MAN-DEVIL: THE MIND & TIMES OF
BERNARD MANDEVILLE, The Wickedest Man in Europe.
John Callanan
ISBN 978-0-691-16544-8
Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments begins:
“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles
in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their
happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the
pleasure of seeing it.”
Mandeville scandalised the moralists, as was his intent. From the start, he
was a polemical writer. His early works attracted little attention, which
was what he craved. He was in his early forties when The Fable
appeared. The clock was ticking. The standard technique of disrupters is to
say what they know will offend. Mandeville’s book was a palpable hit. He had
bitten the moralists and they scratched. His target was not morality, which
he failed to gain any significant hold on, but abundant moralism. Early
eighteenth century London was replete with hypocrites: good, Christian ,
respectable husbands and fathers who frequented prostitutes and abused their
daughters. Like Freud in late nineteenth century Vienna, Mandeville didn’t
have to look far to discover the rottenness beneath the gloss. Had he made a
serious attempt to define morality, he might have secured a small audience.
By conflating it with moralism and exposing the sham, he was assured of
notoriety.
Callanan claims Mandeville was asking a new question: “Was it possible to be
morally good in a commercial, capitalist society?” If we accept Callanan’s
definition of a moral action as one applicable in all possible contexts, it
isn’t possible to be moral anywhere. The failure to define what morality is
generates the confusion. Morality is the necessity of choosing how to act.
General principles sometimes apply, but often they don’t. The choice has to
be made in context, but we are forced to choose, just as we are forced to
think. It’s our biological inheritance. Try to stop yourself thinking. You
can do it only by thinking about not thinking. Callanan is wrong: Mandeville
wasn’t writing in a capitalist
society. Commercial, yes, but capitalism hadn’t yet got off the ground.
England was still largely agrarian. Cottage industry was widespread.
Merchants had money and wanted to use it to make more, but large-scale
capitalist industry to invest in wasn’t yet in existence. The “miserable”
who were the lowest of the seven categories into which Daniel Defoe divided
the nation, sometimes starved to death. Parliament was heavily influenced by
the landed class. The flying shuttle wasn’t invented until 1733, the
spinning jenny in 1764, the water frame in 1769, the spinning mule in 1779
and though Newcomen’s engine
was running in 1712 it was 1778 before James Watt brought the steam engine
to a high standard. A working-class in the sense of a mass of workers
organised into a labour force to be employed by capital didn’t exist. The
characteristic form of property in 1714 was land, not capital.
Why then does Callanan claim Mandeville was living in a capitalist society?
He’s tripping over his own anticipation.
He so readily embraces the notions that by allowing “vice” to
flourish, there will be benefit to the economy as a whole, and we ought to
separate economics from morality and learn to “see economically”, he gets
carried away and gives capitalism too early a birth. There is plenty of
evidence for industry in the seventeenth century, and England was a
productive commercial society by 1700, but society wasn’t defined by
capitalism till decades later.
Writing in response to his
critics, Mandeville said: “I am far from encouraging vice, and should think
it an unspeakable felicity for a state, if the sin of uncleanness could be
utterly banished from it; but I am afraid it is impossible.” As usual,
Mandeville has his tongue in the reader’s cheek, but his claim that the
impossibility of eradicating the worst in human nature should lead us to
encourage it, is perverse.
Callanan claims Mandeville operates like a social anthropologist. He was a
physician and therefore had a claim to scientific method, but his polemical
writing eschews the scientific. There has to be
choice: you can’t be a satirist and a scientist simultaneously.
Mandeville claims to be revealing how humanity really is, but on what
evidence? Principally by observing what was going on around him in London.
Nothing wrong with that as a starting point, but there has to be something
like a third-party view to derive anything worthwhile from it. What did
Mandeville know of pre-history? If characteristics are to be claimed as
intrinsic to homo sapiens, it has to be possible to demonstrate they have
always been so. About fifty thousand years ago we gained language and
abstract thought (quite quickly, in contradiction of Mandeville’s view of
slow development over very long periods). It is reasonable to argue they
have been characteristic since. On what grounds can it be claimed that all
societies have shared their essential characteristics with the commercial
London of the early eighteenth century? In essence, this is Mandeville’s
position. His claim to have penetrated to the essence of human nature is
bogus.
He is a cod anthropologist. The discipline didn’t yet exist. His claim that
conniving politicians introduced the notion of morality to serve their wish
for control has no basis in empiricism. On the other hand, there is
convincing empirical evidence for an innate moral faculty. Simple runaway
train problems-you control the points, if the train goes left it kills one,
right it kills five-produce remarkably consistent results across cultures.
Mandeville needs to deny that we are moral by nature in order to sustain his
contention that all morality is a fraud, in spite of which he argues that
prostitution defends the moral virtue of respectable women.
Mandeville, Callanan writes, believed we have a great capacity for
self-deception, a banal observation. Almost the whole of world literature
depends on its recognition. Mandeville introduces a new concept, argue
Mandeville: false consciousness. The idea gained its most famous expression
in Marx where it serves as a catch-all defence: the working-class is bound
to be revolutionary, if it isn’t, it’s guilty of false consciousness. Either
way, my theory is proven. The same sleight of hand is at work in Mandeville.
He has unmasked self-deception and is therefore the sole arbiter of what is
genuine. All claims to morality are false (except when he makes them). He
sees through to the pride which is the source of all human thought and
action (he stole the idea from Montaigne who drew very different
implications) anyone who doesn’t see this is guilty of false consciousness.
The circularity gives him security but tells us nothing. That people have
difficulty understanding their own minds is hardly a revelation.
Callanan claims everything in Mandeville’s thought traces back to his belief
that we are animals. So does almost everything in Bakunin’s, but they draw
remotely different conclusions. The difficult is understanding what nature
has endowed us with. Some things are easy to see: it’s human to have two
arms and legs, barring cruel diseases and accidents. Once we start to ask
how we act in complex situations, we are blundering in the dark. Mandeviile
arrogantly assumes he has the answer: we are always looking to enhance our
esteem. His arguments, however seeming sophisticated, are reductive. He
bangs the same drum over and over: we are vicious and self-regarding, but
don’t worry, it makes us rich and powerful. Maybe the opposite is true, that
wanting to be rich and powerful makes us vicious and self-regarding.
Mandeville has no means of establishing his theory empirically. He sees
perfectly clearly that early eighteenth century London is corrupt and can’t
function without the stimulation of vice, but he can’t embrace the idea that
perhaps that’s the problem. His contention is that if we try to eliminate
vice, the economy will collapse but he has no proof that a flourishing
economy can’t be based on benevolent motivation. Consider Spain during the
Civil War. Briefly and in part, the anarchists pushed aside both capitalists
and the State, but the result wasn’t collapse. On the contrary, the
anarchist areas were hives of activity, just not for personal enrichment.
Adam Smith may have approved. In the Theory of Moral Sentiments he
calls the pursuit of personal wealth “a delusion”.
