The so-called Enlightenment - part one: the flattening of man
It is typical of the whole spirit of willing self-deception with which the average educated person approaches the so-called Enlightenment, that the most famous quote about it is false. Voltaire never said: "I disagree with your views, but I will fight to the death for your right to hold them", and if he had he would have been a liar. Voltaire was thoroughly intolerant and spent half his time insulting, slandering and ridiculing anyone who even slightly disagreed with him, and, even worse, anyone who actually agreed with him but threatened to become a rival. As for toleration, his best-known genuine quotation - "Crush that infamous thing!" - does not promise much, and would not do so even if it was turned to any other object but the Catholic Church. To demand the "crushing" of a large religion hardly proves tolerance. (With the ignorant and often fraudulent picture that justifies this attack in the minds of those who know about it, I may deal elsewhere.) And Voltaire was not as bad as the atheist and totalitarian d'Holbach, or as the totalitarian Rousseau. Of no phenomenon as much as the so-called Enlightenment can it so truly be said that Vulgus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur; beginning with the fact that no-one - no, not even Chesterton! - has ever stopped to wonder just how arrogant and, yes, self-deceived a generation must be, to call itself "enlightened".
But if the most famous false quotation from the period at least flatters it in a humane and decent direction, one in which one would be happy to move even if it had in fact anything to do with Voltaire, the most famous true one does not. It has been repeated for 250 years with every sign of admiration, as a kind of acquired if not revealed truth, without anyone ever awakening to the kind of thing it is: a piece of brutish, adolescent cynicism, false on all but the most superficial level, that falsifies and blights a whole area of human life, pure poison to mind and to morality.
The quotation is this: It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
Why has it taken so long, why does it have to be this poor fool who writes, to point out that this is rubbish, that this is the viewpoint of business of a man who has never transacted any in his life, that it has precisely zero to do with any of the reasons why any of us work and with any of the satisfactions we look for from work? Adam Smith had never worked in a shop. I have. I know selling, if I know anything. And I can tell you this: that no technique of selling will work half as well as the tongue of a man or woman who has a good product and knows it is good. Which would please the butcher best: to squeeze his client, or to be told that he produces the best meat in town? Would the baker be pleased if he made money by selling bread so bad that he himself wouldn't touch it? What delights the brewer's heart: to count the money in his cash register, or to know that his beer is being spoken about in distant towns and that people come out of their way to taste it?
It is not mainly from the benevolence of the brewer, the baker and the butcher that we look for our daily meal; although, if we were unlucky enough to be destitute, we might hope that they have some of that natural human instinct that only Adam Smith is unable to see. It is from their own self-respect, and, even more, from their respect for their trade. People who feel that they are doing something good by preparing the food and the drink of the rest of mankind will apply themselves to the job; people who think of their own self-interest will do the least possible work and cut corners. And it follows that the person who has his own self-interest in mind will not even be as successful as the person who is willing to waste some time and some work, but wants to make sure that his work is of the best quality.
And there is yet another and deeper point. The city of Milan - one of the economic engines of the richest continent in the world, and a place where people know and have always known about wealth and success - has recently held a city-wide competition to find the best ten shop workers in town. A hundred were shortlisted, from businesses as different as fashion and flea markets, ice-cream stores and motorbike shops, butchers and goldsmiths. There were very different types: a former police sergeant who had gone on to be floor manager for a major fashion store, a Japanese man who had come to Milan apparently only out of love for male fashion design, a raspy-throated motorbike expert, a man who managed a xerox machine in the town's university quarter, a labourer in a small corner shop. A few things turned up over and over again, in spite of the immensely different fields covered: favourite shop workers worked hard, did not rush the customer, had the details of all the goods in the store at their fingertips, their advice was reliable, they did not make impecunious customers feel bad as compared with millionaires. Some made a special effort: three (including the corner shop employee) carried the shopping for elderly customers, even to their homes. Most were praised for finding solutions that would not cost too much but gave the customers exactly what they wanted; some for enthusiasm, some for restraint. But there is one feature that turned up in every one of the one hundred shortlisted, and it was summed up by the only American of the lot, a charming young lady who sells costume jewelry: "I want my customers to leave the shop happier than they came in."
