Theoretically averse to money, practically speaking, devoted to it. No one talks about money, they just make it. Eager to obtain riches, but also ease and comfort. Interested in public office, he despises politics as an arena of intrigue.
The bourgeois is never sufficiently unaware to be truly happy. As he ages, his strength gradually subsiding with the years and the horizon of his expectations progressively shrinking, his disappointment swells exponentially. Life dwindles away and very few can claim to have truly lived it. Inasmuch as he is the guardian of a contradictory idea of stability and continuity (which in fact conflicts with the canonical model, the model of social advancement), he would like to put an end to the uncertainty that dominates his life. If that happens, however—if, that is, he does indeed secure a margin of economic security, then behold the arrival of boredom and monotony, seeing that pleasure and joy spring from discontinuity, from the unexpected. It is the arch and mocking mechanism governing the law of desire. People curl up on prosperity as if seated in a chair but immediately thereafter, their derrieres begin to tingle and grow numb from restricted circulation. To say nothing of the fact that economic tranquillity, which we suppose is acquired in a permanent fashion, does little if anything to keep you safe from the other misfortunes perennially lurking in ambush, disease, the death of one’s loved ones, or one’s own death—events that can sneak up on the most prosperous merchant or the most renowned lawyer. Indeed, if you listen to the words of certain holy parables, it is precisely upon these people that destiny strikes down with particular savagery, it is prosperity that the hand of God smites with exemplary fury, in order to ensure that each and every one of us should gain a better understanding of the actual worth of the things of this world. Money, success, beauty, the pleasures of the flesh, the vanities of the spirit—all crushed to dust. Rich landowners stripped of all their wealth in the course of a night, merchants afflicted with disgusting cases of scabies or blinded by bird shit, opulent hoteliers swallowed up by earthquakes, cabinet ministers who lose their posts and wind up with their heads on the executioner’s block before the sun sets.
This is something the bourgeois can smell well in advance. His anxiety can never be placated, those forces might be unleashed against him at any point.
And so, beneath a conventional patina of optimism donned with a view to decorum, like a clean shirt and a pair of neatly pressed pants, one must be prepared for the worst (“The worst will come, it’s at the gates, it’s only a matter of time . . .”). In the bourgeois mentality, that which is transitory is intolerable. And since everything is transitory, in the end everything turns out to be intolerable. At that point, there is nothing left but dreams, illusions. If you persist in believing in nothing you will ultimately end up believing in the most ludicrous of fairy tales. The myth of permanence, ruminated and chewed over by the aristocracy down through the centuries, is injected into the veins of the bourgeois like a drug. All that’s required is a few generations and a renovated ruin in order to fool yourself into believing you’ve founded a dynasty. That you’ve sunk deep roots, assuring yourself of an ongoing return of memories and deeds upon which time will progressively place its seal. Though he never opens his mouth without singing the praises of pragmatism and reasonableness, no one believes in symbols more implicitly than the bourgeois, and he clings to them in times of crisis: in comparison with him, the aristocrats and the plebeians are brutally realistic.
Actually, the bourgeois has taken a vow of unhappiness by definition: his morality may encourage the accumulation of wealth and prestige, but it cannot bring joy to those who adhere to it. The congruence of means and ends rarely arouses enthusiasm. The Arnolfini couple, man and wife, hardly seem to be bursting with happiness. And aside from the occasional sated or arrogant gaze here and there, the images handed down by the paintings of these well-to-do gentlemen and couples always seem to betray traces of an irrepressible anguish of living. The age of anxiety, in short, had begun long, long ago, a very long time back.
vecchia piccola borghesia . . . ittle old bourgeoisie . . .
per piccina che tu sia . . . small though you may be . . .
