"Mandeville's Fable
By Robin Douglass
Princeton, 249 pages, $35
For much of the 18th century, England marinated in gin. Its production was encouraged after 1688 by bans on French wines and by the drinking habits of William III. Cheap gins were vile home brews, made with turpentine and sulfuric acid and sold from rank nooks and cellars. Gin's per capita consumption reached a staggering 14 gallons a year. Its inebriating effects encouraged vice and degradation, and its lethality was sufficiently extreme to stall the growth of England's population.
It was thus scandalous when, in his "Fable of the Bees," Bernard Mandeville addressed the topic with insouciance. Though he conceded that gin "sets the brain in flame, burns up the entrails, and scorches every part within," Mandeville wryly defended it. The gin trade, he said, sustained agriculture, financed government, emboldened soldiers and comforted the poor. Of the "vulgar," Mandeville wrote, "the happiest are those who feel the least pain." He offered a similarly cold-blooded defense of prostitution: "How is it to be supposed that honest women should walk the streets unmolested if there were no harlots to be had at reasonable prices?"
Opinions like these earned Mandeville the sobriquet "Man-Devil." His book was denounced before a grand jury for denigrating religion and virtue. To this day, his views are often deemed licentious to the point of disrepute. In "Mandeville's Fable: Pride, Hypocrisy, and Sociability," an astute and engaging work of intellectual history, the British political theorist Robin Douglass seeks to redeem Mandeville's reputation.
Bernard Mandeville, a Dutch physician, emigrated to London in the 1690s when he was in his 20s. His specializations -- hypochondria and hysteria -- indicated his fascination with human psychology and self-deceit. By this time, London had a boisterous media culture, and Mandeville plunged into a world of scribblers and printers, churning out minor verse, translations and political tracts. He was not above the 18th-century equivalent of click-bait, as with "The Virgin Unmask'd," a play-like dialogue between an elderly aunt and her niece that is less salacious than it sounds.
But Mandeville was up to something more serious. In 1714 appeared the work that made his notoriety, "The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices and Public Benefits." In 1723 he published a substantially expanded version. This work is rightly the focus of Mr. Douglass's attention.
The book begins with a long verse allegory describing English society as a beehive. Twenty "remarks" follow, explaining the fable and in the process developing what would prove an influential, if infamous, social theory. Mandeville held that developed societies -- however imposing in power and wealth -- rely on the "vilest and most hateful" of human passions, such as avarice, ambition, jealousy and lust. He derided venerable dogmas asserting the dignity of human nature or the grandeur of human reason. In the spirit of Thomas Hobbes, he understood humans as appetitive creatures, driven to relentless competition by their wants and passions. Denying these truths, he felt, was mere pretense, a pose designed to accrue credit and authority and itself an act of self-interest.
Historically, Mandeville argued, an ethic of self-denial and a belief in the supposed dignity of deprivation had been foisted on the vulgar by devious politicians, the better to dominate them in conditions of inequality. His own social analysis insisted that, in a modern commercialized society at least, the material prosperity of the whole is only possible when propelled by the self-regard, and indeed vices, of the many.
"The Fable of the Bees" offered a proto-sociological analysis of England just as it was beginning its rise as a manufacturing and military superpower. The fable's core theory, offered with a mischievous candor, seemed to explain the inner logic of this globally momentous development. But Mandeville's book was remarkable as well for its brilliantly acidic social observations. Pious, silken bishops; archly generous nobles; fussily polite members of the emerging middle class: No stratum of Briton escaped his razor-like dissection of motives and manners. Mr. Douglass is not alone in finding Mandeville's "withering criticisms of the moralism of his day" a guilty pleasure.
On the whole, though, Mr. Douglass is less interested in investigating his subject's life and times than in making Mandeville speak to our own era. His question is not "Why did Mandeville write what he did?" but rather "Was Mandeville right?" His answer is an uneasy affirmation.
With his vision of a self-regulating society of egoists, Mandeville has long exerted an influence on political economists. Adam Smith was queasy about him, but John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek both admired him. Mr. Douglass is suspicious of any "uber-capitalist" interpretation of Mandeville and seeks instead to recover him as a social theorist.
The master concept of Mandeville's theory of sociability, Mr. Douglass argues, is pride -- the passion that "leads us to care about how other people think of us." The desire for esteem or recognition is the "hidden spring" that instigates our social interactions. Pride forces us to behave conventionally and to overcome our raw instincts. We are proud to be pious, gentlemanly or polite.
But, Mandeville insisted, our conformity to convention is rarely if ever disinterested. Gentility and politeness are merely social combat of a softer hue. At dinner, he wrote, a "Man of Manners picks not the best but rather the worst out of each dish." This small sacrifice is a bid for esteem no less selfish than the appetite it restrained. Good breeding, Mandeville said, is a habit aimed at "flattering the pride and selfishness of others, and concealing our own with judgement and dexterity."
Mr. Douglass's book insightfully probes Mandeville's account of prideful sociability, testing it against the criticism of, among others, David Hume. Hume believed that humans could take pride in being legitimately praiseworthy, not just in securing praise by various wiles. Mandeville cast a colder eye, and in general Mr. Douglass shares his view that "self-serving biases" and "moral hypocrisy" are pervasive aspects of human social psychology, motivating us in a way that dispassionate reason cannot.
The current resonance of Mandeville's thought is disconcertingly difficult to ignore. Ours is, of course, a compulsively acquisitive society and thus Mandevillian in a material sense. It is also one increasingly cynical about those once worthy elites and institutions supposedly dedicated to service and the public good. Mandeville would have appreciated that populist distrust too.
Still more striking is our current mania for "recognition," a subject that Mr. Douglass periodically explores as a "pride-centered" social phenomenon. Our politics often abandon macro, communal goals and fixate on individual micro-aggressions or the implications of minor interactions and small gestures -- all said to challenge our self-worth and deprive us of the esteem we consider our due. Our schools and workplaces are paralyzed by the surveillance of triggers and sleights. All of this might be analyzed as a Mandevillian social competition, reworked for an era of atomized identity politics.
Doubtless the politics of recognition has at times advanced the cause of equality, but it can also breed the divisive parochialism recognizable in many recent "social justice" campaigns. Mr. Douglass's ambivalent account of Mandeville's famous fable -- with its calculation of "Private Vices and Public Benefits" -- suggests that the endless affirmation wars of our current travails are provoked less by the cause of justice and more by the vice of pride. That this form of self-regarding behavior has brought "public benefits" is very much open to doubt.
---
Mr. Collins is a professor of history at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario." [1]
1. REVIEW --- Books: When Virtue Is a Disguise. Collins, Jeffrey.
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 24 June 2023: C.9.
Komentarų nėra:
Rašyti komentarą