Reading Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments 5
An impartial spectator calls
O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
An’ foolish notion
(From Robert Burns, “To a Louse, On Seeing one on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church”, 1786).
I am reading Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) - the most recent post in the series is here, and you can read Smith himself here.
Burns was born in 1759, the year TMS was published. Benjamin Wilkie tells us that Burns admired Smith, and read his major works, including TMS, but they never had a chance to meet in person.
In Part III of TMS Smith moves from his discussion of how we sympathize, and praise or blame others, to how we consider ourselves. The only way we can do this is to imagine ourselves observed by an impartial spectator, and we imagine that spectator to see us as we, in our better moments, see others. We cannot see ourselves from the inside:
We can never survey our own sentiments and motives, we can never form any judgment concerning them, unless we remove ourselves, as it were, from our own natural station, and endeavour to view them as at a certain distance from us. But we can do this in no other way than by endeavouring to view them with the eyes of other people, or as other people are likely to view them. Whatever judgment we can form concerning them, accordingly, must always bear some secret reference, either to what are, or to what, upon a certain condition, would be, or to what, we imagine, ought to be the judgment of others.
Burns laughed - we can’t do this, there’s no power that has given us this gift. Smith makes it clear - we imagine what ought to be the judgment of others. We also care whether the impartial spectator knows the whole story. That we might appear to be deserving of high praise, even though we know the fact of the matter is that we have done nothing special, and credit ought to go elsewhere, is not the same thing as being recognized for something we know actually was a good deed. Smith recognizes that praise based upon the superficial, and a false image, might appeal to some people, the hopelessly, shamefully vain. But the ethical person imagines an impartial spectator with true insight into our nature.
And yet … have we reached a place where Smith’s world, of a generally understood idea of what constitutes good and praiseworthy conduct as seen by an impartial spectator, is simply gone? We are surrounded by people quite willing to let us know how monstrous they are, generally with the hope that there are some spectators who share their penchant for cruelty, insult, and implied threat of violence. Uninterested in persuasion that could possibly change their beliefs, impervious to whatever “facts” they seem to have missed, not basing their baseness on “misinformation”, but on just being, very openly, appalling. I started to feel some despair at this part of the book - Smith is relying on senses that far too many people have come to think of as simply not mattering at all.
I don’t mean that different times and places don’t live with different social expectations - of course they do. The impartial spectator in Glasgow in 1759 is not the same person as in London in 1905, or Tokyo in 1949, or Bloomington in 2024 (though not entirely different either - human sympathies are human sympathies after all).
And I don’t mean that people don’t care about how they appear. Our most odious public figures worry very much about how they appear, taking care to ensure consistency in their brand, and their marketability to their consumer base.
But what they don’t care about is an impartial spectator, weighing their statements and actions, approving or disapproving. I don’t think it is a hazy nostalgia that makes me think something has changed, is changing.
I began this reading of TMS with the prompt from more than a few pre-election commentators that we ought to try our best to find sympathy with Trump voters, many of whom (though certainly not all) have had few prospects for socio-economic mobility, and feel somewhat “left behind”. But post-election this continues to be a challenge. Consider what we might think of as Trump’s two “big” policy goals: deportation of immigrants without papers (and, he has made clear, some immigrants who do have papers), and drastically cutting federal government expenditures, though with the vagueness customary to Republicans promising to cut budgets since Reagan. Each of these policies has an aspect of cruelty in them: the deportations will tear people’s lives apart, and give families terrible decisions to make when some are US citizens and some are not. The budget cutting is also about inflicting harm: it is about firing people. It doesn’t matter what they do; in this exercise the actual functions of the US Forest Service, or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, are not even a matter of discussion. The promise of “cutting government” is simply that some “Washington bureaucrats” will find themselves packing up their office pictures in cardboard boxes and searching for a new job. But I cannot sympathize with that emotion. We cannot even call these policies self-serving for Trump voters - they seem unable themselves to explain how their lives will be improved by any of this, except for the satisfaction that, on their behalf, Trump and his enablers will bring hurt.
From Smith: our sympathies are with those emotions we think are worthy of the circumstance. And we imagine an impartial spectator judging our own emotional responses in light of how we ourselves react to the behavior of others. But I recoil from cruelty.
The impartial spectator grants us perspective:
In my present situation, an immense landscape of lawns and woods, and distant mountains, seems to do no more than cover the little window which I write by, and to be out of all proportion less than the chamber in which I am sitting. I can form a just comparison between those great objects and the little objects around me, in no other way than by transporting myself, at least in fancy, to a different station, from whence I can survey both at nearly equal distances, and thereby form some judgment of their real proportions. …
In the same manner, to the selfish and original passions of human nature, the loss or gain of a very small interest of our own appears to be of vastly more importance, excites a much more passionate joy or sorrow, a much more ardent desire or aversion, than the greatest concern of another with whom we have no particular connection. His interests, as long as they are surveyed from his station, can never be put into the balance with our own, can never restrain us from doing whatever may tend to promote our own, how ruinous soever to him. Before we can make any proper comparison of those opposite interests, we must change our position. We must view them, neither from our own place nor yet from his, neither with our own eyes nor yet with his, but from the place and with the eyes of a third person, who has no particular connection with either, and who judges with impartiality between us.
In common with all great moral theories, Smith asks us to count everybody as one and only one, including ourselves. We must imagine our concerns as proportionate to that of others. It doesn’t mean that we don’t give greater attention to our selves and families and loved ones as we do to others - society would we become a mess if we didn’t attend to those for whom we are in the best position to care for. But it does mean that we understand our smallness in the grand scheme of things, that the families and cares of others are of equal weight to our own. (In this part of TMS Smith ranks Thomas Gray as the greatest English poet, “who joins to the sublimity of Milton the elegance and harmony of Pope”, and we can hear in Gray’s Elegy what Smith is getting at here).
Our sensibility to the feelings of others, so far from being inconsistent with the manhood of self-command, is the very principle upon which that manhood is founded. The very same principle or instinct which, in the misfortune of our neighbour, prompts us to compassionate his sorrow, in our own misfortune, prompts us to restrain the abject and miserable lamentations of our own sorrow. The same principle or instinct which, in his prosperity and success, prompts us to congratulate his joy, in our own prosperity and success, prompts us to restrain the levity and intemperance of our own joy. In both cases, the propriety of our own sentiments and feelings seems to be exactly in proportion to the vivacity and force with which we enter into and conceive his sentiments and feelings.
The man of the most perfect virtue, the man whom we naturally love and revere the most, is he who joins, to the most perfect command of his own original and selfish feelings, the most exquisite sensibility both to the original and sympathetic feelings of others.
And here Smith brings our sympathies, and our own self-control, together. The person who can best sympathize with others, through their good times and bad, is best able to see himself through the eyes of the impartial spectator, and then exert control over his own statements and actions. The person who could not care less about the welfare of others will lack that ability to see himself through the eyes of others (although he might imagine that he can), and as such lack the ability to see that people are not going to sympathize with his silly boasts, his excessive sense of grievance, his lack of any filters, as we say these days.