Adam Smith Archives - James E Hartley

SMITH’S MAN OF SYSTEM IN ROMEO AND JULIET

The biggest threats to liberty always come from people who look at the world and become firmly convinced that their plan to overhaul the whole system will bring great joy. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith argues that such people will inevitably bring harm to society.

In Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare has provided a marvelous example of such a person, exploring both the motivation and the devastation which ensues. Friar Laurence may rank with Iago and Edmund in the roll call of Great Shakespearean Villains.

Read the rest at AdamSmithWorks

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Imitating Captain Kirk

“This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect, persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”

More than 250 years later, Adam Smith’s observation from The Theory of Moral Sentiments is still a constant refrain in discussions of culture. The Culture War, which seems to be always with us, finds its fuel in exactly this corruption of our moral sentiments. Some rich or powerful person engages in yet another violation of long established community norms and the commentators come out of the woodwork declaring the end of civilization. People want to keep up with the Kardashians because they are so young and beautiful and rich, but what happens when they turn into objects of worship?

The solution? It seems obvious to many commentators that we need to tear down the corrupt moral culture and insist that people follow a better set of cultural norms. The strategy is frequently wholesale attacks on contemporary culture. If only we could prove to the population at large that the cultural norms of their objects of worship are terribly degrading to human soul. Perhaps an even stronger denunciation will finally get through to people.

But, as Smith goes on to note, the problem is deeper than the culture warriors want to admit.

It is from our disposition to admire, and consequently to imitate, the rich and the great, that they are enabled to set, or to lead, what is called the fashion. Their dress is the fashionable dress; the language of their conversation, the fashionable style; their air and deportment, the fashionable behaviour. Even their vices and follies are fashionable; and the greater part of men are proud to imitate and resemble them in the very qualities which dishonour and degrade them.

The admiration people have for the rich and great leads them to want to imitate their style and behavior. It is not, however, only the dress or language which people imitate, it is also their vices and follies. People are proud to imitate even the most degrading aspects of their behavior.

If Smith is right, then it is no wonder that the attacks on popular culture have so little impact. It does no good to tell people that the acts of the rich and famous are degrading if people are proud to imitate those acts even though they are degrading. The desire to imitate the successful runs deep in human character. As reading Smith makes clear, this is not a modern phenomenon; it seems to be a constant in human behavior.

What then can be done? Captain Kirk has an answer.

Read the rest at AdamSmithWorks

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Do The Eloi And Morlocks Trade?

“I grieved to think how brief the dream of human intellect had been. It had committed suicide.”

That is the traveler in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. Leaping forward in time, the traveler discovers a world in which the pastoral Eloi are living lives of rustic comfort, eating the fruit of the land with nary a bit of toil or sweat. Meanwhile, the terrifying Morlock, using vast machines to provide air to their subterranean lair, venture forth under the cover of darkness to feast on the Eloi.

Wells’ earth of the future is a rather unattractive place. That is, after all, his intention. As is his wont, Wells uses this science fiction tale to moralize about the evil economic system in Britain in 1895. Enraptured by the ideas of the Social Darwinists, Wells’ sets his mind wandering over how both humans and society will evolve in the global survival of the fittest. One of the most well-known socialists of his age, Wells unsurprisingly imagines a future where the lifestyle of the rich become ever more indolent and the wretched poor are gradually forced out of sight into the underground to work the machines. The Morlocks eating the Eloi is little more than a morbid revenge fantasy. A century and a quarter later, it is rather obvious Wells’ Social Darwinist predictions were comically wrong.

He should have known better.

Read the rest at Adam Smith Works

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Star Trek and Adam Smith: Sympathy of the Vians

Adam Smith begins The Theory of Moral Sentiments with a discussion of sympathy:

“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.”

What follows is a lengthy exploration of the implications of the fact that we are sympathetic beings. Smith provides an array of examples meant to illustrate the nature of sympathy, but, for some odd reason, he never seems to have watched Star Trek.

The Star Trek episode “The Empath” (directed by John Erman and written by Gene Roddenberry and Joyce Muskat) is an extended exploration of the theme of sympathy.

If you want an example of what Adam Smith is talking about when he discusses the importance of sympathy, there may be no better example than the self-sacrifice of the Vians, the people who realized there is no greater love than to lay down their lives so that others might live.

Too see the argument, you can read the post at Adam Smith Works

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Hidden Revolutionaries: Tristram Shandy and Adam Smith

Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations suffers from a familiarity bias in the modern world. It is difficult to get people excited about a book that explains how the division of labor leads to specialization and trade which then creates immense wealth. The shocking nature of the work is hidden from us because we all see this every day and thus think of it as nothing particularly revolutionary.

A good comparison is provided by Isaac Newton’s Principia. In that book Newton demonstrated that the same force that causes apples to fall from trees to the ground can explain planetary movements around the sun. The shocking nature of this is hard to underestimate. As Alexander Pope described it: “Nature, and Nature’s laws lay hid in night./ God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.” Newton had turned the entire solar system into a giant machine, following regular laws of behavior. Yet, because everything in it seems so obvious now, few people today are rushing out to read Newton’s work.

In exactly the same way, Smith turned the idea of economic society into a giant machine. It may seem like uncoordinated specialization would lead to total chaos, but there is something akin to an invisible force which induces all the parts to work together into a harmonious whole. Society is not nearly as fractured and disorganized as it first appears.

The reason it is hard for us to see the revolutionary nature of Smith’s insight is that we do not always appreciate how the world looked to people before Adam Smith wrote. In other words, we can all profit from spending some time with Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, published in nine volumes between 1760 and 1767.

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Can Sober Smithians Soften Polarized Partisans?

The centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

Yeats’ lines seem to have a particular resonance these days.

One of the most frequent laments about the state of modern politics is the rise of polarization. Where, people ask, is the spirit of compromise, the willingness to come together to get things done? Each side blames the polarization on the other. Those who feel trapped in No Man’s Land frequently point to the rise of social media with its separate closed ecosystems.

Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments offers a different explanation for the polarization, an explanation which suggests there is nothing new under the sun.

Read the rest at Adam Smith Works