Home-made morality

Deirdre N. McCloskey
THE BOURGEOIS VIRTUES
Ethics for an age of commerce
592pp. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. $32.50.
0 226 55663 8

I feel I have spent the last week in the company of Deirdre N. McCloskey, both because there is a good deal in The Bourgeois Virtues about her, her friends, and her activities (what happened to her, for example, when she tried to sell her elderly Toyota), and because it is written in a relentlessly chatty tone (“I love commerce and I love Chicago”), so that you don’t feel you are alone with a book, you feel you are alone with Deirdre McCloskey. The puzzle is that I’ve ended up rather fond of McCloskey, and very fed up with her book. To begin with I loved it: but that’s because the first fifty pages provide a summary of what McCloskey intends eventually to say in four volumes. Those pages are clever, lively, provocative. The general feeling of benevolence they induced in me never quite wore off; but when I finally got to the end I felt as if I was emerging from a thicket of thorn bushes. Six hundred pages and 750 cited works later, and I regretted not having stopped after the first fifty pages.

Still, I now feel that I know McCloskey rather well. I know she started on the Left and has moved to the Right. I know she started her career as a cliometrician, that’s to say someone making a statistical analysis of economic activity in the past (she studied with Robert Fogel), and that she now teaches literature and rhetoric as well as economics (she was most recently hired by Stanley Fish). I know that she was born Donald, and chose to be Deirdre. (Actually I knew this already, for McCloskey is the source for one of the great stories about life in the contemporary university. When Donald had decided to become Deirdre – at the time he was teaching in Iowa – he went to see the Dean of his Faculty to break the news to him. “Thank God”, the Dean said, when he had heard him out. “For a moment there I thought you were going to say you had decided to become a socialist.”) I know she used to be a jogger, and has spent a lot of time in Holland. I know she converted from atheism to Christianity in 1997, after she had begun work on this project.

Some of this life history has made for a good book. McCloskey has an extraordinarily wide range of interests. She can write with rare authority on “masculine” and “feminine” virtues, having tried to live both of them (men, she tells us, “think of courage every minute of their lives”). Her experience of living in Holland has opened her eyes to cultural diversity. But, alas, the jogging gave her a new capacity for endurance, which, combined with a belief that it is long books that give academics high status (a true belief, I’m sorry to say), has resulted in this dreadfully overlong and hopelessly disorderly book. The interest in rhetoric has trained her in techniques of repetition with variation (what the Renaissance called copiousness) which have enabled her to get from one end of the book to the other without noticing that she is constantly going in circles. Finally, and worst of all, the Christianity (or at least her version of it) has hopelessly muddled her thinking, making the whole enterprise incoherent.

It is one of the rhetorical tricks of the book that it makes the reader feel guilty for disagreeing with the author. McCloskey is so pervasively present in the text that it seems almost rude to disagree with her, as if one was arguing with her in her own home. Still, here goes. The Bourgeois Virtues contains fragments of a rather good book in defence of libertarian politics and free market economics. As a libertarian, McCloskey points out that governments are not there to look after the unfortunate. If one-quarter of all US government income were given to the 10 per cent of the population who are regarded as poor, each poor person would receive $30,000 a year – a family of four would receive $120,000 – on top of their existing earnings. There would then be no such thing as poverty. In reality, the US government transfers about one-sixteenth of its income to the poor, or about $7,500 per poor person per year. Which raises the rather puzzling question of what government is for. Where do the other fifteen-sixteenths go? In part they go to provide common benefits, such as roads, but there are other ways of funding such activities. Tolls, of course, in the case of roads; but in nineteenth-century England, lighthouses (a public good for which the user cannot be charged) were funded, not by taxation, but by public subscription. As a free-market economist McCloskey provides a good critique of the idea that profits are generally made at someone else’s expense, and an interesting (though not entirely convincing) attack on the claim, first made by Mandeville, that capitalism relies on extravagance, waste and luxury to drive economic expansion.

The Bourgeois Virtues also contains the ruins of a great book on what is sometimes called the Adam Smith problem. Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations (1776), an account of how people pursuing their selfish interests can create wealth; and he wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), an account of how we ought to concern ourselves with the welfare of others, and indeed are motivated to do so, not just by our own selfish interests, but by our capacity for sympathy and by our concern to be thought well of and to think well of ourselves. How do the two books relate to each other?

