Adam Smith - Not for Beginners

Many students are familiar with the name Adam Smith, and have a few loose associations between that name and a concepts such as free market capitalism and economic equilibria. But he is worthy studying more closely: his nuanced writings cannot be simplified to a few bullet points on a note card. The notion that economies can be self-correcting mechanisms maintaining a sort of balance is part of a larger philosophical outlook, including perhaps Thomas Malthus and John Locke, which saw this same process of homeostasis applied to populations and politics - just as an economy keeps prices from being to high or to low through the interactions of supply and demand, so Malthus thought that populations would keep themselves at sustainable levels by means of corrective measures like wars, plagues, and famines; Locke's embrace of democracy in the form of majority rule was a mathematical averaging of political opinions, designed to keep a government from straying to far from a central balance.

This type of thinking was a response to what Smith, Locke, Malthus, and others (notably David Hume and Thomas Reid) saw as faulty attempts to theorize about political, moral, and ethical questions. Surveying the errors of various social theories, they saw, as Prof. Paul A. Rahe writes, people mistakenly thinking that

political and moral obligations have their foundation in a crass calculation regarding one's own security and material well-being, in a self-forgetting passion for the public good, or in a heroic and selfless will informed by the categorical imperative.

Such notions are both incorrect and doomed to failure, as both reason and experience show, because pure self-interest as a motivation will not sustain a society, because passion for the public good is easily fooled into destructiveness, and because the categorical imperative will instruct about what is right but cannot motivate.

Adam Smith, in place of these failed ethical frameworks, proposes something more subtle: a theory grounded

in the human capacity for sympathy and the natural human desire to garner respect and be genuinely worthy of it.

There is both a hint of selflessness and a bit of self-interest here: this mix is perhaps more realistic about human nature.

Morality is neither selfless nor what we would call selfish, but it is self-regarding. Men, as Smith understands them, are not isolated operators who calculate their interests. They make their way within civil society, and they are embedded in a social nexus in which they find that they have obligations.

Smith rejected naive utopianism, and instead looked for practical ways in which we could make the world, not perfect, but good enough to maintain a just society.

Time Before Time

Probably the first philosopher to precisely analyze the concept of time, using the tools of modern mathematics and physics, was Zeno of Elea (circa 500 B.C.) - which also makes us realize how old "modern" mathematics and physics really are! Ever since, the most brilliant philosophers have pondered the nature of time. All the great ones - Aristotle, Leibniz, Newton, Kant, Husserl - have striven to define the word "time." Augustine, writing around 400 A.D., is no exception.

Augustine systematically explained the history of man from Adam and Eve to his present. One hang-up Romans had with Christianity was that it did not seem to fit properly into the history of the world as they viewed it. Also, Christians had failed to answer some basic questions about time and creation. For example, there was an issue about what God was doing before creation. Augustine argued that time did not exist before creation. Anthony Kenny characterizes Augustine’s response to the Roman questions: “Rejecting the answer ‘Preparing hell for people who ask inquisitive questions’, Augustine responds that before heaven and earth were created, there was no time. We cannot ask what God was doing then, because there was no ‘then’ when there was no time. Equally, we cannot ask why the world was not created sooner, for before the world, there was no sooner.” Augustine believed that time was really only in the mind. While a tough concept, he gave an answer that at least satisfied some intellectuals. He also explained the history of man, from a Christian perspective. He’s able to explain all the earlier civilizations, and their role in history, and explain how all of it was in concert with Christianity. He believed that God has been with mankind since creation and Adam and Eve and could show it. It was an interpretation of time and history that Roman scholars could understand at an intellectual level.

Against a backdrop of pagan mythologies, which told stories about the tragic fates of those who ask questions, Augustine relished the idea of intellectual exploration. Instead of polytheism's mythological warning against inquisitiveness, Augustine eager engaged in mental exploration, including speculations about the nature of time.

Gender and History

Understanding one’s gender, and how one’s gender influences one’s thinking and social interactions, is of interest to philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists. We also see gender as an important topic in history. One need only think of the wars between Frederick the Great and Empress Maria-Theresa to agree, or to consider the progress which took place as the Judeo-Christian tradition removed some of the limits placed on women by earlier societies. In fact, it can be said that a necessary foundation for any society is the discovery of gender roles. Robert Lewis wrote:

After a lifetime of studying cultures and civilizations, both ancient and modern, the eminent anthropologist Margaret Mead made the following observation: “The central problem of every society is to define appropriate roles for men.” Author George Gilder adds: “Wise societies provide ample means for young men to affirm themselves without afflicting others.”

