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By Root 519 0

when life became still more commercialised, was a time when racism, sexism and child molesting became unacceptable. In between, when capitalism gave way to various forms of state-directed totalitarianism and their pale imitators, such virtues were noticeable by their retreat – while faith and courage revived. The twenty-first century, when commercialisation has so far continued to spread, is already a time when battery farming and unilaterally declaring war have just about become unacceptable. Random violence makes the news precisely because it is so rare; routine kindness does not make the news precisely because it is so commonplace. Charitable giving has been growing faster than the economy as a whole in recent decades. The internet reverberates with people sharing tips for free.

Of course, these trends could be nothing more than coincidence: we happen to be becoming nicer as we become more irretrievably dependent on markets and free enterprise. But I do not think so. It was the ‘nation of shopkeepers’ that first worried about abolishing slave trading, emancipating Catholics and feeding the poor. Just as it was the nouveau riche merchants, with names like Wedgwood and Wilberforce, who financed and led the anti-slavery movement before and after 1800, while the old county money looked on with indifference, so today it is the new money of entrepreneurs and actors that funds compassion for people, pets and planets. There is a direct link between commerce and virtue. ‘Far from being a vice,’ says Eamonn Butler, ‘the market system makes self interest into something thoroughly virtuous.’ This is the extraordinary feature of markets: just as they can turn many individually irrational individuals into a collectively rational outcome, so they can turn many individually selfish motives into a collectively kind result.

For instance, as evolutionary psychologists confirm, sometimes the motivation behind conspicuous displays of virtue by the very rich are far from pure. When shown a photograph of an attractive man and asked to write a story about an ideal date with him, a woman will say she is prepared to spend time on conspicuous pro-social volunteering. By contrast, a woman shown a photograph of a street scene and asked to write about ideal weather for being there, shows no such sudden urge to philanthropy. (A man in the same ‘mating-primed’ condition will want to spend more on conspicuous luxuries, or on heroic acts.) That Charles Darwin’s wealthy spinster aunt Sarah Wedgwood’s funding of the anti-slavery movement (she was the movement’s biggest donor) may have a hint of unconscious sexual motives, is a charming surprise. But it does not detract from the good she did, or from the fact that commerce paid for that good.

This applies among the poor as well as the rich. The working poor give a much higher proportion of their income to good causes than the rich do, and crucially they give three times as much as people on welfare do. As Michael Shermer comments, ‘Poverty is not a barrier to charity, but welfare is.’ Those of libertarian bent often prove more generous than those of a socialist persuasion: where the socialist feels that it is government’s job to look after the poor using taxes, libertarians think it is their duty. I am not saying that the market is the only source of charity. Clearly not: religion and community provide much motivation to philanthropy too. But the idea that the market destroys charity by teaching selfishness is plainly wide of the mark. When the market economy booms so does philanthropy. Ask Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.

It is not just cruelty and indifference to the disadvantaged that have retreated with the spread of the collective brain. So has illiteracy and ill health. So has crime: your chances of being murdered have fallen steadily since the seventeenth century in every European country, but once again beginning with the trade-mad Holland and England. Murder was ten times as common before the industrial revolution in Europe, per head of population, as it is today. The fall in crime rates turned