How the Scots Invented the Modern World (31 page)

If Hume had made a dog’s breakfast of Hutcheson’s moral theories (Hutcheson was horrified when he first read the
Treatise,
and did what he could to prevent Hume from getting a university appointment), he gave a similar disturbing twist to the question Lord Kames had started out with: Why does society exist? He agreed with his mentor that it was there to protect property. But Hume also pointed out that we are surrounded by a seething, crawling cesspool of passions, our own as well as those of others. Left to ourselves, with no external constraints, the result would be a murderous chaos—Hume certainly saw Hobbes’s view of man’s natural depraved state as more realistic than Hutcheson’s more exalted vision. Yet no society, even the best organized, can possibly police each and every outbreak of self-gratification at the expense of others. There aren’t enough minutes in the day. Any appeal to reason is hopeless, since “reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions”: and the passions are the root of the problem.

So, in order to survive, Hume concluded, society has to devise strategies to channel our passions in constructive directions. Through social rules and conventions and customs, internalized by its members and made into regular habits, it turns what might be socially destructive impulses into socially useful ones. The passion of lust becomes licit within the confines of marriage—which not only prevents social discord, but actually helps to propagate the society’s members. Anger and bloodlust are rightly condemned as socially disruptive—that is, unless they are unleashed on the battlefield against society’s enemies.

The passion of avidity could, if left without limits, destroy all social bonds, as each member of society robs and plunders his neighbors, and is plundered in turn. However, canalizing that desire and pushing it in a constructive direction makes it work to the benefit of society. Instead of robbing a bank, why not open one? One can make more money with less work and stress, and help his neighbors at the same time. In short, the passion of avidity becomes socialized—“refined” as William Robertson might say—and generates a sense of property. We can have what we want, when we want it, society tells us, just as long as we do not take it at the expense of the rights of others.

“There is no passion, therefore,” Hume concluded, “capable of controlling the interested affection but the very affection itself, by an alteration of its direction.” And he went further: “Men are not able radically to cure either in themselves or others that narrowness of soul which makes them prefer the present to the remote,” or, in other words, the short-term to the long-term. Men cannot change their nature. All they can do is create social and political arrangements that “render the observation of justice the immediate interest of some particular person, and its violation their more remote.” Hence the origin of government, and hence the best possible social framework within which human beings can operate, based on a secular Golden Rule: I won’t disturb your self-interest, if you don’t disturb mine.

This is the best we can hope for, in a world in which men are governed by self-interest, and “even when they extend their concern beyond themselves, it is not to any great distance”; in which morality is largely a matter of convention and ingrained habit; in which the laws of nature offer nothing to help, and appeals to reason fall on deaf ears; and with an empty sky above, devoid of divine guidance or even a supernatural presence. This world offers a form of liberty—the freedom to pursue one’s own self-interest—and a form of authority: the power of the magistrate “to punish transgressors, to correct fraud and violence, and to oblige men, however reluctant, to consult their own real and permanent [long-term] interests.” But, Hume had to conclude, there is nothing particularly exalted, or inspiring, about the nature of civil society.

What did his contemporaries make of all this? A large part of the response to Hume was, very understandably, negative. It comes as no great surprise that Hutcheson was horrified, or that the Kirk’s General Assembly tried to have him censured, or that he failed to get a university appointment not once but twice. But much of the response was respectful, and at times slightly celebratory, even among those, such as Edinburgh’s literati, who were deeply disturbed by the implications of Hume’s philosophy. This was not explained merely by his affable personality, which made him a popular guest at dinner parties and club meetings, or his elegant command of written English (although he always spoke it with a heavy Scottish burr). It arose from his own confidence in the future of civil society, which seems strange given its less-than-noble origins, and from his optimism about modern commercial society in particular.

The work that made him a major figure in British letters was his collection of
Political Discourses,
which Andrew Millar published in London in 1752, followed by other collections and reissues of earlier essays over the next half-decade. In them, Hume pointed out what seemed to him obvious: society’s effort to canalize human being’s passions into constructive channels
does
work; we do learn from past failures and manage over time to improve how government works and how it administers justice and protects civil rights. The whole growth of the British constitution from feudal despotism to modern liberty was proof of this. History revealed to Hume a growth of human industry and cooperation over time, as well as a growth of personal liberty of the sort Hutcheson and others celebrated. And central to it was the role of commerce, as the great engine of change:

It rouses men from their indolence; and presenting the gayer and more opulent part of the nation with objects of luxury, which they never have dreamed of, raises in them a desire of a more splendid way of life than what their ancestors enjoyed. . . . Imitation soon diffuses all these arts; while domestic manufactures emulate the foreign in their improvements. . . . Their own steel and iron, in such laborious hands, become the equal to the gold and rubies of the INDIES.

Commerce and liberty; liberty and refinement; refinement and the progress of the human spirit were all interrelated. And every Scottish Whig could applaud Hume’s statement that “it is impossible for the arts and sciences to arise, at first, among any people unless that people enjoy the blessing of a free government.”

But Hume also threw out a warning. Liberty was a fine thing, but it required a counterbalancing principle—something to remind us that human beings are creatures of their passions and that, left entirely to themselves, they become their passions’ slaves. Jacobites and Tories had had a point: no society can survive without some stable center of authority. The power of government is needed to redirect those potentially destructive passions, to “punish transgressors,” and ultimately to preserve the conditions under which liberty can be enjoyed. “In all governments,” Hume wrote, “there is a perpetual intestine struggle, open or secret, between Authority and Liberty, and
neither of them can ever
absolutely prevail in the contest.
”

Politics in modern society, then, must involve a tension between two conflicting, but complementary principles: liberty, which preserves individuals, and authority, which preserves society. Authority that is absolute and uncontrolled ends by destroying society itself; Hume foresaw what the history of totalitarianism would teach the rest of us. But he also realized that even in the freest society, “a great sacrifice of liberty” has to be made to authority, which, he wrote, “must be acknowledged essential to its very existence.”

