Looking Out For Number One Only?

Edmund Burke by Joshua Reynolds

Capitalism is predicated on the idea of individual initiative. The most obvious economic manifestation of that is entrepreneurship, a talent that’s touted on the television show Shark Tank, a kind of American Idol for those with an acumen for business. But the greatest capitalist of them all Adam Smith, the author of The Wealth of Nations, which did for capitalism what Das Kapital would for revolution, also wrote a book called The Theory of Moral Sentiments in which human empathy was the subject. Talk about Originalism, what a different attitude early proto-conservatives like Smith and Edmund Burke had in comparison to our right wing Tea Party firebrands, latter day Social Darwinists, advocating the dog eat dog vision of human society propounded by Herbert Spencer. In their view man is no different from the animal on the veldt competing for scarce resources, with the strongest, the pythons, the hyenas triumphing over more docile species. Advocates of this laissez faire view envision a society freed from entitlements and  over constitutionalized with protections for those who may not be strong enough to defend themselves. The fact is that the ancestors of man may have been apes, but why throw the baby out with the bathwater? If individual liberty is at stake, why don’t those who virulently argue for the free market, and less government intrusions, use their heads. Without the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment there would be no democracy to defend. Robert Ringer wrote the bestseller, Looking Out For Number One. But is that all there is?

The Wealth of People

Caterpillar Inc. made headlines a while back when it attempted to freeze wages amidst windfall profits (“At Caterpillar, Pressing Labor While Business Booms,” 7/22/12). Supply side economics which epitomizes free market capitalism basically holds that water will find its own level. But the most prominent and earliest theorizer of capitalism and the author of The Wealth of Nations also wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments which begins thusly, “How selfish so ever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others... .” Here Smith clearly looks at the agora as a human arrangement in which empathy plays a significant role. What for instance would happen if to quote Yeats “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” with every individual giving into all his wishes and desires without any consideration for the path of destruction he or she was leaving in their wake. How free is the free market? In order to live in society we abide by a social contract through which many of our instincts are tamed or channeled into directions in which they help both ourselves and others. Psychoanalysts employ the term “compromise formation,” in reference intrapsychic attempts to mediate conflict. But this very concept can be applied macrocosmically in terms of considering how the market may regulate itself. One paradigm is the Spencerian Social Darwinist view in which the “survival of the fittest” governs both economic and social transactions. The countervailing position looks at altruism as naturally selective; mutually beneficial exchanges result from the nurture and care that one displays in showing consideration for the needs of others. Under this paradigm Caterpillar would have been more generous with its salaries.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments

In a review of Andrew Cayton’s Love in the Time of Revolution: Transatlantic Literary Radicalism and Historical Change, 1793-1818 (“Emotions in the Balance,” TLS, 1/17/14), Rachel Hewitt quotes from Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments thusly, “if you have either no fellow feeling for the misfortunes I have met with, or none that bears any proportion to the grief which distracts me; or if you have no indignation at the injuries I have suffered, or none that bears any proportion to the resentment which transports me, we can no longer converse upon these subjects.” Hewitt points out that this concern with empathy might be surprising for the author of the bible of capitalism, The Wealth of Nations. But actually it’s actual the understanding of emotion that seems to allow for free trade, in Smith’s world view. “The emotional subject’s passionate heat becomes tolerably warm; the spectator’s cool impartiality gives way to concerned compassion,” Hewitt explains. “This perfect but delicate balance of reason and compassion is ‘rational affection.’” In this regard it’s easy to see how the tolerance and equanimity of Dutch society became a breeding ground for the mercantilism of such giants as the East India Company. Smith’s thinking is also significant in the way it combines the micro with the macrocosm, ontogeny with phylogeny. Spencer coined the term Social Darwinism and free market capitalism exemplifies the survival of the fittest. But Smith obviously regarded empathy and altruism as market forces too. Hewitt isn’t the first critic to point out The Wealth of Nations had been preceded by a treatise (The Theory of Moral Sentiments) of such uncommon humanity. In this age of narrow Tea Party party politics that’s a far cry from true Burkean conservatism, it’s nice to be reminded that the father of modern capitalism regarded prosperity as deriving from something more than just the struggle to survive.