A startling new book, published under the auspices of the American Psychological Association, edited and largely written by Christopher Peterson and Martin E. P. Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (2004), lends empirical support to the Seven, at any rate within the European tradition in which they were theorized. It seeks, as the philosopher Peter Danielson says in another connection, the “ethical genome.”[1] In 644 big-format text pages, using 2300 citations to the technical literature in clinical and social psychology and related fields, the 40 drafters of the chapters (which Peterson and Seligman then rewrote) present a “manual of the sanities,” that is, the “positive psychology” of healthy people. Studying sanity is an idea that the psychologist members the board for the Values in Action Institute of the Mayerson Foundation, which sponsored the volume, such as Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (remember: “CHICK-sent-me-high) and Howard Gardner, have been especially known for.

Peterson, Seligman, and the others detect 24 “ strengths of character,” on the basis of ten criteria, not all of which are satisfied for every strength (about half of the 24 do satisfy all ten). A character strength:

Ten Criteria for Twenty-Four Strengths of Character

A character strength:

• contributes to the good life, as for example:

  • Curiosity

  • Social Intelligence

• is valued in its own right:

  • Integrity

  • Humility

• does not diminish other people:

  • Kindness

  • Hope

  • Perspective

• does not have an admirable opposite:

  • Persistence

  • Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence

  • Gratitude

• can be assessed (that is, observed):

  • Vitality

  • Fairness

  • Leadership

  • Persistence

• is embodied in human exemplars:

  • Love

  • Spirituality

  • Creativity

• shows sometimes in children as prodigies:

  • Love of Learning

  • Self-Regulation

• shows sometimes in total absence:

  • Humor

  • Open-Mindedness

  • Bravery

• finds support in human institutions:

  • Forgiveness and Mercy

  • Citizenship

Source: Peterson and Seligman 2004, pp. 29-30 and throughout.

The ten criteria on the left side are on their face useful reflections on the virtues. Yet if they were merely speculative the exercise would be much less interesting. The authors, however, take seriously the matching of the criteria with the psychological literature, quantitative and qualitative. In other words the 24 strengths of character not mere assertions but findings, summarizing a gigantic scientific literature.

The 24 species of strengths are clustered into the encompassing genuses of: Courage, Humanity, Justice, and so forth—that is to say precisely the “virtues [,] . . . the core characteristics valued by philosophers and religious thinkers.”[2] The authors number them as six rather than seven, but this is mainly because they lump Hope and Faith together in one virtue named Transcendence, that is, “strengths that forge connections to the larger universe and provide meaning.”[3] Five of these “High Six” virtues they identify lay down with ease on the classical Seven—Transcendence [that is, Faith and Hope], Courage, Humanity [that is, Love, which appears in their classification as a “character strength” within what they view as the wider virtue], Justice, Temperance.

The only lack of fit is their genus of Wisdom-and-Knowledge, which is not Prudence seen as practical wisdom, Aristotle’s phronēsis, but intellectual strengths of character, namely, creativity, curiosity, open-mindedness, love of learning, and perspective. These are desirable strengths, surely. But in the classical definitions they would not be virtues at all, but aptitudes ethically indifferent—such as having a high percentage of fast-twitch muscles, the better to run a record mile or from the police. Or they would be sub-species of Prudence, not a genus substituting for it. Or perhaps they would be subspecies of Love of learning and or of Hope for a touch of the transcendent in art and science. Aquinas in fact did not believe that such “habits,” as he calls them, are properly classified as virtues.[4]

The psychologists instead put their version of what they call “Prudence” under the cardinal virtue of Temperance, and define it narrowly as “being careful about one’s choices; not taking risks.” This is a tiny part of the wider classical or Aquinian or Smithian concept of Prudence, and is in fact more naturally placed under Temperance. It’s the virtue of Proper Caution. Psychologists are likely to identify such a thing as “not taking risks” with what they call “impulse control,” which is rather easy to measure in experiments and questionnaires, and can even be found in a part of the brain. The drafting author of the chapter directly on Prudence, Nick Haslam, spends two pages worrying about such a reduction.

But in the classical definitions it is Temperance, not Prudence, which is the virtue of controlling impulses. Haslam, as revised by Peterson and Seligman, states flatly that “Aristotle does not . . . equate phronēsis with. . . impulse control,” which is correct. Aristotle and Plato and the rest had another word for self-control, sophrosynē [from sophron, sober], which Cicero translated as temperantia.[5] Prudence in the classical definitions is intellectual and calculative, like Justice, not emotion-controlling, like Temperance and Courage. Prudence belongs with the intellectual virtues, not with Temperance, and indeed could be said, as all writers from Plato to Adam Smith did say, to be the chief of the intellectual virtues.

Having criticized the Peterson and Seligman psychologists on this score I should admit the great truth of a theme underlying their work: that emotion and intellect are intertwined, not always to be distinguished—the book has four citations to Antonio Damasio’s thinking on the matter; though none to Martha Nussbaum’s. But that is precisely why, as the team asserts and as Aristotle, Aquinas, Adam Smith, Martha Nussbaum, and Deirdre McCloskey also assert, the virtues do make a coherent system, and not merely a fungible list of Good Things You Might Want to Get Hold Of.

Aquinas’ definition of Prudence, for example, is that Prudence is “any virtue which causes good in reason’s consideration.”[6] Prudence deals “rightly with those things that are for the sake of the end.” It is “reason rightly deliberating, judging, and commanding.” “There can be no moral virtue without prudence.”[7] Prudence as know-how, that is, figures in the exercise of any virtue. It should not be sorted away as a minor aspect of Temperance.

But I also agree with Peterson, Seligman, and their collaborators that the exact sorting of strengths into the wider virtues is not very important to their project, since their empirical work goes on always at the level of “strengths” or at the still lower level of “situational themes.”

Yet the sorting is important for my own project, namely, finding how the classical virtues lie down on capitalism. The team appears to me to have sorted mistakenly here, mainly because it has not looked carefully enough into the meaning in Western ethical history of “Prudence” as against “Wisdom” and “Temperance.” That’s no great sin in a splendid book and project. After all, even a well-regulated team of over 40 people can’t do everything, and they are to be congratulated for their just and prudent gestures towards the history of ethics.

One side of the problem, I would argue, is that the authors have confused phronēsis, practical wisdom, with sophia, theoretical wisdom. This at any rate is the way Aristotle typically used sophia, as supreme and scientific knowledge. According to Liddell and Scott, earlier sophia refers in fact to “skill” or indeed “practical wisdom.” You could contrast phronēsis instead with episteme, the usual Greek word for knowledge.[8] But anyway phronēsis is devalued by the prestige of theory. Aquinas did not think theoretical, speculativus wisdom was a virtue at all, but a gift of the Holy Spirit, though he himself possessed the gift to a miraculous degree. Aquinas distinguished for example the theoretical “knowledge” of chastity, the kind, say, a philosopher might have, from the prudential “knowledge by connaturality” that a truly chaste person has in her life.[9]

The definition of wisdom given in Chapter 2, “Universal Virtue? Lessons from History,” drafted by Katherine Dahlsgaard, depends revealingly on a German source, namely, certain researchers at the Berlin Max Planck Institute. It is “revealing” because as I’ve noted all Germanic languages except English have difficulty in translating Latin prudentia = Greek phronēsis. The Berliner Max Planckers speak of wisdom as “good judgment and advice about important but uncertain matters of life.”[10] Yes. But this is precisely phronēsis, or Latin practical prudentia, not Germanic Weisheit or wisdom, which mixes the practical and the theoretical. The Dutch word for philosophy is wijsbegeerte, wis[dom] desire, a calque on the Greek literal meaning, “love of theoretical wisdom.” English/French/Latin “prudence” is not Aristotle’s theoretical sophia, which Cicero translated as scientia and sapientia. Phronēsis /prudentia/prudence is a knowledge of means, not of ends, good judgment in practical matters, not a command of theories.

The Dahslgaard-drafted chapter quotes the Yale psychologist R. J. Sternberg (1998), another prominent psychologist on the board of the Values in Action Institute. Sternberg writes about one of his three sorts of intelligence: wisdom “is involved when practical intelligence is applied to . . . a balance of various self-interests . . . with the interests of others.”[11] Sternberg is here precisely not speaking of scientia or sapientia but of prudentia mixed with justitia. Note that he even uses the phrase which translates Aristotle’s phronēsis: “practical wisdom.”

And so later in the book, the Peterson-Seligman book repeatedly elides theoretical wisdom and practical prudence. The Haslam-drafted chapter on Prudence does a better job sometimes, because he has evidently troubled to read Aristotle, if not perhaps Aquinas. But even Haslam gets entangled in sophia, maybe because he was saddled with the group’s too-wide definition of “Wisdom.” [12]

The group have also, on the other border of the word “prudence,” as I said, confused prudence with temperance. Haslam in particular seems to struggle honorably with it. The confusion is important because most of the psychological measures of Prudence mix it with other virtues. Thus the five-factor model of personality traits developed by Costa and McCrae speaks of “conscientiousness” as a prime trait. It is said to be made up of classically prudential facets such as “competence, order, and deliberation,” but then also Justice, in “dutifulness,” Hope, in “achievement striving,” and Temperance, in “self-discipline.”[13]

Haslam himself says that “Prudence therefore implies a balance and harmony . . . . play[ing] a mediating role, . . . ensuring that hope is tempered by realism.”[14] This is Temperance, not Prudence. Or rather, as his unconscious use of “tempered” suggests, it is an amalgam of the know-how to plan and the will-power to carry out the plan. The one is Prudence, the other Temperance. Haslam speaks of “the components of prudence having to do with balance,” but immediately admits that they “fall under Aristotle’s concept of moderation”—sophrosynē is the world Aristotle used for the virtue; and to metron, the [golden] mean, for the corresponding method.

The ethical tradition of the West, in short, would shuffle some of the character strengths the psychologists have examined under other heading. In particular it would place under a virtue of Prudence some of the strengths now under “Wisdom and Knowledge,” such as open-mindedness, love of learning, and perspective, and under “Humanity” the strength called “social intelligence” and under “Justice” the strength called “leadership.” It would rename the strength now called “prudence” as “caution,” or “impulse control,” and leave it under “Temperance,” where it appears to belong.

But no matter. What is anyway striking is that a group of modern clinical and social psychologists, using largely Western evidence, have on the whole confirmed what ur-Westerners such as Aristotle and especially Aquinas discerned by other means: that the virtues among we Westerners (at least) are these particular Seven, and that they work as a system in the best of our lives and the best of our communities.

The philosopher John M. Doris has challenged such systems, calling them the theory of “globalism,” the notion that people “have” characters, “robust traits or evaluatively integrated personality structures.”[15] He points out the impressive body of evidence from experimental psychology that people are in fact highly sensitive to situation—that an ordinary Ukrainian can be made into an extermination-camp guard reasonably easily. He notes, too, that non-Western societies, such as the Japanese, “interpret behavior more in terms of situations and much less in terms of personal dispositions than is typical in the West.”[16] Doris’ book is a model of philosophical psychology, even more thorough, if such a thing can be imagined, than Peterson and Seligman, at any rate per person. But in the end he admits that our ethical stories in our culture and our notions of Courage and Faith are important for ethical judgment. He thinks that being realistic about the stories and the notions, noting how fragile and specifically Western the notion of character is, “tuning down” our virtues, will make us better.[17] Could be, and at any rate a philosophical psychology is one way to find out.

[1] Danielson, personal conversation January 2005. Danielson runs at the University of British Columbia an amazing inquiry into what people actually think about the virtues.

[2] Peterson and Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues, 2004, p. 13.

[3] Peterson and Selgiman, Character Strengths and Virtues, 2004, p. 30.

[4] Aquinas, Treatise on the Virtues (Summa theologiae), c. 1270, IaIIae, ques. 57, art. 1.

[5] Haslam in Peterson and Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues, 2004, p. 480; Cicero, On Duties, I. xxvii, 93.

[6] Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, c. 1270, Ia IIae, c. 1270, q. 61, art. 3 and 4. These are pages 112 and 113 in John Oesterle, St. Thomas Aquinas: Treatise on the Virtues (which consists of Ia IIae, questions 49-67).

[7] Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia IIae, c. 1270, q. 58, art. 4; Oesterle, p. 86. Also Ia IIae, q. 65, a. 2; Oesterle, p. 143.

[8] As do Jonsen and Toulmin, Casuistry, 1988, pp. 58-74.

[9] Cited in Novak, Business as a Calling, 1996, p. 2.

[10] Quoted in Peterson and Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues, 2004, p. 39.

[11] Peterson and Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues, 2004, p. 39. The other two of his dimensions are analytic and creative intelligence. Sternberg by the way suffered from test anxiety as a child and has become an eloquent spokesman against one-dimensional theories of intelligence.

[12] Sarah Broadie accepts her co-editor Christopher Rowe’s translation of “wisdom” unmodified as the word for phronēsis. But she makes clear that it is practical not theoretical, as the Philosopher himself said (Broadie, “Philosophical Introduction,”2002, p. 46).

[13] Haslam, “Prudence,” in Peterson and Seligman, p. 482.

[14] Haslam, “Prudence,” in Peterson and Seligman, p. 480, italics supplied.

[15] Doris, Lack of Character, 2002, p. 114.

[16] Doris, Lack of Character, 2002, p. 105.

[17] Doris, Lack of Character, 2002, p. 169. This is the last page—a short book, in which nonetheless Doris makes use of fully 750 items of bibliography, ranging from thorough use of Lifton on the Nazis to Conrad on Lord Jim.

The principal ends of human acts are God, self, and others, since we do whatever we do for the sake of one of these.

Aquinas, Summa Theologia, Ia IIae, q. 73,

art. 9, objection 3, “I answer that.”.

[O]ur life consists in this achieving of a pure relationship between ourselves and the living universe about us. This is how I `save my soul.’ . . . [If you view] love as the supreme, the only emotion worth living for, then you will write an immoral novel. Because . . . . all emotions go to the achieving of a living relationship.

D. H. Lawrence, pp. 128-29.

The “moral universe within” has been described for 2500 years in the West, then, in terms of the Seven Virtues, containing hundreds of particular virtue, among which are the virtues for a bourgeois life:

The Seven Virtues

In ethical space the bottom is the realm of the Profane, where Prudence and Temperance rule, the top the realm of the Sacred—of spiritual Love, and Faith and Hope. Moving from bottom to top is moving from self-disciplining virtues whose main object is the Self through altruistic virtues whose main object is Others (Love of humans; Justice) to the transcendent virtues whose main object is God or Physics or the Nation. That is, bottom to top is the axis of wider and wider ethical objects.[1]

The essentially transcendent virtues of Faith and Hope, I have noted, are essentially verbal. The others can be silently yet fully expressed. Prudence and Justice are calculative and intellectual. They have been thought since Plato and the writers of footnotes to Plato to be the most characteristically human of virtues. Prudence or Justice could be seen in a god-haunted society as gifts or laws from the Creator to Man: “for which cause /Among the beasts no mate for thee was found.” Animals were “dumb” in both senses.

By the grace of Darwin, however, we now see the calculative virtues in the least human of beings, in ants justly sacrificing themselves for the queen, or dandelions prudently working the cracks in the sidewalk. The terminology is figurative, note the scientists, a human attribution, not Nature’s own way of putting it. But that is what we are discussing: human figures of speech. Natural history has taught us in the past three centuries to realize that the lion is not actually “courageous,” ever, but merely prudent in avoiding elephants and just in acknowledging the pride’s hierarchy. Courage and Temperance are emotion-controlling and will-disciplining, and therefore, we now realize, human. Faith, Hope, and Love, above all, provide ends for a human life. The rest are means, and prudence is not the highest, God-given Rationality but the lowest evolved strategies of these.

The triad of Temperance-Justice-Prudence near the bottom and middle is cool and classical, and therefore recommended itself to theorists of the bourgeoisie such as David Hume and Adam Smith. The others at the top and edges are warm and Romantic, and came into their own in the 19^th century. Hume called Temperance-Justice-Prudence the “artificial” virtues, necessary for the artful making of any community whatever. They were of particular interest to men who had seen or vividly imagined communities collapsing in the tumult of religious war and dynastic ambition, of Jesuit and Presbyter, of Habsburg and Bourbon and Stuart. Hume and Smith both, for example, had witnessed the Jacobite rising of 1745, and with nothing like sympathy—they were not wild Highlanders, and certainly not Catholics, but lowland Scots of a deist or atheistic bent who had made their peace with Englishry.

“Enthusiasm” was in the 18^th century a term of abuse. Let us confine our discussion, most of the philosophes of France and Scotland agreed, to the cool, dignified, essential, and “artificial” virtues. Hume was using the categories and argument of Pufendorf, defending natural law against the intellectual and political chaos of the early 17^th century. The categories became part of European classicism in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, reacting to the rhetorical charms of the Renaissance and the rhetorical excesses of the Reformation and Counter-reformation.

The other, “natural” virtues of Courage, Love, Hope, and Faith impart warmth and meaning to an artfully made community. Sometimes too much warmth and meaning. The Scottish followers of Hutcheson admitted Love, as benevolence, and admitted Courage, as enterprise, but rather off to the side of their main concerns. They certainly had no patience with Hope and Faith, and Hume was fierce against their religious forms, “celibacy, fasting, and the other monkish virtues.” Imparting warmth and meaning was decidedly not what the Scots of the Enlightenment had in mind. That is a Romantic project, and these are not Romantics.

That Adam Smith was a virtue ethicist for a commercial age is pretty plain. He escaped, as Hume did not entirely, from the “prison,” as Hayek puts it, of the Greek categories physei (natural) and thesei (artificial). He emphasized a third category, the social interaction neither rock-like nor painting-like, the invisible hand.[2] Hayek observes that the 18^th-century learned the third category from the appalling Dr. Mandeville. But Smith used it to support rather than attack conventional ethics.

Smith made his virtue-ethic purposes clearest at the end of his life, in a Part VI added to The Theory of Moral Sentiments 31 years after its first publication. Section I of the new Part is an encomium on The Prudent Man. Section II is an analysis of love in an expanding circle outward from self to country. It concludes with a criticism of going still higher, to the faith and hope in transcendence that had been so troublesome to the Scotland of his grandfathers:

The administration of the great system of the universe, however, the care of the universal happiness of all rational and sensible beings, is the business of God and not of man. To man is allotted a much humbler department, but one more suitable to the weakness of his powers, and the narrowness of his comprehension: the care of his own happiness, of that of his family, his friends, his country. That he is occupied in contemplating the sublime can never be an excuse for neglecting the more humble department. . . . The most sublime speculation of the contemplative philosopher can scarce compensate the neglect of the smallest active duty.[3]

One can hear him including the theologian or other advocate for the Transcendent in that phrase “contemplative philosopher.” Compare Hume’s “ divinity or school metaphysics.”

And then Smith embarks on a concluding, climactic Section III, “Of Self-Command,” the master virtue in his book. “The man who acts according to the rules of perfect prudence, of strict justice, and of proper benevolence [love, that is] may be said to be perfectly virtuous.” That accounts for three of the seven virtues: Prudence, Justice, and Love. But suppose he knows he should so act, but can’t bring himself to it? “The most perfect knowledge, if it is not supported by the most perfect self-command, will not always enable him to do his duty.” “Extravagant fear and furious anger,” to take one sort of passion, “[are] often difficult to restrain even for a single moment.” The “command” of fear and anger was called by the ancients “fortitude, manhood, and strength of mind,” which is to say Courage. “The love of ease, of pleasure, of applause, and other selfish gratifications . . . often mislead us.” The command of these the ancients called “temperance, decency, modesty, and moderation,” that is to say, Temperance.[4]

So: in Smith there are the five virtues, of Prudence, Justice, Love, Courage, Temperance. There is no room for Faith and Hope.

But this will not do. Alasdair MacIntyre—his name and Glasgow birthplace are not irrelevant, nor is his youthful Communism or his mature Catholicism—argues that the artificial and all the natural virtues including Faith and Hope are to be taken together:

The virtues that we need, if we are to develop from our initial animal condition into that of independent rational agents [viz., prudence, temperance, and justice], and the virtues that we need, if we are to confront and respond to vulnerability and disability both in ourselves [courage, hope] and in others [love, faith], belong to one and the same set of [seven] virtues, the distinctive virtues of dependent rational animals.[5]

All three regions of the diagram are drawn on for a full life. The Romantics after the 18^th century understood this. The Christians before the 18^th century did, too.

In particular, Prudence Only will not be a life worth living. As Ellen Charry observes, “the gratification of being a part of a larger reality [Tillich’s ‘the courage to be a part of’] that gives each experience a purpose beyond its momentary accomplishment buffers the soul against life’s disappointments.”[6] For “ye have your closes,/And all must die.”

It is an obvious secular truth, too. Enjoy the White Sox game, by all means, in the present—the ballgame, the show, the peanuts, the crackerjack, in the lower region of Prudence, sheer Utility. Live as Nature’s son, not her bastard. But enjoy also your own little son’s delight in being there with his father, at the middle region of Love. And at the higher regions take joy in “being part of a larger reality,” Baseball or American Fatherhood or the Democratic Tradition.

* * * *

The seven virtues illuminate other ethical systems. William Schweiker, for example, quotes with approval Tzvetan Todorov’s characterization of humanists, believing that “freedom exists and that it is precious, but at the same time . . . [appreciating] the benefit of shared values [such as Hope and Faith], life with others [such as Love and Justice], and a self that is held responsible for its actions” [showing Temperance, Prudence, and moral Courage].

The philosopher Harry Frankfurt starts with the usual definition of “virtue” as “altruism,” confined to the middle region of the diagram. The ethical object at the bottom is a self, I have noted, and at the top is a transcendent; in the middle the object of ethics is other people. Like Susan Wolf writing about her obnoxious moral saints, Frankfurt uses terms like “morality,” “moral principles,” and “moral philosophy” as though they did not include either the self or the transcendent as objects of ethical action.

Such a definition appears to be a convention in mainstream, Kant-derived ethical philosophy. “Morality is most particularly concerned with how our attitudes and our actions,” Frankfurt writes, “should take into account . . . other people.”[7] Well, not in the view of Aristotle or the other virtue ethicists. Morality among them is about the good life for a human, which requires a character of prudence and temperance towards oneself, and faith, hope, and higher love towards the transcendent. And it requires justice and courage and lower love on behalf of other people—the Scots called it “benevolence.” Thus ethos, character. Robinson Crusoe on his island can be said to have had a good or bad ethical life, even before Friday. So virtue ethics.

But Frankfurt comes to the same view in the end, concluding that love must have a transcendent object for a human life to have a point. “A person may legitimately be devoted to ideals—for instance, aesthetic, cultural, or religious ideals—whose authority for him is independent of the desiderata with which moral principles are distinctively concerned; and he may pursue these nonmoral ideals without having his personal interests in mind at all.”[8] The ideal of the transcendent, such as God or Baseball, are independent of altruism. The transcendent is defined as “nonmoral,” namely, having in mind the self-interest of Prudence and Temperance. Frankfurt is saying that the transcendent, and in particular a notion of Love which includes what Christians would call agape, is necessary for a fully human life. In this way the ethics of the Enlightenment is sacralized.

He could have got to the conclusion by way of virtue ethics with less heavy lifting. “What we care about, what is important to us, and what we love” give point to a life, says Frankfurt. But these, I note, are Faith, Hope, and Charity.[9] I expect that Frankfurt is well aware of all this, and is engaging in a crafty figure of argument necessary in a corner of the academic world dominated by Kant. He shares with Wolf and many other modern philosophers the job of clambering out of the rationalist hole that Kant dug so diligently.

Frankfurt here seems to be marshaling a reductio ad absurdum, to show that Kantianism or for that matter utilitarianism do not give a coherent account of an ethical life. The ethical life cannot in fact to be reduced, Frankfurt is saying, to formulas for deciding ethical dilemmas, formulas applicable to any rational creature as such. On the contrary, “it requires us . . . to understand what it is we ourselves really care about.”[10] It depends on ethos, on agape and philia, on character, on moral sentiments, on a philosophical anthropology and psychology, on being a particular woman in Chicago at a particular time, with particular loves and faiths and hopes. As Philippa Foot put it, Kant went wrong in not realizing that “the evaluation of human action depends . . . on essential features of specifically human life.”[11]

In fact, as I have noted, the Kantian program is self-contradictory, which among Kantians is judged the deadly sin. The character of ourselves that we care about, a caring denied in pure rationalism, is what makes a Kantian moralist—or for that matter, if he reaches beyond ice-cream hedonism, what makes a utilitarian moralist. You have to want to be good. You have to care about what Frankfurt calls “ideals” and I and the rest of the Western ethical tradition call “transcendentals.” Only then will you have an interest in following, say, the categorical imperative or the true happiness of all people in your dealings with others. The ethical-theorizing “constructed self” that the social psychologist Timothy Wilson speaks of wants to work with the ethical-behaving “adaptive unconscious.” Being good, in Frankfurt’s account and in mine, is a consequence of “what we regard as important to ourselves,” not itself derivable from Kantian or utilitarian maxims.[12]

* * * *

arryh

Left to right in the diagram exhibits the gendered character of the virtues, masculine and feminine in the conventional tales. That is, left-right expresses the gender of the ethical actor. Women of course are supposed conventionally to think of the world from the perspective of right-side Love, or its corresponding vices, such as envy and jealousy. Men are supposed to think of the world from the perspective of left-side Courage, or cowardice, vainglory, self-absorption, and so forth.

Another name for the right side in the diagram is “connection”; and for the left, “autonomy.” Knight believed that even ordinary desires could be reduced “in astonishingly large measure to the desire to be like other people, and the desire to be different.”[13] Tillich called them “participation” and “individualization,” and noted that there is a “courage to be as a part,” that is, to participate. Michael Ignatieff called the one side “connection and rootedness” and the other side “freedom”: “a potential contradiction. . . arises between our need for social solidarity and our need for freedom.” We have rights, which is good, allowing us to achieve our left-side projects of hope and courage regulated by justice. But we need “love, respect, honor, dignity, solidarity with others,” Ignatieff notes, on the other, upper-right-hand side, and these cannot be compelled by law.[14] Hence Hume’s vocabulary of “natural” as against “artificial,” law-enforced virtues.

Whether or not men in general do actually fall on the left, autonomous side, the male non-Scottish, non-virtue-ethics ethical philosophers of the 18^th century certainly did. The Kantian and Benthamite men, for example, are just that, men deciding ethical issues without regard to connection, men fiercely autonomous, adults always in their primes, rational beings never dependent. So they believed. They are as the feminists put it with irritation and amusement “separative selves.”

The third fresh option in 17^th- and 18^th-century ethical philosophy, contractarianism, is likewise gendered. A Hobbesian/Lockean/ Rousseauian “contract” is not the usual metaphor with which women describe their lives. Rather: love, caring, obligations of affection, “a view of the self as relational.”[15] Women in fact find themselves with children and parents and friends and husbands and lovers to take care of. Men seem to think of such connections as optional, wholly contractual, even as relationships of exchange. Thus Marcel Mauss, a leading male anthropologist of the early 20^th century, encouraged people to think of the gift, too, as a sort of exchange.

The feminists such as Carol Gilligan and Virginia Held resist. Annette Baier, following them, observes that not all male ethical philosophers take the side of autonomy. She gives passing grades on the matter to Aristotle (connection in the polis), Marx (class), Mill (progressive sympathy), and MacIntyre (dependent rational animals, and practices), and then she studies Hume from the feminine, connective perspective in detail. Hume is, she argues, “uncannily womanly” in emphasizing the role of sympathy as against higher law, having others to share experiences with, and the love of children as the exemplum for ethical theory. She finds in Hume a stress on “the inescapable mutual vulnerability and mutual enrichment . . . [of] the human conditions. . . [which] make[s] autonomy not even an ideal.”[16]

A socialist like Paul Tillich would have viewed the right side of Love, Temperance, Justice, and Faith as commendably anti-capitalist, as against the left-side enterprise of Courage, Prudence, and Hope. Capitalism is, after all, the system supporting the virtue of enterprise, and that is the left-side virtues—though I have emphasized that in fact even capitalism depends of the loving right side, too. Tillich among others would have quarreled with placing Courage only on the left, masculine side.[17]

The pioneering feminist economist/philosopher Julie Nelson would argue that any left-right, top-bottom has the danger of privileging one over the other. Any one over any other. I’ve said why I think all the virtues work in any serious ethical life. So I am not saying that Hope and Faith are superior to Prudence and Temperance, or that Love trumps Courage every time. Nelson would use positive and negative versions of each virtue, deconstructing the geometry of a “top” thought superior to a bottom, or a “left” sinister.[18] So Love of others can be negative as love of others only, without sufficient self-love: self-abnegation, the womanly sin.[19]

And indeed the placement of the virtues in the diagram is that of mythical convention, not God’s truth, or even science’s. Thus upper-and-right pertains to the past, lower-and-left to the future: well . . . perhaps. The four virtues in bold are the signature virtues of the mythically ancient social classes: warrior (Courage, daring), peasant (Love, loyalty), merchant (Prudence, know how), and priest/brahmin (Temperance, wisdom). More mythical convention. But that is how we talk.

* * * *

There is no reason why the number of sins should equal the number of virtues, though of course in Western tradition, thanks to Pope Gregory, there are also seven, and deadly. In modern English they are Lust, Gluttony, Avarice, Anger, Envy, Sloth—that is, Acedia, from Greek, spiritual sloth, a lack of Hope, replacing “Sadness” in the 17^th century— and mastering above all Pride.[20] They can be paired off by social class, Pride being the characteristic sin of the rich, such as the Florida woman in her mink who on TV in 2004 while clinging to her husband said about the poor, “We aren’t losers.” Acedia is the corresponding sin of the poor and hopeless. Avarice-Gluttony are again sins of the rich and Envy-Anger of the poor, similarly paired. And Lust, after the Fall, is ubiquitous.

Sin or vice, I have argued, is the notable lack of any one or more of the virtues, and so the seven virtues lead to seven single lacks, Imprudence, Injustice, Intemperance, and so forth. But as Hursthouse notes, “although our list of generally recognized virtue terms is, I think, quite short, our list of vice terms is remarkably—and usefully—long.”[21] She notes that the list far exceeds the number of rules that Kantians imagine might be formulated to summarize ethical ideas. The list of vices shows how we actually reason ethically. We call people names. Hursthouse instances “irresponsible, feckless, lazy, inconsiderate, uncooperative, harsh, intolerant, indiscreet, incautious, unenterprising, pusillanimous, feeble, hypocritical, self-indulgent, materialistic, grasping, short-sighted, . . . and on and on.”

Take down your Roget’s International Thesaurus, the Third Edition of 1962, for example. Virtue itself (category number 978) takes up about half a column of words; the two opposites that follow, Vice (979) and Wrongdoing (980) take up two full columns. Asceticism (989), Temperance (990), Fasting (993), and Sobriety (995) fit handily into about two columns, interlarded with seven and a half columns on Intemperance, Gluttony, and Intoxication (which by itself accounts for 5½ columns). Respect (962) has a column of words, followed by two and half columns on Disrespect, Contempt, and Ridicule. Courage (891), in two columns, is surrounded by Anxiety, Fear, Cowardice (888-889) and Rashness, totaling six and a half columns. Cut the six-and-a-half in half to allow for Roget’s habit of alternating opposites and it still works out to 3.25 pusillanimous vices to every virtue of Courage.