Successful shop workers, shop workers who get customers to come again and again, are those who take a personal interest, who - in the words of many on the shortlist - make customers feel like friends. Buying and selling is a social business, and the whole person is engaged in it. I spoke of what delights the brewer's heart, but surely there is something even more significant - and daily - even than a reputation for excellence; and that is to see the regulars come back, smiling at you as often as not as they come, slowly growing in numbers year after year as your pub's reputation grows, chatting to each other, telling you their troubles. Money is the last consideration for any successful business; it is at best a tool for achieving all the rest - sound product pleasantly sold, a solid and growing reputation, the life of a self-respecting, satisfied worker.
Indeed, the main function of money is to serve as a tangible counter for good service and good product. Money represents value, and is given for value received. If I have been well served, I have no problem with paying a price, indeed I would feel a bit like a thief if I did not. In some trades, it is habitual to add a tip or gratification according to the satisfaction one has had in the product and service, but whether or not this is acceptable, money is the tangible evidence of the customer's satisfaction. Its main purpose, therefore, is to certify to the producer that their work and products are valued. So, to rephrase one last time Adam Smith's fallacious phrase, It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from our own gratitude and honesty in properly compensating good work well done and well offered.
Because Adam Smith was mired in the dreary, valueless world of "self-interest", he could not insert the obvious in his work. So he resorted to the obviously fallacious labour theory of value, whereby money stands for the value of the work that went into the object being purchased - and a child could answer that a jeweller and a baker can put the same amount of work and price it very differently. Indeed, the baker himself can price his own work very differently according to the quality of the bread, even though the amount of work is largely the same.
The labour theory of value is the inevitable child of Adam Smith's immature, cynical, adolescent incapacity of appreciating value as it is, an inevitably subjective reaction given objective form. The "Enlightenment" obsession with being "rational", that is with excluding from reasoning all that human beings really live on, leads to a theory that is not only emotionally unlovable but flatly wrong and disastrous in its results. When Karl Marx elaborated his theory of plus-value, he was moving straight from Adam Smith; if monetary value is only bestowed by labour - disregarding quality and desirability, for instance - then the person who does not contribute labour is a thief, and anything that adds price without corresponding labour is theft. From this one could have predicted, right from the start, the collapse of the Soviet Union: a society that does not understand quality and value is never going to be able to function properly. People will always do as little work as is in their "self-interest", and standards will remain damagingly bad. The ugly Soviet joke "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work" is the inevitable result of Smith's theory of value; Smith is the father of Marx and the grandfather of Lenin and Stalin.
But if the most famous false quotation from the period at least flatters it in a humane and decent direction, one in which one would be happy to move even if it had in fact anything to do with Voltaire, the most famous true one does not. It has been repeated for 250 years with every sign of admiration, as a kind of acquired if not revealed truth, without anyone ever awakening to the kind of thing it is: a piece of brutish, adolescent cynicism, false on all but the most superficial level, that falsifies and blights a whole area of human life, pure poison to mind and to morality.
The quotation is this: It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
Why has it taken so long, why does it have to be this poor fool who writes, to point out that this is rubbish, that this is the viewpoint of business of a man who has never transacted any in his life, that it has precisely zero to do with any of the reasons why any of us work and with any of the satisfactions we look for from work? Adam Smith had never worked in a shop. I have. I know selling, if I know anything. And I can tell you this: that no technique of selling will work half as well as the tongue of a man or woman who has a good product and knows it is good. Which would please the butcher best: to squeeze his client, or to be told that he produces the best meat in town? Would the baker be pleased if he made money by selling bread so bad that he himself wouldn't touch it? What delights the brewer's heart: to count the money in his cash register, or to know that his beer is being spoken about in distant towns and that people come out of their way to taste it?
