So-called “welfare economics” has recently shown some faint stirrings of complexity in ethical thought, as in the works by the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen, and more in the works of younger economists and philosophers inspired by his forays. But most academic economists continue working the magician’s hat. The hat does not contain a living theory of moral sentiments. Sen complained of the “lack of interest that welfare economics has had in any kind of complex ethical theory,” and added: “It is arguable that [utilitarianism and]. . . Pareto efficiency have appealed particularly because they have not especially taxed the ethical imagination of the conventional economist.”[1] Truth be known, this “welfare economics” and what passes for “ethical” theorizing among economists and economics-loving philosophers is a Victorian, utilitarian parrot, stuffed and mounted and fitted with marble eyes.

An economist named Robert Nelson has tried in two amazing books to give the stuffed parrot back to the pet store. The books have puzzling titles: Reaching for Heaven on Earth: The Theological Meaning of Economics (1991) and Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond (2001). The theological meaning of . . . economics? Economics as . . . religion?

Nelson, who now teaches at the University of Maryland, was for a long time a “policy analyst” working on zoning and property rights, Federal coal policy, and the case for abolishing the U. S. Forest service.[2] Though trained in the arcania of academic economics, he uses economics for practicalities. He therefore knows a dead parrot when he sees one. He is not, as many economists are, devoted to finding out what can be drawn out of a hat if you assume you have stuffed it backstage with parrots.

Economics and theology are usually believed to be opposites. According to Nelson, who leans against a presumption since Goethe and Coleridge, they are not. Economics is the doppelganger of theology. Like Veblen, though with a different politics, Nelson takes seriously the newspaper cliché that economics is “mere” religion, voodoo economics. But he drops the “mere.” Theology is serious business, the discussion of ordering principles.

Economics, he argues, has become the theology of a new religion of abundance. “Almost all the leading schools of economics have had more impact on the world by virtue of their religious authority” “than by the specific technical knowledge . . . they have provided.”[3] Joseph Schumpeter and Robert Heilbroner called it “vision.” Economics is the vision thing of the ordinary.

Nelson detects two theological traditions, which he calls the Roman and the Protestant. His “Roman” means ancient Roman but also Roman Catholic; and his “Protestant” means Lutheran/Calvinist but also rebellious and cantankerous. The issue between the two schools, the optimistic Romans and the pessimistic Protestants, has always been the perfectibility of humankind. The Romans emphasize the four cardinal virtues, courage, temperance, justice, and prudence, and think they are attainable in the works of this world. By their works shall ye know them. The Protestants emphasize the three “theological” virtues, faith, hope, and love, and count on amazing grace to save a wretch like me.

The United States is famously a Protestant country, given to gathering under tents in which sinners declare for Christ. On Sundays even Catholic Americans nowadays partake of the Protestant spirit. But during the rest of the week, says Nelson, Protestant Americans are Romans. “Of all nations, the United States exhibits a characteristic national outlook that matches most closely the Roman tradition. American typically believe that reason guides the world, showing a deep faith in progress.”[4] Contrast French people. An American soldier was asked if he “hated” his Iraqi enemy. “No, of course not. I reckon I’m here to do a job, and so is he.” A centurion standing uneasily between Jesus and the Pharisees could not have better expressed the Roman view.

Rome, especially under its Republic, had a civic religion, depending on the reading of entrails and the interpretation of the flights of birds among other sensible precautions. The civic religion of the modern world is social engineering, which depends on a similar divination, called “time series econometrics.” The new religion promises material salvation, yielding, as Nelson points out, spiritual salvation as well. For better or worse, economics is the theology of the new religion of this-worldly Progress and Problem Solving.

But it doesn’t work very well, partly because it’s not recognized as religious. Religion, I’ve said, is not something that can be dispensed with. We need religion just as much as our ancestors did, which is to say that we need an account of the transcendent, the meaning, the faith, the hope, the love. Nelson believes that the American civic religion needs renewal. His own suggestion is a merger of two of the churches, the environmentalist and the libertarian, the tree-worshippers and the market-worshippers. Save the earth, by all means—by getting our engineering off of it. Take the tools away from the Army Corps of Engineers. Prevent the ranchers from using government land at a subsidized price. Abolish the U. S. Forest Service. Get Washington out of the business of running the country from a nice office on K Street. Nelson’s new theology is anti-Roman, that is, anti-imperial and anti-social-engineering. It is Protestant in Nelson’s wide sense—wary of bishops and centralization, unpersuaded by time-series econometrics.

The Political Economy Research Center in Bozeman, Montana is an example of the new faith, showing how the wilderness can be protected by capitalism rather than by a capitalist-influenced government. PERC’s manifesto is: “Private property rights encourage stewardship of resources. Government subsidies often degrade the environment. Market incentives spur individuals to conserve resources and protect environmental quality. Polluters should be liable for the harm they cause others.”[5] The magic word there is “stewardship,” a theological term of long standing. Nelson, PERC, and I are suggesting that a true stewardship comes from ownership, not collectivism.

The contrasting, Roman faith shows in the views of Robert Reich, the famously short professor of government at Brandeis. Reich appears to be a charming, intelligent man: how can you dislike a short man who writes a book called I’ll be Short: Essentials for a Decent Working Society (2003)? But in 1991 he sounded the alarm against what he called the “succession” of the educated classes. He worried that taxable income would move out from under the taxing authority—precisely the program, at least in words, of Bush II. According to Reich, why does it matter? Because without taxes the lobbyists on K Street cannot spend your money to make a community.

The economist Albert Hirschman speaks of the three social options of exit, voice, and loyalty. If you don’t like the environmental policies of your town, you can either love it or leave it, exercising loyalty or exit; or else you can go down to City Hall and complain, exercising voice.[6] The Roman tradition in social thinking, represented on the left by Reich and on the right by George Will, wants to create fresh reasons for loyalty. It wants to block the exits. Nelson by contrast views exit as just the ticket, the most basic of political and religious rights. The Protestants—or the ecumenical Rome of John XXIII—regard exit as making for a freer world. Only an established church, says Nelson, views the splintering of religious power as bad.

Though he has his opinions, Nelson preaches “tolerance of diverse economic theologies.” This is not the present situation in economics, which is dominated by a theology “from Samuelson to Chicago and beyond.” Nelson is unimpressed by the claims of the Samuelsonian Chicagoans to a monopoly of scientific method. He doubts in fact, as many students of the matter since Thomas Kuhn have, that there is really such a thing as “scientific method.” “To abandon the [so-called] scientific method . . . is to undermine a basic faith of the American welfare state, a faith as deeply embedded in Western civilization as the Roman tradition of thought.” He proposes instead a “postmodern economic theology,” as I do here, and Don Lavoie did, and Arjo Klamer does.

“Postmodernism” does not mean what you may have gathered from the outrage of conservative cultural journalists. It means merely dropping the artificialities of high modernism, and in particular dropping the fact-value split in its cruder forms and the established church of social engineering. “The new world of the welfare state and of economic pursuits would have to be placed within the context of a broader understanding of the meaning a purpose of human existence.” Nelson’s hero, Frank Knight, would have detested the word, but of course Nelson is calling exactly for an economic theology.

[1] Sen, Ethics and Economics, 1987, p. 50.

[2] These are the titles of three of his other books, of 1977, 1983, and 2000.

[3] Nelson, Economics as Religion, 2001, p. 267.

[4] Nelson, Reaching for Heaven on Earth, 1991

[5] http://www.perc.org/aboutperc/index.php.

[6] Hirchman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, 1970.

I cannot conceive the necessity for God to love me. . . . But I can easily imagine that he loves that perspective of creation which can only be seen from the point where I am . . . . I must withdraw so that he may see it.

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1942), p. 41

According to one standard English translation of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, the humble person “in respect of that which is his own ought to subject himself to every neighbor, in respect of that which the latter has of God’s.”[1] It’s a cloudy sentence, and not any clearer in the Latin. But it seems in context to mean merely this: we should respect in other people what God, after all, has created. To scorn listening to others is to commit the chief theological sin against the Holy Spirit, pride. The sparks of perfection in people are to be esteemed, “that we may know the things that are given to us by God,” as St. Paul put it.[2] Or, as St. Augustine wrote—also quoted approvingly by Aquinas—“We must not esteem by pretending to esteem, but should really think it possible for another person to have something that is hidden to us and whereby he is better than we are.”

The founding Quaker, George Fox urged us to listen quietly, and “answer the witness of God in every man, whether they are the heathen . . . or . . . do profess Christ.”[3] Father Peter Maurin was described by Dorothy Day after his death in 1949 as “truly humble of heart, and loving. . . . He. . . saw all others around him as God saw them. In other words, he saw Christ in them.”[4] And Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in 2002, since the point is not merely Christian, writes: “Truth on the ground is multiple, partial. . . . Each person, culture and language has part of it. . . . The [Jewish] sages said, `Who is wise? One who learns from all men.’”[5]

To put it academically and economically, humility enjoins listening to one’s colleagues for the sake of Truth’s message in them. Shut up and learn something. The wisdom books of the Hebrew Bible are full of such advice, as in the proverbs of Solomon:

Wise men lay up knowledge, but the babbling of a fool brings ruin near (Proverbs 10: 14).

He who belittles his neighbor lacks sense, but a man of understanding remains silent (11:12).

If one gives answer before he hears, it is his folly and shame (18:13).

Or Jesus son of Sirach: “The tongue of man is his fall . . . . But if thou love to hear, thou shalt receive understanding” (13, 33). “Some people without brains,” says the Scarecrow in the movie of The Wizard of Oz, “do an awful lot of talking.” Harry Truman, I have noted, defined an expert as “someone who doesn’t want to learn anything new.” Such pride is the opposite of humility, the humility to listen and learn.

The philosopher Amélie Oksenberg Rorty once described the habit of intellectual humility, rare among academics eager to speak and reluctant to listen. What is crucial is

our ability to engage in continuous conversation, testing one another, discovering our hidden presumptions, changing our minds because we have listened to the voices of our fellows. Lunatics also change their minds, but their minds change with the tides of the moon and not because they have listened, really listened, to their friends’ questions and objections.[6]

Humility is part of the cardinal virtue of Temperance, which in turn is the internal balance essential for a good life. Humility, said Aquinas, answers among the Christian virtues to the pagan virtue of Great-Souledness, which Aristotle the pagan teacher of aristocrats admired so much. To be humble is to temper one’s passions in pursuing as Aquinas put it “boni ardui,” goods difficult of achievement. To be great-souled, which in turn is part of the cardinal virtue of Courage, is to keep working towards such goods nonetheless.[7]

We appear to need both. Think of the balance of Hope and Temperance, and in particular the balance of Great-souledness and Humility, necessary to sustain good work in science and scholarship; or in sports or crafts; or in any difficult good. Your high-school driving instructor said, “Aim high in steering.” Words to live by, the great-souledness. But the skepticism of humility is also needed, to listen to the hints of the highway. If we are not to end in foolishness, or in the ditch, we need to aim high and also to listen, really listen.

The goods difficult of achievement must to be “goods” in the non-economic sense in order for humility and great-souledness in pursuing them to be ethical. Scholarly excellence in understanding actual economies, for example, or the use of one’s wealth in proper stewardship, are good goods, and proper objects therefore of a paired humility and great-souledness in their pursuit. Scholarly excellence in understanding imaginary economies, or wealth used in projects of gluttony, are not such goods. It is not surprising to find people bound up in such bad goods exhibiting an idiotic pride and lack of temperance. They sin boldly, but do not believe in or rejoice in Christ, or any other good Good. Humility would resist such presumption, as Aquinas’ Christian version of great-souledness resists despair.[8]

To be prideful in the bad, unchristian, boyish sense is to will to defy God, which is to say to make oneself the object of striving, a very god, violating the first through fourth commandments. God is God, said the commandments, not little moi: Sh’ma Yisrael adonai elohaynu adonai echad, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord.

Thus Lucifer, who even when he was light-bearer among the angels was not given to humble listening, is described in Paradise Lost:

he of the first,

If not the first archangel, great in power, 660

In favor and pre-eminence, yet fraught

With envy against the Son of God, that day

Honored by his great Father, and proclaimed

Messiah King anointed, could not bear

Through pride that sight, and thought himself impaired. 665

Deep malice thence conceiving and disdain.[9]

“Impaired” turns on the usual sort of Miltonic ambiguity. Lucifer thinks, that is, falsely imagines, himself to be a “pair” with Christ, thus “impaired,” but immediately the reader is surprised to see that Lucifer thinks himself impaired, that is, damaged. And Lucifer thinks himself into actual damage, indeed “conceives,” that is, generates, himself, by way of the double meaning of “conceive” = “think up” and “conceive” = “create a child.” He could not “bear,” that is give birth to, the sight of Christ; he was fraught with, that is, bearing, envy, coming “through” the master sin, pride.

Such word games seem impossibly cute. But that was how Milton worked.[10] For example the number of the last line, 666, known in numerology as the Devil’s number, is exactly where Lucifer becomes Satan (Hebrew “enemy”). The year 1666 was a culmination of disasters for Restoration England, a plague year (1665) followed by the Great Fire (1666). But it was a year of triumph for Milton the Puritan and embittered Cromwellite, who in it appears to have finished the first editions of Paradise Lost (published 1667) and Paradise Regained, though blind. Michael Lieb points out to me that 999 is important, too, the line in Book 9 of Adam’s Fall in Paradise Lost. It is the result of turning upside down that 666, again the number of the beast (Revelations 13:18) . From Milton’s viewpoint one could say that 666 + 999 = 1665, the beginning of apostate England’s well-deserved troubles.

Satan in Milton is a great speaker, and no humble listener, which has led Romantics such as Blake and Goethe to imagine that Milton was of Satan’s party. But he is utterly incapable of shutting up and learning anything, as Milton shows most clearly in the Satan-Christ colloquies in Paradise Regained. His pride is the opposite of a proper humility that could balance his undoubted great-souledness.

The theologian Stephen Pope emphasizes that “Humility should not be confused with humiliating self-abnegation before others.”[11] “Some strands of Christian piety and theology,” writes another theologian, Ellen Charry, “suspect that enjoying life is somehow impious.” She notes that humility as interpreted by medieval monasticism—”because of poor theological education of monastics”—”was interpreted as requiring self-abnegation.”[12]

St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) never learned to write—she would dictate as many as three texts simultaneous to three scribes, in the style of St. Thomas—but became a diplomat in the chaotic Italy of the Schism and was proclaimed at last a Doctor of the Church. She starved to death at the age that Jesus was crucified by insisting on eating nothing but the eucharist. Dorothy Day said that reading a hagiography of St. Catherine inspired her to her own life of radical abstention in the name of Christ. The outcome, Charry notes, “looks to many of us like defiant pride rather than obedient humility. Humility, perhaps now the most despised of Christian virtues, is, nevertheless, essential to happiness.” But in Catherine “we see how easily it slips over into pride.”[13] Simone Weil, too, in her proud self-abnegation seems like a more literate version of St. Catherine.

But Weil declares in her notebooks that “Humility is the refusal to exist outside God,” as she so refused. “It is the queen of virtues.”[14] But as Thomas Merton put it, “Humility is a virtue, not a neurosis. . . . A humility that freezes our being and frustrates all healthy activity is not humility at all, but a disguised form of pride.”[15] That’s Satan’s repeated error. He thinks humility before God is self-abnegation, and a prideful Self is his little god. Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven, says he. No, Satan, wrong again. Humility is seen erroneously as the opposite of a world-enjoying spirit. Satan thinks of it as merely an inconvenience to the questing will. Confusion about humility is widespread. If you are a candidate for the priesthood in the Episcopal church you will fear that your “discernment committee” assigned to test your calling will turn out to be itself a site of envy and pride, engaging in hazing under a demand that you be “humble.”

What may be bothering Satan is the feminine quality of humility. Feminist theologians such as Valerie Saiving, Judith Vaughan, and Rosemary Ruether have been observing for decades that humility has a womanly cast, and that the corresponding sin of excess against the spirit is precisely self-abnegation—as Saiving put it in 1960, “triviality, distractability, and diffuseness; lack of an organizing center or focus; dependence on others for one’s own self definition; . . . in short, underdevelopment or negation of the self.”[16] It is a point that John Stuart Mill made in his feminist blast of 1869: “I believe that equality of rights would abate the exaggerated self-abnegation which is the present artificial ideal of feminine character.”[17] Excess in self-abnegation is to humility as excess in pride is to great-souledness. Together the two virtues balance and complete each other. On their own, without the other, they are not virtues at all, but rather the characteristic female sin against the spirit and the characteristic male one.

True humility is not undignified. Uriah Heep is most umble, but of course has merely the semblance of the virtue. He esteems, or more accurately feigns to esteem, only rank. That is undignified. “But how little you think of the rightful umbleness of a person in my station, Master Copperfield! Father and me was both brought up at a foundation school for boys. . . They taught us all a deal of umbleness. . . . We was to be umble to this person, and umble to that; and to pull off our caps here, and to make bows there; and always to know our place, and abase ourselves before our betters. And we had such a lot of betters!”[18]

True humility on the contrary is democratic, looking for the best in people, and often finding it. In theological terms, it is to answer the witness of God in any other person, whether he is the heathen or does profess Christ. Uriah does not honor the God’s Truth in the least high-ranking of us, which is to say that he embodies the error that rank and truth are identical. He defers unreflectively to rank. In similar fashion, to give examples from the Theory of Prudence, misled “Austrian” economists will defer unreflectively to, say, Ludwig von Mises or misled M.I.T. neoclassical economists to Paul Anthony Samuelson. Like a bad scientist, Uriah does not listen, really listen to anybody or anything.

In his Autobiography Benjamin Franklin makes a characteristic joke about the matter, noting of humility “I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue; but I had a good deal with regard to the appearance of it.”[19] Yet in fact—a point which applies to most of his self-descriptions, and is part of his craftiness in appearing umble—he understated his ethical achievement here. The mature Franklin was well-known as never giving an answer before he had heard out the other person. He acted as though he had read and taken careful note of the medieval motto, Listen even to the other side.

In an age of orators Franklin was a listener. In the Constitutional Convention he hardly spoke, not out of pusillanimous fear of failure—this diligent printer had stood before kings, and had all the great-souledness a man could require—but out of a proper and habitual humility towards his fellows. To be humble in this sense, from the Christian and doubtless other perspectives, is merely to have a decent respect to the opinions of humankind, because other men and women sometimes reveal God’s Own Truth. As Iris Murdoch expressed it in 1967, “Humility is not a peculiar habit of self-effacement, rather like having an inaudible voice. It is selfless respect for reality and one of the most difficult and central of all virtues.”[20]

A striking example in my own experience—I myself cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue—is the late Don Lavoie (1951-2001), a professor of economics at George Mason University. His very name reflects it: officially “Don,” in French-Canadian style, not the full Hibernian Donald, which means in Old Irish “world ruler”; and was indeed once my own name.

He was humble, a most startling quality in a profession not known for showing it. When a physicist some time ago attended a conference about economics and chaos theory he remarked that he had once thought that physicists were the most arrogant academics around.[21] Lavoie was not umble. His respect for the opinions of humankind was not deference to mere rank. He was a democrat, small-d. He embodied the great-souledness that Aquinas viewed as paired with humility. He ventured on great, hopeful projects, such as bringing the humanities to economics, seriously, or bringing the computer to economics and to its teaching, seriously. He satisfied the Aquinian definitions of a humble and great-souled venturer, being a Christian with a telos of approach to God.

“The good man,” writes Murdoch, “is humble; he is very unlike the neo-Kantian Lucifer. . . . Only rarely does one meet somebody in whom [humility] positively shines, in whom one apprehends with amazement the absence of the anxious avaricious tentacles of the self.”[22] Murdoch points out that humility is one of the chief virtues in a good artist and in a good scientist. In his Justice as Translation the legal scholar James Boyd White put it in terms of humble reading, “a willingness to learn the other’s language and to undergo the changes we know that will entail.”[23]

Among the contending schools of economic science there is one which does at least theoretically recommend humility, listening, really listening, scientifically speaking—not certainly the Marxism I started with; nor the Harvard neoclassical economics I was trained in; nor the Chicago-School economics I then practiced; but the NYU-Auburn-George-Mason-University Austrian economics that Lavoie discovered young as a student of computer science and improved in his work. Austrian economists are the free-market followers of the literal, ethnic Austrians Menger (1840-1921), Mises (1881-1973), and Hayek (1899-1992). They have now for about a century been explaining to us other economists that the economic scientist cannot expect to outguess the businessperson.

We should listen to the mystery of entrepreneurship, the Austrians say, not airily assume as my fellow neoclassicals tend to do that nothing whatever is to be gained by actually talking to economic “agents,” because after all such “agents” are completely determined by such-and-such a Max U model. As a non-economist professor at the business school of the University of Chicago put it to me once, the neoclassicals, especially at Chicago, believe a contradiction: that everyone is rational; and that everyone who doesn’t believe so is an idiot.

I said Lavoie improved Austrian economics, and this is one way he did it, by oncovering a hermeneutics in economics, and by listening for the hermeneutics inside the actual economy itself. Hermeneutics is the listening side of a speaking rhetoric, as Lavoie said.[24] It is the art of understanding what you have listened to—really listened to, an art of close listening. Austrian economics is the natural home for a humanistic approach to the economy, which acknowledges, as economics after Smith mainly has not, that humans are speaking and listening and interpreting animals. Smith believed that the propensity to truck and barter was based on the faculty of reason—so much for Max U and the Reason half of the Enlightenment project. But he added, and believed, “and the faculty of speech,” which is the other, Freedom half, ignored after his death.[25]

The habit of listening, really listening in Lavoie’s academic life was strictly paralleled, that is, by his belief that hermeneutics worked also in the economy. Adam Smith was again wiser than his followers. Smith’s butcher and baker are not merely Max-U folk who treat the rest of the world as a lamentable constraint on their own willfulness, a sort of vending machine, as I said.[26] A person in business depends on an imaginative engagement with the customers and suppliers, to guess what they are thinking, to see the witness in them. The Quakers were good businesspeople. The rigorously humble Amish are well-known as brilliant farmers, within their self-imposed constraints of no tractors and no electricity. An alert businesswoman “subjects herself to every neighbor.” She listens and learns from other people and from the world, through that selfless respect for reality. The businesswoman’s goods are difficult of achievement, requiring great-souledness, but depend also on listening to what people want and the world will allow.

The business section of the Chicago Tribune has a feature on Mondays called “My Biggest Mistake,” in which managers of small businesses confess to this or that expensive failure to answer the witness of reality: not listening to customers here; not listening to employees there. It is hard to imagine a similar column in a publication directed at the clerisy: “My biggest scientific mistake” running an experiment on oxidative phosphorylation or “my biggest artistic mistake” wrapping a building in cellophane. The clerisy chooses never to stoop. Considering the allegedly modern temptations to pride in capitalist enterprise it will seems odd to say so, but Lavoie believed, as I do, that a capitalist at her pretty-good best is humble. McDonald’s offers a humble meal for working people at half-an-hour’s minimum wages. WalMart listens closely to what its customers want.

* * * *

A proud, modern, secular member of the clerisy, on the contrary, declares that he can get along without such stuff, and scorns the humility of religion, or of capitalism. But he accepts the cornucopia of a capitalist society. And he is himself in thrall to a faithful or hopeful vision of, say, Art or Science or Progress or Hap or even merely to his proud self-image as the Village Atheist: “I thank whatever gods may be/ For my unconquerable soul.”

“The man who has made his choice in favor of a profane life,” noted Mercea Eliade in 1957, “never succeeds in completely doing away with religious behavior. . . . [E]ven the most desacralized existence still preserves traces of a religious valorization of the world.”[27] Humans symbolize, and symbolizing entails hope and faith. The atheist treats as sacred the scenes of his youth, the graves of his ancestors, the loves of his life, the blessed hope for his career, for his science, for his family. “The issue between secularists and believers,” writes J. Budziszewski, “is not whether to have faith in a god, or faith in something other than a god; it is whether to have faith in this or that kind of god.”[28]

H. L. Mencken admired in himself and in Joseph Conrad and in Theodore Dreiser—at least in Dreiser’s more aristocratic moods—the “ability to look into the blackness steadily.” He detected backsliding on this matter even in his hero Nietzsche, who

shrinking from the horror of that abyss of negation, revived the Pythagorean concept of der ewigen Wiederkunft [the eternal recurrence]—a vain and blood-curdling sort of comfort. To it, after a while, he added explanations almost Christian—a whole repertoire of whys and wherefores, aims and goals, aspirations and significances.[29]

Theodore Dreiser, too, labored sometimes under “the burden of a believing mind,” lapsing into “imbecile sentimentalities.” He was after all “the Indiana peasant.”[30]

Such a pose is dissected by Murdoch:

The atmosphere is invigorating and tends to produce self-satisfaction in the reader, who feels himself to be a member of an elite, addressed by another one. Contempt for the ordinary human condition, together with a conviction of personal salvation, saves the writer from real pessimism. His gloom is superficial and conceals real elation.[31]

Mencken admitted as much. He was cheerful even after his major stroke in 1949, which left this great writer penless. In 1922 he had declared himself the happiest of men, elated to live in a nation so filled with boobs, clowns, morons, and Methodists—”the Ku Klux Klan was, to all intents and purposes, simply the secular arm of the Methodist Church”—that he could earn a comfortable living making fun of them.[32]

The agnostic and especially the atheist, unaware of the god he believes, is as uncritical in his faith as a Sicilian widow lighting a candle before a statue of the Virgin. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., had been annealed in the fires of the Civil War. He was seriously wounded three times, and saw his best friend die. Before the war he had been a devout and peaceable Emersonian, an abolitionist who joined up on principle. In the War he lost his principles, adopting instead a hard faith of Mere Duty. No God for him—except the Romantic H*ms*lf of the stoic materialist. “The faith is true and adorable,” he wrote in “A Soldier’s Faith,” delivered on Memorial Day in 1895 “which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has no notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use.” Small comfort the words must have been to the widows and orphans in attendance. But Holmes was a hard man.

The mere, eloquent assertion of his Faith was as far as Holmes could get in defending it. “Truly courageous persons,” Daryl Koehn argues, “do not fight to death simply because ordered to do so. . . . They consider whether a . . . situation demands such a stance.”[33] But Holmes did not consider ethics to be a matter of consideration. He did not bring a theology to bear, no repertoire of whys and wherefores, aims and goals, aspirations and significances. Theologies are denied to the non-faithful by their faiths.

Yet note the title, “A Soldier’s Faith,” thirty years after the War, and listen to the religious words pouring out. The man who with Captain Holmes has known “the blue line of fire at the dead angle of Spotsylvania. . . [knows] that man has in him that unspeakable something which makes him capable of a miracle, able to lift himself by the might of his own soul, unaided, able to face annihilation for a blind belief.”[34] While sick with dysentery behind the lines at Fredericksburg a younger Holmes wrote to his mother with what was already a mixture of an aristocratic and a shadowy Christian view: “it’s odd how indifferent one gets to the sight of death—perhaps because one gets aristocratic and don’t value much a common life— Then they are apt to be so dirty it seems natural—’Dust to dust’.”[35] Holmes planned his last words: “Have faith and pursue the unknown end.”

So likewise the Nobel laureate in physics and learned theologian Stephen Weinberg accepts invitations to appear on television to attack the very notion of God. He defends his own god, Physics, against the heresies of relativism and postmodernism professed over in the departments of English and sociology, about which, thank God, he is innocent. Weinberg has no need for the hypothesis of a Jehovah. Not for him, this proud physicist, humility before what Kant called the two most astonishing facts, astonishing after thinking about them for a lifetime: “the starry skies above [compare Vincent] and the moral universe within.”[36]

No religion. No theology. No transcendent. No love or faith or hope. The abyss of negation. How glorious and brave.

[1] Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, c. 1270, IIa IIae, q. 161, a. 3, “I answer that . . .,” quoted in Pope, “Overview,” in Pope, “Overview,”, 2002, p. 45

[2] 1 Cor. 2:12, quoted by Aquinas, and himself quoted in Pope, “Overview,” 2002, p. 45.

[3] Quoted in Brinton, Friends, 1964, p. 36.

[4] Day, June 1949, in Day 1983, p. 124.

[5] Sacks, Dignity of Difference, 2002, p. 64f.

[6] A. Rorty, “Experiments in Philosophic Genre,” 1983, p. 562

[7] IIa IIae, q. 161, a. 1, quoted in Houser in Pope, ed., Ethics of Aquinas, 2002, p. 311.

[8] Sweeney in Pope, ed., Ethics of Aquinas, 2002, p. 163.

[9] Milton, Paradise Lost, 1667, V, 656-666.

[10] Fish, How Milton Works, 2001.

[11] Pope, “Overview,” in Pope, ed., Ethics of Aquinas, 2002, p. 45; Comte-Sponville cannot get this, or any other Christian virtue, right: On the Virtues, 1996, pp. 140-148.

[12] Charry, “Happiness,” 2004, p. 24.

[13] Charry, “Happiness,” 2004, p. 25.

[14] Weil, Gravity and Grace, 1942, p. 40, in a chapter entitled “Self-Effacement.”

[15] Merton, Thoughts, 1956, p. 55.

[16] Saiving, “Human Situation,” 1960, p. 109.

[17] Mill, Subjection of Women, 1969, Chp. 2, p. 41.

[18] Dickens, David Copperfield, 1850, Chp. 39.

[19] Franklin, Autobiography, 1771-1784, p. 159.

[20] Murdoch, “Sovereignty of Good,” 1967, p. 95.

[21] Richard Palmer, quoted in Pool, “Strange Bedfellows,” 1989, p. 700. Compare Cicero, De divinatione, II.xiii. 30, “physicus, quo genere nihil adrogantius.“ Palmer and Cicero, did not perhaps know any professor of surgery.

[22] Murdoch, “Sovereignty of Good,” 1967, p. 103

[23] J. B. White, Justice as Translation, 1989, p. 42. Our mutual acquaintance Richard Posner does not know how to read this way. See my review of White’s book, a book by Stanley Fish, and a book by Posner, McCloskey, “Essential Rhetoric of Law,” 1991.

[24] Lavoie, ed., Economics and Hermeneutics, 1992, in his “Introduction.”

[25] Smith, Wealth, 1776, Chp. 2 of Part I, second paragraph, p. 25.

[26] Fleischacker, “Economics and the Ordinary Person,” 2004.

[27] Eliade, Sacred and Profane, 1957, p. 23.

[28] Budziszewski, ‘Religion and Civic Culture,” 1992, p. 52.

[29] Mencken, “Theodore Dreiser,” 1916, p. 49.

[30] Mencken, “Theodore Dreiser,” 1916, p. 51.

[31] Murdoch, “’God’ and ‘Good’,” 1969, p. 50.

[32] Mencken, “On Being an American,” 1922, p. 19 and throughout. Compare Mark Twain in Following the Equator (1897), motto to Chp. XXVIII, quoted from Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar, Century Magazine: “Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.”

[33] Koehn, “Virtue Ethics,” 2005, p. 535.

[34] Holmes, “Address,” 1895, p. 266.

[35] Quoted in Alschuler, Law Without Values, 2000, p. 43.

[36] Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 1788, “Conclusion.”

We are in a transition stage between a mechanistic concept of man and an amalgam of both the rationalistic and what you could call the mystical or spiritualistic concept of him. . . . The work of art, the great work of art, is going to be that work which finds space for the two forces to operate.

Arthur Miller, interview 1958, p. 173.

The Wagnerian replacement of religion with Art is typified by a Dutchman: Vincent Van Gogh. He has become a Christ-figure of art appreciation, tormented for the bourgeois’ sin of not buying his paintings when he was alive, and now redeemed in dollars. Vincent was a poet in paint, a self-educated sophisticate. He read novels and journals of opinion ravenously in four languages, taking themes for paintings directly from them, and wrote letters in three of the languages often and well, especially to his equally sophisticated art-dealer brother Theo. Thanks to his literary bent he is the most word-described of 19^th-century painters, at any rate per year of artistic activity.

The Van Gogh of popular myth is the tortured artist, his allegedly chronic madness and his actual suicide casting a shadow back on his art, as he feared it would. Had he not started to have attacks of a supposed mental illness in December of 1888, and especially had he not committed suicide in July of 1890, but lived out a normal span like Monet or Cézanne, we would have more of his art, with the same qualities—which were technical developments, not effusions of madness—at a lower price per painting, unhyped by the Romance of his illness and death. The productions of Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton have suffered, and in Romance benefited, from a similar overemphasis on their alleged or actual mental illnesses. According to modern psychiatric dogma, suicide just is crazy. Anyone in the United States who threatens suicide can be committed to a mental institution against her will.

In Van Gogh’s case the overemphasis of his alleged mental illness began six months before his death with an article in Le Mercure de France by the young critic Albert Aurier, seeing madness and greatness in “the isolate.” Van Gogh wrote to Aurier thanking him for praising the paintings, though trying to show him that this was no isolated madman holding the pen, or the brush, but a man of normal mind who was a competent and thoughtful artist.[1]

The myth, however, has been unstoppable. It fits well the late-Romantic, wannabe-aristocratic notion of the mad artist, as in Kirk Douglas’ riveting but nutty performance in the movie Lust for Life. Saul Bellow, speaking of Delmore Schwartz in Humboldt’s Gift, attributes the attitude to the prestige of business and technology in America: “the weakness of the spiritual powers is proven by the childishness, madness, drunkenness, and despair of these martyrs. . . So poets [and other artists] are loved, but loved because they just can’t make it here.”[2]

The mad-artist idea is not confined to capitalist America. Herbert Read in The Meaning of Art (1931) spoke of Van Gogh’s letters: “Here is a veritable Painter’s Progress, but with no Celestial City at the end of it, only chaos and dark despair—the madness and self-inflicted death of a genius in a cold and uncomprehending world.”[3] A sidebar in the section about the Van Gogh Museum in the Eyewitness Guide to Amsterdam (1995) gives “An Artist’s Life” in 72 words: fully 40 of them concern his illness.[4] Among the Dutch, speaking to themselves, it is a similar tale. De Millenium Top-40, giving sketches of the 40 “greatest” Dutch people of all time, ranked Vincent 13^th and entitled the sketch, Zelfmoordenaar die bleef leven, “a suicide who continued to live.” It devotes over half of its 360 words to a bizarre comparison of van Gogh with Nietzsche gone mad allegedly from syphilis, a comparison said to be minder gek dan het lijkt, “less crazy than it seems,” and a still more crazy one with the “suicidal artist-politician” Adolf Hitler.[5]

If a great novelist died at age 37 of heart disease brought on by lack of temperance in diet no one would think to retell 55 percent of her artistic story as a battle of the waistline. Dylan Thomas did die at 39, apparently from drinking. But no one interprets his poetry as being a result of his boozing. Indeed, from age 31 to 39 he wrote a total of eight poems.[6] No doubt the myth of audacity added to his fame, post-mortem—his last words are supposed to have been, “I have just drunk eighteen double whiskeys in a row. I believe that’s a record.” We seem to want these cults to flourish.