The richness of our vocabulary of abuse comes from the stories and images that ground ethical thinking. We remember Billy in kindergarten who would not lovingly and justly cooperate, and he becomes our exemplar for the lack of those qualities. Judas Iscariot becomes the exemplar of intemperance and faithlessness.

If there are seven virtues and if the lack of any combination constitutes a vice, then the combinatorial mathematics implies that there would be. . . let me see, 7 items taken 6 at a time plus 7 taken 5 at a time plus 7 taken 4 at a time. . . exactly 126 vices. I jest. Seriously, there’s no guarantee that every language has a word for any random failure, such as a lack of Faith, Justice, and Prudence in the presence of the other four, Love, Hope, Courage, and Temperance. A man like this would have no rootedness or identity, would not give people respect, or even their due, and would be careless and uncalculating. Yet he would be affectionate, brightly hopeful about something turning up, courageous over present fears, and modest in his needs. Not a Mr. McCawber, precisely. But it’s Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman to a T. The play lets us reflect, then, about this uncategorized vice.

Such a system for reflection has behind it a library of philosophizing, which is one reason for taking seriously the particular septet. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, and at the very end, before Kant, Adam Smith, and now the women and men exploring virtue ethics, did not merely copy each other. They built on each other’s thought a great engine of analysis.

Hursthouse argues, following Gary Watson and Neera Badhwar, that “we believe the virtues form some sort of unity.”[22] To put it in an economist’s terms, the separate virtues are complements; or to put it statistically, they are not independent. That is, we are startled when on some occasion a bad man behaves well, apparently, and tend to doubt the claim that he did in fact behave well on this occasion. And we expect good men never to behave badly. So as academics we are surprised when a “good” economist behaves badly in other ways, a Nobel laureate at the University of Chicago expressing a virulent homophobia, for example. At least we are a little surprised.

[1] Aquinas Summa Theologiae, c. 1270, Iae-Ia Q. 96, art. 3; and Q. 54 art. 2, to which he refers, quoted in Lisska, Aquinas’s Theory of Natural Law, 1996, p. 285.

[2] See the discussion of this in Rudi Keller, On Language Change, 1990, for example p. 46.

[3] Smith, Moral Sentiments, 1790, p. 237.

[4] Smith, Moral Sentiments, 1790, same place and page following. Compare pp. 268f, 271. He has a confusing discussion on p. 189 (an older section) in which he analyses Prudence as Temperance plus Wisdom, Sophia. But in the passage I quote he is adhering to Aquinian divisions.

[5] MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals, 1999, p. 5; compare p. 155f.

[6] Charry, “Happiness,” 2004, p. 28.

[7] Frankfurt, Reasons of Love,2004, p. 7.

[8] Frankfurt, Reasons of Love, 2004, p. 8.

[9] Frankfurt, Reasons of Love,, p. 11.

[10] Frankfurt, Reasons of Love,, p. 28.

[11] Foot, Natural Goodness, 2001, p. 14.

[12] The phrase from Frankfurt, Reasons of Love, is from p. 29.

[13] Knight 1922, in Knight 1935, p. 22.

[14] Ignatieff, Needs of Strangers, 1984, pp. 17, 15.

[15] Held, Feminist Morality, 1993, p. 62.

[16] Baier, Moral Prejudices 1994, pp. 53, 62f.

[17] Tillich, Courage to Be, 1952, pp. 86-96

[18] Nelson, Feminism, Objectivity, 1996, pp. 10-19, 28-34, 45.

[19] Nelson, Feminism, Objectivity, 1996, p. 136.

[20] http://deadlysins.com/sins/history.html is amusing. Luxuria, Gula, Tristia, Avaritia, Ira, Invidia, Superbia are specified in St. Gregory’s Moralia in Job, XXXI cap. xlv. The sin ‘Tristia’ was later replaced by ‘Accidia’, or Sloth, or Despair (Wenzel (1967), 38).

[21] Hursthouse, Virtue Ethics, 1999, p. 41.

[22] Hursthouse, Virtue Ethics, 1999, p. 155,

For a century and a half afterwards it was the city hall, the Stadhuis. Its main room, judged one of the architectural jewels of Europe, was named De Burgerzaal, the [full, voting] citizens’ hall. The hall and its building were designed on strict Vetruvian principles, an outsized Palladian villa, but built for the bourgeois citizens of Amsterdam rather than for an outsizedly rich duke of Capra or Vicenzo. The historian Pieter Geyl calls it “a real citizen’s palace.”[2]

Larger than the great New Church next door (“new” in 1385), contemporaries spoke of a contest between secular and ecclesiastical power. The alternative proposal for celebrating the peace was to supply the Church with a magnificent new tower. The church-improving proposal was rejected, and the New Church to this day lacks a proper tower. The Stadhuis served no royal or religious purpose, no celebration of aristocratic or peasant/Christian virtues.

At the four corners of the building’s principal roof façades, front and rear, were placed four large bronze statues, whose plaster casts were later put up in De Burgerzaal as well. The statues and casts may still be seen. They do not celebrate Greed (Is Good) or Avarice (Above All). On the contrary, they celebrate as was usual in Dutch civic tradition on the front façade Justice with her scales (Rechtvaardigheid: “right-skill”) and Prudence with her mirror. The prudence-word is actually Voorzichtigheid, foresight, which again reflects the difficulty of rendering Prudentia in Germanic languages except English. Similar ornaments placed in 1441 on the Ducal Palace at that older mercantile republic, Venice, are identified in Latin: Justitia preeminent, Prudentia, Temperantia, and Fortitudo, with Charitas.[3]

To get the Pagan Four entire the Stadhuis celebrates, as was not usual in Holland until then, Temperance (Matigheid) and Vigilance—the original architect intended the fourth virtue to be, as classically, Courage, but his successor for some reason made the substitution. Perhaps he thought vigilance (Waakzaamheid: watchfulness) less belligerent than martial courage (Moed) in a new—though as it turned out brief—time of peace. In any event Amsterdam at the height of its success as a bourgeois republic spoke like Venice insistently of a balanced set of virtues.

And in fact it spoke of the pagan four, not merely of gain, gain, and gain—though gain, which is to say Prudence, figures, too, with that fourth of the bronze statues, and inside and outside with reliefs and inlays celebrating the world-girdling commerce of the city. The wily Venetians were less candid in their celebration of gain.

Likewise at one end of De Burgerzaal the entrance to the Magistrate’s Court is surmounted by Death and Retribution aiding Justice in trampling the sins of Greed, personified by King Midas, and Envy. The upper bourgeois are to eschew greed, and so they are to give to charities, for example, as they did with an open hand. In exchange the lower orders are not to envy the upper. Earthly possessions represented in the frieze and arch are restrained by the harness of Temperance and the sword of Justice, with Hercules’ lion skin and club to complete with Courage the three non-Prudential pagan virtues.

And on and on. As Blair Hoxby put it, the “decorative scheme [of the Stadhuis] was probably the most sustained exposition of mercantile ideals in the language of emblems, allegory, and classical allusion extant anywhere in the world.”[4] It all sounds impossibly preachy. Surely “content,” and “morals” in illustration of folk proverbs, cannot be the subject of Serious Art. Surely, like us, Dutch people must have thought of Art as being for Art’s Sake, yes? The MoMA rules, right?

No. Dutch people in the early 17^th century read much of their art ethically: Rembrandt, Hals, Vermeer. That is why they had the century before stripped their churches of the lovely papist ornaments accumulated over centuries in one of the richest quarters of Europe. No non-Protestant messages, please. Images were ethically charged, and were not viewed as objects for Art’s sake alone. True, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.[5] But the “genre” paintings so characteristic of the Golden Age in the Netherlands, like the conceits of metaphysical poetry in early 17^th-century England and Milton’s “typologies” (a theological term for parallels and anticipations of history), were often heavily and ethically metaphorical. As R. H. Fuchs observed in explaining such a sensibility, arising out of a Protestant duty to read and understand God’s texts oneself, “Had not Christ himself spoken in parables?”[6]

The theme of the four virtues honored by the city hall is repeated, in case you missed it, in the little room known in English as the Tribunal. A wooden public scaffold to where the fated victim was to adjourn would have been set up just outside the room, on the Dam Square. The judges handing down the sentence of death faced a large statue of Justice with sword and blindfold and another of Prudence with a self-reflecting mirror, as on the front façade. Opposite his side the condemned prisoner faced elaborate bas reliefs of Love and, again, Justice and Prudence. Left to right he could read, if he had been classically educated, sculptures showing a Greek father who lovingly volunteered to be punished in his son’s stead; then Solomon’s prudent judgment; and finally a Roman father, an early Brutus, who justly executed his own sons for treason. In other words, to repeat, in its icons the first bourgeois society in northern Europe dealt in the virtues of love, prudence, and justice as much as in rye and nutmeg. So we do still, though we have become embarrassed to say so.

As the Dutch of the Golden Age grasped, the ancient notion that Courage, Temperance, and Justice could not flourish in a commercial society is wrong. Prudence, it was always realized, could flourish among city folk, certainly, which made too much of it suspect in a hero. A coldly maximizing merchant is no Achilles. Remember that Odysseus was a trifle suspect on this score. One is not shocked to find Dante, no friend of commerce, assigning Odysseus, as a false counselor, to the next to the lowest of nine levels of Inferno, the place for those committing Simple Fraud (also in that 8^th level, a little higher up, are astrologers and magicians, that is, in modern terms, economic forecasters).

Yet the Courage to venture on the largest bourgeois building in Europe, the Temperance to stick to the plans once formed, the Justice to enforce business contracts on the delivery time of Norwegian lumber propping it up, all these are virtues withal. From the English side—the English were just then learning to restrain their penchant for noble gestures—Sir William Temple commenting on the Dutch Republic in 1673 contrasted the aristocratic soldier with the bourgeois trader:

One intends to make his fortune suddenly by his courage. . . the other slower, but surer, by craft. . . . This makes the first frank and generous, and [inclined to] throw away upon his pleasures what has been gotten in one danger, and may either be lost or repaired in the next. The other wary and frugal, and loath to part with in a day what he has been laboring [on] for a year, and has not hopes to recover but by the same paces of diligence and time.[7]

Temple uses throughout the chapter, sometimes acknowledged, the nobility-admiring turns of Tacitus concerning the Germans, among them the alleged ancestors of the Dutch. Here for example Temple shadows Germania 24: the noble Germans “will stake their personal liberty on a last decisive throw” of the dice, though Temple’s rhetorical purpose is the opposite of Tacitus’. Of course Temple (or Tacitus, for that matter) is not to be taken as simply conveying facts to the page. But the opinion about the lack of nobility among the early modern Dutch was general, and foreigners accustomed to government by aristocrats therefore laughed at them—though Temple points out that the governing class, the rentier regents, were in fact bred up to government rather like an aristocracy.[8]

“Rather like”—but a real aristocrat, like the Earl of Leicester who had been assigned ninety years earlier to meddle in Dutch politics, would sneer at the “Sovereign Lords Miller and Cheeseman” with whom they had to deal.[9] “Many foreigners,” noted the liberal Huizinga in 1935, “believed that the policies of the United Provinces had but the one aim of flattering the greed of avaricious merchants.” Well, yes: so the aristocrats have always believed about trade-enhancing policies. But “these very policies also benefited the country as a whole.”[10]

The “pagan” virtues, when taken out of their heroic or Hellenic context, are after all merely human, good for business, good for life: the courage to venture, the prudence to venture aright, the temperance and justice to keep balance in doing so. The mother of a handicapped child, the manager of a company facing bankruptcy, the ordinary person rising daily to work in an ordinary job for her son or his daughter, need to be courageous, temperate, just, and prudent, “the better fortitude / Of patience and heroic martyrdom / Unsung.” St. Thomas’s teacher, St. Albert the Great, summarized Cicero’s claim that every virtuous act has all four: “For the knowledge required argues for prudence; the strength to act resolutely argues for courage; moderation argues for temperance; and correctness argues for justice.”[11]

In On Duties (c. 44 BC) Cicero had declared that the Four pagan virtues constitute a man’s honestas, there meaning simply “rectitude, moral worthiness.”[12] But in Latin honestas also meant “honor” in the aristocratic sense, that that is, reputation, as does exclusively its reconstructed root *honos without suffix and the usual honōs (genitive honōris) or simply honor. The Romans used rather the original of our “sincere,” originally meaning “pure,” for what we now call “honest.” Sinceritas was not highly esteemed in a shame culture of aristocrats, and in fact this particular form is not attested before Augustus. At Rome and in its offshoots ethical goodness was what was worthy of esteem in a man of honor. “To live honorably” is the modern English translation of the advice in Justinian’s treatise on Roman law in 533 AD, honeste vivere, not our modern “live honestly.”[13] Truth-telling was distinctly secondary to this notion of honestas. Think of the haughty virtues, the dignitas, of an English lord or of a Mafia don.

Othello’s repeatedly addressing “honest Iago” (1.3.298, 2.3.160) and “my friend, your husband, honest, honest Iago” at 5.2.162 just before he discovers Iago’s lies are therefore not quite so crude cases of dramatic irony as appears to us now. In Othello as most usually in Shakespeare the word means chiefly “honorable,” as men still speak in jest of the purity of an “honest” woman. This sense with reference to women is also very common in Shakespeare—8 times for example in Othello about Desdemona (”I do not think but Desdemona’s honest,” 3.3.230).

Thus 5.1.32, “O brave Iago, honest and just / That hast such a noble sense of thy friend’s wrong.” Iago is here characterized as a warrior, brave and noble as a warrior should be, though as it will turn out having neither integrity nor justice. In Othello the word is used 25 times about dishonorable Iago, 9 of these by Iago about himself and 14 about Iago by the tragically misled Othello. The play mentions honest/honesty fully 53 times—as against only 5 times in Macbeth, 10 in Lear, 16 in Hamlet, or 29 even in Winter’s Tale, all of which like most of Shakespeare are centrally concerned with honor and falsity.[14] In 1713 Shaftesbury was still using “honest” to mean “honorable, virtuous.” He inquired “What honesty or virtue is, considered by itself,” and concluded piously that “it is impossible for an atheist to be virtuous, or share any real degree of honesty, or merit.”[15]

The same happens in French — honnête has an obsolete sense of “civil, courteous”; and honnêteté an obsolete sense of “virtue, decency.” Now it means truth telling. It happens, too, in Germanic languages with an entirely different root word. The usual Dutch or German words for “honesty” mean now truth-telling, but in olden days, as in Latin-derived languages before the rise of the bourgeoisie, meant noble honor. In modern Dutch eerlijkheid means simply honesty. Eerlijkheid duurt ‘t langst, “honesty lasts the longest,” that is, “honesty is the best policy.” But it arises, as does “honesty” in French and English, from honor words in a very different society. The Dutch element eer itself still today means simply honor, eerbaarheid chastity, eergevoel [= “honor feeling”] “sense of honor,” eren “to honor or revere” as in Dutch hymns to de Heer. And erezaak “a point of honor”; even old eerverlies, “corruption of blood lines.”

The OED notes that in English “honest” in sense 1a, meaning “held in honor” or “respectable,” from honestas by way of French, was obsolete after 1692. This is just about the time that England became as bourgeois as the Dutch Republic. The Bank of England in imitation of Dutch models was founded in 1694, for example; and the nation acquired like the Netherlands a public debt. The last citation of the meaning “commendable,” sense 2a, is Pope’s Iliad of 1715-20, though still in use, as we have seen, in 1732. That is just about the time England and Europe generally had its first fully capitalist financial crash. Financial crashes I have noted characterize capitalism precisely because a market society depends on the honesty of strangers, in the modern sense. The meaning of honesty as our usage of “sincere,” says the OED, is “the prevailing modern sense,” sense 3c, though used occasionally this way from Middle English. In Othello the two senses of it, honorable and sincere, mingle.[16]

It is no surprise that in a commercial democracy such as ours the word “honesty” has come to signify instead our master virtue, the egalitarian and bourgeois equivalent of an aristocratic and anti-commercial “honor.” John Casey is astonished that honor “today . . . finds almost no place in the thought of moral philosophers,” though it was central in the Renaissance and before.[17] But that is because it has been replaced by “honesty,” which in a bourgeois society plays an identical social role. In The Stones of Venice (1851-53) John Ruskin remarks after a long disquisition on the origin of virtue lists, “It is curious that in none of these [Italian] lists do we find either Honesty or Industry ranked as a virtue, except in the Venetian one.”[18] Surely it is not so very curious, considering the frankly bourgeois and busy character of the Venetian Republic at its height, and the honor-obsessed cultures of contemporary feudal societies like France or England. As Ruskin notes, later the virtue of “Industry, in Northern [that is, proto-bourgeois French, German, Dutch, English] art and Northern morality, assumes a principal place.”

** * * *

The Japanese constitution was imposed in 1946 by Douglas MacArthur on his charges. In the course of her remarkable work on the linguistics of Japanese politics (1991, 2001, a­nd especially 2002) Kyoko Inoue has noted that the English phrase “individual dignity” (as in Article 23, “Marriage shall rest upon . . . individual dignity and essential equality of the sexes”) was quite innocently translated by the Japanese Diet ratifying the constitution as jinkaku.

The word was a Meiji Restoration coinage jin [individual] + kaku [rank], used in westernizing (specifically French-imitating) legal reforms in the late 19^th century for “legal personality,” as in corporate law. One might also translate it as “standing,” as in “having standing to sue.” But the root kaku means “rank” in a sense of Justice that would have seemed completely ordinary to a 17^th-century Frenchman or a 5^th-century Greek. The dignity of an emperor or a samurai or a mid-20^th-century free male Japanese comes from his rank, not from his humanity shared with commoners, women, slaves, Koreans.

Until the 1970s, when in the junior high school textbooks that Inoue takes as representative jinkaku began to be replaced by more egalitarian words meaning “humanity,” ethical discourse in Japan had trouble digesting the emphatically non-hierarchical notion of “dignity” entailed in radical Christian and then radical bourgeois and finally radical democratic talk in the West. Indeed the two Japanese intellectuals Inoue discusses as beginning in the 1920s to drain jinkaku of its hierarchical meaning were among the 1 percent of the population professing Christianity. As Robert Bellah notes, in Japan “Christians played a role out of all proportion to their numbers in the cause of social reform in the period before World War II.”[19]

In an aristocratic and hierarchical society of status and shame the four pagan virtues lead up to honor = the courage, justice, and faith to take the front rank in the line of battle. In our bourgeois and egalitarian society of contract and guilt they lead up to honesty = the courage, justice, and faith to be reliable in making a deal.

* * * *

The ethical bourgeois can be seen in his enemies. Consider Jean-Paul Sartre, who remained a fellow traveler long after Khrushchev’s destalinization speech, long after the Hungarian Revolution, long after the disappointments of actually existing socialism. “The philosopher of liberty,” Raymond Aron wrote, “never managed, or resigned himself, to see communism as it is. He never diagnosed Soviet totalitarianism, the cancer of the century, and he never condemned it as such.”[20] In his youth and in his age he was, with Simone de Beauvoir and that generation of French intellectuals, unthinkingly anti-bourgeois. It is ironic, by the way, that Sartre and Beauvoir both used metaphors of market dealings in describing their “open” relationship—well. . . open for Sartre—and the sexual ideal of free men and women.

The ethical content of Sartre’s early work such as Being and Nothingness has been brilliantly drawn out by Ronald Santoni, in his 1995 book Bad Faith, Good Faith, and Authenticity in Sartre’s Early Philosophy. Santoni sees the passage from “bad faith” (mauvaise foi) to Heideggerian “authenticity” as ethical—this against the popular parody of existentialism as amoral, a Valley-Girl “Whatever.” Bad faith is lying to oneself. Good faith attempts at least not to lie. The third and most noble state, authenticity, ascends to a still higher level, accepting the ambiguities and ethical responsibilities of a full life.

But Sartre seems to be importing a specifically political concern into his ethical thinking. Good faith, or sincerity, is (hélas, Sartre would add) a bourgeois virtue, that is to say, a virtue the capitalist system would honor, at least in its preachments. Bad faith would in this way of looking at it be the manner of life of the very worst of the bourgeoisie. In writing of good faith Sartre is considering, with distaste, the project of liberalism, by a European definition of the word, which tries to imagine and bring into being a Good Capitalism. Santoni observes that Sartre spends very few pages on good faith but entire books on bad. Perhaps the explanation for his brevity is that good faith is precisely the best project—but withal he strongly feels an ethically inadequate project—of the detested bourgeoisie.

The pro-bourgeois theorists, on the contrary, would claim that the best of capitalism is good faith, which in Santoni’s words “pre-reflectively accepts rather than flees human reality. In short, it is self-acceptance as freedom.” Sartre seems to be suggesting: “Yes, good faith is the best from a bad lot. It is the best from les bourgeois, and therefore still very bad. What one should aspire to is authenticity, an altogether unbourgeois condition.” This political concern would perhaps explain what Santoni calls “Sartre’s baffling counterintuitive claim that good faith [or ‘sincerity,’ for that matter] shares the project and goal of bad faith.”[21] Faith is bourgeois. If I’ve got this right, Sartre would fit also into the dogmatic secularism of French intellectuals at the time, against Foi of a churchly sort. No foi, thank you, good or bad: we’re French leftists.

The true best, that third thing above the plane of mere faith whether good or bad, is authenticity, that “self-recovery” or “deliverance.” It is an aristocratic virtue, which would recommended it to the Marxist clerisy of Sartre’s time. But in political theory it follows from the Revolution. Neither Sartre nor Santoni say this in so many words. Sartre claims that a cowardly reaction to the anxiety of being and nonbeing is the source of inauthenticity. But my point is that the bad-faith vs. good faith yielding finally to authenticity fits the dialectic structure of the philosophical argument and fits, too, Sartre’s political beliefs.

Sartre’s Revolution is to be led by philosophers. In this interpretation Sartre accords a glorious place to the clerisy, that embodiment of “reflection,” to use the Sartrean vocabulary, because the clerisy leads humanity, with a self-consciously grasped “willed choice.” One is tempted to note cynically: What other class would elevate a sheer intellectual activity to world-changing? And what other class would accord orthodoxy, upright opinion, such power?

In 1955 Simone de Beauvoir defended the Stalinist orthodoxy that she and Jean-Paul espoused in this way: “Truth is one, error is many. It is therefore no coincidence if the right wing claims to be pluralist.”[22] The clerisy alone can experience a “radical conversion”—note the revolutionary rhetoric here—maintaining nonetheless “ambiguity.” Ambiguity, understand, is not a bad thing in such a theology, so long as the proper clerisy is in attedance to interpret the signs. The blessed confusion gives the clerisy, whether secular or religious, its leading role in the state. Ambiguity therefore is beloved of Sartre.

The clerisy is uniquely positioned, says Sartre, to accept responsibility and moral agency. One is here inclined to call the preacher of ethical responsibility to account for “the cruel, duplicitous stratagems employed by the polygamist Sartre in [sexual] love,” as Santoni puts it. Or to wonder how an advocate of moral agency could so long admire Communist tyrannies.[23] The worst of bourgeois society, bad faith, Sartre claimed, is a flight from freedom, adopting for example the absurd conventions of French bourgeois society. Bourgeois good faith might be admitted as a stage “laying the foundation” for authenticity, as in orthodox Communist thought the success of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the revolution and for communism.

But that hopelessly bourgeois good faith or sincerity, Sartre is saying, is in the end impossible. One cannot possibly, contrary to what Santoni hopes, “rescue good faith from the controlling tentacles of bad faith” (p. xxxix). The liberal project, which is Santoni’s and mine but of course not Sartre’s, is ethically impossible. Sincerity, in Sartre’s puzzling words, is a “phenomenon of bad faith.” Only a faux-aristocratic authenticity is possible, for a select few.

Sartre was wrong. The bourgeois project is on balance good and has in large part succeeded. The Other, such as the working class, Sartre claims, is “menaced” by capitalism (Santoni’s word, p. xxxvi). I don’t believe so. That particular Other has for one thing become bourgeois. And the remaining proletariat, and other Others, such as The Woman, became free and prosperous within capitalism, as well as ethically complete. The goal of a society in which ”each-for-itself affirms and promotes the freedom of the Other” (Santoni again) is a good description of what bourgeois capitalism has in sober fact accomplished.

* * * *

In Book IX of The Spirit of the Laws, chps. 1-5, Judith Shklar observed, “Montesquieu attributed all the commercial virtues to citizens [of Athens]. . . . Frugality, prudence, honesty, caution, these are the commercial traits of character, and a democratic republic needs them especially.”[24] Beyond these, commerce uses the cardinal virtues, too. As Aquinas and every theorist of the virtues through Smith concluded, the pagan and civic and “natural” Four are an almost complete account—perhaps the masculine side of a complete account—of even the bourgeois virtues:

The Four Pagan Virtues

JUSTICE - [social balance] - Gandhi

COURAGE - (Aristocrat/Hero) - Achilles

TEMPERANCE - [individual balance] - (Priest/ Philosopher) - Socrates, Jane Austen

PRUDENCE - (Bourgeois/Businessperson) - (Max U, Practical Wisdom, Rationality) - Ben Franklin

[1] For the following: Kraaij, Royal Palace, 1997, pp. 10, 12, 14, 23, 42-47; Huisken, Royal Palace, 1996, pp. 22-23; Goossens, Treasure Wrought, 1996, pp. 16-17, 22, 28.

[2] Geyl, Netherlands, 1936, p. 540.

[3] Rosand, Myths of Venice, 2001, p. 97.

[4] Hoxby, Mammon’s Music, 2002, p. 107.

[5] Eddy de Jongh, who started the business of reading moral messages in paintings like a text, has some second thoughts in Jongh, 1987. In the same volume Eric Sluijter mounts a brilliant assault on the didactic hypothesis.

[6] Fuchs, Dutch Painting, 1978, p. .

[7] Temple, Observations, 1673, IV, p. 92; “not” and “hopes”: sic.

[8] Temple, Observations, 1673, IV, p. 84.

[9] Huizinga, “Dutch Civilization,” 1941, p. 20; Israel, Dutch Republic, p. 222.

[10] Huizinga, “Spirit of the Netherlands,” 1935, p. 31.

[11] Quoted in Houser, “Virtue of Courage,” 2002, p. 306.

[12] Cicero, On Duties, 44 BC, I, 61.

[13] Justinian, Institutes, 533 BC, p. 1, section 1.1.

[14] Complete, scannable texts are given at http://www-tech.mit.edu/ Shakespeare/.

[15] Shaftesbury, Characteristics, 1713, Vol. II, p. 4. Compare p. 8: “honest or moral character.”

[16] For example Shakespeare, Othello, Act 1, scene 3, lines 283, 293, 382; and 2.1.198; 2.3.6, 125, 160, 230, 249, 309-315; 3.1.20-21, 38; 3.2.5; 3.3.105-107, 123, 130, 134, 158, 229, 247, 262, 380-389, 417, 438; 5.1.32; 5.79, 155, 161 (in the Oxford edition given in Greenblatt, ed, The Norton Shakespeare).

[17] Casey, Pagan Virtue, 1990, p. 83.

[18] Ruskin, Stones of Venice, 1851-53, Vol. II, Chp. VIII, “The Ducal Palace,” para. LXIV, p. 328.

[19] Bellah, Imagining Japan, 2003, p. 42.

[20] Aron, Memoirs, 1983, p. 330.

[21] Santoni, Bad Faith, Good Faith, 1995, p. xvi-xvii.

[22] Quoted in Todorov Hope and Memory, 2000, p. 35.

[23] Santoni, Bad Faith, Good Faith, 1990, p. 187.

[24] Shklar, “Montesquieu,” 1990, p. 268.

The classical virtue ethicists believed they had spotted the seams in the universe, the essence of Prudence or the substance of Justice. In re-using their words now, in an expanding universe, we do not have such ambitions. The ethical, we believe, is local, not universal, knowledge. It is contingent and fallible, not universal and necessary. “It is a contingent fact,” writes Hursthouse, “that we can, individually, flourish or achieve eudaimonia, contingent that we can do so in the same way as each other, and contingent that we can do so all together, not at each other’s expense.”[2]

Such a notion of the ethical, Kant would have said with a sneer, is only anthropological or psychological or historical, not pure and rational. Alasdair MacIntyre characterizes the monistic tradition of Hobbes, Bentham, and Kant as asserting without much evidence, or on the evidence, as MacIntyre notes, of a misunderstanding of how geometry proceeds, that “there is a way of founding adequately the first principle or principles of right action by appeal to considerations which they take to be equally available at the commencement of enquiry to every rational person as such.”[3] Any rational person just knows that we “must” imitate Euclid in method and “must” come to the Categorical Imperative in substance. There’s no grounding to the “must” in the Grundlegung.

And the method assumes its conclusion in another way, too: that we are discussing a person possessing practical wisdom already. No need to learn to cut cloth on the bias by watching one’s mother, to take batting practice, to run marathons. No need to grow in practical or ethical experience. The representation of Right lies deep in the soul of everyone, says Kant, even of the most delicate child, an axiom, an assumption. One is reminded of the joke about a physicist and an economist on a desert island finding a can of beans. They only lack a can opener. The physicist says, “Let’s build a fire and heat the can. By the laws of physics, it will explode, and that way we can get into the beans.” The economist says, “What a messy solution! I have a much neater one, which uses the laws of academic economics. First step: assume as an axiom that we have a can-opener. . . .”

The ethics of the virtues asks insistently of the universalizers, though always politely: “Do you have a reason for seeking The Universal? What guidance, when all is said, can such a priori generalities give to actual lives?” Talk of the local, contingent, non-universal virtues has the virtue at least of preserving how we actually talk, and therefore might help us talk—and behave. And there is a worry in the actual behavior of people who, as Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, “identify what are in fact their partial and particular causes too easily and too completely with the cause of some universal principle.” “They usually behave,” he notes, “worse than they would otherwise do.”[4]

Factually speaking, as Alan Wolfe found in his surveys and interviews about American ethical views in the 1990s, “virtue,” singular, as a word means little to ordinary Americans, except to arouse annoyance at the conservative churches and their recent obsession with sex, sex, sex. But to Wolfe’s Americans the particular named virtues, plural, mean a great deal, provoking calm yet committed discussion. Americans admire especially, for example, loyalty, that blend of faith, love, justice, and temperance, and honesty—courage, justice, and faith; and in a broader sense a bourgeois blend of all the virtues.[5]

The way we actually talk does not depend on the Golden Rule or the categorical imperative or even the vaguer maxim of maximizing utility, at least not much. It depends on the particular virtues, straight from the Girl Scout Handbook, on the testaments old and new, and on the songs, poems, stories, family histories, and public dramatizations which give them life. Go and learn the commentary.

