First, his "invisible hand of the market" is grounded in a time-specific philosophical stance, 1700s Enlightenment Deism.
Deism, with its "clockwork God" who set the universe in motion, to run with predictable precision and exactitude, has foundered and wrecked on the shoals of quantum physics and its uncertainty principle.
Second, the rationlist mindset of Deism has been demolished in other ways. Although I think Freudianism as a working theory of psychology is thin soup, nonetheless Freud was the pioneer in looking at the emotional drives of homo sapiens, to be followed on a more scientific basis by neuroscience, then on a better-defended philosophical plane by things such as game theory and certain threads in cognitive science.
Beginning with Freud, moderns began exploring — and then demonstrating — how many human actions were emotionally driven even to the point of being quite irrational.
By analyzing brain structure, neuroscientists have shown these emotional drivers are in the most primitive parts of the brain and therefore overridden only fitfully and with difficulty by modern rationalist thought.
Smith himself unwittingly demonstrated this, as do his less-thinking devotees today, as the wants of the consumer of modern capitalism are clearly driven by greed — a base-level, primal emotion that is often highly irrational. Quod erat demonstratum, as old high school geometry tests said at the end of proofs.
Madison Avenue knows this all too well, as any advertising or marketing person today can tell you. Their job is to break down rational resistance in the brain, not build up rational analysis.
A skeptical leftist's, or post-capitalist's, or eco-socialist's blog, including skepticism about leftism (and related things under other labels), but even more about other issues of politics. Free of duopoly and minor party ties. Also, a skeptical look at Gnu Atheism, religion, social sciences, more.
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Even if I don’t believe the argument in the post, it sounds like an argument for capitalism, which entices people to act rationally with the lore of profits.
ReplyDelete(BTW, greed is not an emotion. It’s a code of ethics like altruism, hedonism and pragmatism.)
And emotions are not necessarily irrational--and neither is greed for that matter. They are simply the automatic responses of already-made value judgments.
Besides, capitalism increases the costs of being irrational, so that works to limit people acting improperly.
My favorite on this is Gordon Gekko's takeover speech in “Wall Street.”
Justin
P.S.:
ReplyDeleteHow guilty must it feel to be using innovations of capitalism--namely, Blogger's own parent company--to damn everything that makes it possible?
A disappointed Texan,
Justin
Ahh, Justin. And I suppose there actually are WMDs in Iraq, too.
ReplyDeleteAnd, if "greed" is defined as "code of ethics" that explains while Bush wants to kill Social Security. It's the godly thing to do, obviously.
And, I nowhere note that I'm opposed to capitalism, per se. All I do is point out its illogic and lack of philosophical underpinnings to those who are open to viewing that.