On the Wealth of Nations (3 page)

Yet inexplicabilities have their comforts, and likewise, explanations have their pains. Take, as illustrations, two previously mentioned matters Adam Smith was explaining: (1) money has no objective value; and (2) money is a notation of subjective worth, because when one person exchanges something with another they both get the best side of the deal. It's not that we who are getting this explained to us are stupid. But every overcompensated modern CEO has tried the first explanation on us. And every car dealer tries the second when we offer him a trade-in.

All explanations start out brief. But pretty soon Smith gets enmeshed in clarifications, intellectually caught out, Dagwood-like, carrying his shoes up the stairs of exegesis at 3:00 a.m., expounding his head off, while that vexed and querulous spouse, the reader, stands with arms crossed and slipper tapping on the second-floor landing of comprehension.

All explanations start out brief with the exception, of course, of legal briefs.
The Wealth of Nations
is one of these as well. Adam Smith was serving a nine-hundred-page indictment of the mercantile system. Mercantilism was the dominant economic theory of his day, insofar as it can be called a theory. In fact, mercantilism was a ragbag of commercial regulations and tax and tariff policies resulting from special interest politics, influence peddling, and parliamentary logrolling all mixed together with some general misunderstandings about cash, capital flow, and government finances. Mercantilists held that
the way to make a nation rich was to increase its exports and limit its imports. To give Smith's case against mercantilism in extreme concision: imports are Christmas morning; exports are January's MasterCard bill.

In
The Wealth of Nations
the accused were all the world's potentates, politicians, and wealthy merchants. But these were also the veniremen, judges, and officers of the court. Surprisingly, acquittal of the mercantilists wasn't immediate. William Pitt the Younger, prime minister during Smith's last years, accepted the evidence and instituted some reforms suggested by
Wealth
. Alexander Hamilton, architect of American protectionism, did not. More than two and a quarter centuries after
Wealth
's publication – what with the neomercantilists running China, the opposition to globalization being voiced around the globe, and the occasional rock getting thrown through the window of a Starbucks because it doesn't foster 'sustainable development' among coffee bean growers – the jury is still out.

Meanwhile Adam Smith continues to bear witness.
The Wealth of Nations
is more than an explanation, an analysis, or an argument. It is a sermon. And a fire-and-brimstone sermon at that. Smith is famous for supposedly favoring laissez-faire (a term that appears nowhere in his writing) and for allegedly trusting the 'invisible hand' of capitalist progress. But Smith knew the hand could grasp: 'People of the same trade seldom meet together … but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.'
¹⁰

Smith realized that a broadly prosperous consumer-oriented economy would not change human nature: 'The pride
of man makes him love to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his inferiors.'
¹¹
Truthfully, that's how we feel every time we ask to be paid for our services or goods.

Smith did believe free markets could better the world. He once said, in a paper delivered to a learned society, that progress required 'little else … but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice'.
¹²
But those three things were then – and are now – the three hardest things in the world to find.

Smith preached against the gravitational load of power and privilege that always will, if it can, fall upon our livelihood.
The Wealth of Nations
is a sturdy bulwark of a homily on liberty and honest enterprise. It does go on and on. But sermons must last a long time for the same reason that walls must. The wall isn't trying to change the roof's mind about crushing us.

The unprinted subtitle of this Grove/Atlantic series on world-changing books is 'Works Which Let's Admit You'll Never Read the Whole Of'. William Kristol, editor of the
Weekly Standard
and a more erudite man than I, has a nice phrase for such tomes. He says he has 'read
in
them'. Happily, we may so do with
The Wealth of Nations
. Unhappily, there's Adam Smith's first book, which we do not read at all. And
Wealth
cannot be understood without understanding
The Theory of Moral Sentiments,
published by Smith in 1759.

Adam Smith devoted most of his career to a single philosophical project, the betterment of life. A modern reader – or a modern reader who doesn't wear Birkenstocks – is tempted to laugh. It is a hilariously big job. But many of us have undertaken hilariously big jobs such as raising children. We were lured into the enterprise by the, so to speak, pleasures of conception. New beginnings are always fun. And Smith was
intellectually in bed with the virgin idea of betterment. The prospect of making wholesale improvements in ordinary life was as fascinating in the eighteenth century as the prospects of making life simpler and less stressful and of blocking e-mail spam are today.

