|
|
Bourgeois VirtueJohn Mcreery (jlm@TWICS.COM)Mon, 2 May 1994 11:00:39 JST
like his argument; I like where it leads; I also like his style. The following is a sample: "The intelligentsia thinders at the middle class but offers no advice on how to be good within it. The only way to beomce a good bourgeois, according to Flaubert and Sinclair Lewis and Paolo Pasolini, is to stop being one. Not having an ideal of bourgeois virtue, or devaluing the ideal by comparison with Christian and aristocratic virtue, leaves us unable to talk about virtue at all. We bourgeois are left without reasons for ethical standards. We are left with What's Profitable: "Yet a great deal of money is made here. Good day, sir.... "The point is not to elevate bourgeois virtue over the others in some universal sense. The point is to sidestep universal senses. In some personal and social circumstances, [the aristocrat's] courage is a virtue. (In others, it is a vice.) So is humility. (Likewise.) But when the class left out by the virtue-talk is half the population, on its way to being all the population, the vocabulary of the virtues is not doing its job. As Richard Rorty puts it, 'detailed descriptions of particular varieties of pain and humiliation (in, e.g., novels and ethnographies), rather than philosophical or religious t treatises, were the modern intellectual's prinicpal contributions to moral progress.' Chinua Achebe's _Things Fall Apart_ or the writings of Borges inspire me to act ethically toward Nigerians or Arentineans more than does any amount of philosophizing about universal good. A modern society needs poetry and history and movies about bourgeois virtue: integrity , honesty, trutworthiness, enterprise, humor, respect, modesty, consideration, responsibility, prodence, thirft, affection, self-possession." As a member of the class of which McCloskey writes, I gladly shout, "Bravo!" I wonder with some amusement if the violence of the "critical" language in vogue these days isn't largely reflective of people who expect to be treated as either aristocrats or monks and find the foundations of their ivory towers dissolving. It's an interesting thought. Cheers, John McCreery (JLM@TWICS.COM)
|