Van Gogh’s main illness was said at the time to have been epilepsy, which has not been classed with paranoia and the like for quite a while. He did also appear to have a few psychotic breaks, though it is easy in psychiatric diagnosis to be wrong. A Dr. Peyron wrote in May of 1889 that he had “acute mania with hallucinations of sight and hearing.” Peyron was the same doctor who the following autumn told Vincent’s brother Theo that the disease was a form of epilepsy.

Van Gogh’s troubles are more consistent with George III’s disease, that is, inherited porphyria, an accumulation in the body of self-produced porphyrin, a chemical involved in the transport of oxygen to the cells, exacerbated by his drinking, especially of absinthe. Acute attacks sometimes bring on anxiety and other behavior disturbances, and are painful. Whatever Van Gogh had during that year and a half, it was episodic, with long intervals of quite ordinary health in which he continued, as he had done before the illness came on, to develop his art with his usual thoughtfulness.

Van Gogh was a difficult person, lonely yet enthusiastic, inclined to turmoil in relationships. But in seeming contradiction he was a cheerful and enterprising Dutchman, too. Everyone “knows” he sold only one painting in his lifetime, “The Red Vineyard” (1888), though an economist observes that in fact he “sold” a great many more—to other painters in trade for their paintings which did have a cash value in the market. In 2004 a collective of artists chosen by critics initiated just this scheme for old-age insurance: give to the collective a few works when you’re unknown and then get a pension on the basis of all the artists’ now more valuable work when you’re old. Nonetheless Van Gogh’s lack of worldly success would have depressed anyone so hopefully intent on “the art of the future,” a phrase he drew from a manifesto by the commercially more savvy Wagner.

The myth classifies Vincent with lunatics, or at best with suffering humanitarian poets romanticized, and sees in his controlled swirls of impasto in his late works the Mad Artist. But to believe this you have to believe a psychiatrism finding madness everywhere. He was ill for only those last 19 months, and then I repeat only from time to time. Vincent’s sister-in-law, who knew him well, believed that “fear of the illness that was threatening him, or an actual attack” precipitated his suicide.[7] Suicide was in 1890 a reaction minder gek dan het lijkt to a dread disease without a cure, increasing in severity.

He was prudent about the illness except for his continued heavy drinking. He cooperated in finding asylums that would protect him so that he could work in peace between attacks. Psychiatrists have a name for such cooperativeness, “insight,” commonly lacking in people attracting their attentions. From the depths he never writes letters or tries to paint. People with epilepsy describe a fog on the brain persisting long after an attack. Porphyria to repeat is also episodic. After each recovery, Ronald de Leeuw the former director of the Van Gogh Museum notes, “he writes clearly, rationally and with a marked lack of sentimentality about his illness.” Above all “he studiously refuses to grant mental illness any positive influence on artistic creation.”[8]

Van Gogh’s illnesses did not make his art. They blocked it.[9] In his estimation sex did, too. He declared in a letter of June 1888 to his young artist friend Émile Bernard: “Painting and fucking a lot don’t go together, it softens the brain. Which is a bloody nuisance.”[10] His art certainly did not derive from his madness, or from his sexual activity, or from his bodily pains, or from his drinking. He painted when he was well and sober. His art had nothing to do with being sick.

What is this insistence on the mad, alchoholic artist? Such a man (always a man) is above all imprudent. He does not plan. He can’t handle money. He injures himself. The bourgeois is known as a seeker of safety—this against the fact of risk in a commercial life. The Mad Artist rejects safety. The myth is an anti-bourgeois faith in the autonomous human spirit—this against the opportunities for expression in a commercial life. Who is in love with the myth? Sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie.[11]

Compare the attitude towards Van Gogh the anti-bourgeois bourgeois with that towards the most despised artist of modern times, Norman Rockwell—despised that is by the clerisy. Rockwell’s scenes of middle-class life are loathed for their warmth. Sentimental? Of course, rather like the sentimentality reflecting a loving regard of El Greco’s Assumption of the Virgin or of Van Gogh’s Irises. What outrages the clerisy in Rockwell is his embrace of bourgeois American life—that and his commercial success and his long, sober, boring life: he is the opposite of Van Gogh in every way except his sentimentality and his bourgeois values and his lack of esteem among his high-art contemporaries.

In his painting Van Gogh was not foolish or mad. There is even doubt, by the way, about the circumstances of the ear-cutting-off. A German art historian, Rita Wildegans, claims that Gauguin did the ear-cutting, and that Van Gogh was covering up for his friend by claiming that he himself did it. Vincent, as non-religious people say, was spiritual. He sought Faith and Hope, but substiuted art for religion. Van Gogh was canonized, I have noted, at the peak of Art as religion, the age of high modernism, Picasso to Pollock.

By the time of his best painting he was no longer the intense young Christian seeking after sainthood he had once been. Yet he was still, de Leeuw writes, a “struggling seeker after God”: “Whether his particular concern was religious or artistic, he invariably cultivated his inner universe and confidently sought the eternal in the temporal.”[12]

Explaining in the letter to Bernard in June of 1888 mentioned above how he painted one of his many studies on Millet’s The Sower he speaks of the technical details (”the rest of the sky is chrome yellow 1 and 2 mixed”), noting that “I couldn’t care less what the colors are in reality.” Post Impressionism came to be more and more about the arrangement of colors on a flat surface. He then declares to Theo his search for Faith and Hope, tying them to a particular aesthetic project: “I am still enchanted by snatches of the past [his Faith], have a hankering after the eternal [his Hope], of which the sower and the sheaf of corn are the symbols. But when shall I get around to doing the starry sky, that picture which is always in my mind?”[13] “I keep hoping,” he wrote to Theo in September, “to express hope by some star.”[14] Hope, hope, hope. Thus his Starry Night (June, 1889). The very painting that is supposed to show him as the Mad Artist turns out to have been not a crazy effusion but a project long conceived, worked on repeatedly, planned carefully before his first illness, and achievable only when well.

One of his two last paintings was Wheatfield with Crows, “hankering after the eternal,” is shadowed by birds of ill-omen. Yet, writes Denise Willemstein and the staff of the Van Gogh Museum, “this theory is probably incorrect as the subject is traditional. . . . Moreover, in his final letter to Theo, dated 25 July, Vincent ordered new paint, suggesting that he still had many plans for new paintings.”[15] He shot himself two days later. Vincent was not the sort of non-bourgeois, non-Dutch brother to waste long-suffering Theo’s money on a gesture.

Johan de Meester wrote a newspaper article about the painting six months after Vincent’s death. It emphasized, as he put it in a letter to Andries Bonger, Vincent’s brother in law, “the side that interested me most as a pessimistic psychologist.” Bonger wrote back politely but firmly, “I have not considered Vincent `a sick man’.”’ He rejected de Meester’s comparison of Vincent with Claude, the painter and suicide in Zola’s novel L’Oeuvre (1886).

Zola was advancing the theories of the doctor and criminologist Cesare Lombroso that men of genius were mentally ill—for example, epileptic.[16] Medicine in its initial decades of real science seemed to wish to redefine virtually everyone as sick. It is the theme of Freudianism. In April 1887, before Vincent had fallen ill, Theo himself had written of the Zola novel, “before I read it, I also thought according to the criticism that Vincent had much in common with the hero. But that is not so. That painter was looking for the unattainable, while Vincent loves the things that exist far too much to fall for that.”[17] A later Dutch painter, Jan Sluyters, wrote about it this way in 1953:

His paintings have nothing strange, mysterious, or abstract about them. They are the most natural impressions of a perfectly healthy temperament. . . . People—how well I know it—have often written about mental disorders, etc., etc., but of these so-called nervous disorders I have discovered no trace in his entire oeuvre. . . . He shows . . . the usual things of daily life. . . fanatically, yes!—but naturally.[18]

In another letter to his brother in the year of miracles, 1888—again before the attacks—Van Gogh confessed to “a terrible need—shall I say the word—of religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars.”[19] His art became Art, a simulacrum of Religion like others put forward as the sea of faith receded. The simulacra since Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn have been more or less in sequence Beauty, Literature, History, the Nation, Spiritualism, Science, Progress, Evolution, the Future, the Race, the Revolution, Struggle, the Suburban Family, Technology, Peace, Wall Street, and the Environment. Van Gogh’s was the movement of a faithful spirit aiming at great things, as humans keep faithfully hoping.

“I can well do without the good Lord in my life and also in my painting,” Van Gogh wrote a few weeks before the paint-the-stars letter, “but, suffering as I am, I cannot do without something greater than myself, something which is my life—the power to create. . . . I want to paint men and women with a touch of the eternal, whose symbol was once the halo, which we try to convey by the very radiance and vibrancy of our coloring.”[20] He suffered spiritually, not mentally: he had no attacks yet.

The other of his last two paintings, Tangled Roots, could equally have been a suicide note. But the putative illness of his suicide, or the rational plan of his suicide, or the momentary impulse of his suicide in the face of a new attack of porphyria, is of no help in understanding the bulk of his art, for example, Starry Night. Sometimes a suicide note is just a suicide note.

And Van Gogh was of course bourgeois. An educated Dutchman who worked from age 16 like his brother as an art dealer could be no other. He wrote in French when in France, as he did to Theo. In the usual businesslike Dutch way with commercial languages he was also completely fluent in English—he gave his first sermon in England in English—and could read German well. He was the son of a Dutch Reform pastor and the nephew of three other art dealers. Holland’s pastors are dealers, too. His father managed the farms of pioneering Protestants in the Catholic south of the Netherlands.

And so Vincent made the case for his sacred ends in profane terms, expressing as simple Prudence his hopes for a very grand Studio of the South. To his brother, who supported him apparently gladly and was paid in pictures to obviate the appearance of a peasantly handout, he wrote with prudence that if Gauguin were to join him in Arles the enterprise would have low costs and would make money. “You always lose by being isolated. But you might think it’s a good idea that we share expenses, set an amount of, let’s say, 250 francs per month, if every month, besides and apart from my work, you get a Gauguin. Provided that we do not exceed that sum, wouldn’t it mean a profit?”[21]

Compare his scheme for the leading Impressionists to pool some of their market-valued paintings to support “a whole battalion of artists who have been working in unremitting poverty,” for example that same V. van Gogh.[22] These are natural terms to use in pitching an idea to a businessman in 1888. An aristocrat in the same activity, like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, only son of the Comte de Toulouse and on his mother’s side as well coming from one of the grandest families in France, would deign to talk this way to no one. And a peasant would merely beg the noble lord’s indulgence, or claim his due, inarticulately. Only a bourgeois would offer words and reasons and calculations in support of transcendence. The Vincent of Romance is above all anti-bourgeois, “making no concessions to his bourgeois surroundings.”[23] But that’s not Van Gogh.

* * * *

In other words, we humans, even we bourgeois humans, cannot get along without transcendence—faith in a past, hope for a future, justified by Larger Considerations. If we don’t have religious hope and faith we’ll substitute hope and faith in Art or Science or National Learning. If we don’t have Art or Science or National Learning or Anglicanism we’ll substitute fundamentalism or the Rapture. If we don’t have fundamentalism or the Rapture or the local St. Wenceslaus parish we’ll substitute our family or the rebuilt antique car. It’s a consequence of the human ability to symbolize, a fixture of our philosophical psychology.

We might as well acknowledge it, if only to keep watch on transcendence and prevent it from doing mischief, as did once a Russian hope for The Revolution and as now does a Saudi Arabian faith in an Islamic past. The Bulgarian-French critic, Tzvetan Todorov, who has seen totalitarianism, warns that “democracies put their own existence in jeopardy if they neglect the human need for transcendence.”[24] Michael Ignatieff put it well: “The question of whether . . . the needs we once called religious can perish without consequence . . . remains central to understanding the quality of modern man’s happiness.” [25] Evidently the answer is no. There are consequences and there will be more. That is not a reason to return to the older sureties. It is a reason to take seriously the transcendent in our bourgeois lives.

[1] Van Gogh, “Letter to Aurier,” early Feb., 1890, p. 195-197 in Stein, Van Gogh.

[2] Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, quoted in Kirsch, “Get Happy,” 2004, p. 91.

[3] Read, Meaning of Art, 1931 (1968), p. 202.

[4] Pascoe and Catling, Eyewitness, 1995. Jan Hulsker, ed., The Mythology of Vincent van Gogh, 1993 treats the bizarre story of van Gogh’s postmortem fame.

[5] Van Baar and Kok, De Millenium, 1999, pp. 32-33. Nietzsche’s syphilis, by the way, appears to be still another mad artist/scientist myth. He seems to have had in fact a slow-developing brain tumor.

[6] Kirsch, “Get Happy,” 2004, p. 92.

[7] Johanna van Gogh, quoted in van Gogh, ed. Leeuw, Letters, p. 509

[8] Van Gogh, ed. Leeuw, Letters, p. 509, xix.

[9] Van Gogh, ed. Leeuw, Letters, p. 365.

[10] Van Gogh, ed. Leeuw, Letters, p. 365

[11] John McCloskey has helped me with these ideas, as with many others.

[12] Van Gogh, ed. Leeuw, Letters, 1996, pp. x, xi.

[13] Van Gogh, ed. Leeuw, Letters, 1996, p. 3262f.

[14] Van Gogh, ed. Leeuw, Letters, 1996, p. 395.

[15] Leighton, ed. 100 Masterpieces, 2002. Plate 75, “Wheatfields with Crows,” text by Willemstein.

[16] Stein, ed., Van Gogh, 1986, pp. 246, 257f., compare de Meester’s article of March 1891, p. 261ff in Stein, ed.

[17] Stein, ed., Van Gogh, 1986, p. 107, italics his.

[18] Stein, ed., Van Gogh, 1986, p. 374.

[19] about September 29, 1888, (van Gogh,Verzamelde Brieven #543, p. 321), quoted in Druick and Zegers, Studio of the South, 2001, p. 138, underlining in French original.

[20] van Gogh,Verzamelde Brieven #531, quoted in Druick and Zegers, Studio of the South, 2001, p. 138.

[21] 28 May 1888, quoted in Druick and Zegers, Studio of the South, 2001, p. 108. Contrast by the way Aurier’s praise for ‘the isolate.’

[22] Van Gogh, 1883-1890, Letters, p. 342f.

[23] Van Baar and Kok, De Millenium, 1999, p. 32.

[24] Todorov, Hope and Memory, 2000, p. 32.

[25] Ignatieff, Needs of Strangers, 1984, p. 21.

But where are the other two, sacred Hope and Faith? Hursthouse ends her book with an appeal to “Keep hope alive.” Her only other mention of the two is a page attacking “piety” as irrational, not characteristically human, “based on a complete illusion” from an atheist’s point of view.[2] One wonders: is the physicist’s pious but entirely atheistic faith in the orderliness of nature, which Hursthouse elsewhere notes is essential for a scientific world view, therefore also irrational? Is science, then, “based on a complete illusion”? Hursthouse’s own project—of justifying the virtues piecemeal from within a cultural set of them—is likewise undercut. It depends on philosophical Faithfulness and Hopefulness that such a procedure makes some sense, which she herself says are not justifiable philosophically, a mere piety.

That is, we humans live on air. My suggestion to my good colleagues of the modern clerisy is that they get used to it. The most characteristic virtues of humans are not a Rationality or a Persistence that one can see plainly in ants and bacteria as well. They are Hope and Faith. So late in the age of Banishment, I wish that the advanced members of the clerisy would recover from being embarrassed by the most characteristically human virtues.

In his recent, elegant book, A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues (1996; English ed. 2001), the French philosopher André Comte-Sponville, for example, explicitly rejects both Faith and Hope from a place among his eighteen virtues. The pagan tetrad of Prudence, Temperance, Courage, and Justice he acknowledges as cardinal, and these begin his book.

In the last chapter he deals also with Love, along lines similar to mine in fact—he draws heavily there as I do on Simone Weil, and elevates agape to primacy, though skirting uneasily its religious content. His attempts to distinguish love from Compassion, Mercy, and especially Generosity are not wholly persuasive. He quotes his master the philosopher of music at the Sorbonne (d. 1985), André Jankélévitch, as admitting that “though the two are not the same, love and generosity, ‘at its most exalted,’ are hard to separate one from the other.”[3] And so they are. Distinguishing true generosity from possibly self-interested indulgence of family and friends, the care of children, for example, depends in Jankélévitch and Conte-Sponville precisely on generosity being exercised “at its most exalted.” The logic of classification would seem to require therefore that generosity be viewed, as it is in Aquinas for example, as a subspecies of love.

But with the other two of the theological virtues, Faith and Hope, Comte-Sponville has no patience at all. He attempts to exclude incense-smelling Faith from his virtues entirely. One device is to call it instead “Fidelity,” with a prominent chapter of its own, with no mention that faith in the transcendent might possibly include faith in God. The device does not work very well, since it merely substitutes the one faith-word for another, both derived from fides by longer or shorter etymologies.

Comte-Sponville writes wisely that “where there is mind there is memory. . . . Fidelity is . . . memory itself as a virtue.”[4] He quotes Montaigne on fidelity as “the true basis of personal identity.” But in the very quotation Montaigne declares a “fidelity to the faith [foi] I swore to myself,” which seems a sound way to think about it. “The past,” Comte-Sponville writes, “is in need of our compassion and gratitude; for the past cannot stand up for itself.”[5] That too seems right. The towering dead are indeed owed some backward-looking faith, or else we are nobodies ourselves, disloyal pleasure-machines with no sacred identity. We are not worthy even of self-love, if we have not faith.

Fidelity, Comte-Sponville writes beautifully, is “an always particular presence within us of the past,” our father, dead, our grandmother, the three men with the same last name from a village in Southwestern France, whose dates on the wall of the parish church record them killed successively in the very first month, a middle month at the time of Verdun, and the very last month of the Great War.[6] We should preserve, Comte-Sponville puts it, “love for the sake of what once took place.”[7]

But all this is precisely faith, foi, fides. It’s too bad—too bad at least according to the faith of French anti-clericals—that it’s gotten mixed up with faith in God. But there you are. “Faith,” writes A. N. Wilson about the decline of the Godly version of it in the 19^th century, “was not something which could be gradually eliminated from the human scene. It was a vital component of the human make-up—personal and collective.”[8]

The plainest exercise of anti-theism in Comte-Sponville is reserved for Hope. Having taken occasional jabs at it in the previous 287 pages he finally admits the reason for his distaste: “Faith, hope, and charity are traditionally the theological virtues (because they have God as an object). The first two I have not included in this treatise because they have no plausible object, it seems to me, other than God, in whom I do not believe.” But Comte-Sponville has included Faith, as fidelity. He continues, “Moreover, one can do without these two virtues: courage suffices in the presence of danger or the future.” One might think that the second, forward-looking part of courage, “in the future,” is precisely Hope. But he is determined not to let the word in. He thinks Hope is a fool’s “virtue,” suitable for the soft-minded who merely hope and pray when a tough, masculine, existentialist courage is what is called for.

He is not here reading Aquinas very carefully. Aquinas makes plain that courage is about fear (in the present) but hope is about imagination (about a future)—which analysis Comte-Sponville himself concedes during his chapter on Courage: “the future is . . . an object of our imagination.”[9] Précisément. The courage to face a present pain is one thing. It is akin to Temperance in its presentness. Courage resists pain now, Temperance pleasure now. The Hope to face imagined future pains for some imagined future purpose is distinct from these.

A woman can have a stoic Courage in the face of the pain of chemotherapy yet lack the Hope that makes it work. Physicians are finding that encouraging a lucid, realistic Hope is therapeutic. The mind and body are connected. Jerome Groopman of Harvard Medical School argues that “Hope. . . does not cast a veil over perception and thought. In this way, it is different from blind optimism: It brings reality into sharp focus.”[10] Hope is not about fooling ourselves—or at any rate no more about fooling ourselves, after innocence, than are any of the other virtues. Hope, though a religious virtue, is not necessarily about religion,.

Comte-Sponville is quite correct to note that “all the barbarities of this [20^th] century were unleashed in the name of the future, from Hitler’s thousand-year Reich to Stalinism’s promise of brighter and better tomorrows.”[11] But such a remark contradicts his assertion that the only plausible object for Hope is God, and shows the illogic in his case against counting Hope among the great, if dangerous, virtues. La Révolution or Das Deutsche Volk were plainly objects of Hope. Yet they are equally plainly not God. That is one reason we need to keep Hope firmly in view, because when unbalanced by the other virtues it produces evil, such as revolutionary socialism or revolutionary fascism.

Comte-Sponville attacks Hope, then, as utopian, “the seductions of hope and the dangers of utopia.” One can certainly agree that damage has been done in the world by hopeful “utopic” theorists, as the 10^th Federalist Paper skeptically put it. And the theorists did so especially after 1789. In the same way a hopeful religious utopianism did damage in Europe for a thousand years before 1789.[12] Such for example was Oliver Cromwell’s rejection in the 1650s of the faithful precedent of the rule of law in favor of a hopeful vision of a city set upon a hill, and his arbitrary rule. But Hope does damage precisely because it takes all the future as its imaginative object and its ethical end. When unbalanced it justifies any number of broken eggs to make the imagined omelet. Hope is one of the characteristically human virtues—and when alone and unbalanced it is one of the characteristically human vices, too. The barbarities of the 20^th century were hopes granted. Be careful what you hope for.

Comte-Sponville declares that “faith and hope have left us; we live without them.”[13] I do not think so. He and you and I do not in fact live without faith and hope. No one does for long, not really, or else she goes off and hangs herself. Comte-Sponville confuses God with the numerous other possible objects of Hope and Faith, showing in particular the atheist’s stony inability to grasp that these other objects, in which he does believe, are psychologically the same as the God in which he proudly does not. Similarly in 1902 Bertrand Russell declared that a free man’s worship was to be erected on “the firm foundation of unyielding despair.”[14] One wonders why; but especially whether: Russell was miserable as a child, but as an adult gave few signs of despair, yielding or not.

In a similar Schopenhauerian vein, Romantically attractive now for nearly two centuries but still dubious, Comte-Sponville declares that politics is a matter of “will . . . not hope.”[15] I think not. Will and prudence act to balance and complete hope, as do faith and the other virtues. Politics, like the economy, is a field for the exercise of all the virtues together, and the vices. The will itself is a mixture of courage and temperance. The unsystematic and one-by-one conception Comte-Sponville has of the virtues shows up here. He does not see how virtues talk to each other.

Comte-Sponville in the end simply doesn’t want Hope and Faith in his book. But after all they are part of human life, and keep barging in. The reason they do so—and here is something to be learned from the French clerisy’s three-century old distaste for religion—is that Faith and Hope are the verbal virtues. They require the symbolism of words. The invention of language and with it metaphor and other art made theorizable an imagined past and an imagined future. “The peculiar power of the human mind,” wrote Stuart Hampshire, following his master Spinoza, “is the power to think about its own states and processes, and, by this reflective thinking, to modify them.”[16] The cave painters of Lascaux, or the earlier painters of rocks in Ubirr in northern Australia, to give the usual interpretation, made hopeful images of the animal bodies they hoped to kill and the animal spirits they kept faith with. We cannot be sure of the details of their hope and faith precisely because we lack their words.

The other virtues can flourish without speech, even in non-humans. Think of White Fang in the team, or finally at home in California, exhibiting canine Courage, Justice, Prudence, Love, and even perhaps Temperance, though I suppose that one is a little hard to see in a dog. Aristotle noted that “so in a number of animals we observe gentleness or fierceness, mildness or cross temper, courage, or timidity, fear or confidence, high spirit or low cunning, and, with regard to intelligence, something equivalent to sagacity.”[17]

But not Faith or Hope. We say a dog is faithful; and is hopeful for the bone. But in a dog these are reducible to solidarity with the pack and pleasure in the marrow. Is human faith or hope so reducible? Marx and Freud to the contrary, I think not. The aborigine’s Dreaming or the tales of the Great Spirit, the holy text, the Johnny Cash song, the language in our lives spin out and out. Humans can’t leave ideas alone.

“The animals do not live in the world,” sang Edwin Muir,

Are not in time and space

From birth to death hurled.

No word do they have, not one

To plant a foot upon,

Were never in any place.

For with names the world was called,

Out of the empty air,

With names was built and walled,

Line and circle and square. . . .[18]

Think of a human mother before language who Courageously overcomes her fear of bears and so with Prudence finds some berries close to the bear’s cave, which she shares Lovingly with her child, exercising Temperance in not gorging on them all herself, and then gives some to her child’s playmate, too, in Justice. Yet without a language in which to symbolize the transcendent she cannot be said to exercise Faith in the historical identity of her Clan of the Cave Bear, or Hope for an afterlife in the sky. And she can’t pass on her faiths and hopes. Perhaps this is why recognizably modern customs of burial and art appear rather suddenly together, after 50,000 BC, worldwide, when language appears to have spread rather suddenly out of Mother Africa, worldwide.

The heroine of the David Lodge novel Thinks . . . (2001) faces a conference of confidently positivist and behaviorist brain scientists. She gently notes to them the literary axiom they may perhaps have overlooked, “that human consciousness is uniquely capable of imagining that which is not physically present to the senses,” instancing Marvell:[19]

The mind, that ocean where each kind

Does straight its own resemblance find;

Yet it creates, transcending these,

Far other worlds and other seas,

Annihilating all that’s made

To a green thought in a green shade.

There could be no religion without language. That is clear enough. What is not clear is the outcome of our two- or three-century old experiment in language without religion. Perhaps the two are inseparable. I think; therefore I believe.

* * * *

From the aborigines of the songlines and the cave painters of Lascaux to the plastic present, then, people have not lived without the transcendent. We are unique in this. Or at least so we imagine, lacking access to the spiritual world of whales and gorillas.

“If [faith] was not directed towards the true God,” A. N. Wilson points out, noting the logic of the First Commandment, “it would be directed towards idols.”^[20] And therefore the modern Westerners rejecting God found other gods, in Will or Despair or History or Spiritualism or Science or the Environment. Giuseppe Mazzini had declared in 1835 that “the republican party is not a political party; it is essentially a religious party,” and he declared again in 1848 that Young Italy “was not a sect but a religion of patriotism. Sects may die under violence; religions may not.”^[21] In the same revolutionary year he wrote: “Young men of Italy, it is time that you should comprehend how grand, how holy and religious is the mission confided to you by God.”^[22] By the end of the century Puccini’s Tosca, who “lived for art, lived for love,” and her lover Caravadossi, similarly motivated—and somewhat accidentally a nationalist revolutionary, too—explore the limits of these substitute religions among the Italians.

The Age of Substitution begins among a handful of advanced European souls as early as 1700, is widespread among them in 1800, is a passion among a wider clerisy after 1848, and takes hold among the newly educated masses after 1880 and especially after 1968. Interestingly, Japan embarked on the first part of this history a little earlier. In the late 17^th century it had its own secular phase, in a Japanese version of the Enlightenment, against Buddhism. And in the mid-18^th century, somewhat in advance of similar Romantic nationalisms in Europe, some Japanese substituted National Learning for a China-worshipping and classicizing Confucianism.^[23]

In Europe for about two centuries now a secular religion of Beauty has been fashioned out of one or another Art. Wagner’s remark that “I believe in God, Mozart, and Beethoven” is not merely a secular witticism. It is a serious invitation to beatitude through Art, a faith reaching its height in the early 20^th century. It persists. Lucy bothers Schoeder over his piano with an earnest question: “I’m looking for the answer to life, Schoeder. What do you think is the answer?” Next panel, he replies with screaming capitals: “BEETHOVEN!” Next panel, more screaming: “Beethoven is it, clear and simple!! Do you understand?!” The fourth panel fills with notes from a piano piece, presumably by Beethoven, and Lucy’s subdued “Good grief!”[24]

And it is new. The musicians in Mozart’s time, or the painters in Vermeer’s, or the poets and playwrights in Shakespeare’s, had viewed themselves as crafts- and business-people, not as secular saints. All those craftspeople, further, were, most of them, believing Christians, if only because believing in Christianity was not viewed as optional. They did not need Art, capital A, or screaming block capitals, because they already had a transcendent, called God, capital G.

The shift comes with radicalism and Romance. Consider, for example, the modern public art museum, which begins in 1793 with the opening of the Louvre to all citizens. The Vatican had started occasional public exhibitions in 1773. But the Louvre was an aggressively populist project, a project transferred by the Bonaparte brothers to the Accademia of Venice in 1807 and to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in 1808.^[25] The museum was transformed in a revolutionary age from a plaything for aristocrats into a democratic temple to Beauty, replacing God. In the early 20th century the museum came to be devoted to the admiring of Genius and in the late 20^th century to the anticipation of Shock. But anyway “devoted.”

That is, museums since the late 18^th century have been temples for the worship of some God-replacing transcendent. One is quiet in them, contemplative, worshipful, impressed by the presence of The Sacred. One carries home trinkets from the museum gift shop like crucifixes from the shops around St. Peter’s. “As people desert the churches to fill the galleries,” writes Nathalie Heinich, “art is no longer an instrument, but instead an object of sacralization. . . . Widely circulated reproductions are but substitutes . . . in those places where the ordinary person can experience the presence of the originals, preserved as relics.”[26] Indeed the literal churches of Christianity have been turned into museums, especially in Italy. The skeptical tourists swoon before Christian frescoes. How odd / Of God / To be crazy / About Veronese. But not so crazy / As those enticed / By Christian Veronese / Who spurn the Christ.

Charles Hutchinson, one of Chicago’s pork kings, and Martin Ryerson, a lumber baron, made the Art Institute in the 1890s a democratic cathedral of culture. The bourgeois Chicagoans acquired European paintings by the square yard—for example El Greco’s Assumption of the Virgin, urged on the Paris agent of the Institute by Mary Cassatt. Hutchinson replied, “We have made our money in pigs, but is that any reason why we should not spend it on paintings?” Hutchinson in fact spent fully half his large annual income from meatpacking on civic projects, such as the Art Institute, and on Jane Addams’ Hull House.

Addams herself is sometimes said to have used Art to raise the immigrant poor of Halstead Street. That was a typically Progressive project, the bourgeoisie bending down to impart bourgeois values to the poor. In truth Addams was skeptical of the notion favored at Toynbee Hall in London (1884-) that Art was elevating. But a mile away from Hull House and far up the social scale Hutchinson certainly did have in mind civilizing the millionaires of Prairie Avenue with the Art Institute.^[27] Neither project in the short run would achieve its end, since art is not so powerful in the short run. But the point is that they tried, viewing Art as their god.

It is hardly surprising nowadays to find art museums very common in, say, the progressive Netherlands. Bookstores in the sophisticated neighborhoods of Rotterdam or Amsterdam or Gouda shelve their many books of poetry next to their few books on God. Until the 1960s half of the titles issued by Dutch publishers were religious. No longer. But the old stock of cultural capital, formerly religious, is re-appropriated now for non-religious ends of a secular and yet still transcendent Faith and Hope.

The Noordekerk was the first church built in Amsterdam for specifically Protestant worship.It is still used sometimes as a church in the sober fashion of the North Hollanders.But mainly it is now a meeting hall to celebrate secular faith and hope.On the day of remembrance for the Amsterdam Jews, at 8:00 p.m. exactly, a little band outside the Noordekerk in the yuppified neighborhood of Amsterdam’s Jordaan plays a few songs, the hymns so to speak for the largely gentile congregation, and then god’s service moves inside for communion with transcendent Faith and Hope, the reading of secular poems and the playing of classical music.

[1] Hursthouse, Virtue Ethics, 1999, index. I am counting multiple pages at their total: thus “benevolence, Humean, 99-102” countis as four pages in the sum

[2] Hursthouse, Virtue Ethics, 1999, p. 232f; compare 218: “But what could this fifth end be?”

[3] Comte-Sponville, On the Virtues, 1996, p. 92.

[4] Comte-Sponville, On the Virtues, 1996, pp. 17, 19.

[5] Comte-Sponville, On the Virtues, 1996, p. 21.

[6] Comte-Sponville, On the Virtues, 1996, p. 25.

[7] Comte-Sponville, On the Virtues, 1996, p. 28.

[8] E. N. Wilson, God’s Funeral, 1999, p. 59.

[9] Comte-Sponville, On the Virtues, 1996, p. 53, italics supplied.

[10] Quoted from Groopman, Anatomy of Hope, 2003, in Publisher’s Weekly, itself quoted at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0375506381/002-8162323-5258406?v=glance.

[11] Comte-Sponville, On the Virtues, 1996, p. 26.

[12] Comte-Sponville, On the Virtues, 1996, p. 295n20.

[13] Comte-Sponville, On the Virtues, 1996, p. 288.

[14] Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship,” 1903 (1957), p 106.

[15] Comte-Sponville, On the Virtues, 1996, p. 295n20.

[16] Hampshire, “Postscript,” 1982, in Hampshire, Thought and Action, 1959, p. 283.

[17] Aristotle, History of Animals, Bk. VIII, Part 1.

[18] Muir, “The Animals,” 1956.

[19] Lodge, Thinks. . ., 2001, p. 318.

[20] E. N. Wilson, God’s Funeral, 1999, p. 59.

[21] Mazzini in Ganulee, ed., Selected Writings, pp. 106, 103.

[22] Mazzini in Ganulee, ed., Selected Writings, p. 105.

[23] Collins 1998, pp. 349, 361-364, 369-70, 378

[24] Classic Peanuts, Chicago Tribune March 24, 2005.

[25] Johnson, Birth of the Modern, 1991, p. 600f.

[26] Heinich, Glory of Van Gogh, 1991 (1996), p. 148.

[27] Donald Miller, City of the Century, 1996, pp. 387-391, 422.

Man doth seek a triple perfection: first a sensual . . . . then an intellectual. . . . Man doth not seem to rest satisfied . . . but doth further covet . . . somewhat divine and heavenly, which with hidden exultation. . . [such desire] rather surmiseth than conceiveth. . . . For although the beauties, riches, honors, sciences, virtues, and perfections of all men living, were in the present possession of one; yet somewhat beyond and above all this there would still be sought and earnestly thirsted for.

Richard Hooker,

Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593),

First Book, XI, 4 (pp. 205-206.)

Hope is by contrast forward-looking, the virtue of the energetic saint or entrepreneur who seeks “a future, difficult, but attainable good.”[1] It is the opposite of acedia, spiritual sloth, despair, hopelessness, the “desperation” (< de + sperare, to be separated from hoping) that the 17^th of the Church of England’s 39 Articles warns against, “a most dangerous downfall, whereby the Devil doth thrust [curious and carnal persons] into desperation.”

