Harmony with the devil

Life av Keith Richards er virkelig litt av en bok. Og mellom alle dopreferansene, bilulykkene og damehistoriene finner vi avsnitt som dette:

What is it that makes you want to write songs? In a way you want to stretch yourself into other people’s hearts. You want to plant yourself there, or at least get a resonance, where other people become a bigger instrument than the one you’re playing. It becomes almost an obsession to touch other people. To write a song that is remembered and taken to heart is a connection, a touching of bases. A thread that runs through all of us. A stab to the heart. Sometimes I think song-writing is about tightening the heartstrings as much as possible without bringing on a heartattack.

Det sender tankene til Adam Smith, som skrev mye om nettopp denne typen harmony of sentiments. Et fint sitat (via EconLib):

The great pleasure of conversation and society, besides, arises from a certain correspondence of sentiments and opinions, from a certain harmony of minds, which like so many musical instruments coincide and keep time with one another. But this most delightful harmony cannot be obtained unless there is a free communication of sentiments and opinions. We all desire, upon this account, to feel how each other is affected, to penetrate into each other's bosoms, and to observe the sentiments and affections which really subsist there. The man who indulges us in this natural passion, who invites us into his heart, who, as it were, sets open the gates of his breast to us, seems to exercise a species of hospitality more delightful than any other. No man, who is in ordinary good temper, can fail of pleasing, if he has the courage to utter his real sentiments as he feels them, and because he feels them.

Sang.

Hverdag og verdenshistorie, Adam Smith edition

Jeg har nettopp lest John Raes Adam Smith-biografi (utgitt i 1895, gratis på Amazon og Project Gutenberg). Dette er strengt tatt mer av en hyllest enn en biografi, og boka ligger milevis unna å være noen nøktern personbeskrivelse. Men slik var kanskje skikken den gang. Og likevel er den ganske interessant å lese.

Jeg vil trekke fram én liten historie: vi vet ikke nøyaktig hva Smith gjorde 14. juli 1789, mens Bastillen ble stormet i Paris, men dagen etter hadde han besøk av dikteren Samuel Rogers. Nyheten om den franske revolusjonen hadde naturligvis ikke nådd Skottland ennå, og det var en hverdag som mange andre:

Rogers arrived in Edinburgh apparently on the 14th of July— that momentous 14th of July 1789 which set the world aflame, though not a spark of information of it had reached Edinburgh before he left the city on the 21st; and on the morning of the 15th he walked down Panmure Close and paid his first visit to the economist. He found Smith sitting at breakfast quite alone, with a dish of strawberries before him, and he has preserved some scraps of the conversation, none of them in any way remarkable.

Det skjer så mye av historisk viktighet rundt oss, og vi forsøker å forstå det som best vi kan samtidig som vi fortsetter med hverdagen. Midt oppe i alle historiske begivenheter - revolusjoner, terrorangrep, historiske vedtak - har vi vårt hverdagsliv. Jeg tror jeg er spesielt mottakelig for denne tanken nettopp nå i år.

Og mens Frankrike våknet opp til første morgen etter revolusjonen, spiste Adam Smith jordbær til frokost.

Jammen, jeg VIL ha demokrati!

Jeg leste en sak i går morges som jeg ikke klarer å få ut av hodet. Professor Dietlind Stolle inviterte fire- og femåringer til statsvitenskapsforelesningene sine ved McGill University.

Eksperimentet er beskrevet i The Montreal Gazette:

Stolle asked her students to prepare a lecture introducing the little ones to the concepts of voting, democracy and choosing a prime minister.

They started by talking about what a prime minister does – making decisions for all Canadians. Someone a little like the teacher in their daycare, except a prime minister can be chosen.

Then Stolle’s students made up a game. First, daycare kids were given clickers and asked to vote which sticker they liked best, one of an ice cream cone or a soccer ball. Because this was a democracy, and ice cream had trounced soccer, everyone got a sticker with an ice cream cone on it.

But what would have happened if this wasn’t a democracy?

“They voted again for a sticker, but instead they got nap time,” said Stolle.

“They were puzzled, and one girl said right away, ‘I want democracy.’ Then all the others joined in. It was fantastic as an experience.”

Hele artikkelen er inspirerende lesning.

Det får meg til å tenke. Én ting er at demokratisk deltakelse må ha vært en betydningsfull erfaring for barna - men barns deltakelse er også inspirerende for oss voksne. Det å inkludere barna i politiske debatter krever mye av oss; vi må uttrykke oss enklere og klarere, og vi tvinges til å vurdere våre egne argumenter fra barnas perspektiv. Jeg tror for eksempel det er en effektiv måte å se verden omtrent slik som Adam Smith så for seg da han skrev om the impartial spectator.

Jeg kom forresten over denne saken via The Monkey Cage.

