Will Wilkinson cuts through the book’s odd organization:
To be happy is to be loved and praised. Also, to be happy is stoic
indifference to love and praise. The love of high relative standing is
based on misery-making self-deception. And this self-deception turns
the wheels of industry, which produces wealth, and leaves even those of
low relative position in a good absolute position. Which is all you
really need to be happy! That is, as long as you are stoically
indifferent to love and praise, to relative position. Which, really,
none of us are, because, OMG, we really really want other
people to think highly of us. And, hey, again, that’s a pretty good
thing when you think about it, otherwise none of us would be
self-deceived enough to do all the crazy hard work that creates the
wealth that leaves us all in a good absolute material position. So, you
personally should probably worry about becoming actually praiseworthy,
instead of just seeking to receive praise, because you’ll be happier if
you deserve it, whether or not you get it. Unless everyone is doing
this. In which case we’ll all just be poor, which isn’t good at all.
You’ll find the other foot at the link. The book is arguably a comic tragedy and you could write a third foot about the role of fortune in the argument. Will is maybe reading a bit backwards from Wealth of Nations, but for a Platonist (I’m not saying Will is one) this should be allowed.
The same dynamic applies in our direct relationship to money and material advancement, whereby money gives us benefits directly rather than through the love and praise of others. Having more money makes us happier, but thinking that money is of great importance makes us unhappy. Aquiring money is very difficult, and gaining a reasonably large amount usually requires many years of education, plus many hours of work per week; all for something which the happiest of us often profess not to desire. Perhaps fooling oneself into thinking money unimportant, then taking a career which is enjoyable, but still provides substantial monetary rewards, is a path to happiness. Academics may score highly in this regard, though many quite openly desire love and praise, more so than average, which could lower their happiness as indicated by Smith.
Not reading backwards from the Wealth of Nations! The passage where “the invisible hand” first occurs is part of a meditation on the self-deception behind consumerism and obsession with the status that accrues to wealth.
He says this:
And on THE NEXT PAGE says this:
This is Robert Frank upside down. Self-deceived status-seeking is individually irrational but collectively beneficial. So we should subsidize it!? Well, no. He doesn’t want to promote it, and indeed promotes moderate stoic detachment. There is something like virtuous or proper status-seeking, which he does promote. But he seems not to think that that will deliver the goods. And he is the first thinker to really grasp the moral imperative of a scheme of coordinated sentiment that delivers the goods, and that recognition is clearly present in TMS. But the value of absolute material well-being sits uncomfortably both with his descriptive account of the centrality of positional goods and his normative account of the desirability of stoic peace of mind. These tensions never resolve in TMS.
Smith was at best a deist, meaning a theist who believed God stood outside the system of the universe, after having set it in motion. So then the next problem ought to be constructing an apology for the material success of a godless system. Because if God rewarded only those who forget themselves and dwell in him, then any country that pursued egotistic materialism should have suffered horrible plagues and disasters. But clearly the market system had begun to provide material wealth, which is also a good, and indeed is defined in the Bible as a blessing. Now how does selfishness lead to blessing? The question for Smith and indeed the early Enlightenment was how this contradiction can exist. So he bounced back and forth on the causes of happiness, from stoicism (a spiritual path) to public status (definitely not.) And his book often does so from the viewpoint of external description and received opinion, not lived experience.
These days of course most intellectuals on the right and left are atheists, and have accepted the flipside of the “great chain of being”– the reverse explanatory principle, evolutionism. It is applied uncritically to all sorts of things. The right has moved over to supposing that humans tend always to be nasty, but somehow their self-interests will always be coordinated into a good outcome by the “spontaneous order” of the market. While the left thinks that humans themselves are perfectible, and entirely by rational means, which somehow will amount to a transcendence. Two more nutty beliefs! So, the scientific Enlightenment’s divorce from spirit, by way of the demolition of an intellectually untenable religion, has led us further astray: to two more unbelievable views of the world, now fighting each other for political dominance. Is this too simplistic an explanation? Join the crowd! Always the danger of putting things into a nutshell, and look at all the nuts.
Oh oh, I forgot to add the introductory paragraph to my post that I banged out at bursting speed in Word. It explains who Macfie is. To wit:
Wilkinson’s stimulating discussion of Smith’s Moral Sentiments jogged my memory back to my student days, when the leading scholar of Smith’s overall philosophy and views of nature, man, individuals and society as well as moral sentiments was Alexander L. Macfie . . . who held the Adam Smith chair in political philosophy at Glasgow University, where Smith studied and taught.
Macfie’s interpretations of Smith centered on the conflict between individualism on the one hand and social order and society on the other. On Macfie’s view, to put it in his terms:
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