Dinesh D' Souza, an immigrant from India who is now a U.S. citizen, is the Robert and Karen Rishwain Scholar at the Hoover Institution and author of the New York Times best-seller What’s So Great About America. A few years ago, he wrote a paper for the Heritage Foundation called What’s Great About America. For seven days, I'm posting, one each day, the qualities D'Souza listed in his paper. Here's #4
The Ethics of Work
Capitalism gives America a this-worldly focus in which death and the afterlife recede from everyday view. The gaze of the people is shifted from heavenly aspirations to earthly progress. As such, work and trade have always been important and respectable in America. This “lowering of the sights” convinces many critics that American capitalism is a base, degraded system and that the energies that drive it are crass and immoral.
Historically, most cultures have despised the merchant and the laborer, regarding the former as vile and corrupt and the latter as degraded and vulgar. This attitude persists today in the Third World, and it is even commonplace in Europe. Oscar Wilde spoke for many Europeans when he commented that to have to scrub floors and empty garbage cans is depressing enough; to take pride in such things is absolutely appalling.
These modern critiques draw on some very old prejudices. In the ancient world, labor was generally despised, and in some cases even ambition was seen as reprehensible. Think about the lines from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “The noble Brutus hath told you Caesar was ambitious.” And here you might expect Mark Antony to say, “And what’s wrong with that?” But he goes on: “If it were so, it was a grievous fault.”
In the cultures of antiquity, Western as well as non-Western, the merchant and the trader were viewed as low-life scum. The Greeks looked down on their merchants, and the Spartans tried to stamp out the profession altogether. “The gentleman understands what is noble,” Confucius writes in his Analects. “The small man understands what is profitable.” In the Indian caste system, the vaisya or trader occupies nearly the lowest rung of the ladder—one step up from the despised untouchable. The Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun argues that gain by conquest is preferable to gain by trade because conquest embodies the virtues of courage and manliness. In these traditions, the honorable life is devoted to philosophy or the priesthood or military valor. “Making a living” was considered a necessary but undignified pursuit. As Khaldun would have it, far better to rout your adversary, kill the men, enslave the women and children, and make off with a bunch of loot than to improve your lot by buying and selling stuff.
In America, it is different, and the American Founders are responsible for the change. Drawing on the inspiration of modern philosophers like John Locke and Adam Smith, the American Founders altered the moral hierarchy of the ancient world. They argued that trade based on consent and mutual gain was preferable to plunder. The Founders established a regime in which the self-interest of entrepreneurs and workers would be directed toward serving the wants and needs of others. In this view, the ordinary life, devoted to production, serving the customer, and supporting a family, is a noble and dignified endeavor. Hard work, once considered a curse, now becomes socially acceptable, even honorable. Commerce, formerly a degraded thing, becomes a virtue.
Of course, the Founders recognized that, in both the private and the public spheres, greedy and ambitious people might pose a danger to the well-being of others. Instead of trying to outlaw these passions, the Founders attempted a different approach. As James Madison put it in Federalist 51, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” The argument is that in a free society, “the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, in the other in the multiplicity of sects.” The framers of the Constitution reasoned that by setting interests against each other, by making them compete, no single one could become strong enough to imperil the welfare of the whole.
In the public sphere, the Founders took special care to devise a system that would prevent, or at least minimize, the abuse of power. To this end, they established limited government in order that the power of the state would remain confined. They divided authority between the national and state governments. Within the national framework, they provided for separation of powers so that the legislature, executive, and judiciary would each have its own domain of power. They insisted upon checks and balances, to enhance accountability.
In general, the Founders adopted a “policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives,” as Madison said. This is not to say that the Founders ignored the importance of virtue, but they knew that virtue is not always in abundant supply. The Greek philosophers held that virtue was the same thing as knowledge—that people do bad things because they are ignorant—but the American Founders did not agree. Their view was closer to that of St. Paul: “The good that I would, I do not. The evil that I would not, that I do.” According to Christianity, the problem of the bad person is that his will is corrupted, and this is a fault endemic to human nature. The American Founders knew they could not transform human nature, so they devised a system that would thwart the schemes of the wicked and channel the energies of flawed persons toward the public good.
