Bourgeoise values, freedom, and democratic accountability

From Bourgoise Dignity - Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre N. McCloskey. Page 44. Chapter 4.

Here you have in prospect, God help you, a sestet. Yet bourgeois life and innovation since 1848 have had a voluminously bad press, worse even than warranted Christian belief. The prosecution in the past century and a half has written out the indictment of the developing bourgeois and free and business-respecting civilization in many thousands of eloquent volumes, from the hands of Dickens (the critics of innovation were not all of the left), Carlyle (ditto), Alexander Herzen, Baudelaire, Marx, Engels, Mikhail Bukharin, Ruskin, William Morris, Nietzsche, Prince Kropotkin (my hero at age 14, when I fell in love with socialist anarchism down at the local Carnegie-built library), Tolstoy, Shaw, Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldman (another admired figure, when I later developed my anarchist convictions), D. H. Lawrence, Lenin, Trotsky (companion of a brief flirtation with communism), John Reid (ditto), Veblen, Ortega y Gasset, Sinclair Lewis, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Mussolini, Giovanni Gentile, Hitler, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, F. R. Leavis, Karl Polanyi, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, Dorothy Day, Woody Guthrie (whose singing made me for a while a Joan-Baez socialist: the leftish opponents of bourgeois dignity and liberty, alas, have all the best songs), Pete Seeger, (ditto), Lewis Mumford, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, J. K. Galbraith, Louis Althusser, Allan Bloom, Frederic Jameson, Saul Bellow, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Paul Ehrlich, Stuart Hall, George Steiner, Jacques Lacan, Stanley Hauerwas, Terry Eagleton, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Charles Sellers, Barbara Ehrenreich, Nancy Folbre, and Naomi Klein. Few people have defended commerce from this magnificent flood of eloquence from the pens of left progressives and right reactionaries — jeremiads which indeed stretch from the Hebrew prophets through Plato and the Analects of Confucius and down to the present — except on the economist’s prudence-only grounds that after all a great deal of money is made there. After such grand prolixity in the prosecution of innovation and markets, I admire my restraint in offering in defense merely six volumes. As Henry Fielding wrote towards the end of Tom Jones, a “prodigious” book, “when thou hast perused the many great events which this book will produce, thou wilt think the number of pages contained in it scarce sufficient to tell the story.”

Absurdly lengthy as that list is, it also is the mere tip of the mountain of criticism directed at the system (bourgeois values in a society of free, self-determining people, operating in a free market, with free elections) which has delivered such staggering progress (increasing life spans, falling morbidity, rising incomes, increased education attainment, falling violence, improving environment, plummeting poverty, broadening democratic participation, etc.) in so brief a time (2-3 centuries) as to constitute a miracle.

Every intellectual thinks they can do better than the emergent prosperity arising from bourgeoise values, freedom, and democratic accountability, and yet manifest nearly complete unawareness of the actual progress made. It is not just that they are wrong, but that they are dangerously wrong.