(The Muir portrait, circa 1800, unknown author. Wikimedia Commons)
(Above is an audio recording of the blog post)
Society for Adam Smith functions like a mirror, and the learning process takes place within it socially, interactively. As he says in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, bring a human creature:
into society, and he is immediately provided with the mirror which he wanted before. It is placed in the countenance and behaviour of those he lives with, which always mark when they enter into, and when they disapprove of his sentiments; and it is here that he first views the propriety and impropriety of his own passions, the beauty and deformity of his own mind … Bring him into society, and all his own passions will immediately become the causes of new passions. He will observe that mankind approve of some of them, and are disgusted by others. He will be elevated in the one case, and cast down in the other (TMS III.1.3, pp. 110-111).
The kind of social learning that Smith is invoking here is indirect and habituated by the agent in everyday life; moral causation takes place within society amidst others – a totally isolated human creature, if such a thing existed, would have no moral self. An individual’s character, their values, and their opinions, are formed through their interaction with others and their environment. As Griswold (1999) puts it, the moral self ‘arises through social interaction. The “mirroring” process of sympathy is a necessary condition for the development of moral self-consciousness and character’ (p. 210).
Living in a society involves learning through the emission and reception of information about our actions. We will learn through the reactions of others that we receive that some of our actions are approved of, and some disapproved of. Given his empiricist theory of motivation; namely, that ‘pleasure and pain are the great objects of desire and aversion’ (TMS VII.iii.2.7, p. 320), and since approval brings with it pleasure and disapproval pain, the individual in society is motivated to learn which actions will elicit approval and to act accordingly. Society is the fertile ground from which our motivation will grow our moral compass. Society and morality are essentially conjoined. The communicative sentimentality of social actors and spectators produces moral judgment, and it is through this process of social learning that human beings learn how to behave as members of any given society. Social learning is part and parcel of everyday human life, the effect of the exposure to which was referred to as ‘moral causation’ (from the Latin for ‘custom’ mos/morem) in the 18th Century, flagging up that one’s values, opinions, and character are fundamentally related to the social environment.
Given that social learning is an interactive, communicative process, and that society functions as a mirror, if most of the common people find themselves in a factory all day producing part of a pin, they will be denied access to an expansive social experience and will be less exposed to the learning experience that naturally comes about in society. By contrast to “primitive societies” with a limited division of labour, wherein individuals are generally able to learn ‘almost all the abilities and virtues which that state requires, or perhaps can admit of’ ‘without any attention of government’ (WN V.i.f.49, p. 781), the division of labour in commercial societies leads to the occupations of those who live by labour, and that is the ‘great body of the people … to be confined to a few very simple operations’ (WN V.i.f.50, p. 781). As a result, a worker will have ‘no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention’ (WN V.i.f.50, p. 782). The result of this being that the worker ‘naturally loses … the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become’ (WN, V.i.f.50, p. 782).
In such a situation, as Smith says, ‘some attention of government is necessary in order to prevent the almost entire corruption and degeneracy of the great body of the people’ (WN V.i.f.49, p. 781). State supported education builds upon the natural capacity of human beings to learn and to be educated and it can help to counteract the impoverished, degenerated state of workers under the division of labour. Through education, some of the expansive experience necessary to the formation of a healthy imagination can be provided for the children of workers. Formal education exposes pupils to greater social learning as well as providing them with access to a formal curriculum. Education and schooling are necessary for both the individual’s and society’s good because education counteracts degenerative moral causation, leading people to be ‘less liable’ to socially harmful delusions and actions. An educated common person becomes more able to understand what society demands of them: education makes them better citizens. In very un-Rousseauean vein, for Smith ‘education can help to produce more dutiful and better informed citizens’ (Rasmussen, 2013, p. 58). The ‘wealth’ of nations includes culture and learning.
Smith advocates education, not apprenticeship, to which he was opposed, considering it ‘both inefficient and unjust’ (Rothschild, 2001, p. 89). Apprenticeship represents a restriction on individual freedom and works to exclude others from protected professions. Apprenticeship, in Smith’s view, is an unsatisfactory manner of teaching people both skills and habits. As Rothschild reminds us, William Playfair represented Smith’s preference as the outcome of a choice between ‘a society brought together by education, and a society brought together by training’ (Rothschild, 2001, pp. 96-97). For Smith, it is through education, not training, that children will ‘learn to see through projects, and to feel themselves to be respectable’ (Rothschild, 2001, pp. 112-113).
For Smith, ‘The great secret of education is to direct vanity to proper objects’ (TMS VI.iii.46, p. 259). One of the best passions of human nature is the desire for esteem and admiration for the possession of qualities and talents that are the proper objects of esteem and admiration. Vanity is often the usurpation of that esteem and admiration before it is due. Smith says: ‘Though your son, under five-and-twenty years of age, should be but a coxcomb; do not, upon that account, despair of his becoming, before he is forty, a very wise and worthy man, and a real proficient in all those talents and virtues to which, at present, he may only be an ostentatious and empty pretender’ (TMS VI.iii.46, p. 259). Not only does Smith here show himself to be a believer in the powers of education (and adult education) to bring about wisdom, education, on his view, has a power to create an atmosphere of mutual respect: the lower orders feel more respectable and self-possessed through having been educated such that they feel ‘more likely to obtain the respect of their lawful superiors’ (WN V.i.f-g.61, p. 788). The superiors in turn feel ‘more disposed to respect’ (WN V.i.f-g.61, p. 788) the lower orders. Here, in Smith, we have in nascent form a view that will be developed in Hegel with the recognition that social solidarity grows out of mutual recognition and respect. For Smith, this recognition is grounded in education; education is essential to sustain well-governed societies.
Peaceable coexistence is the result of social negotiation, and the product of social learning and Smith advocated the adoption of universal primary education (modelled on the Scottish parish school system); he also advocated including science and philosophy in the education for those of middling rank to combat religious enthusiasm which can also be tamed by the ‘frequency and gaiety of publick diversions’ (WN V.i.g.15, p. 796). Education and a healthy public sphere work to ‘dissipate … that melancholy and gloomy humour which is almost always the nurse of popular superstition and enthusiasm’ (WN V.i.g.15, p. 796).
Education, for Smith, was essential in its capacity to improve the imaginative situation of all people, as well as being an important agent in counteracting threats to civil liberties, to the peace and order of society. Education is of paramount importance to the ‘health of the body politic’ (Broadie 2001, p. 105).
References
Broadie, A. (2001). The Scottish Enlightenment: The Historical Age of the Historical Nation, Edinburgh: Birlinn.
Griswold, C.L. (1999). Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rasmussen, D.C. (2013). Adam Smith and Rousseau: Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment. In Berry, C. J., Paganelli, M. P. and Smith, C. (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rothschild, E. (1998). Condorcet and Adam Smith on Education and Instruction, in Oksenberg Rorty, A. (ed.) Philosophers of Education: Historical Perspectives, London and New York: Routledge.
Smith, A. (1976a). The Theory of Moral Sentiments, (eds) D.D. Raphael and A.L Macfie, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Glasgow edition. Reprinted, Liberty Press (1982).
Smith, A. (1976b). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, (eds) R.H. Campbell and A.S. Skinner, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Glasgow edition.