How much of a sacrifice is, of course, the key question, for eighteenth-century Britons as well as for us. Hume never quite answered it, although he did, in his essays and his
History of England,
explore the conditions under which the question can be posed. However, it may be that Hume thought there was no real answer. He may have simply decided that the struggle is perpetual, and that we only realize we have gone too far when it is already too late.

As a philosopher and as a friend, Hume made a huge impact on Adam Smith. Smith read and understood him more thoroughly, perhaps, than any other contemporary. His own writings would be inconceivable without Hume’s peculiar take on the “progress” of civil society, and on what an imperfect, trial-and-error process it really is.

Hume swept away all that was pretentious and sanctimonious from the Scottish intellectual scene. Even his most telling opponent, Aberdeen’s Thomas Reid, acknowledged him to be one of the great philosophers of the age. Smith himself probably would have endorsed the German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s remark on first reading Hume, that it awakened his mind from its “dogmatic slumbers.” Hume had certainly cleared the air of illusions and made it free from cant. But there was still the question of what to build afterwards, and this is what Smith now undertook.

His starting point brought him back to where Hutcheson and Hume had first diverged. What makes us good? Is morality inborn, as Hutcheson insisted, a gift from God and nature? Or is it something that has to be imposed from outside, as Hume suggested, a system of punishments and rewards that mold us into creatures fit for society?

As he shuttled back and forth between Edinburgh and Glasgow in the 1750s, lecturing to students at one end and listening to papers at the Select Society at the other, Smith was thinking of ways to resuscitate Hutcheson’s original notion of an innate moral sense. But if Hutcheson had been right in one sense, that morality is something we carry inside us from birth, he had forgotten about the need for what Smith would call the “awful virtues”: discipline, self-restraint, moral rectitude, and righteous anger at wrongdoers. The virtues of the ancient Stoics and of the Calvinist Kirk were just as necessary to life in society as were civility and compassion, because they policed the sometimes volatile frontiers of our dealings with others. How ironic it must have seemed, that the clergyman Hutcheson should overlook their importance, and that the skeptical agnostic Hume should understand how they contained and channeled our most explosive impulses!

In fact, Smith was trying to build a notion of an inborn moral sense that was more basic and instinctual, and less abstract, than his former teacher’s notion. He eventually found it in what he called “fellow feeling,” a natural sense of identification with other human beings. When we see someone suffer, we suffer. When we see others happy and celebrating their good fortune, it raises our own spirits. To be a social creature, part of the world of men, is to experience the joy and sorrow, and the pleasure and pain, of others.

This “fellow feeling” and identification with others leads to our first moral judgments. We use it first to judge others’ actions toward us (what makes me feel happy is good, and what makes me sad is bad), and then our own actions toward others, as we watch their reactions. Then, finally, we use it to judge the motivating passions behind those actions (here Smith accepted Hume’s basic point, that human beings were largely governed by their passions, not reason). Society acts as a mirror to our inner self, by reflecting back to us the reactions of others, and becomes our guide to what is good and evil in the world. “Were it possible,” Smith wrote, “that a human creature could grow up to manhood in a solitary place, without any communication with his own species, he could no more think of his own character . . . than of the beauty or deformity of his own face.”

Bring him into society, however, Smith stated, “and he is immediately provided with the mirror which he wanted before.” He will see that some of his passions—anger, for example, or lust—trigger other people’s disgust and disapproval, while others—bravery in the face of adversity or love or fame—get the opposite response. We learn to adjust our passions accordingly, we “internalize” that approval and disapproval, and concentrate ourselves on those that make us loved by others—and by ourselves.

H. L. Mencken once defined conscience as a little voice that says “someone might be watching.” For Smith’s
Theory of Moral Sentiments,
that someone is myself, my social self. “When I endeavor to examine my own conduct,” he wrote, “I divide myself, as it were, into two persons. . . . The first is the spectator, whose sentiments with regard to my own conduct I endeavor to enter into, by placing myself in his situation, and by considering how it would appear to me, when seen from that particular point of view. The second is the agent, the person whom I properly call myself. . . . The first is the judge; the second the person judged of.” The moral human being is by nature a divided self, united by the voice of conscience, which is the voice of others who watch and listen and judge. Postmodern morality tells us constantly, “Don’t be judgmental”—yet Adam Smith was saying that being judgmental is the essence of what makes us moral beings.

It is also about being accountable to ourselves as well as to others. “Nature, when she formed man for society,” Smith explained, “endowed him with an original desire to please, and an original aversion to offend his brethren. She taught him to feel pleasure in their favourable, and pain in their unfavourable regard.” But again, the approval of others is not enough by itself. We are not by nature entirely “other-directed” beings. We also need to meet the approval of our own inner judging self, which understands when we really are what we approve in other people: honest, trustworthy, generous, compassionate. It is this capacity for self-judgment that, Smith argued, makes us “really fit” for society.

So being moral requires an interplay of imagination. It demands that we put ourselves in another person’s place, and put another person (someone making judgments) in our place. It leads us to promote the well-being of others, by making them as happy as ourselves—here Hutcheson’s altruistic instincts come back into play. At the same time we want others to leave our own happiness undisturbed—and here Smith gave a more sympathetic account of Hume’s Golden Rule: I’ll leave you alone, if you leave me alone, so that we can both be happy.