But the virtues do not work one-by-one. Murdoch observed that

as we deepen our notions of the virtues we introduce relationship and hierarchy. Courage, which seemed at first to be something on its own, a sort of specialized daring of the spirit, is now seen to be a particular operation of wisdom [including what I am calling Prudence] and love. We come to distinguish a self-assertive ferocity from the kind of courage which would enable a man coolly to choose the labor camp rather than the easy compromise with the tyrant. It would be impossible to have one virtue unless it were a very trivial one such as thrift.[6]

Or unless it were in fact a vice. Mary Midgley speaks of the treacherous Iago in the play: “Iago’s envy . . . . has taken him over. It swallows up every other motive. . . . All attempts at inward balance have ceased . . . . There are no more conflicts.”[7] Iago lacks temperance: “I do hate [Othello], as I do hell’s pains,” he says in the first scene, using a proverbial exaggeration, though also an ironic foreshadowing of his ultimate destination. As an economist would say, he is “specialized” in one or two virtues, showing courage in venturing and prudence in completing his somewhat haphazard plan against Othello but showing none of that inward balance in acknowledgement of the conflict between one virtue and another that would make room in a good person for Love or Justice or Hope: namely, Temperance.

You are moved to hate the boss who passed you over in favor of some insipid Cassio, and for all you know slept with your spouse. But you draw back from hatred, anger, envy, with a mild reflection that after all it would be unjust to indulge your feelings, or that after all the Lord has laid down that “Vengeance is mine,” not thine. Iago, however, courageously and unbalancedly does not draw back. His “motiveless malignity,” as Coleridge put it, arises from his character, not from the “motives” he offers, now one, now another, “the mere fictions of his own restless nature, distempered by a keen sense of his intellectual superiority, and haunted by the love of exerting power, on those especially who are his superiors in practical and moral excellence.” [8] Iago’s sin, like most sin, originates in the master sin of pride.

Likewise in Paradise Lost Satan declares courageously and single-virtuedly, “so farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear, / Farewell remorse: all good to me is lost; / Evil be thou my good.” Of course it’s not so simple as he claims. In seeing with Stanley Fish how Milton works one should remember that theologically speaking Satan must be wrong about almost everything of importance.[9] C. S. Lewis writes: “What we see in Satan is the horrible co-existence of a subtle and incessant intellectual activity with an incapacity to understand anything.”[10] Satan is not just a liar, “with calumnious Art/ Of counterfeited truth.” He is an idiot savant of unbalanced virtù.

Satan is not some Other to God, a force of pure Evil as against pure Good. We must rid ourselves, wrote Lewis in the midst of the Second War, “of the absurd fancy that devils are engaged in the disinterested pursuit of something called Evil (the capital is essential).”[11] Devils have goals like our own—honor, affection, nourishment, dominion—and being like us creatures (that is, created by God) have the usual virtues and vices. Their chief lord is shown by Milton as gloriously courageous, accepting as great a share of hazard as of honor. I have noted that his courage has mislead romantics from William Blake to Jack London into imagining that Satan is admirable even in Milton’s secret heart. London took the proud words of Milton’s Satan as his personal motto: “To reign is worth ambition, though in hell: / Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.”[12]

Courage, in other words, is a virtue, but in a bad man or a fallen angel or a CEO gone off the ethical rails it is a virtue uncompleted by other virtues, such as Temperance or Justice or Love. Iago is courageous and, especially, prudent, but intemperate and, especially, unjust and unloving. The result is unchecked Envy and Hatred.

The classical and now revived analysis of virtues involves such balance and completion among the incommensurate virtues. The virtues cannot simply be added up into one sovereign Good, using that handy pocket-sized card. Aristotle or any typical recent Aristotelian, as Alan Ryan puts it, “approaches human nature more as a biologist than a mathematician, willing to recognize a variety of goods and ills [which suit different kinds of being] and a variety of ways of life which promote” the goods and ward off the ills.[13] That’s right: the long experiment in ethics of emulating Descartes and Newton, with their mathematical axioms and rigid proofs, has failed. We neo-Aristotelians want to try instead to emulate Darwin, Mayr, and Gould, with their biological classifications and their stories.

That is to say: Being good—lower-case g, no single Platonic ideal—always involves alloyed virtues, tin with copper, each a distinct element, to yield the more durable bronze. In fact Sin—Evil being Sin institutionalized—merely is some one or two virtues unalloyed with the rest. St. Gregory the Great classified the sins into the Seven Deadly ones. In matters of money an excess of virtuous Prudence unalloyed is sinful Greed, and its character is the miser. In matters of the body an excess of Love is Gluttony or Lust, and its character is the sybarite. Sin is a condition. Sins, plural, are acts. In Christian terms, sin is distance from God. Sins push one further away.

To think of sin or evil as a unified essence of its own, a contagion easily spotted in the very face of the person “infected” by it, is a Romantic and suburban Manichaeism according to which most of us believe ourselves to be—for all our admitted weaknesses, you see—on the good and light side of the Force. As Sartre once noted, “Manichaeism conceals a deep-seated attraction towards Evil. . . a curiosity fascinated. . . . In Berlin I knew a Protestant in whom sexual desire took the form of indignation. The sight of women in bathing suits aroused him to fury; he willingly encouraged that fury and passed his time at swimming pools.”[14]

On account of our after-knowledge of its evil fruit we are now rather more ravished, if we allow ourselves, by Triumph des Willen, Leni Riefenstahl’s film celebrating will-and-art politics in 1934 Germany. Listen to one Archibald Q. Stanton, a lay viewer of the film in 2002, about what he calls this “Feel Good Movie of the Century”: “Set aside your preconceptions, notions of political correctness, kick back with some nachos and enjoy the spectacle, pageantry, patriotism and just plain ole unmitigated evil of a bygone era.”[15] We cannot pretend to be much superior to Mr. Stanton, having ourselves felt the sexiness of evil, with or without nachos. We thrill to horror movies like Jaws or Friday the Thirteenth. It is therefore erotic as well as comforting to imagine Evil, though very interesting, as a rare case and therefore mainly irrelevant: Hitler or Darth Vader or Osama bin Laden.

Ethical questions are then corralled off as transfixing oddities. They are not how in the next minute or so you treat your husband or the clerk at the store or your fellow driver on the Kennedy Expressway. They are about how you decide, after consulting newspaper editorials and presidential commissions, the exceptional Bill-Moyers/ Charlie-Rose issues of abortion and cloning and bombing and other titanic wrongs and rights.

The problem for such a modern, secular, post-Holocaust, and Romantic view, in other words, is the banality of evil. As the philosopher John Doris puts it, in his book arguing that situations matter more than the character assumed in virtue ethics, “It takes a lot of people to kill . . . 6 million . . . human beings, and there just aren’t enough monsters to go around. Unfortunately, it does not take a monster to do monstrous things.”[16] Doris cites the famous experiment by Stanley Milgram in 1960-63, in which ordinary citizens of New Haven were persuade to (as they believed) torture other people to extreme pain and death.[17]

The ordinariness of the Germans—and let it be noted, the Austrians and Poles and Hungarians among others—who served as Hitler’s willing executioners, for example, disappears if we are looking for some Essence of Evil. Albert Speer, Hitler’s official architect and from 1942 minister of production, was a very saint of Prudence Only, an echt efficiency expert. But he was merely a more extreme version of ordinary Germans. He resembled ordinary Dutch and French people watching placidly out the window at Jews and Gypsies, homosexuals and socialists, being marched efficiently away. Compare ordinary Swedes trading peacefully with Hitler. Or ordinary Danes working with their usual efficiency in Hitler’s war machine. Or ordinary Swiss accommodating the banking needs of Nazi officials. Or, when it comes to that, ordinary Britons and Americans supporting their governments’ refusal to accept Jewish immigrants.

If we search always for the titanic we miss the banal evil, the unbalanced, uncompleted virtues, of our own, small, ordinary, local lives. In suburbia nowadays the very words “evil” and “sin” are taboo, except on Sunday mornings and then not in the sermon but only in the older hymns and rituals—and for special occasions in the rhetoric of conservative politicians. The Oxford English Dictionary notes dryly that evil as “the antithesis of good” is “now little used.” “Deliver us from evil,” you say in prayer—but you certainly do not mean your participation in the institutions of sin. You in such a pageant are (surely) a sweet old Dr. Jeckyl, and far away and far below is some terrifying, alien, evil, and above all rare Mr. Hyde.

In the view of virtue ethicists from Aristotle to Annette Baier, on the contrary, we are all capable of sin, and get into it daily. This is the secular meaning of the Abrahamic conviction that we are born in sin. It is the Greek and Christian sense of tragedy persisting in our culture—opposed recently by an Evangelical enthusiasm for a Rapture in which we, at least, will be saved. Sin in the Greek and orthodox Christian view is not radically foreign, something Satan made me do just this once, or something that only satanic people from the red or the blue states do, Anthony Hopkins playing Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Compare in this connection, by the way, Dr. Faustus, Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Strangelove, Dr. Roger Chillingworth the learned if evil physician, husband to Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter; or, in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the “scientific” Dr. John X, the scorning and confining husband, and Dr. Y, the wife’s complicit brother—thus are the learned honored in Protestant Europe.

Anyway, sin is domestic. We actual, suburban humans are imperfect. We do not have for example perfect Temperance. We chicken out, overindulge, harden our hearts, can’t think it through, remain confusedly ignorant. And so a courageous gesture with our SUV at 70 miles per hour on the Kennedy Expressway, a banal, unremarkable aggression against a too-slow driver, a mini-heroic act, will once in while produce a looming, ramifying catastrophe.

The need for balance in the virtues, lest they be specialized into sin, is tragic. In Democracy and Social Ethics (1902) Jane Addams spoke autobiographically, as a woman would, about the conflict between the “family claim” which kept her from going to Smith College as she had planned and the “social claim” which later drove her life: “The collision of interests, each of which has a real moral basis and a right to its own place in life, is bound to be more or less tragic. It is the struggle between two claims, the destruction of either of which would bring ruin to ethical life.”[18]

“Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you, in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone.” We are to confess our ordinary inability to balance our virtues in a world of scarcity, failing to exercise for example a properly Christian, cheek-turning love towards someone who has hurt us. Justice alone is not enough. Justice alone, unbalanced, will morph into the sin of Anger. One must have Love, and Courage and Temperance and the rest.

Bishop Butler in 1725 viewed Temperance as the crux, as one would naturally in an 18^th century very conscious of its progress over the chaos of religious war. Self-interest was a matter of Prudence and Courage, benevolence of Love and Justice. But neither could flourish without Temperance restraining the passions.

Men daily, hourly sacrifice the greatest known interest to fancy, inquisitiveness, love or hatred, any vagrant inclination. The thing to be lamented is not that men have so great a regard to their own good or interest [even] in the present world, for they have not enough.[19]

“The greatest known interest” is eternal salvation. But in Butler’s way of arguing it could be any great secular end, too. The problem is to control passion, to balance virtues, as Temperance does.

“The existence of inborn tendencies to evil,” Midgley writes, “need not puzzle us too much. It only means that our good tendencies are not complete or infallible.”[20] Philippa Foot calls vice a “natural defect” in a living thing, as a tiger would be defective without teeth or an oak tree without leaves and a human without love or locomotion. For example, people who habitually free ride on the efforts of others “are just as defective as those who have defective hearing, sight, or powers of locomotion.”[21] But perfection is as rare in ethics as in body.

As St. Augustine and later Aquinas thought of it, sin is not a thing in itself but an absence, a hole in the fabric.[22] The holes are original and ordinary. Or as Milton thought of it, sin is not a thing in itself, since after all nothing but God exists. It is rather a mistaken love for and loyalty to the imagined holes—again ordinary, for God loves and respects us so much that He gave us the free will to make such a mistake, to make nonentities our gods. And after loss of Eden we do.[23]

* * * *

Justice, the giving of dues, said St. Augustine, is the social parallel to Temperance. Temperance speaks of inner, Justice of outer weather.

Temperance is the management of the self, Justice the management of society. The one is a balance of passions, the other a balance of citizens. “Just as a man is well-ordered in himself by virtue [namely, Temperance],” says Aquinas, “so too is he well-ordered to his neighbors [by Justice].”[24] As John Rawls noted, justice is the characteristic virtue of institutions, and of the people running them. Justice is the characteristically social virtue among strangers, because as Aristotle observed, “if men are friends, there is no need of justice between them,” which is to say that from someone who loves you as he loves himself you have no need to claim your due.[25]

What is due depends. Before the Protestant and egalitarian and bourgeois sentiments of the 18^th century in Northwestern Europe flowered into a passion for equality a just balance meant what we and the reactionaries would now call “order.” The ordines, the classes, of Roman society were enforced by law and by the customs of the ancestors with bewildering precision, such as the details of seating at the games, the senatorial ordo in front, knights next, plebs in the back. And this was just. Justinian’s Institutes of 533 begins by defining justice as “the constant and perpetual will to acknowledge the right of each.”[26] But “right” [iūs] varied with social condition. And this was just.

Pliny the Younger declared that nothing is more unequal than equality itself. Shocking injustices as we now believe they are such as slavery or pedophilia could therefore survive millennia of ethical scrutiny, or rather a blithe lack of scrutiny. Thus too the inequality of women; or of children subject to a pater familias; or more recently the inequality of homosexuals abused by law and custom in Germanic countries; or of black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze; or of young black or Hispanic men imprisoned for selling coke to suburbanites slumming.

Humans have shown repeatedly that they can imagine almost any injustice—at any rate an injustice by the most elevated egalitarian standards of bourgeois Europe—as fit, decorous, natural, what we do, nothing-to-be-done-about-it-anyway; in a word, as “just.” Consider the Germans of the Third Reich, or the Germans rehearsing for the Third Reich in East Africa in 1904. Consider Hotel Rwanda. We have shown ourselves capable of imposing almost any indignity on Iraqis or Tutsis or barbaroi or any inferior.

Dignitas in Latin is from an Indo-European base *dek- meaning “receive, be fitting,” from which also decus (ornament) > decōrus (proper) > decorous. What is decorous depends in a hierarchical society of course on the dignity of rank. It is the free adult male Roman citizen, not a slave or woman or child, for whom it is dulce et decorum to die for the fatherland. Aristotle declares that “justice between master and slave and between father and child is not the same as absolute and political justice. . . . A chattel is . . . a part of oneself.”[27] Well, of course. An ancilla, a female household slave (from which we get the word “ancillary”), was recommended by ancient ethical writers as a sexual object useful for preventing real adultery. Never mind her admitted humanness. Galen the doctor warns an owner not to hit slaves with his fist, to avoid injury to his—the owner’s—fist. Wait until the passion subsides, he counsels, then apply the rod of justice. Never mind the slave’s humanness.

One waxes indignant about past slavery. But the point here is that its justice was until the late 18^th century entirely unquestioned. Souls in such a view are of course equal before God, the “of course” applying for example to Greek and Roman stoicism, and to the Abrahamic religions of the Near East. It does not seem to apply to Hinduism, where a higher rank in the orders of the world must be earned in successive incarnations. Little wonder that over the millennia the castes of India have been sociologically hardy. The equality before God that distinguishes monotheism from rank-preserving polytheism is ancient.[28]

But as Samuel Fleischacker points out, {a} this-world egalitarianism was not imagined until Rousseau and especially Adam Smith. Equality of souls did not imply anything like equality of condition in this life.[29] On the contrary, fallen man must take up his burden as God’s test. The poor are to be relieved because charity is a Christian duty and a Jewish mitzvah, not because the poor servant is entitled to a comfortable life. Until the bourgeois ethicists of the late 18^th century, whose new policy was carried out in the 19^th century, every stoic, Jewish, Christian, and Moslem society placidly accepted slavery, on the principle for example of rendering unto Caesar in this life what is Caesar’s. And rendering unto quite a few other people, too: my lord, my master, my owner, my boss, my priest, my husband, my father, my older brother.

And until the bourgeois ethicists of the late 19^th century, whose new policy was carried out in the 20^th century, almost every society enforced the subordination of women, on the principle for example that a woman is an imperfect man. And until the bourgeois ethicists of the late 20^th century, whose new policy is being carried out in the 21^st century, Christian societies among others adopted the persecution of homosexuals, on the principle for example that anything that causes anxiety to young heterosexual men is to be assaulted. Whatever the conception of justice, an orderly ancient one or a Protestant modern one, Justice is the virtue of treating with respect whomever should be treated with respect. The rule of Justice is: no dissing. It is not a rule of Prudence or Love or any of the other virtues.

Bourgeois societies from ancient Jerusalem to modern Hong Kong have been notably, if never perfectly, free. This is because two people doing business must deal with each other, not overawe or submit to each other. So bourgeois society developed a historically unique notion of justice. Samuel Fleischacker in recent books has noted that Adam Smith, the theorists of bourgeois virtues, was a radical egalitarian, quite unimpressed with the claims of philosophers (say) to superiority over street porters.[30] An old notion has survived scrutiny: 18^th-century liberal philosophers did abandon an appeal to status in favor of an appeal to contract, and the European society surrounding the philosophers was changing this way, too. So Henry Maine said in 1861, and Tocqueville, too, in The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution.

By contrast, everyone in Elizabethan England believed in a great chain of being from God through kings to lords to masters to apprentices to women to slaves. You can see it vividly in Shakespeare. David Cannadine argues that in Britain “the Elizabethan world picture did not die with the Elizabethans.”[31] By now in America only certain members of the Country Club believe it. Whether we like it or not we liberals, and even we radicals and conservatives in our less bloody-minded moods, are entangled in a bourgeois conception of justice.

[1] Williams, Moral Luck, 1981, p. x.

[2] Hursthouse, Virtue Ethics, 1999, p. 22.

[3] MacIntyre, Whose Justice, 1988, p. 175, italics supplied.

[4] MacIntyre, After Virtue, 1981, p. 206.

[5] Wolfe, Moral Freedom, 2001, pp. 21, 23ff.

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

[7] Midgley, Wickedness, 1984, p. 147. Othello, I. i. line 154.

[8] Coleridge Omniana (1812), quoted at http:// www. clicknotes. com/othello/ motiveless.html.

[9] Fish, How Milton Works, throughout, for example pp. 47, 57. 92.

[10] Lewis, “Satan,” 1942, p. 200

[11] Lewis, Screwtape Letters, 1943, p. xi.

[12] Milton, Paradise Lost, 1667, Book IV, lines 108-110; Book I, lines 262-263. London’s use of Milton: James Dickey, “Introduction” to his edition of The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and Other Stories (1961), quoted in Gary Kinder, ed., Jack London, The Sea Wolf, Modern Library 2000, p. 293.

[13] Ryan, “Human Nature,” 1987, p. 218.

[14] Sartre, Anti-Semite, 1944, p. 46f.

[15] http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0025913/

[16] Doris, Lack of Character, 2002, p. 54.

[17] Doris, Lack of Character, 2002, pp. 39-51 and throughout.

[18] Quoted in Elshtain, “Adams, Jane,” 1995, p. 14.

[19] Butler, Fifteen Sermons, 1725, Preface, p. 352.

[20] Midgeley, Wickedness, 1984, p. 14.

[21] Foot, Natural Goodness, 2001, pp. 16, 116.

[22] Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, c. 1259-1264, III: 7.

[23] Midgley, Wickedness, 1984, p. 14.

[24] Aquinas, Disputed Questions, 1269-72, “The Cardinal Virtues,” Art. 1, p. 106.

[25] Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, c. 330 BC, VIII, 1, 4 (1155b).

[26] Justinian, Institutes, 533 AD, p. 1, “Iustitia est constans et perpetua voluntas ius suum cuique tribunes.”

[27] Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, c. 330 BC, V, vi, 8 (1134b).

[28] Sacks, 2002, Dignity of Difference, p. 92.

[29] Fleischhacker, Short History, 2004b, p. 2 and throughout.

[30] Fleischacker, Short History, 2004b, and “Economics and the Ordinary,” 2004c.

[31] Cannadine, Class in Britain, 1998, p. 167.

“When I was young,” said Clovis, “my mother taught me the difference between good and evil—only I’ve forgotten it.”

“You’ve forgotten the difference between good and evil?” gasped the princess.

“Well, she taught me three ways of cooking lobster. You can’t remember everything.”

Saki (Hector Hugh Monro),

Quoted in The Wit and Wisdom of Quentin Crisp.

An ethic of the virtues gives a guide. It does not solve every ethical problem slam-bang, which as Rosalind Hursthouse notes is no special problem—because after all neither does any other serious ethical theory. [1] Even as straightforward an ethical theory as “follow the 613 commandments of the Torah,” Hillel’s count, has not proven to be slam-bang, not even close.

Deciding whether a certain act “would be the object of choice of all rational beings” (as Hursthouse summarizes Kant) or “maximizes happiness” (as one might summarize Hume, Bentham) or “would be chosen at the social contract” (Ockham, Suarez, Hobbes, Locke, Rawls, Nozick) is no less difficult than deciding whether the act entails cowardice or hatred or injustice. Ethics after virtue is commonly more difficult to apply, not less. The stories of our culture give us models for acting courageously or lovingly or justly. The virtue-words with stories attached appear anyway to be how humans reason ethically. “A [Greek] tragedy,” Martha Nussbaum declared, “does not display the dilemmas of its characters as pre-articulated; it shows them as searching for the morally salient; and it forces us, as interpreters, to be similarly active.”[2]

The point applies to less elevated stories than Orestes and Antigone. In my 30s and 40s I used to jog long distances. I did not then tell myself Kantian or utilitarian ethical reasonings, though neither was entirely irrelevant, I suppose. The Kantian duty to step out the door on a cold morning or the utilitarian reasoning that after all it was good for me did help, a little. Kant’s maxim would not acknowledge any pleasure in the run, and Bentham’s calculation would not acknowledge any identity in it. Virtue ethics combines the two. The unity of ethical thinking was torn apart by the analysts of the 18^th century. (I really cannot, though, even at a stretch, see a contractarian motive in a lone daily run. The fact casts light on a fault of contractarianism such as Nozick’s, namely, that it reduces ethics to the improvement of other people, ignoring self improvement, and ignoring also the Transcendent—unless we think, as monotheists in fact do, of making covenants with God.)

To actually keep putting one foot in front of another I told myself, as we do, little character stories, of Pheidippides running from Athens to Sparta, say, or of the game of making it to the next bridge, or of my identity imagined and actual. I was in a sense fooling myself, though aware. I learned from running how to make a change from a very overweight smoker to a somewhat overweight non-smoker. In my fifth decade, that is, I learned that the combination of temperance plus courage we call Persistence can achieve with small steps quite a lot. As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, choose not to drink one day, or one hour, at a time. Beginnen is ondernemen, the Dutch say. Literally, “to begin is to undertake”— a journey of a thousand miles.

I had of course “known” such an obvious truth long before in the intellectual sense sufficient for Kantian or Benthamite reasoning. But to little good for weight control. That’s what’s wrong with Kantian or Benthamite reasoning. It is reasoning, not a cause for action. “Moral knowledge, unlike mathematical knowledge,“ Hursthouse notes, “cannot be acquired merely by attending lectures and is [therefore] not characteristically to be found in people too young to have much experience of life. A normative ethics should not aim to provide a decision procedure which any reasonably clever adolescent could apply,” like the chain rule for derivatives.[3] But an adolescent’s head is of course filled with stories and characters to imitate, for good or evil.

Both Kant and Bentham were sweet but notably inexperienced men. As Mill said of Bentham, “He was a boy to the last.”[4] Kant and Bentham had seen little of life. Neither of them had been married or had run a business or had carried a spear in the phalanx. Both of them supposed, with Socrates—who I have to admit had had all these experiences of life—that knowledge of the good is enough for the will to achieve it. I am not against sweet, inexperienced, and unmarried men. After all, my hero Adam Smith was one. One of my other heroes, Aquinas, was another. But, unlike Kant or Bentham, Adam Smith managed somehow to restrain the impulse to theorize much beyond human life as actually lived. And Aquinas surpassed in intellectual flexibility and a sense of lived life many a neo-Thomist.

The running so to speak changed my character to long, slow distance. I stopped thinking of my economic scholarship as a matter of the next article and started to think of it as a marathon. “Running,” said Sir Roger Bannister to the BBC cameras on the 50^th anniversary of his first breaking the four-minute mile, “is only a metaphor for life.” A certain kind of life, actually. And your life becomes a metaphor for running itself. I applied the narrative of running to other parts of my life, such as slowly, slowly acquiring small Latin and less Greek, or learning to read a smattering of difficult books in the humanities. Reading The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, you see, is like a marathon, or at least like a run from Iowa City to the Lake McBride Dam and back.

Guides to ethical life, to repeat, are achieved mainly through story and example. As Robert Hariman puts it:

What to do? One typical [modern] response is to look for rules: what would any rational person do in this situation? . . . . There was another approach familiar to the classical thinkers, however, which was to look to exemplars: how have other individuals managed situations such as this one? The attention given to the particular wise person—the phronimos—is not merely a heuristic device. . . . Prudential theory [which is Hariman’s name for the Ciceronian program of virtue ethics in action] requires a bifocal perspective that alternates between impersonal norms and individual circumstances, a perspective that is similar to the reading strategy for understanding a persuasive text.[5]

Hariman is here referring to the fruitful notion of the rhetorician Richard Lanham that we should “toggle”—Lanham was using the computer term—between surface and depth, rhetoric and philosophy, practice and theory.[6]

The theoretical precepts are not useless. In baseball: “Keep your eye on the ball.” In writing: “Don’t overload your sentences.” But they are like a coach offering commentary, not the achievement itself. There are no formulas, or else such activities would not be valuable arts. They would be mere skills, easily acquired by anyone, like typing or using econometrics.[7]

Indeed, coaching itself has no formulas, or else great coaches would be a dime a dozen.[8] Ted Williams’ book, The Science of Hitting, offers precepts for life as much as for “the single most difficult thing to do in sport”—hitting a major-league fastball.[9] To achieve in hitting you need to witness and then to imitate Williams’ swing, among the wonders of mid-20^th-century sports. But you need to do it, and keep doing it, supported by a boy’s myth of excellence. It was a story Williams told to himself, a story of his ethical character, not a decision-making formula. The story kept him at batting practice until his hands bled.

The character thus formed I say applies to more than baseball. In 1995 at a conference organized by the rhetorician Herbert Simons I heard a paper by Linda Brodkey about teaching writing called “Writing on the Bias.” Brodkey told how she learned to write by watching her mother sew. Her mother was a gifted seamstress and could cut cloth “on the bias” to give a dress a graceful drape. The daughter learned to write—and she writes well—by translating the virtues of dressmaking into the virtues of writing.[10]

Likewise I learned how to do academic tasks—actually any task—by watching my mother do carpentry or sewing or cooking or learning Greek irregular verbs, witnessing the virtues of hope and courage operating in them. Try learning to sew or write or hit a major league fastball by following the Categorical Imperative, or the Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number. Try learning with those ideas to be “good” in any sense. They don’t work.

We build our characters story by story. In the romantic comedy written and directed by Harold Ramis, Groundhog Day (1993), the Bill Murray character, a self-centered jerk of a TV weatherman, is condemned to relive his February 2 of 1992 over and over and over again. At first he sins deliciously, indulging in table-fuls of food for example, three hot fudge sundaes, a big stack of pancakes, a plate full of bacon. “Don’t you worry about love handles?” Not if after the intemperance the clock is always turned back to a new 6:00 am of the very same Groundhog Day, to the same bright chatter of a wake-up show predicting c-o-l-d in Punxsutawney, PA. Phil’s motto is to eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow will be today all over again.

He is the only person on the scene who remembers all his yester-todays. So by reliving the day he can correct each false move in achieving pleasure, as in his attempted seduction of his TV colleague, the Andie MacDowell character. He learns for instance that she always orders sweet vermouth on ice with a twist of lemon and always toasts to world peace. He therefore can craftily ingratiate himself by anticipating just these, getting better and better at concupiscent “love,” for his pleasure late on the day. Tomorrow won’t do, because it never dawns. The seduction fails, of course, because McDowell is pure. It is a romantic comedy.

After many hundreds of iterations of his February 2, having indulged every sin, he enters a dark night of the soul, killing himself in every conceivable way. One time he kidnaps the groundhog-of-honor and drives off the edge of a quarry. But to no avail. The curse of waking up again and again on the same February 2 in the same bed-and-breakfast hangs on, and he repeats yet again the day he knows to perfection. He knows the exact second at which the waiter will drop the tray of dishes or where exactly the slush-filled hole is located in the street or the identities and histories of every single actor in the little drama on the Nth day of its run. He has the time—all the time—to learn French, ice-sculpting, pop piano, dazzling by evening his colleagues who knew the Phil of the day before as a talentless piece of TV talent.

But having tried to make his pleasures of lust and gluttony into his gods, and having reached despair, he begins to shift, to grow in character. “I am a god,” he says at the midpoint, puzzled, “not the God, I think,” an angel, perhaps, able by repetition to know every way to prevent unhappy accidents. That he now gives a damn is evidence of his ethical growth. Phil arranges for example to arrive every morning as a little boy falls out of a tree, exactly in time to catch him, the ungrateful brat. “Maybe God is just someone who’s been around for a long time.” Yet he discovers, too, the limited power of an angel-not-God. Despite repeated shots at that same February 2 he is not in fact able to save the life of an old derelict fated then to die. By such spiritual exercises Phil’s character evolves, gradually. Bill Murray’s craft is on display here, as when he conveys even failed acting, the Phil character playing a role mechanically to some end not consistent with true character. Virtue is character, not rational maxims or parlor tricks of good-deed doing—“when someone’s watching you,” Tom Lehrer warbled long ago.

Phil becomes truly virtuous. By experimenting on a big scale he discovers, in other words, the best life for a human, the ethical laws of our nature. “There is not,” said Shaftesbury, “the least degree of certainty wanting. . . concerning the preferableness of the mental pleasures [in Phil’s case, mastery of French] over the sensual [three hot fudge sundaes]. . . and even of the sensual accompanied by good affection and under a temperate and right use [jazz piano] to those which are no ways restrained” [plotting to seduce the MacDowell character].[11] Phil discovers the balanced virtues of Love and Courage and the rest, and even a Humility quite inconceivable in Phil the Jerk.

He is able for the first time to love in the higher sense, that is, to care for someone for her own sake instead of merging hers into his own utility. MacDowell therefore falls for him, he is redeemed by love, the curse is broken, a February 3^rd dawns, and they live happily ever after. I said it was a romantic comedy.

The conventions of the genre in a secular age make it impossible for him to find God in the last reel, but the story otherwise persuades. People really do prefer to be virtuous rather than vicious. Exiled tyrants like the late Edi Amin of Uganda, retired in luxury in Saudi Arabia, believe to the end of their days that what they did for their people was good—eating them, for example. Plato’s (or Socrates’) error was only in believing that sheer intellectual information about The Good would suffice. Plato was correct that if we know, really know, virtue, on our pulse, after thousands of repetitions of Groundhog Day, then we will prefer it to evil.[12] Satan’s facile formula, “Evil be thou my good,” doesn’t work in human lives any more than in angelic lives.

