A decade ago, I joined a small mélange of folks trying to revive interest in Adam Smith the enlightenment thinker and fierce opponent of feudalism and aristocratism, whose best-known work in 1776 accompanied the US Revolution. This should not have been necessary, as Smith made repeatedly clear that the truest enemies of fair markets were always cheaters at the top, always (across 6000 years and all continents) conniving to rob hardworking competitors in the middle, in order to favor their own inheritance-brat sons.
(Soviet nomenklatura ‘commissars’ and their unmasked Putin versions were no exceptions.)
By that light – as even F. Hayek said – maximizing the number of skilled, confident competitors absolutely requires mass education/health/nutrition and rights for poor children, lest their diverse talent be wasted, instead of surging happily into creative markets. In other words, today Smith would be a 'liberal' in both the old and the new senses of the label.
Lately, Smith has won a bit of a revival, as seen here: The Betrayal of Adam Smith by K. Phillips-Fein:
“Smith had a deep and abiding dislike for nobility, aristocracy, and the leisured rich. In his view, these groups influenced state policy in ways that betrayed the larger interest. As historian Robert Heilbroner has proposed, material productivity was important to Smith because it could occasion “that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people.” For Smith, the “butcher, the brewer” and “the baker” were the people who mattered.”
Well worth reading! Though my own insights into Smith still have some freshness. ‘Adam Smith - Liberals, you must reclaim him!’
== Roots of autocratic lying ==
Let me start this section with some paragraphs from 'Arresting Our ‘Flight From Reality’ by Bard College Prof. Roger Berkowitz. “Because an ideology “looks upon all factuality as fabricated, it no longer knows any reliable criterion for distinguishing truth from falsehood.”
“In 1949, when Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) went to Germany as part of the New York-based Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Commission, she was struck by the way the Germans showed an “at times vicious refusal to face and come to terms with what really happened.” This “escape from reality,” as Arendt named it, meant that the reality of the Holocaust and the death factories was spoken of as a hypothetical. And when the truth of the Holocaust was admitted, it was diminished: “The Germans did only what others are capable of doing.”
“The Germans, at times, simply denied the facts of what had happened. One woman told Arendt that the “Russians had begun the war with an attack on Danzig.” What Arendt encountered was a “kind of gentleman’s agreement by which everyone has a right to his ignorance under the pretext that everyone has a right to his opinion.” The underlying assumption for such a right is the “tacit assumption that opinions really do not matter.” Opinions are just that, mere opinions. And facts, once they are reduced to opinions, also don’t matter. Taken together, this led to a “flight from reality.”
“The focus of Arendt’s lifelong engagement with the human flight from reality was her encounter with ideologies, specifically Nazism and Bolshevism. In The Origins of Totalitarianism and other texts (especially her essay, On the Nature of Totalitarianism), Arendt defines an ideology as a system that seeks to explain “all the mysteries of life and the world” according to one idea.”
Of course these passages are redolent today, as some on the far-left and nearly the entire American right strenuously denounce any recourse to factual validation or falsification. Their narratives - or ideologies - are paramount, over-ruling mere objective reality. Indeed, to that fringe left and entirely-mad right, the most-hated common foe are the nerds of fact professions, especially science.
The first half of this article is so perfectly on target and diagnostic of the same flaw in human nature that I often point-to - our propensity for self-satisfying delusion, (a flaw that is also a taproot to our greatest gifts, like art and love). Ideologies, especially, can be ecstatically masturbatory, simplifying all of those who disagree into mistakes, to be corrected with erasure.
I concur, while adding that another (or overlapping) common element is romanticism. Nazism, Stalinism, the American Confederacy (in all of its manifestations) were all romantic movements (Mark Twain blamed the Civil War on the novels of Sir Walter Scott.) We see many common features in the works of Tolkien and George Lucas, as innately superior beings are elegantly admirable (and pretty) while opposing orcs or robots or clone soldiers or masked storm troopers can be mowed down without qualm, as none of them have faces or mothers.
== We are experimental exceptions to the rule ==
I go into this in Vivid Tomorrows. And oh sure, I have earned most of my income by penning tales that have strong romantic elements! I write such passages mostly at night, when the wind rustles tree branches and I feel thrumming echoes of the caves.
