Defining Greed Up
The
Virtue of Prosperity: Finding Values
in an Age of Techno-Affluence
The most memorable moment in Wall Street, a film widely considered to have captured the 1980's money-grubbing zeitgeist, came when the absurdly named bad-guy financier Gordon Gekko delivered his ''greed is good'' speech. The spirit of more recent times has been somewhat different: it hasn't been Wall Street sharpies who have raked in the dough, it's now said, it's been everyone. Whether that's true or not is another matter, but I do sometimes wonder: If Gordon Gekko were to spring to life now, whom would he find to argue with?
This problem became acutely apparent a few years ago, after T. J. Rodgers, the C.E.O. of Cypress Semiconductor, famously received a letter from a nun urging him to add more women and minorities to his board. Rodgers fired back an angry letter saying such a move could be disastrous in his competitive industry, perhaps endangering his loyal shareholders, and he added that the sister should ''get off her moral high horse.'' Rodgers's bellicose Gekkoism was less interesting than the fact that there have been so few opportunities in recent years to lock and unload it on someone.
But perhaps I'm being unfair, because here is Dinesh D'Souza with a book that purports to wonder if all the great, sloshing wealth creation of the past decade or so has in some way been bad for the American soul. The book's title, The Virtue of Prosperity, would seem to be a bit of a giveaway as to where D'Souza is going to come down on the question, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Early in the 1990s, D'Souza was one of the best-known conservatives in America, on the strength of his books Illiberal Education and The End of Racism. More recently he wrote a book about Ronald Reagan (he was a domestic policy analyst at the tail end of the Reagan administration) and now holds the title of ''research scholar'' at the American Enterprise Institute, whose other beneficiaries include Robert Bork, Charles Murray, Newt Gingrich and Lynne Cheney.
Given this backdrop, the (outside) possibility that D'Souza might, say, condemn capitalism as immoral is the book's great selling point. So he aims to be very scrupulous in his assessment of the situation, positioning himself as an ''anthropologist'' poking around for answers. The world is changing, he says prudently, ''but how? And for better or worse? These are questions we have to figure out.'' He discovers two tribes, which he labels the Party of Yeah, whose members argue that the great alliance of technology and the stock market is an unqualified boon, and the Party of Nah, whose members have their doubts. The skeptics, D'Souza is careful to add, have some good points.
On to the evidence. First, D'Souza reminds us that half of American households now have some money in the stock market, and that entrepreneurialism is very popular. Perhaps more to the point, he notes that ''techno-capitalism'' is creating ''the first mass affluent class in world history.'' Poverty, meanwhile, is ''no longer a significant problem in America,'' since the poor here are so much better off than the poor everywhere else in the world, and are also better off than average Americans were 50 years ago (evidence: 98 percent of the poor have refrigerators). As for the wealth gap, well, the bottom line is that ''the prime culprit in causing contemporary social inequality seems to be merit.'' Sure there's some jarring inequality as a result, but as long as the poor "get richer" along with the rich, and there's no rigid caste system preventing anyone from climbing the ladder of success for purely social reasons, then things are fine. (As an example of how America provides ''adequate illusions'' of social equality, he notes that fans of, say, the Los Angeles Lakers ''can vicariously share in their team's triumphal quest for enduring greatness.'' So ... let them eat ESPN?)
Having established what he says are his facts, our anthropologist addresses the underlying philosophical concerns. Maybe greed is good for capitalism, but isn't it a sin? Isn't there something immoral about buying personal jets while others starve? At the very least, isn't there more to life than money? Enter T. J. Rodgers, the nun-baiting, moral-high-horse-eschewing C.E.O., who happens to be an Ayn Rand nut. Rodgers says that the pursuit of personal gain makes successful entrepreneurs better human beings than any public servant because the entrepreneurs (example: himself) create jobs and build shareholder value. This proves to be more or less good enough for D'Souza, , who concludes that the rich have done more for the greater good than any member of the Party of Nah, or than Mother Teresa for that matter. And when you think about it — or when D'Souza thinks about it, anyway — the rich are actually more virtuous than the poor, since poor people are guilty of the sin of envy, and often steal besides. By Page 187 the verdict is in: thanks in large part to techno-capitalism, the United States today, while not perfect, is ''probably the best society that now exists or has ever existed.'' What a relief!