Montaigne argued that the difference between animals and humans is one of
degree not kind. It’s a reasonable contention. We are all products of
evolution and natural selection; but no other creature has or ever has had
language. We are set apart from the rest of the animals by this astonishing
faculty. Nor do other animals have abstract thought at anything like the
human level. These may be differences of degree, but they are very
substantial. There is a little push in Callanan to claim we are irrational
because controlled by our instincts like other animals. Our passions make us
irrational. Is that what the evidence suggests? Antonio Damasio makes the
opposite case in Descartes’ Error, regarding the famous case of
Phineas Gage, whose brain injury took away the tissue related to emotion but
left him intellectually undamaged. The result was a transformation from a
diligent, polite, sober, self-possessed pillar of society to a foul-mouthed,
wayward drunkard. Emotion, in Damasio’s reading, makes us rational. The
inability to read emotions is a cruel deficit. It doesn’t render people more
rational, but confused and isolated. Callanan, like Mandeville, has to
assume emotion is vicious, wild, nasty and logic is what makes us behave
well. It isn’t necessary to think very far to see how empty this is: Harold
Shipman didn’t lack logic, nor did Stalin. Adam Smith was right to employ
sentiments in the title of his work on morality. Biology has provided us
with emotions which guide our actions. We are not divided between devilish
instinct and saintly logic. Montaigne claimed that human characteristics
place us “in the lowest category of animate creatures”. He takes this false
position in order to set “characteristics” against culture: we are debased
by the former, elevated by the latter. He’s mistaken. Our highest faculties
are biological endowments.
Pride, in Mandeville’s view, is our original sin, but he doesn’t adequately
define it. Suppose a surgeon who successfully removes a tumour and sees her
patient recover; is there any fault in being proud of her accomplishment? In
this sense, pride means taking pleasure in something well done. Is that
vicious? What Mandeville is getting at is what today we would call
narcissism, the compensation for a weak sense of self which leads people to
deny impersonal values and common standards. Narcissism, however, is not
native but the product of denaturing circumstances, like those of early
eighteenth century England.
Mandeville does make a good point when he criticises the intellectual
presumption which assumes nothing is beyond our comprehension, an
inheritance from Locke.
Callanan points out that Mandeville rejects the notion of pure self-denial
as the requisite for a concern for others. Of course, pure self-denial is a
fiction, but in attacking it Mandeville claims he is attacking morality. On
the contrary, there is no need for self-denial in order to behave
beneficially towards others. Biology has made our self-fulfilment socially
beneficial. It is not when we fulfil our natures we damage others, but when
we pursue denatured aims. Wilhelm von Humboldt, in The Limits of State
Action, says: “The grand leading principle towards which every
argument…unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and
essential imperative of human development in its richest diversity.” Like
Smith and Hume, von Humboldt believed we are mutually sympathetic by nature.
There is no contradiction between individual fulfilment and social benefit,
when the former is defined as following the dictates of nature. My
fulfilment implies yours because if I pursue an end which denies you, the
result will be negative, to some degree. Our biologically given social
nature impels us to mutual fulfilment, which is why von Humboldt celebrates
it. The moralists Mandeville had in his sights were hypocrites who denied
others in pursuit of their own twisted aims of personal wealth and
power. It is apposite to call these aims twisted because wealth and power
are social relations. Defoe has to bring in Man Friday at length, because
without him Crusoe is nothing.
“The thing we think of as our most distinctive cognitive capacity- the
ability to…articulate our thoughts in language” Callanan argues is a
delusion. Once again, a straw man. Externalised language is not our “most
distinctive cognitive capacity”. It is the abstraction from a cognitive
capacity, internal language. Essentially, a very minor and more or less
accidental side effect of the language faculty. Most language use, over 90%,
is internal. When we use language to assist thinking we don’t “articulate
our thoughts in language”. That’s what we do with our lips, tongue and
larynx and it came after the emergence of the internal faculty. Internally,
language works in a much less syntactical manner. It is optimal while
externalised language is full of ambiguity and inaccuracy. Callanan argues
that before we express ourselves in language, thinking has already taken
place, in more or less the same way as in animals. There is some similarity
to animals, but no other animal is capable of the recursion which is a
feature of the language faculty. No animal can think like we do. Callanan is
driven to these silly arguments by his assumptions in favour of the pursuit
of material wealth as the core aim of human life: if we are vicious,
unthinking animals by nature, well, what’s wrong with greed? What’s wrong
with it is that we are capable of thinking about it in ways other animals
can’t and, as Joseph Conrad explored, the pursuit of material wealth in and
of itself is not a moral aim, and we can’t live without those.
Mandeville thought the Stoics phonies: they pass off their disadvantages as
advantages; they may be poor, but they’re happy, to put it simply.
From this, Mandeville goes on to
conclude that all thinking about the meaning or value of life is
inauthentic, presumably therefore, his own, as he argues that the meaning
and value of life lie in national wealth and greatness. Mandeville spotted,
quite rightly, that wealth and power require dehumanisation. A common,
shared humanity is an obstacle to the exploitation which
makes “greatness” possible. Mandeville was writing while great
fortunes were being made from the slave trade. That people with dark skins
were less than human was taken for granted. He reverse-engineered from this
prejudice to the false conclusion that the social divisions he saw around
him were natural. He took it for granted the poor should be poor,
prostitutes were sex slaves by nature. He is always engaged in this futile
attempt to reduce his culture to nature. Marx in the first volume of
Capital calls him: “..an honest and clear-sighted man”, before
castigating him for not realising that the accumulation of capital must
engender a growing proletariat; he was clear-sighted only in so far as he
saw the society he belonged to was corrupt. When it came to asking why, he
was woolly-minded and schoolboyish: because people are corrupt by nature.
Mandeville claims we are irrational by nature, but believes it rational to
pursue “greatness”, that we are morally vacuous by nature, but upholds the
moral rectitude of a society which keeps the poor in their place. Like a dog
chained to a stake he can do nothing but run in circles.
Not the first to use the beehive as
a literary device, Mandeville followed Montaigne, Erasumus and Thomas Willis
in his medical writings. In Mandeville’s fable, the bees are blindly
self-seeking but their absence of care for the hive results in the
organisation which keeps it running so well. Only when the gods intervene to
try to make them virtuous does industriousness fail and disaster follow.
What Callanan doesn’t mention is that no one knows how bees do what they do.
The waggle-dance has been analysed, but no one knows how they do it. How can
a creature with a brain of about a million neurons be so socially organised?
Modern research suggests it’s because bees are eusocial, as the scientists
put it, they can behave so cleverly. They have short lives so can’t pass
skills to their young. Each individual has to be biologically endowed with
the means to find its way to pollen and so on. It appears bees have a
minimal capacity for abstraction, being able, on the basis of simple clues
to, choose left, right, up or down. Mandeville made a bad choice: bees
aren’t selfish individuals, by nature they have to behave in the interests
of the hive. They have no choice in the matter, Nature has fitted them for
it, just as it has fitted us to make moral choices as a matter of course.
Hobbes disagreed. He believed our joy consists in man “comparing himself
with other men”. Callanan says Hobbes believes we are driven to pursue our
own interests, but, as usual, he doesn’t define what “interests” means. He’s
back among the propagandists, allowing “interests” to attract whatever
meaning people attribute. If it’s in my interests to have my granny looked
after in old age, perhaps the best way to ensure that is to see that
everyone’s granny is looked after. If my interest is getting to work quickly
and cheaply, maybe good public transport is the best option. If my interest
is in being able to see my GP on the day my illness begins, perhaps more
funding for the NHS is the answer. Callanan uses “interests” to mean
unenlightened self-interest, narrow, grasping, benighted. It’s because he
never defines the term he can use it to defend Mandeville’s tendentious
arguments. Like Hobbes, Callanan is claiming the characteristics of our
culture, or for that matter of the last several thousand years, are an
expression of our nature: it is human nature to be selfish. The proposition
makes no sense, because if it were true, there would be no possibility of
anything else, and therefore, no possibility of selfishness either.