AFFLICTED BY ITS VERY WISDOM, it would be tempted to get rid of it with impulsive bolts from the blue or authoritarian coups, and sometimes it allows itself to be seduced by extraneous forces in which it believes it recognizes instinct, vigor, spontaneous joy, since it is incapable of such things, incapable of understanding what it actually wants, what it really and truly desires. Postponed till the end of the world the idea of liberation, and the dream of attaining an authentic liberty, it is obliged in the meantime to be scrupulous at every instant, to take seriously an infinite array of minutiae and weigh them carefully to see if there is any profit to be had from them. The principle of personal advantage multiplies human contacts but ruins them from the outset. The quantity of things that must be measured exceeds all measure. If the noble was for the most part a layabout and yet happily active in his passions, the bourgeois is reactive—nothing that he does is autonomous, gratuitous, spontaneous, original—not even his amusements—everything in him originates as a reaction to something else, as a response, as a resentment or a retort, a recovery, a counteroffer, a negotiation. He can consider virtuous only that which puts him in a condition to be as productive as possible; everything else doesn’t count or, even worse, is a luxury, it becomes a shameful waste to be a person with impulses and faults; all inefficiency must be discredited, all waste. Even health is useful, a certain food is good for you, knowledge is money, cornering the market on beauty can be profitable, luxury confers prestige, the mountains help you relax, they soothe your nerves.
sei contenta se un ladro muore you’re happy if a thief dies
se arrestano una puttana if they arrest a whore
se la parrocchia del Sacro Cuore if the parish of the Sacred Heart
acquista una nuova campana purchases a new church bell
Those were the lyrics that Claudio Lolli sang in 1972 and that we psalmodized along to, as we listened to the record of this grim antibourgeois nursery rhyme. With the dreamy conviction of those who are captivated by the music: an emotional vector capable of transporting any content whatsoever.
The song perfectly nails the rhyme of puttana/campana (whore and church bell) which points to the sharpest point of contrast between the respective moralities, the libertarian and transgressive morality of the prostitute, and the shuttered, bigoted, resentful morality of some hypocritical Catholic church lady. It’s obvious that, romantically, our preference veers toward the former, in songs and poetry the whore wins hands down over the respectable matron, just as the bandit and the rebel gobble up the office worker in a single bite. Difficult to conceive of the ballad of a bank clerk, if not as a parody. Those tightfisted church ladies, conformist and decorous, who were responsible for keeping Italy running, at least according to reactionary thought, are always good for a caricature, it matters little whether ferocious or good-natured, once it’s made clear that we’re talking about figures unworthy of being taken seriously. Decorum, in literature, is in fact the very apex of the indecorous. At the very most, it can be accorded contempt. From the day that the bourgeoisie made its entrance into literature, literature has done nothing but insult and mock it, and rightly so I might add, since the bourgeoisie shoved aside the fine characters of the old days, heroes and heroines, musketeers and princesses, replacing those fine people with greedy social climbers, governesses, pharmacists, and depressed functionaries. Two-bit extras, in other words. It’s a singular thing how the very authors who first offered free access in the world of art to these characters devoid of attractive qualities should hate them or look down upon them from the bottoms of their hearts, even when they identify with them: it’s as if they hated themselves and the novel was their pressure valve, a desperate “coming out,” to use the English term. Yes, I’m grimy-fisted, envious, devoid of titles, and yet I want to be princely and beloved as such. I deserve it, if for no other reaso
n than my own frankness in admitting that I don’t deserve it. Since nearly all writers were parvenus, who dragged themselves up out of the swamps of their social origins with acts of sheer will, aestheticizing and invariably verging on desperation, a form of self-legitimizing bootstrapping, like Munchausen pulling himself up out of the water by his ponytail, like Tartuffe, who builds a solid position on the fascinating nothingness of words, they know perfectly well that they’re lying but they’re so fond of and stirred by their lie that they seriously believe in it, to the point of becoming genuinely heartbreaking for the faith with which they recount it. The original sin is washed clean by art. It’s an exorcism. Those who have risen through the social ranks blow the dust of their origins off their shoes, those who are well-to-do redeem that fault by joining movements that preach their own destruction.