The movie asserts that, regrettably, most of us need experience, quite a lot of it, to become ethically educated, to be led out of lives of big and little evils. If we have the short lives of the pre-industrial world, for example, there’s no second, third, fourth act in which to set aside alcohol or violence, acquisitiveness or cruelty, in favor of the [really] good life. Seneca made this point. For many of us it takes fully three score years and ten to get even close to the ethical life. Or it takes many good movies. Unsurprisingly, there opened in early 2004 an Italian remake of the Groundhog Day plot, called È già ieri, “it’s still yesterday,” and an Adam Sandler vehicle with a similar theme, 50 First Dates. There’s a TV movie on the theme called Christmas Every Day (1996). Over and over and over again.

Or good autobiographies. Anyway inspiring stories in our culture, if we haven’t the wit to see it in our own lives. Hursthouse observes that “we do not always act as ‘autonomous,’ utterly self-determining agents,” the way the masculinist version of ethical reflection supposes. We “often seek moral guidance from people we think are morally better than ourselves,” or at any rate have gone through annealing experiences we think relevant to our own lives.[13] In a womanly way we are fascinated by ethical stories, finding them in literature, in autobiography, in gossip.

It is a fault in Hursthouse’s philosophically sophisticated exposition of virtue ethics that she does not acknowledge the river of narrative in which humans swim. She argues persuasively that an adolescent cannot be wholly ethical, that the writing of a complete ethical Code Napoléon is an unattainable goal, that in short an educated judgment must be exercised.[14] Yet how then are we to grow into such ethical wisdom? Breadth of actual life experience is clearly relevant, though commonly not sufficient. But so is breadth of hearing and watching and reading the images and stories of our culture.

A story: The prison-hardened gangbanger and thief Carl Upchurch had been in solitary confinement at the federal penitentiary of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania for two months before he noticed the little paperback book propping up one leg of the table. “I pulled it out, excited to have found something to alleviate the monotony. I turned it over and stared at the cover in disgust. It was Shakespeare’s sonnets.” He put it back. But his time in solitary was long, and “after three more days of staring at gray, I pulled it out again, muttering that Shakespeare was better than nothing.”

I don’t pretend that Shakespeare and I immediately connected. I must have read those damn sonnets twenty times before they started to make sense. . . . I had almost always been contemptuous of intellect. That book of sonnets didn’t just change my opinion—it quite literally changed my mind. . . . I wanted to ask for more books, but I didn’t have a clue where to start. At least I knew that Shakespeare had written other stuff besides the sonnets, so I requested anything else they had by him. I . . . started plowing my way through thirty-eight plays and some other poetry. . . . Caught up in the first flush of literary exploration, I was pretty impressed with myself. In retrospect, it was lucky I was in the cell alone. . . . [The] guys would have burst my bubble mercilessly.[15]

He burst it often enough himself, in further explosions of macho violence. But gradually he emerged, through what he calls “de-niggerization.” Story by story he remade his character. For example this very tough guy wept his way through Les Misérables.

Religious ritual, which seems so idiotic to the secular mind, has the same feel as Carl’s Nth chance to go straight or Phil’s Nth repetition of Groundhog Day. The words and motions of the mass give the faithful repeated chances to get it right. At the Nth repetition of “this is my blood, the cup of salvation” you for the first time grasp, really grasp, the meaning of redemption through Christ’s sacrifice. Well . . . part of it at any rate.

* * * *

If Kantianism, and its vulgar British cousin, utilitarianism, did not in fact provide guides to an ethical life, they do provide cool poses to assume, neat stories the man espousing them can tell himself.

The utilitarian can pose as Practical, a numbers man. I have said why I think this modern myth of Practical Prudence is sometimes phony or dangerous. But when the issue is in fact a matter of numbers, and the fix is not in, the Practical Man is a useful guy to have around. He can tell you very properly that this particular design of a highway off-ramp implies a certain value of human life, whether or not you are comfortable with such numbers. Grow up, he says. Face facts. If we spend thousands of dollars investigating each airline fatality and only scores of dollars investigating each highway fatality the result will be less safety. The economist says, “Shift some money from airline to highway investigations.” When you want to be practical and consistent and not waste money, the utilitarian should be listened to. Really.

The uses of Kantianism are more spiritual. The ideal Kantian is, as Iris Murdoch put it, a combination of Romantic and Puritan, a man who chooses never to stoop, but always does his duty. Compare Alexander Gerschenkron. Gerschenkron was, surprisingly to those like me who knew him only superficially, a believing Christian. But he was also the best, my boy, the bravest. Kant helps bourgeois men without a god feel nonetheless proud of who they are.

In the Groundwork Kant denied such ethical pride to women, almost explicitly: “there are many persons who are so sympathetically constituted that, without any further motive of vanity or self-interest, they find an inner pleasure in spreading joy around them. . . . In such a case an action of this kind, however dutiful and amiable it may be, has nevertheless no true moral worth.”[16] This is the kind of analysis, in which womanly people cannot be virtuous, that annoyed Carol Gilligan. “How recognizable, how familiar to us, is the man so beautifully portrayed in the Grundlegung,” Murdoch writes. He is

with us still, free, independent, lonely, powerful, responsible, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of moral philosophy. . . . He is the offspring of the age of science, confidently rational and yet increasingly aware of his alienation. . . . He has the virtue which [the bourgeois men of] the age requires and admires, courage. [17]

How noble, how glorious, above all how manly to face damnation without illusions. I called it “secular stoicism,” that god-absent virtù. Murdoch notes that from Kant to Nietzsche is “not such a very long step,” and thence to existentialism and “the Anglo-Saxon ethical doctrines [of ethics, in the early 20^th century, ‘emotivism’ in particular,] which in some ways closely resemble it.” The central doctrine of secular stoicism is that ethics is not a matter of the nature of imperfect human beings, much less of transcendent ethical realism, and certainly not of God. The post-Kantian secular stoic believes that ethics is merely a matter of steady, manly, secular, human will. “In fact Kant’s man,” Murdoch observes, “had already received a glorious incarnation nearly a century earlier in the work of Milton: his proper name is Lucifer.”[18]

[1] Hursthouse, “Virtue Theory and Abortion,” 1991, p. 224, and her comparison of virtue theory with Kantian and utilitarian theories at pp. 217-219.

[2] Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, 1986, p. 14.

[3] Hursthouse, Virtue Ethics, 1999, pp. 18, 59. Notice that Hursthouse uses “moral” and “ethical” as synonyms.

[4] Mill, “The Mind and Character of Jeremy Bentham,” 1838, p. 317.

[5] Hariman, “Theory Without Modernity,” 2003, p. 7.

[6] Lanham, Electronic Word, 1993, p, 79ff.

[7] McCloskey, If You’re So Smart, 1990.

[8] A point made by the economist Gary Walton in Beyond Winning, 1991.

[9] Williams and Underwood 1986 (1970), Science of Hitting, p. 7.

[10] Brodkey, “Writing,” 1994.

[11] Shaftesbury, Characteristics 1713 (1732), VoL. II, p. 99.

[12] Compare McDowell, “Virtues and Reason,” 1979, pp. 144-147.

[13] Hursthouse, Virtue Ethics, 1999, p. 35.

[14] Hursthouse, Virtue Ethics, 1999, pp. 60, 39ff, 57f.

[15] Upchurch, Convicted in the Womb, 1996, pp. 81-84

[16] Kant, Grounding, 1785, Ellington trans., p. 398.

[17] Murdoch, “Sovereignty of Good,” 1967, p. 80.

[18] Murdoch, “Sovereignty of Good,” 1967, p. 80.

Thus Kant, with a pocket-sized, 3 inch-by-5 inch card inscribed: “Imagine the action you propose to take would be elevated to a general rule for all society.” Or Rawls: “Imagine you are a risk-averse person making rules for society behind a veil of ignorance about your own location in the society.” Such meta-rules are as applicable to creatures on a planet circling Proxima Centauri as to us humans.

From its beginnings in Plato’s writings ethical monism did not work very well. As Aristotle said—he apologized for thus refuting his teacher—“it is not easy to see how knowing the same Ideal Good will help a weaver, . . . or how anybody will be a better physician or general for having contemplated the absolute Ideal.”[1] The neo-Aristotelian and anti-Kantian turn in recent ethical philosophy can be put this way: it’s no good talking like Plato or Kant of The Ultimate when most of the ethical issues we face are matters of practice as a weaver or a physician or a mother. Or to put it more strongly, as people like Alasdair MacIntyre and Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish do, the Ultimate never comes up.

In the preface to his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) Kant declared “the ground of obligation must be looked for, not in the nature of man nor in the circumstances of the world in which he is placed, but solely a priori in the concepts of pure reason.”[2] We are to study how people are supposed to behave without reference to their psychologies or their customs or their histories.

He offers in the Groundwork only two reasons for this on-its-face bizarre assertion about the proper method of ethics—which on Kant’s authority was then followed scrupulously for nearly two centuries by ethical philosophers in the West. First, he says, there is and should be a division of labor between theorizers and observers “if we are to know how much pure reason can accomplish.” He means that we are to set aside actual human culture, in the manner so to speak of a controlled experiment. And second, “morals themselves remain exposed to corruption of all sorts as long as this guiding thread is lacking, this ultimate norm.”[3]

A virtue ethicist is moved to respond, a trifle impatiently: “Why, dear Immanuel, `must’ a division of labor govern ethical philosophy, why `must’ there be an ultimate norm, why does it seem plausible to you that we will be corrupted by a lack of such a norm, why `must’ duty be derived as though by geometric proof from an axiom of a hypothetically `pure’ Rational Creature, who never was a child, never had a mother or father, never walked the actual streets of an actual Königsberg?” Kant in the Groundwork suggested no reply, or merely the Platonic/Cartesian reply that we “must” turn our minds to an ideal rather than to the “merely” ordinary. In The Critique of Practical Reason the method is defended as separating “ought” from “is,” following Hume in this. But why would it seem plausible that “ought”-sentences would have no contact with “is”-sentences? They do{n’t} in life.

Kant entirely separated ethics from anthropology and psychology, indeed from any empirical claim whatsoever. Ethics in his view was to take place in its own realm. After him therefore ethical thinking in the West was haunted by the fear that to justify ethics in actual humans is to fall prey to a “naturalistic fallacy,” as G. E. Moore came to call it in attacking Bentham, Mill, and Sidgwick for their utilitarianism. One ought not to derive an Ought from an Is, an ethical precept from a factual statement. Thus, “free trade is desirable because it causes happiness in humans as they actually are” is an error.[4] A fallacy. Illusion.

“When we run over libraries persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make?” Hume asked in the peroration of An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748):

If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.[5]

No theology; no natural law; no ethics. We are to have only mathematics on the one hand and on the other the “sciences”—though in the wide, non-post-1850-English sense, that is, systematic studies of the world, human or natural: Wissenschaften.

But no philosophy either, whether academic or worldly, is to survive the flames. It does not seem to have occurred to Hume that his Inquiry would be among the first to go, and shortly thereafter his theoretical essays on economics advocating free trade. Nor does it seem to have occurred very often to the philosophers in Kant’s train that in saying “You ought not to derive Ought from Is” they were engaging in a natural human ethical activity.[6] Nor does it seem to have occurred to them that a Greek-admiring ethics or the Roman equivalent of morality would lack point unless based on philosophical psychology (ethos) or philosophical anthropology (mos).

Kant helped create the glorious yet mischievous utopianism of the Enlightenment project; but by fiat, not by reasoning. He had one implicit reason, though not mentioned in the Groundwork, which must as ordinary politics be given weight. It is that we “must” strip social status from ethics. Universal, unparticular Reason, he seemed to reason, would apply to a miller as much as to a marquis. Writing in a world of 1785 in which status most oppressively ruled, the egalitarian axiom of Kant, and of Bentham and Smith and Locke and Richard Hooker and John Knox and for that matter St. Thomas of Aquino, St. Augustine of Hippo, and Jesus of Nazareth, was revolutionary stuff. “A man’s a man for a’ that” is an explosive idea.

I say it had been foreshadowed in soul-focused religions, especially in Protestantism and it appears in Early-Church Christianity, such as in the democratic governance of John Knox’s Presbyterianism or Calvin’s Geneva, or among the still more radical Congregationalists or Quakers or Baptists—who in some eras would let even women preach—or among the Lutheran Pietists of Kant’s ancestry. As it was put at the dawn by a Presbyterian soldier, “I am sure there was no man born marked of God above another, for none comes into the world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him.”[7]

Kant’s notion that status is an accident but that the human duty to Reason is an essence echoes his own absolutist king, Frederick the Great. Frederick wrote an Anti-Macchiavel in 1740, published in French under Voltaire’s auspices at the Hague in the same year that Frederick ascended the throne. It was the year Kant entered university as a student at the former Prussian capital. Kant’s own book on ethics was published in his old age, a year before the end of Frederick’s long reign. In the Anti-Macchiavel Frederick forswears personal gain from kingship, thus contradicting as he imagined Machiavelli’s supposedly self-profiting prince. He declares famously that “the ruler is far from being the arbitrary master of his people; he is indeed, nothing other than the first servant.”[8] In 1842 Thomas Macaulay the Liberal noted sarcastically that Frederick had nonetheless “studiously kept up the old distinction between the nobles and the community. In speculation, he was a French philosopher, but in action, a German prince.”[9]

In 1785, aged 61, and with increasing rigor as he grew older, Kant scornfully rejected an “anthropological” approach to ethics. Kant was not scornful of anthropology itself as a subject. Indeed, he taught it every Saturday morning in term, as Manfred Kuehn tells us in his recent, splendid biography.[10] But Kant thought it was to be impaled on Hume’s Fork to include facts of actual human life in ethical philosophy. Hume’s Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, Kant said, had awakened him from his dogmatic slumber. But, oddly, he did not appear to know of Hume’s other, ethical treatise, of human nature.[11]

For instance Kant rejected as a maxim of a true and therefore universal ethics the “honor” (Ehre) that, as Kuehn notes, “may even have been more important to the citizens of the larger towns and cities of Prussia” than to the literal and Ehre-regarding aristocracy. Thus Kant’s father was of the honorable guild of harness makers, if poor, and Kant himself of the honorable guild of scholars.[12] Kant appealed rather to an egalitarian psychology reminiscent I repeat of the Pietism of his parents—Kuehn, though, does not think that Pietism was the source. “Honor is something entirely conventional,” Kant wrote. “By contrast, the representation of right lies deep in the soul of everyone, even of the most delicate child.”[13] Find the maxim within the soul and we can construct a pure, ultimate, non-anthropological universal ethic.

There was another, personal reason for Kant’s fascination with ethical maxims and his increasing rigor in hedging them off from the life world. This was his intimate friendship from age 41 to age 62 with Joseph Green, an English trader in timber, fruit, and spices, a Hull man who lived most of his adult life in Königsberg. Kant had many friends within the bourgeoisie of the city, as did Adam Smith at the same time in Glasgow and Edinburgh. The parallels between Kant/Green and Smith/Hume are striking; and Mr. Green was in fact a conduit for Humean ideas to Kant. As the Kant scholar Lewis White Beck expressed it in his brilliant parody of 1979, an alleged manuscript of Boswell’s account of a (non-existent) visit to the Königsberg group in 1785, “Dr. Smith had told me of an English merchant here resident, a Mr. Green, a man of prudence & virtue.”[14]

Green was “the most intimate friend Kant ever had.”[15] Like Kant a lifelong bachelor, Green spent every afternoon and early evening for twenty-one years in Kant’s company, supplying the philosopher with detailed criticism. The criticism, Kuehn notes, seems to have resulted in a comparative lucidity in Kant’s writing style, lost after Green’s death in 1786. Kant’s writings during the friendship contained “many phrases and idioms . . . that can be traced back to the language of merchants, such as `borrowing,’ `capital’,’ and so forth.”[16] One might guess that Kant refused offers from the universities at Erlangen and Jena in 1769-70 in part because his special friend of by then three years standing was attached by business to Königsberg. Kant did mention his “very wide circle of acquaintances and friends” in the letter awkwardly taking back an initial acceptance of the offer from Erlangen.[17] He also declined a call to Halle in 1778.

Green’s influence on Kant was psychologically profound and philosophically important. According to Kuehn, Green’s example transformed Kant’s character. Mr. Green was above all a “Man of the Clock,” the title of a comedy in 1765 by the famous progressive Königsberg playwright and member of their set, one of Kant’s followers and later his benefactor, Theodor Hippel, spoofing Green.

Mr. Green was not difficult to spoof. Kuehn recounts that Kant and Green had arranged one day to take a carriage ride together the next morning at exactly 8:00 in the morning. Kant was a little late. He had not yet become the Professor Kant by whose comings and goings one could adjust one’s watch. Yet Green, true to his maxim of following the clock, set off in the carriage anyway. Passing Kant hurrying along the road towards the house, he drove past him, “with Kant vigorously signaling for him to stop.” He did this not because he was angry at Kant’s tardiness but merely because “it was against Green’s maxim” to deviate from any prudent plan.[18] In the play Hippel has his Green character declare, “I do not get up because I have slept enough, but because it is 6:00 a.m. I go to eat not because I am hungry, but because the clock has struck 12:00.”[19]

The case shows vividly the force of a bourgeois and even a specifically English and non-conformist version of Reason in the Enlightenment. Besides Kant and his English merchant and Smith and his Scottish ones there is Voltaire, who himself made a fortune in finance before he was 30—he added to it throughout his life, and died one of the richest commoners in Europe—and the English merchant to whom he dedicated in 1732 his play Zaïre.

In Hippel’s play an academic character, based it seems on Kant as he was in 1765, age 41, before Green took entire charge, complains that in his own, non-bourgeois work prudence and plan cannot rule: “A dissertation . . . is not a bank draft. With such work one cannot keep hours.” Kuehn remarks that “little by little [Kant] learned to write philosophy like a bank draft,” until in the year before Green’s death he produced The Groundwork:

Green’s effect on Kant cannot be overestimated. . . . [Kant] gave up playing cards to please Green. His visits to the theatre became rarer, and late in life they ceased almost altogether. Green was completely tone deaf. . . . Kant, “at least in his early years” [wrote a contributor to the memorial lectures for Kant in 1804] “listened to good music with pleasure.” He gave up that custom as well. . . . The elegant Magister [that is, a German academic before his professorship] with somewhat irregular and unpredictable lifestyle changed into a man of principle with an exceedingly predictable way of life. He became more and more like Green. . . . The days of the whirlpool of social diversions were coming to an end—not suddenly, but slowly: maxim by maxim. . . . Kant’s view of maxims, as necessary for building character [“morals themselves remain exposed to corruption of all sorts as long as this guiding thread is lacking, this ultimate norm”], was, at least in part, indebted to Green’s way of life. It was not an accident that in the lectures on anthropology in which Kant spoke of maxims, he often claimed that the English had the most solid understanding. He himself relied on the judgment of his English friend.[20]

The Kantian tradition in ethical philosophy, then, begins with a monomania for Prudence Only—a Prudence worthy of Jeremy Bentham and the modern economists. In a not charming sense it is bourgeois. That such intemperate lunacy lies at the heart of the modern and anti-Aristotelian theory of ethics should perhaps give pause.

Bernard Williams, another of the pioneering virtue ethicists since the 1950s, concluded that “The resources of most modern moral philosophy are not well adjusted to the modern world.” “Its prevailing fault, in all its styles, is to impose on ethical life some immensely simple model,” such as Contract behind a veil of ignorance, Rationality as European bourgeois men might define it, or Utility, which seems so measurable.[21] An intellectual revolution was initiated 1690 through 1785, dethroning the thick, storied, pagan-Christian account of the virtues, plural, and erecting one or another universal monism in their place. Reason was to become a new monotheism, demanding sacrifice and promising salvation in return, either here below or in the Good Society by and by.

It was an admirable effort, courageous and prudent and hopeful, worth the attempt. Perhaps it had something to do with the rise of the bourgeoisie, uneasy in a system of the virtues which had classically talked of heroes and saints. It certainly had to do with the contractarian idea so obvious to the bourgeois that, in the words of Richard Rumbold (the Presbyterian soldier I mentioned) before he faced the hangman in 1685, “the king having. . . power enough to make him great; the people also as much property as to make them happy; they being, as it were, contracted to one another.”[22] No saddles and spurs. And the scientific revolution must have made ethicists strive for a similar rethinking.

Yet on the whole, except as I say as a historically contingent rhetorical tool of liberals against status, Locke’s or Kant’s or Bentham’s system have failed. They succeeded negatively as a political expedient, thank God. But afterwards they failed positively as an ethical guide. They have not given us guides to action and they have not matched how we live.

[1] Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, c. 330 BC, I, vi, 16 (1097a).

[2] Kant, Grounding, 1785, Ellington trans., p. 56 f.

[3] Kant, Grounding, 1785, p. 57.

[4] See Lisska 1996, pp. 57, 73.

[5] Hume 1748, last page, his italics.

[6] Compare Putnam, Realism, 1990, p. 115; and discussion in McCloskey, Knowledge and Persuasion, 1994, p. 277 and p. 95ff.

[7] Richard Rumbold, speech on the gallows, Edinburgh, 1685, from The World’s Famous Orations. Great Britain: I. (710–1777). 1906. In full at http://www. bartleby. com /268/3/15.html.

[8] Frederick II, Anti-Machiavel, 1740, Chp. 1.

[9] Macaulay, “Frederic the Great,” 1842, p. 188.

[10] Kuehn, Kant, 2001, p. 272.

[11] Pluhar, “Translator’s Introduction,” 1987, p. xxxi, note 8.

[12] Kuehn, Kant, 2001, p. 281; compare pp. 27, 43.

[13] Quoted in Kuehn, Kant, 2001, p. 43.

[14] I am such an incompetent scholar of Kant and of Boswell that on finding this on the internet I believed for a day or so that it was genuine.

[15] Kuehn, Kant, 2001, p. 157.

[16] Kuehn, Kant, 2001, p. 241.

[17] Kuehn, Kant, 2001, p. 163.

[18] Kuehn, Kant, 2001, p. 155.

[19] Kuehn, Kant, 2001, p. 155.

[20] Kuehn, Kant, 2001, p. 156.

[21] Williams, Ethics 1985, pp. 197, 127.

[22] Rumbold’s speech on the gallows: http://www. bartleby. com/268/3/15.html

“Prudence” seems a reasonable long-period average of such words. The Germanic languages less frenchified than English cannot translate exactly the English/ French/ Latin word “prudence,” lost in connotation among foresight [Dutch voorzichtigheid], caution [omzichtigheid], policy [beleid], good sense [verstandigheid], knowledge, saving, caretaking, management, calculating. In Dutch a possible translation of prudence is the neologisms berekendheid, “calculating-ity”; or, worse, berekenendheid, “be-reckoning-ness.” Neither is recorded in compendious Dutch dictionaries.

Prudence is not academic knowledge, sophia or scientia, praised by the philosophers from Socrates to the Great Books as a knowledge of ends. The claim that philosophers such as themselves gain a special knowledge of ends—phronēsis or prudentia means “practical knowledge of means,” the sense, writes Gadamer, “of what is possible, what is correct, here and now”—will seem optimistic to anyone who knows many philosophers, worldly or Academic.[1] As Aristotle observed, “if [the Platonic idea of The Good] were so potent an aid, it is improbable that all the professors of the arts and sciences should not know it,” as they appear not to.[2]

Prudence as practical know-how is a virtue. This was once a commonplace, in Aristotle, for example, the obligation to self-development, or in Aquinas the obligation to use God’s gifts. The Christian version is reformulated in 1673 by Joseph Pufendorf of Leipzig, Heidelberg, and Lund thus:

It seems superfluous to invent an obligation of self-love. Yet. . . . man is not born for himself alone; the end for which he has been endowed by his Creator with such excellent gifts is that he may celebrate His glory and be a fit member of human society. He is therefore bound so to conduct himself as not to permit the Creator’s gifts to perish for lack of use. . . .[3]

Thus Comus tempting the Lady in 1634 argues that from niggardliness in using God’s gifts “Th’All-giver would be unthanked, would be unpraised/ Not half his riches known . . ./ And we should . . . live like Nature’s bastards, not her sons.”

One can detect in Pufendorf’s “it seems superfluous” a hint of the modern substitution of prudence as mere behavior for prudence as an ethical obligation. We have been inclined for some centuries now in the West to relegate prudence to an amoral world of “mere” self-interest—especially so since around 1800, with the “separation of spheres” into a male market and a female home. “By allocating selflessness to women,” notes Joan Williams, “domesticity helped legitimate self-interest as the appropriate motivation for men.”[4] Or in Stephanie Coontz’ formulation, “Men learn their roles and values best in places women cannot go.”[5]

The inclination to demoralize Prudence is not simply stupid, though it has had some bad outcomes. Wise philosophers such as Michael Oakeshott have erected systems on the distinction between “prudential” (or “enterprise”) associations such as business firms on the one hand and “moral” associations on the other such as families. I am saying that in this matter Oakeshott was mistaken. It may be that such a distinction is the typically modern ethical mistake, the mistaken assumption that homely Gemeinschaft is the exclusive site of virtue and that businesslike Gesellschaft is an ethical nullity. It is certainly Machiavelli’s and Hobbes’ mistake.

“The virtues nowadays thought of [as] especially worthy to be called moral virtues,” writes Philippa Foot, “are often contrasted with prudence.” But she shows this is wrong. “A reasonable modicum of self-interest” is also an “Aristotelian [necessity] for human beings.”[6] It is not surprising to find women criticizing a separation of spheres that makes prudence into a masculine realm of action and the rest of the virtues into a cloistered virtue. The theologian Ellen Charry notes that “happiness” has come to mean “prudent utility,” what she calls “a state of mild euphoria.” The modern supporters of such a view, such as Peter Singer or Shalom Asch, “would say that the ‘things other than happiness’ “ are indeed more important, because “happiness, having been privatized, is thought to be self-serving.”

This attitude is socially disastrous, because on its terms there is no reason for people to want to contribute to the common good, since they assume that it will not make them happy. . . . Seeking happiness, which ancient philosophy recognized to be a universal and proper desire, now opposes being good. Concern for the loss of civility, the triumph of “autonomous individualism” so bemoaned in recent sociology—as in the writings of Robert Bellah—is partly the result of an assumed enmity between goodness and happiness.[7]

This is the crucial difference between a virtue ethics that focuses on the good life and a neo-Kantian, academic ethical philosophy that focuses on good intentions towards other people—leaving mysterious the desire to do such good deeds in the first place. Virtue ethics, by contrast with neo-Kantian ethics, attends also to the self and the transcendent, giving a reason to seek goodness. Kant himself was in 1785 more to the point: “act to use humanity, both in your own person and in the person of every other, . . . as an end.”[8]

Among moderns before virtue ethics, in other words, only an habitual disposition to take care of others was construed as “virtue,” and then for its intentions rather than for its practical effect. Having such other-directed good intentions in one’s heart was said to be virtuous. This is pure Kant, not merely neo-Kantian, and evangelical Protestant, too. The intentions are virtuous even if when carried out, as in high-rise public housing along the Dan Ryan Expressway, or the war on drugs brought onto the streets of Watts and East LA, or the First and Second Iraq Wars, they do not quite deliver. And surely, we in European culture have been saying for a long while, knowing how to take care of oneself is hardly a virtue?

Yes, it is. And so is the correlated carefulness in “helping” others. The Love or Justice moving us to help others is a vice, not a virtue, when unalloyed with Prudence. The good Samaritan who ignorantly if unintentionally kills the person he is trying to help is properly held responsible in law. Knowing that one must put out a candle before leaving the room is a good thing, even if you didn’t mean to burn the place down, even if your intentions were pure, even if it was your own room to dispose of. The school of Plato defined prudence [phronēsis] as “the ability which by itself is productive of human happiness; the knowledge of what is good and bad; the knowledge that produces happiness; the disposition by which we judge what is to be done and what is not to be done.”[9]

Aquinas declares that “any virtue which causes good in reason’s consideration is called prudence,” and observes that Prudence “belongs to reason essentially whereas the other three virtues [viz., courage, temperance, and justice]. . . apply reason to passions.”[10] And elsewhere he says, “One needs to deal rightly with those things that are for the sake of the end [finis], and this can only come about through reason rightly deliberating, judging, and commanding, which is the function of prudence. . . . Hence there can be no moral virtue without prudence.”[11] Or still elsewhere, the job of such practical reason is “to ponder things which must be done. . . but it is through prudence that reason is able to command well.”[12]

It is the executive function. Executive, not technical. In his book urging an Aquinian ethic on economics, Andrew Yuengert points out that the adjusting of means to ultimate ends that is “prudence” is not merely the adjusting of means to intermediate ends of “technique.”[13] In Rosalind Hursthouse’s textbook of virtue ethics the word “prudence” is rare. But the equivalent phrase, “practical wisdom,” occurs repeatedly, because reason must rightly deliberate about any virtue if the intended act of justice or temperance or faith is to do the job.

Prudence is so to speak the grammar of the virtues. Robert Hariman writes that it “fulfills an executive function in respect to human flourishing.”[14] Some faithful Roman Catholic who believes imprudently—that is, unwisely in practical terms—that going to mass regularly suffices for resurrection at the Last Judgment is making a dreadful mistake. A Federal judge who believe himself a just man fails in his project if he is ignorant of the law, or if he entertains a theory of it that no one else regards as just.

Amélie Oksenberg Rorty neatly encapsulates the Aristotle behind Aquinas as requiring that “the virtuous person perform the right action in the right way at the right time on the right objects.” [15] Clearly, such a person must be a phrónimos, a person of practical reasoning, “really knowing what one is doing, being aware of the circumstances and consequences of one’s actions, with the right conception of the sort of action one is performing.”[16] He is, Aristotle said, “able to deliberate well about what is good and advantageous to himself”[17]

A person notably lacking in prudence is, we say, a loose cannon. Think of the nautical image, Jack-Aubrey style: an iron cannon weighing two tons gets loose from its lashings and hurtles with thirty feet of momentum towards the battened porthole on the other side of a man-o’-war lurching with every wave deep to port and then to starboard in a force 9 gale off Cherbourg. Of course prudence is a virtue. Try living in a ship or a family or a polis, or for that matter as a Crusoe on a desert island, without it.

Prudence fits for example all of Alasdair MacIntyre’s requirements for a virtue: “an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices [such as statecraft].” A virtue is acquirable in part only, since people are admitted as having from early childhood varying gifts for common sense, as for lovingness or even justice-giving. MacIntyre himself accords “practical reasoning” (that is, prudence) the status of a virtue when it is understood as a “capacity for judgment . . . in knowing how to select among the relevant stack of maxims and how to apply them in particular situations. Cardinal Pole possessed it [in statecraft]; Mary Tudor did not.”[18] Sir Thomas More said that Pole, a 16^th-century Englishman loyal to the Pope, was as learned as he was noble and as virtuous as he was learned.

Imagine a community filled with imprudent people, Mary Tudors in bulk, and you’ll see the social virtuousness of prudence. The imagining is not hard. A community of school children would fit the bill, as in The Lord of the Flies, or a community of adolescents such as the Latin Lords. Or indeed—and this is a crucial point—a community of moral saints would fit, too, if “moral” is taken to mean “improving the welfare of others or of society as a whole” without considering one’s own flourishing. There is a private virtue in prudence, too.