Everything is what it is only because it isn’t something else. The point
about the moralism Mandeville conflates with morality, is it’s necessary
because it is our nature to make moral choices. The conniving have to sound
morally authentic or they will be reviled. This is easy to spot in politics:
Hitler had to propose himself as the moral saviour of the Germans. Had he
said simply “Vote for me and I’ll exterminate the Jews and drive the world
to war” he might have found winning an election a bit difficult. This
doesn’t confirm Mandeville’s thesis. If it were our nature to be selfish,
greedy, nasty, vicious, conniving, how would revulsion at these things
arise? There is scant evidence that people think murder, rape, assault,
burglary, mugging, fraud are acceptable. Isn’t that because we have an
instinct for justice and fairness? How else could even the law be explained?
Why have a law against murder if self-interest is good for us? If it were
our nature to be vicious, ie we had an instinct for viciousness, no one
would be repulsed by rape.
The assumption of an instinct for fairness is reasonable on the grounds of
experience: those who wish to behave unfairly have to claim fairness as
their justification. However, it may be that, as with language, this is a
matter of “an instinct to acquire an art.” Thus, it wouldn’t be sensible to
claim “it’s human nature to be kind” as that implies we are incapable of
anything else. There can be circumstances in which an instinct for fairness
would drive us to be unkind: someone breaks into your house and tries to
abduct your children, so you shoot them. Shooting them can’t be seen as
kindness. It’s vicious, but the viciousness is motivated by an instinct for
justice: abducting kids from their beds is unjust. We have a range of
capacities, endowed by
evolution; we live in contexts where we have to choose between one capacity
and another. That’s what morality is. We can choose only within the limits
of our biology. No one can choose to fly off to Venus (not even Musk).
Logically, it makes sense to elaborate contexts which ignite our most
mutually beneficial capacities. Early 18th century London hardly
fits the bill, and that’s where Mandeville’s fundamental mistake lies.
Mandeville liked William and Mary and the 1688 settlement, which he saw as a
defence against Catholic tyranny. Parliament had to protect the people from
tyrants, but also from themselves. If the people were permitted to govern
themselves, they might make the wrong choice and return the Stuarts. Every
individual in Mandeville’s hive is out for themselves, motivated by “lust
and vanity”, yet constitutional monarchy is virtuous. Wherein lies its
virtue? In its ability to impose order and to prevent people choosing what
their betters declare to be chaos. It ought to be transparent to everyone,
even so sycophantic a commentator as Callanan, that this is the mental
gymnastics of special pleading. Let vice prevail, declares Mandeville,
except the vice of democracy.
The free rein given to endowed vice makes the hive prosperous and envied by
its competitors. Callanan claims the reader would struggle to disagree with
either of these assertions. His ideal reader must lack wits. Mandeville’s
London was “undergoing a revolution in economic prosperity” he argues.
Prosperity for whom? Estimates suggest some 60% of the population of 18th
century England was poor, 2% in workhouses. Of course, Callanan is little
concerned with the effects of Mandeville’s doctrine on the losers, it’s the
winners he celebrates. The rich were flourishing. England was powerful and
feared. Why bother about children going hungry?
“…the greater economic good is generated by the economic activity of vicious
behaviour sometime being indulged and sometimes being condemned” writes
Callanan. Not all vicious behaviour benefits the public good, although all
vicious behaviour in some way benefits the public good. This is his argument
(p116). The State has a role here. It must keep vice and virtue aiding one
another, although virtue is, of course, a delusion. What does he mean by
“the greater economic good”? Simply, to put it in modern terms, the GDP gets
bigger, which is fine if you’re one of the few sucking huge amounts of
wealth out of society for personal consumption. This is what Mandeville’s
theory boils down to: there’s lots of money to be made out of roguery, so
let it rip. How can Callanan argue that vice should sometimes be condemned
if vice is the origin of the benefits he praises? Who is to decide which
vice should be accepted and which rejected? On what grounds?
The downfall of the bees comes from their impulse to do away with the
injustices of their present. Callanan, like his mentor, chides them: they
ought to see what they have is the best this life can offer. Is there
another life? Because a “vice-free” society is impossible, they should
accept the prevalence of vice, but not all vice, of course. It’s hard to
argue against the idea that we have an instinct to solve problems. When the
roof leaks, who would say: “Ah, well, the carpet’s getting soaked, but this
is the best we can hope for?” Who wouldn’t wrack their brains to find a way
to plug the hole? Mandeville condemns his bees for no more than that by
characterising every attempt at improvement as a wish for perfection. There
is no doubt that chiliasm can debilitate, but piecemeal rectification is
another matter. Why would we have a capacity to recognise problems if we
weren’t biologically impelled to solve them? It is Mandeville who is the
utopian: the hive is best of all possible worlds. It must remain as it is,
Any change is sure to be for the worse. What better recipe for despair?
Mandeville is castigating those who would try to address some of the obvious
deficiencies of the London of his time, and Callanan embraces his reaction.
Inevitably, Callanan refers to Machiavelli as a precursor who distinguished
political expediency from moral principle. Mandeville, in his turn, wishes
to distinguish a “flourishing society” from “a society of morally decent
individuals”. What exactly is a flourishing society if its members aren’t
morally decent? What is society, if not the relations between those
individuals, and how can any of those relations be anything but moral?
Family relations, sexual relations, economic relations, political relations,
none can break free of morality because we have an instinct for justice and
freedom. How else can we explain people’s rebellion against injustice and
oppression? If it were socially engendered, it could be socially eliminated,
but the kicking against the pricks of injustice is remarkably consistent
across cultures and centuries. Machiavelli is as wrong as Mandeville: there
is no morality-free zone for Princes or merchants.
Callanan argues (p123) that Mandeville’s fable is a “paradoxical encomium
without the paradox”. Perhaps he can explain how that makes it other than an
encomium (to vice).
Mandeville believes he has laid bare human nature, yet he’s unable to get
anywhere near a third party view. Human nature is how people behave in
London in 1714. The idea, of course, tells us nothing. He doubts free will,
as we are driven by our passions, like other creatures. Presumably then,
Callanan had no choice but to write this book, no choice about its
structure, no choice about its title, no choice about its arguments. It was
all done by his “passions”. If this were true, how could the law operate? A
man kills his wife, but he didn’t do it, it was his passions. An MP fiddles
her expenses, but she is innocent, her passions are guilty. Free will is an
assumption without which human life is impossible. If I can choose to wiggle
my little finger, then I have free will. To claim this is an illusion is
mere sophistry. The serious question is what is going on in my brain which
gives me this capacity? That’s laying bare human nature, not Mandeville’s
self-serving speculations.
We have, Callanan says, a “malformed nature” in that our passions drive us
,but we are self-conscious and therefore bothered by the fact so cover up by
inventing a fantasy of ourselves as rational. How can we be “malformed” by
biology? Evolution can’t “malform” species. That would imply some
pre-existing blueprint of which evolution falls short. If evolution has
formed us to be self-deceiving then that’s how we are, not a malformation;
but if evolution has formed us to be ruled by our passions, why would we be
bothered by it? Unless evolution had formed us to be. This descends into
absurdity. Callanan’s theory is an attempt to justify the unjustifiable:
that bad behaviour isn’t really bad because all attempts to
define it as so are compensatory. A better theory is that we put up
internal defences when we know we are in the wrong and we know that by
instinct. We are not malformed, but endowed by biology to make moral
distinctions.