It is not mainly from the benevolence of the brewer, the baker and the butcher that we look for our daily meal; although, if we were unlucky enough to be destitute, we might hope that they have some of that natural human instinct that only Adam Smith is unable to see. It is from their own self-respect, and, even more, from their respect for their trade. People who feel that they are doing something good by preparing the food and the drink of the rest of mankind will apply themselves to the job; people who think of their own self-interest will do the least possible work and cut corners. And it follows that the person who has his own self-interest in mind will not even be as successful as the person who is willing to waste some time and some work, but wants to make sure that his work is of the best quality.
And there is yet another and deeper point. The city of Milan - one of the economic engines of the richest continent in the world, and a place where people know and have always known about wealth and success - has recently held a city-wide competition to find the best ten shop workers in town. A hundred were shortlisted, from businesses as different as fashion and flea markets, ice-cream stores and motorbike shops, butchers and goldsmiths. There were very different types: a former police sergeant who had gone on to be floor manager for a major fashion store, a Japanese man who had come to Milan apparently only out of love for male fashion design, a raspy-throated motorbike expert, a man who managed a xerox machine in the town's university quarter, a labourer in a small corner shop. A few things turned up over and over again, in spite of the immensely different fields covered: favourite shop workers worked hard, did not rush the customer, had the details of all the goods in the store at their fingertips, their advice was reliable, they did not make impecunious customers feel bad as compared with millionaires. Some made a special effort: three (including the corner shop employee) carried the shopping for elderly customers, even to their homes. Most were praised for finding solutions that would not cost too much but gave the customers exactly what they wanted; some for enthusiasm, some for restraint. But there is one feature that turned up in every one of the one hundred shortlisted, and it was summed up by the only American of the lot, a charming young lady who sells costume jewelry: "I want my customers to leave the shop happier than they came in."
Successful shop workers, shop workers who get customers to come again and again, are those who take a personal interest, who - in the words of many on the shortlist - make customers feel like friends. Buying and selling is a social business, and the whole person is engaged in it. I spoke of what delights the brewer's heart, but surely there is something even more significant - and daily - even than a reputation for excellence; and that is to see the regulars come back, smiling at you as often as not as they come, slowly growing in numbers year after year as your pub's reputation grows, chatting to each other, telling you their troubles. Money is the last consideration for any successful business; it is at best a tool for achieving all the rest - sound product pleasantly sold, a solid and growing reputation, the life of a self-respecting, satisfied worker.
Indeed, the main function of money is to serve as a tangible counter for good service and good product. Money represents value, and is given for value received. If I have been well served, I have no problem with paying a price, indeed I would feel a bit like a thief if I did not. In some trades, it is habitual to add a tip or gratification according to the satisfaction one has had in the product and service, but whether or not this is acceptable, money is the tangible evidence of the customer's satisfaction. Its main purpose, therefore, is to certify to the producer that their work and products are valued. So, to rephrase one last time Adam Smith's fallacious phrase, It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from our own gratitude and honesty in properly compensating good work well done and well offered.
Because Adam Smith was mired in the dreary, valueless world of "self-interest", he could not insert the obvious in his work. So he resorted to the obviously fallacious labour theory of value, whereby money stands for the value of the work that went into the object being purchased - and a child could answer that a jeweller and a baker can put the same amount of work and price it very differently. Indeed, the baker himself can price his own work very differently according to the quality of the bread, even though the amount of work is largely the same.
The labour theory of value is the inevitable child of Adam Smith's immature, cynical, adolescent incapacity of appreciating value as it is, an inevitably subjective reaction given objective form. The "Enlightenment" obsession with being "rational", that is with excluding from reasoning all that human beings really live on, leads to a theory that is not only emotionally unlovable but flatly wrong and disastrous in its results. When Karl Marx elaborated his theory of plus-value, he was moving straight from Adam Smith; if monetary value is only bestowed by labour - disregarding quality and desirability, for instance - then the person who does not contribute labour is a thief, and anything that adds price without corresponding labour is theft. From this one could have predicted, right from the start, the collapse of the Soviet Union: a society that does not understand quality and value is never going to be able to function properly. People will always do as little work as is in their "self-interest", and standards will remain damagingly bad. The ugly Soviet joke "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work" is the inevitable result of Smith's theory of value; Smith is the father of Marx and the grandfather of Lenin and Stalin.