts—that delivers a profoundly spiritual message.”What message? “It is through exchange that difference becomes a blessing,not a curse.” This from a man who has given some thought to the costs andbenefits of difference. Sacks understands that “the free market is the bestmeans we have yet discovered for alleviating poverty,” yes, but also for “creatinga human environment of independence, dignity and creativity.” 62Capitalists ended slavery and emancipated women and founded universitiesand rebuilt churches, none of these for material profit and none bydamaging the rest of the world. Bourgeois virtues led us from terrifiedhunter bands and violent agricultural villages to peaceful suburbs and livelycities. Enlightened people such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, andMary Wollstonecraft believed that work and trade enriched people in morethan material things. They believed that a capitalism not yet named brokedown privileges that had kept men poor and women and children dependent.And for the soul they believed that labor and trade were on the wholegood, not dishonorable. Work is “rough toil that dignifies the mind,” wroteWollstonecraft, as against “the indolent calm that stupefies the good sort ofwomen it sucks in.” 63 Commerce, the French said, was a sweetener: le douxcommerce. Commerce may have lowered the spirit of the proud noble,Voltaire noted with little regret, having suffered literal beatings at his behest,but it sweetened and elevated the rude peasant.