Mandeville introduces a serious caveat about us being driven by our
passions: it doesn’t apply to Christians and Jews. They are not “in nature”.
Quite why he doesn’t include Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists or many more is open
to rumination. It would seem, therefore, in order to cure our “malformed”
nature we simply need to convert. How can our nature be our nature if it can
be so easily overcome? Callanan tries to pass this off as a device for
deflecting criticism, but Mandeville can’t be so easily excused the glaring
failures and contradictions of his theory. Our nature is our biological,
immutable endowment. It is immutable in the sense that if it changed, we
would become a different species. It must inhere in every individual,
barring severe brain damage etc. What is endowed by biology can’t be
expunged by reading the Bible or going to the synagogue.
It won’t pass to claim Mandeville is
using another sleight-of-hand to prevent the reader dismissing his ideas. If
he is claiming to have revealed human nature, he needs to be able to
demonstrate it.
“..and everyone turning the vices and frailties of others to his own
advantage endeavours to pick up a living the easiest and shortest way his
talent and abilities will let him..”
writes Mandeville . “..would we be better off if we could cure ourselves of
materialism and greed?” ask Callanan, and answers “obviously not” in his
slavish adherence to his mentor’s ideology. The question is senseless. It’s
on a par with asking, “Would we be better off if we could rid ourselves of
intestinal bacteria?” Materialism and greed are potentials of our nature. We
can’t rid ourselves of them without becoming a different species, something
over which we have no control. The question ought to be, “Would we be better
off if we recognised the ill effects of materialism and greed and chose to
avoid them?” Callanan, like Mandeville, bases his argument on the
impossibilism of changing our natural endowment, and uses that as a cover
for the proposition that its
worst aspects should be given free rein because by so doing much money and
power can be achieved, by some. The ill effects, of course, are poverty,
misery, violence, mental derangement, social breakdown, war; these are mere
collateral damage, given in he way the world works. The world in question is
early 18th century London. Mandeville’s depiction of how people
exploit others and employ their talents to their own advantage is drawn
directly from that context. Human nature is whatever fits with this partial
view. “Throughout the remarks we see that private vices bring public
benefits” writes Callanan airily. No such thing is demonstrated. Mandeville
defines “benefits” tendentiously and narrowly: whatever helps the cause of
wealth and power. Because of his assumptions, he has no means of gaining a
third party view and his theory is a farrago of misapplied science and flat
ideology.
Each chapter has as its epigraph one of La Rochefoucauld’s maxims. La
Rochefoucauld was born in 1613 into the French aristocracy. His cynicism was
drawn from his milieu, like Mandeville’s. Wealth and power were what
mattered in his circle. Callanan uses him as a cultural reference point
whose fame and reputation buttress his position. La Rochefoucauld thinks
generosity is nothing but Lady Bountiful’s posture; no kindliness is ever
sincere but always serves egocentric self-interest. We return to the
absurdity that if this were true, egocentric self-interest would be
impossible; only because there is something to compare it to can it exist.
If genuine generosity weren’t possible, how could La Rochefoucauld or
Mandeville criticise the false form? They validate this form, not because
there is no alternative, but out of pusillanimity: to take a stance against
the phoney form, would be to stand against the dominant culture of their
time. Thus , they deplore the fact that genuine generosity, kindness,
honesty etc are impossible, while celebrating the fact. They are right, of
course: 17th century France and 18th century England
were ruled by hypocritical elites whose moral claims were empty, but that is
no proof that all moral claims are so.
Callanan cites Calvin who believes it is our capacity to “overcome our
instinctual drives” which makes us rational. As we’ve seen, this is a
dubious assumption. Suppose, on the contrary, it is our instinctual drives
which make us rational. Mandeville’s thesis rests upon what he claims to
reject: moralism. Morality is genuine, moralism its simulacrum. The latter
is necessary only as a cover. Suppose our instincts make us moral.
Mandeville’s assumption is that, as we are animals, our instincts must be
vicious; but he is unable to prove this. He thinks that by assimilating our
status to that of the rest of the creatures on the planet he makes the
argument that we are nasty by nature; but the nature of a bonobo isn’t that
of a chimpanzee. Our nature is unique. No other creature has language, a
history or mathematics. That we are products of evolution and natural
selection doesn’t argue for an identity between us and creatures who evolved
quite differently. It argues the opposite. Mandeville, unaware of evolution
assumes divine design. God made all animals nasty, vicious, aggressive,
selfish, including us. Our belief in our rationality is a delusion.
Nevertheless, Callanan writes books which appeal to our rationality. He
hopes to persuade us, through reason, that our reason is an illusion.
Mandeville believed the best way to rear children was to praise them when
they behaved well and shaming them when they do the opposite. Odd, for
someone who believes they are nasty by nature. Callanan discusses
Mandeville’s notion that we will temper our passions in order to win esteem.
Why would we do that if we didn’t have some instinct for esteem? And in what
way is that vicious or even self-regarding? Wanting to win the esteem of
others implies having a concern for their feelings: when we esteem others we
feel good, when we disdain them it is unpleasant. However, Callanan goes on
to claim that even this tempering of passion is nothing more than
“overweening pride”. The need in both Mandeville and his admirer to deny
absolutely any minute possibility of generous human motivation gives away
their ideological purpose: to deny the faults of their societies can be
remedied.
Moderation is nothing but a ploy engaged in by failures to mask their
jealousy. It allows the poor, the sidelined to convince themselves they are
superior to those whom they are “in reality inferior to by comparison.” It
is at such moments, Callanan gives away his intellectual emptiness and moral
immaturity: what does he mean by “in reality” and “inferior”? Simply the
indefensible notion that the rich and powerful are “superior”; a judgement
which leaves us with the conclusion that Hitler and Stalin were amongst the
most “superior” people of the 20th century.
Hobbes believed we once lived in a “pre-societal state”. This is like
believing we once lived without arms and legs. We are social by nature.
There has been no pre-social homo sapiens. Mandeville’s fantasy
theory of how virtue made its appearance among us when we were mere
assemblages of vicious drives without any semblance of sociability deserves
no serious attention in the light of modern archaeology and anthropology.
Nevertheless, Callanan embraces it: a political elite (how such a thing came
into existence among the wild animals we once were isn’t explained) invented
the notion that human beings are special. Callanan calls this an “incredibly
radical” notion, which gives some idea of the adolescent level of his
criticism. Human beings a re special, as are tigers, shrimps, giraffes and
rats. They all have a nature endowed by biology. Ours happens to include
language and abstract thought at a high level. That is special in a
non-judgemental sense: no other creature has what biology has endowed us
with.
What Mandeville correctly grasps is that the morality of an elite of wealth
and power is intended to keep the poor and disenfranchised in their place.
His mistake, however, was to take this for morality per se. In the same way,
he recognises that the Christian doctrine of self-denial cuts against the
grain of human nature, but fails to distinguish this from the morality which
works with its grain. All morality is founded on impossible self-denial, he
claims, once again conflating morality with moralism.
