[0:00:01 Speaker 0] Mhm. Yeah. Mhm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's 

[0:00:21 Speaker 1] my pleasure to welcome you all to another in the lecture series that is put on by the thomas jefferson Center for the study of 

[0:00:28 Speaker 0] cortex and ideas. 

[0:00:30 Speaker 1] This is the new great Books program at the University of texas. We have an array of 

[0:00:35 Speaker 0] courses, there are brochures on 

[0:00:38 Speaker 1] the table out there, just outside the 

[0:00:40 Speaker 0] door that you could pick 

[0:00:41 Speaker 1] up and tell you more about the program in the center. And we also conduct this series of distinguished visiting lectures 

[0:00:50 Speaker 0] by scholars, speaking on 

[0:00:53 Speaker 1] great books and great authors. And today I'm especially pleased to welcome 

[0:00:58 Speaker 0] Professor Richard Boyd 

[0:01:00 Speaker 1] from Georgetown University. 

[0:01:02 Speaker 0] Uh he teaches political thought, 

[0:01:05 Speaker 1] history of political thought and 

[0:01:06 Speaker 0] political theory at Georgetown. 

[0:01:08 Speaker 1] Formerly he was a professor at the University of Wisconsin. His uh first book was called 

[0:01:14 Speaker 0] Uncivil society, the perils of pluralism and 

[0:01:18 Speaker 1] the making of modern liberalism. And he's at work on a book 

[0:01:22 Speaker 0] called liberalism, 

[0:01:23 Speaker 1] capacities and citizenship. He's published many articles 

[0:01:28 Speaker 0] ranging over 

[0:01:30 Speaker 1] major thinkers in the history of political thought, from Aristotle to Hobbes 

[0:01:35 Speaker 0] and Rousseau Locke Burke 

[0:01:37 Speaker 1] On two Toqueville Madison, and the Scottish enlightenment on themes of civility 

[0:01:44 Speaker 0] and civil society, citizenship, 

[0:01:47 Speaker 1] civic education, the nature of modern liberalism, and of course nationalism, and the thought of Adam smith, which he will today favor us with his reflections on, first of all, Right, thank you. 

