About 8 years ago, I wrote an article titled “Is Self-interest Sufficient to Organize a Free Economy?” and posted it on the Free Software Foundation website. In it, I argued that Adam Smith was not an individualist while I seem to have made Adam Smith the poster boy for the evil of modern liberalism (individualism) in my book To See a World in a Grain of Sand. My views of Adam Smith have certainly changed as have my views of liberalism. I see the conservatives likely to defend Adam Smith as being no more than right-wing liberals and I find their ways of morally forming human beings to be ultimately as individualistic as was Adam Smith.
As the reader of To See a World in a Grain of Sand might realize, I see public marketplaces to be inherently corrupting, inherently destructive of the traditional forms of human life. That is, public marketplaces should be entered only by representatives of local communities which have needs they cannot satisfy on their own or surplus goods. Public marketplaces are not for daily use nor for the use of children or the gentler sort of folk — and I sometimes fear I’m in that category.
Anyway, a right-wing liberal, such as the fine gentlemen and ladies at National Review or even Rush Limbaugh, wish to be individuals in the public marketplaces but they seem to imagine that such individuals can be shaped by pseudo-traditional institutions such as the nuclear family, that is mom and dad and kids without grandma and grandpa and all those annoying aunts and uncles. When the morality of more traditional forms of life was still embedded in the very language of human beings and in their habits, as it they were in the citizens of Glasgow observed by Adam Smith, then it is possible to keep the game going for another few generations — or less. But the game is in its final stages.
Adam Smith wished to preserve Western Civilization in the state of decay it had reached in his day — Christianity was dead but the corpse was still fresh. Well, the corpse has decayed, though Christianity has been reborn in tiny forms outside the mainstream of Western Civilization. In any case, modern right-wing liberals, such as Limbaugh or the late Barry Goldwater, are looking to exhume the corpse and prop it up, maybe pumping some blood into its collapsed veins.
As I noted in To See a World in a Grain of Sand, the nuclear family of Father Knows Best fame was invented by the Evangelical William Wilberforce, his wife, and some of their friends in the so-called Clapham Sect. They invented this rather shallow form of human family life in a brave but futile effort to protect children from the corrosive effects of Industrial Capitalism. I further noted that Daddy accepted his role of going out into the dangerous world to earn a living while living wife and children safe in the castle, but Daddy quickly began developing goods and services that destroyed the role of that wife and mother and eventually goods and services that invaded the home to re-shape the children to the needs of corporate entities and centralized governments.
The human social and political structures which so many right-wing liberals long to restore worked to ease our ancestors into this brave, new world. Even if it were possible to restore the world of Father Knows Best, we should be smart enough to see it was never a desirable world but only a desparate attempt to delay the inevitable effect of prosperity, it makes men as dumb as the beasts of the field as King David, or his proxies, once claimed. It also makes them corrupt enough to prey upon their own wives and children and don’t kid yourself that a large percentage of our GNP has consisted of profits from predatory activities.
No, self-interest isn’t enough to organize an economy but the teaching of moral rules to a modern individual will not produce anyone capable of standing up to the pressures of the modern corporate and governmental worlds. All it can do is produce those nice people discussed by Hanna Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem and other works, the nice people who were necessary to carry out the schemes of Hitler and Stalin because the fanatics and true-believers were too stupid to build the systems which moved the Jews east or manufactured all those weapons and poison gases and so forth.