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I hate the middle class. I am a snob and an ingrate, an erudite ignoramus unappreciative of the market that puts food on my table and books on my shelves. I and my left-wing ilk are responsible for at least one global war, the persistence of poverty and despair among the wretched of the earth, and a culture that maligns the genuine virtue of hard-working entrepreneurs. I should be thoroughly ashamed of myself, and I should run to the nearest small business and beg for forgiveness and instruction. I should get a real job.
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In short, Deirdre McCloskey has exposed me for the fraud that I am—or so she tells me in The Bourgeois Virtues. We lefties have endured quite a lot of disappointment over the last three gilded decades: the pyrrhic victory of global capitalism; the near-erasure of serious critical voices from the broadcast media; the erosion of unions and the welfare state; the enormous expansion of corporate power, and the attendant shrinking of the political imagination; the elevation of the Marketplace into the ontological sublime, the anointment of trucking and bartering as the telos of humankind. All of that is quite enough History, thank you very much. But to be told that we represent "the high orthodoxy of the West" and that now it's "time to listen to the other side"? Where has McCloskey been for the last twenty-odd years? We've been hearing "the other side" for two centuries, and in the last generation it's been 24-7 about Business, Business, Business. The Other Side is advertising, public relations, the plague of twaddle from pompous moneybags like Welch, Buffett, and Trump. It's the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Economist, and Business Week; it's management-speak, the financial news, and the stream of stock prices that frame every image on MSNBC. It's the students who tell me that accounting class is more valuable than poetry. The other side. Give us a break.
Declaring one's bold rejection of Conventional Wisdom is a standard move in branding these days. And the market in capitalist apologetics has been getting more crowded of late, creating a brisk and voluminous trade in the wares of ideology. Two major firms are the service providers for bourgeois cultural authority. One is Bobo Triumphal, and it features a growing product line of bite-sized intellectual confections: "freakonomics," "tipping points," "blink," "substance of style," "flat world," "creative class." A herd of independent intellectual contractors, it includes Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, Malcolm Gladwell, Virginia Postrel, and Richard Florida. Disdainful of those ancien bourgeois drones with gray flannel suits and briefcases, they're the leading public relations flacks for the professional-managerial elite, the winsome "creators" of goods and services that help "grow" Your Small Business. (Judging from contemporary advertising, everyone has a Small Business these days.) Appealing to the tasteful suburban consumer of news and digitalized gadgetry, they celebrate the spread of globalized capitalism as the coolest imperium in history. (If you're one of the uncool in sweatshops or slums, you still never had it so good.) What apocalypse has ever been so awesome? The market is the site where Vanity Fair and the School of Athens meet, a forum for the harmonic convergence of glamour and science, desire and calculation, hipness and instrumental reason.
Less tony than Bobo Triumphal, the other provider is Theodicy, Inc., where God and Mammon settle their differences and negotiate a lucrative partnership. Fearless defenders of the rich and powerful, this company specializes in a blend of theology, moralism, ruling-class self-pity, and populist fellow-traveling. Safely ensconced in think tanks, university institutes, and media conglomerates, these voices for those who already have a voice portray themselves as beleaguered mavericks, daring to say Unfashionable or Politically Incorrect Things to the Cultural Elite, the Liberal Media, or the Academic Establishment. Often funded by the trinitarian economy of Scaife, Coors, and Olin—groaning, in other words, in what has to be the plushest marginality in history—this outfit sports an embarrassment of riches from the unharried service of two masters. Attentive to the denominations of currency, it's cheerfully ecumenical—Richard John Neuhaus, Ted Haggard, Pat Robertson—but its model employee is Michael Novak, whose "theology of the corporation" is a minor masterpiece of theo-sophistry. The corporation is "a metaphor for the ecclesial community"—in fact, it's the "best secular analogue to the church"—and "its creativity mirrors God's." As knock-offs of the body of Christ, Microsoft and Wal-Mart become "Suffering Servants"—and judging from their quarterly reports, these poor, oppressed creatures are carrying their crosses all the way to the bank. (At Robert Sirico's Acton Institute, neo-classical economics weds scholastic philosophy to produce the love child of Ayn Rand and Thomas Aquinas. Now there's an ugly baby.) If you have a hard time thinking of stocking Wal-Mart shelves as an imitatio Christi, you're just an arrogant pedant too lazy and proud to go out and name it and claim it—sorry, I meant serve and suffer.
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