Psychologically, men are far more fragile than women. Men struggle with their identity much more than women do. Though feminists would have us believe that poor self-esteem is largely a female problem, caused primarily by social inequities, the evidence tells a different story. “Men, more than women,” says David Blankenhorn, “are culture-made.” For this reason, a cultural definition of manhood is critical.

Why would Margaret Mead, herself obviously a woman, stress that the “central” task for any society is to discover the correct roles “for men”? As an anthropologist, she had analyzed the data: the vast majority of major crimes, violent crimes, burglaries, vandalism, and graffiti are committed by men. Essentially all rapes are committed by men. Drunk driving is disproportionately male. Margaret Mead saw that men, if they do not discover their proper roles in society, are dangerous and destructive. Conversely, if men find, or are shown, the roles they ought to assume, they are productive.

The Start of Scholasticism

The ancient roots of Scholasticism were Aristotle and Augustine. Centuries after both of them were dead, the philosophers of the Middle Ages created the logical style of analysis which we call Scholasticism, and which formed the foundation for modern physics, mathematics, and chemistry. Scholasticism was characterized by rational debate, in which various viewpoints were examined carefully. As a movement, it reached its high point by around 1250 AD, and was on its way out by the 1400's. It lay dormant during the Renaissance era, when there was neither interest in logical debate, nor openness to competing viewpoints. Scholasticism was re-incarnated as modern philosophy in the disputes between Descartes and John Locke, and in the innovations of Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle.

But can we say that Augustine himself was a Scholastic? Usually he is identified as a "root" of Scholasticism, as one who laid the foundation for it, but not as a Scholastic proper.

Augustine was a scholastic in the sense he reconciled human reason with Christian faith. Scholasticism was actually a popular movement in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, gaining most of its momentum before and after the Crusades and bringing the reading of Greek, and the study of Aristotelian reasoning into Western Europe. The classics of Greece and Rome were never fully lost: from 476 AD onward, there was a continuous reading and study of the great Latin and Greek authors. The claim that the classical heritage was lost to Europe during the "dark ages" is both false and widely-accepted. Famous scholastics from that era like Pierre Abelard, Anselm, and Thomas Aquinas owe a great deal to Augustine. Augustine understood that Christianity was the same kind of truth that Plato and Aristotle discussed. That being the case, then all Christian concepts could be understood using reason, with the exception of God. To Augustine, God was beyond reason, and works in ways humans cannot understand. By showing that reason is a basis to understanding Christianity, Roman scholars could identify with the religion in a deeper manner. It made sense. He said, in one of his sermons, that “If you cannot understand, believe so you can understand.” In essence, he’s saying that faith is a precursor to knowledge. They are not contradictory. After all, you can't know anything unless you believe it. In fact, he believed that faith cleared the mind of confusion. “The skeptic concentrates on the weak points in human knowledge. The man of faith looks and see that there are points of strength also.” In his book City of God, he talks about how reason is a clear characteristic of God’s city. By espousing scholastic ideas, he made Christianity appealing to an even wider group of skeptics. However, this viewpoint of faith and reason will be subject to various interpretations during the middle ages: the Scholastics will present competing theories to explain how faith and reason work together.

In any case, Augustine, although he probably shouldn't be labeled a Scholastic in the technical sense of the word, clearly contains the main currents of Scholastic thought, if in embryonic form.

Architecture and Philosophy

In a strange and difficult-to-describe way, there is a connection between architecture and philosophy: between conversation about life after death and the shape of a stained-glass window; between the logical analysis of time and the curve of a stone arch. It is no mere coincidence that, for example, the great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was also an architect. "The disposition of Gothic sculpture," write Ann Mitchell,

is more controlled, since it is confined to the important unites of the building, the load-bearing capitals (in England, the keystones), and finally the facade and portals.

The organized nature of Gothic sculpture corresponds to the mathematical elegance of the philosophical books being written at the same time:

The logical quality is particularly apparent in the cathedrals of the Ile de France whose basis of design shows striking parallels with the forms of the current philosophical system known as Scholasticism. Its major work, the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, is another of the encyclopedic series of this period. Erwin Panofsky in his Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism has defined the system's three requirements. First, a presentation of the totality of knowledge (theological, moral, natural, and historical). This we have seen in the sculpture of the facades of the cathedrals. Secondly, an arrangement of this knowledge according to a uniform system of division and subdivision. This is best illustrated by the uniformity in design of a sector of the apse, the whole apse, and the choir. And thirdly, these divisions, though related to the whole, should be quite distinct; for example, the cross-section of a pier should explain the whole structure of the church. From the last quarter of the thirteenth century to the end of the middle ages, Scholasticism was beginning to be replaced by other systems and no longer had the same influence; nor was its effect felt so strongly outside the Ile de France.