The happy outcome of our inclination to meekly accept the need to curb our
passions is that it allows us to “get along and prosper in society”, reasons
Callanan; like the Israelis get along with the Palestinians perhaps, or the
Jews and the Nazis, or the coloured folk of the southern States of the USA
with their white owners, or the first people of north America with the
settlers. Who prospered in the society Mandeville was part of? Not the
agrarian majority. Whenever the putative public benefits of private vices
are hinted at, they are always principally benefits for the wealthy and
powerful.
“The Fable is a humorous tale about human beings and the nature of moral
behaviour in commercial society” writes Callanan. Apart from children’s
books, aren’t all tales about human beings? Callanan concedes Mandeville is
writing about how people behave in a commercial society. Yet time and again
he upholds the idea that Mandeville has stripped human nature bare. The
constraints a particular culture places on human nature make distinguishing
what is in our nature from what is enforced difficult. It can’t be done by
introspection or speculation. Yet far from “controlling” for cultural
pressures, Mandeville takes the typical behaviour of his time as natural,
the standard procedure of reactionaries. Callanan concedes too that most of
Mandeville’s writings were directly political.
Broadly a Whig, Mandeville identified with their interests and
ideology. Their belief in Protestant ascendancy was obviously in his favour
as was their challenge to the landed interest. Callanan argues that his
amoral philosophy wouldn’t have endeared him to the Whigs, and indeed, his
assumption was that as he had revealed the absolutely self-regarding and
hypocritical nature of humanity, he was bound to be rejected. It seems,
therefore, the whole of humanity is deluded, except for Mandeville. He alone
sees the truth about his nasty nature. Yet his essential opinions were
commonplace in his time. It was the stock-in-trade of the rich and powerful
that greed and bullying are human nature. If he differs from the
commonplace, it is only in claiming to refute hypocrisy. All the same, on
the one hand he claims virtue is a fraud, on the other likes harsh sentences
for bad behaviour.
Callanan calls the Earl of Shaftesbury’s theory that we each possess a moral
sense which “allows our personal interest to tend to tend to the good of the
universe as a whole”, fanciful. That we each possess vices which do the
same, however, he assumes to be proven. What is “the good of the universe as
a whole” supposed to mean? How could an innate moral faculty make any
difference to the universe? And what is the difference between the universe
and the universe as a whole? These foolish, rhetorical flourishes are
indicative of Callanan’s polemical, tendentious purpose. An innate moral
faculty would have no influence at all on the movements of the planets, but
far from being fanciful, there is plenty of evidence for it. We know of no
society where murder is not outlawed. How can that be explained? If
Mandeville is right and our raw vices contribute to general social good, why
do we have laws against child pornography? Why don’t we let drug dealers
sell heroin at the school gates? Callanan’s book is dedicated to “Becky”.
Would he celebrate her being mugged or raped? Why not? It would help turn
the wheels of the economy. Surely he would be outraged and surely that
points to an instinct for fairness and justice.
Mandeville disliked the Charity Schools, on the one hand because they were
potential sites of Catholic indoctrination (Protestantism is truth,
Catholicism is brain-washing), on the other because of his prejudice against
large social institutions and his belief that children learn what they need
from their families and close associates, together with his clam that
ignorance was not the problem; on the contrary, education prepared the poor
badly for their proper station in life – mind-numbing labour. The latter
opinion is too crass to deserve comment. As for children being adequately
served by their immediate family, a view Callanan appears to endorse, it
sits ill with one of the most telling studies: The Nurture Assumption
by Judith Rich Harris. Harris looks at “good” families in “bad” areas and
the opposite. What the study suggests is that children from “bad” families
in “good” areas tend, on average, to turn out with fewer obvious problems
than children from “good” families in “bad” areas. This is a gross
simplification of a complex work, but its essence is that the wider social
context has much more influence over how children turn out than parents
assume. Her study rests on evidence, while Mandeville’s conclusion is based
on opinion, or more accurately prejudice. His dismissal of the Charity
Schools is nothing more than a political dislike of what offends his
interests. The evidence supports children being exposed to a wide range of
social influences, and especially beneficial ones; and even Mandeville
accepts that public benefits exist, even if he is wildly wrong about how.
“..society requires a poor underclass if it is to prosper” writes Callanan
endorsing Mandeville as he paraphrases. In what way is a society prospering
if a significant proportion of its people are poor? Are the poor not part of
society? Mandeville’s class bias is exposed: society embraces those with
wealth and power, they prosper while the poor suffer, which is just as it
should be. The natural order. What evidence is there that producing a
generalised prosperity is impossible without some being confined to
deprivation? Prosperity isn’t luxury. The three American men whose wealth is
greater than the bottom fifty percent enjoy something way beyond prosperity.
Bernie Sanders experiences that. There is no need to have billions to be
prosperous in a contemporary economy. Mandeville’s assumption is the rich
and comfortable of his day deserve their rewards, as the poor deserve their
poverty. That this is unexamined is a measure of the narrow assumptions
within which he thinks.
Callanan thinks Mandeville taught us to “see as economists”. What he means
is we should recognise the economy as a morality-free zone. He is
fond of writing of “society as a whole”, a sleight-of-hand by which he
identifies the interests of the rich with those of society: poverty is fine,
as it helps “society as a whole”, similarly with vice, greed, bullying and
so on. “Societies of human beings are…run by the flow of animal spirits,”
observes Callanan, telling us nothing. He executes a strict distinction
between the individual and the “society as a whole”. What looks out of
kilter at the individual level, serves efficiency at the macro level.
Callanan thinks this is justification for the pursuit of material wealth in
its various forms. We might cite Stalin’s decimation of the Kulaks, pretty
lousy for the estimated 3.9 million individuals who were killed or starved,
but pretty good for Soviet “society as a whole”.
Callanan, because he is an ideologist at his core, is blind to how
his glib non-thinking serves the interest of dictators and tyrants.
Mandeville, Callanan claims wanted his readers to “forgo the aim of moral
virtue and instead pursue the goal of freedom from oppression.” But doesn’t
oppression imply virtue? Who would care about oppression if they didn’t have
some instinct for freedom, and how can that be teased away from virtue? If
we are not moral by nature, why would we baulk at oppression? Is our
revulsion at Stalin and Hitler not moral? From Callanan’s point of view,
that of judging any measure by its effect on “society as a whole”, should we
not say Hitler made the trains run on time and Stalin industrialised the
Soviet Union in double quick time? What but our moral sense stands between
us and the gas chamber or the gulag?
Callanan’s ideology reaches its apogee when he writes of “economic and
non-moral aspects of life.” It is incumbent on him to demonstrate how
economic relations are non-moral. If they are, what is wrong with slavery?
Or for that matter, concentration camps? Callanan runs to embrace this false
notion because of his puppy-dog enthusiasm for theories which justify,
post hoc, exploitative and grossly unjust economic and social forms. The
notion that there is such a thing as non-moral human relationship is
extraordinary. If “economic” is defined broadly, it would be possible to
argue that bank robbery, shop lifting and mugging are acceptable, given by
such a definition they could be said to lie outside morality. Far from it
being the case, however, that the current spate of shop lifting in the UK is
welcomed as a boost to the hive and its prosperity, shopkeepers are in
despair and the economic and social damage significant. Ideology, of course,
as it serves a masking function, doesn’t pursue the logical consequences of
its propositions; the pity is, that Callanan, passing himself off as an
objective critic, uses Mandeville as the means to promulgate the view that
economic relations (and that’s just about everything in modern culture) are
amoral.