This is a question both about what was going on in Smith’s mind, and about what goes on in real market economies. McCloskey has only really thought about the second half of the question. She argues eloquently that real market economies cannot function if people are short-sighted and greedy in their pursuit of their own interests. Business depends on trust, cooperation, honesty and other qualities that are grounded in our ability to sacrifice our short-term interests for unspecific (but not unpredictable) long-term gains. We all do better by helping each other, and attempts to describe the behaviour of economic agents in terms of purely selfish rational calculation must always fail because they underestimate the extent to which people are prepared to gamble on the advantages of cooperation: I stay late at work tonight, hoping that next year I will be rewarded with a promotion, or fearing that if we do not all pull together the business will go bust and I will be out of a job. As a consequence, economics as conventionally understood can never give an adequate account either of the real world or of the business strategies that are most likely to meet with success. We’ve seen a fine example of the dangers of crude economic thinking in Britain recently. The government refused to believe that senior hospital doctors worked many hours for which they weren’t paid, for after all who would do such a thing? It insisted that pay should be tied closely to hours worked, believing it would give senior doctors an incentive to work instead of playing golf; in practice the result has been that doctors are billing for previously unpaid hours, almost bankrupting the health service. Cooperation and pride in work have been replaced by purely financial incentives because the government was too cynical to believe in anything else, and we are all worse off as a result. Even the doctors, for all the extra money in their bank accounts, feel worse off, for they have now got the message that they are hourly paid wage workers, not self-managing professionals.

McCloskey is much less interesting on the question of what was or should have been going on in Smith’s mind because, now she is a Christian, she regrets the fact that Smith does not give enough weight to the religious virtues of faith and hope, concerning himself only with prudence, justice, love, courage and temperance. Instead of asking how good Smith’s moral theory is, or how far it can be improved within its own terms, she substitutes for it the moral philosophy of Aristotle (she describes her programme as “Aristotle in modern dress”) and (this is astonishing in someone who admires Smith) Aquinas. These she takes to be the paradigm cases of what she calls “virtue ethics”. So what we get is, in effect, an account of how capitalism and Aquinas are made for each other, a view that is not entirely unreasonable, since Aquinas was living during a period of rapid urbanization and commercialization, but that makes one wonder just what the Enlightenment was for.

At this point you may well be wondering for whom this book is written. Much of the time McCloskey seems to be addressing someone with the most elementary of educations, explaining, for example, how to pronounce bourgeois, and the difference between bourgeois, sometimes an adjective and sometimes a noun, and bourgeoisie, always a noun; though of course one should never underestimate the difficulty even educated Americans have with French, as evidenced by the famous statement, attributed to George W. Bush, that the French have no word for entrepreneur. But at the same time she lards her text with endless references to scholars both distinguished (Pierre Bourdieu, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Rorty, Amartya Sen, Fish, to take five at random) and obscure, so that even someone used to academic prose is bound to end up with their head spinning. Her own C. S. Lewis-inspired Episcopalianism will be alien to most Catholics, and her admiration for Aristotle and Aquinas will puzzle most Protestants. Most economists will find her too historical and literary; most historians and literary scholars will find her too much of an economist. The book seems almost deliberately designed to drive away every possible audience, were it not for the fact that, even as you grow impatient, you feel you are McCloskey’s guest, which means that it would be rude to stand up and walk out.

Still, the project of writing a book which expounds a set of virtues derived from Aquinas, and argues that these virtues are both necessary for market society and in fact flourish within it is (I suppose – I must confess to a certain reluctance when obliged to consider the possibility) is perfectly coherent. McCloskey is very interesting when she attacks the long tradition of those, from Carlyle to Richard Sennett, who have argued that capitalism destroys community, undermines friendship, and besmirches love. On the contrary, she argues, capitalism gives people resources (above all, time) and freedom of choice: people have much more opportunity to choose to form a community (to belong to a Rotary club, or a Women’s Institute), to cultivate friendships, to fall in love, than they had in pre-industrial societies. We haven’t acquired wealth at the expense of our finer feelings; with wealth we’ve acquired the possibility of having finer feelings.

I’d love to have seen this line of argument pursued more systematically. But instead we have to face the fact that McCloskey is totally unconvincing in her role as a disciple of Aristotle and Aquinas, and this is because she is an avowed postmodernist who believes all truths are local, all knowledges are grounded not in reality, but rhetoric. This, of course, is not something Aristotle, Aquinas or, for that matter, Smith would have accepted for a moment. Aristotle thinks reason is eternal and unchanging; Aquinas thinks God is eternal and unchanging; and Smith thinks human nature is everywhere the same. Each grounds his moral philosophy in something stable and permanent. But McCloskey is an anti-foundationalist. The key chapter is the chapter on “ethical realism”, which argues that the claim that something is “real” is a “rhetorical turn”. Ethics, she argues, is just as real as any other form of knowledge: indeed more real than others, because all forms of knowledge depend on an ethical commitment to truth telling. Moreover we have a privileged access to our own thoughts and feelings: thus if we know anything we know ourselves – a claim that she transmogrifies into the quite different claim that if we know anything we know about morality. Here she pauses to praise Kant, whom everywhere else she attacks because she rightly recognizes that he stands for the opposite of everything she stands for (one chapter is called “The Monomania of Immanuel Kant”). This claim to be an ethical realist is just muddled thinking. Replace it with a consistent ethical relativism, and Aquinas (and perhaps Christianity too) is the baby that has to be thrown out with the bathwater.