Hope is of course essential for eternal life, and for humdrum life, too, as one can see in the lethargy that comes over a human who, as we say, “has nothing to look forward to.” Carol Shields, the modern novelist of psychological health, calls hope “the slender handrail.”[2] Richard Wilbur, the modern poet of psychological health, repeatedly surprised by joy, puts it this way: “Joy for a moment floods into the mind/ Blurting that all things shall be brought/ To the full state and stature of their kind.”[3] The secular, or “natural,” version of hope is an egalitarian version of Aristotle’s aristocratic and favorite virtue, “great-souledness,” megalopsychia, translated literally into Latin as “magnanimity.”[4]

Christian doctrine and so-called “Austrian” economics agree in stressing that hope is about that ever-unseen future. It cannot be reduced to a mechanical prediction in the style of positivism, or to some easy dream of fey or elf, the assurance of indulgences purchased or chantries financed. “By hope we are saved,” says St. Paul in Romans 8:24, “But a hope seen is not a hope, for why hope for something you already see?” It is a notable oddity of non-Austrian, “neoclassical,” Samuelsonian economics that it imagines that we already have the information to make accurate judgments about the future. In such a case we would be in heaven, or hell, and hope would not exist: “Neither the blessed nor the damned can possess hope,” as the theologian Romanus Cessario puts it. Hope is a virtue, Aquinas said, of the wayfarer, not of a person in command of all he is ever going to get.[5] It is, he said elsewhere, “the movement of a spirit aiming at great things.”[6]

I am thinking, to change the image, of backward-looking Faith as the rootedness of humans, in their identity as Dutch or female or psychologists or mothers. Then Hope is the forward-looking flower growing from the roots. Lacking roots, one is faithless, having no place from which to grow. Rootlessness is the characteristic American failing, at any rate by comparison with the heavy rootedness of much of the rest of the world. But without the flower one is stuck in the soil. That is the characteristic failing of Asia and Europe, an excess of Faith, at any rate by comparison with the crazy, uprooted Hopefulness of America.[7]

Globalization has put Faith and Hope out of balance. The Marxist geographer David Harvey has noted that the “time-space compression” of modernity has eroded identity.[8] Or at any rate it can. It happened in the Europe of old. One can watch the cozy world of self-satisfied and rooted Franks being challenged by successive Others in the Crusades, the age of discovery, the confrontation with the Primitive, the shocks to European provincialism administered by Atlantic capitalism, imperialism, world wars, and finally globalization. Marshall Berman writes: “To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and at the same time threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.”[9] Hope can erode Faith.

Ceaseless travel, made cheap to moderns, is exhilarating. But it is disturbing, too. Dilip Gaonkar points out to me that the dream of “retirement” in modern America has become a parody of the word. The oldsters do not “retire” to Innisfree. They change residences compulsively, looking for a new life, indulging a Hope at the sacrifice of Faith. The ultimate in such itinerant retirees is someone who owns a condo of the latest kind—on a cruise ship. “Wake up in a new harbor every couple of days” says the teaser in the E-Bay ad for a $70,000 ocean-going condo on the Norwegian Star. “Living on a ship circumnavigating the globe or catching your ship for a few days when it reaches your selected vacation spots, will raise a few eyebrows. You can hear it now: `You live where?’ It is a well deserved opportunity, but not for everyone. You have to love travel, be adventuresome, accept challenges with aplomb and enjoy exploring new places and meeting interesting people.”[10]

Yet the European gazing at other cultures as a conqueror or anthropologist, or for that matter a condo owner on a cruise-ship, presents a pathway for non-Europeans out of the tribe or village. Move to Metropolitan France, as Ho Chi Minh did after working on a French ocean liner, living in London and the United States. Work as a pastry chef in Boston’s Parker House—baking, one supposes, Parker-House rolls. Then use the capitalist economy of Paris to remake yourself into a founding French communist.

Mobility in space, in other words, offers Hope of a new identity. An American folk song from the early 19^th century asked, “Oh, what was your name in the States?/ Was it Thompson, or Johnson, or Bates?/ Did you murder your wife and fly for your life?/ Say, what was your name in the States?”—that is, the organized States admitted to the Union, as against the territories. Lighting out for the territories, of course, is the American myth of freedom through movement away from the faith-based oppressions of one’s born class or region. It is Ben Franklin moving from fraternal domination in Boston to autonomy in Philadelphia, disembarking at the Market Street wharf carrying three great puffy rolls under his arm, the Frontier Hypothesis, the road movie. It is the blissful literalization of freedom.

Mobility does make for freedom. That’s why Adam Smith the egalitarian advocate for freedom{,} was so outraged by British and in particular English restrictions on the mobility of workers. A sharecropper who can move to another Southern county, or North to Bronzeville, cannot be exploited in situ by the country store. He’s not in place. He’s in the wider world. He can yet hope.

The rise of a secular Hope and the fall of a spiritual Faith, in other words, is nothing like always bad. A Faith rooted in the economic importance of land made elders and imagined ancestors powerful, for good or ill. You can see it in the twists of 18^th-century plays and novels right through Jane Austen, in which the elders control inheritance and therefore the hopeful young. The displacing of land by human capital as the main source of wealth sharply devalued Faith, the past, the dead hand, the mort-gage, the family line, the ancestors. And it upvalued Hope, the future, the children, the individual.

* * * *

Religious versions of faith and hope and love have been banished from the list of virtues in the West twice, during two waves of anti-Christian revision, what William Schweiker calls the “banishment of religious resources.”[11] Or if you wish there was one long banishment interrupted in the late 18^th century by a surprising revival of religious enthusiasm, at any rate in Protestant Europe.

The First Banishment happened among the clerisy of Europe in the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries. The New Philosophers reaped the harvest of 17^th-century natural philosophy. Having learned that comets were not portents and tides were not miraculous, they generalized to a rejection of “particular providence”: a rejection of God’s restless agency in the world. Prayer for example has no efficacy if God is a remote prime mover.

A founding figure is Pierre Bayle (1647-1707), a French Protestant heretic and skeptic who found refuge in Rotterdam to write his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1696, 1702), the “arsenal of the Enlightenment.”[12] Bayle and other deistic or even atheistic theoreticians culminating with Voltaire, Holbach, and Hume were reacting to excessive faith and hope in the wars of religion.

The deists and neo-stoics of the age of equanimity were therefore eager to banish the transcendent. The words ‘taste’ and ‘politeness’,” J. G. A. Pocock notes, “for most of the eighteenth century, were freighted with a heavy ideological load. To latitudinarians and philosophes they connoted that reasonable and civic [faith] . . . with which it was hoped to replace the enthusiasms and fanaticisms of Puritanism or Christianity.”[13] And for a time it did.

Take England, for example. The political settlement in 1660 and especially in 1689 had parallels in arts and manners. “After the Restoration the time had come,” Matthew Arnold observed,

when our nation felt the imperious need of a fit prose, . . . . of freeing itself from the absorbing preoccupation which religion in the Puritan age had exercised. . . . The needful qualities for a fit prose are regularity, uniformity, precision, balance. . . . But an almost exclusive attention to these qualities involves some repressing and silencing of poetry.[14]

“Regularity, uniformity, precision, balance”: he might as well have said “literary Prudence and Temperance in their bourgeois expressions.” It is no surprise to find Arnold the 19^th-century Hellenist commending poetry for an aristocratic expressions of the virtues, its “glory, the eternal honor, . . . this noble sphere.”[15] Arnold is not exactly contemptuous of the literally prosaic virtues of the bourgeoisie. He is not a proud aristocrat, not actually. But in judging poetry he takes his stand on the plains of Ilium or in the courts of Shakespeare’s imagined age of Lancaster and York, not in the coffee houses of Addison’s London, or the London of Chaucer, either, that hive of the bourgeoisie before its greater time.

The Second Banishment of religious faith and hope gathers force among secularizing intellectuals around the middle of the 19^th century. A. N. Wilson attributes the odd hiccup in the Banishment—on in the 18^th century, then off, then on again in the mid-19^th—to “Hume’s time bomb,” that is, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published in 1779, three years safely after his death and three years, too, after the publication of another anti-Christian bomb with a long fuse, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In Wilson’s view these sat on library shelves until the new seriousness of religiosity in England in the 1820s and 1830s caused them to be taken down and examined. In their own time Hume could logic-chop and Gibbon sneer and the cosmopolites of 1776-79 could laugh along with them. Not the sober and intellectually serious Victorians.[16]

Arnold himself, though a deist, and a devout student of the Bible, said it (“Dover Beach” was composed about 1851):

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a great girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar. . . .

Or Edward FitzGerald (1859), though the sentiments are of course also ancient and Epicurean and indeed secularly Persian of the early 12^th century:

Myself when young did eagerly frequent

Doctor and Saint, and heard great argument

About it and about; but evermore

Came out by the same Door as I went in. . . .

Into this Universe, and Why not knowing

Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing;

And out of it, and Wind along the Waste.

I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing.

Or Thomas Hardy (1866):

If but some vengeful god would call to me

From out the sky, and laugh . . . .

But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,

And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?

—Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain.

And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan . . . .

Wilson has given a lively and touching portrait of the European and especially British men and women of the clerisy—and often enough of the clergy—who lost their faith then. John Maynard Keynes, writing in the 1920s, portrayed the late 1860s as “the critical moment at which the Christian dogma fell away from the serious philosophical world of England, or at any rate of Cambridge.”[17] Early in the 1860s the soon-to-be economist Alfred Marshall was preparing for holy orders; by the end of the decade he and his fellows could not, Keynes writes, be called Christians. In praising the passage, Joseph Schumpeter notes that in the 1860s “Christian belief, gently and without any acerbities, was dropped by the English intelligentsia.”[18]

Wilson takes his title, “God’s Funeral,” from another poem by Hardy, a poem written fifty years after “Hap.” Hardy in 1908-10 envisions Christians, as Feuerbach had some 70 years before, projecting their anxieties into their God:

I saw a slow-stepping train—

Lined on the brows, scoop-eyed and bent and hoar—

Following in files across a twilit plain

A strange mystic form the foremost bore. . . .

Yet throughout all it symbolized none the less

Potency vast and loving-kindness strong. . . .

“O man-projected Figure, of late

Imagined as we, thy knell who shall survive?”

This was a quarter century after the sad doubt in England had begun to spread beyond the clerisy. In the 1880s “the loss of faith which had hitherto tormented only a few of the better-informed,” Wilson reports, “had reached the suburbs” through among other routes a best-selling novel Robert Elsmere (1888), by Mrs. Humphrey Ward—neé Mary Augusta Arnold: her uncle was Matthew Arnold; her nephew Aldous Huxley.[19] Not that everyone became a skeptic. The Great War was still on the British and the German sides a religious crusade. By the Second World War, though, religion had been squeezed out of war.

Also in the middle of the 19^th century one sees the sharper French turn of the clerisy against the clergy in, say, Flaubert, or in Baudelaire. Progressive thought in France was from the time of Voltaire and Helvétius anti-clerical, reinforced by the reactionary stance of the Church during the Revolution. It was therefore anti-Christian and in the end anti-theist. Progressives in France were and are dismally existentialist in their celebration of Crass Casualty. Wilson attributes the harsher anti-clerical turn in Catholic Europe also in part to the reaction of former seminarians, “kept in genuine ignorance of biblical scholarship or of the developments of modern philosophy. . . who therefore suffered easily explicable crises when, in later life, they started to read books.”[20] Compare Catholic Ireland, as in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

In Britain, as in Germany and the United States, advanced thinkers often kept a worshipfully Christian tone even in their plans for the new society. Schumpeter attributes the tone to the Englishmen “having started their intellectual travels with a thorough grounding in Anglican theology (and, owing to the constitutions of Cambridge and Oxford colleges, with definite obligations towards it).” In consequence they “arrived at their final positions by way of conscious wrestling rather than by a growing agnosticism through indifference.”[21] Note the contrast with Wilson’s hypothesis of crisis in Catholic countries. In any event, there is a quasi-Christian cheerfulness about, say, George Bernard Shaw’s English socialism which one does not find in Bertold Brecht’s Continental version.

[1] Cessario, “The Theological Virtue of Hope,” 2002, in Pope, ed., Ethics of Aquinas, p. 234.

[2] Shields, Dressing Up, 2000, pp. 46, 50, 53.

[3] Wilbur, “On the Marginal Way,” 1969, in New and Collected Poems, 1988, p. 122.

[4] Aristotle, Nich. Ethics 1123a35 ff.

[5] Cessario, “The Theological Virtue of Hope,” 2002, p. 238.

[6] Aquinas, Summa Theologia, c. 1270, IIa IIae, c. 1270, q. 161, art. 4. The citation is in the usual form. It means the second [Secunda] half of the Second [Secundae] Part—note the Latin case endings, -a and -ae. Aquinas organized his inquiry around Questions (”q.”) and broke down his dialectic answers into a few or a half dozen articles (art.). I general{ly} use the New Advent website for the translation.

[7] I am indebted to Marijke Prins for these ideas.

[8] Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 1990.

[9] Berman, All That is Solid, 1982, p. 15.

[10] Item 2359006705, category 15897.

[11] Schweiker, Theological Ethics, 2004, p. x.

[12] An amazing reproduction of the actual French text of the 1740 Amsterdam edition is available at http://www.lib. uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/ dicos/BAYLE/search.fulltext.form.html

[13] Pocock, “Cambridge Paradigms,” 1983, p. 241.

[14] Arnold, “The Study of Poetry,” 1880, pp. 320-21.

[15] Arnold, “The Study of Poetry,” 1880, p. 301.

[16] A. N. Wilson, God’s Funeral, 1999, p. 25.

[17] Keynes, “Marshall,” 1924, p. 134.

[18] Schumpeter, History, 1954, p. 772 n 2.

[19] A. N. Wilson, God’s Funeral, 1999, p. 125. Compare Novak, Catholic Social Thought, 1989, p. 64.

[20] A. N. Wilson, God’s Funeral, 1999, p. 9.

[21] Schumpeter, History, 1954, p. 772 n 2.

Nihil aliud scio nisi fluxa et caduca spernenda esse, certa et aeterna requirenda.

[Nothing else I know except that things perishing and transitory should be spurned and things certain and eternal should be sought.]

St. Augustine, Soliquia c. 386 AD, Bk. 5, Para. 5

The theological virtues are above the nature of man, whereas the intellectual and moral virtues belong to the nature of man. . . . Therefore the theological virtues should be distinguished . . . . The intellectual and moral virtues perfect the human intellect and appetite in proportion to human nature, but the theological virtues do so supernaturally.

Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia IIae., q. 62, art. 2.

The theological virtues are above the nature of man, whereas the intellectual and moral virtues belong to the nature of man. . . . Therefore the theological virtues should be distinguished . . . . The intellectual and moral virtues perfect the human intellect and appetite in proportion to human nature, but the theological virtues do so supernaturally.

Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia IIae., q. 62, art. 2.

To speak then of the profane world, the self-regarding virtues are Prudence, Temperance, and sometimes Courage—since the courage sometimes is directed to self-preservation. And the other-regarding virtues are Love, Justice, and sometimes Courage, the courage sometimes being on the behalf of others. Let’s be quantitative about it. The individual and the social virtues are by this reckoning 2 ½ + 2 ½ = 5. To do the sum the other way, they are the pagan 4 of Courage, Temperance, Justice, and Prudence, with the Christian virtue of Love added to them, reaching up to the transcendent, making 5.

Something’s missing. In the analysis of Aquinas and of other Western ethical thinking before Kant, and now sometimes in the revival of virtue ethics, there are seven: 5 + 2 = 7, the pagan four plus that Christian virtue of Love, eros, philia, agape. . . and two more: Faith and Hope, virtues six and seven. They complete the traditional ethical psychology of humans. Hope and faith are the other transcendent. “They have God not only for their end, but for their object”:[1]

The Three Theological Virtues

HOPE: Martin Luther King

FAITH: St. Peter

LOVE: Emma Goldman

In spiritual terms Faith, as St. Paul said in part, is “the argument for things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). St. Thomas Aquinas wrote a hymn defining Faith:

Quod non capis, quod non vides, What you do not grasp, not see,

Animosa firmat fides A lively faith affirms,

Praeter rerum ordinem. Beyond the order of [material] things.[2]

Even to look at nature one must affirm an order beyond the mere things. Facts without precepts are blind, a blooming, buzzing confusion. “No argument,” the political philosopher J. Budziszewski notes, “can be so completely drawn as to eliminate its dependence, conscious or unconscious, on undemonstrable first premises.”[3]

The discovery in the 19^th century of non-Euclidian geometries and in the 20^th of undecidable propositions should have taught the most scientific among us that faith grounds observation. The mathematicians Philip Davis and Reuben Hersh note that “underlying both mathematics and religion there must be a foundation of faith which the individual must himself supply.” Mathematicians, they observe, are practicing Neo-Platonists and followers of Spinoza. Their worship of mathematics parallels the worship of God. Both God and the Pythagorean Theorem, for example, are believed to exist independent of the physical world; and both give it meaning.[4] Faith in what Aquinas called the “eternal” law is nonetheless a faith. Admittedly the faith of the Christian has more. It comes from the grace of God.[5] But who is to say that scientific faith is not also God’s grace in action?

The physicist Stephen Barr puts it this way: “Even the atheist. . . asks questions about reality in the expectation that these questions will have answers . . . . It is not because he already has the answers. . . . [I]f he [did]. . . he would not be seeking them. Yet he has the conviction. . . . This is a faith.”[6] And a great faithman, Thomas Merton, once wrote that “Faith is first of all an intellectual assent.”

But the assent of faith is not based on the intrinsic evidence of a visible object. . . . The statements which demand the assent of faith are simply neutral to reason. . . . Faith brings together the known and the unknown so that they overlap: or rather, so that we are aware of their overlap. . . . The function of faith is not to reduce mystery to rational clarity, but to integrate the unknown and the known together into a living whole.[7]

Faith is not an attack on Science or a turn to superstition. Like the assent to the enterprise of Science as a whole, as against particular scientific propositions embedded in the enterprise, it is not based on the visible. Physicists affirm that ”God is a mathematician” or “God does not play dice.” Such faiths are not against rationality, but complete it.

The faith, in other words, need not be faith in God. Many secular folk believe in a transcendent without God, though approaching Him. “I think all poets are sending religious messages,” declared Richard Wilbur, “because poetry is, in such great part, the comparison of one thing to another; or the saying, as in metaphor, that one thing is another. And to insist, as all poets do, that all things are related to each other, comparable to each other, is to go toward making an assertion of the unity of all things.”[8]

But why then is faith a virtue? Why isn’t it sheer epistemology, a matter of how we Know, though concerning things not seen, such as a faith in the orderliness of the universe or in the power of reason or in a God of love? Because, C. S. Lewis explains, faith is a kind of spiritual courage, a willed steadfastness against the times when “a mere mood rises up against it.” Faithfulness is necessary for epistemology, “thinking with the giving of assent,” as Augustine put it. “Belief” in Germanic origin is cognate with “beloved,” from Indo-European *leubh-, whence “love.” It connoted faithfulness, and only later acquired the meaning of giving credence to a proposition. A physicist who was, as Lewis says, “just a creature dithering to and fro” about whether in designing the universe God, figuratively speaking, is a mathematician would be a poor physicist. An historian who has nothing of “the art of holding on to things [her] reason has once accepted, in spite of [her] changing moods” is going to dither to and fro about whether or not history is caused (figuratively speaking) by the class struggle or by a horseshoe nail. She will not really have tested the class struggle or the horseshoe nail. As a historical scientist she will not be wholly virtuous, because as Lewis observes, she will change her mind unreasonably.[9]

Faith is a backward-looking virtue. It concerns who we are; or, rather, italicized, who we are, “the mystic chords of memory.” In personal and modern terms it is called “integrity” or “identity.” “If we create a society that our descendants will want to hold on to,” writes Kwame Anthony Appiah, “our personal and political values will survive in them.”[10] The faith needs to be instilled, “because children do not begin with values of their own.” Though Appiah does not attach his notion of “identity” to religious “faith,” perhaps he should. In social and ancient terms it is the virtue of insisting on belonging to a community, such as a polis or a church. As Tillich put it, faith is “the courage to be a part of,” to share a social purpose. “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith,” says the Christian, and does keep the faith steadfastly against many contrary moods.

The political scientist James Q. Wilson uses “duty” instead of faith, though he speaks of duty also as “fidelity,” from of course fides, faith.[11] That is: adhere to one’s commitments, do your duty in the face of temptations to take a free ride. As Wilson says, and Lewis said, faithful duty is akin to courage.[12] Indeed all the virtues require courage in the face of attack. But all courage requires faith, in turn, so that the courage is exercised for something enduring. Wilson’s leading example is Admiral James Stockdale’s leadership of the American POWs in the hands of North Vietnamese torturers. But he notes that the signs of faith lie all about. Faith is the who-you-are that finds you contributing to public radio, conserving water in a drought when no inspector will spot a defection, turning up to vote against George W. Bush when your vote was after all of no consequence.

Wilson adopts the view of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the Aristotelian tradition before it, that ethics is a matter of habit and character, not continuous decisions under a rule of Reason. Like other virtues, he argues, faith is behaviorally instilled, working in tandem with genetic predispositions. Once instilled it is a feeling, a complaining conscience, what Smith called the Impartial Spectator. That is why Hutcheson and Hume and Smith in 18^th-century Scotland claimed that virtues arose from “moral sentiments”: virtues are matters of a prepared feeling rather than a decision on the spot.

You begin, though, with a decision to cultivate the moral sentiments. You enroll with a free will at Annapolis and train your ethical muscles. Like a body trained to a sport, the present performance is both forward and backward looking, hopeful and faithful, both. The rule of reason, by contrast, insists on disowning the past, extracting you from your history. Utilitarianism insists on faithlessness.

Fides was the term by which the Romans described their relationship with allies. In the Roman wars against Carthage, Inc.—so bourgeois as to distribute annually the “profits” of the state to its citizens, in the style of Alaska with its oil revenues—the rule of Faith repeatedly overcame a rule of mere Prudence. In the last stages of the first of three Punic Wars, for instance, the prudent Carthaginians decided to economize on their navy, in the very years in which the extraordinarily faithful if previously not very nautical Romans built and staffed additional war galleys to the number of two hundred. In the Second Punic War the Romans were defeated again and again in Italy by Hannibal, losing 50,000 dead in a few hours at Cannae. But they never ransomed captives, nor hesitated to free slaves to staff fresh legions. They kept the faith in Rome.

The Dutch have a somewhat heavy word expressing the tug of the past through faith, lotsverbondenheid, solidarity. It means the sharing with solidarity of a common fate, those bonden, bonds, to the lots—compare English “lot,” as in “your lot in life.” Aristotle’s phrase for it is “another self.” Such friendship is a combination of love and faith directed here below. Love without faithfulness would be called “inauthentic” or “phony” or at best “inconstant, flighty,” the crushes of adolescents or the serial polyamy of adults. In some families Faith without love would be called “having relatives.”[13] Friends of mere use or amusement, Aristotle’s first two types, do not have lotsverbondenheid: “such friendships . . . are easily dissolved if the parties become different; for if they are no longer pleasant or useful they cease loving each other.”[14]

Friends of the third type, who care for one another as for themselves, do have a bonded lot. The Dutch university students portrayed in Paul Verhoeven’s movie Soldier of Orange (1979) go through the Second World War in different ways, one dying as a German officer on the Eastern Front, another sitting peacefully at home and passing his exams to become a lawyer, another escaping to England and becoming an RAF pilot, while several others die in the Resistance to the German occupation. The hero of the movie, played by Rutger Hauer, keeps faith with them all, even with the traitor and the shirker, embodying lotsverbondenheid. In a scene on the beach at Scheveningen, for example, the others walk away from the fellow student who has traitorously joined the German army. The Hauer character, although himself by then leaning towards the Resistance, will not abandon him. Later the two verbonden friends, even though they have taken politically opposite paths, exchange postcards. Their lots are bound. You go to your high-school reunion. You say to yourself, “I have nothing in common with these people.” But you do, if you are a person, theologically speaking. You have Faith.

Lotsverbondenheid is made evident in the technique of psychological intervention called family-constellation therapy. The participants play roles of mother or son or cousin or dead grandfather or anyone else bound by life’s lottery to the person who is the main subject of the therapy. Even someone who murdered a former spouse may have a place in the constellation. It is not a drama viewed in detachment. Faith is called upon, performing a sort of public oath. The exercise of one’s will towards lotsverbondenheid is Faith, Geloof.

* * * * *

We are told by the Habits of the Heart authors that nowadays “The rules of the competitive market, not the love of families or the practices of the town meeting or the fellowship of the church, are the real arbiters of living.”[15] Bourgeois society is supposed to have undermined faithful friendship. The claim has been a theme in European thought since Bacon, perhaps an echo of the aristocratic and classical disdain for the bourgeoisie. But recent sociology has shown Bellah and Bacon and Plato are mistaken. Markets are consistent with real friendship.

An economistic way to make the point is a paper by Paul Ingram and Peter Roberts in the American Journal of Sociology in September, 2000, “Friendship Among Competitors in the Sydney Hotel Industry.” They find that the friendships among competing hotel managers in the 40 Sydney hotels in their study generate about $2.25 million more of gross revenues per year per hotel—for example, through recommendations of the competing hotel when fully booked—than would be generated by a hotel with friendless managers.[16] They add “the critical caveat that the instrumental benefits of friendships are inextricably tied to the affective element,” that is, you can’t successfully fake friendship.[17] The faithless ones get found out.

Considering the depth of skill among primates in performing and detecting falsehood, this is not surprising. Both Prudence and Solidarity work. “Individuals who try to form and maintain friendships solely as a means to material gain will fail to evoke trust and reciprocity.” That is, Prudence Only will not work, and so “those who would limit the intrusion of society into economy by . . . characterizing embedded relationships between buyers and suppliers as predictable outcomes of a repeated, non-cooperative game” are mistaken.[18]

One can show it historically, too. “Far from traditional society being suffused with brotherly gemeinschaftlich virtues,” the sociologist Ray Pahl has concluded,

the reverse appears to be the case. Counter to what the classical sociological tradition appears to suggest [Simmel, for example], Aristotelian styles of friendship [”for the friend’s own sake”] re-emerged with the coming of commercial-industrial society in the eighteenth century. . . . Counter to what is assumed in much modern social theory, it was precisely the spread of market exchange in the eighteenth century that led to the development of new benevolent bonds.[19]

Pahl believes, rather less persuasively, that friendship between men flourished unusually in 12^th-century Europe. Peter of Blois declared in the 1180s, “Are not my friends my inner self, whom I cherish and who take care of me in a sweet commerce of services, in an identity of affection?”[20] But what is clearer than his medieval evidence from monks and heretics is that in early modern Europe people were by modern standards extraordinarily feckless. Shakespeare’s plots are filled with betrayals—far above the frequency in Ibsen’s or O’Neill’s, which on the contrary are often grim illustrations of lotsverbondenheid in a bourgeois society. Even in a Shakespeare comedy everyone is fooling someone else, lying, disguising, dissembling. Stephen Greenblatt traces the theme of perfidy in Shakespeare to his supposed secret Catholicism, in a world in which exposing such a secret was fatal.[21] Shakespeare is not alone in portraying an exceptionally shifty world c. 1600. Lawrence Stone concluded that “so far as surviving evidence goes, England between 1500 and 1660 was relatively cold, suspicious and violence prone.”[22]

Pahl cites the ironically named Boncompagno da Signa, who in his Amicitia of 1205 paints a similarly grim picture of faithless friends in Italy. One Paolo da Certaldo wrote a Book of Good Practices around 1360 with 388 precepts for merchants, among them “test [a purported friend], not once but a hundred times,” a sentiment repeated in the same words a half-century later by Giovanni Morelli, another Florentine businessman and moralist.[23] Certaldo quotes a proverb, “he who trusts not, will not be deceived,” and Morelli advises the novice merchant, “above all, if you wish to have friends or relationships, make sure you don’t need them. . . . Cash . . . [is] the best friend or relative you can have.”[24]

But Pahl argues, following Allan Silver, that the economistic exchange model beloved of tough-guy sociologists and anthropologists in the early 20^th century fits even modern history poorly. And it was not favored by most of the ancients in theory. Cicero lambastes the Epicureans—the ancient Mediterranean’s version of Max-U economists—as “those men who in the manner of cattle [pecundum ritu, literally, “by the rite of the cattle”] refer everything to pleasure” and who “with even less humanity. . . say that friendships are to be sought for protection and aid, not for caring.” He calls them “men abandoned to pleasure,” who “when they dispute about friendship have understanding of neither its practice nor its theory.” [25]

Adam Smith, supposedly the inventor of a theory conserving on love, emphatically did not follow with such a theory in his work or in his life. Smith and his friends thought of sympathy as creating a trusting society as by an invisible hand, in the way that Prudence created an efficient one, an argument stressed by the economist Jerry Evensky.[26] As Daniel G. Arce M. put it, citing Evensky, “It is the coevolution of individual and societal ethics that leads to the stability of classical liberal society.”[27] Pahl concludes that “sometime in the eighteenth century friendship appeared as one of a new set of benevolent social bonds.”[28] It was not in modern times but in the olden times that the life of man was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

This is no paradox. When a poor man can buy as much for his penny as a rich man, though he have fewer pennies, he is not required to doff his hat to get his daily bread. He does not need to pretend to be an ally of the butcher or the baker. This frees him when the occasion arises to be a real friend, an equal. Allan Silver notes that “the intense loyalties, coexisting with the frank expectation of reward, found in codes and cultures of honor before commercial society” were not nice and were not good for real, that is, bourgeois, friendship. Samuel Johnson described an aristocratic “patron” in his Dictionary as “a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid in flattery,” in the fashion of Lord Chesterfield. Johnson found the relationship with his paying bourgeois readers more satisfactory: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”

In a world governed by honor one makes friends to keep from being assaulted, Cicero’s “protection and aid.” In a world governed by markets one buys protection, one hopes, anonymously with taxes or with fees to ones condominium association, and then is at leisure to make friends for the sake of real friendship. Modern capitalism—though we must not suppose, as many people do, that markets did not “exist” before 1800—was supported by, and supported in turn, a trust in strangers that still distinguishes prosperous from poor economies. The division of labor in the modern world, as Paul Seabright has emphasized, is achieved through “honorary friends.”[29]

Trust and friendship, further, make possible speculative bubbles, from the tulip mania of the 1630s to the dot-com boom of the 1990s. The very fact of capitalism’s speculative instability, therefore, argues for an entirely new prevalence of belief in strangers. “Credit” is from creditus, “believed.” A business cycle based on pyramids of credit was impossible in the distrustful 16^th century. The macro-economy could in earlier times rise and fall, of course, but from harvest booms and busts, not from credit booms and busts. In those pre-modern-capitalist days God’s hand, not human beliefs, made for aggregate ups and downs. Medieval and early modern people trusted only allies, and had wise doubts even concerning some of them: “How smooth and even they do bear themselves!/ As if allegiance in their bosoms sat,/ Crowned with faith and constant loyalty.”[30] Pre-moderns had to keep faith with God and with their lords temporal. Late moderns keep faith with the market and with their friends.

On this theory the episodes of disorder and unemployment in capitalism from the 1630s in Holland and from 1720 in Northern Europe arose from the virtues of capitalism, not from its vices, from its trustworthiness, not from its greed. To be more exact: the business cycle arose from trustworthiness breaking down suddenly in an environment of quite normal human greed for abnormal gain, the auri sacra fames which has characterized humans since the Fall. What is novel in capitalism is the faithful trust, lotsverbondenheid writ large.

[1] Aquinas, Disputed Questions, 1269-72, “Virtues in General,” Art. 12, p. 89.

[2] Aquinas, Lauda, Sion, salvatorem, verse 6, at http:// www.ewtn.com/ library/ PRAYER/ LAUDA.TXT.

[3] Budziszewski, “Religion and Civic Culture,” 1992, p. 51.

[4] Davis and Hersh, Descartes’ Dream, 1986, for example p. 232.

[5] “Faith” in Cross, ed., 1957, Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, p. 491f.

[6] Barr, Physics and Faith, 2003, p. 266.

[7] Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, 1962, pp. 127, 135f.

[8] Quoted in Kirsch, “Get Happy,” 2004, p. 97.

[9] Lewis, Mere Christianity, 1943-45, pp. 123-126.

[10] Appiah, Ethics of Identity, 2005, p. 137.

[11] J. Q. Wilson, Moral Sense, 1993, pp. 99-117.

[12] J. Q. Wilson, Moral Sense, 1993, p. xiii.

[13] Cicero, De amicitia, 44 BC, v, 20.

[14] Aristotle, Nich. Ethics, c. 330 BC, 1156a20, Broadie and Rowe trans.

[15] Bellah and others, Habits of the Heart, 1985.

[16] Ingram and Roberts, “Friendship among Competitors,” 2000, p. 417.

[17] Ingram and Roberts, “Friendship among Competitors,” 2000, p. 420; compare Mueller, Capitalism Democracy, 1999, p. 39.

[18] Ingram and Roberts, “Friendship among Competitors,” 2000, p. 418.

[19] Pahl, Friendship, 2000, p. 53f.

[20] Quoted in Pahl, Friendship, 2000, p. 30.

[21] Greenblatt, Will in the World, 2004, Chp. 3.

[22] Quoted in Pahl, Friendship, 2000, p. 53.

[23] Branca, ed, Merchant Writers, 1986, pp. 48, 68. Compare Cicero’s similar advice in De amicitia, for example xvii, 63 and xix, 67; and before him Hesiod, Works and Days, lines 371-72: “even with your brother smile—and get a witness; for trust and mistrust alike ruin men.”

[24] Branca, Merchant Writers, 1986, pp. 48, 73.

[25] Cicero, De amicitia ix, 32; xii, 46; xiv, 52.

[26] Evensky, “Ethics and the Invisible Hand,” 1993 and, Adam Smith’s Lost Legacy,” 2001.

[27] Arce M., “Conspicuous by Its Absence,” 2004, p. 263.

[28] Pahl, Friendship, 2000, p. 55.

[29] Seabright, Company of Strangers, 2004, p. 8.

[30] Shakespeare, Hen. V, II, ii, lines 3 ff.

Who says? Really, now, how d’you know? In common with most social scientists, Selznick assumes without inquiring much into the evidence that modernization has these effects, and that they do go to the limit, organic unities terminally thinned and diminished. Selznick and the others rely mainly on the repeated assertion without evidence in canonical works by Marx, Tönnies, Weber, Durkheim, followed by 20^th-century ethnography before the generation of Clifford Geertz and 20^th-century history before the generation of Peter Laslett—in the 1960s Geertz and Laslett challenged the pieties of 1950s modernization theory, which assumed that Marx, Tönnies, Weber, and Durkheim had history right. “In almost every sphere of life,” Selznick asserts, “there has been a movement away from densely textured structures of meaning to less concrete, more abstract forms of expression and relatedness.”