The exclusively public, social, altruistic definition of “virtue” is implicitly adopted by Susan Wolf in her essay mentioned, “Moral Saints.”[19] The implicit definition introduces a flaw into her case. In the style of many Anglophone philosophers she leaves out privately self-interested Prudence as a virtue, and so lets her moral saints behave badly towards themselves.

This is not good. And indeed showing its badness is Wolf’s point, by a reductio. It’s the Jewish-mother version of goodness: “Oh, don’t bother to replace the bulb. I’ll just sit here in the dark.” But the mother, after all, is God’s creature, too, and benevolence therefore should include a just benevolence towards herself. Being wholly altruistic, and disregarding the claims of that person also in the room called Self, about whose needs the very Self is ordinarily best informed, is making the same mistake as being wholly selfish, disregarding the claims of that person called Other. In both cases the mistake is to ignore someone.

Oddly, selflessness—note the word—is unjust, inegalitarian. “There is a manifest negligence in men of their real happiness or interest in the present world,” said Bishop Butler in 1725. People are “as often unjust to themselves as to others.”[20] The more optimistic Earl of Shaftesbury took in 1713 an evolutionary line to arrive at praise for Prudence:

the affection toward private or self-good, however selfish it may be esteemed, is in reality not only consistent with public good but in some measure contributing to it. . . [It is] for the good of the species in general. . . . So far as being blamable in any sense, . . it must be acknowledged absolutely necessary to constitute a creature good. . . . No one would doubt to pronounce so if he saw a man who minded not any precipices which lay in his way, nor made any distinction of food, diet, clothing or whatever else related to his health and being.[21]

Just as humility is not self-abnegation, prudence is not self-centeredness.

As Michael Stocker puts it, “modern ethical theories would prevent each of us from loving, caring for, and valuing ourself.”[22] Max U does not value Max the man. He values himself and others and ice cream only for its utility-producing capacity. Not for his sweet, or his not-so-sweet, self. Such an ethical universe is not merely imperfect. It is, Stocker concludes, “devoid of all people.”

No wonder we agree so readily with Wolf in finding her sort of moral saint obnoxious. They are unjust towards themselves, monsters of altruism. No wonder actual monks and nuns watch carefully for prideful and imprudent excesses in their mortifications of the flesh. No wonder Gandhi makes us more than uncomfortable. George Orwell noted that Gandhi was literally, and on three occasions, willing for his wife and children to die rather than eat animal food. He exhibited an inability to love friends and family in particular, exclusively, as against the for-all-we-know-perfectly-sincere Universal Love he exhibited to an unusual degree. Thus too Erasmus complains about saintly Socrates that he was “a man completely deaf to all human sentiment“ and Gregory Vlastos notes Socrates’ “frigidity.”[23] The average moderately good human being,” writes Orwell, is not “a failed saint.” To be like Gandhi or Socrates, as admirable as they are in some dimensions, is to miss part of humanity, the caring for oneself and for one’s best beloved. Sainthood, too, like tobacco and alcohol, Orwell affirms, “is also a thing that human beings must avoid.”[24]

We labor to teach our children and adolescents and our dogs and, yes, ourselves the practical wisdom that keeps them and us from injuring or impoverishing or failing to develop themselves and others and ourselves. In the selling of retirement homes the salespeople speak of the “Benjamin-Franklin close.”[25] The salesperson lists with the older person the costs and benefits, or the balance sheet, of buying into the Scottsdale Royale Retirement Community. It has been found that people now old, who have lived through the Great Depression or the War or are just old and well off, are focused, not unreasonably, on Prudence. Provide, provide. To close the deal the salesperson has to acknowledge in the style of an imagined Franklin—it is not the real Ben, by the way—that life is a calculation.

The selling technique here is not some improper trick. An imprudent person, someone who doesn’t know the value of money and how to keep accounts, is a menace to his friends and family, and to his own developed self. And certainly he is a menace to his need in old age to provide, provide. He may be chivalrous in some sense, courageous and temperate and just, even great-souled, as Aristotle wished, or loving, as did St. Paul. Yet without prudence he is a particular kind of fool, not virtuous as a whole. He is tragically or comically flawed, as most of us are, more or less, short of King Arthur or Cardinal Pole.

* * * *

Catalunya, around Barcelona, politically in Spain but culturally autonomous, and having its own language and literature distinct from Castillian, is in its own view a nation of sensible businesspeople enchained by fate these many centuries to a government of aristocratic madmen in Madrid. Catalunya praises above all the virtues seny [“SEHN-yuh”], the local version of prudence. The great Catalan historian Jaume Vicens Vives (1910-1960) declared famously that his region evinced seny, prudence or common sense, combined with rauxa [”RAU-shah”], passion or madness, the two “punts cardinals del temperament català.”[26]

In medieval times, when Barcelona was the chief port of the Western Mediterranean and Catalan was the lingua franca of the Christian fleets, a Catalan poet could think of no higher praise of his beloved than that she was “plena de seny,” full of common sense. Robert Hughes tells of a Catalan country priest anxious to get to dinner rushing out another wooden Jesus whose feet could be kissed when the line of worshippers in front of the first one, brought in earlier with all slow solemnity, looked to the priest inefficiently long. “Perhaps only in Catalunya,” Hughes observes, “the first industrial region of Spain, could time-and-motion study be so quickly and instinctively applied to piety.”[27] It’s seny, as against the Castillian lack of it.

Consider, for example, that noble Castillian, Don Quixote de la Mancha. His Courage is unquestionable, though exercised against phantasms, as when he meets a cart filled with actors and takes it to be Death and company. “The knight’s spirit mounted with the belief there was some new and perilous adventure presenting itself.” And he is of course exacting in Justice, too—his lady Dulcinea del Toboso, in sober fact a milkmaid, must always receive her just due, as surely will by way of just revenge any foul giant or contemptuous knight who balks at acknowledging her excellence. Thus in a gesture to knightly manners in the cowboy myth the Walter Brennan/Judge Roy Bean character in The Westerner (1940) extracts obeisance to posters of Lillie Langtry put up behind his bar. And the Don is disciplined by Temperance, his cowboy-like willingness to live a hard life: “labor, unease, and arms alone were designed and made for those the world calls knights errant,” he declares, willing with the other Shanes of the world to bed down rough in the barn, weapon at the ready.

Sancho Panza is a peasant or a bourgeois (one imagines that he must have had Catalan blood)—anyway, a practical man, pleno de seny, a man of prudence, ready with proverbial wisdom, ever articulating profane value: “I renounce the governorship of the promised isle [which glory the Don supposes throughout is Sancho’s true goal], and all I want in payment . . . is . . . the recipe for that marvelous liquor. . . . worth more than two reals an ounce”; or, lovingly, “the well-being of a single [self-appointed] knight errant is worth more than all the enchantments . . . on earth.” Don Quixote, whose mind is on higher things, hushes him, as he does always when prudence breaks in—though even a knight errant feels practical wisdom somehow necessary, as he shows by offering crack-pot rationalizations for his adventures, prudence within a world of madness.

No seny.[28]

* * * *

Because aristocratic and slave-owning members of city states first discussed the pagan virtues systematically, the pagan four of Courage, Temperance, Justice, and Prudence are often supposed to be especially suited to the ancient polis, and irrelevant therefore to the sick hurry of modern life. But the supposition cuts economics off from virtue, which is a mistake.

In view of the highly commercial character of Greek culture from at the latest the 7^th century on, the anti-commercial construal of the Greek-labeled virtues seems strange. After all, the urns from which we learn so many details of Greekness contained olive oil bound in profit for a startling array of places, from Phoenicia’s strand to where the Atlantic raves outside the western straits. The old idea that the aristocracy of Greece and the senatorial class of Rome was nobly landholding, and wouldn’t think of lending money at interest or investing in a scheme of apartment building for profit, is of course nonsense.[29] Athens and Rome were great commercial empires. When Aristotle is struggling to make justice fit his formula for virtue as a mean between deficiency and excess he turns with enthusiasm to the marketplace for examples.[30] As Thomas Carney observes, “The history of antiquity resounds with the sanguinary achievements of Aryan warrior elites. But it was the despised Levantines, Arameans [for example Jesus of Nazareth], Syrians, and Greeklings who constituted the economic heroes of antiquity.”[31]

The aristocracy, however entangled in the economy, affected to disdain it. Plato’s Socrates declares in The Republic that “the more men value money-making, the less they value virtue.”[32] Aristotle says of retail trade that it is “justly to be censured, because the gain in which is results is not natural made, but is made at the expense of other men.”[33] By “natural made” he means grown from plants and animals. Aristotle is exhibiting here a hardy physiocracy that views only agriculture as “productive.” Late in the Politics he says that that, of course, “the life of mechanics and shopkeepers . . . is ignoble and inimical to goodness.”[34] In 44 BC Cicero declares to his son Marcus that “trade, if petty, is to be considered vulgar; but if wholesale and on a large scale. . . it is not to be greatly criticized. . . . But of all the gainful occupations none is better than cultivation of the soil, none more fruitful, none more sweet, none more appropriate to a free man.”[35]

It was such aristocratic, or wannabe-aristocratic, snobbishness about urban production in the ancient world, rehearsed in the Hellenic revival of 19^th-century divines and schoolmasters, that made the three non-Prudence pagan virtues of Justice, Temperance, and Courage seem non-bourgeois virtues, thankfully not seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toil. After all, toil was for slaves and women, and trade for ill-bred shopkeepers. Free men of landed wealth, the leisured citizens of the polis, or the boys at Eton and Rugby, were to do the great-souled stuff.

For all their actual immersion in a market economy the two founts of virtue-talk in Athens—Plato the literal aristocrat and his graduate student Aristotle, the son of a physician in the Macedonian court and himself tutor to royal Alexander—did not view businesspeople as capable of true virtue. Julius Caesar likewise attributes the bravery of the Belgians to their distance from cultivation and refinement and to their lack of commerce with merchants whose goods tend to the effeminization of the spirit (ad animos effeminandos). Seneca the stoic in a commercial Rome was contemptuous of the idea that businessmen could have honor, though it is among his many self-contradictions that he was born into an extremely rich family and himself lent money at interest.

Businesspeople in this aristocratic view, I have noted, did not have the moral luck to be in a position to show their mettle. The Homeric, the Political, and even the Stoic versions of pagan virtue were explicitly anti-bourgeois. A hero or a landed gentleman or a philosopher unmoved (apathes) by earthly desires should be hostile towards any suggestion of pleonexia (excess, greed). The founder of stoicism, Zeno of Citium [335-263 BC ], was it appears the son of a Phoenician businessman, which is perhaps why he took a little broader view, though nonetheless anti-bourgeois. The dual heroes of Roman stoicism were a Greek slave and a Roman emperor, in their luck as differing as could be. Aristotle did not even admit that the citizen-soldier’s feats were real courage. The hoplite “seems to face dangers because of the penalties imposed by the laws and the reproaches they would otherwise incur”—so unlike, one might retort sarcastically, the Homeric Hero obsessing about his reputation.[36]

The exclusion of commercial prudence from the highest virtues becomes absurd in the late Roman Republic and early Empire, and caused endless theological difficulties in the Christian Empire, especially in the West, and in medieval Europe. It still haunts our talk of virtue.

[1] Gadamer, Truth and Method, 1965, p. xxxviii.

[2] Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, c. 330 BC, I. vi. 15 (1097a), Rackham trans.

[3] Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man, 1673, Bk. I, Chp. 5, “On duty to oneself,” p. 46.

[4] Williams, “Virtue,” 1995, p. 707.

[5] Coontz, Way We Never Were, 1992, p. 60.

[6] Foot, Natural Goodness, 2001, p. 17.

[7] Charry, “Happiness,” 2004, p. 21.

[8] Kant, Grounding, 1785, James Ellington translation.

[9] Plato, Definitions, c. 350 BC, Stephanus 411d, p. 1679.

[10] Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, c. 1270, Ia IIae, c. 1270, q. 61, art. 3 and a. 4. These are pages 112 and 113 in John Oesterle, trans., St. Thomas Aquinas: Treatise on the Virtues (which consists of Ia IIae, questions 49-67), under “Aquinas” in the works cited.

[11] Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, c. 1270, Ia IIae, c. 1270, q. 58, art. 4; Oesterle, p. 86. Also Ia IIae, q. 65, a. 2; Oesterle, trans., under “Aquinas,” p. 143.

[12] Aquinas, Disputed Questions, 1269-73, “The Cardinal Virtues” Art. 1, p. 109.

[13] Yuengert, Boundaries, 2004, p. 13.

[14] Hariman, “Preface,” 2003, p. viii.

[15] Amélie Rorty, “Contemplation in Aristotle’s Ethics,” 1980, p. 380.

[16] Aquinas, Treatise on the Virtues, c. 1270, q. LXI, art. 3, 4.

[17] Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, c. 330 BC, VI, 5.

[18] MacIntyre, After Virtue, 1981, pp. 178, 207-08.

[19] Wolf, “Moral Saints, 1982, p. 80, line 7, “improving the welfare of others or of society as a whole,” among many other places (four times on p. 80, for example; on p. 81; p. 85, middle; taken back on p. 93, top, but then, “This approach seems unlikely to succeed.”

[20] Butler, Fifteen Sermons, 1725, Sermon I, p. 371.

[21] Shaftesbury, Characteristics 1713 (1732), Vol. II, p. 13f. The evolutionary cast of the book is notable. For example, again, Vol. II, p. 18, “if the affection be . . . [an] advantage to the society. . . this must necessarily constitute what we call equity and right.”

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

[23] Quoted in Hariman, “Radical Sociality,” 1999, p. 10.

[24] Orwell, “Reflections on Gandhi,” 1949, p. 1353.

[25] I am indebted to Robin Rapp for this example.

[26] I am indebted to Eduard Bonet for this punt.

[27] Hughes, Barcelona, 1992, p. 26.

[28] Don Quixote. 1604/1614, trans. Cohen Part II, xi, p. 534; Part I, Chp. xiii, p. 96; Sancho: Part I, x, p. 81; Part II, xi, p. 533. Compare George Borrow in 1843 (The Bible in Spain, Preface): “you may draw the last cuarto from a Spaniard [or at any rate a Castillian], provided you will concede to him the title of cavalier, and rich man, for the old leaven still works as powerfully as in the time of the first Philip.”

[29] For example, Andreau, Banking and Business in the Roman World, 1987, p. 13: “Although it was fashionable to deplore moneylending for interest, the Greek and Latin elite members—in these periods at least—appear to have been at great pains to conceal their investments.”

[30] Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, c. 330 BC, V, v, passim; compare V, ii, 13.

[31] Carney, The Shape of the Past, 1975, p. 197, quoted in Crossan, Historical Jesus, 1991, p. 55.

[32] Plato, Republic, c. 360 BC, 550E.

[33] Aristotle, Politics, c. 330 BC, Barker trans., end of 1258a, p. 28.

[34] Aristotle, Politics, c. 330 BC, Barker trans., 1338b, p. 301.

[35] Cicero, On Duties, 44 BC, 1.150-151.

[36] Aristotle, Nic. Ethics, quoted in R. E. Houser, “The Virtue of Courage,” 2002, p. 305.

In 1922 Sinclair Lewis savagely spoofed in six pages the morning drive to his real estate office by George Babbitt, a manly head filled with boyish tales of Courage:

To George F. Babbitt, as to most prosperous [male] citizens of Zenith, his motor car was poetry and tragedy, love and heroism. . . . The office was his pirate ship but the car his perilous excursion ashore. . . . Babbitt . . . devoted himself to the game of beating trolley cars to the corner. . . a rare game, and valiant. . . . [Even parking his car] was a virile adventure masterfully executed.[1]

Lewis for all his cruelty and intellectual snobbery was on target. He regularly was on target in mimicking attitudes and language he was making fun of. The characters who speak woodenly in Lewis are his alter-egos, the intellectuals. It is rightly said that Lewis was himself entangled in those risible bourgeois values. Modern male writers, especially American male writers, allow themselves aristocratic poses, but are highly amused by other people taking them.

Twenty years after Babbitt James Thurber (ditto for his class values) was still making fun of the bourgeois man’s dreams of glory, to always be the best, my boy, the bravest:

“We’re going through!” . . . . “We can’t make it, sir! It’s spoiling for a hurricane, if you ask me.” “I’m not asking you, Lieutenant Berg,” said the Commander. “Throw on the power lights! Rev her up to 8500! We’re going through!” The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. . . .

“Not so fast! You’re driving too fast!” said Mrs. Mitty. “What are you driving so fast for?”

“Hmm?” said Walter Mitty. He looked at his wife, in the seat beside him, with shocked astonishment.[2]

Such fantasies motivate business and military and political leaders as much as their calculations of profit and loss. Frank Knight writing in 1923 on the ethics of competition claimed that “The competitive economic order must be partly responsible for making emulation and rivalry the outstanding quality of the character of the Western peoples who have adopted and developed it.” He contrasts it with “the religious ideals to which the Western world has continued to render lip-service—a contrast resulting in fundamental dualism in our thought and culture.”[3]

The historical sociology here is perhaps a bit dubious. Knight was the first American translator of Max Weber, and one can see the Weberian influence. Competitiveness after all is no less the life of Afghani tribesmen and other decidedly non-bourgeois types. And bourgeois life is in fact largely a matter of cooperation, not competition: thus the Kiwanis-Club mentality that Lewis spoofed; or the cooperation c. 1700 of traders in lumber and tobacco across oceans in the Atlantic. The philosopher Jennifer Jackson asks how a capitalist life can be reconciled with moral virtues. The two temptations to vice in such a life, she supposes, are the encouragement of intemperance in consumption and the “avid competitiveness” of the businessperson, “the seeming unremitting need to be doing others down.”[4] One would like to know the society of men, capitalist or not, that did not exhibit an unremitting need to do others down. Or, while we’re on the point, one would like to know too the society of men or women that did not exhibit intemperance in consumption. As a system capitalism in modern times is the greatest triumph of cooperation ever. The play of competitiveness in the souls of businessmen does not seem to be essentially bourgeois. It reflects the jousting values of an aristocracy, or more accurately a neo-pseudo-aristocracy, and to the male roles governed in fantasy by them

But Knight observes acutely that “economic activity is at the same time a means of want-satisfaction, an agency for want- and character-formation, a field of creative self-expression, and a competitive sport. While men are `playing the game’ of business, they are also molding their own and other personalities.”[5] Joseph Schumpeter had given in 1912 a similarly sociologized analysis of why capitalists played the game, a step beyond the naïve assumption in Marx and Veblen and many more recent critics of the bourgeoisie that “endless accumulation” is the game. Accumulation, Schumpeter said, was for social status, not only for itself. “For itself” businesspeople “delight in ventures,” “exercising one’s energy and ingenuity.” And the macho “will to conquer,” “akin to sport,” is motivating, too. Yes—though none of these is peculiarly capitalistic, and only for the first, status-taking motive “is private property as the result of entrepreneurial activity an essential factor in making it operative.”[6] At the funeral games of Hector, too, the men raced, exercising their energy and skill, and proudly won, and nobly lost.

Yet Schumpeter, too, was influenced by Weber, and thence by Marx. He writes in 1942 that “capitalist civilization is rationalistic, and anti-heroic. . . . The ideology that glorifies the idea of fighting for fighting’s sake and of victory for victory’s sake understandably withers in the office among all the columns of figures.”[7] I don’t think so: the younger Schumpeter had it more right. It is not the case that the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie dislikes a “warrior ideology that conflicts with its `rational’ utilitarianism.” It was not the case that bourgeois Europe had gone beyond aristocratic values in 1914. Rather the contrary: the bourgeoisie had been re-animated by heroic values. And still.

An aristocratic myth, in other words, still animates the men of the middle class. It peaked in the Greatest Generation, who grew up reading the boys’ books of a fading Romance. Alexander Gerschenkron (1904-1978) was a Russian émigré professing economics at Harvard 1948-1975, famously learned in two dozen languages, a student of Shakespeare, of statistics, of chess problems, of the Boston Red Sox, an expert in Russian and many other histories and literatures. Nicholas Dawidoff, the author too of a best-selling biography of the baseball catcher and spy, Moe Berg, describes his grandfather’s aristocratic and Russian temper as “charging the most ordinary events in his life with conspicuous moment” (ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa). Gerschenkron “never wanted to be associated with anything likely” (a rare game and valiant). He “never felt right if he was not feuding with someone” (wanting to swing on one, any one, anything to shatter that superior, simpering composure). “He believed that a gentleman does not say unflattering things out of another man’s hearing” (you wine sack, with a dog’s eyes, with a deer’s heart). “My grandfather was a life-long champion of what he called `French manners’” (extremely well-bred). “You were more generous with a friend than you were with yourself” (fearless, generous). “Any form of self-pity was anathema; he was someone who never wanted to be seen as a victim” (today this strange coming left me still a man. Give me my guns). “Over and over again he had to win [his wife’s] favor” (as gentle to a pure woman as King Arthur).

Like a Greek aristocrat in the Iliad, Gerschenkron’s most unbelievable thing was courageous talk. On April 11, 1968, at a tumultuous meeting of the Harvard faculty in the face of a student take-over of University Hall, he gave a twenty-minute oration without notes calling his colleagues to arms—well, at least to action (in a rude society nothing is honorable but war). Always be the best, my boy, the bravest/ and hold your head high above the others. “My grandfather didn’t command armies or lead governments or win pennants,” Dawidoff concludes, “but he was big, big in his qualities.”[8] A bourgeois aristocrat.

Gerschenkron was, as we say, quite a guy. His aristocratic courage looked better than the cowardice of many of his colleagues at the time. The next year he was visiting the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. A Princeton administrator gave a seminar at the Institute suggesting that the university grant all the demands of the black students. When the Institute fellows pressed him on the point, he burst out in vexation, “Well, after all, the black students have the guns.” Into the stunned silence following this remark Gerschenkron, with more learning than originality, dropped, in his Russian accented basso profundo, “Ven I hear the vord ‘gun,’ I reach for my culture.”

But there can be ethical mischief as well as good in the gendered fantasy of courage. Screwtape explains,

Think of your man [whom we devils are trying to corrupt] as a series of concentric circles, his will being the innermost, his intellect coming next, and finally his fantasy. You can hardly hope, at once, to exclude from all the circles everything that smells of the Enemy [viz., God]: but you must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy, and all the desirable qualities [that is, desirable to devils, therefore sins from God’s point of view, for example, pride, covetousness, envy, anger, gluttony] inward into the Will. It is only in so far as [the non-sins, the virtues] reach the will and are there embodied in habits that [they] are really fatal to us [devils].[9]

The CEO who dreams himself an artist of war, a samurai or general, is thereby encouraged not to notice that in the boardroom his actual Will behaves habitually in the service not of real ethical courage, in taking a prudent risk, say, or in standing up to the latest accounting trick, but in the service of pride and envy and covetousness.

It is said perhaps in jest that men think of sex every 15 seconds. What is true is that they think of courage every minute of their lives. It’s entailed by their gender identity, and is encouraged by an age nostalgic for aristocratic virtue. Maybe it’s biological, but certainly the biology can be muffled or amplified by social arrangements—by the laws of wife beating, for example, or the stories we tell. Women, it is said, dream of love, men of courage. The bourgeois men dream themselves back to cowboys and knights, to Horatius at the bridge, to the plains of Ilium, to tall Hector, breaker of horses, to Odysseus the resourceful, and to swift-footed Achilles, son of Peleus, and his aristocratic rage.

* * * *

Yet the best among the best, hoi tōn aristōn aristoi, must show a balance of virtues. Courage isn’t enough, even for a fulltime hero. Even noble Gunnar of Njal’s Saga violates the temperate, just, and prudent rules worked out in Iceland for the resolution of blood feuds. He carries on killing, with disastrous results.[10] Philippa Foot wrote that “nobody can get on well if he lacks courage, and does not have some measure of temperance and wisdom, while communities where justice and charity are lacking are apt to be wretched places to live, as Russia was under the Stalinist terror, or Sicily under the Mafia.”[11]

You need all the pagan virtues in play—prudence (what Foot calls wisdom) and courage and temperance and justice. Even an institution specialized in Courage, such as an army or a fire department or a police force, must exercise the other virtues, too. “A man who places honor only in successful violence,” wrote Dr. Johnson of the Western Islands of Scotland, “is a very troublesome and pernicious animal in time of peace.”[12] It was the problem of the late Roman Republic, as of many disordered times, that Roman men sought aristocratic glory in violence rather than bourgeois wealth in peace. The Danny Glover character in Lethal Weapons inquires of the Mel Gibson character, also a policeman, “You ever met anyone you didn’t kill?” A courageous institution or society or person lacking Temperance and Justice and Prudence will not last, or work.

So at least we wish. We need a criterion for the virtue of virtues, an answer, not necessarily a simple one, to the question, “Why is this a virtue.” It is not the case, as opponents of virtue ethics sometimes believe, that an answer has to reduce virtue ethics to duties or to utility. Edmund Pincoffs has suggested that could we decide which characteristics are virtues by asking whether we could approach or flee the person having them.[13] The moral philosopher Hursthouse identifies four ends, in two dimensions, survival/flourishing and individual/group: the mere survival of the individual or of the group, or the flourishing of the individual or of the group.[14]

Alasdair MacIntyre is one among the male philosophers, such as Bernard Williams and John McDowell, who have contributed to virtue ethics. His answer to the question is a “social teleology.” You test virtue X by asking how X contributes to the purpose, end, telos of the society, what Knight called “the moral habitability of the world.”[15] The ancient theorists of the virtues applauded that balance and completion of virtues, worth having of course in a little community. What sort of person suits best the telos of democratic Athens or republican Rome? Well, of course a person having the four virtues Courage, Temperance, Justice, and Prudence. Jean Bethke Elshtain puts Aristotle in the post-heroic camp. She too uses the movie Shane as an example: in the end Shane himself must leave, she writes, because “he is as out of place in the placid, settled kingdom of a tamed town on the American frontier as was Achilles’ gory glory in Aristotle’s list of civic virtues.”[16]

Unfortunately, as Elshtain well understands, the question about the virtue of virtues can’t really be answered as it typically was before the game was spoiled by Machiavelli and Hobbes. The old question and the then-obvious answer was in effect, “What does a society need to be virtuous? Well, that’s obvious: a throng of virtuous chaps.” The new social sciences of the 18^th century came to realize, a century or two after the Terrifying Italian and the Angry Englishman had first said it, that social virtue, and certainly virtù sociale, does not require personal virtue in every one of a society’s citizens, or perhaps in any of them. A self-interested mob of corporate raiding, asset-stripping Gordon Gekkos might result for example in a rich economy, thank you very much.

The ancients and medievals by contrast argued about politics in a less social-scientific way. They were less aware that what is true of individuals might not turn out to be true of a group composed of such individuals. As Isaiah Berlin put it, Machiavelli’s juxtaposition of the private, Christian world of personal virtues and the public, pagan world of political virtù raised for the first time a disturbing question:

What reasons we have for supposing that justice and mercy, humility and virtù, happiness and knowledge, glory and liberty, magnificence and sanctity, will always coincide, or indeed be compatible at all? . . . Machiavelli . . . undermines one major assumption of Western thought: namely that somewhere in the past or the future, in this world or the next . . . there is to be found the final solution to the question of how men should live. . . . The very search for it becomes not merely Utopian in practice, but conceptually incoherent.[17]

In Plato’s Republic the balance within the individual called Temperance is taken as a parallel, even a cause, for the balance within the polis called Justice. “And isn’t he moderate because of the friendly and harmonious relations between these same parts?” asks Socrates. Glaucon replies (and Socrates evidently approves), “[Temperance] is surely nothing other than that, both in the city and in the individual.”[18] In Aristotle’s Politics it was an explicit principle, says Sir Earnest Barker in his gloss, “that what is true of the felicity of individuals is also true of communities.”[19]

Well, no, sadly, it is not. But set aside for a long while the problem that Plato and his graduate student Aristotle were perhaps overenthusiastic for the parallel between individual and civic virtue. Set aside that a later tradition known as Civic Humanism or Civic Republicanism looking back to the polis has the same problem. It has the problem, namely, that virtue in each person is strictly speaking neither necessary nor sufficient for the virtue of and certainly not for the survival of the whole community.

I will never fully resolve the social/private dilemma. At least I am in good company—for example, the company of all social observers since the dilemma first became clear in the 18^th century. Alasdair MacIntyre, to pick a modern example, argues persuasively in his “social teleology” that “the essential function of the virtues is clear. Without them, without justice, courage, and truthfulness, practices could not resist the corrupting power of institutions.”[20] Think of a scientist who is not committed to telling truth, or a judge not committed to justice. Yet one can argue—people have—that institutions like competitive pressures in science or the procedures for recalling judges will result in social virtues regardless of the dishonesty of scientists and the corruption of judges. It may be. Smith, Tocqueville, and Marx each had invisible-hand explanations of why good or bad in people can lead to bad or good in the system. But observe that they held on to their non-invisible-hand indignations, about mercantilists corrupting the British state or intendants over-centralizing pre-Revolutionary France or Mr. Moneybags engorging the national income.

The dilemma is that private good is neither necessary nor sufficient for public good. The dilemma shows among the American Founding Fathers, as David Prindle among others has noted. John Adams doubted “whether there is public Virtue enough to support a Republic”; yet James Madison expected political competition, like economic competition, to make it “more difficult for unworthy candidates to practice with success the vicious arts by which elections are too often carried.”[21] Adams stands for a civic republicanism depending on individual virtue, Madison for a liberalism depending on constitutional structures. Either individual virtue is necessary for the polity to thrive, or else ingenious structures can offset the passions with the interests.

Set aside for the present book, that is, the potentially paradoxical details of “social teleology.” I will return to it in Bourgeois Towns: How a Capitalist Ethic Grew in the Dutch and English Lands, 1600-1800. I hope. At least we can agree, following Aristotle, that person-by-person the whole set of pagan virtues is desirable for the telos of the person herself: “No one wou­­ld call a man happy [makarion] who had no particle of courage, temperance, justice, or wisdom.”[22] You are not going to be a fully realized woman if in your mad Courage you lack Temperance and Justice and Prudence. You are going to be swept with animal passions. The jails are filled with people of undoubted physical Courage. Their problem is that they have been too courageous, Thelma-and-Louise-style, Bonnie-and-Clyde-style, willing to take risks that non-criminals will not or cannot take.

* * * *

The virtues are distinct. An ethic that elevates manly Courage to the only virtue will speak of suicide bombers as “cowardly,” since there is only one unified anti-virtue if there is only one unified virtue. If you have only one word for the Good Man you are led to unhelpful locutions. Adolf Hitler was not merely “crazy,” or in pursuit of some unanalyzable goal of “Evil.” A man with personal courage beyond doubt, and charming and witty in company, what he lacked in the end were the rest of the pagan four. Having one of them is not enough.