Historien nedenfra og opp

Jeg har bare fått lest de to første kapitlene så langt, men Howard Zinns A People's History of the United States: 1492 - Present er såpass tankevekkende - og såpass annerledes fra de siste bøkene jeg har lest - at jeg må lufte noen tanker:

Først: dette er Henry Kissingers rake - og selverklærte - motsetning. Mens Kissinger ser historien ovenfra og ned, gjør Zinn alt han kan for å se verden nedenfra. Slik formulerer Zinn det selv (side 9-10):

"History is the memory of states," wrote Henry Kissinger in his first book, A World Restored in which he proceeded to tell the history of nineteenth-century Europe from the viewpoint of the leaders of Austria and England, ignoring the millions who suffered from those statesmen's policies. From his standpoint, the "peace" that Europe had before the French Revolution was "restored" by the diplomacy of a few national leaders. But for factory workers in England, farmers in France, colored people in Asia and Africa, women and children everywhere except in the upper classes, it was a world of conquest, violence, hunger, exploitation-a world not restored but disintegrated.

My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been, The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners. 

Zinn er for øvrig mye rødere enn jeg først trodde.

Én ting til: da jeg tok metodefaget i historie på Blindern måtte vi lese et makkverk av en bok:  Lifelines From Our Past. A New World History Revised Edition, av Lefton Stavrianos. Hovedargumentet i denne boka kan oppsummeres omtrent slik: menneskeheten har aldri vært så lykkelig som da vi levde som stammesamfunn av samlere og jegere, og etter jordbruksrevolusjonen har det bare gått nedover. Kapitalismen er noe svineri.

Howard Zinn er ikke langt fra å si det samme (side 16-17):

Behind the English invasion of North America, behind their massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that special powerful drive born in civilizations based on private property. It was a morally ambiguous drive; the need for space, for land, was a real human need. But in conditions of scarcity, in a barbarous epoch of history ruled by competition, this human need was transformed into the murder of whole peoples. (...) 

Was all this bloodshed and deceit-from Columbus to Cortes, Pizarro, the Puritans-a necessity for the human race to progress from savagery to civilization? (...) 

That quick disposal might be acceptable ("Unfortunate, yes, but it had to be done") to the middle and upper classes of the conquering and "advanced" countries. But is it acceptable to the poor of Asia, Africa, Latin America, or to the prisoners in Soviet labor camps, or the blacks in urban ghettos, or the Indians on reservations-to the victims of that progress which benefits a privileged minority in the world? Was it acceptable (or just inescapable?) to the miners and railroaders of America, the factory hands, the men and women who died by the hundreds of thousands from accidents or sickness, where they worked or where they lived-casualties of progress? And even the privileged minority-must it not reconsider, with that practicality which even privilege cannot abolish, the value of its privileges, when they become threatened by the anger of the sacrificed, whether in organized rebellion, unorganized riot, or simply those brutal individual acts of desperation labeled crimes by law and the state?

Adam Smith har selvfølgelig et ganske annerledes syn på kapitalismen, og på hvordan rike menneskers egeninteresse påvirker resten av samfunnet. Les det lange sitatet i bloggposten om Moral Sentiments, og sammenlikn det med Zinn. For min egen del: jeg ser Zinns poeng - og det er verdt å dvele ved disse maktovergrepene - men i utgangspunktet er jeg nok mer på linje med Smith.

Du kan forresten laste ned hele (ja, hele!) Howard Zinns bok som pdf her.

Moral Sentiments

Det er vanskelig å oppsummere Adam Smiths Theory of Moral Sentiments i en bloggpost, men her er noen tanker og sitater.

Den aller første setningen er flott:

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.

For Smith begynner alt dette med sympati: vi kan ikke fullt ut oppleve noen annens virkelighet (fordi hver av oss bare opplever verden gjennom vår egen bevissthet), men vi kan forestille oss hvordan vi ville følt i samme situasjon. Dette betyr også at ingen andre kan se verden fra nøyaktig samme perspektiv som oss selv, og vi må forstå at våre egne gleder og sorger oppleves sterkere for oss selv enn for andre. Det ligger en god porsjon ydmykhet i dette, og Smith oppfordrer oss til å vurdere våre egne følelser og argumenter gjennom øynene til the impartial spectator.

Videre: denne lille setningen (på side 264 i siste Penguin-utgaven) fikk meg til å tenke på The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, og på hvor mye mer vi får ut av arbeidslivet enn bare lønn:

Colleagues in office, partners in trade, call each other brothers; and frequently feel towards one another as if they really were so.

Det synes jeg er veldig flott å tenke på.

Her er et altfor langt sitat (fra side 213-215) hvor Smith forklarer hvorfor vi bør følge vår egeninteresse, og hvordan den usynlige hånden fungerer:

Our imagination, which in pain and sorrow seems to be confined and cooped up within our own persons, in times of ease and prosperity expands itself to every thing around us. We are then charmed with the beauty of that accommodation which reigns in the palaces and oeconomy of the great; and admire how every thing is adapted to promote their ease, to prevent their wants, to gratify their wishes, and to amuse and entertain their most frivolous desires. [...] The pleasures of wealth and greatness, when considered in this complex view, strike the imagination as something grand and beautiful and noble, of which the attainment is well worth all the toil and anxiety which we are so apt to bestow upon it.

