Sympathy for other people
This birthday excursion into Adam Smith's life and times has been cheerful, for the most part. The awesome charge has not been convincing. Smith, and even Smithianismus, are not the causes of climate change. There have been moments of optimism along the way (as though on the Fife Coastal Path https://fifecoastandcountrysidetrust.co.uk/walks/fife-coastal-path/from Burntisland to Kirkcaldy and the Leven Beach.)
The (elusive) idea of Smithian growth is encouraging, as a prospect of continuing improvement in wellbeing, the wellbeing of everyone, that is founded not on the large-scale use of coal, oil and gas, but on exchange and the division of labour. Smith's confidence in the ingenuity of all individuals, without exception, is encouraging, and so is the optimism of his enlightenment admirers, Turgot and Kant and Condorcet. Even the poorest of children, in Smith's description, need Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, p. 540."subject for thought and speculation," and to be sent out to work (as young children were in the coal mines) On the "children, who carry up the coals on their back," see Sinclair, "Alloa," p. 615.is to be deprived of possibility; "when he is grown up he has no ideas with which he can amuse himself."
Smith's political economy, with its depiction of how enterprises imposed "external" costs on other people, and of how the anti-heroes of the Wealth of Nations, the "merchants and manufacturers," pursued their interests through public influence, is itself encouraging, in a rationalist sort of way. It is a source of understanding; an explanation, or part of the explanation, of the historical causes of climate change.
The story was dire, with its private interests elaborated into vast systems of the "general welfare of the society." There were Smith, The Wealth of Nations, pp. 471, 496. lobbyists -- "like an overgrown standing army, they have become formidable to the government, and upon many occasions intimidate the legislature" -- and tariff (or non-tariff) barriers -- "mercantile jealousy is excited, and both inflames, and is itself inflamed, by the violence of national animosity." But to be able to explain something -- in this case the causes of climate change -- is to have a larger chance of improving things in the future. It is to understand the conversations about roads, now as then.
The most encouraging of all is Smith's confidence in the moral sentiments of all individuals, almost without exception. His basic idea of moral judgment, in all the successive versions of the Theory of Moral Sentiments is that it is to be found in the immediate society that surrounds the individual: in conversation, society, intimate friendships, family relationships. To have conversations about one's own and one's friends' sentiments seems, even, to have been one of his lifelong amusements, as it was for his closest friend, David Hume; what is to compare, after all, with David Hume, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) (Oxford, 1961), pp. 283-284."the unbought satisfaction of conversation, society, study, even health and the common beauties of nature, but above all the peaceful reflection on one's own conduct?"
But Smith's own world changed substantially over the thirty years between the first edition of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1759, and the sixth edition, published in 1790, that he was working on in the last years of his life. There was the first almost worldwide war, in 1756 to 1763; Smith had a long and adventurous period in Toulouse, Paris and Compiègne; he observed, in his own social milieu, and his own neighborhood, the consequences of the prodigious expansion of the East India Companies and the Atlantic slave trade.
"Bell alias Belinda," who was the last person to be deemed a slave by a court in the British Isles, in 1771, was living at the time in Balgonie, On Bell alias Belinda, see Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires, pp. 87-91, 216, 291-299. Her case was reported in the Scots Magazine, the Caledonian Mercury, and the Public Advertiser; p. 228. a pleasant walk away from Kirkcaldy, where Smith was writing the Wealth of Nations, and near what was later the Rothes coal mine (opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1958). She had come from Bengal, the "slave or servant" of an East India Company official, and she was accused, by his other servants, of having of thrown her new-born son, wrapped in a linen cloth, into the River Leven. In her defense -- in a widely reported court proceeding -- she asked to be banished to the "East or West Indies," and was condemned by the court to be sold as "a slave for life;" she was sent, in the end, to Virginia. The East India Company official, who signed the court document, was an acquaintance of Smith's and the younger brother of one of his closest friends; in 1774 he became the member of parliament for Kirkcaldy and the Dysart burghs.
The last additions that Smith made to the Theory of Moral Sentiments, which account for around a third of the final work, were concerned, most of all, with the extension of the intimate, conversational foundations of morality to this much larger universe of individuals and information. To see one's own sentiments "with the eyes of other people, or as other people are likely to view them" was to think with See Emma Rothschild, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Inner Life," The Adam Smith Review, vol. 5 (2010), 25-36.history, with information, and with stories, in Smith's description. It was also to think about distant Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, pp. 110, 112.as well as nearby individuals; "to view ourselves at the distance and with the eyes of other people."