We are asked to believe that a graduate student in Professor Selznick’s law and sociology courses at Berkeley, the descendent of, say, Chinese peasants, has access to less densely structured textures of meaning, a thinner, less love-filled life, than his ancestors. The student reads, let us say, English perfectly and French and German very well, and can understand a little spoken Cantonese. He is married and has a three-year old daughter—whose feet, by the way, he wouldn’t think of binding. He needs only to complete his Ph.D. dissertation on The Abstract Forms of Expression and Relatedness in Modern Life: A Study of Tönnies and Durkheim to take up a satisfying career of teaching and research. He has fellow graduate students he will keep as beloved friends for a long life. He stays in touch with his college classmates, and with some of his friends from the neighborhood where he grew up, in Rio Linda, north of Sacramento.

In what feature exactly, one might ask Professor Selznick, is the graduate student able to enjoy less texture, structure, concreteness in his expression and relations than his male ancestors? One of his male ancestors was his immigrant great-great-grandfather working as a coolie on railway construction in Nevada—he died in a tunnel collapse at age 31. Another great-great-great grandfather lived in a village in southeast China. He could not read a single character, and left the village once only, feet first, when he died at age 44.

On the face of it the graduate student has a more textured, structured, concrete life, and a more uniform, flexible, and abstract one than these men. He has wider experience, a life twice or three times as long, more friends, longer-living relatives, more interesting work, and access to the world’s best in spiritual experiences—advanced Buddhist thought, for example, or the piano sonatas of Beethoven.

True, he cannot go back to the ignorance of his ancestors. None of us can, after innocence. We know that the earth is round (p < .05), we know that cholera is caused by sewerage in the drinking water, we know that people with good advanced degrees in the humanities are capable of serving as SS officers. We cannot forget so by an act of will. But what of it?

Selznick says that “the fundamental truth is that modernity weakens culture and fragments experience.” Does this mean than moderns don’t have a culture? That can’t be right. Does it mean that the moderns participate in more villages, so to speak, than their home village alone? Yes: they participate in the village of work, the village of an extended family in which relatives surviving into their 80s are commonplace, the village of a church or temple, of a professional association, of a square dancing club, of local politics, of a women’s reading group, of a bridge club, of a service organization, of hospital volunteers, of a local coffee house, of Giants fans, of Berkeleyites, of Californians, of Americans, of world citizens passionately aware of our shared big blue marble. What is wrong with that?

What exactly has humanity lost from such “fragmentation”? It should be easy to gather actual evidence on the amount of fragmentation and especially the amount of “loss” if it is so very pervasive a feature of modern capitalist life. The evidence needs to be comprehensive in its accounting and serious in its history. It should not be a notion generalized from Durkheim’s anomie or from a professor’s whinge against his bourgeois neighbors.

The century-and-a-half old premise among anti-capitalists is that we have through capitalism lost a good world worth keeping. But evidence has in fact been assembled by generations of social historians since 1900 against the German Romantic idea of a Black-Forest homeland for a noble peasantry—a peasantry which allegedly benefited from a more densely textured structures of meaning than we moderns can muster.

The evidence is overwhelming. The historians have found that the Gemeinschaft of olden times was defective. The murder rate in villages in the 13^th century, to take the English case, was higher than comparable places now.[2] Medieval English peasants were in fact very mobile geographically, “fragmenting” their lives.[3] The imagined extended family of “traditional” life never existed in England.[4] Or, to turn to other instances: The sweetness of the old-fashioned American family has been greatly exaggerated.[5] The Russian mir was neither ancient nor egalitarian, but a figment of the German Romantic imagination.[6] Vietnamese peasants did not live in tranquil, closed corporate communities.[7]

Love, in short, is arguably thicker on the ground in the modern, Western, capitalist world. Or at any rate it is not obviously thinner on the ground than in the actual world of olden and allegedly more solid times. The feminist Nancy Folbre remarks that “we cannot base our critique of impersonal market-based society on some romantic version of a past society as one big happy family. In that family, Big Daddy was usually in control.”[8]

Robert Bellah and his co-authors of The Habits of the Heart (1985, 1996) repeat the tale of lost solidarity. It is one of their main themes. “Modernity,” they say without offering evidence—why seek evidence for so obvious a truth?—”has had . . . destructive consequences for social ecology. . . , [which] is damaged . . . . by the destruction of the subtle ties that bind human beings to one another, leaving them frightened and alone.”[9] They worry that “the first language of America,” individualism, “may have grown cancerous.”[10] They give aesthetic and moral meaning to their everyday lives as social scientists by detecting through traditional forms of scrutiny of their neighbors a “weakening of the traditional forms of life that gave aesthetic and moral meaning to everyday living.”[11]

Everyone believes it. Everyone does, that is, except the historians who have actually looked at the comparative evidence. Except them, everyone believes in “the extreme fragmentation of the modern world.”[12] After warning about the misleading nostalgia for a “romantic vision of one big happy family,” Folbre retails the usual critique of modernity based on it. “Social critics like Karl Polanyi,” she writes, “have long warned that the growth of market-like behavior . . . might encourage selfish calculation.” So they have, but with not much evidence. “Economic development seems to lead to a decline in the importance of close personal relations.” I don’t think so; if anything, it seems to lead to the opposite. “Our culture has almost certainly become more materialistic.” By comparison with Roman civilization or medieval European civilization? I don’t think so. “Adam Smith believed that we would become . . . more civilized. I haven’t seen much evidence of this.” [13] You haven’t? Not in the rights of women, the extent of higher education, the number of books published, the attendance at museums and orchestra halls worldwide? Such pessimism appears to have more to do with the alienation of academics from the society around them than with the historical or sociological facts.

Intellectually speaking the claim of “fragmentation,” I say, descends from German suspicion of French Enlightenment, which around 1800 emerged as Romance, and later in the century was intellectualized as the particularly German theme in professional folk lore, history, anthropology, theology, and at last sociology. One finds many central-European intellectuals and their followers early in the 20^th century repeating what they learned about the modern world’s lack of solidarity from Marx, Weber, and the rest, accented by the passing bells of 1914-1918: thus Karl Mannheim, Martin Heidegger, Karl Polanyi, Arnold Hauser, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and many other young men after the Great War declaring themselves to be hollow men.

The German sociologist and Fascist enthusiast Hans Freyer (1887-1969) wrote in 1923 that “we feel ourselves to be unconfirmed, lacking in meaning, unfulfilled, not even obligated.” No commitment, no Faith or Love. The Hungarian literary critic and Marxist revolutionary and later Communist state functionary Georg Lukács (1885-1971) wrote in 1913 about the lack of “totality” in modern culture.[14] The implied premise, borrowed from the philosophical history of the German Romantics, is that former times did have such a totality. The decades following 1914 were to show what could be accomplished by making the anti-liberal search for “totality” into an “ism.” The evidence has always been weak for a new “fragmentation.” But the claim justified in Europe 1914-1945 a violent assault on liberal democracy. “Everything in the State, nothing against the State, nothing outside the State” is one version. And in its milder echoes nowadays the nostalgia for an alleged unity justifies at least a disdain for the way we live in Middletown or the San Fernando Valley.

Bellah and his fellow authors defer to Robert Putnam on the evidence for a rise in bowling alone. Habits of the Heart, they note in the Introduction to the updated edition of 1996, “was essentially a cultural analysis, more about language than behavior.”[15] Putnam, they say, assembled the real evidence of behavior. The behavioral evidence is not persuasive. They quote Putnam in the 1990s, for example, as predicting that the internet would probably “not sustain civic engagement.” That behavioral prediction by now does not seem to have been a very good one. Look at the “civic engagement” of Howard Dean’s internet-based campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2003-04, or the new unionism built on e-mail mobilization. [16] Look at the hundreds of thousands of little communities worldwide that now gather every evening in the ether to chat and court and opine and quarrel, a virtual stroll in an electronic city square.
The new social forms do not constitute, an “obligation” or a “totality” in the sense that 20^th-century fascists and communists understood the terms. They are not a “terrestrial paradise,” as Isaiah Berlin described the myth that has long haunted Western thought, “an ideal state of affairs which is the solution of all problems and the harmonization of all values.”[17] But what is the evidence that there ever was such a totality, or that it would be a good idea if it ever were achieved? The idea is Rousseau’s general will and its dismal spawn. “The Fascist conception of the State,” wrote Mussolini and Gentile in 1932, “is all embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value.”[18] Swell.

And in any case the notion that “social capital” has declined appears to be misleading. Richard Florida conveniently summarizes the recent criticism of Putnam’s work by Dora Costa, Matthew Hahn, Robert Cushing, and others.[19] The decline of social solidarity that worries Putnam seems to be exaggerated.

In particular the numerous “weak ties” of the modern world, as Mark Granovetter put it, have taken together great strength. They are like a rope made of many strands. At the beginning of modernity Bishop Butler used the same phrase as the sociologists now use looking back on it: “anything may serve. . . . to hold humanity together in little fraternities and co-partnerships: weak ties, indeed, and what may afford fund enough for ridicule, if they are absurdly considered as the real principle of that union; but they are in truth merely the occasions.”[20] The occasions of work groupings and hobby clubs and NASCAR races is the “natural principle of attraction in man towards man” which one finds in 2006 as much as in 1725.

Putnam yearns for the one-strand rope of an invented tradition. Florida challenges him gently:

I am not advocating that we adopt lives composed entirely of weak ties. . . . But most Creative Class people that I’ve met and studied do not aspire to such a life and don’t seem to be falling into it. . . . They have significant others; they have close friends; they call mom. But their lives are not dominated or dictated by strong ties to the extent that many lives were in the past. . . . Interestingly, people seem to prefer it this way. Weak ties allow us to mobilize more resources and more possibilities for ourselves and others, and expose us to novel ideas that are the source of creativity.[21]

Richard Sennett, in The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (1998) is, like Bellah and other communitarians, nostalgic for strong ties, the “social bonds [which] take time to develop, slowly rooting into the cracks and crevices of institutions.”[22] He has particular nostalgia, as many on the left and right do, for the 1950s in America: “strong unions, guarantees of the welfare state, and large-scale corporations combined to produce an era of relative stability.”[23] I remind my communitarian and neo-con friends—who share more than they realize—that if you were not male and white and straight and a suburbanite and a union member, those 1950s were in fact not very nice, even in America. They were nice only by comparison with still earlier times of still stronger ties, still greater stability, and still tighter social bonds rooted in institutions. Enracinement sounds nice. But the real glory is the flower, the human flourishing, not the roots.

Somehow we have traveled from the sunny realism of Bishop Butler and Adam Smith in the 18^th century to a dark and unrealistic pessimism in the 20^th century, at just the time that liberal capitalism is succeeding. We’ve traveled from Butler’s belief that “it is manifest fact that . . . the generality are frequently influenced by friendship, compassion, gratitude; and even a general abhorrence of what is base, and liking of what it fair and just” to Christopher Lasch’s assertion that we live in a culture of narcissism. [24] We’ve traveled from Smith’s belief that “the uniform, constant, and unmitigated effort of every man to better his condition . . . is frequently powerful enough to maintain the natural progress of things towards improvement” to Georg Lukács’ assertion in his old age (the 1960s) that “even the worst socialism is better than the best capitalism.”[25]

I suggest that German Romanticism was the detour. German Romanticism still seems attractive to many, against the Scottish and liberal idea of letting people alone in their marketplaces to fashion a varied culture. I follow Berlin in observing that one strand in Romance led to modern racism, by way of myths of Kultur. Another strand, he says, led to modern revolution, by way of myths of Action. And a final strand led to some of the best of modern liberal values, by way of Romanticism’s novel notions of sincerity and authenticity.[26] Jerry Muller notes that there was a liberal counter-argument to the bad strands in Romance even in Germany—such as Walter Goetz in 1919 making “an extended critique of the notion that there existed some ongoing essence of the German Volk.”[27] Muller, or for that matter Goetz, could have cited another German, Franz Boaz working in America to the same liberal and anti-racist end.

When Bellah and his co-authors venture to illustrate the modern fragmentation they do not persuade. The only example they give of the fragmented character of modern solidarity is “the euphoric sense of metropolitan belongingness” that comes “when a local sports team wins a national championship.” These are “rare moments,” they claim, which happen “briefly.”[28] They view them as fleeting episodes of trivia.

That doesn’t seem right. Sports championships are rare and brief, of course, aside from the New York Yankees since Ruth, and in Chicago for a while during Michael Jordan. But the belongingness in the big city and its hinterland that sports teams nourish is not rare. To some in the clerisy it seems trivial, I realize, but loyalty to sports teams creates for millions in America and Holland and Japan an enduring belonging. It’s nicer, actually, than war. And it’s not brief. Ask a New Englander about 1918-2004. Ask a 60-year-old Englishman today about the World Cup win over Germany in 1966, or a Dutchman about the loss to Germany in 1974. My 98-year old grandmother wore a Cubs cap while she watched on television her beloved team of Ernie Banks, Ron Santo, and Billy Williams trying and failing, yet again.

Yes, I know: such stuff is so silly, so unacademic, so characteristic of the alienated lives of moderns. It is so much less dignified than the densely textured structures of meaning that came out of the villages of English Volk c. 1300 playing, uh, football.

The five-person Habits team interviewed about 200 Americans. They concede that they found no one among the 200 who was fragmented. “Most are seeking in one way or another to transcend the limitations of a self-centered life.” [29] But that’s what people have been doing since the invention of language—at least in the brief episodes in which their material circumstances have given them time to think. “If there are vast numbers of a selfish, narcissistic ‘me generation’ in America, we did not find them.” That’s right: there are not actually in very large numbers the sociopaths and Dilbert characters who are supposed in some theories to be generated by capitalism.

What the Habits team did find is that people could not articulate a theory, usually, beyond a naïve ritualism or a naïve individualism provided to them by the less thoughtful of the local clerisy, the parish priest, say, or a précis of Ayn Rand. But are Americans actually moved by the worst of these, and in particular by radical individualism? Some Americans say it. But do they do it? Is Prudence Only, Screw-You, Mac, really the operating system of capitalism? The clerisy has believed so since 1848. Is it right about this?

Habits of the Heart begins with a relentless if polite criticism of one of the interviewees, called “Brian Palmer,” a businessman who holds two full-time jobs to support his family. The main complaint against Brian seems to be not that he has no values—which would be a strange assertion under the circumstances—but that he can’t say what they are. “Apart from the injunction not to lie [’integrity is good and lying is bad’], he is vague about what his values are.”[30]

Gosh, that’s terrible. Palmer is a poor theorizer. He can’t say what his values are. Another interviewee, “Wayne Bauer,” is a community organizer. Apparently it is not only the business bourgeoisie who have this characteristically modern American problem of ethical disfluency. When grilled about his ethical theories, the college professors note, “Wayne becomes strangely inarticulate.” Liberated people “will make society ‘better,’ he says.” The exasperated professors quiz the student: “what does he mean by ‘better’?”

Only a group of intellectuals would regard as a Grave Problem such a failure to articulate. One is inclined to respond uncharitably: “If even the glorious Immanuel Kant found it challenging to articulate the Meaning of Life, what do you expect to get by way of such theories from 200 ordinary Americans, untrained in German philosophy and sociology and theology? I suppose that in the 200 ordinary Americans not even one could articulate the categorical imperative, much less give its three alternative formulations. So bloody what?” I said “uncharitably.”

The unspoken premise of the Habits method is that under the “traditional” forms that gave aesthetic and moral meaning to everyday living in olden times the results of conversations with 200 people would be quite different. But that’s not likely. If you asked 200 American fundamentalists nowadays or 200 of Hester Prynne’s fellow Puritans what their values or their ethical theories were, you would get a predictable set of allegedly Bible-based formulas. Hester’s Puritans would be articulate, all right, wonderfully so. Words would spill out with King-James eloquence. But the words would give little or no scientific insight into the actual state of love and justice in Boston or Springfield c. 1680. The formulas would not be the actual sociological rules of 17^th-century Massachusetts.[31] Ditto for a sample of ordinary modern fundamentalists. There would be theorizing, all right, but bad theorizing, bad in every sense: mistaken, superficial, insincere, uninsightful, often enough concealing a hatred for others under a theory of a hateful God. And certainly you would get little or nothing by way of independent theorizing, except perhaps from a rare Anne Bradstreet. The Puritans would get a bare C+ in the professors’ examination. The 700-Club fundamentalists would get a C-. These are better than the well-deserved D- assigned to the appalling Brian Palmer and Wayne Bauer, to be sure, but certainly not the honor-roll level of theorizing the professors seek.

My argument is in some ways the opposite of that in Habits of the Heart, though the Habits authors and I agree on many things. We agree that ethical matters are important, that Prudence Only is a poor ethical theory, that what they call “Biblical” values are not to be disdained. But I would argue that bourgeois and capitalist and modern American life in fact participates in the transcendent as much as life anywhere has. I’m willing to stipulate that bourgeois life does not participate in the transcendent any more than earlier and non-capitalist life—though I wish that my friends of the clerisy who despair of modernity would concede in turn that because of capitalist economic growth many people in capitalist countries, for example my friends of the clerisy who despair of modernity, have now the time and mental equipment to push beyond What Dad Said.

Doubtless the booboisie doesn’t push hard enough. Doubtless it views artists and academics as something like inessential entertainment. But at least some of the booboisie try to reach the transcendent, in their contemptibly naïve ways. And the rest at least pay willingly for someone else to try. American Babbitts save for their children’s college educations on an impressive scale, educations in which the children are taught to despise the values of their parents.

When the political philosopher Harvey Mansfield noted to his colleague at Harvard Judith Shklar that virtue in America is bourgeois virtue, she replied, “Is there any other kind?”[32] That’s right, and more professors need to acknowledge it. Americans, bourgeois and workingclass, in fact exhibit an integrated set of virtues, though present-day, non-clerisy, non-fundamentalist people have no ready formulas for describing it in a way that would satisfy a panel of professors.

This is not the interviewees fault, the rhetorical subtext of Habits to the contrary notwithstanding. It’s the clerisy’s job to provide articulations that illuminate our lives. Artists and intellectuals provide the images and the theories articulating a transcendent. For a century and a half a good part of the clerisy has been off duty, standing in the street outside the factory or office or movie studio hurling insults at the varied workers there.

On this Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, Tipton, and I do agree: “individuals need the nurture of groups that carry a moral tradition reinforcing their own aspirations.”[33] Time for members of the clerisy, such as we six, to articulate a moral tradition more useful than Down With the Bosses or To Hell With the Poor or Back to the Church or Reverse the 1960s or Prudence Only.

[1] Selznick, Moral Commonwealth, 1992, pp. 6, 8.

[2] Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict, 1979, p. 271f.

[3] Raftis, Tenure and Mobility, 1964, Chps. VI-VIII.

[4] Wrigley and Schofield, Population History, 1981.

[5] Coontz The Way We Never Were, 1992.

[6] Dennison and Carus, “Invention of the Russian Rural Commune,” 2003. For the attachment to the figment, see Engels’ first footnote to the 1888 English translation of The Communist Manifesto, in which Haxthausen’s notions about the mir are praised.

[7] Samuel Popkin, The Rational Peasant, 1979.

[8] Folbre, Invisible Heart, 2001, p. 20.

[9] Bellah et al., Habits, p. 284.

[10] Bellah et al., Habits, p. xlii.

[11] Bellah et al., Habits, p. 291.

[12] Bellah et al., Habits, p. 286.

[13] Folbre, Invisible Heart, 2001, p. 32.

[14] See Muller, Mind and Market, 2002, pp. 263, 280.

[15] Bellah et al., Habits, p. xvii.

[16] Freeman (2003), “Not Your Mother’s Union.”

[17] Berlin, letter to Norman Birnbaum, quoted in Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, 1998, p. 251. Compare Nozick, Anarchy, State, 1974, p. 297: “That it is impossible simultaneously and continually to realize all social and ethical goods is a regrettable fact about the human condition, worth investigating and lamenting.” But a fact.

[18] Mussolini and Gentile, “Doctrine of Fascism,” 1932, para. 10.

[19] Florida, Creative Class, 2002, Chp. 15.

[20] Butler, Fifteen Sermons, 1725, Sermon I, p. 367, italics supplied.

[21] Florida, Creative Class, 2002, p. 277.

[22] Sennett, Corrosion of Character, 1998, p. 24.

[23] Sennett, Corrosion of Character, 1988, p. 23.

[24] Butler, Fifteen Sermons, 1725, Preface, p. 343.

[25] Smith, Wealth, 1776, p. 343 (II.iii.31) and Lukács quoted in Lendvai, Hungarians, 1999, p. 491.

[26] See for example Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, 1998, pp. 245, 247, 248.

[27] Muller, Mind and Market, 2002, p. 280

[28] Bellah et al., Habits, p. 292.

[29] Bellah et al., Habits,. p. 290.

[30] Bellah et al., Habits, p. 7.

[31] Innes, Labor in a New Land, 1983.

[32] Mansfield, “ Liberty and Virtue,” 2003, p. 9n. Mansfield is uncertain whether Shklar was praising the bourgeoisie or dissing “virtue.” It seems unlikely that one who spoke so often of the republican virtues intended the latter.

[33] Bellah et al., Habits, p. 286.

At the risk of sounding a bit uncool, I say to the graduating class that your success in life, and the success of our country, is going to depend on the integrity and other qualities of character that you and your contemporaries will continue to develop and demonstrate over the years ahead. . . . I could urge you all to work hard, save, and prosper. And I do. But transcending all else is being principled in how to go about doing those things . . . . And beyond the personal sense of satisfaction, having a reputation for fair dealing is a profoundly practical virtue. We call it ‘good will’ in business and add it to our balance sheets. Trust is at the root of any economic system based on mutually beneficial exchange. . . . Our system works fundamentally on individual fair dealing.

Alan Greenspan, Commencement address, Harvard University, June 1999.

Love figures in any human group, even a capitalist group, understanding “love” in an expanded sense to include more than Aristotle’s lower friendships for pleasure and profit. We do not have to be Hobbesians or utilitarians and reduce “love” to self-interest. We can be stoic or Christian, or followers of Grotius or Adam Smith, and suppose that people care. In fact I’d claim we had better, if we want to be Scientific about it.

Disinterested solidarity is necessary for any human activity—even, to take what would seem to be the hardest case, for the playing of a game. It has been discovered mathematically that games such as those contemplated by John Nash, that beautiful mind, cannot be played to mutual profit with Prudence-Only rules. For one thing, if the game is finite—even as long as 10 moves—it unravels into selfishness. For another, if it is not finite it has an infinite number of solutions. The second point is known as “the Folk Theorem,” because no one knows who first devised it—and perhaps because it is so destructive of game theory that no game theorist now will claim it.

As some of the theorists remarked in 1994, “[infinite] game equilibrium models of rational play lead to an outcome set where players can do almost anything and still be consistent with the theory. The prediction that individuals might do anything from a large set of feasible strategies is neither useful nor precise.” [1] The discoveries were logical, not factual, but they devastate the blackboard claims of Prudence Only to rule the world as we know it. Clever stuff.[2]

And anyone can understand that, say, chess players must adopt this or that rule of the game, such as the rook’s move, which is not itself derivable from the prudent pursuit of victory inside the game. Even to play the game, much less to achieve mutual profit, there has to be an outside. To play chess you must have at least the minimal amount of fellow-feeling needed to perform the Alasdair-MacIntyre-like “practice” called “playing a game of chess according to accepted rules.” It would wreck the game if you announced, because you noticed that if you could move your rook diagonally you would win, “This time I’m going to move my rook as though it were a bishop.”

Playing the board game Monopoly under a rule of no side deals, with children who have no grasp of the importance of building houses quickly, is a quite different experience from playing it with adults sophisticated in the game who live in a commercial culture accustomed to contingent contracts. “You sell me New York Avenue for $2000 and I’ll throw in two exemptions from rent if you land on any of my properties. . . all right, four.“

Alexander Field argues persuasively that “The willingness of substantial numbers of humans to violate the unambiguous predictions of game theory in both cooperating and in engaging in third party punishment underlies our ability to initiate and sustain social order.”[3] As noted from far outside the mathematical theory of games, by the philosopher John Searle and the literary critic Stanley Fish, any game depends on interpretive communities, all the way down.[4] And interpretive communities are just that—communities, commonalities, fellow-feeling, solidarity. That is, they are spheres of love.

One can object that disinterested solidarity is not “love.” But the stretch is not so great, and has a purpose. I mean by “solidarity,” besides the intense engagement of true love, the mere trust, good humor, neighborliness, respectfulness, cooperativeness, decent intentions of our daily lives.

These can be self-interested in part, just as Aristotle said. When a neighbor becomes bad company we walk away. When a beloved does, we try harder. It is as though love—or any virtue—is a gravitational force weakening with distance from the core. Admittedly, people can be courteous to neighbors and good humored with fellow game-players merely because they recognize they will be punished if they are not. That’s only Prudence.

The question here is whether the gravitational force of Prudence is enough to account for all of solidarity, or whether solidarity has an influence from the sphere of Love, or Justice, or Faith. Plainly, as a scientific matter, it does. The solidarity expressed in cheerfully greeting a neighbor is a kind of love. The fleeting solidarity of the deal agreed is a kind of justice. The solidarity of sports fans is a kind of faith.

Off the blackboard and the game board it is becoming increasingly clear that real economies depend on real virtues. If one performs economic experiments on students and other hired victims the love, justice, temperance, faith, hope, and courage come tumbling out even from the laboratories. A pioneer in the field, Vernon Smith, puts it this way:

laboratory experiments also support reciprocity in two person extensive form games under very unfavorable conditions in which we give the self-interest its best shot: complete anonymity. Hence these norms are so strong that half the subjects cooperate without ever knowing the identity of their matched counterpart. Moreover, we can show that this depends on the second mover seeing the payoffs foregone by the first, and therefore knowing what he/she has done for me lately.[5]

Experimental economists are, with economic historians, among the minority of reliably scientific economists—the others tend on their bad days to wander off into meaningless speculation and arbitrary tests of “significance,” and they have a lot of bad days. The economic experimentalists would do well to test explicitly for virtues other than Prudence. Substantively speaking they would then merge with social psychologists, as economic historians have merged with historians.

An economic actor must have a social stage, since no contract can be explicit about every aspect of a complex transaction, or even of a simple transaction. In selling a newspaper to me the newsagent trusts that I won’t at the last minute snatch back the money and run out of the store with the paper he has just handed me, or take out a loaded Magnum 45 when he opens the cash register. It’s not exactly because I love the newsagent, though a weak form of love develops if I buy from him every day. But it shows a form of justice, surely, and a faithful identity as a law-abiding citizen who does not rely on stealing, who pulls her weight.

A classic paper in 1963 by the legal sociologist Stewart Macaulay studied firms that did business in Wisconsin. He confirmed what everyone in business knows, that business normally depends on a state of trust, not on explicit contracts to be enforced in courts. One large manufacturer of cardboard boxes looked into how many of its orders had no agreement on exact terms and conditions that would satisfy a lawyer looking for a “contract.” The manufacturer found that in the mid 1950s the percentage ranged from 60 to 75 percent of the orders, in an industry in which an order canceled means you end up holding a lot of useless boxes shaped and printed to the particular customer’s specifications.[6]

It drove the company lawyers crazy. One said, “Often businessmen do not feel they have `a contract’—rather they have `an order.’ They speak of `canceling the order’ rather than `breaching the contract’.”[7] Another lawyer declared that he was “sick of being told, `We can trust old Max,’ when the problem is not one of honesty but one of reaching an agreement that both sides understand.”[8] The non-lawyer businessmen didn’t see it that way. “You get the other man on the telephone and deal with the problem. You don’t read legalistic contract clauses at each other if you ever want to do business again. One doesn’t run to lawyers if he wants to stay in business because one must behave decently.”[9] One uses the courts only when someone defects. But few defect. There’s a purely prudent reason, to be sure—that it’s bad for business. But there’s a just, faithful, loving (”good old Max”) reason, too.

People want to be virtuous in business as elsewhere in their lives. Macaulay concluded that “Two norms are widely accepted. (1) Commitments are to be honored in almost all situations; one does not welsh on a deal. (2) One ought to produce a good product and stand behind it.”[10]

In 1912 before a House committee on the money trust J. P. Morgan was being questioned by a hostile Samuel Untermyer:

Untermyer: Is not commercial credit based primarily upon money or property?

Morgan: No sir; the first thing is character.

Untermyer: Before money or property?

Morgan: Before money or property or anything else. Money cannot buy it. . . because a man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom.

Of course. If you want to be frightfully sophisticated about people’s real motives and claim that these are not the rules of bourgeois life you will need to explain why you get indignant when they are violated, and why in your daily transactions you assume they will be obeyed.

That does not mean you need to abandon tough-minded economic reasoning. Here’s some tough-minded economic reasoning: the bigger the game the easier it is to cheat, a new sucker coming along every minute. But the incentive to cheat is balanced by love, by shame, by the Man Within. That’s sociology. Both Prudence and Solidarity rule. Here’s some related economic reasoning: solidarity is especially, though not exclusively, powerful in small groups, Prudence in large. But such reasoning is also classical sociology, the point of Ferdinand Tönnies’ book of 1887, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, natural community and unnatural society, loving family and associational firm. And it is also, for that matter, classical political philosophy, the point of Aristotle’s Politics..

Moving in 1980 from Chicago to Iowa City I was startled by the reduction in the cost of doing business, and noticed the cost going up again when I moved back to Chicago in 1999. Even in near-suburban Oak Park, where I lived for a few months before I moved downtown, a store selling Irish merchandise would not take back the same afternoon a cloak bought, but not worn, which I had decided after a couple of hours I didn’t want at the price. No way, the owner said. Tough luck, dearie. The virtue I thought we shared had disappeared once money changed hands. We had a contract, not an order. In Chicago in 2003 trying to sell a car, before finding CarMax and plain dealing in the suburbs, I spent half a day swimming through commercial slime on Western Avenue. “Your car, ma’am? That Toyota Avalon outside? I’ll give you $2500.”

I love commerce and I love Chicago. I love even my newly established identity as A Tough Urban Girl Who Can Take It As Well As Dish It Out. But every transaction in Iowa City or Schaumburg was easier. Checks passed, grocery clerks smiled, auto mechanics did what they said they were going to do, clothing stores and Toyota dealers wouldn’t think of treating you in any fashion but the Golden Rule. When I visited for a number of weeks at Denison University in little Granville, Ohio, after three years of Chicago re-hardening, with episodes in tough old Amsterdam as well, there it was again, like taking off tight shoes. I knew the local jeweler in Granville would do a good job of resizing my rings. He did. In tough old Rotterdam in 1996 the jewelers needed close supervision, and often took advantage—well, not Marianne’s and Trees’ jeweler on Mauritsweg, whom we had grown to trust.

You can’t run human groups on Prudence only, not well. And “well” means not merely prudently and profitably—though the Iowa-City/ Schaumburg/ Granville monetary gain is not trivial, Gemeinschaft in aid of Gesellschaft, J. P. Morgan’s test of character in aid of smart loaning. But humans want more. Depending on Prudence Only makes it harder to achieve a transcendent, sacred goal such as communal love or social justice or scientific progress. And such a transcendent goal, I repeat, is necessary to make the prudence have a point.

On the other hand, when I moved back to Chicago from Iowa City and later from Granville I noted also a rise in the richness of the gemeinschaftlich attachments I could form in the big city: thirty Episcopal churches within easy driving distance instead of four or five; seventy ethnic groups in bulk instead of two; twenty Irish pubs instead of one. Iowa City is a little jewel, and so is Granville on an even smaller scale. But they are little, SMAs of perhaps 100,000 all told in Iowa, 20,000 in Ohio, as against millions within a similar travel time in Chicago.

Tönnies, with many sociologists since, predicted that the big places such as Chicago would be soulless. He and the others have claimed that over time the soulless Gesellschaft replaces cozy Gemeinschaft. What is wrong in Tönnies is just what is wrong with most German social thought in the 19^th century, a belief in historicism before the facts had been ascertained by professional historians—though professional history, too, was a 19^th-century German planting, which bore its fruit in the 20^th century outside of Germany. True, a big city has of course more businesslike Gesellschaft—admittedly or splendidly depending on how you feel about “unnatural” human projects. But it has more Gemeinschaft, too, more loving human connection, and that in enormous bulk. In consequence it has more of that third thing, the invisible-hand specialization that make for a rich life. A big city has more of everything. That’s why there are so many people there.

The historian Wilfred McClay praises another historian, Thomas Bender, for arguing that “the most influential of all sociological dualisms—Gemenschaft and Gesellschaft—[is] to be understood, not as designating strictly discrete and sequential phases in the evolution of human social relations, but as signifiying two kinds of relations that, particularly in a modern society, coexist and contend with each other.” McClay observes that “one benefit of this approach is that it helps us account for the ways that premodern, traditional, and gemeinschaftlich ways and values coexist with, and even interpenetrate, the characteristic ways of the modern world, contrary to a more monolithic understanding of modernization.”[11]

Brian Uzzi in an elegant 1999 paper in the American Sociological Review showed that borrowing firms did best—saving 3 percentage points on their borrowings, which is very large on loans costing 6 or 10 percent—when they mixed strong-tie relations with bankers (”X has been our bank for fifty years”) and arm’s-length ties. The firms mixed love/faith with prudence.[12]

You can do this in a big city. Focusing on the alienating, disintegrative results of big scale is a problem with the focus, not with the scale. And anyway a French peasant in the 12^th century was as “alienated” from the goings-on of the upper levels of European Christendom as much as is a modern bourgeois from the goings-on of the upper levels of global capitalism. Yet both the peasant and the bourgeois live in families, have friends, have projects. All human communities work with prudence and solidarity. Both.

* * * *

A balanced set of virtues within Prudent, economical, capitalist, market-oriented behavior is not merely a supplement, a nice thing if you happen to have a taste for it. It’s virtuous, and necessary for a good life. It’s necessary for transcendence, which gives life its worldly and its otherworldly value. Business, Michael Novak argues, is a “morally serious enterprise.”[13] By contrast, the Prudence-Only behavior celebrated in recent economic fable is bad. Bad for prudent business—consult on this point Arthur Andersen. Bad for a just and faithful life. Bad for children and other beloveds. Most important, bad for the soul. We call it greed.

The ethical wholeness matters. When the unionized teachers of Philadelphia quarreled with the superintendent in the 1990s about reward-by-result their anger came from the insult as much as from a prudent regard for their tenure. Are we—we professionals—to be trained with incentives like seals? Their indignation cost the school system millions of dollars and its chance to teach the children to read.

Professionals are educated to consider something other than pocket-book prudence. It’s the very meaning of the word “profession,” as distinct from “racket.” I recently was introduced to an architect and told him I was an economist. He replied, only half joking, “I hate economics,” and explained amiably that what he meant is that all day long he has to ask if Prudence is worth this or that sacrifice of Quality. A friend who is a professional lighting designer says that the pressure of Prudence Only is something he has to resist all day. He could get a little more profit by doing a little worse job, using the wrong wattage here or there, cutting this or that corner. But he won’t. He’s a lighting designer, not a crook.