Or three out of four. When in 1937 Winston Churchill praised Mussolini as having “amazing qualities of courage, comprehension, self-control, and perseverance”—that is, Courage, Prudence, Temperance, and Courage again, with Faith—he was praising, as an aristocrat raised at Harrow and Sandhurst would, an almost balanced set of the pagan virtues. Churchill said once that if had been an Italian he would have become a Fascist. Yet presumably even he found the Justice of Italian fascism a trifle deficient.[23]

In other words, Courage needs other virtues to be a virtue. Temperance, for example, self-control. From Achilles the berserk warrior to Tony Soprano the New Jersey mob boss, any society needs its men to exercise “impulse control.” The problem with men, especially young men, is the excess of Courage. Cardiff City’s football hooligans are of all social standings, including at least one millionaire and one former professional footballer. The lads who on the day of the game mob the Swan and Anchor, surrounded by British police on the alert, are not always young and unemployed. What they share is an addiction to courageous violence, admittedly more common among young men with time on their hands than old men with jobs. What Eric Hoffer called true believers are the young, courageous men who make up the storm troopers in every violent upheaval, good or bad.

Perhaps it’s biological. In any case the virtù of young males requires elaborate socialization to check and channel. In East Africa not long ago a group of young male elephants, orphaned by poachers, engaged in what can only be described as gang banging. There is film of one particularly bold teenager tossing clumps of grass and mud at a rhinoceros, over and over again, challenging him to unequal battle. The teenagers became a nuisance also to the humans in the neighborhood, and the problem was solved at last by laboriously moving the worst offenders hundreds of miles into a herd led by mature female elephants, as elephant herds are. The boys stopped their Rebel-Without-a-Cause behavior and became temperate members of the elephantine community. Doubtless they were happy, too, makarioi, and well favored, flourishing, eudaimonikoi.

Temperance itself is not an unalloyed good. “In some people,” Foot reminds us, “temperance is not a virtue, but is rather connected with timidity or with a grudging attitude in the acceptance of good things.”[24] A related sin is literal hopelessness, “acedia,” spiritual sloth, not caring. It is the second-to-the-worst in the deadly list. The virtue of Temperance in Christian thinkers like Aquinas is not about mortification of the flesh, but on the contrary the moderate yet relishing use of a world charged with the grandeur of God. The characters in Grant Wood’s painting American Gothic seem on one reading to show an excess of Temperance. Only the wisp of hair over her right shoulder betrays the woman’s passion.

Paul Dombey in Dickens’ first anti-bourgeois novel, Dombey and Son, published in installments between the year of the Repeal of the Corn Laws and the revolutionary year of 1848,

was not a man of whom it could properly be said that he was ever startled, or shocked; but he certainly had a sense within him, that if his wife should sicken and decay . . . he would find a something gone from among his plate and furniture . . . which . . . could not be lost without sincere regret. Though it would be a cool, business-like, gentlemanly, self-possessed regret, no doubt. [25]

In truth, Mrs. Dombey’s status in law, like that of any bourgeois woman in England in 1848, was little better than his plate or furniture. As we expect from the passage, Dombey is in for a lesson about letting one’s life be ruled by Temperance and Prudence without Courage or Justice, and especially without Dickens’ favored virtue, a secular and sentimental version of Christian Love.

The point is that to last like bronze the virtues must be alloyed with each other. A personality governed wholly by temperance is bad, as is one governed wholly by courage, or wholly by justice. It’s the “wholly” that’s the problem. Imagine how dangerous it would be to be in a platoon filled with Medal-of-Honor types or how tiresome to be in a nunnery filled with Mother-Teresa types. As Susan Wolf puts it, “if the moral saint is devoting all his time to feeding the hungry . . . then necessarily he is not reading Victorian novels, playing the oboe, or improving his backhand. . . . A life in which none of these possible aspects of character is developed may seem a life strangely barren.” [26]

[1] Lewis, Babbitt, 1922, Chapter III.

[2] Thurber, “Secret Life,” first paragraph.

[3] Knight, “Ethics of Competition,” 1923, p. 39; compare p. 59.

[4] Jackson 1996, p. 80.

[5] Knight, “Ethics of Competition,” 1923, p. 39, his italics.

[6] Schumpter, Theory, 1912, p. 93f.

[7] Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, 1942, Chp. XI, pp. 127f.

[8] Dawidoff, Fly Swatter, pp. 12, 13, 15, 42, 91, 313-320, 336.

[9] Lewis, Screwtape Letters, 1942, p. 31.

[10] As Byock observes, Viking Age, 2001, p. 229.

[11] Foot, “Virtues and Vices,“ 1978, pp. 2-3.

[12] Johnson, Journey, 1775, p. 99, punctuation modernized.

[13] Pincoffs, Quandaries, 1986, p. 78.

[14] Hursthouse, Virtue Ethics, 1999, p.p. 198-202.

[15] Knight, “Ethics and the Economic,” 1922, p. 30.

[16] MacIntyre, After Virtue, 1981, p. 183. Elshtain, Women and War, 1987, pp. 52-56.

[17] Berlin, “The Originality of Machiavelli,” 1953, in Against the Current, pp. 72, 76.

[18] Plato, c. 360 BC, The Republic, IV, Stephanus 442c-d, p. 1074.

[19] Aristotle, Politics, c. 330 BC, VII. i, §11, p. 281.

[20] MacIntyre, After Virtue, 1981, p. 181.

[21] Prindle, Politics and Economics, 2003, pp. 98, 70.

[22] Aristotle, Politics, c. 330 BC, VII. i, §4 (1323a), p. 280.

[23] David Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy, 1994, p. 159; Vinen, History in Fragments, 2000, p. 159.

[24] Foot, “Virtues and Vices,” 1978, p. 18.

[25] Dickens, Dombey and Son, 1848, p. 54.

[26] Wolf, “Moral Saints,” 1982, p. 81.

All the more did they authorize themselves to master and manhandle apparently “feminine” men. These taciturn, tough, pagan, fishing, hunting, boxing, misogynistic, Boy Scouting, anti-mollycoddle, and above all Courageous men became increasingly obsessed with homosexuals, especially gay men, and most especially flamboyantly talkative, effeminate gay men. Recent scholarship on gender history in the United States, summarized by John D’Emilio and Estelle Friedman, has located an “early-twentieth-century crisis in middle-class male gender identity.” [1] The story is paralleled in Britain after the trials of Oscar Wilde (1895) and in Germany after the scandal of Philipp von Eulenburg (1906); though in America the turn against homosexuality took a more violent character. Fag bashing is an especially American sport.

No one before the late 19^th century thought of same-sex affection as defining a whole class of human beings. Homosexual acts even in culturally backward America were never, after the totalitarianism of the early Puritans, viewed with enough distaste to evoke the Biblical penalty—the penalty in Leviticus [18: 22 and 20:13] is, of course, death, as it is there for other appalling crimes, such as cursing your parents or committing adultery [20:9-10]. Abraham Lincoln, it now seems somewhat plausible, was gay; Walt Whitman was without any doubt. Nobody cared much. In fact during the most of 19^th century homosexual acts in America were ignored, until the turn after the Civil War to purity in the Comstock Law and the like, putting the United States in the van of anti-sex countries. Consenting sodomy was not against the law in New York state until the 1890s. Until 2003 it was illegal in Texas. We have emerged from one hundred years of virulent homophobia, comparable to a similar episode in the 13^th century. St. Thomas was in this matter conventional, ranking homosexual acts just below murder.[2] As John Boswell shows in detail, the 13^th century was a local maximum of such attitudes, and Aquinas was going along with them, illogically.[3] Likewise the modern hysteria about unnatural acts.

Public attributions of passive homosexuality in Western societies were shaming always, at any rate for an adult. See for example Catullus 57’s smirking commentary on the sex life of Julius Caesar. But to be ashamed of an active role was something new in the late 19^th century. Wilde was led into the first of his three disastrous trials by a manly desire to challenge for this reason the Marquis of Queensbury, a wretchedly bad choice of sparring partner. In France at about the same time Marcel Proust, though notoriously gay, was ashamed of it, and in order to defend what he imagined was his good name against the charge of unusual tastes engaged repeatedly in courageous if stylized dueling with pistols. No one was ever hurt. Compare bucks in spring. He went to lengths in Remembrance of Things Past (1913) to recast the good loving by a man as love for a woman (“Albert”  “Albertine”), which unfortunately, as he explained to an indignant André Gide, left all the bad loving to the many homosexual characters in the novel.

In France, however, homophobia was merely a matter of social shame, and of occasional high-handedness by police and judges, not of explicit legal sanction. The sole exception was the law passed under the Vichy government, repealed in 1982, raising the legal age of consent to 21 for homosexual liaisons; for heterosexuals it was 15. As Scott Gunther puts it, French law, unlike American or British or German, simply did not mention homosexuality.[4] The French have long been amused by the Anglo-Saxon, Dutch, and German fixation on queers, just as the northerners have long been amused by the French and Italian fixation on being cuckolded.[5] In Shakespeare the balance is “Latin” in this matter, obsessed with cuckoldry yet relaxed about homoeroticism.

Simon Schama notes in the Dutch Republic a startling outbreak in 1740-2 of “a hysterical persecution of homosexuals in a culture that had virtually no history of witchhunts of any kind since the Anabaptists had swung on the gallows two hundred years before.”[6] The laws under which some hundreds of prosecutions were brought in these few years, resulting in some score of executions, dated to the same 1530s, with extensions in 1570. In the Golden Age prosecutions were rare. Schama suggests that up to 1740, during a long time of peace—which is not how one would characterize the earlier Golden Age—“there were time and space for the Dutch to brood over their own identity and the unsettling discrepancy between a heroic past and a prosaic future.”

In Britain the modern law criminalizing male homosexual acts under which Wilde was prosecuted was passed only in bourgeois and long-peaceful 1885, the Labouchère amendment, and was not seriously used for ten years. In America, as typically, the initiative was local, not national, and therefore varied greatly, though it started at about the same time, the 1880s. Something about those 1880s.

It took decades during the very late 19^th and early 20^th centuries for modern gender hysteria to build in the northern countries, though this time the Netherlands was not a part of it. Michael Quinn’s startling Same-Sex Dynamics Among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example (1996) establishes that even Mormon leaders who came to maturity in the 19^th century “looked upon sodomy as less serious than other sexual sins.”[7] A focused faith that God hates fags, the laserlike focus on merely two of the hundreds of prohibitions in Leviticus, took hold even in conservative American Christianity only in the mid- and especially the late-20^th century.

It’s puzzling, this anxiety about homosexuality. Why did a bourgeois Courage seem to require such an angry reaction to the encroachment of The (Alleged) Feminine? The change becoming so apparent around 1900 and building thereafter was sometimes said to have happened because modern life for the bourgeois man allowed too little scope for his physical courage. That is, the men just had to land violent hands on women and gay men because the women and their gay brothers had taken away the other opportunities for manly play, such as gun play. In any event that’s what real American men like Owen Wister and Zane Grey and Jack London and Teddy Roosevelt seemed to be hinting in their gun-happy, feminine-excluding fictions.

In Europe between the Wars, Richard Vinen notes, “political styles become more aggressively masculine.” “In spite of, or perhaps because of, the enfranchisement of women. . . . uniforms and clenched fists dominated demonstrations, and speeches were about ‘struggle,’ ‘battle,’ and ‘the enemy’.”[8] Dating the gender crisis as late as the 1930s, George Chauncey links it to the Depression: “As many men lost their jobs, their status as breadwinners and their sense of mastery over their own futures, the central tenets undergirding their gender status, were threatened.”[9] But in some advanced male imaginations, as I’ve said, homophobia or gynephobia constituting the dark matter to Courage appears a good deal earlier. Before 1914 one can see already for example in Roosevelt the elder and in the strange death of Liberal England the masculinization of political rhetoric and the appeal to military metaphors of struggle—that is, to Kampf.

Wilde’s conviction and jailing for gross indecency in 1895 was a turning point among educated English speakers in the matter of homosexuality, a model application of the Labouchère amendment. The very word “homosexuality” was just becoming known. It appears to date from 1869; though the first quotation in the Oxford English Dictionary is 1897. Only with Wilde, argues Alan Sinfield, were effeminacy, arty tastes, love of other men, and those acts of gross indecency bundled together in the bourgeois mind and viewed by straights as horribly dishonorable. For decades afterwards in England the euphemism for sodomy was “unspeakables of the Oscar Wilde sort.” That was the phrase for example in E. M. Forster’s posthumously published coming-out novel, Maurice, written in 1914.[10] “All these years [since the trials of 1895],” Wilde’s eldest son Cyril, once wrote to his brother Vyvyan,

my great incentive has been to wipe that stain away; to retrieve, if may be, by some action of mine, a name no longer honored in the land. . . . The more I thought of this, the more convinced I became that, first and foremost, I must be a man. There was to be no cry of decadent artist, of effeminate aesthete, of weak-kneed degenerate. . . . [I wish] nothing better than to end in honorable battle for King and Country.[11]

On May 9, 1915 King and Country arranged to wipe away the stain.

Or curing the sickness. The eagerness of American, British, and German doctors after the 1870s to get into the business of social engineering, a half-century in advance of their total victories in drug and licensing laws, played a role in the strange rise of homophobia. Lucy Ann Lodbell, who in the 1850s passed as Reverend Joseph Lodbell without arousing the interest of the legal or medical authorities, and wrote a memoir, was by 1883 reclassified as mentally ill, justifying incarceration in a madhouse. “It is reasonable to consider true sexual perversion,” wrote one Dr. “Wise” about the Reverend’s case, “as always a pathological condition and a peculiar manifestation of insanity.”[12] The turn against same-sex intimacy—intimacy practiced among males in armies and navies always and praised in Hellenizing and Romantic literature through Walt Whitman and A. E. Housman—led to a succession of laws prohibiting gender deviation, something like a men’s version of the women’s push for Prohibition, with likewise a reign of terror half-enforcing the laws.

D’Emilio and Friedman note that the medicalization of homosexuality worked two ways. Especially in a purity-minded America fearful of contagion from immigrants and blacks and other untouchables, it made people think that the unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort was a disease that could be spread by contact, or perhaps “recruitment,” as to a fraternity. Why do young men become gay? Because the parties are better.

Yet at the same time medicalization encouraged Americans to think that homosexuality was an inherited identity rather than a vicious moral failing. Thus Kinsey’s research from the late 1930s on. Certainly the psychiatrists, whose American branch dropped homosexuality as an “illness” only in 1973, though not finally in all versions of the illness until 1986, deserve full credit for a long and manly history of torturing homosexuals. For transsexuals the American, Canadian, and British psychiatrists are still at it, bless ‘em, at, for example, the Clarke Institute in Toronto, named after a famous Canadian eugenicist, and at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, and especially the rat psychologists and psychoanalysts among them.

As the second European war approached the fear of the feminine climaxed. In Britain in the twenty years of increasing state power after 1931 prosecutions under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 quintupled. In the 1930s the Nazi state was using with enthusiasm the notorious Paragraph 175—inherited by the German Empire in 1875 from the unusually harsh Prussian code. The Bolsheviks at first legalized homosexuality, in accord with their progressive ideas. But by 1934 they had decided it was just another sign of bourgeois decadence, and did what they usually did with bourgeois decadents.[13]

Alan Turing, the British mathematician of the computer and breaker of the German military code was homosexual. He was fictionalized as heterosexual, by the way, in the movie Enigma: compare Proust’s technique. In 1952, just before the strange business of legal ramifications for private acts began its long unraveling, Turing was sentenced by a court to take female hormones. He reckoned gaily that the sentence was better than the judge’s alternative of prison; or, as he did not say, the psychiatrists’ of electric shock therapy or lobotomy.[14]

During the early 20^th century in American culture as in other Germanic countries one can see the gynephobic and homophobic hysteria of a bourgeois Courage spreading like an oil slick. In the first lines of The Sea Wolf (1904) Humphrey van Weyden, the narrator and victim, introduced as an effete writer of essays on “Poe’s place in American literature” for The Atlantic, “scarcely knows where to begin.” His last name means in Dutch “of the meadows,” van der weyden, and in London’s time evoked the racial degeneration of the Eastern, Hudson-Valley Dutch “aristocracy”—such as Roosevelt [“rose field”]. Van Weyden is a derivative writer, and starts an evident pansy, says Jack London of the West, quite another breed of man-writer, short of saying it.

The scene of the sinking ferry which opens the book is dense with gender anxiety. London spends a page recurring to Van Weyden hearing the “screaming bedlam of women.” So when Van Weyden is swept away by the tide ripping out of the straits from San Francisco Bay, he himself recalls, “I shrieked aloud as the women had shrieked.” The Cockney cook from a fatefully passing ship who helps fish him out is “weakly pretty, almost effeminate,” as Cockneys apparently always are. In a transvestite gesture he gives some of his clothes to Van Weyden, who recalls, “I shrank from his hand, my flesh revolted”—whether from the taint of the “hereditary servility” of the Cockney Race or from “his effeminate features” is unclear.

And yet the Cockney assigns effeminacy to Van Weyden himself, a literary gentleman, unproletarian: “you’ve got a bloomin’ soft skin, that you ‘ave, more like a lydy’s than any I know of.” When the captain Wolf Larsen appears it is with a great noise of “not namby-pamby oaths,” of which Van Weyden writes with ladylike delicacy, “It should not be necessary to state, at least to my friends, that I was shocked.” The first words Larsen says to Van Weyden are, “You’re a preacher, aren’t you?” The world of women, preachers, and homosexuals recedes as the schooner Ghost speeds towards the seal-hunting grounds and a masculine rebirth.

The novel ends with the formerly effete Van Weyden jerry-rigging an entire ship—“I did it! I did it! With my own hands I did it!”—and being swooned over by Maud Brewster (“My man”). The former aesthete queer, practically a woman for God’s sake, is redeemed for the manly cult of Courage.[15]

Again, in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, first published in 1929, Joel Cairo, whose very name evokes myths of the love of boys in Araby, is introduced in a page of effeminizing clichés. He was “small-boned,” “his black coat, cut right to narrow shoulders, flared a little over slightly plump hips,” he “came towards Spade with short, mincing, bobbing steps. The fragrance of chypre came with him.” He spoke “in a high-pitched thin voice, and sat down. He sat down primly, crossing his ankles. . . and began to draw off his yellow gloves. . . . Diamonds twinkled on the second and fourth fingers of his left hand . . . . His hands were soft and well cared for.” Cairo pulls out a little gun to frisk Spade: “His dark eyes were humid and bashful and very earnest.” It’s hard to imagine anyone but Peter Lorre in the movie role.

“He lifted Spade’s coat-tail and looked under it. Holding the pistol close to Spade’s back, he put his right hand around Spade’s side and patted his chest,” a mistake in the world of tough heterosexual men: Spade disarms Cairo with a swift turn, and then, for the insult, calmly knocks him out. In the novel (not in the movie) Cairo when he wakes demands with powder-puff indignation, “Why did you strike after I was disarmed?” “‘Sorry,’ Spade said, and grinned wolfishly.”[16] Compare the courageous and intemperate Wolf Larsen. Jack London’s friends called him “Wolf,” and his mansion in California was the Wolf House.[17] All the villains in The Maltese Falcon are queer, which Hammett’s editor tried get him to change. Hammett wouldn’t.[18]

Such passages are impossible in 19^th-century literature in English before Wilde, even in the working-class dime novels and penny dreadfuls, or indeed nowadays outside of the club comedian’s homophobia in search of an easy laugh. In 19^th-century American fiction, for example, crossdressing and the like are common enough—recall Jo in Little Women; or Huck Finn trying to pass in drag­­—but are not particularly sexualized or scorned.

The dime novels referred to gender bending with a calmness that startles the modern reader. Deadwood Dick and pals, male and female, jumped with abandon into and out of drag.[19] The Adventures of Buffalo Bill around 1882 in Beadle’s Boy’s Library of Sport, Story and adventure, Chapter XVIII, “A Clever Disguise,” claims that our hero captured a road agent by posing as a girl rider. “Buffalo Billy got the reward for his capture, and a medal from the company, and he certainly deserved all that he received for his daring exploit in the guise of a young girl, and a pretty one too, the boys said he made, for he had no mustache then, his complexion was perfect, though bronzed, and his waist was as small as a woman’s.”[20] The actual Wild Bill Hickok, too, it appears, was notably androgynous in behavior. But the book taking special, disdainful note of Hickok’s queerness is not contemporary. It looks back from the gender-anxious date of 1930.[21]

Something special, in other words, happens in the half-century of middle-class but tough-guy fiction in America after Owen Wister and Jack London. The fictional shift is especially American, not French or British, though I understand that Argentina at the same time independently developed in Spanish a similar tough-guy fiction.

In The Sun Also Rises (1926) Hemingway’s narrator and alter ego is a figure of ethical seriousness, practicing his American bourgeois ethic in which one pays the price, working for the one true sentence. He observes “a crowd of young men,” homosexuals, coming into a Parisian dance hall, and almost permits his fears to arouse his manly skill at boxing:

I could see their hands and newly washed, wavy hair in the light from the door. The policeman standing by the door looked at me and smiled. . . . I was very angry. Somehow they always made me angry. I know they are supposed to be amusing, and you should be tolerant, but I wanted to swing on one, any one, anything to shatter that superior, simpering composure.[22]

Hemingway was always interested in gender roles, and was sophisticated for his time about homosexuality. He was even sophisticated about transvestism and transsexuality, which was extremely unusual. Aside from the implied transsexuality in his novels, especially his posthumous last, his mother dressed him quite late in girl’s clothing and in the 1920s and 1930s the works of the pioneering sexologist Havelock Ellis were among his favorite books. It seems like something out of his novels, but is true, that his youngest son Dr. Gregory Hemingway—though well after his father’s death—became Gloria.[23] The narrator’s homophobia in The Sun Also Rises towards “the crowd of young men” cannot simply be assigned to the author. But Hemingway was representing a reaction common then even among sophisticated American men.

The violent fear of being approached by homosexuals is strange when you think about it. What exactly is the big, strong, heterosexual man so terrified of? It’s the talk of the effeminate homosexuals that seems to arouse the violence, just as for white men in America it was the talk of blacks or the talk of women. Or the talk of trade union organizers—in The Grapes of Wrath it is the agitators, the talkers such as Jim Casy the ex-preacher, whom the growers’ cops swing on.

In The Naked and the Dead (1948) Norman Mailer’s alter ego jokes to his Harvard classmates in fictional 1941, “You know when nothing else is left I’m going to become a fairy, not a goddamn little nance, you understand”—one imagines college juniors swinging drunkenly, anxiously on a talkative little nance behind Copley Square—“but a nice upright pillar of the community, live on green lawns. Bisexual. Never a dull moment, man or woman, it’s all the same to you, exciting.”[24] Compare Cary Grant playing Cole Porter in 1946, just before even a little gentle, veiled jesting about homosexuality became taboo in Hollywood. The Motion Picture Code had already in 1934 forbidden anything more explicit. Published casting directories for American stage and film in the first decades of the 20^th century had routine categories for “nance” or “pansy” actors. Edward Everett Horton, for example, backed up Fred Astaire in The Gay Divorcee (1934), Top Hat (1936), and Shall We Dance (1937), apparently in order to make the less-than-macho Astaire believable as a leading man.

The fear that femininity would take over, emasculating the bourgeois man, a fear to be resisted by boxing or going fishing or watching bull fights or even indulging an occasional urge to swing on the talkative less-than-macho men, or by manhandling women, is a theme in every Hemingway novel from The Sun Also Rises (1926) to the very posthumous The Garden of Eden (1986, drafted 1948-1958). Though, I repeat, considering how he toyed always with gender-crossing themes, Papa is not quite so simple as this. Kathy Willingham argues ingeniously for example that the woman Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises is not merely a fearful man-eater, as contemporary critics uniformly said, but a matador, the most admired man in Hemingway’s mythology—pretty and small and coy and dressed in smooth silks, taunting the bull.[25] She’s not called “Mary” or “Jane,” after all, but the highly gender-ambiguous “Brett.” But if Hemingway’s gender talk is not quite so simple-minded as it first appears, it encompasses the simplicity, and the swinging on them, too.

The white male bourgeoisie seemed to fear an improbable alliance among women and gays and blacks, who had all of them before the 1960s been nicely silenced. In Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man (1952) the black hero, a mild and studious boy, is saved from the machinations of his (black) college president and the president’s (white) tycoon trustees by the . . . wait for it . . . homosexual son of the last tycoon.

[1] D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 1997, p. v.

[2] Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, c. 1259-1264, Book III, part 2, Chp. 122

[3] Boswell, Christianity, 1980, Chp. 10, and esp. Chp. 11, pp. 318-30 on Aquinas.

[4] Gunther, La Construction, 1995.

[5] Vinen, History in Fragments, 2000, pp. 116-118, 114.

[6] Schama, Embarrassment, 1987, p. 601. The next quotation is from p. 605.

[7] Quinn, Same-Sex Dynamics, 1996, p. 367.

[8] Vinen, History in Fragments, 2000, p. 154.

[9] Chauncy, Gay New York, 1994, p. 353.

[10] Sinfield, Wilde Century, 1994, pp. 3, 140.

[11] Vyvyan Holland, Son of Oscar Wilde (1954), quoted in Sinfield, The Wilde Century, p. 126.

[12] D’Emilio and Freedman, Sexual Matters, 1997, pp. 124, 129.

[13] Vinen, History in Fragments, 2000, p. 117,

[14] Hodges, Alan Turing, 1983, pp. 458, 462, 471.

[15] London, Sea Wolf, 1904, pp. 3, 7, 9, 12, 14, 17, 20, 280; “I did it,” p. 274.’ “My man,” p. 280.

[16] Hammett, Maltese Falcon, 1929, Chps. IV and V (pp. 46-47, 49-50, 53).

[17] Dickey, notes in Hammett, Maltese Falcon, 1929 (1984), p. 293.

[18] Pierpont, “Tough Guy,” 2002, p. 70

[19] Brown, “Reading the West,” in Brown, Reading, 1997, p. 38.

[20] Vol. 1, No. 1, Chapter XVIII, “Stanford’s Dime Novel and Story Paper Collection, http://www-sul.stanford. edu/depts/ dp/pennies/home.html.

[21] Quinn, Same-Sex Dynamics, 1996, p. 35, quoting Stuart Henry, Conquering Our Great American Plains,1930: Hickok “seemed effeminate,” “feminine,” “sissy,” pp. 271, 275-276, 288.

[22] Hemingway, Sun Also Rises, 1926, p. 28.

[23] Willingham, “Sun Hasn’t Set,” 2002, p. 42 and Wagner-Martin, “The Romance of Desire,” 2002, p. 54.

[24] Mailer, Naked and the Dead, 1948, p. 340.

[25] Willingham, “Sun Hasn’t Set,” 2002, throughout.

Beauvoir articulates the process whereby women, by agreeing to live in comfort inside the fantasies of men, put themselves in a permanently false position. . . . [M]en are forever feeling betrayed, not supported, . . . because when fantasy is governing perception, the truth appears as a blasphemy. . . . Woman as Object may be spared the heavy burden carried by primary Subjects only by suffering the dishonor of constant two-way self-betrayal. . . . [She] often meekly accept[s] every form of raw deal in punishment for representing falsity and weakness.

Simone de Beauvoir,” 1999, p. 84.

Jane Tompkins argues that one enemy is language itself: “Westerns treat salesmen and politicians, people whose business is language, with contempt.”^[1] This is the case even though the occupation of the implied reader of the westerns is in fact a man who earns his living in talk-work. The comical Rebel in the movie of Shane boasts loudly, drunkenly, with a courage lacking temperance; and we know, Tompkins observes, that he is doomed (in the book from which the movie derived he is less central and his lack of taciturnity is less emphasized). “It’s Shane,” she writes, “the man who clips out words between clenched teeth, who will take out the hired gunman.”[2]

Taciturnity is not noticeable in Homeric heroes. After all, they are Hellenes, addicted to persuasive talk. The index of speeches in Stanley Lombardo’s translation of the Iliad contains about six hundred items, and these not mere bright quips (“A crippled newsie took them away from him”) but full-blown exercises in persuasion, about 25 per book, a long interlude of yammering every 30 lines or so.^[3] The knights of the Round Table, according to Mallory, yammered a good deal, too. Maybe it is specifically Roman, and romanizing, revived in a particular sort of haut-bourgeois gentleman in the 19^th century, to demand as it were laconic behavior from our heroes.

Mary Beth Rose suggested that a new and bourgeois and even feminine “heroism of endurance” takes the place in early modern times of the aristocratic heroism of action.^[4] She notes, with Norbert Elias, that the nation state required a monopoly of violence. Just as the cow towns of Kansas disarmed their cowboys, the Tudors and Valois disarmed their barons. In Milton’s Paradise Regained (published 1671), Rose observes, Christ is not the venturing warrior of Book VI in Paradise Lost but a hero of taciturnity. His victories against Satan tempting him in the wilderness consist of not engaging in speech-making, as at the end of Book I, in three lines of in effect a Valley-Girl “Whatever” dismissing a loquacious 25-line appeal by Satan to “talk at least.” After Christ’s brevity Milton himself adds an amazing half-line: “He added not” (I, 497), embodying Christ’s noble—that is, Roman—unwillingness to talk. Satan, the great talker and venturer-forth, is thoroughly puzzled: “What dost thou in this world?” (IV, 372, emphasis supplied); and elsewhere:

Perplexed and troubled at his bad success

The Tempter stood, nor had what to reply,

Discovered in his fraud, thrown from his hope,

So oft, and the persuasive rhetoric

That sleeked his tongue, and won so much on Eve,

So little here, nay lost.^[5]

Milton, eloquent for the Commonwealth and English poetry, here disdains rhetoric, joining in this many 17^th-century men of ideas and letters, from Bacon attacking metaphors with metaphors—thus too Descartes, Pascal, Hobbes, Spinoza—to Newton spinning one eloquent hypothesis after another while declaring “Hypotheses non fingo,” I do not [deign merely to] spin hypotheses.

By the end of the 18^th century, in for example The Magic Flute, taciturnity has been raised to the very essence of masculinity. The one and only test of the opera’s hero to join the men’s club of Freemasonry is to keep quiet in the face of temptations from loquacious women. No heroic action; no swordplay: just endure like a tight-lipped Roman man. Mozart’s librettist stresses over and over that silence is Tamino’s badge of heroism, one which his comically talkative, less-than-aristocratic sidekick Papageno fails repeatedly to display. Tamino is a prince of the blood, again emphasized. By contrast a man of mere commerce must talk if he is to do business.

Shane a century and a half after Mozart still looks longingly back to an imagined aristocracy of taciturn and non-commercial Romans. E. Countryman and E. von Heussen-Countryman note that the movie “renders commerce problematic.” The lone knight Shane himself is willing to join the farmer Joe Starrett, a Cincinnatus finally driven to take down his weapons, in a stirring scene of stump-removing, “bonding on Joe’s ground, literally.” But it is honest, wordless toil—direct production for subsistence, not the schemes and weaselwords and endless bargaining of Ryker and his capitalist gang.^[6]

To Ryker’s suggestion early on in the movie that Shane join the commercial side the knight replies, No deals. Jack Schaefer’s novel of 1949 is on some points less anti-capitalist than George Stevens’ movie of 1953. The offer from Ryker to Shane comes later in the novel than in the movie, in Chapter 12 out of sixteen, and therefore is less temptingly corrupt: Shane has long since become a Lancelot for the homesteaders. Starrett in the novel is more persistent than in the movie about his economic schemes for the farm and as a petit bourgeois man is more critical of the Ryker figure. Ryker, by the way, is called “Fletcher” in the novel. One wonders if the Dutch word rijker, “richer,” spelled in handwriting exactly ryker, is being evoked by some sly script doctor of recent Dutch ancestry. Anyway, Ryker engages, says Starrett, in “poor business” and is “wasteful,” the sort of prudential talk that would be read with pleasure by an American bourgeois in 1949. ^[7] Compare John D. McDonald’s detective novels, with their obeisance to the businesslike.