Smith set out to discern how systems of morality, economics, and government arise and how, by comprehending the way these systems work, people could better their ethical, material, and political conditions. It was a splendid opportunity to be a blowhard. Consider a recent thinker – a Herbert Marcuse, a Newt Gingrich, an Al Franken – launching into the subject. Fortunately Adam Smith had the Enlightenment's knack for posing deep thoughts without making us cringe. His secret was to be an idealist but to not take that impertinent and annoying next step of being a visionary. Smith didn't presume to have a 'blueprint for society' and did presume that the ignorant and incompetent builders of society – he and the rest of us – couldn't follow one anyway. 'To expect, indeed,' he wrote in
Wealth,
'that the freedom of trade should ever be entirely restored in Great Britain, is as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or Utopia should ever be established in it.'
¹

Smith chose his absurdity comparisons with an eye to the Newt Gingriches and the too visionary visions that preceded the Enlightenment. Utopia was Thomas More's sixteenth-century made-up island with people living communally and all property held in common, its name a pun on the Greek words
eutopos
and
outopos,
'a good place' and 'no place'. Oceana was a similar locale, concocted a hundred years later by James
Harrington who mooted even more unlikely social policies such as elimination of agricultural subsidies for rich farmers and term limits. The eleventh edition of
The Encyclopaedia Britannica
calls Harrington's book,
Oceana,
'irretrievably dull'.

The writings of Adam Smith are never irretrievably so. In book 3 of
The Wealth of Nations
there's a twenty-page passage on the Corn Laws that is a trial to read. But at the end one's fugitive attention is caught and brought back by the charm of Smith's humility in postulating an ideal. He denounced the Corn Laws, the British prohibitions on the export of grain, as the crass inequity they were (and would prove to be when they starved my family out of Rosscommon seventy years later). Then Smith
didn't
proceed with the rant that we now expect from people who feel themselves to be, a little too obviously, in the right. Instead, Smith – keeping the inevitable follies of politics in mind – came to a humble conclusion: 'We may perhaps say of [them] what was said of the laws of Solon, that, though not the best in themselves, [they are] the best which the interests, prejudices, and temper of the times would admit of.'
²

Without this humility, reading in Adam Smith's philosophical project would be as grim as living in Kim Jong Il's philosophical project, North Korea. Smith's humble attitude extended beyond the ideal to ideas themselves, to his
amour propre
. In an early essay, 'The History of Astronomy', Smith wrote that he was 'endeavouring to represent all philosophical systems as mere inventions of the imagination, to connect together the otherwise disjointed and discordant phenomena
of nature.'
³
He went on to chastise himself for agreeing too much with Sir Isaac Newton's physics, making 'use of language expressing [their] connecting principles … as if they were the real chains which Nature makes use of to bind together her several operations.'
⁴
It would take, literally, an Einstein to show how right Smith was.

Adam Smith intended to publish three 'inventions of the imagination':
The Theory of Moral Sentiments, The Wealth of Nations,
and a third on jurisprudence, that is, on those most inventive and imaginary connections, law and government. The last was never finished, and just before Smith died he had his notes and drafts burned. Perhaps with reason. Many of Smith's ideas about law and government are apparent in
Moral Sentiments
and
Wealth
. The students' notes recording the lectures he gave on jurisprudence in the 1760s do not add much to the sum of Smith's thinking. Let us defer to his superior wisdom. Doing good and doing well should be enough for us. That we then should be obliged to listen to campaign speeches, make campaign contributions, and vote for fools is asking too much. As Smith himself declared in
Moral Sentiments,
'We may often fulfil all the rules of justice by sitting still and doing nothing.'
⁵

And it is from a certain kind of sitting still and doing nothing that, according to
The Theory of Moral Sentiments,
our sense of right and wrong arises. The foremost invention of our imagination is morality.

Adam Smith begins
Moral Sentiments
with the riddle upon which all our well-being depends: '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.'
⁶
The root of these principles is, according to Smith, sympathy. We are sympathetic creatures. We possess one emotion that cannot be categorized by cynics as either greed or fear. And it isn't love. We may love without any fellow feeling, the way John Hinckley 'proved his love' for Jodie Foster.

Our sympathy makes us able, and eager, to share the feelings of people we don't love at all. We like sharing their bad feelings as well as their good ones. We enjoy, in a daytime-TV way, commiserating with the sorrows of perfect strangers. And we are so eager to have the most trivial of our own feelings shared that, Smith wrote, 'We are even put out of humour if our companion laughs louder or longer at a joke than we think it deserves.'
⁷

This sympathy, Smith argued, is completely imaginative and not, like most emotions, a product of our physical senses. No matter how poignantly sympathetic the situation, we don't feel other people's pain. In a preemptive rebuttal of a future president of the United States, Smith used the example of seeing one's brother being put to the rack. (Although the brother of Roger Clinton might have chosen a more poignantly sympathetic case.) 'Our senses,' Smith declared, 'never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person.'
⁸
It is our imagination that generates sympathy and gives sympathy its power.

People have the creative talent to put themselves in another person's place and to suppose what that other person is feeling.
Even very shallow and frivolous people have this creative talent. We call them actors.

But sympathy by itself – be it for humans, animals, or Clintons – can't be the basis of a moral system. Otherwise a person who watched daytime TV all day would be regarded as a saint. 'He must not be satisfied with indolent benevolence,' Smith wrote, 'nor fancy himself the friend of mankind, because in his heart he wishes well to the prosperity of the world.'
⁹

Imagination, already working to show us how other people feel, has to work harder to show us whether what they feel is right or wrong. Then there's the problem of whether
we're
right or wrong. We'll always have plenty of sympathy for ourselves. 'We are not ready to suspect any person of being defective in selfishness,' Smith wrote. 'This is by no means the weak side of human nature.'
¹⁰
Morality can't be just a bunch of good feelings, or I know a pill we can swallow to be moral.

