Non-aristocratic men, at least the non-goddamn-little-nancy ones, imagined themselves in butch tales of whitened, imperialist, macho, womanless, taciturn, WASPish, aristocratic courage, and if the men were bourgeois the intelligentsia began in the 1920s to be amused. A bourgeois man did not in his own opinion have the moral luck to be a real hero, that is, aristocratic and weapon-wielding.
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 18th 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 18th 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]
The text above is an excerpt from The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, the first volume of Deirdre McCloskey’s trilogy on the ethical and historical origins of modern prosperity.
[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.