This was not a cosmic prospect. "Universal benevolence" was a subject Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, pp. 235-247.of "sublime contemplation." But there is nothing in the Theory of Moral Sentiments that corresponds to the two capacious visions that have imbued recent discussions of climate change: a global change in consciousness, or a global public commitment, going beyond targets for reductions in climate emissions to agreements with the force of (national or international) law. Smith was familiar, certainly, with the "Utopia," as he called it, of long-distance government. Smith, The Wealth of Nations, pp. 933-934. He was deeply sceptical (like Hume or Kant or Condorcet) about efforts to influence collective mentalities. His confidence about moral sentiments, in respect of other, distant people, was founded on micro or local connections.
One of the most abstruse additions to the Theory of Moral Sentiments, oddly enough, is suggestive in relation to large causal stories about climate change. It was about the unintended Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, pp. 107, 338.(bad) consequences of one's actions (just as the Riga or invisible hand story was about good unintended consequences.) Smith was describing the "man, who, from false information, from inadvertency, from precipitancy and rashness, has involuntarily deceived;" and, more dramatically, "a man of humanity, who accidentally, and without the smallest degree of blameable negligence, has been the cause of the death of another man."
The individual "feels himself piacular, though not guilty," Smith wote; "though not guilty, he feels himself to be in the highest degree, what the ancients called, piacular." (A piaculum, in Roman religion, was an act of expiation and an act requiring expiation.) Oswald, the coal mine owner, or Owen, the prophet of selfishness -- or the entire cast of characters in the 19th-century rise of the fossil-fuel economy -- can be thought of in this sense as "piacular, though not guilty," in relation to the catastrophic climate change of the 21st century. If they had known, or could have known -- "if it had been done with knowledge and design" -- they would have been subject to "the deepest reproach." But they did not know.
There was so much they did not know, and so much that they knew. The daily life of mines was known, as in an (ironic) pamphlet A Vindication of Natural Society, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke (Oxford, 1981-2000), 9 vols., vol. 1, p. 178.by Edmund Burke in 1756:
There are in Great-Britain upwards of an hundred thousand People employed in Lead, Tin, Iron, Copper, and Coal Mines... [who are] perpetually confined in the close Vapour of these malignant Minerals. An hundred thousand more at least are tortured without Remission by the suffocating Smoak, intense Fires, and constant Drudgery necessary in refining and managing the Products of those Mines.
The minister of the parish of Dysart, in 1793, knew Sinclair, "Dysart," p. 522.that "the engines and salt pans occasion much smoke, which is very disagreeable, destroying vegetation in the gardens, and penetrating the inmost recesses of the houses." The heroic capitalists of the mid 19th-century age of industry knew, or imagined, that they were conquering nature: "Subjection of nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground:" Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848) (London, 2002), p. 225. the "subjection of nature's forces to man,"
"This self-deceit, this fatal weakness of mankind, is the source of half the disorders of human life," Smith wrote in the Theory of Moral Sentiments (in all the editions), and one of the promises of his system of sympathy -- of all the conversations with other people -- is the possibility of being free, from time to time, from Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 158.the "mysterious veil of self-delusion." It is to see oneself at a distance, "with the eyes of other people," and it is also to see things that are almost out of sight, or at the edge of one's vision, like Bell alias Belinda, by the River Leven in Balgonie in 1771.
Smith's faith, in the end, was in the mildness and thoughtfulness of most individual men and women, most of the time. Individuals, in his view, will usually not pursue their interests in grossly oppressive ways, and they will usually wish to live in a society in which other people are not grossly oppressed, or deprived. The vivid expression he used in the "Early Draft" of the Wealth of Nations -- "in the midst of so much oppressive inequality" -- was a description "Early Draft," in Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, pp. 562-564; "the poor labourer who has the soil and the seasons to struggle with, and who, while he affords the materials for supplying the luxury of all the other members of the common wealth, and bears, as it were, upon his shoulders the whole fabric of human society, seems himself to be pressed down below ground by the weight, and to be buried out of sight in the lowest foundations of the building."of a particular society, "in Britain or in Holland," in which the poor labourer "bears, as it were, upon his shoulders the whole fabric of human society." But the promise of the last additions to the Theory of Moral Sentiments, with its extended, virtual and imagined conversations, was that the particular society has itself become larger, or the society within which inequality or injustice is so oppressive.
This, too, is evocative of our own, foreboding times. The accidental, interrupted virtual conversations that Smith imagined are everywhere, now. It is possible to see the micro-effects of climate change almost anywhere in the world, and it is possible, too, to see the association of climate-related emissions, in our own local circumstances, with other forms of pollution and injustice. Everyone is confronted with thinking about the effects of their or our existence on other future and distant people; everyone thinks, too, about events, or varieties of injustice, with which they, or we, have "some sort of connection." The universe of "other people" -- Smith used the expression 102 times in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, and the words "imagine" and "imagination" 155 times -- is expanding, in random, idiosyncratic ways. To think about the sort of society in which one would wish to live is itself a Smithian exercise, and an exercise in sympathy.
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