A couple of weeks ago, I was talking to my son about how frankly mystified I am that I have reached the age I am, and been offered a comparatively extensive range of education and experience, and still couldn't fathom fully, until recently, how selfish, self-centered, and frankly cruel so many people are.
I could explain about my background and upbringing, and how they led me not to be that way myself, but it's a great deal of water under the bridge.
I clearly understand that other people are that way, but it's harder to understand, on a broad basis, why they are. When I encounter it, which is in a given patient, for example, the explanation is personal, not categorical.
Originally in 1987, Robert Heilbroner wrote a book called Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers. It was just this week that I read an excerpt from that book, and the excerpt was about Scottish-American Adam Smith. It was Smith who coined the term "invisible hand of capitalism," and he was a proponent of capitalism and what he imagined was its "invisible [self-regulating] hand." Smith was apparently a very odd sort of person, he didn't live among the lower classes, and he wrote in the mid to late 18th Century. So, between impossible wages, terrible work conditions, child labor, and the rest, it's unclear how satisfied he should really have been with capitalism's ability to self-regulate, unless he wouldn't have minded if this self-regulation was at the considerable expense of other people.
In any event, Smith wrote a book called The Theory of Moral Sentiments. It was a small part of that book that was excerpted by Heilbroner. "Theory... was an inquiry into the origin of moral approbation and disapproval. How does it happen that man, who is a creature of self-interest, can form moral judgments in which self-interest seems to be held in abeyance or transmuted to a higher plane? Smith held that the answer lay in our ability to put ourselves in a position of a third person, an impartial observer, and in this way to form a sympathetic notion of the objective (as opposed to the selfish) merits of a case."
Well, clearly, I didn't major in philosophy or economics. If I had, and if I had had to confront Smith's proposal, I would have had a problem. There would have been a lot to consider. Setting aside the obvious faultiness of the adaptively self-regulating "invisible hand of capitalism" -- if capitalism was adaptively self-regulating, no one would have challenged it -- we're left with a conundrum which some people would say was religious: the nature of humans is to be self-interested (that's the tendency that "god" programmed into humans), but that tendency can be held in abeyance, by force and virtue of more civilized traits "god" also programmed into humans, in favor of a "higher plane." (Helluva sense of humor that boy has.) And the impetus to seek that higher plane lies in what we could call empathy (I'm reducing the idea of "put[ting] ourselves in a position of a third person...and in this way...form[ing] a sympathetic notion of the objective, as opposed to the selfish" to empathy, or caring about other people instead of just caring about ourselves.) It becomes even more complicated if we have to consider the idea of recognizing that some people are more disadvantaged than are others, and the ones with greater advantage should perhaps care even more about the disadvantaged ones than they do about themselves.
But I still have to admit that large swaths of humans either can't or won't exchange their "god-given" selfishness for their "god-given" capacity to care about other people. They don't exist at that "higher plane."
Perhaps another economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, put it best: "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." That's what allows people to quote Smith's "invisible hand" idea, and ignore the "higher plane."
I have a movie called "Brothers." In one scene, one woman tells another that the man she should want is the one who will leave the last bite of food for her. He ate it himself.
I still don't know how I made it this far without realizing how fundamentally rapacious people are. As Brian Tyler Cohen is fond of saying in his youtube posts, "it's not a bug; it's a feature."
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