Middlemen are featured in both novel and movie. The owner of the saloon and general store is a Good Bourgeois. But there are bad ones, too. The novel has a five-page scene of the aristocratic Shane and the aristocrat/peasant Starrett outwitting “a peddler or trader” who tries to overcharge for a new plow. The peddler in cruder novels would have had a Jewish name or would have been from the East, or both.

Shane is uninterested in becoming permanently a laborer for wages, or what is perhaps more to the point an adulterous Lancelot to Marion Starrett’s Queen Guinevere. In the end he rides on to further knight errantry—he tells Joey: “A man has to be what he is”—leaving the peasantry in possession. So do the surviving three in the Japanese cowboy movie, Seven Samurai (1954), based, the director Kurasawa said, on American westerns such as Shane. So do the surviving three in the American remake returning the favor to Kurasawa, with American cowboys/samurai, The Magnificent Seven (1960). The director of Shane, George Stevens (it was his only western), once declared outright that his hero had overtones of medieval knighthood.

All the westerns had it, as for example Stanley Kramer’s High Noon (1952). The bourgeoisie pursues Prudence-Only, economic goals, to “keep the town decent, keep it growing,” as the Thomas Mitchell character puts it emphatically. In Mitchell’s fluent, climactic speech in the church he argues—we are surprised by the argument, considering the conventions of the genre—not that a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, which is the aristocratic, ducal formula, but that investors from the northern part of the state are thinking of investing in the town, and therefore to keep things quiet and commercial the Gary-Cooper character, the outgoing sheriff, should leave town without dueling with the villains.

The Gary-Cooper sheriff cannot then or at any other point in the movie find much eloquence to explain his knightly duty to stay and fight—not to the church people, not to a bourgeois town, not even to his new Quaker wife, the Grace-Kelly character. His wife does fight in the end, lethally. In the Cold War we all needed to, even Quakers. Contrast the reversal of such roles before anticommunism took hold. The John Wayne of Angel and the Badman (1947) becomes finally a pacifist under his wife’s influence. In 1947, after all, Americans were still laying down their weapons. Thomas Dewey, confident of victory in the 1948 elections, nobly refrained from using the anti-Communist card, which swiftly thereafter developed in American politics into the only winning card.^[8] Though it is complicated: High Noon was designed as an anti-McCarthyite movie, inspiring right-wing replies from John Wayne.

But like noble Tamino and noble Shane, Gary Cooper scorns using the persuasive words. He is not a politician. It is revealing that High Noon is the favorite movie of U. S. presidents, measured by actual showings at the White House (Clinton saw it 30 times). The Gary-Cooper/President figure is an employee of the bourgeoisie but he is quite different from them, as are the taciturn hired swords/guns in Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven, impoverished aristocrats. The folklorist John Lomax had set the tone in 1910, as the Western myth was becoming bourgeois and respectable: “Dauntless, reckless, as gentle to a pure woman as King Arthur, [the cowboy] is truly a knight of the twentieth century.”^[9] That “reckless” should worry Americans. Anyway, not a capitalist.

* * * *

For the self-dubbed knights of the bourgeois world the other enemies, aside from the talk-talk capitalists, were those tiresome, Bible-reading, church-going, water drinking, talk-talk women. As Peter French notes, “Women do a lion’s share of the talking in westerns,” and gain no honor for it.[10] Tompkins observes that the female lead in the 1957 version of The Gunfight at O.K. Coral, the Jo Van Fleet character, is merely an absorber of dishonor to purify the male lovers in preparation for battle, Burt Lancaster as Wyatt Earp and Kirk Douglas as Doc Holliday. “Her [pacific] words are always in vain, they are chaff, less than nothing, another sign of her degradation.”[11] Words and women, say the cowboys, are a lethal combination. Guns first, talk later.

The sentiment is old, right from the beginning of the modern story of emancipation alternating with reaction. The Magic Flute, again, is relentlessly misogynistic on this score. The gendering of aristocratic nostalgia could not be more explicit in the scripting of low-born Papageno’s failure as a man, except as one of inferior appetites. Papageno is unable to meet the Masonic/Shane standard of being “steadfast, tolerant, and discreet”: at one point he blurts out, startlingly, “Ich wollt’, ich wär ein Mädchen”: “I wish I were a girl.” Later he asks Tamino plaintively, “Can I not be quiet when I must? Yes! When it comes to business [Unternehmen, undertakings], I’m a man.”[12] But he’s not. Compare Sancho Panza—though the non-aristocratic character in Mozart carries no hint of anti-aristocratic irony, and Sancho in 1614 certainly has nothing feminine about him. By 1791 the gender world of Europe had shifted.

A century later it had shifted again. American literature after 1900 embodies a bourgeois and masculinist reaction to female religiosity and female rights. You can see it in the Westerns, the hard-boiled detective stories, the literary imitations of journalistic pith: Zane Gray, Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway. “I don’t like eloquence,” says Hammett’s first hardboiled hero in 1924, the Continental Op (operative, that is, for the Continental Detective Agency). “If it isn’t effective enough to pierce your hide, it’s tiresome; and if its effective enough, then it muddles your thoughts.” An anti-rhetorical rhetoric was the imagined tough-guy’s way of eluding, as Claudia Roth Pierpont puts it, “the feminine imperative against which Hammett defined himself: the tireless urging to feel, to connect, to talk, talk, talk.”[13]

Talk, talk, talk is an American black imperative, too, against an aristocratic Roman and bourgeois American ideal of taciturnity. In Ralph Ellison or Zora Neale Hurston the men are very Attic Greeks in their eloquence, “big picture talkers . . . using a side of the world for a canvas.” In Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) Jamie complains about her husband Jody off being the mayor: “You’se always off talkin’.” He replies, “Ah told you in de very first beginnin’ dat Ah aimed tuh be uh big voice. You oughta be glad, ‘cause dat makes uh big woman outa you.”[14] Women form in the book, until they get their own voices, a Greek chorus to the men’s eloquence.

Talk of prohibition and the vote for women—never mind blacks—stuck in the craws of a lot of American men, as had earlier the domestication of the bourgeois male, subordinate to the angel in house. “For most of the nineteenth century,” Tompkins notes, “the two places women could call their own in the social structure were the church and the home. The Western contains neither. . . . [M]en gravitated in imagination towards a womanless milieu.”[15]

Think of Teddy Roosevelt, the fragile (and “aristocratic”) child who adopts the strenuous Western life with grim manliness. After his first wife and his mother died suddenly in the same week he took his sorrowful exercises far away from home and church, a New-York Dutchman in Dakota with other splendid fellows shooting everything that moved. Roosevelt had been in fact a Harvard classmate of Owen Wister—The Virginian, 1902, is dedicated to Roosevelt. H. W. Brands writes that Roosevelt’s “great good luck was to come of age when America had a particular weakness for romantic heroes.”

Roosevelt was a prolific writer about his self-created romances, like his younger contemporary Winston Churchill. Churchill was of course an actual aristocrat, first cousin of the 9^th Duke of Marlborough, nephew of the 6^th Earl of Airlie, witnessing with dismay in Britain, as T. R did in America, the decline of “a small and serious ruling class.”[16] Roosevelt wrote a six-volume The Winning of the West (1889-96), which with Henry Jackson Turner’s presidential address to the American Historical Association at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 helped set the tone of nostalgia for a lost frontier of real men. Roosevelt’s history of the American navy of John Paul Jones and Oliver Hazard Perry remained a classic for decades. In the second year of his presidency a fourteen-volume oeuvres completes appeared—fourteen thick and self-authored volumes, not merely bureaucratic papers written by others. He was a man of many words. He wrote about ten letters a day, 150,000 in total, while Holmes, whom he appointed to the Supreme Court, managed a mere 10,000. A war-mongerer, then a peace-maker, a threatener, then a deal maker, a strike settler, Roosevelt talked, talked, talked from whatever pulpit he could command.[17]

Literary men of action early in the 20^th century, especially in America before Hemingway masculinized American fiction, were caught uneasily between feminine words and masculine action, speaking softly but wanting to be known for carrying a big stick. William Carlos Williams writes in 1913:

First he said:

It is the woman in us

That makes us writeLet us acknowledge it—

Men would be silent.

We are not men

Therefore we can speak

And be conscious

of the two sides.

Unbent by the sensual

As befits accuracy.[18]

“Male poets born in the Gilded Age,” writes Guy Rotella about Robert Frost, who masculinized American poetic style, “confronted . . . a business-dominated society [judging] their chosen work not to be work at all, and certainly not manly work.”[19] About the same time, quoting an imagined manifesto for The Writer in Death in Venice (1912), Thomas Mann wrote: “We poets . . . . may be heroic after our fashion, disciplined warriors of our craft, yet are we all like women, for we exult in passion, and love is still our desire—our craving and our shame.”[20]

In the minds of literary men less subtle than Frost or Mann, such as Teddy Roosevelt, the non-work work was all supposed to come out gloriously in the end, this quasi-manly, poetic yammering leading to undeniably manly violence, women cheering from the castle window, like a knightly tale of olden times, the splendid little wars of imperialism, the white man’s burden, the charge up San Juan Hill—successful of course, with the bold colonel on horseback surviving, like a boy’s game. All four of Roosevelt’s sons served in France—as did the sons, I’ve noted, of British ducal families: noblesse oblige—and one got the Croix de Guerre.

The ageing Roosevelt was crushed when his youngest son, beloved, troublesome Quentin, met his fate somewhere among the clouds. Is this what war is like, a courageous son actually dying? In August of 1918, still three months from Armistice, he wrote, “It is rather awful to know that he paid for his life, and that my other sons may pay for their lives, to try to put in practice what I preached.” TR’s luck held, though. His other sons survived the War, and he himself died in 1919, before the apparent failure of the Peace had devalued the romantic sacrifice.[21]

After 1916, after Verdun and the Somme, the highbrows at least had started to doubt the old lie. Middle-brow culture held onto it. As you go up the stairs to the reading room of Harvard’s Widener Library you come on the landing to a gigantic, Rubenesque double mural painted by John Singer Sargent a little before his death in 1925. One panel is inscribed, “They crossed the sea crusaders keen to help the nations battling in a righteous cause”; the other, “Happy those who with a glowing faith in one embrace clasped death and victory.” Sweet and proper is it to die for the fatherland.

The romance of the Homeric hero spreads in American literature in TR’s time. It has roots of course as far back as Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales (1823-1841). Think of Daniel Day Lewis’ luscious performance in The Last of the Mohicans. It persists to the present in the middle- and low-brow reading of bourgeois men. Early in Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage (1912: it has since then never been out of print) Bern Venters rejects the voluble peacemaking by Jane Withersteen, and demands she return his guns, after a gunslinger who happens along has saved him from a humiliating beating: “Hush! Talk to me no more of mercy or religion—after today. Today this strange coming of [the gunslinger] left me still a man, and now I’ll die a man! . . . Give me my guns.” Venters disarms the woman by stopping her talk. Quoting the passage Tompkins remarks, “In Venters, American men are taking their manhood back from the Christian women who have been holding them in thrall.”[22] With words.

[1] Tompkins, West of Everything, 1992, p. ***

[2] Tompkins, West of Everything, 1992, p. ***

[3] Homer, Iliad, Lombardo trans., 1997, pp. 506-513.

[4] Rose, Gender and Heroism, 2002, pp. xii.

[5] Milton, Paradise Regained, 1671, IV, 1-7.

[6] Tompkins, West of Everything, 1992, p. 51, 52. Countryman and von Heussen-Countryman, Shane, 1999, pp. 15, 17.

[7] Schaefer, Shane, 1949, pp. 72-73, 82

[8] Richard Fried, “Operation Polecat,” 2002 and “Voting Against the Hammer and Sickle,” 2003.

[9] Lomax, Cowboy Songs, 1910, p. ***

[10] French, Cowboy Metaphysics, 1997, p. 32.

[11] Tompkins, “Me and My Shadow,” 1987 (2001), p. 2141.

[12] Mozart, The Magic Flute, 1791, Act Two, scenes II and XIX.

[13] Peirpont, “Tough Guy,” 2002, p. 68.

[14] Hurston, Their Eyes, 1937, pp. 85, 74.

[15] Tompkins, West of Everything, 1992, p. 44.

[16] Cannadine, Aspects, 1994, p. 157.

[17] Holmes numbers are given in Alschuler, Law Without Values, 2000, p. 39.

[18] Williams, “Transitional,” The Tempers, 1913, at http://www.english. uiuc.edu/ maps/ poets/s_z/williams/ additionalpoems.htm

[19] Rotella, “Synonymous with Kept,” 2001, p. 242, with elisions.

[20] Mann, Death in Venice, 1912, p. 72.

[21] Brands, TR, 1997, pp. 32, xi-xii, 797-799, 802, 812; Dalton, Theodore Roosevelt, p. 504; Cannadine, Aspects, 1994, p. 157.

[22] Tompkins, West of Everything, 1992, p. 33.

. . . I am not a king, have laid no kingdoms waste. . . .

Should I not hear, as I lie down in dust,

The horns of glory blowing above my burial? . . . .

Tell me, as I lie down, that I was courageous.

Blow horns of victory now . . . .

Conrad Aiken, “Tetélestai”

Collected Poems, 2^nd ed.

Oxford University Press, Cpp. 296, 298

We talked of war. JOHNSON: “Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea. . . . The impression is universal: yet it is strange.” . . . . Such was his cool reflection in his study; but whenever he was warmed . . . he, like other philosophers, whose minds are impregnated with poetical fancy, caught the common enthusiasm for splendid renown.

Boswell’s Life, 1778, aetat. 69

Modern Library ed., II, p. 191-192

When the old tales of Western Courage got written down their values were already antique. This is another problem with the Western and masculinist focus on gut-checks and violence; a problem, that is, beyond its actual, sociological antiqueness. The accounts of it that throng our Western culture are phony from the start.

After all, it is mainly the civilized—the “citizen-ized,” those of high standing living in town—who can read and write, and can record the alleged deeds, not the illiterate and rural aristocracy itself, which leaves such stuff to priests and bards and especially to posterity. The writings of the civilized Mediterranean had of course audiences mainly non-aristocratic, the Many of the Greek city states and the plebs of the Roman Republic. And yet the writings taught in the schools to the boys patrician or plebeian represented as I have noted an archaic, physically Courageous, wholly aristocratic virtue. For the Greeks it was Homer and for the Romans it was translations and then imitations of Homer such as Ennius and Virgil. Cicero was a lawyer, not a soldier. Yet he told his brother that his “childhood dream” was expressed in the lines from The Iliad, Glaucus telling what his father had said to him in sending him off to Troy, “Always be the best [aristeuein, compare “aristocratic”], my boy, the bravest.”[1]

Which is to say that our cultural vocabulary for the chief pagan virtue in the West isn’t fresh news from the front, any front. The vocabulary of Courageous heroism is sociologically inauthentic, reworked over centuries, belated, secondary, not based, as historians say, on primary sources. Homer was imagining a warrior society long gone, about five centuries gone. He himself lived in an eastern Aegean culture radically less knightly and more workaday than the one he imagined. “The resulting picture,” writes Hanson, “is an amalgam-mosaic spanning five hundred years. . . ; it may not reflect an actual historical society at all.”[2]

So usually. A little after Homer wrote, in the 6^th century BC, a redactor in the style of Deuteronomy looked back on Joshua the berserk nomad marching up to the walls of Jericho back, far, far back, in the 13^th century BC, a little before Troy fell. The mythical Aeneas, counting from the actual date of the fall of Troy, would have died more than a thousand years before he was imagined by Virgil as a model of archaic piety. Beowulf of the Spear Danes lived if he did centuries before his literate cousins in far-off Saxon England set down a version of his tale. Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 12^th century crafted the knightly stories, and in the 15^th Thomas Malory perfected them, about a King Arthur who flourished, if ever, perhaps in Wales around 540 AD.

The Icelandic sagas prove the rule, at its edges. The historical Gunnar was killed in a siege of his house about (perhaps exactly) 990 AD and his ally Njal burned in a similar siege about 1011 (the site can be visited still). But the saga-writer, though he creates in the Hemingwayesque restraint of saga prose an impression of reporting from the scene, was looking back on the events from 1275 or so, from an Iceland thoroughly Christianized and commercial. The Icelandic sagas “must be thought of as historical novels rather than histories,” R. I. Page warns. “Their authenticity must be continually questioned. The Viking historian must feed on more austere fare.”[3] Some think that the sagas can be fed on still, as documents of an oral tradition carrying fact. To the contrary, Jesse Byock points out, the “bookprosist” view of the sagas was to some degree a result of 19th-century Icelandic nationalism eager to see the century and a half of saga-writing not as merely the writing down of traditions but as “one of the most powerful literary moments in recorded history,” in the words of the leader of this view. [4] Compare the 200-year dispute over the authorship of Homer.

The stories of Joshua or King Arthur are still more clearly “historical novels.” The days of yore are doubly so:

Miniver cursed the commonplace

And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;

He missed the mediaeval grace

Of iron clothing.

Nor of course do we post-mediaevals live in societies led by literal aristocracies of fighting men. So why, one might ask, should we go on being governed in our ethics by aristocratic virtues characteristic of such men? True: only Walpole among 18^th-century prime ministers of England was without literally aristocratic blood on a mother’s or a father’s side.[5] And, true: the last British cabinet still having a majority of aristocrats was surprisingly late, Gladstone’s of 1892. Thirty years later in Bonar Law’s there were still equal numbers of aristocrats and commoners. Thatcher’s of 1979 still contained nearly a quarter from the “landed establishment,” though some quite recently recruited to it. But even in that class-haunted nation it is by now a good while since real aristocrats mattered. Harold Macmillan’s cabinet of 1957, it was said, had more “old Estonians” (émigré politicians) than old Etonians.[6]

Centuries earlier the English and then the Scottish aristocrats had stopped their Homeric bloodletting and had turned to farming, court masques, and the gaming table. The proportion of violent deaths for males over age fifteen in English ducal families—“the king’s brothers,” so the very top of the social order—is an astonishing one half for the cohort born 1330-1479, dying courageously in the Hundred Years War and the Wars of the Roses. It falls to about a fifth for those born under the Tudors and Stuarts, then to about one in twenty for those born under the Hanoverians, fighting in the ethically-restrained wars of the 18^th century. The mortality rate from war comes back, startlingly, to its medieval levels for sons of dukes of an age to serve in World Wars I and II. So compelling is the faith in an aristocratic Courage; and so ethically unrestrained is modern war. [7]

Most of us in modern democracies therefore have forgotten what an “aristocracy” literally is. American university students believe “upper class” is merely a fancy word for “rich.” European and especially British students have less difficulty understanding caste-like classes. The young Americans begin to understand if they are urged to think of European “class” as equivalent to American “color.”

Most Americans therefore think of the Kennedys as “aristocrats,” though the older one’s are only two or three generations from proletarian origins—Senator Edward’s grandfather Kennedy grew up poor—and none are professional soldiers. It’s a metaphor. Professors and artists since the late 19^th century have preened themselves as a “new aristocracy,” though of merit (they modestly say) rather than of birth, as though there were such a thing. Such a category mistake among democrats would have puzzled a Renaissance duke with a 900-year old name.

When in the 16^th century the new Dutch Republic threw off Spanish and other dukes and kings, its aristocracy lost the mechanisms of refreshment by new ennoblements. The aristocratic rump, now an entirely closed class, remained somewhat influential in the affairs of the Republic, though continuing to shrink. But no one in the Netherlands mistook the nouveau-riche merchant class, the regents, with a training in accounting and classical languages, for literal aristocrats, with a training in violence and leadership.

Income had nothing to do with it, and still doesn’t. There persists in places like Holland and Sweden, now five or so centuries after the sanguinary deeds that elevated it, an aristocracy consisting of a few folk living in modernized castles behind hedges. Though democrats now, they still possess the self-confidence of hereditary rulers, often taking up military careers. My friend the economist Axel Leijonhvufvud (literally, “lion head”) comes from such a family, ranking high in the Swedish aristocracy, a descendent of Norse kings. It causes an American peasant of Norwegian descent like me to swoon.

We all need to be Courageous in life. But even our physical courage cannot be merely aristocratic virtù, if we wish to stay out of jail. It cannot be Homeric or even old Roman, certainly not olde-tyme as filtered through the stories from Homer to Hollywood. “How much longer,” asked John Stuart Mill in 1869, “is one form of society and life to content itself with the morality made for another?”[8] It is my main concern here. We ordinary, unarmed citizens in the West, as against our fellows who volunteer to fight as imitation aristocrats at Srebrenica or the Somme or the local crime-or-fire scene, are urban and democratic and liberated and pacified and bourgeois and even female now. Perhaps we should acknowledge the fact.

* * * *

That is, the word and ideology of Courage has been corrupted. Bourgeois men have adopted instead the mythical histories of knights and cowboys as their definition of masculinity. Stories help construct identities and, as William Reddy argues, even emotions.[9] We, and especially the men among us, keep turning, turning over in our minds aristocratic stories of virtue in the line of the Iliad. You would think that bourgeois men of Europe or Japan or America were actual Kings of Ithaca, or of Engelond varray, parfit, gentil knights.

Take the professions of arms c. 1800 in England. England was to be sure “une nation de boutiquiers,” in Napoleon’s well-worn phrase (well-worn even before Napoleon: I quoted Adam Smith’s use of it in 1776). Yet Napoleon was the son of a businessman and bureaucrat, and himself a genius of Prudence. He was affecting to scorn the other bourgeois nation that at last defeated him. The British Navy in the age of Lord Nelson, if one looks merely at the origins of the officers, was ordinarily in fact non-aristocratic, Nelson himself the son of a parson, Captain William “Bounty” Bligh the son of a customs officer. The equally eminent Dutch navy of the previous century had been equally egalitarian, drawing its admiraals, its Tromps and van Dorps, from sons of common sailors and of aristocrats, both.

William McNeill observes that navies possess an analogy in merchantmen that armies do not. There is no civilian analogue to an army. The British Navy therefore required habits of mind natural to commercial ventures, such as double care in provisioning a ship before setting sail, or never missing a tide, or manning the pumps with energy in a crisis.[10] Work, work, work. No laying about merely waiting for the wild charge. Like engineers in the Royal Navy under steam, below-decks with the black gang monitoring pressure gauges, an 18^th-century British naval officer had to know quite a lot and do all sorts of jobs and was therefore permitted to be less than genteel—a non-aristocratic Scot, for example. Being Jack Aubrey is not just a matter of aristocratic Courage.

Indeed, as Jack is always saying, it is a matter, too, of bourgeois profit from prizes. Captain Wentworth in Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818) reminisces about the sloop Asp: “I knew that we should either go to the bottom together, or that she would be the making of me.” And then his frigate: “those were pleasant days when I had the Laconia! How fast I made money in her!”[11]

But England expected its sailors, whether of bourgeois origin or not, to do their duty, which was defined peasant-wise for the men and aristocratically for the officers. Not bourgeois-ly. Admiral Lord Nelson died at Trafalgar because he chose, as was his nouveau-noble duty, to stand on the quarter deck in full view of French snipers, with medals flashing in the smoke. Those are the traditions of brave men at sea, as a post-aristocratic Lord Jim ruefully apprehended. Jane Austen’s ideal potential husband, acknowledged to be in want of a wife, is a naval officer, honorable off-stage doubtless in a very gallant way, though never so lofty as an actual aristocrat. Two of Jane’s much-beloved brothers ended as admirals; another was for a time in the army. Even bourgeois Carthage would literally crucify admirals and generals who came home empty handed. The Dutch behavior at Srebrenica would have earned British admirals in the nation of shopkeepers courts martial and speedy executions—“to encourage the others,” as Voltaire described the execution in 1757 of a British admiral for not doing his utmost.

The Army of the Duke of Wellington was even more rigidly tied to aristocratic myth, and unlike the Navy was sociologically speaking an aristocratic preserve. The echt-aristocratic officers at Waterloo were expected to sit nobly on their horses and face decapitating cannon fire while their peasant or proletarian soldiers were permitted—no, ordered—to lie down.

John Keegan points out that by the time of the Napoleonic Wars the Army officers, unlike their Homeric or medieval models, were not supposed to engage directly in slaughter. The sailors still did, with cutlasses issued in a crisis indifferently to seamen and admirals. An English captain at Waterloo, doubtless a crack shot of deer and grouse, spotted a French common soldier climbing into the farmyard he was under orders to defend, and “instantly desired Sergeant Graham, whose musket [the captain] was holding, . . . to drop the wood [that the sergeant himself was carrying], take [back] his [musket from the very captain] . . . and shoot the intruder.” Yet the captain would gladly have dueled to the death man-to-man with a French fellow officer. “The only feats of arms worth the name were those conducted between men of gentle birth, either one on one or in nearly (ideally exactly) matched numbers,” like cricket teams.[12]

The point is that bourgeois men still take their models from aristocratic warriors, or cricket teams. By 1914 the British and other European armies had became very different, making the Great War possible. By then the officers, though aristocratic in imagination, were bourgeois in origin. Thorstein Veblen had this point right: that aristocratic values survived in the imaginations of the bourgeoisie.

In her profound study of the rise and fall of the American western Jane Tompkins quotes the inventor of the acceptably middle-class version of the genre, Owen Wister, writing in 1895, seven years before The Virginian: “In personal daring and in skill as to the horse, the knight and the cowboy are nothing but the same Saxon of different environments.” Tompkins notes: “Wister’s identification of the cowpuncher with the Anglo-Saxon knight-at-arms is a way for an upper-class composer-turned-short-story-writer with doubts about his independence to claim a robust masculinity.”[13] The predominately Norman knighthood of England would have been amused by Wister’s concept; and King Arthur was if anything a Celt, not a Saxon.

Wister like his friend and fellow enthusiast for heroism Teddy Roosevelt knew the West as scenery, but could not have known the samurai warriors of his imagination, because they did not exist. His model was not “reality” but the elaborate fictions developed in the workingman’s dime novel. Buffalo Bill, King of the Border Men appeared first in December 1869 as a magazine serial. The author of the Deadwood Dick series, Edward Wheeler, who described his occupation on his letterhead as “Sensational Novelist,” lived in Philadelphia and never ventured much further west than that.[14] Wheeler wrote 33 dime novels from 1877 until his death in 1884, and after his death 97 more novels appeared under his name, petering out finally in 1897. The author of Shane (1949) admitted that when he wrote the novel he “had never been west of Toledo, Ohio.”[15]

The cowboys inspiring the myth early and late did actually make the Long Drive in Texas and Kansas and the Indian Territory briefly in the 1870s and early 1880s before the southern rail lines were extended west, and later herded doggies in the draws as employees of the cattle barons of Wyoming and Montana. There were only some 35,000 of them. The number is uncertain, but anyway it was a very small share of the 17,000, 000 or so Americans working for a wage at the time. The Western cattle industry was some small fraction of 2 percent of national income in 1880. After all, beef was not a very large share of the nation’s expenditure—ask yourself how much even you in your early 21^st-century prosperity spend out of your annual income on the farmer’s share of the proceeds from beef. Only a small part of the beef had seen the Wild West. Corn-fed cattle from Iowa pens, not grass-fed from Montana open ranges, dominated the industry from 1900 at the latest. The workers who took care of the grass-fed cattle were buried in the occupational category at the bottom of the proletariat, farm hands. They were proletarians, not aristocrats. They were commonly teenagers, not men. Upwards of a quarter were people of color.

The bourgeois real-estate men who governed the cow towns kept their boys under strict control, by taking their guns away. Gun control is not a recent idea. The actual gunfight at OK Corral, October 26, 1881, for instance, was about Doc Holliday and the three Earp brothers, as the law in Tombstone, trying to take away the pistols the McLaurys and Clantons were illegally displaying in town.

A classic study of the extent of violence in the cow towns of Kansas discovered that all the murders 1870-1885 came to a mere one-and-a-half per town per trading season, and few of these the outcome of Shane-type duels. [16] It’s hard to duel with pistols to the death when the city fathers have disarmed you. Less than a third of gunshot victims in the non-Hollywood cow towns returned fire. Many were not armed, as for instance the Caldwell wife shot dead in 1884 by her drunken husband. The fictionally terrifying Bat Masterson, for example, killed no one while resident in Dodge City. The cowboy, like the samurai and the knight and the Homeric hero, is a belated fiction.

“Fiction” does not mean “an utterly pointless fantasy without the slightest reference to the actual world,” at least not in the minds of the male audiences for such tales of courage. As Norris Lacy and Geoffrey Ashe observe in The Arthurian Handbook, “Medieval storytellers . . . . and their audiences viewed Arthur’s kingdom rather as people now regard the Wild West. . . . Like the Wild West, [Arthur’s Britain] was a realm of the imagination, but its creators would have denied that they were simply inventing out of nothing.”[17]

The assertion that a fiction is about something that once actually happened is important to the men who read it, as to the men who read Tom Clancy novels about spies and use them to interpret the day’s headlines, or to make their next business deal. In his introduction to an edition of The Ox-Bow Incident (1941) by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, the literary man Clifton Fadiman declared that “we should remember that the background out of which the Western came was once a reality, that there was a Wild West, that gunplay was a habit.”[18]

Not really. The blood spilling out of the dime novels, carried into the mature western novels and then into the western movies, most profusely in the spaghetti westerns at the very end of the genre, was a literary and economic device, not a sociological statistic. The boys and men of the 1870s, and the 1970s, had to be enticed to turn the page, and to buy the next novel in the series, or to go to the movie. “A hundred dead in two chapters,” The Atlantic Monthly sneered in 1879.[19]

On the last page of his first Deadwood Dick novel, set in contemporary (1877) South Dakota, Wheeler—remember, he lived in Philadelphia—adds “a few words to end this o’er true romance of life in the Black Hills.” He reports on the after-plot life of the characters, such as Calamity Jane, Dick’s sometime fiancée and fight mate, who “is still in the Hills.” “And grim and uncommunicative [note this: no talk], there roams through the country of gold a youth in black, at the head of a bold lawless gang of roadriders, who, from his unequaled daring, has won and rightly deserves the name—Deadwood Dick, Prince of the Road.”[20]

As Robin Hood was to feudal lords, so Deadwood Dick and Jesse James and Bonnie and Clyde and other outlaw heroes were to American capitalism. Or they were at least in song and in story. In sociological fact James and his gang were the sons of rich Missouri slaveholders, continuing after the war the guerrilla resistance to Union and abolition they had learned before and during it. The historian James McPherson notes that “the unromantic truth is that Jesse spent much of his ill-gotten gains on fine horseflesh and gambling,” not paying off the mortgage of poor farmers or engaging in other proto-socialist gestures.[21]

It’s unclear what Wheeler meant by claiming his roadrider story was “o’er” true. But despite the reportorial rhetoric, it wasn’t. The men and boys reading the dime novels did not want pure fantasy, science fiction, say, because they wanted to imagine themselves into the fictions, and so the fictions denied their fictionality. The black cowboy, Nate Love, later claimed to be the “real” Deadwood Dick, but this is an instance among many, from James Fenimore Cooper to the urban cowboys of suburban Dallas, of life imitating art.

