Bourgeois Blues

Donald N. McCloskey from the May 1993 issue

The bourgeois have won. Furthermore, they deserve to win, since they are the good guys. The 21st century will be the century of the universal middle class. It will exhibit the bourgeois virtues.

"Bourgeois virtues"? Don't make me laugh. The bourgeoisie may be useful, even necessary. But virtuous? Since 1848 or so the intellectuals, who at first welcomed the bourgeoisie most cordially, have been sneering this way at the very idea of "virtue" in the middle class. "Man must labor, / Man must work," says a nursery rhyme for moderns, "The executive is / A dynamic jerk."

Charles Dickens, the first and most successful of the antibourgeois writers, loved peasants and proletarians most warmly and had a kind word even for some of the aristocracy. But he detested the merchants and mill owners. The merchant Scrooge hurls his "Bah: humbug!" at a Christian holy day, a celebration of peasant virtues. Mr. Gradgrind, teaching little children to be wage slaves, declares, "Now, what I want is, Facts." The motto, "Facts alone are wanted in life," rejects all that is noble and aristocratic and romantic in the talk of virtue.

We talk of virtue in one of two ways only, the patrician or the plebeian, the virtues of the aristocrat or of the peasant, Achilles or Jesus. The two vocabularies are heard each in its own place, in Camp or Common. The one speaks of the pagan virtues of the soldier–courage, moderation, prudence, and justice. The other speaks of the Christian virtues of the worker–faith, hope, and charity. Achilles struts the Camp in his Hephaestian armor, exercising his noble wrath. Jesus stands barefoot on the mount, preaching to the least of the Commoners.

Camp and Common, the romantic hero or the working-class saint: That's been our talk of good and bad. And yet we live now in the Town, we bourgeois, or are moving to the Town and bourgeois occupations as fast as we can manage.

The prediction that the proletariat would become the universal class has proven to be mistaken. Half of employment in rich countries is white collar, a figure that's steadily rising. Jobs for peasants, proletarians, and aristocrats are disappearing. The class structure that the intellectuals analyzed so vigorously in 1848 and have since tried to keep in place is going or is gone.

The Classes & the Virtues

Aristocrat/Patrician pagan Achilles pride of being honor forthrightness courage wit courtesy propriety magnanimity justice foresight moderation love grace subjective

Peasant/Plebian/Proletarian Christian St. Francis pride of service duty solidarity fortitude jocularity reverence humility benevolence fairness wisdom frugality charity dignity objective

Bourgeois/Mercantile secular Benjamin Franklin pride of action integrity trustworthiness enterprise humor respect modesty consideration responsibility prudence thrift affection self-possession conjective

The explanation is that the production of things has become and will continue to become cheaper relative to most services. In 50 years, a maker of things on an assembly line will be as rare as a farmer. The proletariat, an urban and secular version of the rural and religious peasantry, have sent their children to Notre Dame and thence to careers in plastics. Brahmins may lament, churchmen wail, bohemians jeer. Yet the universal class into which the classes are melting is the damnable bourgeoisie.

The result will be a massively bourgeois Town. It's time for the intellectuals to stop complaining about the fact and to recognize the bourgeois virtues.

To sing only of aristocratic or peasant virtues, of courage or of solidarity, is to mourn for a world well lost. We need an 18th-century equipoise, a neoclassicism of virtues suiting our condition. We are all bourgeois now. For some decades about 80 percent of Americans have identified themselves as "middle class" (such consciousness of course may be false). The ideals of nationalism or socialism have not suited our lives (refer for empirical verification to records of the Great European Civil War 1914-1990). The ideals of the townsperson, by contrast, have suited us peacefully, and no surprise.

Bad news? A future of selfish SOBs? The country club regnant? The death of community? No, unless you swallow the talk of Western clerks and scribblers since 1848.

The growth of the market promotes virtue, not vice. Most intellectuals since 1848 have thought the opposite: that it erodes virtue. As the legal scholar James Boyd White puts the thought in his otherwise admirable Justice as Translation, bourgeois growth is "the expansion of the exchange system by the conversion of what is outside it into its terms. It is a kind of steam shovel chewing away at the natural and social world."

And yet we all take happily what the market gives–polite, accommodating, energetic, enterprising, risk-taking, trustworthy people; not bad people. In the Bulgaria of old the department stores had a policeman on every floor, not to prevent theft but to stop the customers from attacking the arrogant and incompetent staff selling goods that at once fell apart. The way a salesperson in an American store greets customers makes the point: "How can I help you?" The phrase startles foreigners. It is an instance in miniature of the bourgeois virtues. As Eric Hoffer said, "It is futile to judge a kind deed by its motives.... We are made kind by being kind." Thank you very kindly.

It is usual to elevate a pagan or Christian ideal and then to sound a lament that no one achieves the ideal. The numerous bourgeois virtues have been reduced to the single vice of greed. The intellectuals thunder at the middle class but offer no advice on how to be good within it. The only way to become a good bourgeois, say Flaubert and Sinclair Lewis, is to stop being one. The words have consequences. The hole in our virtue-talk leaves the bourgeoisie without reasons for ethics. Since they cannot be either knights or saints they are damned, as we are all, and say: To hell with it.