It’s a matter of identity, and makes society possible. We tell jokes about doctors performing surgery on our pocketbooks and about lawyers closing the curtains and asking us how we want it to come out. But most people would reject a career of doctoring or lawyering if they actually credited the jokes, since most people do not want to be thieves or con men. Law and health would collapse if the only careers were such dishonest versions. Politics threatens to, always. Cynicism about careers on the Cook County Board or in the Italian Parliament means that the government is left to the crooks, and republican virtue is put under siege.

Blair Kamin, an architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, rails often against a local architect named Loewenberg for his cookie-cutter skyscrapers. The buildings are so notorious that they have spawned a noun to describe how they “blight” a neighborhood, “Loewenbergization.” The other Chicago architects are scandalized that Loewenberg will put up a high-rise a mere twenty blocks from another that reuse the very same blueprints. Goodness. In Chicago such economizing at the expense of Art matters because the place fancies itself the architectural capital of the known universe. According to Kamin the offending Loewenberg buildings exhibit a “sterile symmetry and unarticulated surfaces that recall the old housing blocks of East Berlin,” “dismal themes,” “overgrown and under-detailed,” “comically bad.”[14]

You can see that Mr. Kamin does not like Mr. Loewenberg’s work. To which Loewenberg calmly replies, “We design to a budget.” Kamin in turn fumes, “That attitude is as cynical as it is lamentable, an abrogation of the architect’s responsibility to design for the broader public.” Kamin is trying to shame Loewenberg, and any architect who might think to imitate Loewenberg, into being professional beyond Prudence Only. Loewenberg and his clients aren’t buying. Kamin and I think they should.

The conflict pervades our culture. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is still assigned in the business schools as a deliberation about quality and rhetoric. But most of what the students are taught there is a variation on Prudence Only.

The English aristocracy defended itself in a democratic age as a service class, going to Eton the better to serve King and country. Dedicated to loving England, and incidentally getting employment in politics and the Empire, they viewed themselves as upholding an alternative to a bourgeois ethic imagined as Prudence Only. Remember John Gielgud as Master of Trinity College in Chariots of Fire scolding the Ben Cross character for transgressing the code of the amateur, the lover. Now the children of the aristocracy go to Eton and thence to careers as chartered accountants in a global economy—nothing so quaint as England, my England. Prudence Only reigns, it is said. Love is devalued, at least in capitalist theory.

But love in the extended sense is necessary for a company, or England, or any human project. Love does make the world go ‘round. Robert Frank has argued at length that the trustworthiness necessary for business “is motivated not by rational calculation,” which would reduce all virtues to Prudence, “but by emotions—by moral sentiments, to use Adam Smith’s term.”[15] True. But there is a deeper argument available. Harry Frankfurt points out that “love makes it possible . . . for us to engage wholeheartedly in activity that is meaningful.”[16] Humans want meaning. They just do, and they do not make an exception for capitalism.

C. S. Lewis composed a paean to male friendship—he wisely realized he had a less-than-reliable understanding of women’s friendships—in which the friends sit side by side looking at a beloved object, trading remarks about it. Aristotle also thought this third thing to be looked at together was essential for friendship. So it is with the project at the office this week, or the Superbowl on TV, or Shane and Starrett in the movie bonding in work, “their minds . . . on that old stump.”[17] “Friendship must be about something,” writes Lewis, “even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominos or white mice. . . . Friends. . . are all travelers on the same quest.”[18] Such male friendship is how a company of men works wholeheartedly to make deals or automobiles.

A woman would say that friendship is about the friend or, still better, about the relationship. She or it, not the Superbowl, is the object. The female version of friendship is how a company of women works wholeheartedly. Think of women cleaning up after a meal, the point being to help Jane. I have a friend who founded a small publishing company, and at first she tried an exclusively motherly style of leadership. She found she had to bring in some of the father. Her company works on loving relationships, prudently judged, balanced in style between male and female. A company or a market runs partly on Love.

Of course a company and a market work also on Prudence. But the modern academic theory of market capitalism, that Samuelsonian economics I studied so passionately in the 1960s and 1970s, goes astray in imagining that the only character we need in understanding capitalism is Mr. Maximum Utility, the monster of Prudence who has no place in his character for Love—or any passion beyond Prudence Only. Recall Steven Pinker’s Max-U—or Max -G[enes]—analysis of love. Max U does not work scientifically, the only terms the Samuelsonian economists profess to care about, for which see the economists Frank and Frey and Akerlof.[19] And in terms that the rest of us can appreciate, he is a menace. Iris Murdoch describes Max U as “the agent, thin as a needle, [who] appears in the quick flash of the choosing will.”[20]

Such a fellow would view friendship, philia, as an exchange, and would never achieve what Aristotle saw as the highest stage of friendship, love for the friend’s own sake.[21] Another’s “own sake” is meaningless in a Max-U view of the social world. Things in such a world are valued for their capacity to yield utility, with the result, as Michael Stocker has noted, that people disappear.[22] The so-called “man” Max U does not value even himself as a person, and leaps at the chance to hitch himself up to an Experience Machine. Impulsive, manipulative, shallow. How many sociopaths can there be? Max U is a chimera conjured by the clerisy, left and right. They portray a world impossible for most actual human beings.

This is the point of a famous paper by Amartya Sen in 1977, just as Sen was working his way out of a Max-U intellectual world, “Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioral Foundations of Economic Theory.” The founder of modern Max-U reasoning, Francis Y. Edgeworth, had acknowledged in 1881 that such a fellow as Max U depended on “unsympathetic isolation abstractly assumed in Economics.”[23] But as you can see, economists think that “sympathy”—literally in Greek (which Edgeworth knew well) “fellow feeling”—is all there is to inter-human relations. I am sad because you are sad. “Behavior based on sympathy,” Sen writes, nice though it is, “is in an important sense egoistic, for one is pleased at others’ pleasure and pained at others’ pain, and the pursuit of one’s own utility may thus be helped by sympathetic action.”[24] In virtue-ethical terms, sympathy is a matter of Prudence and lower-level (that is, not transcendent) Love. Or maybe it is a matter of mere Prudence, since this “Love” is itself derivative, a sympathy because it gives prudent pleasure. Recall your mother getting derivative utility from your graduation from college.

Sen argued that important realms of our lives are governed instead by “commitment.” Unlike sympathy, a commitment reduces your utility, at any rate your first-order utility in the manner of ice-cream eaten or son’s-college-degree-attained. In Kantian terms commitment is a duty. In virtue-ethical terms, commitment is a matter of Justice, Faith, and Transcendent Love. Recall Adam Smith on Justice for the Chinese. Not Prudent. Commitment involves “counterpreferential choice, destroying the crucial assumption [in Max-U, Samuelsonian economics] that a chosen alternative must be better than . . . the others for the person choosing it.”[25] Acknowledgement of the virtues beyond prudence and passion, in short, “drives a wedge between personal choice and personal welfare.” “Much of traditional economic theory relies on the identity of the two.”[26] In doing so, economics assumes a world without ethical commitment: “The purely economic man is indeed close to being a social moron.”[27] Come to think of it, no “close” about it.

To speak instrumentally against instrumentalism, actual human businesses would collapse into dissembling and advantage-taking à la Dilbert if the businesses did not practice friendship and other forms of non-Prudence-Only virtue. Look round at your own workplace. How does your office actually operate? Really, now. As a hell? With monsters of prudence running around taking care of Numero Uno? No, not really. Admittedly in some Departments of Economics you will meet one or two such people, who declare candidly that “our model in economics proves” they should act like jerks. But outside economics everyone knows that a corporate office runs on love.

Everyone also knows that the love can be trumped. In this and other contexts you will see people who think that greed is good or that the story of My Brilliant Career trumps ethical considerations or that maximizing stockholder value settles every ethical question in business. In his commencement address at Berkeley in May of 1986, the year before he was jailed, Ivan Boesky told the kids that “Greed is all right, by the way. I want you to know that. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.”[28] The kids cheered. Now most of us laugh sardonically.

We find the cartoon strip Dilbert funny, if we do, because the avaricious behavior of its central characters is over the top, crazy-funny, unacceptably and indeed imprudently Prudent. True, when an office is led badly it becomes a bit Dilbertian. I’ve been in such organizations, and so have you. But usually it is not actual Prudence, the good of the company, that is served by on-the-job jerk-ness. As Dilbert itself shows, ego tripping and irrational obsession runs a bad business into the ground, and some of the good ones, too. Likewise in Doonesbury what is funny about Duke, the recurrent Hunter-Thompson figure, is his single-minded if drug-addled pursuit of self-interest, set off against the selflessness of his girl-friend Miss Honey.

The point is that actual workplaces are not often really like Dilbert’s or Duke’s. Robert Solomon puts it this way: “Is the community we work for a white-collar version of hell, or is it a community where (despite the early hour) we are glad to see our colleagues and get on with the work of the day?”[29] More so as capitalism enriches its workers, and as its worker-consumers require to be treated like free citizens, the workplace becomes a home place. More’s the pity, some have said, for it tempts people away to a comfortable place, The Job, The Office, to the loss of the home.

I say again: look around at your own workplace. In the capitalist West now the chances are that it is not a satanic mill in which you labor in noise and dust and isolation for twelve hours a day. It’s not the carding room of a Yorkshire woolen mill in 1830. A recent survey finds that even in I’m-All-Right-Jack Britain half of the workers “look forward to going to work.” In the Tough-Guy United States two-thirds do, and elsewhere in the developed world still higher percentages.[30] Such employees go to work expecting to be treated like human beings, expecting to be even a little loved. An employee of modern capitalism is ethically offended when her boss complains about the harmless decorations festooned on her cubicle. Who does she think she is. Doesn’t she love me? A wholly prudential worker, the economist’s monster of prudence, or a pre-industrial slave accustomed to abuse, would be incapable of such indignation and sorrow.

The writer Don Snyder tried construction work to survive one winter in Maine:

There were six of us working on the crew, but the house was so large that we seldom saw one another. . . . Once I walked right by a man [without greeting him] in my haste to get back to a second-story deck where I had been tearing down staging. [The contractor] saw this, and he climbed down from the third story to set me straight. “You can’t just walk by people,” he said. “It’s going to be a long winter.”[31]

Consultants on workplace politeness emphasize that saying hello to people is basic. Not saying hello is of course imprudent—you alienate your co-workers by failing in this elementary acknowledgement of solidarity. But why are people so offended? On the vending-machine characterization of others that the Max-U model assumes, no offense would be taken. But people do take offense. Even in a workplace of tough-guy American men the avaricious, competitive, Dilbertian, “businesslike” Prudence can’t be all there is.

In other words, it’s not the case that market capitalism requires or generates loveless people. More like the contrary. Markets and even the much-maligned corporations encourage friendships wider and deeper than the atomism of a full-blown socialist régime or the claustrophobic, murderous atmosphere of a “traditional” village. Modern capitalist life is love-saturated. Olden life was not loving, communitarian life was not, and actually existing socialist life decidedly was not. No one dependent on a distant god such as the Gosplan or Tradition can feel safe. Paradoxically, a Market linked so obviously to our individual projects makes us safer and more loving.

As the libertarian Catholic economist, Jennifer Roback Morse, puts it, a capitalist business partnership is like a marriage, not like a temporary contract:

The contract between the partners does not govern every detail of the relationship’s functioning. The partners do not attempt to specify every duty of each party during the course of their relationship: only the most basic duties are so specified. The contractual relationship between partners is not the end of the relationship or the method for how the parties relate to one another. The parties expect to do a great many things of mutual benefit that cannot be included in the set of legally enforceable promises.[32]

She argues that contract-like marriages, or contract-like business partnerships, do not work very well. A lack of committed love “undermines the self-giving required at the heart of the committed marriage: we practice holding back on our partners; we practice calculating.”

[1] Ostrom, Gardner, and Walker, Rules, Games, 1994, p. 322,

[2] A guide to the devastation is Heap and Varoufakis, Game Theory, 2004, for example on defection in finite games (for instance, Nash backward induction), p. 122 and the pages leading up to it, p. 203 (quoting Roger Myerson); on the Folk Theorem, pp. 202, 206, 208; and p. 247: “a new type of Folk Theorem. . . . ends all hope that evolutionary [game] theory will be indeterminacy’s death knell.” The Folk Theorem is a mathematical hell.

[3] Field, “Review of North,” 2005.

[4] Searle, Speech Acts, 1969 and Fish, Is There a Text? 1980.

[5] V. Smith, Letter to Frans B.M. de Waal, April 9, 2005.

[6] Macaulay, “Non-Contractual Relations,” 1963, p. 196.

[7] Macaulay, “Non-Contractual Relations,” 1963, p. 197.

[8] Macaulay, “Non-Contractual Relations,” 1963, p. 195.

[9] Macaulay, “Non-Contractual Relations,” 1963, p. 198.

[10] Macaulay, “Non-Contractual Relations,” 1963, p. 199.

[11] McClay, “The Strange Career of The Lonely Crowd,” 1993, p. 432. The Bender book he is admiring is Community and Social Change in America (1978).

[12] Uzzi, “Embeddedness,” 1999.

[13] Novak, Business as a Calling, 1996, pp. 8, 10, and Chp. 3.

[14] Kamin, 2003, p. 6.

[15] Frank, “Motives,” 2005, p. 370.

[16] Frankfurt, Reasons of Love, 2004, p. 90

[17] Schaefer, Shane, 1949, p. 97.

[18] Lewis, Four Loves, 1960, p. 98f. I am told that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry somewhere says much the same.

[19] Frey, Not Just For the Money, 1997; Frey and Stutzer, Happiness & Economics, 2002.

[20] Murdoch, “’God’ and ‘Good’,” 1969, p. 53.

[21] Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, c. 330 BC, VIII, iii, 6 (1156b).

[22] Stocker, “Schizophrenia,” 1976, p. 72.

[23] Quoted in Sen, “Rational Fools,” 1977, p. 326.

[24] Sen, “Rational Fools,” 1977, p. 326.

[25] Sen, “Rational Fools,” 1977, p. 328.

[26] Sen, “Rational Fools,” 1977, p. 329.

[27] Sen, “Rational Fools,” 1977, p. 336.

[28] Quoted in Ridley, Origins of Virtue, 1996, p. 263, p. 260f.

[29] Solomon, Ethics and Excellence, 1992, p. 104.

[30] Freeman, “Not Your Father’s (or Mum’s) Union,” 2003.

[31] Snyder, “Winter Work,” 1995 (1997), p. 74

[32] Her summary of Roback-Morse 2001, at http://www. hooverdigest. org/013/ morse. html.

Economics since its invention as a system of thought in the eighteenth century has tried to “economize on love,” that is, to get along without it, that is, to justify shopkeepers far removed from saintly or poetic Love. Economics has elevated Prudence, an androgynous virtue counted good in both men and women as stereotypically viewed, into the only spring of action. Tracing it back to Epicurus, Alfred North Whitehead complained in 1938 that “this basis for philosophical understanding is analogous to an endeavor to elucidate the sociology of modern civilization as wholly derivative from the traffic signals on the main roads. The motions of the cars are conditioned by these signals. But the signals are not the reason for the traffic.”[2]

The way most economists do their job is to ask, Where’s the prudence? “The rudimentary hard-headedness attributed to them by modern economics,” as Sen puts it, is the only virtue in the economist’s world.[3] When in the 1960s I wanted to show that Victorian Britain did not fail economically I used Prudence-Only calculations of productivity to calculate that there was no residual to be accounted for by causes other than Prudence. When in the 1970s I wanted to show that medieval English open fields were insurance in an age of terrifying uncertainty I used Prudence-Only calculations of portfolio balance to show that Prudence sufficed to explain the scattering of a peasant’s plots of land. When in the 1980s I wanted to show how to teach economics through applied examples rather than useless theorem-proving—which unfortunately has since then triumphed in advanced economic education—I used Prudence-Only arguments throughout, though I was beginning in that decade to worry that they might not suffice.

Adam Smith asserted in 1776 that “what is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.” A splendidly useful principle. Hard-headed. No talk of love, or of any other virtue than prudence. Smith, however, understood well what later economists have gradually come to forget. After all, said Smith as early as 1759, we want people to have a balanced set of virtues, including even love, not merely prudence, and this for all purposes, sacred, profane, business, pleasure, the Good, the Useful, the wide world, and the home, too. All. Annette Baier argues in “What Do Women Want in a Moral Theory?” that love and obligation, which are both necessary for a society to survive, arise from “appropriate trust.”[4]

The economist and historian Alexander Field has based a similar argument on biology. He notes that on meeting a stranger in the desert with bread and water you want you do not simply kill him. Why not? Sheer self-interest implies you would, and if you would, he would, too, in anticipation, and the game’s afoot. Once you and he have chatted a while and built up trust, naturally, you will refrain. But how does trust get a chance? How did it originate?

Field argues that it originates from “modules inhibiting intraspecific violence,” that is, from a very long evolution of a taboo on hurting ones own kind.[5] The “failure to harm” non-kin is hardwired into animals. It evolved from selection at the level of the group, Field argues, not the individual. It’s better for you as a behavioral egoist to kill the man you meet in the desert. But of course you are inhibited in doing so, because you are not in fact such an egoist: that’s best for the human species.

I remember driving once in Amherst past a woman walking towards me on the verge, and the strange thought entering, “Suppose I run her down?” I didn’t, I’m very glad to report. But there it was, the potential for intraspecies violence even in a very peaceable and law-abiding woman. André Gide’s novel of 1914, Lafcadio’s Adventures, turns on the utterly pointless murder of a stranger, pushing him off a speeding train, just to see it done. It happens.

But Field’s point is that usually it does not happen. Considering the opportunities to harm, the inhibitions to doing so must be powerful indeed. For my purposes it doesn’t matter whether the inhibitions come from socialization or from biology. Anyway—and perfectly obviously—we are equipped with desires for both the sacred and the profane, mutually reinforcing and completing. One of the sacred computer chips in our brains or one of the sacred virtues in our characters is “being nice and trusting.”

Adam Smith was not it seems a particularly religious man. But he was in his only regular academic job, at Glasgow University ages 28 to 41, a professor of moral philosophy, and took his assignment seriously. After his death, however, his followers came to believe that a profane Prudence, called “Utility,” rules. Jeremy Bentham and his followers, and especially his 20^th-century descendents Paul Samuelson, Kenneth Arrow, Milton Friedman, and Gary Becker, are to blame. These are good men, great scientists, beloved teachers and friends of mine. But their confused advocacy of Prudence Only has been a catastrophe for the science that Adam Smith inaugurated. No need, declare the economists of the late 20^th century, for the non-Prudent virtues—well, maybe a little Justice and Temperance on the side to keep the Prudence on track, but certainly not any need for the sacred, transcendent virtues, such as spiritual love. As Field writes,

To build a discipline on the proposition that [behavioral egoisms] exhaust the range of essential human predispositions is to lead to the unsustainable conclusion that there are no cartels, no racial discrimination, no voting, no voluntary contributions to public goods, and no restraint on first strike (defect) in single play Prisoner’s Dilemmas.[6]

And no nationalism, no honor, no love, no courtesy between strangers.

In our time the Prudence Only ethic has become, “Maximize stockholder wealth, and by the way make sure that you as the CEO or CFO have a good chunk of it, and a little inside knowledge about its present value.” You will find some ethicists in business schools arguing that the reason to be just or loving or temperate is precisely that it is prudent. Your stock options will be worth more if you do not sexually abuse your employees and cheat your customers. Virtue makes more money, doing well by doing good.

This is to miss the point of being virtuous. The point of a life exercising the virtue of love, for example, is its transcendence, not the stock options conferred on one who successfully lies about his commitment to the transcendent. In a famous article Milton Friedman argued, as the title put it, that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.”[7] Milton argued that a society with more wealth can better pursue its transcendent goals, and more wealth is produced by maximizing profits. That’s right, and is one crucial argument for capitalism. He further argued that a hired manager for Boeing who improves his social standing in Chicago by getting the corporation to give to the Lyric Opera is stealing money from the stockholders. That’s right, too, though there is a contrary economic argument, namely, that the ability to play the noble lord with the stockholders’ money is part of executive compensation. The stockholders would have to pay the manager more in cash than they do if they insisted that he not be allowed to give away the corporations money to worthy causes. But most people who have expressed shock or pleasure at Milton’s article have not noticed that he adds a side constraint to the manager’s fiduciary duty to the stockholders: “make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.”[8]

The opposite argument is that being honest makes money. As it was expressed in a book on managerial economics, “unethical behavior is neither consistent with value maximization nor employee self-interest.”[9] Wouldn’t that be nice if it were true? The journalist Bennett Daviss wrote in 1999 in the magazine The Futurist an article entitled “Profit from Principle,” with the headline, “Corporations are finding that social responsibility pays off.” “In the new century,” Mr. Daviss believes, “companies will grow their profits only by embracing their new role as the engine of positive social change.”[10] Image ads spread the Good News.

It’s a tough-minded, American idea. A study in 1999 by the Conference Board found that 64 percent of American codes of ethics in businesses are dominated by profits. By contrast 60 percent of the European codes are dominated by “values.”[11] When many years ago the Harvard Business School was given more than $20,000,000 to study ethics it initiated courses that collapsed the virtues into the one good of Prudence, the utility of “stakeholders.” Harvard has since then taught thoroughly all the virtue that money can buy.

The point is that Smith got it right and the later economists and calculators have got it wrong. You can’t run on prudence and profit alone a family or a church or a community or even—and this is the surprising point—a capitalist economy. In far away Japan some decades before Smith one Miyake Shunro (also known as Miyake Sekian), the director of a newly formed academy for 90 bourgeois students in the merchant city of Ōsaka, gave his inaugural address on the theme. Tetsuo Najita explains that in Miyake’s discussion a profit is

nothing other than an extension of human reason. . . . Indeed, merchants should not even think of their occupation as being profit seeking but as the ethical acting out of the moral principle of “righteousness” [gi]. When righteousness is acted out in the objective world, Miyake went on, “profit” emerges effortlessly and “of its own accord” without passionate disturbances.[12]

In 1726 Japan, as only a little less urgently in Europe at the time, the task was to elevate the status of merchants, the lowest of the four classes of the Tokugawa régime. The elevation entailed leveling.

In Europe the priesthood of all believers cast doubt on God-given hierarchy in general, and yielded the radical egalitarianism of, say, Smith or Kant, with precursors a century before in the literal Levelers. One’s position in the great chain of being came to be seen as a matter of nurture, not of Nature. Thus Smith in that egalitarian year of 1776:

The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of. . . . The difference between . . . a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education. . . . [F]or the first six or eight years of their existence . . . neither their parents nor their playfellows could perceive any remarkable difference. . . . [T]hey come to be employed in very different occupations. . . . till at last the vanity of philosophers acknowledge scarce any resemblance. . . . By nature a philosopher is not in genius as disposition half so different from a street porter as a mastiff is from a greyhound.[13]

Similarly in Japan, Conrad Totman notes, the 17^th and especially the 18^th century witnessed a nascent if minority “belief in universal human potential” and a “defense of callings other than rulership.” The merchant’s son Itō Jinsai (1627-1705), declared in 1683 that “all men are equally men.” Another scholarly merchant’s son, Nishikawa Joken (1648-1724), wrote even more startlingly, “when all is said and done, there is no ultimate principle that establishes superior and inferior among human beings: the distinctions result from upbringing.”[14] Obvious, yes? Not to the men of the 17^th century, in Europe or Japan.

As also for Smith and the other pro-bourgeois intellectuals of the Enlightenment the philosophical elevation of the bourgeoisie in Japan was achieved by showing business to be consistent with ethical behavior. As in Europe it took two centuries or so to become widely accepted. From small beginnings in the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries the Japanese gradually reversed the ancient Confucian contempt for merchants, as the Europeans at about the same time reversed their own classical and Christian anti-commercial prejudices.

At length in the new East and in the new West you did not need to be a Chinese general or a Confucian bureaucrat, a Buddhist priest or a samurai, a Christian monk or a duke, to be honorable. Najita explains that gi (recall Benedict on gi-ri: social obligation) meant in Western terms “justice,” but with a prudent emphasis on its calculative side, “the mental capacity to be accurate and hence fair, principled, and thus non-arbitrary, . . . . the human capacity to know external things, evaluate them, and make intellectual judgments as to what was, or was not, just.”[15] A few decades after Miyake Shunro had lectured on bourgeois virtues to the school in Ōsaka its new leader declared that “human beings are endowed by heaven at birth with a virtuous essence consisting of compassion, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom.” It was a Confucian-based egalitarianism, from which Miyake deduced—as Confucius himself, hostile to merchants, did not—”like the stipend of the samurai and the produce of the farmers, the profit of merchants is to be seen as a virtue.”[16]

Adam Smith, had he known of these contemporary developments in Japanese thought—though it was, I repeat, a minority movement there—would certainly have agreed, as his latter-day followers in the business-ethics movement do, Robert Solomon, for example. Business needs, Solomon declares, “both ethics and excellence,” a motto that would serve for Japanese and American business nowadays on its sweetest behavior. No greed. No crony capitalism. “Less money, fewer clients,” as Tom Cruise says in Jerry McGuire. No avarice.[17]

* * * *

A hardened Chicago economist, or just a Chicagoan, might reply, “So? Call me ‘greedy’ or ‘avaricious’ if it makes you feel better, but I like my SUV and my mink, and if screwing other people gets me such toys, fine. What do I care about my so-called ‘soul’?” To which Zeno the Stoic replied, as Gilbert Murray put it, “Would you yourself really like to be rich and corrupted? To have abundance of pleasure and be a worse man? Apparently, when Zeno’s eyes were upon you, it was difficult to say you would.”[18] Zeno’s Roman-Greek follower Epictetus said, “No man would change [honorable poverty] for disreputable wealth.”[19]

It seems so, by the Deathbed Test: what would you wish to remember on your deathbed, more diamond rings consumed or more good deeds done in the world? Drek or mitzvoth? Aristotle wrote that things good by nature are those that “can belong to a person when dead more than alive.”[20] “Although therefore riches be a thing which every man wisheth,” wrote Hooker in 1593, “yet no man of judgment can esteem it better to be rich, than wise, virtuous, and religious.”[21] Unto death.

Leave off if you wish the religious part or the death talk. “The virtuous person’s reward is . . . an entire life of satisfying actions,” writes Daryl Koehn, “while the vicious person’s punishment is a life of actions that produce both unexpected and unintended consequences for himself and others.”[22] Even in consequentialist terms, in other words, an instrumental and materialist view of love is a scientific mistake. A loveless economy would not work. And it would be hell. The secular meaning of the Christian word “hell” is personal corruption, which in truth makes ruling in such a figurative place worse, not better, than serving in heaven. “We must picture Hell,” writes C. S. Lewis, “as a state in which everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, . . . where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.”[23]

David Schmidtz sees again into the core here. He notes a mental experiment imagined by another philosopher that we could “pull a lever” to decide whether or not to have scruples. “Many of us would pull a lever that would strengthen our disposition to be honest.” But as we actually are after Eden we are weak. If you profess an Abrahamic religion you can call the weakness “original sin.” Or you can argue as Schmidtz does that natural selection has made people, alas, “built to worry about things that can draw blood, not about the decay of their characters.”[24]

In The Invisible Heart (2001), a finely crafted “economic romance” (sic), Russell Roberts makes a similar point about the limits of instrumentalism. He improves upon a famous mental experiment of Nozick’s in which you are asked whether you would like to be hitched up to an “experience machine.”

“Superduper neuropsychologists,” Nozick had posited, in a tradition going back through Huxley’s Brave New World and Descartes’ thought experiments to Plato’s cave, “would stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. . . . Would you plug in?”[25] In other words, “what else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside?” Apparently there’s something more than instrumental feeling, more than what our good friend Max U cares about. As Nozick remarks in another book, “We are not empty containers or buckets to be stuffed with good things.”[26]

Or imagine a “transformation machine,” which would make us at the flick of a switch into the lives and characters of Albert Einstein or Queen Elizabeth I, “really.” If you were starving on the streets of Calcutta you would instantly agree. But among you, you comfortably bourgeois readers, any takers?

Roberts sharpens the questions by making clear, in his economist’s way, the opportunity cost. His character Sam Gordon is discussing the matter with his class of high-school seniors:

But there’s one detail that I neglected to mention. This imaginary life that you get to experience while on the Dream Machine must replace your actual life. You will never wake up. You enter the room today as the teenager you are. You win the Masters, the Nobel Peace prize, surpass the popularity of the Beatles, then you grow old and die. It can be a painless death, preceded by [the dreamt experience of] a glorious old age. . . . But after they unhook the last electrode, . . . they put you into the ground. . . . They cart you away and bring on the next.[27]

“Still interested?” Sam asks his kids. Of course not. Max U would leap at such a chance to achieve—well, at least to “experience”—utility. But you as your actual self would not do so, because you intend to go on being you. “While a cat will be satisfied leading an animal’s life of sensation and appetite,” remarks Daryl Koehn, “a human being needs something more.”[28]

The difficulty of life, within limits, is its charm. Sen makes this point with the use of his somewhat veiled term “agency.” [29] He speaks of an “agency achievement” that is not reducible to “enhancement of well-being” in a utilitarian sense. His way of putting it sounds like David McClelland’s old idea of “need for achievement,” that is to say, the need for an identity that strives. No striving, no identity. You would agree to a magic spell to stop a cancer, surely. If you could repeat your life you might do so, especially if this time you had a chance to get it right. In stories in books and TV you temporarily enter into imagined lives, perhaps not temporarily enough for your own good.

But scarcity in your own life seems essential for a real human life. Imagine you were an Olympian god. Being immortal, you would have no need for the virtues of hope, faith, courage, temperance, or prudence. These make no sense if you, like the Devil, cannot die. Othello stabs Iago, who replies in defiance, “I am cut but do not die.” Though then he does. Most virtues are useless to someone who really cannot die. Even on Olympus, admittedly, the virtues of love and justice might have political rewards. But what gives human love its special poignancy, and gives human justice its special dignity, is the limit to life. You love a man who will die. You help a woman who is a mere mortal. Not being either a cat or an Olympian god you want a real life with real hazards and rewards, not an experience machine. You wish to retain an identity, a Faith and Hope, as you might put it, named You.

You might as well give in and call it a soul. [30]

* * * *

The late 18^th-century impulse and especially the utilitarian impulse was to force ethics into a behaviorist and naively scientistic mode, reducing it to some “immensely simple” formula, as one of the virtue ethicists put it.

For example, many utilitarians and some Kantians do not want to acknowledge the force of words and free will and inner light. I myself acknowledged these un-behaviorist motivations late, finally realizing that the meaning of a human action, not merely its external appearance, is important for its scientific description.

Virginia Held argues that in ethics “we should pay far more attention. . . to relationships among people, relationships that we cannot see but can be experienced nonetheless.”[31] We would not call a mother “virtuous” who felt no emotion in carrying out her duties towards her children. Nor would we call a good Samaritan “good” who saved the drowning victim in order to achieve fame.[32] Or call a business person “ethical” who followed the law out of fear of jail time. Virtue is not merely a matter of observable action. It is dispositional—feeling for example love and regret and anguish and joy for our acts of will.

That is, it is a matter of character, ethos, exercising one’s will to do good, to be good. It is a matter of one’s soul.

[1] Yeats, Estrangement, 1909, entry 51, p. 334.

[2] Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 1938, p. 31.

[3] Sen, Ethics and Economics, 1987, p 2.

[4] Baier, “Ethics,” 1994, p. 10.

[5] Field, Altruistically Inclined? 2003, p. 300.

[6] Field, Altruistically Inclined? 2003, p. 313.

[7] Friedman, “ Social Responsibility of Business,” 1970.

[8] Friedman, “ Social Responsibility of Business,” 1970, p 33, emphasis added, as Daniel G. Arce M. does when quoting this passage (”Conspicuous by Its Absence,” 2004, p. 263).

[9] Quoted in Arce M, “Conspicuous by Its Absence,” 2004, p. 265.

[10] Daviss, “Profits from Principle,” 1999 (2003), pp. 203, 209.

[11] Donaldson, Financial Times, 2000 (2003), p. 100.

[12] Najita, Visions of Virtue in Togugawa, 1987, p. 91.

[13] Smith, Wealth, 1776, I, ii, pp. 28-30.

[14] Totman, Early Modern Japan, 1993, pp. 181, 359.

[15] Najita, Visions of Virtue in Togugawa, 1987, p. 88f.

[16] Nakai Chikuzan, around 1760, quoted in Totman, Early Modern Japan, 1993, p. 359.

[17] Solomon, Ethics and Excellence, 1992, p. 21 and throughout.

[18] Murray, Stoic Philosophy, 1915, p. 30.

[19] Epictetus, The Book of Epictetus, Fragments, p. 286.

[20] Aristotle, Rhetoric, c. 350 BC, 1367a, p. 81.

[21] Hooker, Laws, First Book, X, 2, p. 189.

[22] Koehn, “Virtue Ethics,” 2005, p. 536.

[23] Lewis, Screwtape Letters, 1943, p. ix.

[24] Schmidtz, “Reasons for Altruism,” 1993, p. 170.

[25] Nozick, Anarchy, State, 1974, pp. 42-44. William James posed a similar question in Pragmatism, 1907.

[26] Nozick, Examined Life, 1989, p. 102.

[27] Roberts, Invisible Heart, 2001, p. 138.

[28] Koehn, “Virtue Ethics,” 2005, p. 535.

[29] Sen, Ethics and Economics, 1987, p. 43, and p. 55: “Self-interested behavior can scarcely suffice when agency is important on its own.”

[30] As Nozick asks, “For ethics, might the content of the attribute of having a soul simply be that the being strives, or is capable of striving, to give meaning to its life?” (Nozick, Anarchy, State, 1974, p. 50).

[31] Held, Feminist Morality, 1993, p. 8.

[32] Compare White, “Kantian Critique,” 2005, MS p. 6. The example is Kantian.