[0:02:06 Speaker 0] Great, well, thanks so much to devon into tom and to everyone at the center, and especially to all of you for coming over on a friday afternoon. I guess I want to say a little bit about my motivations and the context for the argument and the reading of the tms that I'm gonna give today, uh and then jump in and try to tease out some thoughts on nationalism, from Adam Smith's work, the theory of moral sentiments. Uh just a little bit about a background, I guess, that the two main issues that got me interested in this question, and trying to, I guess, mine uh Adam Smith's theory of moral sentiments for some insights into nationalism. And I guess the first um context of this is really a debate that's internal to Adam smith scholarship, and that's the perennial problem of how one reconcile smith's the wealth of nations, I guess, is better known work, where he seems to be a defender of, at least in the commonsensical view, the Cliff notes view the view that's out there in public and popular culture. He seems to defend a view that's an economist, in view of the world. He seems to defend something like liberating in individualism and self interest, uh and uh I guess providing a kind of ideological justification for something like lazy fair economics and the minimal state. And I think that's in many ways a problematic or at least grossly simplistic reading of the wealth of nations. But it does seem to be a very different view of smith and the view of smith that you get from the theory of moral sentiments where smith is concerned with themes such as fellow feeling, sympathy, sociability identification. So very, very quickly within the Adam Smith literature, particularly 1950s and 1960s, There was what was known as the Adam Smith problem. Right. The Smith contradict himself. Does he change his mind from his writing the first version of the theory of moral sentiments to the publication of the wealth of nations in 1776. Uh, and I guess ideally the assumption would be that even though he may have changed his mind on certain issues for a great mind like smith, there ought to be some way of reconciling the arguments what looks like, apparently the two different smith's that we get in the wealth of nations and in TMS. And while I'm not going to try to To duplicate that effort today, I think that's been very successfully carried out within the realm of Smith. Yana. And at least the last 20 to 30 years of Smith scholarship, which have tried to demonstrate, I think mainly that the usual reading of the common reading or the simplistic reading of the wealth of nations as being all about economy is um, and materialism and the pursuit of self interest is at least partial, if not inadequate. And that in fact, there are signs that smith had some ambivalence about commercial society and that in some ways the theory of moral sentiments provides a certain corrective to the economy is um that you see in the wealth of nations there, smith offers a kind of alternative that's more communal, it's more sociable, and I think that's the view of smith that's emerged in most of the recent scholarship on tMS, of which there's been a great amount in the past uh 5 to 10 years or so. So, uh we've rediscovered a new smith. And the smith that I think most scholars today are engaged in writing about is a smith who is much more of a communitarian, somebody's more concerned about things again, like sympathy, sociability and how we build bridges between individuals. Um, well, I generally endorse that reading of smith and that reading of TMS. I think one of the problems though is that by trying to bring out a kinder and gentler smith, the unintended consequences of this has been to effectively ignore, if not, I guess, downplay if not ignore some of the more conflictual elements of the theory of moral sentiments, in particular, the great and profound insights that smith has into group conflict, into the ways in which people, rather than being brought together by sympathy and the ability to identify with other people, are sometimes drawn apart and sometimes even moved to conflict conflicts even in the extreme uh that we we understand by the term nationalism. So, in part, my interest in the subject matter in smith is driven by an attempt to try to write the imbalance that I see and offer corrective to this overly sympathetic, overly communitarian reading that you get in the recent secondary literature. And then, I guess my second motivation is driven more directly by some of the themes and issues that have emerged in the literature on nationalism, directly, in particular, a couple of themes or controversies that characterize the sociological literature and nationalism back in the back in the 19 nineties, in particular. Uh and I just say something briefly about these, and then I hope you'll see as I go through and offer my reading of smith how it is that I think smith's TMS and his insights into the moral psychology of nationalism might help us to mediate between these different controversies and provide at least some provisional answers or some insights to illuminate these debates. The first issue in the nationalism literature is very debate over the origins of nationalism, right? And I think there are two very, very different schools are very different approaches to where it is that nationalism comes from. Uh and I characterize these, I guess these are the terms that they used to characterize themselves the Primordial. A school on the one hand, and the modernist school on the other hand, and by primordial, is um I mean, I have in mind scholars like uh Anthony smith in particular, other scholars like Edward Shills, his student Stephen Crosby, who want to make the claim that rather than being a uniquely modern phenomenon, that nationalism is essentially something that's hard wired into human nature. That even if we didn't live in a world where there were nation states, and even if nationalism didn't exist as the kind of the virulent social movement that we sometimes observe in the contemporary world, there's still a way in which human cognition and human identity is determined by patterns of thinking that divide the world into us versus them, right? That we we are differentiating creatures. We identify with members of the in group, and very often, or identification with members of the in group is premised upon the existence of an out group. Right? So this idea that gets sometimes described as perennial ism, or primordial is um suggests that ain't the nationality something that's ancient, It goes all the way back to the time, the ancient peoples, the assyrians, um the the biblical, the biblical, um the biblical nations. Uh and that rather than than being something that's uniquely modern, a contemporary nationalism is a perennial feature of human nature by way of contrast, and I think the school that dominates the study of nationalism today, other modernist scholars have pointed out in some ways correctly, at least on historical grounds, that nationalism is a social movement simply could not have pre existed. The existence of nations are politically organized, territorial nation states. And it also seems correct that nationalism as an ideological movement really didn't take off and rise to the position That it enjoys today until the 19th century. Right, so nationalism is a product of the structural imperatives that brought about the nation state and many nationalist movements. Indeed, the creation of many nations is something that elites, other social planners and others created. So we have the familiar story right of peasants in France, Britain and basques and uh Normans who might not otherwise have thought about themselves self consciously as being french where somehow created and turned into Frenchman by the rise of symbols and national holidays and systems of public education. And I think so that this debate is something that's been uh sometimes quite heated debate among scholars of nationalism. Right, is the nationalism a uniquely modern phenomenon, and therefore also something that potentially could disappear as we move into an age when nation states become increasingly less significant or rather is nationality and the ability to see ourselves in terms of groups, something that is in human nature, something that perennial or even primordial, And then, I guess the second debate, which is a debate