Wrong On Darwin, Right on Adam Smith

'The Age of Empathy' by Dutch psychologist and primatologist, Frans de Waal, using primate tendencies as a model, contends that humans are hard-wired for compassion. In Los Angeles Times by Sara Lippincott, a freelance editor specializing in science. HERE:

“De Waal's principal thesis is that when contemplating our evolutionary heritage, we see ourselves more as natural-born competitors than natural-born empathizers and cooperators. "[U]ntil recently," he writes, "empathy was not taken seriously by science. Even with regards to our own species, it was considered an absurd, laughable topic. . . . " Some of us indeed have tended to think like Social Darwinist Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase Darwin has been unfairly stuck with: "survival of the fittest." Indeed, some, like Hitler and the American and British eugenicists of the early 20th century, have tended to think that only the fittest ought to survive. But De Waal's readership is probably aware by now that altruism too has been built into the animal kingdom.

Nevertheless, he rightly argues that we modern humans need to recognize and cultivate our fellow feeling, "an innate age-old capacity" that has been naturally selected for -- for the excellent reason that without it we would have gone extinct long ago. "It's not as though we're asking our species to do anything foreign to it by building on the old herd instinct that has kept animal societies together for millions of years," he writes. "Every individual is connected to something larger than itself. . . . The connection is deeply felt and . . . no society can do without it."

De Waal bolsters his case with plentiful anecdotes of sweet-natured primates and contemporary examples of ill-advised human cold-bloodedness (Enron, the response to Hurricane Katrina). Along the way, you learn a lot of interesting primatological arcana, such as that apes can't swim and invariably defecate when excited.

In concluding, De Waal points out that Adam Smith, the alpha male of free marketeers, has consistently been misunderstood. Smith's disciples "leave out an essential part of his thinking, which is far more congenial to the position I have taken throughout this book, namely, that reliance on greed as the driving force of society is bound to undermine its very fabric."

Comment
Frans De Waal is a much respected scientist, often working at the frontier of primate studies and human societies. Hence, when Sara Lippincott attributes to Darwin the following statement:

“Social Darwinist Herbert Spencer, who coined the phrase Darwin has been unfairly stuck with: "survival of the fittest",

I am a loss to explain from where she got her ideas about the origins of the phrase, "survival of the fittest”. I am sure they do not come from Frans De Waal; at least I hope not, because Frans will be familiar with Charles Darwin’s, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex’ (1871: John Murray, London) and Darwin uses the phrase, survival of the fittest”, several times.

For example:

“In an area as large as some of these islands [New Guinea, Borneo, Australia], the competition between tribe and tribe would have been sufficient, under favourable conditions, to have raised man, through the survival of the fittest, to have the inherited effect of habit, to his present high position in the organic scale” (page 157).

Either Frans is momentarily forgetful, or, more likely, Sara she carelessly summarising Frans’ observation on how often Herbert Spenser used the phrase in his arguments as an epigone of Darwin.

By the way, for balance, we should add some fairly respectable people to Hitler’s name, among whom we have Marie Stopes, Emile Zola, Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, John Maynard Keynes, Winston Churchill, and Sidney Webb.

The last paragraph, however, is encouraging. Greed had nothing to do with Adam Smith’s theories of how humans interact socially. That notion comes from popular misattribution of “greed” as a philosophy to Smith when it was, in fact, an idea of Bernard Mandeville’s (1724).

Beyond The Facts

Anthony North posts in Beyond the Blog HERE:

“Let me make something very clear. Greed is not bad. In order to succeed both individually and as a society, we need to be stimulated. Due to this, we have urges. Without them I doubt if humanity would have advanced at all – and greed is one of those urges.

The problem comes in the level of greed we display. Be too greedy and we hurt both ourselves and society, so it’s a matter of balance. Sadly, though, in today’s capitalism we have a glorification of greed, with it getting out of control. This was not how capitalism was meant to be, originally devised by Adam Smith as a
philosophy to go alongside thrift. We seem to have turned something noble into a feeding trough.”

Comment
“Greed is one of those urges” but is it predominant? Is everybody greedy for everything all of the time? I don’t think so. Life would be pretty grim if it was.

Bernard Mandeville, author of “The Fable of the Bees” (1724), developed a whole philosophy on the basis that greed predominated and he gave it his blessing (“Private Vice, Public Virtue”).

Ayn Rand modernised the idea that selfishness was a virtue and created a school for her philosophy (“Objectivism”) which found popularity undergraduates philosophy classes. (You can find some of her lectures on U-Tube, with wide-eyed students listening in awe).

However, greed and selfishness were never popular with Adam Smith. He called Mandeville’s philosophy “licentious” but plausible in parts as an observation of an aspect of human nature in his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).

Anthony asserts that “in today’s capitalism we have a glorification of greed, with it getting out of control.” Well, is a point of view, though you can read 18th-cxentury sermons in the same tone, and I doubt whether you will find examples throughout history where similar sentiments have not been expressed by someone about their contemporaries.

But Anthony also asserts “This was not how capitalism was meant to be, originally devised by Adam Smith as a philosophy to go alongside thrift.” Where does Anthony get the mishmash of erroneous ideas to compose such a sentence?

There is no such way in which ‘capitalism was meant to be’. Social systems are not ‘designed’ by anyone. The appear in various forms and experience different histories according to how individuals react to circumstances.

Hayek, and others, refer to this as a ‘spontaneous’, or ‘emergent’ order, unintentionally arising by the independent actions of people. That, if I may say so, is their strength. No single person could undertake the myriad of actions that would enable an economy to establish itself, for good or ill.

Which makes the second part of his paragraph, “originally devised by Adam Smith as a philosophy to go alongside thrift”, a misreading of both the emergence of what we call now call capitalism and a misattribution to Adam Smith of that which he had no conscious part.

For a start, Smith neither knew the word, nor the phenomenon of ‘capitalism’. The word itself was first used in English (Oxford English Dictionary) in 1854 by Makepeace Thackeray in his novel, The Newcomes. Smith died in 1790. He couldn’t devise that which did not yet exist, and couldn’t devise a complex economic system even if he had wanted to. In fact, he warned against ‘men of system’ who, ‘wise in their conceit’, force their designs upon others.

Adam Smith was a moral philosopher and saw his scholarly duty as ‘doing nothing, but observing everything’. He analysed how commercial societies functioned in 18th-century Britain – already a major trading economy and major political player in Europe – and wrote in his Wealth Of Nations a devastating critique of mercantile political economy, as practised in Europe.

The players in commercial society dispersed in their private lives did not conform to a master plan for commerce or government. Depending on their history and circumstances their commercial societies grew ‘slowly and gradually’ (some of which struggled because state interventions held back their natural courses and all were affected by the usual ‘jealousies of trade’, petty wars of dynastic succession, legislated anti-competitive tariffs, protections and prohibitions, and the vagaries of different personalities.

To see history as a journey from a sort of ‘ideal’ design towards “a feeding trough” is quite inadequate. Anthony North should re-think his assessments, perhaps read a bit more Adam Smith, and reflect on his current opinions.