The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

78 chapter 2Theodore Schultz, the inventor of the concept in economics, visited anAlabama farm family in the late 1940s, he wondered to the mother andfather about their poverty in run-down hog pens and an unpainted house.He told me that the mother replied in effect, “No, you are mistaken, ProfessorSchultz. We are not poor. We are rich: we purposely ran down the farmin order to invest in the education of our four children, all the way throughcollege. That’s where our treasure is.”Like a college education, property in home ownership is a sign ofmiddle-class status in the United States, a modern version of the Jeffersonianand Roman republican idea of farm ownership as citizenship. The educationand the home are not literally inherited, at least (again) in fable. Theyare bought during each bourgeois life, working for the mortgage, paying offthe loans.With the workers the bourgeoisie shares a resentment of the Great andGood, as they are called jeeringly in bourgeois England, and shares aneagerness to read about their fall. The petite bourgeoisie especially, most ofall in egalitarian places like Australia or America, regards the political orcorporate bosses as mafia dons, warlords, smooth-skinned thieves. Thus ashopkeeper in Santa Fe describes the sales tax, as he calculates it, as “5 percentfor the governor.” The hostility to their betters among the bourgeoisieis sometimes matched by a contempt for their inferiors, and such a mix doeshave fascist possibilities. But the better angels of the bourgeoisie are geniallypopulist, like Clarence the angel to George Bailey the savings-and-loanbanker in It’s a Wonderful Life.Equality, property, and honorable verbal work, helping out with themanual work at the crisis, these three abide. But the greatest of these is honorablework.