that's in part empirical, but I think it's also importantly, normative is debates over the distinction between patriotism on the one hand, and nationalism on the other hand. Uh, and I think this also goes back to an earlier chapter in the scholarship on nationalism all the way back to 19 forties and some of hans cones work, which attempted to distinguish between, uh, the good celebratory reforms of Western patriotism. Right Western nationalism in his terms from those bad, negative, conflict laden forms of Eastern nationalism. Right another way in which this gets sometimes collapsed as the distinction between civic nations, nations like France, or the United States, or great Britain, which are premised on our subscription to certain liberal ideals, uh, to be a member of the United States. It's not about race, it's not about blood, it's not about religion, it's not about any of those things about subscribing to certain common ideas. So, civic nations are good ethnic nations are potentially a liberal and bad. This is an argument you find it goes back again to cone in the 19 forties, but it's something you find expressed more recently in the works of Leah Greenfeld from the 19 nineties, where she again follows in this idea that there's something categorically different about western nationalism, that makes it uh more positive, more affirmative, less politically dangerous than those Eastern forms of nationalism that are rooted in result mall and blood and all of these uh pre liberal or if not illiberal emotions and passions. Uh and I think um smith's understanding of nationalism helps us in some way again to to mediate these two debates. So I just mentioned those things because they're really what got me interested in the subject. And I think as we get into smith, you can see some of the connections between his writings back in the 18th century and attempts by scholars today to try to uh in some ways makes sense of these controversies. So in going through, I want to try to stick to three main frameworks or putting this slightly differently. I've tried to go through and organize my talk and I guess smith system along lines of three different aspects are three different understandings of nationality and nationalism. First, the cultural understanding of nationalism, the idea that we live in a world where nation states are distinguished from one another by virtue of certain cultural particularities. Um the idea that uh nationalism and nationality are sources of diversity in the world, so to be a member of a nation is of course to speak a different language perhaps than your neighboring nation, to have different ideas about styles of literature in in smith's terms dress fashion, religious literature, different different songs, right? Different national traditions, the kind of her darien idea of nationality as something that's defensible in terms of diversity in the world. And then, secondly, I want to try to approach smith's theory through the lens of what I call uh moral nationality or the priority thesis. And that's the normative claim that smith seems to subscribe to. That suggests that we have deeper or more legitimate obligations to members of our own nation than we do to members of other nations or people who are simply members of humanity. And then, lastly, I want to try to turn back to the political and sociological dimensions of nationalism in smith and try to see how he understands uh the peculiarities of nationalism as a social movement, especially the kind of illiberal, uh and sometimes undemocratic dangers of nationalism as a social movement. So that's my talk will be sort of organized along those three headings. Excuse me. So, on the issue of cultural nationalism, I think there's a certain view of smith, a certain view, I guess, of globalization and the market more generally, which assumes that smith either empirically expects or normative lee desires, that we're going to move into a world where the global market simply faces all those national differences that we take for granted today. And this is a a view that many people attribute not just a smith, but to the enlightened more generally. That is that the enlightenment and the kind of commercial civilization that it brings along with it are going to lead to universalism. We're gonna live in one Mc world where everyone wears the same shoes and listens to exactly the same music and it's the same sort of food. And what we think of as being distinctive in particular to our national cultures is simply going to be swept away in this uh this global um this global commercial commercial tied. Now, I think that there are aspects of smith's argument that would seem to support this reading at least on the surface, right, Smith very famously along with his contemporary david hume place, great confidence in the kind of polishing or civilising forces of commerce, right? That in part they assume that commerce was going to instill a greater humanity and human nature, it was going to polish away in their terms, what they described as the rough or barbarous edges of human nature. Uh they both relied upon and presupposed that commerce was gonna be something that would bring nations closer together through commercial ties that it would impart, remove or alleviate what hume called the jealousy of trade. Right? Rather than fighting with one another are going to war. Nations would see that it's more in their interest to trade with one another. They're also certain phrases that smith uses in the wealth of nations, like when he refers to the world becoming eventually a global trading republic, right? That the idea that somehow um apparently not only our national differences going to disappear, but even uh national boundaries and nation states might very well someday wither away and it's, you know, this is the whole part of the 18th and then subsequently 19th century trope right which had globalization and commerce sweeping through the world. I think these were in many aspects, in many ways the parts of the argument about commerce that Karl Marx picked up and drew from the Scottish enlightenment with the commerce is dragging us through different stages of history. However, so while there is some evidence in smith too to suggest that he subscribes to the idea of the globalizing commerce, changing human nature and perhaps weaving the world more closely together. I think this ultimately is a misleading reading of, of smith and that at the end of the day, he is somebody who is a relatively confident that at least for the foreseeable future these national differences are going to persist and moreover, and this is an argument I think that he takes from hume as well, that not only our national differences going to persist, but it's effectively these national differences. What you're going to lead to a kind of international version of the division of labor, which he foresees in a domestic context, in his work, the wealth of nations. Right? So, um, nations have relative advantages to take the economist terms. Nations are going to specialize that. Uh, even though nations might trade with one another, trade is premised on specialization as much as it is homogeneity and uniformity. Uh, so it's that part of his argument that I want to focus in on particularly in the theory of moral sentiments. I guess much of my argument today is going to be drawn from book five of the theory of moral sentiments. The chapter that smith dedicated to the influence of customs and fashion on morality. In this chapter, I think hume hume smith makes it very clear. You could, you could read hume here as well. Uh Smith makes it very clear that in his view, nations are characterized not just by cultural diversity but also by a kind of moral diversity that in many ways springs from the underlying diversity of things like languages. Things like styles of dress, styles of national literature, differences in fashion. Apparently different styles of furniture where a big issue back in the 18th century, because these are many of the most significant differences that he gives among nations, I guess the um, you know, the uh german furniture is different from french furniture, different from british furniture. And heaven forbid you wouldn't be caught dead with the furniture from the wrong country that was out of style in your living room during a particular period. So this was an