The bourgeois creates and administers his own investiture with his own two hands. He is condemned to extrapolate rules from the absolute absence of rules, and without hands up or connections from on high. That is what makes secular morality such an uncertain thing. And he conceals his inherent weakness with his aggressiveness. Those who are forced to be self-made men need to be sarcastic and cutting. If, instead, the bourgeois, for the most part because of a lack of time to devote to the ideal elaboration of morality, for example in the propulsive era of great profits and the accumulation of personal fortunes, when there is no time to do anything but pile up cash, if, as we were saying, the bourgeois in that case is willing to accept an inherited, traditional morality, though only accepting it as transitory and provisional (for example, a Catholic morality), he inevitably falsifies it. His skeptical breath freezes it. From a tumultuous and mystical religion, Christianity becomes terse and pragmatic. The intense and nauseating odor of rot that wafts off martyred flesh is swept away by the brisk breeze of good hard work . . . where by sacrifice at the very most we’re talking about devotion to one’s job and domestic frugality. Hygienicized and internalized, to avoid scandalizing with excessively ardent testifying, amputated of all awkward and overenthusiastic impetus, its quotient of superstition reduced but not quite to zero, in a bid to keep the lower social orders at least clamoring to drink from the trough watered by the spring of mysteries, apparitions, and bleedings, Christianity proved eminently suited to its new function. All you needed to do was switch a plus sign to a minus or vice versa on certain symbolic equations: for example, the anathema against money, which had thundered out from day one on the very lips of the Master, in unequivocal terms. So it had remained for many centuries, and it had worked to perfection: the Christian soul and the bourgeois spirit were fellow travelers, each playing along with the other’s game, and perhaps the Church thought that it was riding the tiger, employing that distinctive brand of Realpolitik that has brought it up to the present day, a blend of shrewd and ruthless alliances with its bitterest adversaries, making use of them to render them harmless, in view of the triumph that awaited them in the bright tomorrow: instead, once it had been sucked well and thoroughly dry, and when all that remained of it was a burdensome, inconvenient shell, religion was tossed aside, first by the bourgeoisie—the bourgeoisie, of all categories!—and then by everyone else, all the others. It no longer worked, its “propulsive force” had run out. In any case, too old-fashioned, too restrictive, bristling with obstacles and dense with precepts, however much they might have been softened and rounded and hollowed out.
Nowadays, in Europe, Christianity is an eccentric belief system practiced only by a minority, and where that is not the case, if it does not accept being bracketed in that manner, it simply no longer exists, it has been expunged from the horizon of everyday life. Even where it ardently wishes it could bring a little warm, young blood back into circulation, it can no longer afford the luxury of outright fanaticism, seeing the unfair competition it is facing on this plane from other radical religious persuasions, so it is constantly obliged to retrench, tread carefully, remain tolerant through clenched teeth, hypocritically conciliatory, though everyone realizes that a faith cannot survive on the basis of such weak and generic feelings. (This is Islam’s unforgivable crime in the world of the present: it has and it cultivates a faith that no longer exists in the West and is no longer cultivated there. This and nothing else is the cause of the fear and disgust, but also a hint of envy, experienced by Westerners.) There really is no need of a God to persuade people to respect stoplights, pay their tithes, and recycle conscientiously (oh Lord, maybe so in Italy, only hellfire is enough to make us toe the line: but in Sweden, in Switzerland?). Everything seems to conspire to abolish religion as an antiquated luxury or replace it with a less demanding kind of mortgage. Faith is madness, a flame that is flickering out and dying if fed only with the arid communion wafers of reasonableness. That which can be proven has very little value.
And then there is a clause in the contract with which Christianity signed itself over to the bourgeois spirit, appointing it as its proxy or sole and exclusive agent, which has proven disadvantageous over the long run: by which I mean the negotiation whereby, in order to conquer the rest of the world in the wake of the imperialist fleets, the Church lost Europe. That was the collateral, this the trade-off. Well, the contract has been honored, Europe was lost, I believe once and for all, proof of which can be seen in the fact that its legislatures are ashamed to name Christianity as one of their underlying principles: ancient Greece, certainly, the Romans as well, the tradition of the Enlightenment as well, but Christ, the first one to say that all men are equal, no. There you go, if Europe has turned its back on Jesus, Jesus remains bound hand and foot to Europe, like a hostage who must necessarily go wherever his kidnappers take him.