A Samuelsonian economist will say, “It’s easy to include ‘love’ in economics. Just put the beloved’s utility into the lover’s utility function, U_Lover(Stuff_Lover, Utility_Beloved).” Neat. Hobbes, who seems to have had little to do with love, wrote in this economistic way in 1651: “That which men desire they are also said to Love. . . . so that desire and love are the same thing. . . . But whatsever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire, that is it which he for his part calleth Good.” [2] Or, the modern economists say, “goods.” But to adopt such a vocabulary is to absorb the beloved into the psyche of the lover, as so much utility-making motivation. Aquinas called it “concupiscent love”—“as when we love wine, wishing to enjoy its sweetness, or when we love some person for our own purposes of pleasure.”[3] It can be virtuous or not depending on its object. But it is not the highest love unless it ascends: “rare is the love of goods,” David Klemm remarks, “that remains true to the love of God as the final resting place of the heart’s desire.”[4]

The philosopher Michael Stocker notes that a psychological egotist of the sort commended in modern economics could get the pleasure from the thing lovers do, “have absorbing talks, make love, eat delicious meals, see interesting films, and so on, and so on,” but would not love:

For it is essential to the very concept of love to care for the beloved. . . . To the extent that I act. . . towards you with the final goal of getting pleasure. . . I do not act for your sake. . . . What is lacking in these theories is simply—or not so simply—the person. For love, friendship, affection, fellow feeling, and community all require that the other person be an essential part of what is valued.[5]

And the beloved must be a living value in himself. If you love him out of pride or mere vanity he is reduced to a thing, a mirror, no person. Love is therefore not the same thing as mere absorbing altruism. You need to explain this to the economists and other utilitarians.

Your mother loves you, in one restricted sense, for the altruistic pleasure you provide to her. When you graduated from college she got utilitarian pleasure in two ways. First, she got some pleasure directly—that she is the mother of such a brilliant child. It reflected on her own brilliance, you see, or on her own excellence in mothering. It added to her utility-account some points earned, straightforward pleasure, like frequent-flyer mileage.

And, second, she got some pleasure indirectly, because you did so well—for yourself, to be sure, yet as a pleasure to her. It is not for your sake. It is as though you were happy and accomplished for her. Even if no one else knew that you had graduated, she would know, and know the material pleasure and higher satisfactions your education would give you, and would be glad for her sake. It was “on her account,” as the revealingly bourgeois expression says. That is, she absorbs your utility into hers. If you are happy, she is happy, but derivatively. It is a return on her capital investment in motherhood. It’s still a matter of points earned for her utility.

Economists think this is a complete description of your mother’s love. Hallmark could make a card for the economist to send to his mother: “Mom, I maximize your utility.” The great Gary Becker of the University of Chicago, for example, seems to think in this fashion, as do his numerous followers. “We assume that children have the same utility function as their parents,” Becker wrote in a classic paper with Nigel Tomes,

and are produced without mating, or asexually. A given family then maintains its identity indefinitely, and its fortunes can be followed over as many generations as desired. Asexual reproduction could be replaced without any effect on the analysis by perfect assortative mating: each person, in effect, then mates with his own image”[6]

Well. So much for happy and loving families, Tolstoy be damned.

Becker is rather more careful than his followers, actually, noting in an earlier paper that “loving someone usually involves caring about what happens to him or her.” He realizes that love—or as he usually styles it, with embarrassed male scare quotes, “love”—entails more than “caring” in his restricted sense: “If M cares about F, M’s utility would depend on the commodity consumption of F as well as on his own.” This is a attempt to acknowledge the evident truth that much of consumption and income-earning is on behalf of someone not the direct purchaser or income earner. After all, in the average American family with children about 35% of expenditure is directed at the kids.[7] Moms are not buying all those frozen pizzas to feed themselves.

But anyway Becker in this paper is willing to reduce a family to the husband’s—sorry, I mean “M’s”—utility, using a methodological twist characteristic of Chicago economics: “if one member of the household—the `head’—cares enough about other members to transfer resources to them, this household would act as if it maximized the `head’s’ preference function.”[8] That’s nice so long as you not worried about reinventing the common-law doctrine of feme covert in mathematical form.

Believe me, as myself a Chicago-School economist I attest that such a strange view has its uses for science. Really, it does. I’ve written whole books, scores of professional papers, going further, triumphantly concluding that all you need for historical explanation is “maximum utility.”

But I was wrong. The economist’s theory is not complete. For one thing, the behaviorism and positivism that often goes along with utilitarianism is an unnecessary narrowing of the scientific evidence. Whitehead remarked in 1938 that “in such behavioristic doctrines, importance and expression must be banished and can never be intelligently employed.” He added cleverly: “A consistent behaviorist cannot feel it important to refute my statement. He can only behave.”[9] In 1982 Stuart Hampshire declared that our knowledge of our own minds, including ethical intentions, “deserves the title of knowledge no less than the kind of knowledge of past, present and future states of the world we derive from perception, from memory and from inductive inference.”[10]

As the feminist philosopher Virginia Held notes, relationships “are not reducible to the properties of individual entities that can be observed by an outsider and mapped into a causal scientific framework.”[11] She may be giving too much away: the meaning of a relationship, I repeat, is just as “scientific” as is a budget constraint. We do not have to go on for ever and ever accepting the definition of “scientific” that happened to be popular among certain English and Austrian academic philosophers around 1922. Your love for your son is real and scientific and motivational, though in some circumstances a behaviorist psychologist watching you from a great height might have quite a lot of trouble “observing” it.

More important, treating others as “inputs into a self’s utility function,” as Becker and Tomes put it, is to treat the others as means, not as ends. Immanuel Kant said two centuries ago in effect that your mother, if she is truly and fully loving, loves you as an end, for your own sweet sake. You may be a rotten kid, an ax-murderer on death row. You’re not even college graduate. You give her “nothing but grief,” as we say. In all the indirect, derivative ways you are a catastrophe. And yet she goes on loving you, and stands wailing in front of the prison on the night of your execution. Economists need to understand what everyone else already understands, and what the economists themselves understood before they went to graduate school, that such love is of course commonplace. It is common in your own blessed mother, and everywhere in most mothers and fathers and children and friends.

You see it, too, in the doctor’s love for healing, in the engineer’s for building, in the soldier’s for the fatherland, in the economic scientist’s for the advance of economic science, down in the marketplace and up in the cathedral. As the economist Andrew Yuengert puts it, “Without ultimate ends, there is no reason to be an economic researcher: economics is for ethics.”[12] To be sure, there is routine form-filling in being a doctor and insincere uses of statistical significance in being an economics scientist. But without loving and transcendent ends such lives would have no point. Alasdair MacIntyre makes a distinction between goods “internal to a practice,” like being a good scientist, and external, such as getting the Nobel Prize, or getting rich. He notes that utilitarianism, even in so saintly a utilitarian as John Stuart Mill, cannot admit the distinction.[13]

Such loves, or internal goods, defeat the economistic view that all virtues can be collapsed into utility. Utility is the measure of an ends-means logic, what I am calling Prudence Only. Loving an end goes beyond means. Whatever happiness of identity a painter earns may be measured by the income he gives up. But that does not make the happiness the same thing as the income.[14] The happiness is comparable to the happiness of identity a skillful truck driver earns or a skillful tennis player, whether poorly or well paid.

The economist Amartya Sen speaks of a “duality” in ethics between what he calls “Well-being,” which is the utilitarian idea of people as pots into which pleasure is dumped, and “agency.”[15] Agency is “the ability to form goals, commitments, values, etc.” It “can well be geared to considerations not covered—at least not fully covered—by his or her own well-being.” But I would call this “agency” the virtues of faith and hope and justice and, above all, love.

The philosopher David Schmidtz likewise speaks about two separate “rational” sources of altruism. He means “economistic” when he writes “rational.” One source he calls “concern” for others, “which is to say [that the beloved’s] welfare enters the picture through our preference function,” that is, through our tastes for pleasures. It is the Beckerian notion of “caring.” Schmidtz observes that there is quite a different altruism, too, a nobler one on its face, which he calls “respect,” by which we constrain ourselves in regard to the beloved. “We manifest concern for people when we care about how life is treating them (so to speak), whereas we manifest respect for people when we care about how we are treating them, and constrain ourselves accordingly.”[16] An economist would say that one has preferences over bundles of goods to be consumed (”concern”), but also over the constraints to be observed (”respect”).

But to these usefully distinguished sources of caring I would add a third and a glorious one—one Schmidtz would acknowledge, of course, if he were not intent in the article on showing a “selfish” rationale for love. The third is sheer love, appreciation for the beloved, the expression here below of agape/caritas/holy charity. That it is sheer does not make it unanalyzable. Joan Tronto analyzes the ethics of care as politics, seeing in the ethical use of sheer love an attentiveness, a responsibility, a competence, and a responsiveness.[17] Attentiveness is temperance and humility in the face of the plight of others. Competence is a species of prudence. Responsibility arises from human solidarity, keeping faith with who we are. And responsiveness is the justice of attending to others. That is, Love is not reducible to Utility, and is a virtue only when in context with other virtues: temperance, humility, prudence, justice, solidarity, faith.

Of course. Only an economist or an evolutionary psychologists would think otherwise, and put embarrassed quotation marks around the very word “love,” and then reduce it to gain. The most extreme of the evolutionary psychologists claim that love itself is an evolutionary result of Prudence Only, this time of the very genes themselves. Consider Steven Pinker in 1997 on the rationality of friendship: “now that you value the person, they should value you even more . . . because of your stake in rescuing him or her from hard times . . . This runaway process is what we call friendship.”[18]

No, Steven, it is what we call self-absorption. The cognitive philosopher Jerry Fodor remarks of Pinker’s one-factor theory:

A concern to propagate one’s genes would rationalize one’s acting to promote one’s children’s welfare; but so too would an interest in one’s children’s welfare. Not all of one’s motives could be instrumental, after all; there must be some things that one cares for just for their own sakes. Why, indeed, mightn’t there be quite a few such things? Why shouldn’t one’s children be among them?[19]

He quotes Pinker on the evolutionary explanation for why we humans like stories, namely, that they provide useful tips for life, as for example to someone in Hamlet’s fix: “What are the options if I were to suspect that my uncle killed my father, took his position, and married my mother? Good question.” Startlingly, Pinker does not appear to be joking here. It’s unintentionally funny, this “scientific” attempt to get along without sheer love, or sheer courage, or to get along without the aesthetic pleasure of stories reflecting faith and hope.

Even the admirable Robert Nozick falls prey to the reductionism of socio- and psycho- and evolutionary- and brain-science-biology. But characteristically he has wise doubts. “Someone could agree that ethics originates in the function of coordinating activity to mutual benefit, yet hold that ethics now is valuable because of additional functions that it has acquired.”[20] She certainly could.

In the analysis of the philosopher Harry Frankfurt this sheer Love has “four main conceptually necessary features.”[21] It must be “a disinterested concern for the well-being or flourishing of the person who is loved.” That’s the main point, and the way the utility-driven mother imagined by economists is less than perfectly loving. Her utility function reflects precisely, and only, self-interest.

Frankfurt, by the way, equivocates between “love” as love of persons and “love” also of non-persons such as The Revolution or Art or God. Thus he adds that love is “ineluctably personal,” which I believe would be better expressed as “ineluctably particular.“ Anyway, the person [or transcendent thing] “is loved for himself or for herself, and not as an instance of type.” One loves Harriet particularly, not incidentally as a type of “woman” or “Vermonter,” however much one might admire those types. As Nozick puts it, “the love is not transferable to someone else with the same characteristics. . . One loves the particular person one actually encountered. . . . Love is historical.”[22]

And “the lover identifies with his beloved.” The two share so much that the line between their selves is forgotten. A friend, said Aristotle, is another self. And finally “loving entails constraints on the will. It is not simply up to us.” Our love for our children, though involuntary and often enough unreciprocated, is glorious. But it must be a give-and-take, acknowledging the constraints imposed by the children. “No, Ma. We’d better have Thanksgiving this year at my mother-in-law’s house.” The constraining is not simply up to us, observe, though it can and should be self-disciplined, too, if it is to be a virtue rather than merely an unrestrained and animal passion.

So: disinterested, particular, identifying, and constraining. None of these four fits a epicurean, utilitarian, pleasuring definition of love. The economist’s Maximum-Utility Man, Mr. Max U, is above all self-interested. He could care less if the item satisfying his interest is this particular one. He has no identity himself to project onto the beloved. And he regards all constraints on utility maximization as bad. “The hedonistic conception of man,” Thorstein Veblen thundered in 1898,

is that of a lightning calculator of pleasures and pains, who oscillates like a homogenous globule of happiness under the influence of stimuli that shift him about the area, but leave him intact. He has neither antecedent or consequent. He is an isolated, definitive human datum.[23]

If the kid cries too much, declares our Max, the isolated, self-interested man, regardless of whether he is the father, let us send him to probable death in an 18^th-century orphanage, since this particular kid is fungible with others. A house “filled with domestic cares and the noise of children” would make a poor place for discoursing on social justice and the raising of children. Thus on five occasions did Jean-Jacques Rousseau act, that great pre-Romantic teacher of good behavior in love and education.

Samuelsonian economics takes need-love, or more narrowly goods-and-services-concupiscence, as all love, and calls it pleasure or utility. But, as has been repeatedly discovered in experimental and observational studies, the argument fails even in its own terms. For example, suppose a Samuelsonian economist says that contributions to public goods—say, the British Lifeboat Service—is utility-based, in the sense that it is motivated altruistically, by a desire to make sure there are enough lifeboats. That is, the economic agent gives to the lifeboat fund not to cover the highly unlikely event that he himself might otherwise drown—pace Steven Pinker—but because many other people will. He is public spirited, altruistic.

Yet he is still a Max-U fellow: he gets utility from contemplating the ample provision of lifeboats. It’s like your mother Maxine U getting pleasure from your graduation. If she could get the graduation without spending a dime on you, all the better, right? Now such an attitude is an ethical improvement over screw-you individualism of a Steinerian or Randian or Pinkerian sort. But it seems to be empirically false. In 1993 Richard Sugden, for example, noted that a plain implication of Max-U altruism is that ₤1 given by Max U would be a perfect substitute for ₤1 given by anyone else, at least in Mr. U’s opinion. So Max U would of course free ride on other people’s contributions to lifeboats. Every time. According to Sugden’s empirical work on the lifeboat fund, however, people in Britain do not so free ride.

Which is evident: there is such a fund, and it does very well in bequests and in coins dropped into collection jars in pubs. Evidently British people feel that free riding in such a case would be bad—which is not a sentiment that would motivate a Max U-er. Sugden and others have shown repeatedly that people do not view the contributions of others as fungible ₤-for-₤ with their own contributions. People take the view that there is something ineluctably particular about their giving. So also in blood donations and in going over the top at the Somme. Altruistic hedonism does not look like a very good explanation of human solidarity and courage.[24]

You could reply that the lifeboat-giver or the blood donor or the voter down at the polling place get utility from the sheer act of giving their money or time without recompense. The love for God, in the altruistic hedonist view, is no different from satisfying an itch or buying a rugby shirt. Therefore economists studying the economics of religion, even if believers themselves, sometimes stop their concerns at explaining church attendance with the same tools one would use for explaining visits to the mall. But that is merely a pointless renaming of love—or justice or faith or some other virtue of steadfastness. As Lewis remarks, “one must be outside the world of love, of all loves, before one thus calculates.”[25]

Lewis offers a ladder of love. The four loves human and divine are, climbing upward: affection, human sexual desiring (eros), human friendship (philia), and finally charity, that is, agape. The lowest is one’s love for non-humans, such as a dog or a thing. The highest includes, Aquinas says, a sacred version of friendship, the astonishing friendship between unequals of humans and God. Agape is God’s gift, notes Lewis, following orthodoxy since Augustine, for God “can awaken in man, towards Himself, a supernatural Appreciative love.” The proud blasphemy that we are loved for our evident merits dissolves into “a full, childlike and delighted acceptance of our Need. . . . We become `jolly beggars’.”

The other three loves for humans, and I suppose also the best love for non-humans, Lewis would group under “natural loves.” These are not to be disdained. But they need to have that touch of transcendent agape, transcendent “charity,” if love “is to be kept sweet.”[26] “Whatsoever love elects to bless,” says Richard Wilbur, “Brims to a sweet excess/ That can without depletion overflow.”[27] The overflow give a point to a virtuous life, whether medieval or socialist or bourgeois.

[1] Lewis, Screwtape Letters, 1943, p. 86.

[2] Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651, I, Chp. 6, p. 24.

[3] Aquinas, Disputed Questions on Virtue (section On Hope), c. 1269-1272, quoted in Cessario, “Hope,” 2002, in Pope, Ethics of Aquinas, p. 237. See the similar analysis in Summa theologiae, c. 1270, Ia IIae, q. 26, art. 4, objection 3, “On the contrary.” By the way, the great Summa is sometimes referred to as “Theologica” and sometimes Theologiae.” The professionals, for example those in Pope, ed., Ethics of Aquinas, seem these days to prefer “Theologiae.”

[4] Klemm, “Material Grace,” 2004, p. 224.

[5] Stocker, “Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories,” 1976, pp. 68-69, 71.

[6] Becker and Tomes, “Equilibrium Theory,” 1979, p. 1161.

[7] Folbre, Invisible Heart, 2001, p. 112.

[8] Becker, “Theory of Marriage,” 1974 (1976), pp. 236, 237. A “preference function” is economic jargon for tastes.

[9] Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 1938 (1968), p.23.

[10] Hampshire, “Postscript,” 1982, to Hampshire, Thought and Action, 1959, p. 274.

[11] Held, Feminist Morality, 1993, p. 8.

[12] Yeungert, Boundaries, 2004, p. 12.

[13] MacIntyre, After Virtue, 1981, pp. 185.

[14] Abbing, Why Are Artists So Poor? 2002.

[15] Sen, Ethics and Economics, 1987, p. 41.

[16] Schmidtz, “Reasons for Altruism,” 1993, p. 164f. My italics on “concern” and “respect.”

[17] Tronto, Moral Boundaries, 1993, pp. 127-137.

[18] Pinker, 1997, quoted in Fodor, “Trouble with Psychological Darwinism,” 1998.

[19] Fodor, “Trouble with Psychological Darwinism,” 1998.

[20] Nozick, Invariances, 2001, p. 300.

[21] Frankfurt, Reasons of Love, 2004, p. 79f, italics supplied.

[22] Nozick, Anarchy, State, 1974, p. 168.

[23] Veblen, “Why Economics is Not an Evolutionary Science,” 1898.

[24] Sugden, “Thinking as a Team,” 1993.

[25] Lewis, Four Loves, 1960, p. 168.

[26] Lewis, Four Loves, 1960, pp. 191, 180, 168, 163.

[27] Wilbur, “A Wedding Toast,” 1971 (1988), p. 61.

In The Four Loves (1960) C. S. Lewis contrasts “need-love” like that of a small child for its mother with “gift-love” like that of a mother for her small child and “appreciation-love” like that of a mother and child for each other in maturity. Need-love expresses a need and dependency; gift-love a desire to serve in fulfillment of one’s identity; appreciation-love an admiration, satisfied to view the face forever. Lewis observed that eros, one sort of love for human beings, “transforms what is par excellence a Need-pleasure [that is, mere lust or chemistry] into the most Appreciative of all pleasures,” as the lover grows to see the beloved as desirable in himself.^[1]

But the point would apply to the love of any need-pleasuring thing that one comes to savor in a non-gluttonous way, as one “appreciates” wine. Such elevation of the form of love can accompany market-using consumption. Not all consumption is unloving. Even a consumption-scorning academic can get a sense of this if she will fondly bring to mind her variorum edition of Paradise Lost in her professional library, or her new centrifuge in her laboratory.

Yet the need-love for earthly things is of course dangerous. The theologian David Klemm summarizes Augustine so: “Most people . . . . become attached to their objects of desire, and in this way are in fact possessed by them,” needing and dependent. [2] It is, Klemm says elsewhere, “a window-shopping of the soul in which I lose myself in desires for shallow and untrue goods.”[3] But “those who use their private property for the sake of enjoying God become detached from their goods and thereby possess them well,” paradoxically.[4] The attachment we have to the world, the need-love for a fur coat or a trophy wife, is the source of our misery, not of our fulfillment, quite contrary to the tempting glow of pleasure on first acquisition. We arrive in the end at So What? . . . and pack last season’s designer dresses off to the resale shop.

In such system of Love, however, the opposite of attachment to earthly pleasures is not detachment, a mere apathy following a rude version of stoicism. “It is the feeling,” Lewis puts it, “which would make a man unwilling to deface a great painting even if he were the last man alive and himself about to die.”[5] In the 1950s a little boy threw mustard on a Rembrandt print, and the rich, sophisticated father was amused. Someone who loved God’s world would have scolded him.

Love calls us, said Richard Wilbur, to the things of this world. It is a love appreciating the world, yet not dependent on it, which sees the spark of the divine in presentness, the sacred in the profane, the lovingly exercised “pressure” of which Chesterton spoke that keeps worldly things in existence continuously. “He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:/ Praise him.”

* * * *

The modern, post-Romantic, stoic-materialist impulse is to set aside Augustine, C. S. Lewis, and Richard Wilbur, that God stuff, as superstitious nonsense—after all, the real point is the secular loving of others, right? We are put on this planet to help other people, yes? Surveys inquiring into the Meaning of Life regularly evoke that one as a response. You can be a good person, entirely loving, without loving something Transcendent, yes?

No, not in the Christian view of love, or even in a non-Christian philosophy beyond altruistic hedonism. The theologian William Schweiker claims that “overhumanization,” the modern urge to “subdue any ‘outside’ to the human project,” undervalues transcendence.[6] “High modernity aims to dignify human existence and yet, ironically, dislodges human worth from any source other than the mechanisms of social power.”[7] In 1943 Weil wrote,

The collective is the root of all idolatry. This is what chains us to the earth. . . . It is only by entering the transcendental, the supernatural, the authentically spiritual order that man rises above the social. . . . The service of the false God (of the social Beast under whatever form it may be) purifies evil by eliminating its horror. Nothing seems evil to those who serve it except failure in its service. . . . A Pharisee is someone who is virtuous out of obedience to the Great Beast [of the collective]. . . . Rootedness lies in something other than the social.[8]

In other words, the problem with setting aside “God is God” is that then The Great Beast of Society, or My Holier-Than-Thou Self, not to speak of SUVs and antique houses and young lovers, become god substitutes. In the Christian view, from Roman to Quaker, Pride is the problem. It is the same, by the way, in Islam, which regards shirk, idolatry, as the master sin. The god [al-Lah] is god, not wealth or al-Uzza the Mighty One of Nakhlah. To engage in idolatry is to be separated from the true God, which is the point of the terrible punishments for setting up idols discussed in the Pentateuch. What distorts New Age spirituality in its merely therapeutic forms is this apotheosis of the Self, what is good for the self-esteem of Moi and my friends in Marin County. It sets up Moi as a proud little god. To put to a new use the old tag: in materialism Homo homini deus. Man becomes to Man a god.

But on the contrary God, that primal Thou, that Holiness immeasurably different from humanity yet immanent in the universe, and always the proper object of striving, is God. Erasmus of Rotterdam did not lack a sense of humor, but remarked soberly of the Latin tag, Homo homini deus, “Among Christians the name of God ought not to be given to any mortal man even in jest.”[9] The original import of “man is to man a god,” Erasmus explains, is to give “divine honors to those who conferred benefits.” Gods are, so to speak, ring-givers, and so a human ring-giver is to be called a “god.” In monotheism this will not do. As Schweiker says, his (and my) “teleological humanism specifies that the source of goodness is wider than human projects and powers and so [wider than the modern] nightfall of values.”[10]

Monotheism is not merely numerical. What seems to us the bizarre practice of Roman emperors declaring themselves divine is no theological problem at all when gods are N. What Karl Jaspers called the “axial” faiths did bring something new during the millennium before and around the time of Christ, among them Christianity itself. They recommended ethical universalism, they rejected the me-centeredness of magic, and above all they emphasized the difference between the ordinary world and a Truer realm of faith and hope. Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Dreaded, and different and detached from us. The word translated into English as “holy”/ “hallowed” is the Hebrew Bible’s kadosh, meaning also “set apart.” Christianity in its various forms is sociologically speaking merely one of these faiths, along with Islam and Judaism and Zoroastrianism and some versions of Hinduism, and even Buddhism and Taoism and Confucianism (the last god-absent but universalistic and certainly anti-magical).

The non-axial, “archaic,” non-universalistic faiths make ring-giving people—chieftains, ancestors, politicians, priests—into gods-to-be-worshipped. Thus the three Japanese generals who founded in the late 16^th century the Tokugawa shogunate were all literally worshipped afterwards, in elaborate temples at which one can still pray. Likewise the first restored Meiji emperor has a gigantic shrine in Tokyo, and his General Nogi, who with his wife committed hara-kiri when in 1912 the Emperor died, has a smaller one. Robert Bellah remarks after recounting these facts that “there is nothing surprising in the divinization of human beings in an archaic culture,” by which he means a non-axial culture, that is, one “affirming the world as it is rather than holding it in tension with ultimate reality.” [11]

A non-axial culture lacks attachment to a spiritual Ultimate. Well short of the Ultimate, a society without an Ultimate has many gods to tend each piece of the world and the heavens. By contrast to such polytheism or ancestor worship or a civic religion such as Confucianism, the god of monotheists is jealous. God is on one view of the matter separated from the world, and bids us look upward. What starts in Judaism perhaps as an early nationalism of the Jews ground up between Philistines and Egyptians and Assyrians, and was certainly in Islam a later nationalism of the Arabs ground up between Byzantines and Persians, becomes theological. Our god is The God, al-Lah. In the beginning was The Word.

And to our good, it is said. The chief sin against the Spirit, Augustine declared, is indeed pride. “Pride” does not here mean ordinary self-respect, or even self-love in a modest, God-fearing way, or else there would be no justice in “love thy neighbor as thyself.“ The sinful sort of pride is making oneself into a proud little god.

Even a saintly person can fall prey to “theological pride,” the worst and last temptation. An old New Yorker cartoon shows two monks walking in the cloister, one declaring to the other, “But I am holier than thou!” The Anglican divine of the late 16^th century Richard Hooker put the joke this way: “the fall of angels doth make it almost a question whether we might not need a preservative still, lest we should haply wax proud that we are not proud.”[12] The Anglicans of Hooker’s day were complaining of two prideful doctrines. The Puritan said proudly that he was among the saints elected by God at the beginning. Whence proud Cromwell guilty of his country’s blood—and proud reborn Christians now, waiting for the Rapture. The Papists held a doctrine of perfect justification by the soul’s infusion with righteousness and therefore salvation not from the continuing grace of God but salvation earned and merited. Whence proud priests, as meritorious purveyors of merit, from which simony and child abuse.[13]

In the making of a non-prideful character the central step is to love God—not moi or Heathcliff or any other treasure on earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break in. Art or the Revolution or Science cannot really “serve the function of religion,” as non-religious people are always supposing, though of course they do serve similar psychological functions. “No,” declares James Wood, an apostate but someone who understands religion, “the great ‘strength’ of Christianity is not that it offers medicines, but that it is true.”[14]

Worshipping idols here below is bad for our souls. And it is impractical, a fragility of goodness. “There are false suns,” writes Iris Murdoch, “easier to gaze upon and far more comforting than the true one.”[15] The problem is that such things pass. The realest of things are in this sense mirages. “Man is in love and loves what vanishes,” said Yeats. As Martha Nussbaum puts it, “by ascribing value to philia [love as friendship] in a conception of the good life, we make ourselves more vulnerable to loss.”[16] Lovers leave, friends move away, riches get spent. And then what? If your life plan consists of accumulating SUVs and antique houses and young lovers, what is the point?

The great thief is death itself. It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch.[17] Whom do you love and who loves you? He will die, or you will, and therefore in one of you each bit of love will be redeemed in sorrow. “These lovely [earthly] things” wrote St. Augustine, “go their way and are no more; and they rend the soul with desires that can destroy it. . . . But in them is no repose, because they do not abide.”[18] The other side of mortal love is mortal loss, every time.

One solution is to deny the fragility of love. And one way of denying it is not to have love in the first place, not to care about the lovely things and the beloved people. It is said that this is the Buddhist solution, the rejection of worldly attachment. It is an element in much Western thought as well, influenced by stoicism. An alternative way of denying the fragility is to imagine a heaven, as the Abrahamic religions do. Its popular if theologically unsound form is a tale of benevolent dead people acting as angels to the living, such as Morley’s ghost in A Christmas Carol. The more sophisticated Christian’s attitude towards love is tragic. The tragedy of God crucified stands for all the impermanences of our loving lives.

Nussbaum admires the solution of pagan Aristotle. “There is a beauty,” she says, “in the willingness to love someone in the face of love’s instability and worldliness that is absent from a completely trustworthy love.”[19] One accepts the tragedy and goes on loving nonetheless. But then isn’t one’s god Beauty, or perhaps Endurance, or Flexibility? The later, Christian step, at least in its theologically sophisticated forms, is to bring out into the open what is implicit in the noblest pagan solutions, an implicit love of God—or, to address the growing unease of my dear non-believing readers, an implicit love of some other transcendent and undying goal, such as Art or Science or Evolution or the Environment or the Life Force or the Revolution or Baseball. A love for the spark of the divine translates the lover into a higher and permanent realm.

Dylan Thomas on the contrary refused to mourn the death, by fire, of a child in London. “I shall not murder/ The mankind of her going with a grave truth” is a pagan and anti-Sunday-School declaration, noble and humanistic, admiring of the masculine virtues. It finds a transcendent in stoic humanism. But it lacks a theology, the grave truths, the truths of the grave. Salvation requires the transcendent and a theology, that is, a purpose to life that includes an account of why it should matter. I believe this is as true of a modern bourgeois life as it is of any other. Maybe more. You rich person in a modern economy have time to think.

Think then of this: Paul of Tarsus, and before him Jesus of Nazareth, and a little before him Rabbi Hillel, and long before them all Moses himself said, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and greatest commandment.” It is literally: “I am the Lord thy God,” amplified by the second, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me”; and by the third and fourth about graven images and the sabbath. “And the [new] second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” That is a summary of commandments five through ten, relating to other people rather than to God. “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”[20]

The commandments of Moses are in summary (1.) God is god, which is to say there is a transcendent, a sacred, a kadosh. And (2.) Love thy neighbor as thyself, which is to say that a transcendent entails an ethical universe applying to the level of the non-sacred, the profane. The sacred and the profane in Abrahamic religions are connected by God’s creation—they are separated but they are not alternatives. Your neighbor, too, is in the community of God’s creatures, to be loved on this account if you love God. That is the transcending secular.

At least so people think who are unwilling to adopt the 20^th century’s nihilistic materialism. Add even to the materialism a dash of stoicism, as the most proudly materialist among us do, and you find yourself back to a transcendent, a free man’s worship.

In 1952 Paul Tillich called stoicism “the only real alternative to Christianity in the Western world.”[21] (Well. . . Judaism? Buddhism? Socialism? Art?) Noble in its way, stoicism can freeze into a sentimental posture of anti-sentimentality, Being Tough, Hemingway’s “grace under pressure.” Weil called such an attitude “the Roman caricature of [Greek] Stoicism.”[22] In its modern American form, which is influenced by the Christian evaluation of the individual soul but is not in other ways Christian, such stoicism has dropped even the classical elitism of the Wise Man. Any American can be a stoic hero, because, as Tillich the immigrant to the New World explains, “the individual is an infinitely significant representation of the universe.”[23] The Romantic I in America contains multitudes. But there it is again, suddenly—a transcendent, the People.

Even in a wholly secular way of thinking, love of sublunary persons or things is good or bad depending on its association with the other virtues. This is the point Raja Halwani makes in discussing Nel Noddings ethics of “care,” that is, the argument that Love is primary. Critics of Noddings have argued that ethics cannot be collapsed into care—or else the justice of universal ethics or the courage of autonomy necessary for human flourishing are damaged.[24]

Similarly, Adam Smith writes in a well-known passage that if love for our fellow humans was all we had to depend on, then the extermination of the Chinese would trouble us less, really, than the loss of a little finger.[25] It takes a sense of abstract Justice, a virtue separate from Love and not translatable into it, to care for a strange people you have never seen and can never love. The moral sentiment of justice impels the man within to scold a self that is so selfish as to save the finger rather than the entire race of Chinese. “What is it,” he asks,

which prompts the generous upon all occasions and the mean upon many to sacrifice their own interests to the greater interests of others? It is not. . . that feeble spark of benevolence. . . . It is reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast. . . . The natural misrepresentations of self-love can be corrected only by the eye of this impartial spectator.[26]

It is the bundled virtues in a soul which ascends. I say “ascend” to my fellow believers in a loving and living God.

But to you others I have at least a practical suggestion, that Love without other virtues is sin and simulacrum. An absorbing love of a child without the virtue of justice, for example, makes the child into a mere source of satisfaction for its mother. You know mothers like this. She “loves” her child, doubtless. But she loves him rather as Screwtape—the imagined middle-management devil giving advice to a junior devil in C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters—describes the “love” his fellow devils have for human souls: “to us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense.”[27] Such increasing of the area of selfhood—in a word, pride—changes love into domination.

“A love relationship,” Murdoch observed, “can occasion extreme selfishness and possessive violence. the attempt to dominate the other . . . so that it is no longer separate; or it can prompt a process of unselfing wherein the lover learns to see, and cherish and respect, what is not himself.”[28] The political theorist Joan Tronto warns liewise about unbalanced and absorbing “love.” She criticizes the communitarians like Nel Noddings and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese for imagining that love conquers all. “Without strong conceptions of right, care-givers are apt to see the world only from their own perspective and to stifle diversity and otherness.”[29] Mother knows best. Yet on the other hand, “justice without a notion of care is incomplete.”[30]

[1] Lewis, Four Loves, 1960, p. 135f.

[2] Klemm, “Material Grace,” 2004, p. 226.

[3] Klemm, “Material Grace,” 2004, p. 233.

[4] Klemm, “Material Grace,” 2004, p. 226.

[5] Lewis, Four Loves, 1960, p. 32.

[6] Schweiker, Theological Ethics, 2004, pp. xii, 201.

[7] Schweiker, Theological Ethics, 2004, p. xv.

[8] Weil, Gravity and Grace, 1942 (1949), pp. 164-65, 166, 168-69.

[9] Erasmus 1500-1533, Adages, selected by William Barker (2001), I I 69, p. 40.

[10] Schweiker, Theological Ethics, 2004, p. xvi.

[11] Bellah, Imagining Japan, 2003, pp. 20, 13.

[12] From his sermons, quoted in Allison, The Rise of Moralism, 1966, p. 4., punctuation modernized.

[13] Allison, The Rise of Moralism, pp. 7, 24. Allison (who, incidentally, was the Episcopal bishop of South Carolina) shows the slide in late 16^th-century Anglicanism towards the Catholic view of works, thence to deism and then to atheism, the view that Christ was a Good Man only: “the imputation of our righteousness, not the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, became that by which we are justified” (p. 204).

[14] Wood, Broken Estate, 1999, p. ***.

[15] Murdoch, “Sovereignty of Good,” 1967, p. 100.

[16] Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, 1986, p. 361.

[17] William Alfred found this on a Vermont tombstone, and made it the motto of his play Agamemnon.

[18] Augustine, Confessions, 398 AD, IV, x.

[19] Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, 1986, p. 420.