The rules which apply to individuals are inappropriate for the collective,
asserts Callanan. Thus we have the “paradox of thrift” for example, part of
the “domestic fallacy”. There are “larger forces” at work, he argues, which
“go beyond what we can readily understand at a human level”. What does “at a
human level” mean? What other level can our understanding work at? Callanan
uses these vacuous phrases when he is creating space for his ideological
assumptions. He claims that the “larger forces” are the “natural
rules that govern human life at the macro level.” You couldn’t wish for a
clearer expression of the reduction of culture to nature. To discover our
nature is no easy matter and when we try to understand how people act in
complex situations, we are blundering in the dark. Yet there are a few
things we can be confident about: we have a biologically endowed nature and
part of that is being cultural. We aren’t fully locked into instinct like
some creatures, but must create by our own choices the social context in
which we live. As this context is a choice, we can get it right or wrong, ie
we are moral by nature. How do we know if we have got it wrong? Slave
revolts happen because slaves are affronted by their condition. How can that
be except through an instinct for fairness and justice? Callanan is arguing
that the commercial society Mandeville believed in and the money-oriented
society he believes in are expressions of the working of nature, but not of
our nature; rather “larger forces”. Though he tries to dismiss notions of
mystical, divine interventions, he collapses into mysticism. Our cultures
are what we have chosen, and often we make bad choices. North Korea hardly
suggests that culture is always the working out of what is natural. What
could be more unnatural than a society in which people are denied the most
basic choices about how to act? It is characteristically human to choose how
to behave, to the degree we can reasonably argue such choosing is part of
human nature. Callanan’s “larger forces” are those which ensure the choices
are made by the wealthy and the rest accept what they’re given. By effecting
a radical disjuncture between the individual and what he claims if happening
at the macro level, individuals can be sacrificed to the needs of an
economic system run by and for the wealthy. It’s simply absurd to claim
there are “natural” forces at work which create societies at odds with our
nature. Von Humboldt has it right: it is the full and harmonious development
of character in everyone we
should be concerned for.
In discussing Mandeville’s attitude to theftbote (the practice of buying
back goods stolen from you) Callanan says it involves “obviously immoral
behaviour”. Quite an assertion for a man who accepts Mandeville’s claim that
all morality is a sham. How does Callanan determine the behaviour is
“obviously immoral”? The use of the adjective is telling: it suggests we
just know when behaviour is morally questionable. How could that be if we
weren’t endowed with a moral faculty, with an instinct for what is or isn’t
right? Mandeville supports punishment for theftbote for the “greater good of
society”. Curious, given his central assertion that vice is the sure route
to public benefit. “Thinking from the perspective of the good of the system
is Mandeville’s fundamental concern,” declares Callanan approvingly. Which
system? The Third Reich? Present-day China? South Africa under apartheid? Of
course, what he’s getting at is obvious: our system. This underlying
assumption of its validity mirrors the same in Mandeville. Such assumptions
make a mockery of the notion of stripping human nature bare. Rather, both
author and critic are defending an emotional position. That Mandeville does
it with some literary skill doesn’t excuse the fault.
Callanan claims Mandeville’s views on theftbote are “not a moralizing
position and not an expression of horror at the normalisation of theft.” He
is “thoroughly economic in approach” thinking theftbote undermines the
property rights which trade and “the public good” depend on.
Callanan that is believes it is possible to define “the public good”
without reference to morality (even though he has just called theftbote
“obviously immoral”). What is the public good? How can it possibly be
defined without reference to morality? Mandeville thinks it is served by
keeping a large number of people in poverty. Maybe those to be held in such
a condition might have a different opinion. Isn’t the question of the
distribution of wealth a moral one? It is unless you accept Callanan’s
thoroughgoing ideological perspective that the market will decide. The free
market of economic theory exists only in textbooks. For example, for
rational actors to make informed decisions in the market, the classic
definition, we would have to ban advertising, which doesn’t inform but
bamboozles.
In regard to Mandeville’s preference for the legalisation of prostitution (
which is not the same as that of pimping) Callanan opines that Mandeville
believes “the procurement of sex cannot be abolished so long as human nature
exists.” How can we know this? We can say without risk of contradiction that
language can’t be abolished so long as human nature exists, nor the
digestive system, the visual system, the endocrine system, but prostitution
is not a biological endowment. It can’t exist without money or property and
they are far younger than human nature. The oldest records of prostitution
date back some 4.5 thousand years, which leaves some 45.5 thousand in which
it appears not to have existed. Prostitution is not a necessary feature of
human nature, any more than tennis, ballroom dancing or bridge. They are
possibilities. Neither Mandeville nor Callanan can know whether the
abolition of prostitution is possible. It may well be in some future culture
we can barely conceive, but to assert what they can’t prove is the essential
procedure of both.
Mandeville has a touching faith in the law of supply and demand: legalised
brothels will ensure just the right number of prostitutes. If this were
correct it would be a reasonable expectation that a steady proportion would
be maintained between the number of mature men in a society and the number
of prostitutes. The evidence is hardly convincing: the proportion of
prostitutes per student in Oxford and Cambridge was far higher in Victorian
Britain than today. It isn’t the market which has changed things, but more
enlightened sexual attitudes. Mandeville was quite happy with the idea that
respectable women should be virgins when they married. His view of the sex
market, like everything else in his work, rest on assumptions. Here, the
assumption that female sexuality takes two forms: madonnas or whores.
Callanan grants that it’s over the question of poverty that Mandeville is at
his worst, yet he lets him off the hook. Yes, he is arguing for the
suppression of wages, but this is only to assist the proper functioning of a
commercial economy. If people aren’t poor, they won’t work. Progressive have
to answer the question, who will dig the ditches? Once more, Callanan works
from assumptions: there has to be wage-labour, levels of wages have to be
manipulated to adjust supply. Wage labour is a very modern invention. Like
prostitution, it isn’t a biological endowment. We lived without it for tens
of thousands of years and what moral justification does it have? Mandeville
is arguing against a soppy Christian pity for the poor which he sees as
threadbare. It’s tru enough his time exhibited a great deal of hypocrisy
over the matter, but his response is flawed: to attribute the poverty of the
poor to a natural order is tendentious. Wealth and poverty are not things,
they are social relations and therefore moral relations.
Callanan sets what is “economically rational” against moral choices. He
cites Mandeville’s example of the porter from Remark 5: the man refuses work
when its price is low but willingly engages when the price is high. This is
how human beings behave, Mandeville is implying. What’s in it for me, is
always the question. Of course, it’s a truism that people are less likely to
take employment if the pay is low, but that is no proof that all human
behaviour can be reduced to questions of monetary gain or loss. Imagine the
porter was offered high pay to deliver a message for a fine gentleman but on
his way passed a house on fire where a child was trapped in a bedroom. He
has access to a ladder and breaks off from his work to rescue the child, for
which he receives no pecuniary reward. Doing so means he delivers the
message late and the gentleman refuses to pay. Was his action right?
According to Mandeville’s reductionism, he should leave the child to its
fate and do what is “economically rational”. Isn’t it rational to save the
child’s life and lose the pay? Isn’t saving the child a moral choice?
Mandeville sees that monarchical power is breaking down in his time and the
power of trade driven by the pursuit of gain is rising. If a monarchy orders
a piece of crimson cloth, people are forced to provide it. When consumer
choice is the driver “no one …has their wills coerced in the production.”