Still, I know what kind of civilization made me and gave me everything I have. I have always tried to push the notion that romanticism has no business - after 6000 years of calamities - getting involved in the daytime pursuits of politics, policy, science, justice and negotiation based on pragmatically verifiable facts.
Alas, the second half of Berkowitz's essay dives into Arendt’s dyspeptic growl at modernity and science accusing them of the same ideology-driven delusion as Marxism! An assertion that I deem easily refuted. If any of you do read the Arendt essay - it was not ‘reconciliation’ that defeated Nazis or Leninist romantics or the many phases of confederatism. It was a spirit of courage to face the ‘loneliness’ that she describes as the cost of escaping romanticism. Courage in alliance with different and varied others, whose very differences contribute to a healthy and wholesome tribe/nation/humanity.
A courage that westerners don't like to gather, unless hard-pressed! But that they showed at Cowpens and Kings Mountain and Gettysburg and Midway and in alliances that stabilized the recent 80 years of the American pax into the least violent and most prosperous of the last 60 centuries. A courage and unity - in the face of blatant resurgence by neo-feudalist neo-Nazis attacking Ukraine and the entire Enlightenment Experiment, as we speak.
So no, Hannah. We are not all so terrified, all the time, that we must clutch demonizing ideologies. There are other emotions, like courage, patience and humor. And curiosity, God's second greatest gift, just after love.
And yes, an appreciation of facts and willingness to change our contingent models of the world (despite Plato’s yammers about the hopelessness of that wondrous pursuit.)
Putting aside the fact that - despite my respect for Hannah Arendt - I feel no need to heed desperately nasty and insane "insights" by either Nietzsche or Hegel - where I chiefly disagree with Arendt is over her outright dismissal of human provability.
Sure, I do not take seriously today's pathetic immortality fetishists... or nutters who think they can promote themselves - via miraculous technology - to godhood. On the other hand, I do recognize that we stand on the shoulders of generations who struggled to make us better than them…
… and we are! Better than them. Each generation of Americans - for example - has struggled over demands that we expand our horizons of inclusion. And slowly - (far too grindingly slowly) - we have done so, in too-small increments, but still ratcheting forward, each generation. And science, disproving ten thousand folk assumptions, played a major role in that.
== Guy who gets it ==
Swinging to another article you might want to look at...
In Defense of Democratic Capitalism: From the Financial Times (possible paywall), Martin Wolf offered a cogent essay that makes my own point - that our struggles today are not about ‘socialism’ or ‘capitalism’ per se, but about rediscovering the careful navigation achieved by the Rooseveltean Compact, which led to the greatest era of hope and progress and (relative) peace in all of human history. A compact whose spectacular successes – greater than ALL feudal or Marxist regimes put together, put an onus - a burden of proof - on all those now raging against it, whether ‘left’ or ‘right.’
In “Defence of democratic capitalism,” Wolf’s interesting "thesis is that it is impossible to sustain a universal suffrage democracy with a market economy if the former does not appear open to the influence — and the latter does not serve the interests — of the people at large. This, in turn, demands a political response rooted not in the destructive politics of identity, but of welfare for all citizens — that is, a commitment to economic opportunity and basic security for all."
Or as I put it - paraphrasing Adam Smith and even Hayek - we need our competitive institutions of democracy, markets and so-on to be positive-sum across an effectively level playing field.
Martin Wolf continues: "Building on FDR himself, domestic policy goals should be rising, widely shared and sustainable standards of living, good jobs for those who can work, equality of opportunity, security for those who need it and ending “special privileges” for the few."
Amen, Though it's hard to achieve, given that so much power has, the last few decades, flowed into the hands of a world oligarchy of what the author calls "rentier" lords (after Adam Smith). Especially since that caste has proved - relentlessly and consistently - to be far less intelligent - or even sapient - than their sycophant flatterers keep telling them they are.
(Inability to perceive the dangerous poison of sycophancy is clear in fools who yowl stuff like: "I no longer believe democracy is compatible with freedom." Whatever, Gilgamesh.)
Even a scintilla of understanding would awaken them to the savvy shown in the 1930s by old Joe Kennedy, who backed the Rooseveltean reforms, saying that he'd rather half his wealth were taken to uplift a contented middle class, 'than lose it all to revolution.'