[20] Matt. 22: 37-40 and a dozen or so other places in the New Testament (for example Matt. 7: 12; re-exposited in Paul’s Letter to the Romans 13: 8); Tractate Shabbos 31a; and Leviticus 19:18.

[21] Tillich, Courage to Be, 1952, pp. 9, 101.

[22] Weil, Waiting for God, 1950, p. 195.

[23] Tillich, Courage to Be, 1952, p. 120.

[24] Halwani, Virtuous Liaisons, 2003, pp. 19, 27, 73ff.

[25] Smith, Moral Sentiments, 1759 (1790), Part III, Chp. iii, para. 4, p. 136. Compare Rousseau Political Economy, 1755, p. 121.

[26] Smith, Wealth, 1776, III.3.5, p. 137. I wish he hadn’t said “reason,” which makes the passage sound Kantian.

[27] Lewis, Screwtape Letters, 1943, p. 37.

[28] Murdoch, Metaphysics, 1992, p. 17.

[29] Tronto, Moral Boundaries, 1993, p. 161; compare p. 135, “the dangers faced by the vulnerable at the hands of their caregivers.”

[30] Tronto, Moral Boundaries, 1993, p. 167.

The gendering of the virtues makes even Christian males a little nervous. It has troubled Christian ethics since the beginning. As Basil Willey once wrote, “There has always, perhaps, been a latent contradiction between our official lip service to the Christian standard in all its rigor, and the pagan ideal of `the gentleman’ which is what we [men] have really admired and sought to practice.”[4] The French Jansenist Pierre Nicole wrote in 1671, “There are an infinity of small things which are extremely necessary for us to live, and can be given for free; and which cannot be traded so that they can be purchased only by love.”[5] He sounds like a modern male economist, thinking of love as an exchange. And said so: “human civility . . . is only a sort of commerce of self-love, in which one endeavors to arouse the love of others by displaying some affection towards them.”

A large group of philosophically savvy women, such as Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Judith Shklar, Iris Murdoch, Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, Mary Midgley, Martha Nussbaum, Sissela Bok, Amélie Rorty, Susan Wolf, Nancy Chodorow, Joan Tronto, Virginia Held, Annette Baier, and Rosalind Hursthouse, have since about 1958 turned a woman’s eye on ethical philosophy. They have noted that love is not self-love. Ethical theory had been for a long time, oddly, a guy thing. I suppose that’s an entailment of “theory” in general having been for a long time a guy thing. Women from Sappho to Virginia Woolf did their ethical thinking in poems and stories, not in philosophy.

This program of Aristotle in modern dress, I say, has been strikingly feminine. Its leaders have been women, though as Kathryn Morgan observed none of them is a “star” in the style of John Rawls or Robert Nozick. “The community of feminist theoreticians is calling into question the very model of the individual autonomous self presupposed by a star-centered male-dominated tradition. . . . We experience it as common labor, a common task.”[6] Let’s get this kitchen cleaned up. No quarterbacks. Speak of thee, not me: “tuistically,” from Latin tua, thy.

The theology and ethics and science of Love is not that of bodice-ripping romance novels. It is hard nowadays to get beyond the Romantic idea of Love, according to which one “falls” into it with no ethical restraint. Stendhal, for example, wrote a long treatise on the subject in 1822, De l’amour, in which love other than an adolescent version of eros is neglected. Alice Monroe calls eros “a tingling contentment in the presence of the other person,” Nick Hornby, “the mad hunger for someone you don’t know very well.”[7]

Such “love” is, as C. S. Lewis put it, one of God’s little jokes, “that a passion so soaring, apparently transcendent, as Eros, should thus be linked in incongruous symbiosis with a bodily appetite. . . . [W]e are composite creatures, rational animals, akin on one side to the angels, on the other to tom-cats.”[8] To give free rein to the tom-cat in us would hardly be a virtue. It would be the vice of lust, a “love” unbalanced by other virtues, a yielding to passion.

Yet eros is not an ethical zero. As Lewis noted it can touch the transcendent. The Song of Songs is erotic yet religious, loving yet Loving. The version of eros that Jane Austen’s novels study, for example, is hardly animalistic. It is ethical, that is, it is concerned with the education of the will to the end of good character, and indeed is precisely about coming to know someone’s character.

Mr. Knightley (note the name) rebukes Emma for her making merry of poor Miss Bates. Emma is instantly ashamed, and at length in love. As John Casey puts it, “Emma’s love for Mr. Knightley has something to do with her sense of his moral rightness and authority.”[9] The result is a marriage of true ethical minds, not mere bodies locked. The same can be seen in homosexual unions, the Boston marriage for example of Stein and Toklas, or of Socrates and Charmides. The special, deep friendship between lovers, a hunger that evolves into admiration, is not sinful.

* * * *

The folk anthropology of “the traditional marriage” makes we moderns feel superior by imagining an alien Other. Modern romantic marriage is widely imagined to have superseded supposedly loveless arranged marriages in “traditional” societies—though, by the way, if you speak to women with arranged marriages they will often give you a different opinion.

The lovelessness of traditional society appears anyway to be a myth. Loving marriage and economically independent women was widespread for example in Europe. Aquinas in the 13^th century attacked polygamy precisely because it makes the wife into a slave, a mere possession.[10] Aquinas classifies conjugal love as superior even to the manly friendship so much admired in his tradition, the tradition of Cicero especially.[11] Jews had a little before Aquinas outlawed polygamy on similar grounds. The historical anthropologist Alan Macfarlane finds “companionate marriage” in English society “as far back as we can conveniently go” in English history, expressed repeatedly as the union of souls reminiscent of Plato’s metaphor in the Symposium. Macfarlane quotes a “Wife’s Lament” translated from Old English as “we have vowed/ Full many a time that naught should come between us/ But death alone, and nothing else at all.”[12]

In short, love and marriage/ Going together like a horse and carriage is not a modern bourgeois invention, as for example Marx and especially Engels believed. In Macfarlane’s account the English have always been in this sense bourgeois. Macfarlane finds agreement on the point from a surprising quarter, again from E. P. Thompson, who wrote in 1965 of a “bourgeois arch, which stretches [in England] from the twelfth century to our own time.” “The central ideology” of English society, writes Macfarlane, has always been “a [nuclear] family pattern [focused on husband and wife, not children or ancestors or clan] and individualistic philosophy,” to achieve the “ends . . . [of] equality of the sexes, physical comfort rather than misery, and responsibility for one’s own decisions.” [13] Bourgeois virtues.

One would expect the same from the Dutch, who in the 11^th and 12^th centuries were pioneers in an empty, tide-flooded swamp, to be taken for cultivation by busy dike-building, unlike the Muslim gardens of Iberia to be taken by heroic reconquista. Wives on a non-military frontier are too useful to devalue, which may perhaps explain the autonomy of Dutch women compared with the Spanish women of the 17^th century or even the French.

The alleged novelty of modern love run parallel in recent scholarship to that of an alleged break in the 16^th and 17^th centuries in European conceptions of childhood, first claimed in 1960 by the French historian Philippe Ariès, and reaffirmed by Edward Shorter for the American case and Lawrence Stone for the English. The bourgeois family against which the young men of the 1960s were rebelling was seen, as Eamon Duffy described it in a recent review, as “oppressive; it de-eroticized children and women; it turned wives into baby machines, children into subordinate versions of their parents.”[14] But the 1960’s anti-bourgeois interpretation of the old and new family appears now, like the lovelessness of traditional marriage, to have been mistaken. “As far back as we can tell,” writes Linda Pollock (note the similarity to MacFarlane’s words), “most parents loved their children, grieved at their deaths and conscientiously attended to the task of child-rearing.”[15] It is continuous, even one might speculate hard-wired. Thus in England the Pearl poet of the late 14^th century longed for his dead daughter, though as in The Song of Songs the longing is refigured as Love for God.

Love’s expressions vary by culture and era, that is, but are not lacking anywhere. Parents love children, spouses love one another. The Puritan settler in Massachusetts, Anne Bradstreet, writes in 1656 of the loss to migration of her children, imagined as birds (”Four cocks there were, and hens the rest”). She comforts herself with her utility in their utility: “Farewell my birds, farewell adieu,/ I happy am, if well with you.” [16] One can try to read her as utilitarian or conventional in expression, but it seems a misreading. Likewise for conjugal love. Puritans were in fact well known for insisting on a loving, unslavish relation between husband and wide. “To My Dear and Loving Husband” expresses more than Puritan patriarchy:

If ever two were one, then surely we.

If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;

If ever wife was happy in a man,

Compare with me, ye women, if you can.[17]

Love rules.

* * * *

Love can also be called a “peasant” virtue, the modern label being “proletarian.” Courage is claimed to be above all the virtue of the aristocrat. As Prudence is of the bourgeois. Love, Courage, and Prudence. When she witnessed a religious procession one night in the late 1930s in a Portuguese fishing village it was suddenly plain to Simone Weil, a French secular Jew on her way to Christianity, that “Christianity is pre-eminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among others.”[18] Love—even in its social forms as an abstract Solidarity—is pacific, Christian, and yielding. It is Nietzsche’s “slave morality,” subordinate to the Greek and aristocratic virtues he admired. So did Aristotle admire them, and disdain any Love but a friendship among men. Alasdair MacIntyre notes that “Aristotle would certainly not have admired Jesus Christ and he would have been horrified by St. Paul,” with all their embarrassing talk of Love.[19] The pagans were not lovelorn, at least not in their philosophies.

The feminine side of the stripped-down, two-virtue, Love-or-Courage way people speak of exercising a will to do good might, I say, also be called “Christian.” I mean the word “Christian” here as evocative, not exclusive. I do not mean to praise Christianity or attack non-Christians. I am well aware that Christendom has not always been a feast of love, as Moslems and Albigensians, Jews and Hussites know. A Buddhist nun I know has shown me centered virtues similar to those of the best of the Christian monks. And I’ve seen the virtue of love in many a loving atheist and anticlerical. Nor am I, though a Christian—a progressive Episcopalian, if you care, the quasi-Quaker branch of the Frozen Chosen—willing to claim that Christianity brought new ethics into the world. Yet some of the virtues have acquired a spin in the talk of literal Christians, carrying over into the minds and hearts of non-believers in the bourgeois West, loading faith with doubt.[20] Bear with me, then, exercising if you please a Christian charity, when I use the loaded word.

In the West before Christianity the most admired virtues, the “pagan virtues,” were manful and military, not feminine and loving. In Plato’s opinion, elaborated by other pagans and by Jews and Christians, with parallels in Chinese and other traditions, they were four, named by St. Ambrose in the 4^th century AD the “cardinal” virtues: first physical and other varieties of that Courage; then Temperance, Justice, and Prudence.[21] Thus the Wisdom of Solomon (8: 7) “teaches self-control [viz., temperance] and prudence,/ justice and courage;/ nothing in life is more profitable for men than these.” And 4^th Maccabees, an instance as Luke Timothy Johnson has put it, of “Jews thinking like Greeks,” reinterprets Jewish law as expressions of a natural law of prudence, justice, courage, and temperance (for example 1:2-4, 18).[22] Cardinal means “hinge-like” or by extension the imagined corners on which the earth turns. So the four virtues made the pagan world go ‘round, absent Christian or romantic Love

The so-called Christian virtues, what St. Thomas Aquinas and his tradition called the “theological” virtues, are three. Thus St. Paul: “And now abideth faith, hope, and charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity,” agape, spiritual love, “the divine friendship of graced human beings.”[23] St. Paul was already accustomed before he wrote 1 Corinthians to bundle them, for example 1 Thess. 1:3, 5:8, as perhaps were still earlier Christians. The word “charity” is the King James Bible’s attempt, and that of some translations in other languages, such as that of Louis Segond’s La Sainte Bible of 1910, to distinguish a higher Love from lower loves. “Charity” or “ charité“ translates Greek agape, spiritual love, distinguishing it from eros, physical love, or philia, friendship.

Most people read 1 Corinthians 13 as recommending love for your husband or your girlfriend, and for this purpose the passage appears on many Hallmark cards. That’s not what St. Paul had in mind. Modern European languages—to the confusion of Romantics in love with love—use the same word “love” for both agape and eros. Until the gender anxieties of recent modernity interfered with the usage, indeed, French and English and Italian and German used it also for philia, friendship of men for men and women for women. That is, “love” signified all four—God’s love for us, our love for God, sexualized love between humans, and non-sexualized love between humans. Amour, for example, seems to have about the same range of meaning in French as “love” has in English.

In Latin on the other hand amor/ cāritas/ amicitia parallels the Greek distinctions eros/ agape/ philia. Cāritas at Rome was from cārus, “dear,” as in “expensive” or “beloved,” and signified “esteem” or “high valuation,” what C. S. Lewis called “appreciation love,” as against amor, desire.[24] But modern languages blur the distinctions in their word “love.” In French too the attempt to make charité into the word for agape did not take, as “charity” for this purpose did not in English. Later revisions of Segond’s bible gave in and used amour, as in modern English translations: “love,” with its vulgar ambiguities.

Love, charity, cāritas, agape is the greatest virtue of the three theological virtues in Christianity because it is the essence of the Christian God, so unlike His predecessors, at any rate in His opinion. Hope and faith have no purpose in a god, foresighted and immortal. Only beings who can die need those virtues. And the Christian God does not “need” agape. By grace He gives it. No one would have accused Zeus of loving humans, except on occasion in a cheaply erotic sense. (The female gods like Athena seem to take a more motherly and less sexually dominating approach to their favored humans.) Yahweh demanded sacrifice of others’ sons, Abraham’s for example, but revealed no loving plans for sacrificing His own, except in tendentious readings by Christians of what they call the Old Testament. Yet the Christian God so loved the world, said John the Evangelist, that His only begotten Son was ordained from the beginning of time to suffer, really suffer a human death, without sure knowledge of his Godness. Norman Mailer, of all people, has written a gripping novel on this theme, The Gospel According to the Son (1997), turning on Jesus’ doubt, quoting the 22^nd psalm: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

The Christian or theological part of Love can be brought down to earth, but keeps a whiff of the transcendent. Love is not merely the earthly itch of lust, eros. The Romantic poets Loved Nature. Giacomo Leopardi in 1819 begins his most famous poem with, “Always dear to me was that lonely hill.” He adopts in this as in many other cases the high Romantic arrangement Nature-Reflection-Nature.

William Wordsworth, on the other hand, as the critic Geoffrey Hartman observed, knew at the beginning of “Tintern Abbey” (1798) one thing only, “the affection he bears to nature for its own sake.”[25] Nature is not to be used as an input into a utility function, as the modern economist would wish. Nor even is Nature to be used in moral illustration, as poets before and after Wordsworth did so freely—Shakespeare’s sonnets or Housman’s lyrics for instance. Matthew Arnold begins “Dover Beach” (1851) with the cliffs of England glimmering and vast, turns then to reflections about the Sea of Faith, and ends with a battlefield, in pointed disruption of the tranquil bay and the sweet night air with which the poem begins. The traditions of the pastoral is disrupted for intellectual use.

But Wordsworth’s Nature in Tintern Abbey, I say, is not to be used at all. It is simply a thing to be loved, amandum, sheerly. Note the parallel with love of God. “These waters . . ./ With a soft inland murmur. . ./ a wild secluded scene” do not raise the poet’s blood pressure or bring into his mind the turbid ebb and flow of human misery. They merely “impress/ Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect/ The landscape with the quiet of the sky.” Nothing follows. It is pure appreciation-love, earthly agape.

As the theologian David Klemm puts it, “material grace” is the experience in the world that “restores me to my own being” by being the presence of God.[26] “I, so long/ A worshipper of Nature, hither came/ Unwearied in that service.” “Worshipper,” not “enjoyer” or “user” or “national-park customer.” Hartman writes, “This dialectic of love makes up his entire understanding. . . . Wordsworth’s understanding is characterized by the general absence of the will to obtain relational knowledge.”[27] No wonder that early Wordsworth was Mill’s crutch when his Utilitarian life began to feel crippled.[28]

A modern Green Party member can give a utilitarian, consequential, instrumental, scientifically knowledgeable reply to an inquiry into why she loves Nature. She can claim for example that the snail darter has a use as, so to speak, a canary in the world’s coal mine, presaging a disaster that even a non-lover of Nature would want to avoid. But had the snail darter no earthly use the environmentalist would nonetheless go on loving it. You might as well ask why your mother loves you. She just does. Such love has no outside use. It is a sacrifice, a making sacred.

The archangel Raphael admonishes Adam in his love for Eve not to make her his god. Milton combines the Aristotelian doctrine of the mean with Augustine’s and the neoplatonists’ doctrine of human love as that spark off a transcendent flint. Raphael speaks:

In loving thou dost well, in passion not,

Wherein true love consists not; love refines

The thoughts, and heart enlarges, hath his seat

In reason, and is judicious, is the scale

By which to heavenly love [viz., agape] thou mayest ascend,

Not sunk in carnal pleasure, for which cause

Among the beasts no mate for thee was found.[29]

Note the other, pagan virtues preventing the corruption of love into lust: prudence (“reason”); justice (“judicious”); and temperance (“not sunk in carnal pleasure”). And note the characteristically Miltonic ambiguity in the line-ending “scale.” The reader is surprised, led from “scale” as temperance and justice to “scale” (scalae) as a staircase ascending to divine love.

Adam should see Eve as a spark of the divine, as one sees it in Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, or in Newton’s Principia, or in Paradise Lost. The priest, novelist, and sociologist Andrew Greeley wrote, in line with Aquinian and Miltonian theology, and against Pauline, Augustinian, Cartesian, Spinozan, and Kantian theology stressing the nastiness of eros, that “God lurks in aroused human love and reveals Himself to us through it.”[30]

[1] For example, by Budziszewski, “Escape from Nihilism,” n. d.

[2] Murdoch, “Sovereignty of Good,” 1967, p. 103.

[3] Tompkins, “Me and My Shadow,” 1987 (2001), p. 2143.

[4] Willey, English Moralists, 1964, p. 107f.

[5] Essais de morale (1671), in Clark, ed., Commerce, Culture, 2003, pp. 57, 59.

[6] Morgan quoted in Held, Feminist Morality, 1993, p. 48f.

[7] Hornby, How to Be Good, 2001, p. 200; Munro, “Nettles” in Munro, Hateship, 2003.

[8] Lewis, Four Loves, 1960, p. 142.

[9] Casey, Pagan Virtues, 1990, p. 163.

[10] Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, c. 1259-1264, III, Part III, Chp. 124, “That Marriage ought to be between one Man and one Woman.”

[11] Plato had applied it of course to both heterosexual and homosexual unions. The Wife of Bath had at church door husbands five, but recent scholarship has found that homosexual unions were routinely honored in the Middle Ages and Renaissance at the same place (Boswell 1994, pp. 191, 264. 267, 280-81).

[12] Macfarlane, Riddle of the Modern, pp. 176, 183, 189.

[13] Macfarlane, Riddle of the Modern, pp. 199, 175 (quoting Steele), 336 (quoting Thompson), 343.

[14] Duffy, “ Cradle Will Rock,” 2002, p. 61.

[15] Quoted in Duffy, “ Cradle Will Rock,” 2002, p. 62.

[16] Bradstreet, Works, 1678, pp. 232, 234.

[17] Bradstreet, Works, 1678, p. 225.

[18] Quoted in Cole, Simone Weil, 2001, p. 116.

[19] MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 172.

[20] Lewis, “On Ethics” c. 1941-42, pp. 68, 76.

[21] Plato, Republic, IV, Stephanus, 442b-d, p. 1073f.

[22] Johnson, 2002, The Greco-Roman Moralists.

[23] Aquinas, as understood by Schockenhoff, “Virtue of Charity,” 2002, p. 248.

[24] The English word “care,” by the way, is Germanic, as in Old English caru, cearu, “sorrow,” from Indo-European *gar-, “to cry out,” whence via Latin garrīre > “garrulous.” The Latin cousin is cūra. “Care” is not, as you would think, from the Latin cārus (whence “charity,” “caress,” cherish”), which is instead from IE *kā, “to desire,” whence also English “whore,” Sanskrit kamasutra. Amor seems to originate in amma = “mama,” in babbling.

[25] Hartman, Unmediated Vision, 1954, p. 4, italics supplied.

[26] Klemm, “Material Grace,” 2004, p. 235.

[27] Hartman, Unmediated Vision, 1954, pp. 4-5.

[28] As A. N. Wilson observes in God’s Funeral, 1999, p. 45.

[29] Milton, Paradise Lost, 1667, VIII, lines 588-94.

[30] Greeley, The Catholic Imagination, 2000, p. 7; and Chp. Two, “Sacred Desire.” Annette Baier argues that Kant, Descartes, and the rest see humans as despicable and love for them as impossible (Baier 1994, “Ethics,” pp. 36, 38).

We should try to redeem the word, and through it rediscover a virtuous middle class. In actual fact middle-class people have not been monsters. Their sworn enemies, from Lenin to Pol Pot, Abimael Guzman, and Osama Bin Laden, commonly have been. Middle-class virtuousness arises not merely when an occasional saintly bourgeoise overcomes the entailments of her social position and joins the Communist Party. A bourgeois social position, if properly tutored by education, draws out the virtues.

But the trouble is that “bourgeois” is used by the left to evoke the alleged ethical bankruptcy of the middle class. On some tongues it has come to mean “bossy, greedy, selfish, vulgar, sexist, patriarchal, fascist, snobbish, elitist, common, American, Midwestern, small-town, philistine, ignorant, uneducated, unethical, conventional, self-satisfied, uncharitable, hypocritical, imperialistic, undemocratic, militaristic, authoritarian, materialistic, and inegalitarian.” The word therefore makes non-leftists uneasy. They worry that they are accepting in the word some nasty conclusions in no way obviously correct about owners and managers of the means of production.

The uneasiness of non-leftists, or of others merely puzzled by a phrase such as “the bourgeois virtues,” shows up in Simon Schama’s book, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (1987). On page 6 he announces his ambition to “rescue the Netherlands from its ancient stereotype as quintessentially bourgeois.” He has in mind Huizinga, and behind him the irritated assessments of the place by aristocratic foreigners, starting with Philip II’s Duke of Alva and Elizabeth’s Earl of Leicester.

Using the word “bourgeois,” he writes, perpetuates “the deadening cliché that tells us at once too much and not enough. . . . The result is a kind of depressing historical perennialism by which the Dutch, being bourgeois, were whatever the modern mind supposes bourgeois to be,” which is to say, bossy, greedy, selfish, vulgar, etc. He therefore wants another word for his beloved Nederlanders. “At the center of the Dutch world,” he declares, “was a burgher, not a bourgeois.” Rousseau in 1762 put it similarly, distinguishing a citoyen from a bourgeois.[2]

That is, Schama wants a word uncorrupted by the sneers of the left, beginning with Rousseau. Schama wants to honor the Northern-Lowlandish townspeople of the 17^th century without implying that they were “bourgeois” in the corrupted sense of the word. “The burgher was a citizen first,” you see, “and Homo economicus second. . . . If any one obsession linked together the [burgerij’s] concerns . . . it was the moral ambiguity of good fortune,” that embarrassment of riches.

The word “bourgeois” in its Marxist dress is to be rejected because it has become merely a synonym for Homo economicus, the man of untroubled selfishness which by now left and right agree in believing is the essence of middle-class life. The bourgeois in this belief is a machine for making (as it is always put) endless profit—profit by blessed invention if you are of the right, or profit by damned exploitation if you are of the left.

Early in the last long chapter in the book Schama lets himself go. The word “bourgeois”

after all, belongs to the classifying vocabulary of nineteenth-century and twentieth-century materialist social science that assumed systems of belief to be appendages of social power. Those frameworks of cultural analysis are notorious for their reductive insistence on a social continuum that extends from the division of labor to the destination of the soul.[3]

Schama can’t bring himself to utter the word “Marxist.” Ideas are not to be reduced to Marxist social class. “If my view is somewhat idealist, the opposite view is often unreflectingly materialistic.”[4]

Schama is right to reject the theory shared by left and right in which for example the “realism” of Golden-Age painting is supposed to be “some sort of clodlike bourgeois adhesion to the concrete.”[5] If the supposition were true it would be hard to explain the bourgeois enthusiasm for Impressionist, or for that matter post-Impressionist, or for that matter Abstract Expressionist, painting. Being bourgeois, Schama and I agree, is not the same thing as being stupidly literal and ethically corrupt. That’s the point of my own book, too, as of Schama’s: to celebrate the “bourgeois virtues”—if Schama would but accept the word.

Buying, selling, owning and operating, managing, planning, advising, persuading, inventing, designing, inquiring, reporting, educating, researching, exploring, calculating, accounting, defending, prosecuting, judging, curing, helping, regulating, governing in Amsterdam and in New Amsterdam, in market work and in housework, in the 17^th century and now, does not automatically produce ethical salvation. But neither does it automatically produce ethical damnation. It is a life of navigating between the sacred and the profane.

“To be a Dutch burgher,” Schama declares, “meant avoiding being either godless or helpless.”[6] I agree. “Money-making, which the Calvinist Church so detested, was tolerated by distinguishing between proper and improper ways of making fortunes, and the concept of wealth as stewardship.”[7] The left could here note sarcastically, and accurately, that in the 17^th century “proper stewardship “ included piracy, slave trading, and colonial exploitation. “To be Dutch,” he concludes, “still means coming to terms with the moral ambiguities of materialism,” now as in the Golden Age.[8] Yes.

But coming to terms with the moral ambiguities of materialism is the life of any bourgeois person, Dutch or Florentine, American or English, Japanese or South Asian. The early Medici bankers, two centuries before Schama’s Dutch, writes Tim Parks, faced the same problem in ethical mechanics. “Precisely because [Cosimo il Vecchio] cares about his eternal soul he is aware of a fierce tension between the competing demands of the sacred and the secular. A rich and powerful man who is also a devout Christian must needs be anxious.”[9] Such a bourgeois anxiety, Parks notes, would not describe the late Medici, by that time aristocratic dukes rather than high-bourgeois bankers.

You can’t be rich and be loved, they say. The superstition is that to get rich you have to steal. Even the rich half believe it. The anxiety of the rich middling sort has been famous in social theorizing for a century, since Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, as Schama notes. It was lively in 18^th-century writing on social ethics, too, such as that of Montesquieu and Adam Smith commending the bourgeoisie. And the anxiety-producing tension between the sacred and the profane has been an obsession in Christianity since the Sermon on the Mount.

A hungry peasant or a well-heeled aristocrat has, as we say, no issues with money and consumption. It’s “eat black bread every chance you get” or “endow St. Paul’s with stained glass.” No issues there. But the middenstand live with the moral ambiguities of materialism. They have so very much of that matter, after all, and know how it was earned. Should a tithe for my church be reckoned before or after taxes? Is it hubris for Silas Lapham to build a vulgar house in the Back Bay? Should Emma Woodhouse persuade Harriet not to marry a mere farmer?

If the bourgeois Dutch nowadays excuse their wealth with good works such as the expedition to Srebrenica, so do bourgeois Americans now, who attend church for this purpose in startling numbers, and who like the Dutch embark on errands of mercy abroad which they sometimes do not have the aristocratic courage or peasant faithfulness to finish. In the great days of bourgeois Florence and Venice the churches themselves were lusciously decorated in expiation for the taking of interest and the taking of advantage. Parks instances the tomb and old sacristy in the Church of San Lorenzo commissioned from Brunelleschi and Donatello by Cosimo’s father, the founder of the bank.[10] The guilt and pride of the bourgeoisie has festooned our cities.

As Schama himself conceded, “the tensions of a capitalism that endeavored to make itself moral were the same whether in sixteenth-century Venice, seventeenth-century Amsterdam or eighteenth-century London.”[11] That is the right tactic for reforming the our discussions about the rise of the bourgeoisie: namely, to note and analyze its ethical tensions. The mistake is to flee from the very word “bourgeois” because some people use it to mean “bad bosses,” or indeed from the word “ethics” because some people use it to mean “inessential rules of business just short of indictable crimes,” or “morality” because some people use it to mean “puritanical, sex-obsessed hypocrisy.”

Schama has a fascinating chapter on housewifery. Why do the Dutch scrub their stoops? Why in Dutch but not in other Germanic languages is the word for “clean” the same as the word for “beautiful”? The Japanese, by the way, are similar. Among both people, and not among their neighbors, “cleanliness” = “beauty,” and so “be beautiful” makes sense as an ethical command: be clean, which anyone can achieve. Such an aesthetic can perhaps be traced in the restraint of Japanese domestic architecture and the similarly “clean” lines of high modernism, in which the Dutch came to excel.

Schama notes that the importance of The Home to bourgeois society was “not of course peculiar to the Netherlands.”[12] “The family household,” he writes, “was the saving grace of Dutch culture that otherwise would have been indelibly soiled by materialism.”[13] Note the image of soiling by contact with the world. The moral ambiguity of compromise in the market is seen as dirty, touching a hundred hands. The Dutch home has soap and towels and moral clarity. The market entails carefully judged degrees of trust, orders of ability, the relativity of a price. At home the man retreats to the sacred absolutes of love, obligation, power. We say it is his castle, Het Slot, where he is no longer required to calculate and deal.

In 1652 Owen Felltham stood amazed at the houses of Flanders, “the best eye beauties of their country,” of which “their lining is yet more rich than their outside; not in hangings [that is, tapestries] but in pictures, which even the poorest are there furnished with.” In probate inventories we learn of deceased Netherlanders of quite ordinary bourgeois status leaving hundreds of paintings. A blacksmith would literally hang an oil paintings on the wall beside his forge. Over a million paintings, it has been reckoned, poured out of the workshops of Holland in the Golden Age.

“Their houses they keep cleaner than their bodies,” Felltham notes with disdain, and then adopts a Cavalier and Anglican Protestant and English haughtiness in asserting further that the Catholic Flemings keep “their bodies [cleaner] than their souls.”[14] No: the cleaning of bodies and houses and front stoops is soul-cleansing, too, said the Dutch and Flemings. The northern European bourgeois home is not in truth a “castle.” It is a temple. Compare the spiritual character of personal hygiene and house cleaning among the Japanese—though there the custom is not at all of modern or bourgeois origin.

“The effort to moralize materialism” is told in the Netherlands, of course, in characteristically Dutch ways, which Schama persuasively illustrates. The word over-vloed, for example, means “abundance, copia.” But the literal meaning, “over flood,” put Dutch people in mind of sea water surging onto the rich but low-lying provinces of Holland and Zeeland—”Zeeland” means “sea land” claimed from and bravely facing the waves. The image reminded self-critical Calvinists of overwhelmed dikes every ten years or so, now here, now there, with gigantic regional disasters remembered for generations every century or so, Saint Elizabeth’s Day in 1421, for example, 72 villages in Zeeland abruptly engulfed in a night, over 100,000 people drowned; or latterly, January 31, 1953. A famous modern poem speaks of eeuwigen rampen/ gevreesd en gehoord, “eternal disasters feared and heard.” Flooding of water figures repeatedly in worries about an over-flood of riches.

Material abundance seems like such a force of nature, crushing all. Nothing is more abundant than the sea. To be deprived by overflooding riches of the necessity to work was bad, not good, because these were bourgeois, work-admiring people. Dutch has a terrifying word, kwelwater, the water that quietly seeps under an apparently sound dike. It is related in folk etymology to kwellen, “to torment, to torture.” A Calvinist, at any rate the rigorist predikant who after 1619 claimed precedence in religious affairs in the Republic, would readily extend it to the seeping corruptions of the soul. The Netherlanders’ “fear of drowning in destitution and terror [from water] was exactly counterbalanced by their fear of drowning in luxury and sin [from wealth].”[15] The Dutch stole the land from the sea, and worried about the counterclaim of nature, or of human nature. “Let us clean our stoops, and our souls,” they repeated uneasily as they worked.

But is the moral effort especially Dutch? Ik denk het niet. I don’t think the Dutch moralized their riches and other bourgeois do not.

The American bourgeoisie, for example, moralizes its riches as just rewards for cowboy courage, or as a gospel of philanthropy of the Carnegie/ Mellon type, or as a democratic creed of opportunity seized. The Hindu bourgeoisie moralizes its riches as the favor of Ganesha or the expression of spiritual worth from a previous reincarnation or as provisioning for those pesky cousins. As behavior, of course, a sheer materialism without sincere reference to the transcendent is common enough in all societies, bourgeois or not. But it is the official theory of none. Official theories are about the transcendent, a Beyond. Every human yearns for it.

Schama does not compare enough with other countries to make his case for Dutch exceptionalism. The same problem is seen among historians of the United States trying with exclusively American evidence to make a case for American exceptionalism. The very phrase “American exceptionalism,” it appears, arose in the 1920s in discussions among Communists as to why America did not respond to socialism in a manner comparable with Europe.[16] The exceptionalisms are founding myths.

The Dutch were not in fact exceptional in character, merely a little early compared to the English or the French and a little late compared with the Florentines and Venetians. The Low Countries north and south were the earliest northern European regions to be thoroughly citified.[17] In 1467 Charles, Duke of Burgundy, ruled over a town-rich region, matched only by northern Italy. In 1600 the northern Netherlands had 19 cities of over 10,000 population, as against only 6 in a Britain five or six times larger in total population.[18] One in four Dutch northerners, Jan de Vries reckons, lived in towns of 10,000 or larger in 1600, one in five in the Spanish Netherlands, that is, Belgium. Only one in seventeen Englishmen did.[19] The Low Countries were the first bourgeois society in the north. Bourgeois, I say—to preserve the comparison with other societies, such as our own.

That is one reason to keep the word “bourgeois.” It does not have to mean “egotistical wretch.” God or Nature or Humpty Dumpty does not determine what words mean. We do. “Bourgeois” can mean, if we wish to use words this way—and can get over being spooked by Marx—“city dweller practicing an honored profession or owning a business or functioning at a managerial level in someone else’s enterprise, including governmental and non-profit enterprises.”

Such a person faces a particular set of ethical problems. He has the anxious ethical task of learning how to be a counselor yet self-prudent, a salesman yet other-loving, a boss yet just, a bureaucrat yet courageous, a scientist yet faithful. Schama is right to emphasize the ethical tensions of capitalism. But the Dutch are merely an early instance, as the Venetians and Florentines and Genoese were still earlier, with the Hanseatic League in attendance, and Osakans and Singaporeans later, of a by-now worldwide social class and a by-now worldwide ethical problem, namely, the tensions of bourgeois-ness ascendant. Avoiding the very word in fear of its historical-materialist accretions doesn’t help. The way to refute historical materialism is to examine the material and spiritual facts, as Schama does. Avoiding the B word is no help.

Still, why not bow to the common prejudice and use instead “middle class” or “middling sort” or “the managerial/professional/upper-bureaucratic/upper-entrepreneurial class” or “SES I, II, and the higher-status members of III and IV,” or even Schama’s “burghers,” which is all I mean?