This is Mandeville’s view of early 18th century England. The
pursuit of material gain as the main aim of life would lead to children
being forced down mines and under looms and workers being driven to early
graves by exhaustion. None of them had their wills coerced because they were
producing for consumers? Pure fantasy.
“It does not matter,” writes Callanan, paraphrasing and endorsing once more,
“what particular thing consumers demand as long as there is consumer
demand.” Child pornography, heroin, snuff movies, zombie knives, they all
provide demand. Mandeville is making the insane claim there is no difference
between demand for bread and potatoes and that for hard drugs or child
pornography. If this is true, why do we have laws against the latter? Once
admit such things need to be regulated, that it is morally unacceptable to
permit them free rein, and you have crossed the Rubicon. The question then
is, how far to go. This is why the argument from “free trade” has to push to
an absolute. If some demands are morally unacceptable, there is great scope
for deciding which. Sugar, for example, has almost certainly killed more
people than cannabis. Should we ban the former and legalise the latter? Road
traffic accidents kill many more people than hard drugs. Should we ban cars?
The advocates of “free trade” have to claim it’s a morality free zone, or
their argument falls at the first hurdle.
Mandeville is, of course, a moral relativist: “things are only good and evil
in reference to something else, and according to the light and position they
are regarded in.” Is this true of aggression? In what circumstance, through
what lens, can it be seen as beneficial? From Mandeville’s point of view, if
I hit you over the head with a hammer and steal your mobile phone, some good
has come from it: I have a mobile I didn’t have before. Once admit this, and
everyone’s dead in the gutter. Aggression is absolutely morally
indefensible. There is no relativist position from which it can be judged
admissible, no reference to something else which can justify it. Isn’t this
why all societies have laws against murder? Hamlet has good reason to kill
his uncle, yet he is morally tormented because he has to be aggressive. The
law should come to his rescue, but his uncle is the law. If we were to take
Mandeville at his word, what would stand in the way of murder and grievous
bodily harm in pursuit of our desires?
Callanan thinks it is “normal human economic behaviour” to cheat and deceive
in order to gain wealth. Why does he include the adjective “human”? No other
animal engages in economic behaviour. An economy is a human creation. No
other creature has it because it requires a degree of abstract thought they
lack. He includes the adjective to suggest the kind of economic behaviour he
is endorsing is human by definition. Everyone cheats and deceives, that’s
what makes the world go round. The example Mandeville uses is two stock
traders, each willing to deceive the other for advantage. Both he and
Callanan seem unaware that the behaviour of stock traders is far from
“normal”. They are attributing to humanity the behaviour and values of an
economic elite. By definition, most people can’t be stock traders. Everyone
can work, produce value, contribute to the collective effort; but the
essentially parasitical activity of trading stocks is confined to a few.
Time and again, both author and critic identify the interests and ways of
the rich with humanity in general.
“Trade is the principal but not the only requisite to aggrandize a
nation:…The meum and tuum must be secured, crimes punished,
and all other laws concerning the administration of justice, wisely
contrived, and strictly executed.” What does Mandeville mean by “aggrandize
a nation”? In simple terms, what today we would call colonisation or
imperialism. Britain aggrandized itself through extreme violence and
systematic exploitation based on racism. It was simply an assumption of the
aggrandizing nations that people with dark skins were less than human and
therefore expendable. Estimates
are that 800,000 were killed in the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Such is free
trade. At the Berlin Conference 1884, Africa was divided among the European
countries like a take-away pizza. In the Belgian Congo, some ten million
coloured people were killed in the last years of the nineteenth and early
years of the twentieth century. No need to continue listing the atrocities.
Interestingly, consider Mandeville’s priorities here: he puts trade at the
service of aggrandization. Doesn’t this give the game away? What he is
defending is the right of rich, white Europe to slaughter and exploit the
lower races. When he talks of the administration of justice, he sets aside
his central claim that all morality is a sham and only self-interest valid;
he is validating the State as the agency of colonisation abroad and
exploitation at home. This is the essence of Mandeville: put aside all
qualms about ethics, go after the money and murder whoever gets in the way;
but if they fight back, use the State to punish them.
Callanan, Liz Truss-like, cites the Laffer curve: “If the increase ( in
taxation) is too much, the government will retard business so much that it
will end up less taxable income..” Notice the definitive “will”. Once more,
we have Callanan the ideologue and propagandist. The Laffer curve is a
disputed theory. At best, it can be argued that in some circumstances higher
taxation can lower tax revenues, but that this will happen is
beyond proof. There isn’t, for example, a push-me-pull-you relationship
between rises and falls in fuel duty and car use. Sometimes people will
continue with or increase a highly taxed activity because of its perceived
benefits. Taxation, Callanan observes, like a Tory on the stump, always
disincentivises.
Hayek thought Mandeville’s intellectual breakthrough was “the twin ideas of
evolution and of the spontaneous formation of an order.” Callanan ties this
to his claim that “the system as a whole is morally neutral.” What dose he
mean by “the system”? The vagueness suits his tendentious purpose, as it
does in Hayek. What is the “spontaneous formation of an order” when it comes
to society? It is convenient for the rich to claim their system arose
spontaneously, but the evidence is hardly convincing. What was “spontaneous”
about the Peterloo Massacre or the Six Acts which followed? These were
deliberate choices by the rich to curtail the protests and organisation of
the majority. Hayek was uncomfortable with trade unionism. He believed
it interfered with the operation of
the “market” and that unions had been granted the right to defy the law. He
was opposed to small groups exercising large power, but had no objection to
it if it was small groups of the rich. Indeed, the operation of the “market”
favoured such control. The economic system Hayek defended didn’t arise
spontaneously, nor did it in any meaningful sense evolve; it was created by
merchants to permit them to make more money from their money. Hayek is
trying to claim it is natural, that it evolved like the human eye or webbed
feet, a view which ignores the bitter social conflicts which attended its
creation. What is natural is revolt against degrading, humiliating, debasing
conditions of life, yet it is just such revolt Hayek disdains as an affront
to the rule of law. Whose law? He believed that free choice could exist
under dictatorship which limited itself but not under unlimited democracy.
It was choice in the market that mattered not at the ballot box. He
preferred the laws of dictators to those of democrats, the logical
conclusion of a belief in the fantasy market. When Callanan writes of the
moral neutrality of the system, he isn’t thinking of North Korea, but of the
so-called “free market” societies which are business owned and business run.
The claim of moral neutrality is part of the attempt to head off the
movements for greater justice: if injustice is not a moral question but
merely an economic one, women’s rights, rights for coloured people, lifting
the poor etc can be dismissed as moral fluff. That this is ideology and not
objective analysis is evident.
“Morality is the currency with which human social trade takes place,” writes
Callanan mysteriously. What this might mean is anyone’s guess, but the use
of “human” again is telling. It’s redundant because morality, in any
sensible definition, is exclusively human. Scorpions don’t choose to sting,
they are wired for it, but we can choose whether to invest our money in
fossil fuels or donate it to Greenpeace. That’s an economic, social,
political and also a moral choice. Callanan can assert that economic choices
break free of morality, but he can’t demonstrate it. Callanan summarises
Mandeville’s argument thus: “the public benefits that accrue to society as a
whole are as a result of human beings’ ineliminable passions being
regulated, curtailed and punished within an organised social system.” The
formulation is risibly clumsy and confused. How can a public benefit accrue
to anything but society? And why society “as a whole”? Callanan uses this
tag several times because it implies that some will be left out; there is an
entity called “society as a whole” but millions may not be part of it. If he
were to write “society”, it would embrace everyone. At every turn, Callanan
has in mind social division and injustice and is seeking to justify them.
