Beware Secularists and Preachers Who Claim to Know Everything About What People Want
Douglas Andrew Henson posts 5 February in the
American Secularist HERE
“My favorite verse in the
letter in 1 Thessalonians 5:15, “…always strive to do what is good for each
other and for everyone else.” I can’t think of another Bible verse that
would do more good for American society if it were whole-heartedly followed –
nor of one that is so blatantly anti-capitalist. Paul is basically saying to
consider others when you decide to do something, and make sure whatever you are
doing is good for everyone else. Imagine how much better our society would be
if we constrained our actions in this way. No one would cut you off in traffic.
Your neighbor wouldn’t walk his dog in your front yard. A stock price wouldn’t
rise when a company sacked a few thousand workers, because this wouldn’t be
good for society as a whole.
Adam Smith assures us
that the beauty of capitalism is that everyone can work towards their own
self-interest, without giving too much thought to what effect it might have on
everyone else. The invisible hand will somehow make this work out for society
in general.
In my personal economic
experience, it has been more of an invisible backhand, Stanley Kowalski in a
wife beater undershirt. Perhaps for the 1%, this hand is more satisfying, more
like an invisible hand job from an expensive escort. In any event, someone is
wrong, as there is an obvious contradiction here. Either the Apostle Paul got
this one wrong, or Mr. Smith did.
Comment:
Paul Says: “…always strive to
do what is good for each other and for everyone else” and Douglas asserts: “Paul is basically
saying to consider others when you decide to do something, and make sure
whatever you are doing is good for everyone else”, concluding that “Either the
Apostle Paul got this one wrong, or Mr. Smith did.”
Paul, or the author
writing decades later in the name of Paul, was writing of the interests of “others”
and “everyone” else by instructing his readers to “make sure whatever you are doing
is good for everyone else”. My
question to readers of Paul trying to follow Paul’s guidance is: How does
everyone or you know what everybody else wants?
They don’t, of course.
And not every one wants what we want. That is why Adam Smith’s
contribution on morality is relevant.
Smith said a great deal
on moral sentiments in his lectures at Glasgow University, 1751-64, and he
wrote a large book on the subject. I wonder if Douglas has read every paragraph
in Smith’s “Theory of Moral Sentiments” 1759, plus 5 other editions up to
1790. (Tip: that’s a whole lot of
reading and, by the way - I was brought up in a Presbyterian household and
Sunday school). I can also highly recommend readers to read, Ryan Hanley’s
“Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue” (Cambridge, 2013) for a thorough
treatment of Smith’s views on morality.
With such a reading background, Douglas would be treated seriously in his certain (even smart ass) comments
about the authentic Adam Smith. The cartoon cutouts from his modern
epigones (who also are given to pontificate about an Adam Smith from Chicago a different person to the Adam Smith from Kirkcaldy) are unreliable
Adam Smith never
“assure[d] us that the beauty of capitalism is that everyone can work towards
their own self-interest, without giving too much thought to what effect it
might have on everyone else. The invisible hand will somehow make this work out
for society in general.”
Smith’s point about
“self-interest” is that it is realised by engaging in the voluntary co-operation
of others –“no man is an island entire unto himself” (John Donne). He repeats this specific point
throughout his Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth Of Nations.
All men depend upon the
“co-operation of thousands of others” and this requires peaceful persuasion,
conversation, haggling and bargaining for each to receive what they want from others. And specifically, Smith mandates
self-interested buyers to address the self-interests or self love of those with
whom they seek to transact (WN I.ii.2: pages 26-27). In short, we can meet our own self-interests morally by mediating our self-interests with the self-interests of others.
This is an entirely
different Smithian mandate for seeking our own self-interests and also the most
practical because though we deal with many other self-interested people we
discover what they want from us without either person having to arrogantly
assume they “know” what is “good for everyone else”. What they want can only be learned and acted upon, assuming
we have the means, by persuasive conversation, not by assertion, which may also
require us to modify what we want self-interestedly for ourselves.
Where this fits with
Paul’s reported dicta is up to theologians to ponder. I think Paul goes too far in preaching knowledge by
assumption that he knows everything about what’s good for everyone else.
I also know Douglas knows
little about Adam Smith’s real views “on the beauty of capitalism” (the last
word was not used in English until after 1854 when Thackeray’s used in "The
Newomes" – see the Oxford English Dictionary, the definitive guide to the
derivation of words in the English Language).
Adam Smith (from
Kirkcaldy) never said that “The
invisible hand will somehow make this work out for society in general”.
Douglas, and new readers, of Lost Legacy can find out the facts about Smith’s
use by casting an eye over any number of previous posts on Lost Legacy on
Smith’s use of the “invisible hand” metaphor.
On this example, it is Douglas
Andrew Henson who “got this one wrong”, not
Smith. As for Paul readers may make their own minds up.
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