example of what changes and what, what is subject to fashion, I guess was slightly different or maybe not so different in the 18th century. It is in the 21st century differences in things like religious liturgy, music. Um Other, other things that we would think of as cultural, but for smith, the differences don't stop at the level of culture, the level of styles of clothes or hair or furniture. But they they go over and blur into what he describes as irregular and discordant opinions about right and wrong. Right? So among the things that he assumes are going to distinguish nations from one another are not cultural differences, write songs or holidays or other sorts of things, but actually different views about justice, different views about right and wrong. Um I think that the smiths discussion in in Book five about the role of custom and fashion is interesting because it seems to start from the point of view of aesthetics, and I think that the aesthetic components of his work, the theory of moral sentiments have have been relatively underappreciated. Um He points out what I guess begins with apparently simple question why it is that we prefer our own ways of life to other ways of life. Why is it that we um you know, I think that our style, our sense of beauty, our sense of fashion is the correct one, and we judge other cultures on the basis of it. And for him, this ultimately hinges on a sense of aesthetics, right? That um uh and and for him, aesthetics have a kind of interesting foundation, a foundation that ultimately goes back to custom or to the things that are around us. Or in his terms familiarity. Now, he doesn't want to rule out the notion that certain ideas of standards of beauty might be universal, right? And the example he gives of this is that um in many if by and large our ideas of what's beautiful simply represent a means of the things that are most familiar to us. And even though in the extremes, we can imagine a transcendent sense of beauty which is premised on the idea of proportionality. So if you have a cartoon where someone is drawn with an enormous nose or enormous ears or something that's wildly out of balance. There's a natural sense of proportionality which tells us that there's something not quite right about this, that this doesn't match with a natural sense of beauty. So he does acknowledge that there's some room for nature for something that's transcendent in our aesthetic standards. But by and large for him, aesthetic standards are relative, right? They simply represent a mean of what it is that's most familiar. And so for him, because we're habituated to see things as most familiar, then familiarity leads to a sense of beauty, right? We form our sense of beauty on the basis of that. And then from that comes a sense of moral approbation or dis approbation. So what's familiar is beautiful and what's beautiful is what we approve of. And for this uh smith, this goes not just for things like fashion or things like aesthetic beauty, but there's actually an aesthetics of morality that he alludes to in this in this chapter. So just so rather than paraphrase, I'll quote smith on this one, since our sentiments concerning beauty of every kind are so much influenced by custom and fashion, it cannot be expected that those concerning the beauty of conduct should be entirely exempted from the Dominion of those principles. Um, I guess it's the converse of this principle, which is most interesting to us and we think about the ways in which nations relate to one another, or uh sometimes in the case of nationalism failed to relate to one another. And that's that a sense of unfamiliarity, right? Being confronted by ways of life. Languages, styles, fashions, moral systems that we find unfamiliar. Our first reaction is to be revolted by them to find them ugly in some sense, and thereby we accord them and treat them with moral disapproval. Right? So, um, you can imagine then why it is, it's not just that um, the, you know, the the fashion of the trump brand islander strikes us as strange or strange or unusual. We've never seen it before. It's something we judge to be ugly when we look at it through our aesthetic standards. But it's also the beliefs, the values, the moral practices of other people's, that we tend by default to judge with disapproval simply because they are unfamiliar. Now, I think smith recognizes that simply because we're confronted with things that are strange or unfamiliar things that at first are jarring to our aesthetic or moral sensibilities. This is not necessarily a reason why we go to war with other nations, right? The, the, at least in our own time, right? Although this was something that perplexed smith and hume in their writings about the earlier, earlier time periods, how strange it would be that people would go to war with one another over the color of their livery, I guess. You know, if you're a fan of european soccer, maybe you can imagine a situation where you'd be moved to violence towards somebody else because they're wearing a different color than you're wearing. But by and large, we don't see these things being sufficient conditions to make nations go to war with one another. We don't go to war with Canada because we don't like the sound of their national anthem rates on our ears or something like that. We were by and large simply see these things as different, Not necessarily better or worse. And even if better or worse, not sufficiently better or worse, that would be willing to fight wars or to persecute other people's or to strike out with resentment. So it's uh, this notion that cultural differences are real, that they're likely to persist, but also that they are necessary, but not sufficient conditions for nationalism. Well then, what are the sufficient conditions will smith explains? Uh, it's very often, uh, an underlying envy or jealousy between nations, right? Uh, and he points out the problem that neighboring nations, particularly rival nations very often have with one another. So France and England, right? You're much more likely when if you're french in the 18th century to be disturbed by or otherwise um, roused to to be to hostility by the uh, english language or being in the presence of an englishman or something like that, or to read an english novel and simply dismiss it out of hand because that's a terrible, terrible style of national literature, you're much more likely to disapprove of these moral standards in situations where there's an underlying economic rivalry or political rivalry between the two nations. And so he points out the very interesting phenomenon that even though uh, neighboring nations very often come to fight with one another over seemingly trivial differences, uh, it's not likely that France or England is going to have strong feelings about the style of national literature, of china japan or some other nation that is completely unfamiliar. So it's, it's uh, in some sense, not familiarity breeds contempt, and yet it is at some level for smith, uh, the idea that familiarity breeds contempt. Um, and yeah, so this underlying envy or jealousy uh sometimes sufficient to provoke conflicts or to put it differently. It's the cultural differences which crystallize the underlying underlying jealousies, the underlying rivalries between the nations. But again, this account assumes that those differences are real and those differences are going to be relatively persistent. So then moving on into the second point that I wanted to make, or the second dimension of nationality. And this is also maybe more topical, more contemporary or topical aspect. That's smith's apparent subscription to. What I'll describe here is the priority thesis. And that is just in essence, that it's morally legitimate, all other things being equal for us to exercise priority towards our own co nationals, rather than toward members of some other nation or toward all of humanity. And I think this is this is an argument that's very topical because you get many people, especially cosmopolitan theorist, people like Peter Singer or Martha Nussbaum, who want to claim that there's something illegitimate morally about this priority thesis, right? If we focus in, for example, on absolute deprivation around the world rather than relative deprivation, then there's a strong case that can be made for americans engaging in charity, for example, giving