301 Years Being Right on Sympathy and Nations

Too many people pretend to have read The Wealth of Nations and I think it’s time to reclaim the importance of pretending to have read The Theory of Moral Sentiments. It is 301 years since Adam Smith was born and I love round anniversaries. I am amazed at the survival not only of his economic ideas but of his entire moral philosophy.

It is not that the 1,400 pages of the two great works are not objectionable today, but that reality has been determined to prove the Scottish thinker right, regardless of the evolution of theoretical battles. The best antidote to most of a nation’s ills remains the prosperity born of freedom not exempt from responsibility, of individualism not exempt from empathy. Freedom without responsibility, individualism without empathy, we already know it and it’s called Kamala Harris. You would not want to live in a society made up of millions like her.

Conservatism is made up of several currents. Edmund Burke traveled a different theoretical route to end up in the same place as Adam Smith, perhaps that is why they agree even in the differences. Dynamiting mercantilism, improving the life of every man, building society from virtue and excellence, signing a pact with prosperity, trusting in the individual’s capacity to make better decisions than any institution, the language of exchange, understanding the ethics of sympathy, knowing how to listen to the inner voice of the “impartial spectator.”

The author of The Wealth of Nations has so many accurate lessons and brilliant proposals that can be gleaned from his thinking that it is incredible that he has so few followers among Western politicians, who are more interested in learning economics by reading Marie Kondo, and ethics with Paulo Coelho, which is like learning the Ten Commandments while smoking marijuana.

Between one democracy fest and the next, there is something Adam Smith wrote that should be engraved in our politicians’ hearts, including those on the right, who are always fearful when it comes to reducing the State: “Great nations are never impoverished by the prodigality or misconduct of some of their individuals, but they do fall into that situation due to the prodigality and dissipation of governments.”

I try to put myself in the place of those political officials who indulge in inaction due to unfounded fears and I am unable to. Following the Scottish economist, I suppose I reject that sentiment or, to put it in plain English: my unbiased external spectator vomits upon imagining the situation.

This is what Smith calls sympathy and we know today as empathy. Humans are empathetic, to the point that we can put ourselves in the shoes of others and feel what they are feeling, even if they are people we don’t love at all: think for example of the tax inspector who just caught a testicle in the elevator door of your block of flats. We don’t forget our hostility towards him, but neither do we wish him to lose a testicle either.

This ability to understand the other, as well as the ability to negotiate, is typically human. Animals cannot do it, except in Disney movies, where everything is possible except the truth: even Tinkerbell is now black. The quotation from The Wealth of Nations is famous: “Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog. Nobody ever saw one animal by its gestures and natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that yours; I am willing to give this for that,” unless we’re counting Hunter Biden at the nightclub.

Perhaps because we are created in the image and likeness of God, human nature is a constant discovery: everything about us has a reason. “The agreeable passions of love and joy can satisfy and support the heart without any auxiliary pleasure,” writes the Scottish author, “The bitter and painful emotions of grief and resentment more strongly require the healing consolation of sympathy.”

And so it is: we need help when we are sick, when we have lost the ability to face life with hope, when our ill health — be it physical or mental — pushes us into dangerous zones. It is much more difficult to die of joy; instead, too many have passed away sad and lonely.

The 301st anniversary of Adam Smith should be an invitation to reclaim more insistently our spaces of freedom, in a time in which it is in clear retreat. The old economist was clear about this in his Theory of Moral Sentiments: we need to be free to take care of ourselves as best we can, we need imagination to put ourselves in the shoes of others and take care of them, and — I would add — we need the Wealth of Nations to be able to afford a good seafood dinner washed down with expensive wine and to celebrate how much better off we all are when we are allowed to live in peace and freedom.

READ MORE from Adam Smith:

Terrorists Used to Lose Their Heads. Today, It’s Their Balls.

My Teachers Knew I Was a Bad Student

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