So what happened to the Party of Nah in all this? It turns out that the only skeptics D'Souza takes seriously come at the morality-of-prosperity issue from the right. All other perspectives are simply found wanting. Studs Terkel is permitted a quick turn as the crotchety liberal whose ideas may be safely ignored; Kirkpatrick Sale's neo-Luddite arguments are briefly gaped at; and the philosopher Richard Rorty is offhandedly dismissed as ''Rip Van Rorty.'' Well now. Stooping to snide name-calling is no substitute for a real argument, nor is it very becoming of an anthropologist, is it, Mr. D'Sillybilly?
But of course we knew D'Souza's objectivity was a ruse. The doubts he's addressing are the ones the overclass has about itself, which is why some of his "findings" slip by unchallenged. By a mass affluent class, for instance, D'Souza seems to mean the 6 million or so households with an annual income of more than $150,000, or about 5 percent of the population. It's not clear why this represents a "mass" phenomenon, when 30 million Americans living under the poverty line are hardly worth discussing, and 42 million without health insurance can be literally ignored. Besides, if we're going to say that poverty isn't a problem because today's poor are better off than yesterday's, couldn't we just as easily say that poverty hasn't been a problem for thousands of years? And is there anything useful (let alone moral) in that line of thought?
More crucial to D'Souza's argument is his conclusion that rewards go to those who deserve them. In one passage, D'Souza quotes a skeptic saying that much wealth created by technology stocks has accrued to "a bunch of young white guys ... in the right place at the right time and winning the lottery." He counters this by saying that most rich people do not inherit their fortunes, which is irrelevant to the skeptic's point. Later he recounts meeting an unnamed billionaire at a dinner party and finding him to be not particularly bright. He concludes that although the man ''did not appear to be smart in the way that we defined the term, he must have a high 'entrepreneurial I.Q.' Judged by his success, he is undoubtedly very good at what he does.'' In other words, we can confirm that successful people deserve their success by observing that they are successful. And in any case, even if luck does play a role in individual prosperity, it does not give the unlucky any rights to the spoils of the prosperous.
But even if you buy that, does it follow that the successful need not give a damn about anyone else? It's not a trivial question in a discussion of virtue. D'Souza's misgivings finally surface in the book's last few chapters, in which he frets about the implications of what he sees as the techno-economy's next step, into the ''posthuman'' world of smart robots and custom genes and so on. Obviously he doesn't want the government to get involved, so he closes by imploring the techno-overclass to ''resist the temptation to arrogance'' that might cause all this wizardry to undermine our humanity.
That seems like a reasonable sentiment, and to be fair there are plenty of reasonable sentiments in the book. I'm not here to argue that capitalism has been bad for America (although I would note a tendency among New Economy zealots to pretend that everything good has happened in the last ten years). What puzzles me is that capitalists like T.J. Rodgers, who are so ruthless about improving the quality of their companies — only the paranoid survive, you know — are so ambivalent about improving the quality of their country. If the successful capitalist is always engaged in the act of making things better, of raising standards, of never accepting the status quo, why then express satisfaction that the poor have refrigerators?
Daniel Patrick Moynihan once gave a clever name to the process by which a culture, little by little, learns to tolerate more and more socially destructive behavior. He called it ''defining deviancy down.'' Whatever D'Souza's intentions in ''The Virtue of Prosperity,'' the book is mostly going to serve to define greed up: it's essentially an elegant rationale for members of his mass affluent class to continue not worrying very much about anyone else. If D'Souza really wanted the Party of Yeah to consider cutting its arrogance with some concern for the commonweal in the future, perhaps he ought to have been a little tougher on them in the present.
A version of this review appeared in the January 7, 2001, New York Times Book Review.