Well, I admit to a contrariness here, a wish to slow down the corruption of meaningful words. The word “rhetoric,” for example, which for two millennia meant “the offering of good reasons,” has been corrupted since the 17^th century to become in English—less so in other European languages, I think—another of the very numerous English words for false speech. Let’s recover it. “Anarchism,” which means in Greek “without a ruler,” that is, without an all-powerful State, has been corrupted in American English since the late 19^th century to become just another word for nihilistic bomb-throwing. Let’s recover it. And “feminism,” which meant at its coinage an advocacy for the flourishing of women, has been corrupted in some minds since the 1970s to become just another word for bra-burning man hating—thus the late Bob Hope: “Feminists burn their bras, then complain about lack of support.” Let’s recover it, too.

I want to recover the word “bourgeois” by taking it back from its enemies. The word “capitalist,” referring in the opinion of Communists in the 1880s to greedy monopolists of the means of production, was taken back in the 1980s to mean “advocates for and actors in free markets.” “Quaker” and “Tory” originated as sneers, but were calmly appropriated by the victims and made honorable.

In April of 1566 two hundred armed and Protestant-sympathizing aristocrats from the Low Countries presented a petition to Margaret of Parma, Catholic Philip’s regent in Brussels, urging her to grant religious tolerance. She was advised by one of her counselors to pay them no heed. They were merely, said he in his aristocratic French, “gueux,” that is, “beggars.” Never mind that the petitions were themselves French-speaking aristocrats.

The Netherlandish noblemen seized upon the word, and called themselves proudly thereafter Beggars, Dutch Geuzen. Baron Henry Brederode, their leader, was called Le Grand Gueux. That summer the new word was claimed too by the Protestant iconoclasts. “Vivent les Gueux,” the rioters cried in Antwerp, or perhaps “Leven de Geuzen,” as they trashed centuries of religious art. [20]

The word has remained alive in the Dutch language. A group in 1568 devoted to the murder of Catholic priests called itself the Bosgeuzen, Forest Beggars. The pirate navy which took Brill from the Spanish in 1572 called itself the Watergeuzen, Sea Beggars. The orthodox Calvinists marching to kill off toleration in 1616 called themselves the Mud Beggars. One of the illegal newspapers during the German occupation of the Second World War was De Geus, The Beggar. The normal Dutch word for such reversals of a sneer became geuzennamen, beggars-names.

I hope to make “bourgeois” a geuzennaam, to remake a word of contempt into a word of honor.

[1] Huizinga, “Spirit of the Netherlands,” 1935 (1968), p. 111.

[2] On the Social Contract, Bk. I, Chp. VI, end, and footnote, in Basic Political Writings. Harvey points this out in Mansfield 2003, p. 9. Rousseau says in Footnote 4 that “Quand Bodin a voulu parler de nos citoyens et bourgeois, il a fait une lourde bévue en prenant les uns pour les autres“ (”When [Jean] Bodin wanted to speak of our citizens and bourgeois, he committed a terrible blunder in taking the one for the other”). http://un2sg4.unige. ch/athena/ rousseau/jjr_ cont.html#4.

[3] Schama, Embarrassment, 1987, p. 568.

[4] Schama, Embarrassment, 1987, p. 567.

[5] Schama, Embarrassment, 1987, p. 11.

[6] Schama, Embarrassment, 1987, p. 420.

[7] Schama, Embarrassment, 1987, p. 420.

[8] Schama, Embarrassment, 1987, p. 609.

[9] Parks, “Cosimos,” 2002, p. 76.

[10] Parks, “Cosimos,” 2002, p. 75.

[11] Schama, Embarrassment, 1987, p. 49.

[12] Schama, Embarrassment, 1987, p. 399.

[13] Schama, Embarrassment, 1987, p. 388.

[14] Felltham, A Brief Character of the Low Countries, 1652, quoted in Gross, The New Oxford Book of English Prose, p. 95f.

[15] Schama, Embarrassment, 1987, p. 47.

[16] Ross, 1995, “American Exceptionalism,” p. 22.

[17] De Vries, European Urbanization, 1984, pp. 270-77, cited in Maddison, World Economy, 2001, p. 54. compare, however, the northern Italians of bourgeois character in Milan, Venice, Florence, Genoa, Pisa, Siena, and the like. In 1600 only Paris and London were in the club of over-100,000-population with Naples, Venice, Milan, Rome, and Palermo.

[18] Israel, Dutch Republic, 1995, pp. 115, 328; Maddison, World Economy, 2001, p. 54.

[19] De Vries, European Urbanization, 1984, pp. 30, 36, 39, and 46, quoted in Maddison, World Economy, 2001, p. 248.

[20] “Vivent les Gueux,” Israel, Dutch Republic, 1995, p. 148.

These white folks in Washington, they know how:

Treat a colored man just to see him bow.

Lawd, in a bourgeois town,

Hee! it’s a bourgeois town.

I got the bourgeois blues, gonna spread the news all around.[1]

At one time in French “bourgeois” meant without contempt merely “townsman-ly,” from a Germanic (not Latin) word for a walled town. It shows up in Edinburgh and the New York borough of Queens and, with Latin latro added on, a burglar, a thief preying on the town. It came itself from an Indo-European root, meaning “high.” So “belfry” from the Old French berfrei, a high place of freedom from attack. The tribe of Burgundi came from the high country of Savoy. The Norse berg, “mountain,” appears in Bergen, literally “the mountain,” and iceberg. All of the Germanic words, it says here in The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, revised and edited by Calvert Watkins, are cousins through their Proto-Indo-European grandparents with Latin words in fort-, such as “fort” and “fortitude,” or any strength.

Anyway bourgeois (boor-zhwa) is the adjective, describing Daddy, say, or the Long Island suburbs. It’s also in the French the noun for the singular male person, a burgher. Benjamin Franklin was “a bourgeois.” And strictly speaking in French, though odd-sounding in English, the plural men of the middle class go by the same word, those bourgeois trading news on the Rialto. The female burgheress, singular, adds an ­-e, bourgeoise (boor-zhwaz). Madame Bovary was a bourgeoise, and she and her friends bourgeoises, plural, with again no change in pronunciation. The whole class of such people are of course that appalling bourgeoisie (boor-zhwa-zee), whence H. L. Mencken’s sneering label, the “booboisie.”

Got it.

But consider this: in sociological fact you are probably a member of it. You may therefore still be using the word as a term of self-contempt, like the f-word for gays or the n-word for blacks. As Mencken also said, the businessman “is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.”[2]

After the Second World War the self-scorning of the middle class became a standard turn among even the non-Marxist clerisy, from C. Wright Mills to Barbara Ehrenreich. Ehrenreich wrote in Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (1989) of the bourgeoisie’s “prejudice, delusion, and even, at a deeper level, self-loathing.”[3] She would know about the self-loathing. Her father started as a copper miner (Ehrenreich was born in Butte) but became a corporate executive. She herself got a Ph.D. in biology, but was radicalized by Vietnam. So was I, incidentally, before my Ph. D. in economics took hold.

Self-loathing among the bourgeoisie has for a century and a half been a source of trouble. We need to rethink together the word and the social position. Guilt over success in a commercial society is for a victimless crime. Yet the children of the bourgeoisie seek an identity challenging that of their elders. The clerisy by which the children are taught accuses the middle class of inauthenticity, and plays on pseudo-aristocratic contempt for “middle” construed as “mediocre.” None of this makes very much sense. A commercial life can be as authentic and virtuous as that of a philosopher or priest. We need to recover its wholeness and holiness.

A reason to keep here the dishonored word “bourgeois” is to distinguish the rethinking from the statistical inquiries evoked by “middle class,” or the older “middling sort.” My focus is not mainly on how large the middle class actually was numerically speaking in 1600 or 1800 or now, although places where the middle class was exceptionally small, such as Russia in 1800, would perhaps be poor places to study bourgeois virtues. I’m not so sure of this. Certainly such places are interesting tests by absence. And one could I suppose have a bourgeois ideology active without an objectively large middle class. A Marxism attributing false consciousness to the majority of American working-class people who call themselves “middle class” would say so.

The townly and businesslike ideology evoked here by “bourgeois” occurs anciently in any city of trade, whether or not such attitudes come to rule the place. On the other hand, a large and ill-defined middle class such as America’s can dilute bourgeois virtues, contrary to expectations, importing dangerous nostalgias like the cowboy-and-detective myth. The samurai myth has done similar mischief in Japan.

The middle class is divided into three parts, which by no means always get along with each other. The haute or grande bourgeoisie is the class of the big bosses, the owners of large factory and department-store, the directors and other denizens of corporate boardrooms, the bankers and merchants of the grander sort. In Europe they have long run the cities. In Holland the urban upper class from the 15^th century on was called the de regenten, the regents. By the 17^th century some 2000 bourgeois ran the Dutch Republic.

In the United States the regents become in a few generations America’s so-called “aristocracy” and send their children to Andover and Yale—thus the Vanderbilts, descendent from a ferry-boy on Staten Island, or the Kennedy’s, from gangsters and ward bosses; or the Bushes from a more distinguished family, containing Princess Diana, George Washington, FDR, Hugh Hefner, Benedict Arnold, John Hinkley, Jr., and, of all people, John Kerry. Eventually a few thousand of the American “aristocracy” came to run the country, too, a power elite.

But “aristocracy” is a European word and concept. The United States never had a literal feudalism and therefore was unusually open to Lockean ideas of equal access to life, liberty, and property.[4] The power elite runs things, I repeat. But it is partly open, unlike the class of regents in 18^th-century Holland. Who in the virulently anti-Irish time of 1860 in America would have anticipated that after 1960 every American president except Ford would have some Irish ancestry?[5] With no feudalism, except for a while a real Dutch version in the Hudson Valley and briefly a faux version in the South, the U. S. of A. has had no literal nobility. Never mind the pretensions of Park Avenue and Newport, R. I.

The admirable Theodore Roosevelt, whose mother came from slaveholders in Savannah and whose father came from two centuries of Knickerbocker merchants and landowners in New York, was America’s closest approach to a real aristocrat among modern presidents, with his fifth cousin Franklin. Before that presidentially speaking you have to go back to the Adams clan or maybe William Henry Harrison for even a whiff of “aristocracy,” though almost all American presidents in the 19^th century were members of the clerisy—lawyers, mainly, like Nixon or Clinton in our day.

In thoroughgoing republics like America and Switzerland even the most haute of the bourgeoisie never quite make a true aristocracy.[6] Contrast England well into the 20^th century, with hundreds upon hundreds of Teddy-Roosevelt figures, but ones who were actual dukes and marquises, owning much of the country’s land rents, running company boards and staffing the Empire. The undertow of feudal privilege and the angry resistance to it can be felt now even in social democracies like Holland, which in fact never had much of an aristocracy. Some of Europe’s most social democratic parts still have kings and queens: Britain, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands. The late Queen Mother Princess Julianna of the Netherlands said, “I come for the people, not for the directors.” And yet, compliments of the directors of Shell Oil, she was among the richest women in the world.

The second part of the bourgeoisie is the Coleridgian “clerisy,” what German historians have called the Bildungsbürgertum, the “education bourgeoisie,” and what has been called in Eastern Europe since the 19^th century the intelligentsia. That Europeans and their heirs kept making up praising or damning names for it—philosophes, Bildungsbürgertum, professionals, preachers, intelligentsia, intellectuals, Brahmins, mandarins, progressives, literati, illuminati, experts, brains trust, highbrows, egg heads, pointy heads, the best and the brightest, the chattering class, the talented tenth, the new class, the symbolic analysts, the creative class—testifies to its uneasy relation with the rest of society. The state bureaucrats of 18^th-century Prussia or the lawyers of 19^th-century Massachusetts or the college professors of 20^th-century California were neither aristocrats nor peasant nor proletarians, and so by a loose definition they were bourgeois.

Eric Hobsbawm disputes that in England there was in the 19^th century such a thing as a Bildungsbürgertum.[7] What is persuasive about his case is that the English clerisy was then small and, as he notes, did not follow party lines, as the Continental clerisy tended to do. England did not have until the 20^th century very many of the numerous high-status civil servants, among them party-line university professors, that Germany and France honored and multiplied in the 19^th century.

But even in England the clerisy was at least talky. In their study of the English middle class 1780-1850 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall observe that “lawyers, teachers, doctors, and above all the clergy and writers spent their lives manipulating words, explaining the middle class to itself.” They quote a writer on legal matters in the middle of the 19^th century asserting that “the professional classes. . . form the head of the great English middle class, keep up to the mark its standard of morality, and direct its intelligence.”[8] They overwhelmingly originated from the economic bourgeoisie—and from the literal clergy. Increasingly the “standard of morality” was critical of the fathers of the owning and managing bourgeoisie, to the advantage of the clerical sons wielding the pen.

We have a paradox at the outset here. Marx’s father was a lawyer, Engels himself a factory owner. French painters in the 19^th century were almost all from the bourgeoisie—with only an occasional Renoir from the working class or a Toulouse-Lautrec from the aristocracy. Yet the clerisy in its Romantic mood claimed a separate perch in the class system, separated especially from its parents of the bourgeoisie, a virtual papacy from which it issued bulls and excommunications. “How did it happen,” asked César Graña looking back on the mid-19^th-century treason of the clerisy, “that while one section of the bourgeoisie was efficiently gathering profits with unbending matter-of-factness, another was giving itself over to philosophical despair, the cult of sensitivity, and the enthronement of the nonutilitarian virtues?”[9]

By now the “creative class”—Richard Florida claims it is 30% of the American workforce, up from 10% in 1900—includes occupations once viewed as workingclass or, if especially profitable, mercantile. Think for example of painters in 17^th century Holland, who were apprentices or masters, poor or rich, but anyway mercantile.[10] Contrast the clerical and anti-market cast of modern painters. They chatter as much as they paint. Language is often as important in modern art as is the art work itself. One is always a little surprised at the smooth articulateness of modern painters, selling, selling. Often language becomes the art: “C’est ne pas une pipe.”

American and British journalists once thought of themselves as workingmen, mostly, right through World War II: Scoop or Front Page. Journalists on the Continent had a higher tone, and therefore priestly claims. A famous radical poem of Holland in the 1930s, written on a slow news day by such a journalist—Jan Gresshof; he was fired for printing the poem in his newspaper—speaks of the conservative wing of his colleagues of the clerisy, “de dominee, de dokter, de notaris,” the minister, the doctor, the lawyer-notary, who together strolled complacently on Arnhem’s town square of an evening. “There is nothing left on earth for them to learn,/ They are perfect and complete,/ Old liberals, distrustful and healthy.”[11]

Whether conservative or radical they are the Experts, of whom Harry Truman said, “An expert is someone who doesn’t want to learn anything new, because then he wouldn’t be an expert.” They are the chattering artists and the preaching intellectuals, too, experts in arts and ideas—though the average artist or professor after 1930s radicalism would be appalled to be classed with de dominee, de dokter, de notaris. That is the historical paradox, and the main worry in this book: a class genetically part of the bourgeoisie, and before 1848 sympathetic to it, has in its radicalism for a century and a half damned. . . the bourgeoisie.

The third part of the middle class is the petite bourgeoisie, the lower middle class, the owner of the corner grocery store, the lower middle manager, in former times the small but not subsistence farmer. Most Americans, as Europeans did not, put the upper working class in the bourgeoisie, and invited them into the bourgeois fraternal societies: the head clerk in the office, the electrician, the freight conductor, the chief sawyer.[12]

In his book The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (2003) Robert Johnston argues that the lower middle class has been tagged wrongly with the label of reaction. His Portland heroes such as Harry Lane, a U. S. senator who defended Joe Hill and voted against American entry into the Great War, or Lora Little, editor and an activist against conventional medicine, had all of them a touch of the clerisy. You can’t be an advocate without being easy with pen or speech. But they were advocates for the small proprietor against the expert, and did not join in the Progressive and bildungsbürgertumlich enthusiasm for top-down social engineering. Lane for example was eloquent against the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Johnston’s middle-class radicals wanted the little man and his wife to run things.

They were more hostile to the upper middle class, the “moneyed interest” above them, than to the blue-collar workers below them, from whom they often came. Such lower-middle-class folk were working stiffs. It was the non-working bond holders and the boodling politicians and the arrogant bureaucrats, the parasites on all working people, who evoked their wrath, à la Michael Moore. Damned right. Johnston notes that in the survey of Akron, Ohio residents in 1941 by Alfred Winslow Jones the lower middle class “sought a ‘middle ground’ between collectivism and absolute property rights.” The majority of Akron’s small business owners “believed that unemployed miners should steal coal to keep warm, that the Flint sit-down strike was proper, and that neighbors should prevent farm auctions and eviction of renters.”[13]arry

La grande bourgeoisie, the clerisy, la petite bourgeoisie: objectively bourgeois all.

One can be in science a lumper or a splitter, talking about chest and hip structures of the great apes in general or of humans in particular. Johnston is right that you can for some purposes usefully split the lower middle class from the rest, and study it comparatively. But of course the choice is pragmatic, depending on your purpose. If your purpose is Johnston’s, to rescue the lower middle class of our great-grandparents from demonization by historians of Nazi Germany like Arno Mayer, who on slender evidence have assigned fascism to shop owners, then you split.[14]

If your purpose is mine, to begin “redeeming the middling folk,” as Johnston puts it, all of them—though especially the non-intellectuals despised since 1848 by the clerisy—then you lump everybody from sweating assistant managers to glittering CEOs.

There’s no permanent thing out there in the world for all times and all purposes called “the middle class.” Social categories, no less than the anatomy of great apes, evolve, and furthermore what will matter about the categories to the social scientist depends on time and on human purposes. Statistics and other facts are relevant, but never come supplied with their own interpretation. Johnston cites on this point the great British student of the working class, E. P. Thompson, who argued that over a generation or two there are changes in the definition of “the working class.”[15] Likewise one can see in English history a bourgeoisie of subordination to the charter-granting power c. 1249 evolving into a bourgeoisie of confidence c. 1649, beheading an anointed king, and then c. 1949 evolving into a bourgeoisie of generality and even of honor.

We are all bourgeois now, a bourgeois apologist would say, or we should work on becoming so, because work after all is a good thing. Not a dishonor. That is the common element in any bourgeoisie, the honoring of work apart from manual drudgery or heroic daring. The European aristocracy delights rather in haughty idleness. As Stephen Greenblatt notes, in Shakespearean England “there was virtually no respect for labor; on the contrary, it was idleness that was prized and honored.”[16] Bourgeois work is dealing, managing, advising. It is verbal work, the speaking of ideas, the calculating of amounts, what you and I are doing now, for example. Note that well into the 20^th century in England the word “gentleman” meant “often, a man whose means enable him to live in easy circumstances without engaging in trade,” a man who did not need to work at anything.[17] “As for gentlemen,” writes one of them in Shakespeare’s time, “whosoever . . . can live idly and without manual labor. . . he shall be called master.”[18] The shift in the meaning of the word follows the spread of work-admiring middle-class values.

Unsurprisingly the word “gentleman” shifts away from the prizing and honoring of idleness first in bourgeois America. Everyone in the American middle class from the small-town plumbing contractor to the captain of industry admires purposeful, energetic work with words, and in a democratic spirit does not disdain helping out occasionally with the manual labor, either. Get busy! Even professors in America are businesspeople, as for instance Morris Zapp in David Lodge’s early academic novels, or Stanley Fish in real life. Busy, busy, busy. An American professor Does the Job, he says to himself proudly, whether the work is of brain or of hand. Get the Job Done. Henry Ford inspects the line. Sam Walton stocks the shelves.

The pretensions to leisure among the wives of the upper middle class has therefore been an embarrassment and a disability, cordoning them off from power. In the old days if the wife worked hard at housewifery or charitable works she was somewhat redeemed, at any rate in her own sphere, though still an object of fun in the style of Helen Hokinson cartoons in the old New Yorker. But eating bonbons has never been honored by the American bourgeoisie. Among the bourgeoisie a job of work is figured as autonomy and identity, adulthood and masculinity. In 1898 Charlotte Perkins Gilman celebrated “the demand in [even bourgeois] women not only for their own money, but their own work for the sake of personal expression. . . . Human labor is an exercise of faculty, without which we would cease to be human.”[19] Or at least we cease to be bourgeois humans, self-defining workers.

Victoria Thompson argues that in 19^th century France the bourgeois women were excluded by convention from making money in order to make that work honorable for their men. The bourgeois men were worried about their lack of aristocratic standing. Women’s production, the pride of French style, perfectly illustrated later by Coco Chanel, and still later in our New-World versions by Julia Child or Martha Stewart, was supposed to arise only from their devotion to consumption: les doigts de fée, the “fairy fingers,” of the woman “constituted an extension of her ‘natural’ feminine attributes rather than incursion into the [male, market, bourgeois] world.”[20] Hers wasn’t real work, though a fine, fine thing, you understand.

The economist Everett Hagen saw the high valuation of work as arising from the status anxieties of [male] English Dissenters and Lowland Scots in 17^th and 18^th century Britain and of impoverished samurai and prosperous merchants in late Tokugawa Japan. An aristocrat is the duke of so-and-so regardless of whether or not he has a go from time to time at soldiering or at estate management. The very word “aristocrat,” by the way, is a French Revolutionary coinage, out of the older and classical “aristocracy” and “aristocratic.” Homo ludens, the species of “playing man,” is an aristocratic or a peasant ideal of a life, weekends of aristocratic hunting and drinking chronicled in a novel by Woodhouse, or equally alcoholic weekends of proletarian soccer rioting in Amsterdam by yobs from Millwall or Sheffield United. Carefree. The aristocrat or proletarian is often portrayed in bourgeois fiction, which is most fiction, as unworried. At least that’s how it looks to a bourgeois worried about the next deal or the next deadline.

The proletarian or peasant sometimes feels driven to his work by the lash. He would rather not. And even when he exercises the proud excellence of a Silas in New Hampshire c. 1915 making a load of hay—”He bundles every forkful in its place,/ And tags and numbers it for future reference,/ So he can find and easily dislodge it/ In the unloading”—he is merely the hired man.

The bourgeois dream is different—to “be my own boss,” he says, working harder than when bossed by others. The owner-managers of American restaurants or American farms earn low pay per hour because they value so highly their busy autonomy on the job, 5:00 in the morning to 11:00 at night. In 2003 Robert Johnston pointed out that, after a long decline, the rate of self-employment in the American economy was growing. He quoted George Steinmetz and Erik Wright on its emotional significance: “at least a quarter of the total labor force, and a third of the male labor force, either is or has been self-employed.”[21]

And never mind the large additional percentage who have never in fact been self-employed and never actually will be, but have an unreasonable hope they will be self-employed in the future. The bourgeois thinks of himself as entrepreneurial, and especially in America he admires such go-getting, even if he has had in fact a routine career as an employee in a great corporation or a big government office. Napoleon is supposed to have said that his ordinary soldier carried the baton of a marshal of France in his kit bag. Thus a military career open to talents. The American middle manager thinks the same way, and has only a slightly larger chance of actually putting his baton to use.

Property, too, is admired and sought among the bourgeoisie, of course. Acceptance of property rights is shared with the aristocracy. No trespassing. This is mine. I get to use it up if I wish. It has been noted often, from Virgil in his Georgics to Thomas Jefferson in his letters, that having property lends respect, and even self-respect. “Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens,” wrote Jefferson. “They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country, and wedded to its liberty and interests, by the most lasting bonds.”[22] Owning is a Good Thing. Thus Bush II and his “ownership society,” at least in its words.

Great-souled gestures of consumption, giving to the church, a granite counter-top for the remodeled kitchen, a summer home in Wisconsin, that third car, the Republican Party, are shared with the aristocrats, too. Since most of the bourgeoisie do not actually know how the aristocrats spend their wealth, the symbolizing of prestige is imitated mainly from other, somewhat grander bourgeois. This is Pierre Bourdieu’s point in his exploration of class and consumption in France, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (1979). Spending property on hobbies and education and status-affirming toys helps make bourgeois people who they are. Everyone of means, they will say to themselves, has an elaborate gas grill under a green cover for the rain. We must have one, too. Everyone of means gives to the church. We must give, too.

But bourgeois property is different from that of the aristocrat or peasant. It is neither the easy inheritance claimed by the aristocrat nor the overused commons claimed by the peasant. It is not a given, zero-sum lump, as these two are. It is bound up, again, with a vision of freely-chosen work. Bourgeois property is at least in fable remade every generation, like the tools of a guildsman. “Human capital” is a modern bourgeois’ idea of skill. When Theodore Schultz, the inventor of the concept in economics, visited an Alabama farm family in the late 1940s he wondered to the mother and father about its poverty in run-down hog pens and an unpainted house. The mother replied in effect, “No, you are mistaken, Professor Schultz. We are not poor. We are rich: we purposely ran down the farm in order to invest in the education of our four children, all the way through college. That’s where our treasure is.”

Like a college education, property in home ownership is a sign of middle-class status in the United States, a modern version of the Jeffersonian and Roman republican idea of farm ownership as citizenship. The education and the home are not literally inherited, at least (again) in fable. They are bought during each bourgeois life, working for the mortgage, paying off the loans.

With the workers the bourgeoisie shares a resentment of the Great and Good, as they are called jeeringly in bourgeois England, and shares an eagerness to read about their fall. The petite bourgeoisie especially, most of all in egalitarian places like Australia or America, regards the political or corporate bosses as mafia dons, war lords, smooth-skinned thieves. Thus a shopkeeper in Santa Fe describes the sales tax, as he calculates it, as “5% for the governor.” The hostility to their betters among the bourgeoisie is sometimes matched by a contempt for their inferiors, and such a mix does have fascist possibilities. But the better angels of the bourgeoisie are genially populist, like Clarence the angel to George Bailey the savings-and-loan banker in It’s a Wonderful Life.

Equality, property, and honorable verbal work, helping out with the manual work at the crisis, these three abide. But the greatest of these is honorable work.

[1] Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter, “Bourgeois Blues,” 1937 (copyright 1959 Folkways Music Publisher, Inc.).

[2] Mencken, “Types of Men,” 1922.

[3] Quoted in Johnston, Radical Middle Class, 2003, p. 5, which contains a good analysis of the phenomenon of the anti-bourgeois bourgeoisie.

[4] Hartz, Liberal Tradition, 1955, following Tocqueville.

[5] Murphy, “American Presidents,” 2004.

[6] On Switzerland, see Kocka, “The European Pattern,” 1988 (1993), p. 26.

[7] Hobsbawm, “ English Middle Class,” 1988 (1993), pp. 134, 138, 145.

[8] Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 1987, p. 264.

[9] Graña, Bohemian vs. Bourgeois, 1964, p. 17.

[10] Florida, Creative Class, 2002, p. 332.

[11] Reprinted and translated in Horst, Low Sky, 1996, p. 142. The poem was called “Liefdesverklaring,” or “Love-Declaration.”

[12] In such matters the Dutch were perhaps a little more democratic even before the War than, say, the English or the French. Accompanying the representatives of the Bildungsbürgertum on their evening stroll in Gresshof’s poem was a representative from the petite bourgeoisie, “en ‘t klerkje dat vandaag wat vroeger klaar is,“ “and a little clerk who today is finished a bit early.”

[13] Johnston, Radical Middle Class, 2003, p. 28.

[14] See Johnston’s review of the critics of the Lasswell-Lipset-Mayer theory of petit bourgeois reaction, Chp. 6 of Radical Middle Class.

[15] Johnston, Radical Middle Class, 2003, p. 13.

[16] Greenblatt, Will in the World, 2004, p. 76.

[17] Remember: unattributed word-lore is from The Oxford English Dictionary.

[18] Quoted in Greenblatt, Will in the World, 2004, p. 77.

[19] Gilman, Women and Economics, 1898, p. 157.

[20] Thompson, Virtuous Marketplace, 2000, p. 174.

[21] Quoted in Johnston, Radical Middle Class, 2003, p. 264.

[22] Jefferson to John Jay 23 August 1785, http:// wikisource.org/wiki/Letter_to_ John_Jay_-_ August_23,_1785.

In 1946 the anthropologist Ruth Benedict wrote a book purporting to explain the ethical system of the Japanese to their former enemies. It perhaps said more, Clifford Geertz has noted, about a “look-into-ourselves-as-we-would-look-unto-others.”1 But never mind. With the substitution of “bourgeois” for “Japanese” her declaration of intent could serve here:

This volume . . . is not a book specifically about [bourgeois] religion or economic life or politics or the family. It examines [bourgeois] assumptions about the conduct of life. It describes these assumptions as they have manifested themselves whatever the activity in hand. It is about what makes [the bourgeoisie into an ethical one].2

I‘ll use the words “ethical” and “moral” interchangeably, though favoring “ethical.” In origin “ethical” is Greek and at the height of Greek philosophy leaned towards character and education, while “moral” is Latin and always leaned towards custom and rule. But this shadow of a difference was blurred even by the Greco-Roman moralists, and is not preserved in modern English, even in precise philosophical English. As happens often in our magpie English tongue, “ethical” and “moral” have become merely two words for the same thing, derived from different languages.

The newspapers restrict “ethics” to business practice, usually corrupt, and “morality” to sexual behavior, often scandalous. I opt for the ordinary, non-newspaper usage that takes “morality” to be a synonym for “ethics,” which is to say the patterns of character in a good person. True, the words have become entangled in the Red vs. Blue states and their culture wars. The left once embraced situational ethics and the right favored a moral majority. Now the Christian and progressive left wonders at the ethics of capital punishment and the Christian and neocon right wonders at moral decline. But at the outset, let us have peace.

“Ethics” is the system of the virtues. A “virtue” is a habit of the heart, a stable disposition, a settled state of character, a durable, educated characteristic of someone to exercise her will to be good. The definition would be circular if “good” just meant the same thing as “virtuous.” But it’s more complicated than that. Alasdair MacIntyre’s famous definition is: “a virtue is an acquired human quality the possession of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving such goods.”3

A virtue is at the linguistic level something about which you can coherently say “you should practice X”—courage, love, prudence, temperance, justice, faith, hope, for example. Beauty is therefore not a virtue in this sense of “exercising ones will.” One cannot say, “You should be beautiful” and make much sense, short of the extreme makeover. Neat, clean, well turned out—yes. But not “beautiful.”

At the simplest level, people have two conventional and opposed remarks they make nowadays when the word “ethics” comes up. One is the fatherly assertion that ethics can be reduced to a list of rules, such as the Ten Commandments. Let us post the Sacred List, they say, in our courthouses and high schools, and watch its good effects. In a more sophisticated form the fatherly approach is a natural-law theory that, say, homosexuality is bad, because unnatural.4

In contrast, the other remark that people make reflects the motherly assertion that ethics is after all particular to this family or that person. Let’s get along with each other and not be too strict. Bring out the jello and the lemonade. In its sophisticated form the motherly approach is a cultural relativist theory that, say, female circumcision and the forced marriage of 11-year-old girls are all right—because it is their custom.5

The “virtue-ethic” parallel to such college-freshman commandments or college-sophomore relativism is the vocabulary of the hero and of the saint. In its senior high-school version the two split by gender, at least conventionally, and at least nowadays. A man wants to be Odysseus, a woman Holy Mary, the one physically courageous, the other deeply loving.

The sharpness of the gender split appears to be only a couple of centuries old. By 1895 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. could declare that “the ideals of the past for men have been drawn from war, as those for women have been drawn from motherhood.”6 “War is for men,” said Mussolini some decades later, “what birth is for women.”7 Now at the beginning of the 21^st century we still speak in our goodness talk mainly of courage and of love, the fatherly rhetoric of conservatives and the motherly rhetoric of liberals.8

The models are popular heroes and saints—“Sergeant York was wonderfully courageous” or “Mother Teresa loved the poor”—and by analogy we praise the ordinary little virtues. We witness “Some village Hampden, that with dauntless breast/ The little tyrant of his fields withstood,” and we applaud. A local boy endures a football injury, courageously. Brave boy. A young almost-bride mourning for her soldier walks up and down, up and down, in her stiff brocaded gown, and we weep. A local girl volunteers at the retirement community, lovingly. Sweet girl.

Such talk is on its way to the virtues. But it’s still high-school stuff. We can do better, getting all the way to graduate school, by being a little more philosophical. In particular, we can enfold the street talk of manly courage and womanly love, fatherhood and motherhood, into the seven virtues of the classical and Christian world. This is my main theme. To the natural-law and cultural-relativist theorists we can reply that virtues underlie their theories, too, and that the virtues are both less and more universal than they think. That’s what I propose to do, and then show you that a bourgeois, capitalist, commercial society can be “ethical” in the sense of evincing the Seven.

The virtues came to be gathered by the Greeks, the Romans, the Stoics, the Church, Adam Smith, and recent “virtue ethicists” into a coherent ethical framework. Until the framework somewhat mysteriously fell out of favor among theorists in the late 18^th century, most Westerners did not think in Platonic terms of the One Good—to be summarized, say, as Maximum Utility, or as the Categorical Imperative, or as the Idea of the Good. They thought in Aristotelian terms of Many Virtues, plural.

We shall better understand the nature of the ethical character [to ethos],” said Aristotle, “if we examine its qualities one by one.”9 That still seems a sensible plan, and was followed by almost all writers on ethics in the West, and quite independently of Aristotle in the East, until the cumulative effect of Machiavelli, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and Bentham at length killed it off. Thus, Edmund Spenser in The Fairie Queen (1596) celebrated in six books Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy.

Since about 1958 in English a so-called “virtue ethics”—as distinct from the Kantian, Benthamite, or contractarian views that dominated ethical philosophy from the late 18^th century until then—has revived Aristotle’s one-by-one program. “We might,” wrote Iris Murdoch in 1969 early in the revival, “set out from an ordinary language situation by reflecting upon the virtues. . . . since they help to make certain potentially nebulous areas of experience more open to inspection.”10 That seems reasonable.

Here are the Western Seven, with some of their subvirtues appended:

The Seven Virtues

• Hope

  optimism, imagination, and [with Courage] entrepreneurship

• Faith

  identity, integrity, loyalty, and [with Courage and Justice] honesty

• Justice

  social balance and honesty [with Courage and Faith],

• Courage

  autonomy, daring, endurance, steadfastness

• Temperance

  restraint, chastity, sobriety, humility, individual balance

• Prudence

  know-how, foresight, phronēsis, self-interest, contextual rationality

The system is a jerry-rigged combination of the “pagan” virtues appropriate to a free male citizen of Athens (Courage, Temperance, Justice, and Prudence) and the “Christian” virtues appropriate to a believer in Our Lord and Savior (Faith, Hope, and Love).

Jerry-rigged or not, the Seven, I will argue, cover what we need in order to flourish as human beings. So also might other ethical systems—Confucianism, for example, or Talmudic Judaism, or Native American shamanism—and these can be lined up beside the Seven for comparison. There are many ways to be human. But it is natural to start and for present purposes pretty much finish with the Seven, since they are the ethical tradition of a West in which bourgeois life first came to dominance.