The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

32 apologydebased values, making people greedy, vulgar, alienated, and depraved. 68Mistaken again. The play-by-play man would remark that our anticapitalistcritic, coming up to bat late in the ball game, is “oh for three.”The theologian William Schweiker expresses the criticisms succinctly:“The modern age in the West . ..brought great rewards. ...Yet it has led,ironically, to the demeaning and the profaning of human existence and allof life through wars, ecological endangerment, and cultural banality.” 69With great respect for the person and the generous sentiment, I wouldreply: no. The reaction to the project, not the project itself, brought thewars. The absence of property rights brought the ecological endangerment.And human culture has always been banal, mostly. What survives intomuseums and history books is normally the nonbanal, giving us an exaltednotion of the past, an anxiety of influence.The claim on the left, in short, is that regardless of the individual capitalist’svirtue or vice the system of capitalism leads to evil. The claim is mistaken.We need to defend a defensible capitalism. We citizens of the bourgeoistowns need to rethink our love and courage. We need to nourish the commercialversions of temperance, justice, and prudence that were admiredduring the eighteenth century by some in the commercial societies ofnorthwestern Europe, and by at least the merchants themselves in Japan. 70And we need to find a safe home for our faith and hope. For failures in justthese regards, see the Muslim, and especially the Arab, and especially theSaudi Arabian world, 1967 to the present. And see, for an earlier case, theChristian, and especially the Western European, and especially the GermanandEnglish-speaking world 1517 to 1689.If we can do all this ethical reinvestment, we can avoid repeating theslaughters and lesser sadnesses of the twentieth century.VI.Refutatio: Anticapitalism Is Bad for UsThe danger is not from the natural environment, as so many physical andbiological scientists believe. Modern economic growth has made the“resources” that everyone except economists thinks of as especially scarce—oil, fresh water, chromium—into an unimportant share of national income.An item’s share of national income is a rigorously justifiable measure ofits economic importance. The biggest one by far is labor, laborers now richin self-owned human capital, the “ultimate resource,” as the economist