The New Criterion is a monthly journal on arts and the intellectual life published in New York City with Roger Kimball as its Editor and Publisher. It derives from the articulate and avant-garde tradition of New York City intellectuals, only its non-conformity takes on the conventional wisdom of progressive intellectuals and activists to expose the underside of those narratives.
Kimball is an eloquent writer, never at a loss for a good turn of phrase and unabashed about being judgmental.
In this recent essay, he deconstructs the adoption of woke virtue signaling by the Wharton Business School.
In effect, he refuses to accept “virtue signaling” as a constructive morality for business. In this, he indirectly ratifies the position of Adam Smith that the morality, the prudent usefulness of business is to create wealth and so improve the conditions under which humanity can live.
Someone must pay for most everything we need or desire and where, do you suppose, the wealth to make all those payments will come from?
Under Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, he supposes that we want to move from meeting basic needs of food and shelter to higher order, more intangible desires to experience self-actualization. But to live a life that permits self-actualization (the way most of us want to self-actualize) takes money. So, again, to live as most of us would wish, we need wealth. Those who create the wealth which flows our way do us a great service.
Making possible those better circumstances for us all is virtue in action.
Kimball’s disdain for the superficial in business education reminds me of the old saying, “If you want golden eggs, the first thing you must do is catch the right goose.”
You can read his essay on the American Greatness website, where he frequently contributes, here.