money to starving Children in africa or Southeast Asia rather than giving to charities in their own community. Because by any absolute standard, even the least advantaged, american is still relatively advantaged when compared to the suffering humanity around the world. Uh so I think that's the sort of contemporary way of looking at this, the cosmopolitan way of thinking about this, but I think it's very different than the way that smith approaches this. And I think that makes smith's argument attractive at some level, but also perhaps controversial. And it also um if we want to accept or weigh the merits of the priority thesis over and against some of its cosmopolitan critics today, I think it's worthwhile to see what smith has to say on behalf of or in defense of this priority thesis. And he offers a number of interesting justifications of this. Um Just backing up one step, then a metaphor. If you'll indulge me a a crude illustration, my handwriting is bad, my illustration skills are even worse, but a crude illustration on the chalkboard because I think it she gives you some representation of what smith might have in mind. Smith. Starting point for the priority thesis is his reference back to the stoic idea of what he calls a certain concentric circles of sympathy or concentric circles of affection. And in the stoic view of the world that smith is building upon are reacting to. We start off with the self, our own individual self at the center, and then we move, we organize our moral world and we move outward by degrees of moral proximity toward the people who are morally closest to us, our family, then to other people who are familiar with people in our own community, our own neighbors. And then maybe you can imagine, I guess something else here, perhaps our co religionists or something like that, then out to the level of our co nationals and then finally out to the widest circle of our sympathy, possible that of all of humanity. Now, in the stoic view, just by no means that expert on stoicism. So I'm taking smith's word here on it. But smith's characterization of the stoic view is that the stoics recognized the natural poll of the innermost circles of sympathy, the innermost circles of affection. So the stoic idea was that one ought to try to as much as possible suppress one's concern for oneself, and even for one's own family members and the people who are most familiar, or at least to try to extend and stretch out one's moral imagination to bring into account all members of humanity, right? The idea of cosmopolitanism and of trying to treat the person who's at the outermost circle of affection in the same way that one would treat oneself or one's own family or people in one's neighborhood, people who work once co nationals smith's reaction to this is that this is both unrealistic on the one hand, and morally undesirable. On the other hand, and the example he gives it, he starts off with a fairly extreme example here. The extreme example he gives will be if you read tms you already know what I'm gonna say. It's the example of the earthquake in china, he goes through a kind of hypothetical example, imagine that a philosopher in europe in the 18th century is presented with the news that there's just been an enormous earthquake in china and 100 million people smith tells us have suddenly been swallowed up into the earth and have lost their lives. While such, such a philosopher might, he says, utter a few pithy platitudes about, you know, the vagaries of fate and how one needs to live every day as if it's ones last and he might, if he is what smith describes as a whining and melancholy moralist, he might even ring his hand about how we ought to immediately rush to the aid of all of those chinese have been displaced by this awful earthquake at the end of the day, though there's really nothing that this so called whiny and melancholy moralist Can really do about this Chinese earthquake. And in point of fact at this very same whining and Melancholy morals were presented with the threat of losing his pinky finger the next morning. He would undoubtedly lose more sleepover thinking about what's going to happen with finger the next day. Then he would over the fate of the 100 million of his fellow human beings in the Chinese who have lost their lives in the Chinese earthquake. So there's a certain mocking mocking of the notion that even the most enormous suffering of humanity is sufficient to overcome our natural preference for our own self even for our little finke, our little pinky finger. So um I think he's onto something, there's something morally intuitive about this. We know that this is in fact how human beings think that we do naturally, all of the things being will place more emphasis on our own family members or our own nation or helping out suffering americans, even if they're suffering a lot less in absolute terms than somebody who's a child in a refugee camp in Africa. But rather than just simply branding this is natural. I think smith provides some interesting justifications for why this is also something that's morally desirable or what uh, the reasons for which we are, we ought to give way to an honor. The priority thesis. I guess the first really gets at this idea of naturalness. I mean, the starting point is that our moral intuitions are there and they tell us that it's more important to care for your own family than to care for some member of humanity. Um, and uh, some point is that intuitions are real. These sentiments tell us something we're effectively hardwired to this uh to feel this way and place priority on the innermost circles and to um certainly weight them more highly than the outermost circle. But he says that it's not just natural, but there's a sense of natural proportionality that arises from this right? He says it points out that, well, we might talk about how all human beings are equal and differences between human beings are morally arbitrary, but I think most of us in this room would regard it as being in smith's terms monstrous. If a mother were to care more about her neighbor's child, then she cared about her own child. There's a kind of intuitive or natural sense of proportionality which suggests that, right? If you're going to give give to the innermost circle, you can, it's not preclude you giving to the outermost circle in helping out humanity, but all other things being equal. Your foremost moral duties are the people who are close at hand. So the natural this argument, I think, is the starting point. There's also I think an argument that can be collapsed into the idea that more it makes no sense for smith to imagine that our moral duties or obligations could transcend our practical ability to actually fulfill them. So, as he points out, quite correctly, most of us in this room could in fact make a difference in the lives of less advantaged people in our own communities. We could give to local charities, contribute to food banks, go to work in soup kitchens, do other kinds of things to improve the condition of the least advantaged people in our own communities. But he I think smith would say that even the most powerful and wealthy among us are relatively powerless to bring about an end to to do more than anything that place, that kind of incremental improvements in the suffering of all of humanity. So even Bill Gates and Warren buffet and bono and all the celebrities, all the very wealthy and powerful people around the world who dedicated enormous amount of time and resources to trying to alleviate suffering in the world. Still, there are people who are who suffer and the resources that they've thrown into it. I think this view of smith would suggest are perhaps akin to drops in a bucket. Uh and smith relatively dismissive way of dealing with this is to say that it makes as much sense to say that we have an obligation to concern ourselves about the fate of the man in the moon, right. It's simply beyond our practical abilities. And so uh right and moral duties cannot for him transcend practical abilities to actually fulfill them. The third argument that he makes is that that there's a sense in which the natural selfishness, the natural self regard that we have for our own person is reflected at the level of the nation in a way that's more immediate and direct than it is reflected in the idea of humanity or to put it