And it is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner. It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind. It is this which first prompted them to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts, which ennoble and embellish human life; which have entirely changed the whole face of the globe, have turned the rude forests of nature into agreeable and fertile plains, and made the trackless and barren ocean a new fund of subsistence, and the great high road of communication to the different nations of the earth. The earth by these labours of mankind has been obliged to redouble her natural fertility, and to maintain a greater multitude of inhabitants. It is to no purpose, that the proud and unfeeling landlord views his extensive fields, and without a thought for the wants of his brethren, in imagination consumes himself the whole harvest that grows upon them. The homely and vulgar proverb, that the eye is larger than the belly, never was more fully verified than with regard to him. The capacity of his stomach bears no proportion to the immensity of his desires, and will receive no more than that of the meanest peasant. The rest he is obliged to distribute among those, who prepare, in the nicest manner, that little which he himself makes use of, among those who fit up the palace in which this little is to be consumed, among those who provide and keep in order all the different baubles and trinkets, which are employed in the oeconomy of greatness; all of whom thus derive from his luxury and caprice, that share of the necessaries of life, which they would in vain have expected from his humanity or his justice. The produce of the soil maintains at all times nearly that number of inhabitants which it is capable of maintaining. The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species. When Providence divided the earth among a few lordly masters, it neither forgot nor abandoned those who seemed to have been left out in the partition. These last too enjoy their share of all that it produces. In what constitutes the real happiness of human life, they are in no respect inferior to those who would seem so much above them. In ease of body and peace of mind, all the different ranks of life are nearly upon a level, and the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for.

Altså: enkeltmenneskers ambisjoner og egeninteresse kan løfte levestandarden til hele samfunn, selv om hensikten bare var å berike en selv. Dette argumentet er kanskje ikke like sterkt støttet hele veien (og bør uansett kontres med argumentet om overklassens conspicuous consumption), men det er en god måte å forstå ideen om den usynlige hånden.

Men likevel: det store poenget å ta med seg fra denne boka er at Adam Smith eksplisitt avfeier at egeninteresse er det eneste vi motiveres av (373-374):

That whole account of human nature, however, which deduces all sentiments and affections from self-love, which has made so much noise in the world, but which, so far as I know, has never yet been fully and distinctly explained, seems to me to have arisen from some confused misapprehension of the system of sympathy.

For mer om denne boka: sjekk EconTalk Book Club.

Jeg kan ta feil, men...

Her er to ting som er viktige når vi diskuterer med hverandre:

1: Å innse og innrømme når man tar feil. Det er skrevet en bok om dette, og jeg tipper den bør leses.

2: Å vurdere våre egne argumenter utenfra.

Det første poenget handler om hva man kan gjøre etter at man har bestemt seg (nemlig å ombestemme seg). Det andre poenget handler om hva man bør gjøre før man bestemmer seg (nemlig å tenke seg grundig om).

Hvis du vil høre en tankevekkende podkast om hva det andre poenget egentlig innebærer, bør du få med deg denne episoden av Radio Open Source. Det er et intervju med James Kloppenberg, som har skrevet boka Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition, om Obamas pragmatisme og hvor den kommer fra. Introduksjonskapitlet ligger forresten gratis på hjemmesidene til forlaget (pdf).

Hvis du vil ha et eksempel på en som ikke er i stand til å vurdere sine meningsmotstanderes argumenter utenfra, kan du gå noen uker tilbake i arkivet til Radio Open Source og høre Noam Chomsky.

Det ligger en god porsjon Adam Smith i dette, særlig ideen om the impartial spectator. Hovedpoenget er at vi må vurdere våre egne argumenter ikke slik våre meningsmotstandere ville vurdert dem, men slik som the impartial spectator ville vurdert dem. Hvis alle gjør dèt, har vi kommet et godt stykke på vei.

Adam Smith feil vei

Verdens sannsynligvis beste podkast - EconTalk - kjører noen veldig gode ekstraepisoder om Adam Smiths Theory of Moral Sentiments. Du finner både bokteksten og lydbok gratis via The Online Library of Liberty.

I dag kjenner mange Adam Smith først og fremst gjennom Wealth of Nations. Det er her han skriver om den usynlige hånden, og om harmonien som oppstår når alle får følge sin egeninteresse. Moral Sentiments handler derimot om alle de andre følelsene og motivasjonene -utover egeninteresse - som er viktige for oss som mennesker.

Mens Smith bruker mye av Wealth of Nations på å utdype hvorfor det er bra for samfunnet at hvert individ arbeider for sin egeninteresse, åpner han Moral Sentiments med å konstatere kort at empati er en åpenbar menneskelig kvalitet:

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.

Sammenliknet med de mange lange eksemplene fra Wealth of Nations, er det interessant at Smith ikke synes det er viktig å forklare hvorfor medmenneskelighet og empati er gode kvaliteter. Han mente kanskje det var ganske selvsagt.

Og etterhvert som den usynlige hånden har fått stadig større tillit, er det omsider blitt nødvendig å lese Moral Sentiments nærmere.