"Growth remains essential. So does the welfare state, which makes economic as well as social sense. It can insure risks the private sector will not insure. Properly designed, it can offer everybody a leg up and so promote equality of opportunity."
What the author doesn't mention is that the most fundamental ethos and logic of market competition - as propounded by Smith and even by conservative doyens like Friedrich Hayek - is that markets work best with the largest number of skilled, knowledgeable, empowered and confident competitors. And hence, any liberal 'program' that helps convert poor children into skilled, knowledgeable, empowered and confident competitors is utterly justified and even required, in purely Smithian market terms.
Those who oppose even that kind of social intervention are not pushing for creative markets.
They are reaching desperately for the same tired pattern of 6000 years. Good luck with those harems, guys. Only get to know the word "tumbrel."
== More on (not moron) Karl Marx ==
Final essay to appraise here, I promise.
My earlier riff comparing Isaac Asimov’s Hari Seldon to Isaac’s influences – Gibbon, Toynbee, Marx, Spengler and so on, led to a lot of discussion. See “Isaac Asimov, Karl Marx & the Hari Seldon Paradox.”
And as always happens nowadays, folks popped up some of the most-wrongheaded and just plain wrong popular notions. Especially about Marx. Let me therefor try to encapsulate a hugely simplified distillation re Marx:
1) First, any citing of Hegelian 'dialectic' automatically knocks anyone down five pegs. Hegel was a flaming horror, detestable and disprovable on any level. Fortunately for Marx, his lip service to Hegel was just a sop to German philosophy-mystics. It was aside from his chief focus on the historic evolution of power and capital.
2) Marx was a Historiographer. And by far his greatest contributions regarded advancing from Smith and Ricardo the notions of capital formation that he saw going on the the previous 300 years.
At some level his description of human advancement through phases dependent upon technological level and society's capital (roads, factories, etc) was simply and obviously true. From tribal societies to feudal to monarchy allied with tradesmen, to bourgeois revolution, to industrial capitalism, it was clear to even his opponents that Karl was onto something with his models of past development.
As was his notion that capitalists played an important role by retaining much of what workers created, in order to invest it into new capital. Hence the word capitalist.
And so the first surprise. True Marxists believe capitalists have a big historical role to play and are not inherently evil! That is, until their final phase, when wealth hierarchy peaks under a narrow clade of uber lords, á la Ayn Rand. Marx and his fans thought they saw that phase rapidly approaching, just ahead, in the giant steel mills and smoking railroads of the last 19th Century. But - like predictions of the Second Coming - that forecast proved to be a mug's game! It turned out a lot more 'capital' needed to be built... or 'formed'... than just steel mills and railroads.
3) Alas, Marx also tried to systematize that insight (capitalists steal some from workers in order to use profits to make capital) with an insanely dumb notion called the Labor Theory of Value. Still, in the most general sense, his appraisals of historical patterns were pretty on-target...
... that is, up until his actual present.
At which point...
4) ...at which point we see (for the millionth time) that explaining the past does not make you a prophet of things to come. In fact, there were almost zero Marxian predictions that came true! Leaving Lenin, Mao and others utterly puzzled. Till they concocted rationalizations to make themselves czars /emperors, with Marx serving as their validating prophet.
No, Marx's greatest effects were in the WEST! Where he was read as a gifted Science Fiction author spinning plausible tales of a near future that terrified enough powerful men that they decided to try staving it off with reform. And that was where, by being canceled by reform, Marx actually changed the world.
And I will eat a bug if more than a couple of you knew any of that. I say that with no rancor or smugness. No one seems to know shit, nowadays.
Anyway, if you actually read all the way here, maybe you actually are an exception. Sorry about that. Tired from a recent airplane trip....
And finally...
"It's easy to be right about what's wrong, while being wrong about what would be right." - attributed (aprocyphally?) to Karl Popper.
Popper was talking specifically about Marx, but also more generally about those who denounce bad things (e.g. repression or prejudice or poverty), only to loudly prescribe tactics and methods that are at-best futile or counterproductive ...
...and all-too often replicate the denounced crimes! It's one of Santayana's 'repeated mistakes of history' ...
...only, again alas, hardly anyone knows any history, anymore.