differently. There's a way in which we extend and experience our own self interest through our membership in the nation. Just a couple of examples of the example that smith himself gives is that from a purely rational standpoint, it makes no sense for the average englishman to be concerned about more about the loss of the island of Menorca, part of the british empire to the spanish than to be lost a farthing from their own pocket. And yet those very that very same englishman would possibly be willing to fight and die, put his life on the line in the navy to defend every last centimeter of the british empire from, from a strictly rational standpoint, it makes no sense unless one concerns oneself or imagines oneself as seeing the nation and the accomplishments of the nation as in some way, a reflection of our own personal accomplishments. And maybe a more contemporary example of this. I think of the feeling of pride that americans are members of any nation, get when I say one of their athletes wins a gold medal at the olympics, right? And you see an athlete, not just any athlete, but an american athlete who's up there on the podium and they're not just playing some world anthem right there playing the american national anthem. And even though it's not our metal, we couldn't hold our own in olympic competition, but there's, there's an american who's being awarded this medal. And so because we are members of this nation, this person is our co national in some way this expresses or reflects our own refracted self interest is smith's term. So we see the nation as an extension of ourselves. So the accomplishments of the nation. When an american, I guess we get more excited about olympic medals, particularly when they come with upsets and hockey teams and Cold War politics. But you might imagine an american being very excited to learn that an american had been awarded the nobel Prize for Chemistry or for literature or something like that, because we don't, we don't take much pride in our, our national literature anymore, but it's a world literature or the um, one wonders whether America has a national literature, but if it did, and if we're honored on the world stage, I think at least some americans who take literature seriously would feel some glimmer of pride in their, uh, in their, in their heart. I guess military conquests are a great example. This when we learn on the television that the american military has made some inroads, you know, push back insurgents or taken over some new territory, there's been some victory or just some american soldiers done something is particularly courageous. We feel a stirring a pride in ourselves, not just for that soldier, but for the nation as a whole of which we are apart. So because of this, because of our ability to identify with the nation, maybe the nation is the largest effective level at which we can imagine ourselves to be apart. Um our our duty, our obligation to the nation and its priority stems from a kind of reflected version of self interest. And then last I guess the the fourth leg on which the stool of the priority thesis rest for smith is that in some ways just as the nation represents a refracted or extended version of our own self interest. We can also imagine the nation representing a refracted or extended version of our own disinterested nous. So just in the way that we care for our own family members, we love our own neighborhood. We love our own towns and cities. We love our own particular land. Uh and we'd be willing to make sacrifices on behalf of that. We recognize the way in which the fate of our family members, our way of life, our land, our communities are tied up with the fate of the nation. So nationality and the priority thesis become a way of expressing that reflected that reflected disinterested nous. So I think most of us would accept um at least some at least maybe not accept entirely. But except at least intuitively some version of the positive version, at least of the of the priority thesis. That is right in a world where you can only do so much. Um I think many of us would say that there's at least something morally intuitive about the idea that you ought to help out your own family rather than giving your money to Oxfam. If somebody in your family happens to be unemployed, disabled, helping out somebody in your own community when you can see that they're suffering rather than helping out somebody who is a member of humanity. So I think there's at least something morally plausible about that version of the priority thesis. But where I think smith complicates the issue is that he imagines a world where it's not just all other things being equal and it's not just choosing to do good to uh one group as opposed to do good to another group. But he imagines a situation a situation that nations very often find themselves in whereby me doing good for or doing something that's gratifying to members of my own political community means that I must necessarily harm members of other nations. Or you can imagine a world where uh, my nation might expect me to put aside my love of humanity, my concern for other people who are my fellow creatures and be willing to fight, to die, to make sacrifices to kill other people, sometimes even to engage in acts of acts of cruelty, things like dropping bombs on civilian cities. You can imagine for smith that this would be an entail mint of the priority thesis. And I think this is one of the issues that that makes it somewhat more morally complicated than just in a world where you can pick our charities, pick the one closest to home. There's there's a negative version that leads to much more morally problematic issues for smith and one is just, I don't want to go too much in depth. This maybe gets way too much into the mechanics of smith and the details of theory of moral sentiments, but it seems to me that there's a deeper attention that lies within smith's argument, uh and it stems from the distinction makes between beneficence and justice and I won't I won't get too far into the details of this argument, but Smith makes it clear that among those virtues that hold society together and makes society possible, justice is first and foremost the most important, and by justice, he doesn't mean justice. And the contemporary sense of social justice, of distributive justice. He needs justice in the very baseline sense of all people being treated equally in the eyes of the law, people's contracts being enforced, people being held in the strict letter of procedural justice. And he thinks that without this society becomes absolutely impossible smith also recognizes though, that I think that a world where we um simply honored the letter of our commitments and nothing above and beyond, that would not be a very pleasant world to live in. So, he also acknowledges that among the virtues are things like magnanimity and things also like Beneficence. Beneficence rather than justice, which arises from general duties that we have to our fellow citizens. Beneficence arises from particular obligations that we have to particular people. So munificence is what would move me to give money to the soup kitchen in my in my neighborhood. Beneficence is what would um make me, I don't know, give money to american charity rather than a world charity. Uh It's Beneficence in the sense that I recognize I have a particular obligation to particular persons. Now, I think on the one way of putting these two parts of smith's argument together to say that there's justice, which is the baseline of the Foundation and then Beneficence is something you can layer on top of it to make society kinder and gentler. And I think that's the way most people read smith. But when you start to think about the tensions that smith sees between universality or at least generality. The duties that we have to all of our fellow citizens versus the particular obligations that we might have to particular people, our own family, people, our own neighborhoods, people are members of our ethnic group, are religious group. You can see that there's a tension here, right? Beneficence is particular and justice is general and like Russo and I think we're so struggles with this very same issue in his treatment of the General Will. He's clear that the General Will is general with respect to all citizens of the political community. But the general Willis