The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

58 appealto William Gaddis’s JR and Benjamin Barber’s Jihad vs. McWorld. Each bookpresents itself as a fresh, brave unveiling of sin and hypocrisy, contrastingwith the imagined purity of a lovely if counterfactual noncapitalist andnonbourgeois world. It must be, I mutter uncharitably under my breath,that people want to hear echoed and reechoed the anti-Daddy notions theypicked up as college sophomores.Daddy and his friends, I admit, have some actual crimes to answer for. Forexample, the execution of the Haymarket anarchists. The Congo. Oil realpolitik.But I am claiming that the anti-antibourgeois case is stronger than a lot ofpeople think. The case is straightforward or complicated, reasonably persuasiveor a trifle dubious, agreed upon by sociologists or assumed by economists,implied by historians or sketched by literary and social critics. Butanyway it is extensive—four volumes of extent, actually—with a good deal ofnot wholly absurd reasoning and not wholly unbelievable evidence attached.An open-minded opponent of capitalism would want to reflect on it, ifonly to achieve a more sophisticated opposition. Yet most of the opponentsof capitalism, and its numerous lukewarm friends, are not acquainted withthe case for the defense. They think the evidence is strong that capitalism isworking badly right now, and has done in its past many bad works. Myfriend and colleague the prize-winning poet Anne Winters, for example,writes in the title poem of her recent book, the narrator sitting reading theTimes in a café on Broadway:....can I escape morning happiness,or not savor our fabled “texture” of foreignand native poverties? (A boy tied into greengrocer’s apron,unplaceable accent, brings out my coffee.) But, no, it says herethe old country’s “de-developing” due to its mountainousdebt to the First World.... 2Well, not so—though Anne’s self-doubting “it says here” should beacknowledged. As Richard Lanham puts it to me, the opponents of capitalismmake 2006 sound like 1933,or 1848, over and over again.It has been a long time since 1933, or 1848. Personally speaking, I havebeen listening to imperfectly informed criticisms of capitalism all my adultlife, from beloved classmates in college and from beloved colleagues in English,and even from some of my beloved fellow economists. Many people seeevery bad thing in our lives as being a result of capitalism, not being as aresult sometimes, after all, of loss of Eden. Many are unwilling to see the