Presumably if the GDP increases that’s good for “society as a whole” even if
deliberate policy directs the increased wealth to the already very rich and
leaves the poor worse off then ever. It has recently been reported that the
57 billionaires resident in the UK increased their wealth in 2024 by some
£82 billion. No doubt Callanan would deem this good for “society as a whole”
while any rational person would see it as fine for the billionaires but
highly questionable for everyone else.
Why does Mandeville believe people should be punished for their
“ineliminable passions”? Isn’t this akin to original sin, but with a
perverse twist? On the one hand, he denies that morality exists, claims that
vices serve the public good, on the other insists the vices should be
regulated and punished. The contradictions arise because he’s engaged in
political polemic, as Callanan acknowledges. Mandeville is an advocate of
vice when it serves the interest he identifies with, but wants it punished
if it doesn’t. None of this establishes in any convincing intellectual way
that we don’t have a biologically endowed moral faculty. By identifying
“virtue” ie moral judgement as complete self-denial he sets up the straw man
which permits him to make his slippery claims. If putting on a clean shirt
is vice, then it serves the good; but Adam smith is right to disdain this.
If we define vice as that which causes avoidable harm to others,
Mandeville’s arguments wither. “Mandeville firmly believes that human beings
simply are not creatures who are capable of living in accordance with moral
rules…” writes Callanan. Curious then he should want them punished for
failing to do so. Jospeh Conrad believed the opposite: that the pursuit of
material wealth, in and of itself, is not a moral aim, and we can’t live
without those because we are moral by nature.
Callanan thinks Mandeviile elaborated an original theory of social
development part of which is
that “specifically human moral notions were invented as part of the process
of bringing humans out of a ‘savage’ animalistic state and into civil
society”. By “humans” does he mean homo sapiens? If so, they were never in a
savage animalistic state. How did moral notions get invented without a
biologically given moral faculty? If we are not moral by nature, how can we
make moral judgements at all? This is like asking, if we do not have
hand-eye coordination as a biological endowment, how can we invent tennis?
And how could animalistic savages invent moral notions? Do alligators knit ?
No creature can do what is not part of its given nature. Of course, we can
put our nature to different purposes: we can use our feet for dancing,
cycling, playing football, but our feet are a biological endowment.
Likewise, we can elaborate differing moral rules, but the capacity to do so
is biologically given. Mandeville’s claim is pure fantasy. When did this
supposed invention take place? Where? His argument is that we have an
original interest in esteem, in seeing ourselves as superior in creation and
it was this which the ”politicians” toyed with to introduce moral notions.
Where did the concern with esteem come from? What evidence is there for it?
And what set the “politicians” apart from the rest? William Law took
Mandeville to task for this, which he saw as nothing but a conspiracy
theory. Callanan’s discussion of the critique is thorough. He gets wrong,
however, the idea that we are capable of music and maths because we have a
natural grasp of harmony and number. Music and maths are exaptations. They
are both modern inventions. Zero was invented around 2,000 years ago and
Equal Temperament in the late 16th century. Thus, it can’t be
true that maths and music are adaptations. Language is. Everyone has it by
nature but music and maths have to be learnt. He cites Daid Hume’s clear
rebuttal of Mandeville and gives due weight to the objections raised by
critics. All the same, he sides with Mandeville in his theory that society
emerged over vast periods of time “without any planning or design”.
Without any? No one ever made any
decision and tried deliberately to apply any policy? Mandeville’s attempt to
reduce society to nature works only if this wild exaggeration is permitted.
The mistake lies in not recognising it is our nature to be cultural. We
choose how to live, we create our institutions, because we are biologically
endowed to do so; but that doesn’t mean that any particular social form can
be said to be “natural”. What can be claimed is that some are more in
keeping with our nature than others. That implies, however, an understanding
of our nature, a hugely difficult matter.
Callanan attributes evolutionary psychology to Mandeville, a time-machine
manoeuvre. We are endowed with
self-love and self-liking. The latter is our over-estimation of our own
importance. From this, Mandeville goes on to explain the structure of
society in a blaze of reductionism. Callanan thinks Mandeville remarkable
and original in this phase of his writing but evolutionary psychology is a
highly contested field which at its worst implies idiotic notions like a
gene for alcoholism or bullying. The critics have an essential point: no
complex human behaviour can be reduced to the existence of this or that gene
or combinations thereof, and as pointed out above, when we try to understand
such behaviour we quickly run into the boundaries of our cognitive
capacities. Undeterred, Callanan holds Mandeville’s poor theorising aloft as
something we should admire.
“Mandeville’s claim is that there is no distinct drive to benevolent
sociability in the human mind.” He does think we are sociable, but only
because we want the esteem of others. What he doesn’t discuss is mutual
benefit. Kropotkin wrote a serious study of mutual aid, much ignored for
ideological reasons. He is able to cite plenty of evidence for mutual aid as
a factor in evolution and for its prevalence in human relations. In
Mandeville’s model, there is either the isolated individual, or the hive,
nothing between, which fits with his political assumptions. If natural
benevolence existed, Mandeville claims, society would not have developed as
it did: “the world must have been destitute of all that industry that is
owing to envy and emulation..all men would have been levellers…” For 38,000
years, that’s more or less how we were. We didn’t evolve to be business
people, bankers, property speculators, city traders any more than to be
poker players or scuba divers. We have a set of biologically given faculties
which can be put to various uses; we can choose to work for our own
enrichment, which Adam Smith called “a delusion” or to assist economic
democracy. The point is, we choose. This is what Mandeville is intent on
denying: he insists it is our nature to behave as his class did in early 18th
century London, a preposterous conclusion.
Callanan claims we are animals who deny we are animals, though he and
Mandeville accept we are. They are joined by billions who accept Darwinian
science. Thus, what happens to the notion that we deny our animal nature?
Mandeville believed poets were lazy braggarts whose poverty flowed from
their idleness and belief in their contentment. Shakespeare was a lazy
braggart? Mandeville has some literary skill, but it is no match for
Shakespeare’s. Nor is his view of what it means to be human. Callanan
exhorts us to think economically. The best words written about money are in
Timon of Athens. Shakespeare understood, as Mandeville didn’t, how
money reduces everything to its own base level.
There is much good scholarship in this study, but also much poor thinking.
Mandeville’s core theory is credible only if we accept a perverse definition
of vice: absolute self-denial. Those who preached this were hypocrites and
power-seekers. Once admit that self-fulfilment is the sensible aim of life,
and Mandeville loses his allure. His core procedure is to reverse engineer
from what he sees around him, which he graces with the definition of
empiricism. By doing so he defines the behaviour of the upper classes of
early 18th century London as human nature. Had he reverse
engineered from, say the behaviour of the native peoples of north America
prior to the arrival of the European settlers, he might have come very
different conclusions. Perhaps it isn’t accidental Callanan should try to
revive Mandeville’s reputation at a time when the “free market” right is in
the ascendancy in several rich nations. Presumably the academic world is
under pressure from these forces: all the more reason to think clearly and
to reject conformism.