Our imaginations must undertake the additional task of creating a method to render decent judgments on our feelings and on the feelings of others and on the actions that proceed from these feelings. Adam Smith personified these conscious imaginative judgments and named our brain's moral magistrate the 'Impartial Spectator'. Perhaps this was a sly nod to the early eighteenth-century
Spectator
essays by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in which 'Mr Spectator' made the diffident claim of taking 'no practical part in life'. That was like Oprah Winfrey saying she takes none. With the Impartial Spectator, Smith had, indeed, predicted daytime TV hosts, spreading sympathy in all directions and acting as sympathy's referees.
Of course he was technologically premature. Oprah herself would have to wait until division of labor had gone so far that we had specialists to do our imagining for us.

The Impartial Spectator produced a show for a more serious age: 'Today, utilitarian philosophers who suffer from Christian agape!'
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
is daytime TV if daytime TV were produced by PBS, featuring a host who is like Bill Moyers, except intelligent.

The host would have to be at least as intelligent as Sigmund Freud. Smith also described the operation of the superego long before Freud did, and more astutely. Smith gave it a moniker that didn't sound like a comic book hero's. And Smith connected our conscience to human attributes more noble and reasonable than what drives a miniature schnauzer to hump our leg.

We envision the Impartial Spectator as having perfect knowledge of everyone's circumstances, experience, and intentions. And since the Impartial Spectator is imaginary and has no self, it has no selfish interest in any judgment that it makes. Smith claimed that what we do, when we develop morality, is shape our natural sympathies into the thoughts and actions that we would expect from an Impartial Spectator who is sympathetic, but objective and all-knowing (and still sympathetic anyway).

'When our passive feelings are almost always so sordid and so selfish, how comes it,' Smith asks, 'that our active principles should often be so generous and so noble?'
¹¹
The answer is 'the inhabitant of the breast … the great judge and arbiter of our conduct'.
¹²
Looking at things from the Impartial Spectator's
point of view instructs us in the emotional self-discipline that we need to behave even tolerably well. Consider how toddlers and drunks behave, who haven't yet received, or who have temporarily forgotten, their instructions.

Thanks to our imaginative sympathy, we are happy when other people are happy and sad when they're sad, and hope they feel the same way about us. But this emotional engagement is laborious. We have to prod our imagination to put ourselves in the place of someone who's feeling stronger sensations than we can feel – and mourn the death of a friend's ancient, stupid, leg-humping schnauzer. We have to control our own emotions when someone can't feel the sensations that we can – and laugh politely when we've taken the schnauzer's old chair and sat in the last mess it made.

According to Adam Smith, the 'wise and virtuous man' uses his imagination to create 'the idea of exact propriety and perfection'. This is 'gradually formed from his observations upon the character and conduct both of himself and of other people. It is the slow, gradual, and progressive work of the great demigod within.'
¹³
If, Smith wrote, the Impartial Spectator did not endeavor to teach us 'to protect the weak, to curb the violent, and to chastise the guilty',
¹⁴
then 'a man would enter an assembly of men as he enters a den of lions'.
¹⁵
Or toddlers. Or drunks. Or as he enters the set of a daytime TV show, or sits in a dead schnauzer's chair.

Adam Smith's recognition of the primary role of imagination in moral thinking reveals several things about morality. Morals are the result of effort. The proper course of moral behavior is
not some piece of arcane knowledge that can be acquired by reading esoteric texts such as
Who Moved My Cheese?
Morality can't be learned by a literal reading of the Bible, for that matter. Smith pointed out that 'In the Decalogue we are commanded to honour our fathers and mothers. No mention is made of the love of our children.'
¹⁶
God didn't put it in there, because God doesn't regard us as totally unimaginative numskulls. Our sympathy for our children should go without saying. Our sympathy for our parents, on the other hand … Did you visit Mom at Sundown Center? Or was this my week to go?

Imagining things is work. The imagination that Adam Smith describes is not the easy, whimsical one that we foist on our children, with whom we supposedly sympathize so much. There is nothing in
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
that resembles the improbably colored and far more improbably noncarnivorous tyrannosaurus on children's television. Singing along with 'Barney can be your friend, too / If you just make believe him,' leads, at best, to churnings of froth such as
Oceana
. Kim Jong Il is said to be an avid movie fan, and probably leads the imaginative fantasy life that goes with large collections of DVDs.

The imagination that Smith describes is the strenuous imagination of an Einstein or a Newton, with all the discipline that this implies. 'Self-command is not only itself a great virtue, but from it all the other virtues seem to derive their principal lustre,' Smith writes.
¹⁷
And, 'In the common degree of the moral, there is no virtue. Virtue is excellence.'
¹⁸