particular with member with respect to other political communities and people who are non members. And so we owe different things with this differently. We owe different things to people who are american citizens by virtue of the justice, which brings us all together than we owe to members of humanity. And smith expresses this distinction where he says that we do, oh, certain things to humanity. We owe them goodwill. I don't wish anything bad to happen to someone in china. We don't wish an earthquake upon them. We may also owe them what he calls, I guess, the duty not to harm them. We don't have the right to do bad things to them, to cause accidents to befall them. But that's different than what he describes as the effectual good offices that we owe to people who are part of our own political community or just one other slightly different way of stating this. I think at the end of the day, smith subscribes to a view that justice is political justice, ultimately, that it's about shared conceptions of justice that apply to people who live within the boundaries of a political community. And that this shared conception of justice means that we have special duties to them, rather than to other people. Just one other last sort of contemporary issue that I think crystallizes a contemporary debate, really, that crystallizes this point very well. Uh, the debate among theorists about immigration right? There's there's a very strong argument that people who defend global ideas of justice make that because we could very easily alleviate the condition of lots of suffering people around the world by simply opening up our borders and allowing them to move to the United States. Because helping them would improve their condition an awful lot more than it would harm the least advantaged, marginal american who might lose their job or have to pay higher taxes or do other sorts of things that we effectively have a moral obligation to open our borders to help out all of humanity, right? Allow anybody to come in and have their shot at the american dream. Other defenders are other critics of immigration, operating by the same argument about duties to the least advantaged. Want to suggest that while we do in fact have duties to the least advantaged, the least advantage we have to concern ourselves with our at least advantaged americans. And they point out quite correctly, on empirical grounds that immigration disproportionately harms people in America who are uneducated, you don't have high school diplomas or college diplomas. People who practice jobs that are already very low, very, uh, very poorly remunerated or low paid. So effectively helping out the least advantaged human being means harming the least advantaged american. And because there's something special about the conception of political justice that we all share with one another as americans when we have were put in a position of choosing between those two things, the correct thing to do is to choose to help out, uh, the least advantaged american. And I think so, immigration is really another, a very good issue where these, uh, these dilemmas that smith's raising hit the ground. And I think ultimately smith would support that argument right, that we have obligations to our own least advantage. The beneficence means that we have particular duties to americans that are based on moral particularity rather than universal duties to human beings that are based on common standards. Okay. And then, lastly, um I mentioned that there are also above and beyond the cultural dimensions of nationality that smith offers his insights into and the moral arguments that he gives for the priority principle and why we have special duties to co nationals. There are also a number of very interesting political and sociological insights that he offers into the phenomenon of nationalism as a social movement. I think, um just backing up one step, I think nationalism as a social movement raises a more generic problem that smith hume and other members of the Scottish enlightenment saw in any social movement. And I think it gets into some basic insights that Scots had into social psychology. The general assumption of hume smith and others is that individuals left of their own devices are basically reasonable, basically decent, basically not inclined to harm other people. And uh they have a basic and intuitive sense of individual conscience. The problem is that when individuals get together into groups, something of the collective enthusiasm, right? What smith and hume describes the contagion effect means that these otherwise decent rational individuals, when they're caught up in a mob or a crowd will collectively descend to moral atrocities, that no one of the single individuals would descend to if they were simply left to their own devices. Right. So, uh, I had a very familiar phenomenon of social, of social behavior, but I think that the Scots are particularly attuned to that. Not only they attuned to that, but smith in particular has a kind of solution to that. And that solution, generally speaking for him, comes in the form of the impartial spectator right? If you read tMS one of the most familiar arguments, probably the most cited phrase or concept from Tms smith's idea is that we often don't know or partial when it comes to our own case, so we don't know what the right thing to do is. We're especially partial when we're part of a group and were engaged in some kind of collective behavior, if not collective atrocity. So the impartial spectator gives us the ability to step outside of ourselves and to imagine how some impartial spectator would judge the actions that were about to engage in. And then, presumably, once we've been able to see our own actions and judge our own conduct through the lens of the impartial spectator will be able to be brought back to our own sense of more conscience, right? It's like a tap on the shoulder to bring us out of whatever momentary lapse that we're about to engage in. Uh and and so the impartial specter plays a very important part in smith's argument. More generally, the difficulty, though, is that smith recognizes that in issues of nationalism, when, for example, there's a quarrel between two different nations. Canada attacks, the United States, the United States attacks Canada, there's been some battle, some skirmish, some great insult against the american nation. Our tendency is to try to figure out what's the appropriate moral action here, what's the proportionate response that we ought to engage in? But the difficulty is that in cases involving nationalism, rather than being able to appeal very easily and intuitively, to some objective hypothetical third party, who is not involved in the issue, what we effectively end up doing is appealing to what smith calls the partial spectator right? Um we take our bearings by what every other american thinks, and the broader effect is rather than introducing some element morality and judgment into our into our actions, it simply ends up reinforcing whatever our first instinct was, whatever the the original prejudice was in the first place. So, just a quick quote from smith on this point, Yeah, captures this more. Let's see. So because the community, which one turns for validations in cases like this, only tends to confirm one's natural subjectivity, the effect is only to deepen the partiality. So s smith says, when two nations are at variance, the citizens of each pays little regard to the sentiments which foreign nations may entertain concerning his conduct. Um it's not because he is indifferent to the praise or blame of other people, it's not that he doesn't care what the impartial spectator thinks, but he's so carried away by the desire to gratify his fellow citizens, that he succumbs to this partial spectator and simply goes along with whatever it is that the nation as a whole has determined so effectively, nationalism negates the potential of the impartial spectator to reintroduce morality into our into our conduct. I think that's a very interesting observation that smith offers. Um One other point, I think, on the political dimensions, and this um goes back to a point that I made about Smith starting point. It may seem slightly to contradict or at least to amend the point that I was making before, but I think it's it's consistent with smith's argument throughout, Smith assumes, by