Some dueling did go on, exceptionally rarely, in the streets of Dodge City. The medieval knights did joust from time to time, though not much, or they would have killed themselves off Monty-Python style. The samurai did refuse on their honor to perform executions in anger, usually. And even in commercial Florence in the 16^th century Cellini the sculptor, no aristocrat, had to the credit of his virtù numerous victims in duels and other affrays. Yet it is not a true history of olden times to portray lethal dueling as how Real Men spent their days, a habit.

Do the math. If a population of male aristocrats engaged in lethal duels on N occasions over some period, by the end, of course, only (1/2)^N would survive. I said “lethal” duels, one-on-one. If such duels happened weekly, for example, as one might infer from watching Gunsmoke on TV, then an aristocracy of 10,000 courageous cowboys would be reduced by the end of a ten-week TV season to merely 10 (very) quick-draw sharpshooters still standing.

You get the point. Fights literally to the death, above once every 18 years or so, it turns out, would overwhelm even pre-industrial birthrates of 4 percent of the existing population in a year. And since people die for other reasons, too, a much less frequent rate of heroic killing—once, say, over an entire career of noble sword-fighting or gunslinging—would destroy the social class that indulged in it. This is why challenges male-on-male in the mammalian world are ceremonial rather than lethal. If bucks actually killed each other each spring at the rates their faux-aggressions seem to promise there would be no species of deer surviving. The same argument in reverse was Darwin’s crucial insight, derived from the economist Malthus, that in a world of scarcity a proliferating class needs to be cut down, somehow; and so it must compete to the death.

Class suicide in fact does seem to characterize gang members in Philadelphia nowadays, who take their models from the television art, and was nearly so of the English dukedom during the Wars of the Roses. The Bishop of Carlisle prophesies accurately in 1399, “the blood of England shall manure the ground / . . . . and this land be called/ The field of Golgotha and dead men’s skulls.”[22] But the mathematics shows that death-defying courage can only in romantic theory be the virtue primarily called upon in any society, except in the emergency services or in a literal military camp, and then only at the rare, looming crisis.

Such a fiction does of course a cultural job. Especially it fueled in an age of democracy the occasional explosions of mass armies, 1861-1865, 1914-1918, 1939-45. In peacetime it gave the over-civilized man of the late Roman Empire or of Enlightened Europe before the Revolution or of late 19^th-century America a way out at least in imagination from under the skirts of women and the domination of priests—and an escape from under an urban, unheroic, international market which took his manhood in a moment’s beastly roaring on the floor of the Bourse.

Like the highwaymen or the Rob Roys of earlier British romance, “Deadwood Dick and [the fictionalized] Jesse James,” writes Bill Brown (agreeing with Michael Denning), “contested the dominant ideology, the encroachment of advanced capitalism. . . . The James brothers achieved iconic status as a force that could interrupt the success of capitalists (the banks) and the institutions of modernization (the train)”—though the hero of the later bourgeois version of the Western initiated by Wister’s The Virginian breaks a strike and protects the owner’s capital, in the style of John Wayne in Red River.[23]

[1] Quoted in Everitt, Cicero, 2001, p. 46. The translation is that of Fagles, 1990, 6: 247 (p. 202), whose “my boy” is not literally in the Greek (VI: 208), but does seem to capture the tone of the passage.

[2] Hanson, Western Way of War, 1989, p. 41.

[3] Page, Chronicles of Vikings, 1995, p. 25.

[4] Byock, Viking Age, 2001, pp. 149-158.

[5] Langford, Polite and Commercial People, p. 34.

[6] Cannadine, Decline and Fall, 1990, Appendix B, p. 711; and discussion pp. 206-222.

[7] Hollingsworth, “A Demographic Study of the British Ducal Families,” 1957, Table 3.

[8] Mill, Subjection of Women, 1869, p. 43.

[9] Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, 2001.

[10] McNeill, Pursuit of Power, 1982, p. 104f.

[11] Austen, Persuasion, 1818, pp. 73, 74.

[12] Keegan, The Face of Battle, 1976 (1978), pp. 190, 322, italics supplied.

[13] Tompkins, West of Everything, 1992, pp. 145, 146.

[14] Bill Brown, Reading the West, 1997, p. 269.

[15] Schaefer, “Interview,” in Schaefer, Shane, ed. J. C. Work, p. 278.

[16] Dykstra, Cattle Towns, 1968, pp. 146, 148, 143.

[17] Lacy and Ashe, The Arthurian Handbook, pp. 3-4.

[18] Fadiman, “Introduction,” 1942, p. vii.

[19] Quoted in Brown, “Reading the West,” 1997, in Brown, Reading, p. 2.

[20] Wheeler, Deadwood Dick, 1877, pp. 357-58.

[21] McPherson, “Confederate Guerrilla,” 2003. p. 21.

[22] Shakespeare, Rich. II 4.1, lines 128, 134-35

[23] Brown, “Reading the West,,” in Brown, Reading, pp. 35, 38, 40.

No longer weeping for one another

as Achilles did in passionate grief,

modern man has taught himself

that tears are to be steeled against

in mute acceptance of his grief.

Thus, he grows less like Achilles,

and more like a man who may, himself,

be cause for grief.

Helen McCloskey, “The Right Stuff,” in The Strain of Roots (2003), p. 128.

I am preaching, as everyone should, in favor of “virtue.” I commend it to you. But in its etymology it contains a worry: “virtue” is constructed in Latin from vir, “adult male human.”[1] True, even in Roman times virtus had widened beyond “manliness” to include pretty much what we mean by it now. But as late as Tacitus around 100 AD it was still the normal word for manly valor on the battlefield. One of the bizarre features of the Germani, Tacitus wrote, is that their women were valorous in this sense: “the [German] woman should not think herself exempted from valor [virtute],” since women accompanied their men to the battlefield, as cheerleaders and sometimes as active participants. A woman’s “virtue” in the male and modern sense among the Romans was pudicitia, “modesty, purity.”[2]

In non-Christianizing works through the Renaissance the Latin word and its Romance derivatives kept this whiff of the men’s locker room. Machiavelli especially had in mind men, and violent, proud ones, not women, when he praised the virtù of the prince or of a republic. Thus Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost, back from his mission to Eden, addresses the hosts of Hell: “Thrones, dominions, princedoms, virtues, powers.”[3] What made Il Principe so scandalous for centuries after its posthumous publication is that in a religious age it praised no feminine virtue. In all his writings Machiavelli associated Christianity with effeminacy, and with states that failed. In return the men of the Roman Church kept his writings on the index of forbidden books from 1559 until 1850.

In modern Italian virtù has lost its association with men. The historian Carlo Ginsburg thinks that Machiavelli’s usage was in its breadth idiosyncratic, meaning “forcefulness,” and that other Renaissance Italians did not use the word this way.[4] Leo Strauss gives the same reading: “This obscurity is essential. . . . [because] the reader is meant to ascend from the common understanding of virtue [namely, Christian goodness] to the diametrically opposite understanding [namely, manly aggression].”[5] The modern Nuovo Zingarelli gives the manly, aggressive meaning, forza d’animo, force of spirit, only as definition 6 of 12 of virtù, “by extension, literary,” and cites Machiavelli. In Il Principe the successful prince’s virtue was reduced to a manly forcefulness, the good citizen’s to a manly loyalty. Machiavelli drew on Greek or Roman examples of the best—or at any rate the winning—emperors, popes, and generals, the thrones, dominions, and princedoms, exemplars of old Spartan or old Roman “virtue.” The team showing such virtù coheres, and scores touchdowns—whatever the point might be of such “winning,” note the women from the sidelines. Nowadays we make jokes about testosterone; or lament the forcefulness of Osama bin Laden.

Harvey Mansfield denied once that “manliness” is the right translation, and argued that an assertive, showy, violent self-interest is what Machiavelli had in mind. Yet “such virtue,” Mansfield wrote, “is prudence inspired by glory and thus combined with the kind of manliness that is comfortable with ferocity and capable of acquisitiveness.”^[6] And elsewhere he and Nathan Tarcov define it as “a new conception of virtue as the willingness and ability to do whatever it takes to acquire and maintain what one has acquired.”^[7] Virtù in Machiavelli is not a cool, just, dignified, republican manliness; it is more like machismo: proud, unjust, unloving, intemperate, adolescent, the worst qualities of manliness. But manly, or at least adult male, nonetheless.

We have had a long run of our virtue talk dominated thus by a male idea of courage, three or four thousand years of writings, with many eons doubtless before the writing. Where men rule, courage rules. And vice versa: where battlefield courage is at a premium, as in the Spain of the Reconquista, I have noted, women are devalued.

Masculine identity depends on success in a field of play. The aristocracy and gentry look down on mere tradesmen having no claim to military courage. In truth, trading had its own dangers, of course. But the dangers were emasculating, not a glorious death in battle. They were merely nasty threats to masculine identity. As Jeremiah James Colman, seed-merchant of Norwich, of Colman’s mustard, remarked bitterly about his worries over bankruptcy, in business “I may be a man one day, and a mouse the next.”[8]

The task of bourgeois ideology in the 19^th century was to up-value—that is, to masculinize—economic success. It only partly worked. “Courage” defined in the pagan and heroic way still crowded out more balanced or bourgeois views of the virtues, at least in the minds of some men. Justice Holmes in 1895 addressed the men: “Who is there who would not like to be thought a gentleman? Yet what has that name been built on but the soldier’s choice of honor rather than life.”[9] The sports-and-war talk still dominates the airwaves and the board rooms and the cabinet rooms, to our woe.

Paradoxically, the sweet universalism of axial religions devised 800 BC to 632 AD was accompanied by a reinforcement of male governance, and therefore by an intensification of the honoring of courage. To paraphrase Henry Kissinger on academic life, modern politicians (that same Henry, for example) are obsessed with courage because in their lives so little of it is at stake.

Courage is a necessary and splendid human virtue; and certainly battlefield courage is especially so, the last full measure of devotion. Its pathologies arise only from an absence of other virtues to complete it, such as prudence and temperance and justice, those pagan virtues, or love. The stories told to boys hold up an aristocratic ideal of courage in battle. The problem is: merely in battle.

The world praised by the pagan virtues is in mythic origin that of a military aristocracy, free males of rank battling. Slaves and women do not count, unless a Spartacus or a Jeanne D’Arc assumes the habit of an aristocratic male. “In a rude society,” Adam Smith explained to his middle-class students at Glasgow in 1766, as the society was changing, “nothing is honorable but war.”[10] The aristocrat is courageous and honorable, great-hearted in hospitality, quick to anger. Achilles derides the king, who proposed to take Achilles’ concubine seized in war, “You wine sack, with a dog’s eyes, with a deer’s heart. Never/ once have you taken courage in your heart to arm with your people,” and swears to leave Agamemnon’s quarrel with the Trojans. Agamemnon has his “mind forever on profit,” no honorable purpose in such a society.[11]

Achilles himself, though, is imperfect in pagan virtues. He has physical Courage aplenty, the central virtue of a society of quarreling chiefs, but not enough Temperance or Justice or even the fourth and least aristocratic of the pagan virtues, Prudence. He is what the Vikings called a berserker, in the end angering the gods with his ­eros-unhinged violence against the corpse of Hector. Simone Weil viewed the Iliad as “the poem of force,” force being “that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.”[12] Forcefulness in humans is Machiavelli’s virtù, or forza d’animo.

A more balanced model for pagan virtues in Homer is wily Odysseus, a man “of many turns” like a merchant, shown most completely in his name-poem of travel and ingenuity. Zbigniew Herbert says of his “collective hero, the Dutch bourgeois of the seventeenth century,” that “if the Dutch modeled themselves on the heroes of the great epics, surely Odysseus was closer to them than Achilles.”[13] Yet honesty of a modern and bourgeois sort would not be prudent in someone leading his men by guile and virtù out of, say, the Cyclops’ cave. Athena remarks affectionately (for “Two of a kind, are we”) that “even a god/ might bow to you in ways of dissimulation.”[14] In 5^th and 4^th-century drama, in an Athens at the height of its commercial power, Odysseus comes across even more as a crafty merchant type, and especially a false speaker, as in Sophocles’ Philoctetes.[15]

Anyway the other three pagan virtues—temperance, justice, and prudence supplementing mere forceful courage—typify the Homeric Odysseus, or the Virgilian Aeneas, or, from Icelandic tales, Gunnar Hamundarson in Njal’s Saga, “extremely well-bred, fearless, generous, and even-tempered, faithful to his friends but careful in his choice of them. He was prosperous.” [16]

The problem is that aristocratic stories of courage in battle, even of battlefield courage balanced by the other three pagan virtues, are not the stories of our lives. We do not live nowadays in military camps drawn up before the walls of new Troys, even temperate, just, and prudent camps, most of us at any rate. The We of modern times includes non-aristocrats and non-men, to give us “heroes” in the literary sense such as Anne Elliot or Erin Brockovich. Anyway, non-soldiers.

The stories of Courage-Above-All were always already mythological. After the archaic times of an Odysseus or a Gunnar the little communities jostling with Sparta or Clusium still required occasionally in the ideal citizen the four pagan virtues, defined for a Real Man. Vir in Latin like “man” in English, but not “andros“ in ancient Greek, means “soldier,” too, especially a foot soldier, as in “officers and men.”

But the virtues are to be exercised in a democratic phalanx, not in an aristocratic duel. Horatius and his two comrades at the bridge point the moral, at any rate according to Macaulay’s poem about the event composed in the 1830s and early 1840s. The courageous three are supposed in 508 BC to have held off an entire Etruscan army at the Sublician bridge to Rome by being permitted, according to Macaulay’s version, to challenge the enemy three at a time, sportingly:

But at his haughty challenge

A sullen murmur ran,

Mingled of wrath, and shame, and dread,

Along that glittering van.[17]

The aristocratic conventions of the duel are imposed on the history, following it may be real behavior in archaic societies carried into city states—or, as seems much more likely, following the fair-play conventions of the ruling class in 19^th-century England. Macaulay’s source, Livy, writing in the first decades of the Empire, five centuries after the alleged event imagines the Etruscans throwing spears in a decidedly unsporting way “from every side.”[18] Even the beneficiaries of ancient freedom were not Homeric heroes dueling one on one.

The citizen armies of the early Western city states from the 7^th century BC on were not highly trained duelers like Odysseus or Horatius—or, in that bizarre parody of aristocratic dueling, dating at Rome from the third century BC, gladiators. In a bench of rowers or a phalanx of hoplites they were nonetheless disciplined—that is, Temperate. The ideal citizen of the polis was Courageous and Temperate—rather more Temperate in fact than Courageous, the beginning of a long devaluation of battlefield courage in actual social behavior, if not in story. The oarsmen in Athens’ wooden wall were paid, free citizens. They were not, as was typical of non-Greek fleets in the Mediterranean for the three millennia of rowed warships, slaves or convicts. A significant exception to the servile propulsion of galleys was Venice, at least until 1571, the other republic holding the gorgeous East in fee.

And ideally the landsmen, the volunteer hoplites—literally, “shieldsmen,” from the hoplon, Homeric “tool,” Attic “heavy shield,” the main tool of their kind of war—were small owners with something to lose in their wheat fields from the depredations of invaders. As Victor Hanson has pointed out, though, unlike their wheat fields their vines and olive trees were too deep-rooted to destroy with fire—and even wheat, as a grass descended from wild grasses in often-burned plains, would re-grow next year. He concludes that it was not plants the hoplites were mainly defending but the honor of men-not-to-be-trifled-with.[19] Such men were at first recruited from the free male farming population, taking down their arms from the place of honor in the late-spring season for campaigning—that is, after wheat planting—and usually surviving to tell the tale around their hearths. In Greece the Spartan aristocrats alone were fulltime soldiers, and correspondingly powerful out of proportion to their numbers.

But at Athens in Periclean times the system of widespread physical courage augmented by temperance was breaking down. Hanson notes that “in place of agrarian protocol and phalanx fighting, city-states in search of absolute victory applied capital and technology [for example siege machinery] without ethical restraints.” Athens anyway had by then fewer free farmer/hoplites than outsiders and slaves and especially free tradesmen living on sea-borne grain—with no special stake in preventing damage to crops beyond the city walls. During the Peloponnesian War “military service of all types became divorced from social status.”[20] The armies were infused with mercenaries. Prudence ruled.

The legions of the early Roman Republic by contrast showed a special Courage combined with a special Love/Faithfulness for the fatherland, and more training under Temperance than non-Spartan Greeks would tolerate. The Romans re-masculinized courage, exhibiting an altogether new level of citizenly virtù. Even the tiny group of early Romans, and all the more so that steadily larger group up to at last the millions who could say “I am a Roman citizen,” were hard to beat. At any rate they were hard to beat permanently. They were in fact beaten by nearly everyone they faced—by Etruscans, Gauls, Greeks, Carthaginians, Germans, Samnites, Parthians, Dacians, Picts—but would come back to the task with mad Courage again and again.

Until the century-long Roman Revolution after 133 BC the legions were drawn literally and exclusively from the middling citizenry led by the richer citizenry of Rome itself or of its carefully chosen allies. The equites, or knightly, upper class, for example, had to pay for their horses. Before the Second Punic War, 218-201 BC, the more heavily armed foot soldiers were drawn in fact from the more well-to-do, since a legionnaire under the Republic in its prime paid for his equipment, like the Athenian hoplite, or the wealthy Athenian citizen sponsoring a warship. But as early as about 400 BC the rank and file of the Roman legions were beginning to get some cash payment. And in 107 BC property qualifications for service in the army were dropped entirely. The armies of the late Republic were not occasional citizen-levies but professional and prudent, serving for decades in Rome’s shocking aggressions.

The armies of the late Republic and the Empire were literate, too. All legionnaires were required to learn to read, and were able therefore to act as quasi-bourgeois bureaucrats after the war was won. The occupied provinces run by republics like Athens and Rome, and later Venice or America, and then the literal empires of Alexander and Augustus, had replaced the earlier citizen foot- and horse-soldiers with bureaucratic professionals, and had replaced citizen oarsmen with slaves.

The individualistic Courage of the hero in a duel, therefore, and the collective Temperance of the polis in arms, were not much in demand. In second-century-AD Rome it has been calculated that a mere 2 percent of the male population was under arms, only 160,000 men. A democracy in crisis, such as France in the First World War, armed many millions, 43 percent of its males of all ages; and similar percentages for pre-literate societies in wartime—those peaceful primitives such as the Tahitians, or the less peaceful Zulus in the War of 1879.[21] But usually not. Prince Maurice of Nassau’s armies in bourgeois Holland c. 1600, which engaged in such unheroic and effective tricks as carrying field shovels for trenching, were small relative to the Dutch population.[22]

In empires and democracies, in other words, a steadily lower percentage of the male population has needed to be physically courageous, ever. Only 5 or so percent of the male labor force in the United States bear arms on the job. Or in other terms 3 percent of the male population age 15 or over do. Or, to compare with the earlier figures, under 2 percent of the entire male population, adults or children, eerily similar to the share in imperial Rome.[23] By now, that is, a lower percentage than in early democratic Athens or early republican Rome need be aristocratically Courageous in an arms-bearing way, whether actual or imitative. The profession of arms has become specialized and small, like all professions in a large society, if the society is not fixed on one mad goal of conquest or defense—contrast Frederick the Great’s Prussia, with routinely 15 percent of the adult men in the army, and his blue-uniformed recruiters scouring the streets to seize more.

Modern armies in democracies therefore sometimes look like corporations—prudent rather than courageous. We imagine the soldiers still acting like Odysseus, saving Private Ryan. But as they themselves reply when praised for heroism they are merely doing the job.

* * * *

Or not doing it. At Srebrenica on July 15, 1995, it seems from popular accounts, a Dutch force abandoned its job of protecting the Bosnian Muslims and fled to safety in Zagreb, with Dutch politicians to greet it, and plenty of Heineken beer. The elite Air Mobile Brigade suffered two deaths, both by accident, not battle. Seven thousand Bosnian men and boys were immediately executed by the victorious Serbs—not all of them “under the noses of the Dutch forces,” as newspaper accounts had it. Only a few hundred were executed literally under their noses, according to the English translation of the summary report by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation in 2002.^[24]

A small minority of Dutch public opinion has viewed the episode as shameful, and in particular as a betrayal of the aristocratic ideal of Courage entailed in being a soldier. The minority feels that the intervention by the Dutch battalion created a lotsverbondenheid with the people of Srebrenica which cannot now be tossed away.

Most Dutch people, though, regard the event as a necessary, bourgeois compromise with disaster—a triumph of Prudence, so to speak, getting almost all of the Dutch boys home without a scratch. The soldiers were sent to Srebrenica from “a mixture of compassion and ambition”: the traditional modern Dutch compassion for victims of war and famine (the Netherlands ranks second only to Norway in proportional contributions to international charities), and the ambition of politicians and generals to “demonstrate the capabilities of its showpiece Air Mobile Brigade at a time of cut-backs.”^[25] The Canadians had originally garrisoned Srebrenica, and when they went home none but the Dutch were courageously willing to take their place. In the crisis, further, when the enveloping Serbian army tested the resolve of the Bosnian irregulars and of the Dutch soldiers, the French refused to provide air support. The Serbian army was overwhelmingly more powerful than the few hundred Dutch soldiers at Srebrenica. In the words of the report, the Dutch force “had effectively become a defeated battalion in the power of the [Serbian army].”^[26]

Yet physical courage is demanded from specialists in it even in a bourgeois society. The battalion was “defeated” without a fight. The Dutch offered no resistance to probes, took up static positions easily evaded by the Serbs, who it appears from their evasions were afraid to bring down the wrath of the United Nations by killing Dutchmen on a U.N. mission. Then the Dutch accepted the Serbian proposal to “screen” for “war criminals” the Bosnian men and adolescent boys still in Srebrenica, whether armed soldiers or merely refugees. Most of the Bosnian men with weapons and hostile intent had in fact already escaped the enclave.^[27] The remaining, defenseless Bosnian males were handed over to the Serbs, and were all promptly shot, though only some of the Dutch soldiers, as I mentioned, were aware of this activity, about which many later received psychological counseling.^[28]

The Institute for War Documentation, which had been set up long before to give a balanced accounting of Dutch heroism and cowardice, resistance and collaboration in the Second World War, believes that the Dutch general was “forced” to accept the Serbian deal. Hand over the men and boys, the Serbs are said to have offered in effect, and we will leave the women and (small) children alone. The frame for the story recounted by the historians of the Institute is a bourgeois Prudence, a utilitarian calculation of cost and benefit, some thousands of men and boys—whose fate was not suspected, the report implies—in exchange for many more thousands of women and small children.

The trouble is that the context was not one of enforceable quasi-contracts in the flower market of Alsmeer or the offices of Royal Dutch Shell. It was a context of peasant/aristocratic warfare, not bourgeois business. The Dutch force left the battlefield without fighting, having got a “promise” that the women and children would not be disturbed, a promise by someone who had repeatedly broken his promises. On this occasion the Serbs did not actually kill the women and small children. But the outcome does not justify the claimed assumption at the time that the deal would hold. The Serbs had shown what they were capable of. The “deal” looks a lot like an excuse for saving the skins of the Dutch in exchange for putting those of the 8000 men and many thousands of women and children in mortal danger.

Why indeed did the Dutch force not fight and die, as was its aristocratic duty? Why does an army—a part of bourgeois society sworn to putting itself aristocratically in harm’s way, like firefighters running up burning twin towers or police exchanging gunfire with criminals—not exhibit Courage? The report from the Institute offers the practical, Prudent reason: “Armed resistance was not an option here because the [Serbs] would have probably slaughtered [everyone, including also the women and children among] the refugees.” That is the explanation for why an elite force of combat-ready soldiers did not fire a shot.

But if the slaughter of the women and children was seen as probable at the time, then of course it would have been still more probable that the Bosnian men and adolescent boys placidly handed over were due for a similar fate. One cannot offer “protecting the women and children from racial cleansing” as an explanation for the Dutch general’s unwillingness to risk his own life yet simultaneously claim that the same Dutch general did not realize that the Bosnian males over 14 were going to be racially cleansed.

And as the report admits, “it is not impossible to imagine that, on a political and psychological level, the [Serbs] would have baulked at a fight that would have resulted in [U.N., that is Dutch] casualties.”^[29] Yes, it is not impossible to imagine. The tactical point, foremost in the mind of every U.N. soldier on assignment anywhere—the triggering function being commonly the point of U.N. forces—is offered as just barely within the range of imagination. On the other hand the fate of the betrayed Bosnian men and boys—unlike that of the women and small children, who “probably would have been slaughtered”—is said to have been unimaginable, a surprise.

If the Dutch soldiers had been courageous, it is possible to imagine that the Serbs would not have attacked them. If so, then on grounds of Prudence, putting Courage aside, the Dutch should have taken action. As Napoleon said to one of his regiments two days before the battle of Jena, “My lads, you must not fear Death; when soldiers brave Death, they drive him into the enemy’s ranks.”^[30] In the aristocratic theory of warfare the Dutch should have offered themselves as a sacrifice to the gods of Courage. It is the telos of soldiers to do so. No deals. And happily, probably—but not certainly, for the gods of Courage do not offer certitude—the Dutch would have driven Death into the Serbian ranks; or, better, in fear of him they would have persuaded the Serbs to refrain from racial cleansing.

Or so say the small minority of Dutch public opinion that continues to be ashamed of Srebrenica. The minority has a larger complaint, the grounds for which is exhibited in the Institute’s report. The complaint is that the historians who worked on the report, and the bulk of the Dutch people, are not ashamed. They do not acknowledge lotsverbondenheid. They do not accept for example any present-day ethical responsibility towards the survivors of Srebrenica. They view the slaughters as an unhappy event caused mainly by the other Westerners implicated, such as the homeward bound Canadians or the perfidious French; an event from which the Dutch, fortunately, extracted themselves. A bad business deal. Let bygones be bygones. The Dutch historians have found a balanced, prudent view, perhaps an outcome of the “Ja, maar . . .,” the “Yes, but . . .”-style of consultation in Holland. It is a bourgeois rhetoric applied to war.

There is a time for aristocratic courage. Courage, not Prudence or Love or Faith, is sometimes what is called for. François Jullien wrote in 1996 a remarkable book in praise of the ancient (and modern) Chinese notion of achieving success in war or other imperium by “upstream” manipulation of the incipient—not waiting until heroic virtue is necessary, downstream, with events tumbling by then with unstoppable force. He notes that such a way of life is prudent, effective—but unheroic.

Western businessmen are fascinated by Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, busily reading it on airplanes. It does not elevate to the chief virtue of a general/CEO heroic Courage but rather a bourgeois Prudence:

11. What the ancients called a clever fighter is one who not only wins, but excels in winning with ease.

12. Hence his victories bring him neither reputation for wisdom nor credit for courage.

13. He wins his battles by making no mistakes.[31]

This is not about heroic gestures but, as Jullien puts it, “efficacy.”

For this lack of heroism, however, “there is a price to pay. . . . To confront the world [in the Greek and Western style] is a way to free oneself from it. . . . [It provides] the substance of heroic stories and jubilation [and, he notes elsewhere tragedy, absent from Chinese tradition]. . . [T]hrough resistance, we can make our way to liberty.”[32] Jullien argues that the Chinese sages on the art of war were explaining, in more detail than Machiavelli, how to be a successful tyrant. From this point of view it is no accident that the culture providing stories of Prometheus, Achilles, Antigone also gave us an idea, if an imperfect practice, of freedom. Tragedy, hopeless courage, Roland at the pass of Rencesvals, the Dutch if only they had acted so at Srebrenica, is the choice of the free man.

[1] Oxford Latin Dictionary 1982, “uirtus,” “uir,” “mulier.”.

[2] For example Tacitus, Germania, 18 Ne se mulier extra virtutem . . . putet,, 19, 30 (virtutem numerare: count on bravery). Pudicitia, p. 19. Compare Plutarch, “Gaius Marius,” para. 19, of the women of the Ambrones, apparently also Germani, “armed with swords and axes,” enduring battle “to the end with unbroken spirits.”

[3] Milton, Paradise Lost, 1667, V, 772, as reported by Raphael. By no accident the same phrase is used by God earlier in the book in promising the Messiah (V, 601).

[4] Personal discussion, October 2003.

[5] Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 1958 p. 47.

[6] Manfield, Machiavielli’s Virtue, 1966, pp. 31, 36; and last quotation, p. 42, italics supplied.

[7] Mansfield and Tarcov, “Introduction,” 1996, to Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, p. xxi.

[8] Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 1987, p. 229.

[9] Holmes, “Address,” 1895, p. 265.

[10] Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, 1766, section 300, p. 527.

[11] Lattimore, trans. The Iliad of Homer, 1951, Bk.1: 225-226, 149.

[12] Weil, “The Iliad,” 1940], p. 163.

[13] Herbert, Still Life with a Bridle, 1991, p. 114f.

[14] Home, OdyssFitzgerald, trans., p. 239.

[15] James Boyd White, Heracles’ Bow, 1984, Chp. 1; Philoctetes, line 111, where Odysseus says, “When one does something for gain, one need not blush.”

[16] Njal’s Saga, c. 1275, section 19, p. 73.

[17] Macaulay, “Horatius,” 1842, stanzas 36-50, 57.

[18] T. Livius, Ab Urbe Condita, II. X. 9, “undique.” By the way, archaeological evidence suggests that despite Horatius’ heroics the Etruscans did in fact re-conquer Rome

[19] Hanson, Western Way of War, 1989, p. 5.

[20] Hanson, “Land War in Thucydides,” 1996, pp. 606f. And see Hanson, Western Way of War, 1989, Chp. 4.

[21] Helley, War Before Civilization, 1996, pp. 34, 189.

[22] McNeill, Pursuit of Power, 1982, p. 128.

[23] U. S. labor force in Protective Services (table 629, minus firefighters, brave but not aggressive) and in the Armed Forces (table 542), mostly men, from U. S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1992 (Government Printing Office, 1992).

[24] Nederlands Instituut, “Srebenica: A Safe Area,” pp. 5, 6.

[25] Nederlands Instituut, “Srebenica: A Safe Area,” p. 3.

[26] Nederlands Instituut, “Srebenica: A Safe Area,” p. 4.

[27] Nederlands Instituut, “Srebenica: A Safe Area,” p. 6.

[28] Nederlands Instituut, “Srebenica: A Safe Area,” p. 6.

[29] Nederlands Instituut, “Srebenica: A Safe Area,” p. 4.

[30] Quoted in Emerson, “Napoleon,” 1850, p. 345.

[31] Sun Tzu, The Art of War, Giles translation (1910), Chp. IV, at http:// www. chinapage.com/ sunzi-e.html.

[32] Jullien, Treatise of Efficacy, 1996, p. 197.

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.