Moreover the implicit claim that we have privileged access to our own moral life is plain wrong. I meet people every day who honestly believe that they are loyal and generous, but who are in fact totally selfish and ruthless. I’m surely not peculiarly unlucky in my social encounters. Any adequate moral theory needs to come to grips with the prevalence of self-deception. One of my teachers, when I was a student, told me he didn’t believe in the possibility of self-deception. “After all”, he said, “who is deceiving whom?” It is a very good question, and one that is not asked or answered here.

The world is indeed a puzzling and remarkable place, and for all I know McCloskey is not the only postmodern scholastic. But even one is one too many. Fifty pages after trying (illogically) to claim that she thinks we have some real knowledge of ethics, she admits (as she ought to, given her anti-foundationalism) that “ethics is a local narrative”. She goes on to quote Rorty (who happens to be attacking Kant) with approval. In debates about ethics there is “no appeal beyond the relative merits of various actual or proposed communities”. Let’s take this claim seriously. The test of this book is the sort of real or possible community it describes. The immediate problem, of course, is that the book slips and slides between being an account of actual communities (Chicago, Rotterdam) and being an attempt to persuade us to join a possible community, a community of free  market, libertarian, scholastic, postmodern Episcopalians. It’s an interesting question whether this is in fact a possible community. How would it cover up its internal contradictions and inconsistencies? How could it remain stable over time? But even if it is a possible community, it does not look like a very attractive community to me – I’d rather belong to a community of sentimental, wealthy, agnostic Smithians. But that’s just me.

Still, even I can see that this book raises a raft of interesting questions. Perhaps the most interesting is that McCloskey tells us she is preaching the virtues. But is there any point to preaching? McCloskey learnt endurance by running, not by listening to sermons. Plenty of people who preach the virtues practise the vices, Jimmy Swaggart style: Pierre Bayle never tired of pointing this out. You can’t learn to trust by being told to trust, or to hope by being told to hope. I’m not sure that any of the virtues can be taught directly, though one can certainly make it easier for people to learn them indirectly: you won’t learn trust if you don’t meet someone who is trustworthy, or hope if you don’t experience improvement over time. Thus any account of how to teach the virtues must be enfolded within an account of human psychological development. Smith grounded ethics in psychology; and, leaving aside God and Reason, that’s the only place where a theory of ethics, if it is to be anything more than a story we choose to tell ourselves, can begin.

And to whom should we turn if we want to learn about psychology? McCloskey has turned to Peterson and Seligman’s Character Strengths and Virtues, a book apparently more than worthy to be set alongside her own, consisting of “644 big-format text pages, using 2,300 citations to the technical literature”, although it contains, we are told, far too few references to Aristotle, Aquinas, and the modern virtue ethicists. Peterson and Seligman sound rather alarming to me. They commissioned forty chapters by forty authors, and then rewrote all the chapters to ensure that they conformed to the views of Peterson and Seligman. This implies an almost neurotic fear of disagreement, and suggests their own characters might do with a bit of strengthening. McCloskey’s ambition is not simply to preach the virtues, but to teach you how to live them. I think she envisages the book as a sort of virtual relationship, so that just as you learn the virtues from the practical examples given by your parents and your friends, you can learn them by getting to know McCloskey – that’s why she herself is present wherever you turn in her book. There’s no doubt that some books can work like this, but very few, and only for a small minority of readers, those who are willing to reinterpret their own experience of life in the light of their reading. Moreover it is not clear that making a book more personal means that it will have more power to change people’s behaviour: if I were to point to one book that has changed my own behaviour it would be Albert O. Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, which is about as impersonal as a book can be. Of one thing, though, McCloskey has convinced me. Brevity is a bourgeois virtue, and one that I have resolved to practise. It places a proper value on other people’s time, and implies a proper humility. “I myself cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this [last] virtue”, says McCloskey, wittily displaying humility (or perhaps false modesty) in the act of denying it. Funny, brevity is not in the index. Nor is Freud, that great theorist of self-deception.