If Christianity could not possibly be, for the bourgeoisie, anything more than a morality provisionally taken on for instrumental purposes, and which has yet managed to cling stubbornly to the bourgeoisie for so many, many years, this is because the bourgeoisie, in the meantime, has proven incapable of developing any other morality to replace it. In spite of the efforts of some first-rate minds, the bourgeoisie has failed ever to go beyond generic affirmations and abstract enunciations. With the collapse of Christian ethics, quite simply we have remained without ethics, and we have been obliged to jury-rig and stitch together bits and pieces of other religious or moral codes, tatters of liberalism or socialism, with which feudally partitioned shares we see represented on the political commissions assigned to lead the discussion of such matters as euthanasia, artificial insemination, birth control, the family. Perhaps the patchwork can serve as a model for a modern society, but certainly not the general body of ethics that governs it.
In the same exact way, as if it had never believed it before, and hadn’t placed it at the center of an entire system of values, the middle class abandoned the patriotic rhetoric it had battened off for a hundred years and through a pair of world wars, wars it had marched off to with resounding hurrahs and tossing of hats in the air, replacing that rhetoric with a pacifism based on the same selfish set of values that propped up the ideology it had just tossed overboard. Many rainbow flags flutter nowadays for the same reason national flags waved just a few decades ago: the unashamed defense of one’s own interests, or at least the interests that people believe, rightly or wrongly, to be theirs. War “no longer interests us,” whereas it used to “be in our interest,” and therefore it had to be waged, right or wrong, it hardly matters. In point of fact, there are no right wars or wrong wars, there are only wars you win and wars you lose. In any case, we don’t want to know anything about it. Keep us out of it, please. It used to be that we believed our interests had to be defended with our blood, nowadays it seems that blood, especially innocent blood, when all is said and done, only hurts them. Peace. Peace. Leave us in peace. Then what has become of that word, which once scalded our mouths and our hearts, the Fatherland, the Homeland—what filled the void left by that concept? Or weren’t those words themselves a void, mere names, verbal idols to hold our lives together? If God and Count
ry no longer warm up the vocabulary of the middle class, it is bound to freeze over, crumpling like the poet’s withered leaf. If you don’t possess or aren’t possessed by a rhetoric, then you fall silent. I’m not saying you’re left without ideas, but genuinely silent, speechless. The other infatuations, such as culture and communism, were too fleeting, and after all they remain fundamentally extraneous to the spirit with which the bourgeoisie undertook its long struggle, while money alone does not provide a sufficient legitimation, not even a self-legitimation. Even when it really is the one purpose for which you live, well, you never have the courage to declare that fact aloud, “All I care about is money” is a phrase you might utter when you’re stinking drunk or defiantly or to show off your cynicism or while beating your chest and scattering ashes on your head at the culmination of an act of self-denunciation, but it would be unbearable if spoken seriously, in a levelheaded manner, it can’t stand up for itself, money isn’t a value, or maybe it is, but it can only be tendered for anything but as a value, so if money cannot be spent, then it ceases to be what it is, it contradicts its own nature, it dissolves into thin air, money, in other words, exists but it can’t be spoken of, it’s a means not a subject, and in fact the richer you are, the less you talk about it, you have money, and you shut up about it, only those who have very little money ever talk about it.
In Italy, there existed a sole exception to this rule, and it was a person who never spoke about anything but his own money, obsessively, and in spite of the fact that he was and remains the wealthiest man in the country, he talked about it as if he needed to convince himself first and foremost that he possessed it, that he needed to touch his cash with the tip of his tongue, the same way that, in the old days, to reassure oneself that it was still where it belonged, you would plunge your hands under the mattress to make sure your wad of cash was still there, well, instead he would stick his tongue into his money, every time that he needed to make it clear who he was, he’d open his mouth and speak of his money. And there’s something heartbreaking about the ritual, like the one practiced by Fagin in Oliver Twist, when he pulled his treasure out of the hidey-hole and ran it through his fingers.
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