The emphasis on reason during the era of Scholasticism and Gothic architecture made it an era which gave birth to the concepts which eventually became modern physics, chemistry, and mathematics.

From Plato to Jesus

One of Augustine's claims to fame is that he presented the internal logic of Christianity to Rome's educated classes, who had previously dismissed the new faith as superstition. How did he get them to see the step-by-step rationality of this concept of God, which was new to Rome, but had a long heritage in the Ancient Near East? Augustine understood that the Roman reader could not penetrate the Hebraic style of the New Testament: Jesus was a Rabbi, who presented his ideas in a typically Jewish fashion. The New Testament was a book written by Jews, for Jews, about Jews - and Roman readers were used to Greek philosophy and Latin poetry, which have very different internal logical structures. Augustine repackaged the concepts of Jesus into the language and style of Classical philosophy, and this made them accessible to the Roman reader.

In particular, Augustine was able to make a close link between Platonism and Christianity. He found they had similar themes, like dualism, the theory of the soul, and anti-materialism. The Neo-Platonists, sometimes just called the Platonists, were a group of intellectuals in the 4th and 5th century who studied the works of Plato and believed themselves to be his intellectual heirs. To clearly make that tie between what they were doing and what Christianity was all about was one of the greatest accomplishments of Augustine. “As a Christian, he is sure that he will never depart from the authority of Christ; as a Platonist he is confident that reason will find in Platonism what agrees with Christianity,” writes Peter Brown. Plato believed that the world is broken in the physical and metaphysical realms. The physical realm could not to be trusted. The metaphysical realm contained the ideas of truth and beauty. It was full of goodness. It was a realm that’s beyond physical, so it denied materialism. Augustine saw a very similar link between the metaphysical realm and heaven.

Coming to America

The greatness of America, in innovative science and technology, or in expanding democratic freedoms to include more and more people, arises from its roots. What we call "American" ideals are actually European concepts: the dignity of every human life, freedom of expression, offering equal opportunity - such notions were brought to this continent by Swedes, Norwegians, Poles, Danes, Czechs, Swiss, Austrians, and others. How did this flow of people arrive in America, and why? Thomas Sowell, one of the first African-Americans to earn a doctorate from Harvard, writes:

Later, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the currents of the French Revolution, the conquests of Napoleon, and the Restoration of autocratic rule by the Congress of Vienna after Waterloo all profoundly affected German emigration. About half the overseas German emigrants of the post-Waterloo era went to South America, but from 1830 until World War I, most German overseas emigration was to the United States - as high as 90 percent or more in some years.

This wealth of intellectual creativity - inventors working on everything from telescopes to rockets, from pharmaceuticals to metallurgy - came to America looking for a safe environment in which to work, when their homelands became turbulent, oppressed, or overtaxed:

The rise of liberal and radical opposition to German autocracy led to the abortive Revolution of 1848, after which many fled to escape persecution, or in despair of achieving greater freedom, or simply to find greater social and economic opportunity elsewhere. Nearly a million Germans moved to the United States during the decade of the 1850's.

The timing was crucial - these newcomers would tip the scales in favor of Abraham Lincoln's abolitionist Republican party, and boldly promote the Republican agenda of ending slavery.

The presence of German settlements facilitated the movement of more Germans to the same country, and indeed often to the same region or city. But this depended on the good or bad experiences of earlier emigrants. The South American experience of early German emigrants provided warnings to others in Germany to change their destinations.

Just as harsh conditions dampened the early enthusiasm for moving to South America (who really wants to live in the Amazon rain forest?), the outbreak of the Civil War temporary reduced emigration to the United States for several years.

There were reductions of immigration to the United States associated with the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War in Europe, and especially World War I. But in between, German immigration to America was massive. During the decade of the 1880's, about a million and a half Germans moved to the United States.

Again, note the timing - from Europe came the impetus, for example, to allow women to vote. Expanding notions of liberty were the heritage of the great philosophers and cultures, brought to America by these millions.

In the twentieth century, there were usually more immigrants to Germany than emigrants from Germany. Even after the Nazi regime came to power in 1933, repatriated Germans exceeded those leaving. Those leaving, however, included some of the leading German intellectuals and scientists - including a German Jew who would later give the United States the decisive military weapon of World War II, Albert Einstein, a pacifist who ushered in the nuclear age.

America benefited by welcoming some of the greatest minds - the spoils, plunder, and loot which the victors took from World War II were not in the form of jewels and gold, but in the form of intellectual leadership.