and large, as we've already seen, that these concentric circles of affection are more or less natural. That is there more or less fixed in our minds? Our sentiments more or less arranged themselves like this, all other things being equal. That being said, he recognizes that particularly when we get out to this level where we're dealing with people who might be members of our own nation in a political sense, but who are strangers to us effectively. Maybe they're american citizens, but they're members of a different religion, a different ethnic group. They don't speak english out here at this border between the nation and all of humanity. Things are more complex. The borders are less clear cut than they are when we're figuring out what the differences between, say, our Children and our neighbors, Children, or our neighbors and some hypothetical person in America we've never met when one gets out to the furthest reaches of this, the distinction between co national and non national, and especially the distinction between a member of humanity and perhaps some other group or category of being who exists beyond humanity are susceptible to political manipulation right there. And we know about the politics of nationalism and the way in which political actors very often appeal to certain rhetoric, right? Draw upon certain narratives to try to either read certain people out of the political community or even at the extremes to read them out of humanity for reasons that have to do with the reinforcement of nationalism in just a few examples of this. And and I guess one of the backing up one step in that argument before the contemporary examples, I think you'll recognize here how smith's argument resembles the argument that you find in john Jacques Rousseau about the the imaginative identification and the role that it plays in what he calls pity pita or commiseration, right? Uh for russo, in order for us to be able to identify with somebody as a fellow citizen or for a fellow human being, we have to effectively be able to look past the differences that separate us, put ourselves in the position of that person, imagine what it's like to suffer as they suffer, and then to bring that feeling back home, right? And then then only under those terms. Only when we can imaginatively identify with that other. Can we can we see what it's like to feel as they do? Uh And so I think Smith's argument about sympathy and sympathetic identification and the construction of these outermost fears rests upon something like that same russo in ideal of imaginative identification. Uh just a couple of examples of this and I think, illustrate the way in which this is susceptible at the margins to political manipulation. One thinks about the ways within a political community that certain groups of people, certain ethnic groups can be effectively demonized, right turned from co nationals into enemies, if not into something beneath human beings. I think of the rhetoric of the genocide in Rwanda, whereby tutsis were repeatedly in the media constructed as not being, not being Rwandan citizens, not even being human beings, but being cockroaches. Um I think of the movies that kind of wartime propaganda movies back in the 19 forties and World War Two, where japanese or Germans in the movies were portrayed as somehow being sneaky or subhuman or somehow not to be trusted, were effectively read out of the category of humanity. The ways in which during the Cold War, right people from the soviet union or communists or Russians were somehow constructed uh uh presented in the media in such a way that made it incredibly difficult for us to put ourselves in their position to imagine imaginatively identify with them. And the consequence of that, of course, is that if one is incapable of engaging that leap of imaginative identification, then it's very easy for us to when we have to go to war, fight battles, to simply imagine that we're not dealing with human beings, but we're dealing with animals or something, something that's non human or something whose moral concerns we don't have to take into account. Um, uh, you can also imagine the strategy operating in the other way and and during the process of nation building in the 19th century in particular, you saw this effort to tell new stories or to introduce new collective memories which were intended precisely to plaster over otherwise apparent differences between groups. So, in the great work by Eugene Debra that I alluded to before peasants into Frenchman, there was a deliberate political effort made to try to introduce into the minds of baritones and backs and corsicans and Normans and uh different peasant groups regarded themselves speaking different languages, being part of different, probably identified more closely with their own, their own regional group, their own ethnic group. And they did with other supposed Frenchman. There's a deliberate attempt to try to construct a narrative of frenchness and to demonstrate that they all share something in common with one another. So nationalist narratives, I think you find engage in both of these efforts right, lumping and splitting, creating differences where differences might not necessarily exist. Trying to read different groups of people out of the category of the nation or out of the category of human beings. Then on the other hand, in the process of nation building, trying to read other groups into this nation to basically undermine the idea of certain sub political groups and reduce them to their political identities rather than the identities that might be more intuitive and natural to them. So I think there's a way in which these things are susceptible to political manipulation. So then I guess to to get back to the points with which I began in two, to wrap things up and conclude. Um I started off by saying that my interest in this was driven by certain contemporary debates and nationalism studies the Primordial list versus constructivist debate on the one hand, and the patriotism and nationalism debate on the other hand, I think it's worthwhile just very quickly to step back and try to see what Smith tells us about these debates. Um I think that in addition to offering some support to both the Primordial list and the modernist or constructivist position, uh Smith offers quite a novel way of reconciling these two apparently, apparently incompatible ways of looking at the world. If I had to play smith into one category, the other, I think I would have to place him on the side of the primordial is in the sense that he does seem to believe on the basis of this moral psychology, that human beings are the kind of beings who construct themselves as members of groups who think and identify in terms of membership in collectivity, is arranging the family all the way up to the political community, and that this is something that changes. The specific configurations may change from time to time and place to place. It's a basic part of human moral psychology. Custom, right at the margins makes differences, but ultimately, it is something that's natural to human beings. That being said. I've also suggested a way of making that basic insight into the fact that human beings divide the world into in group and out group us versus them. Uh that's compatible with the idea that the substance of and the strategies for constructing the US versus them, the in group versus the out group are susceptible to political manipulation. These are things uh that are sometimes part of a collective memory right there, there's things that transcend us as individuals. But at least sometimes at the margins political elites or determine political actors can reconstruct these ideas can make it easier for us to imagine and identify with certain groups than for others. And nations can in fact be invented within this broader framework that site human moral psychology that smith lays out. And then the second point on the patriotism, nationalism issue. On the one hand, smith offers us an idea of sympathy and of identification that does not necessarily have to be tied to the presence of some group of enemies are outsiders or others against which we define ourselves. And very examples he gives of how we identify with the family, right? We can love our own Children without thinking of this means that we hate our neighbor's Children. We can love members of our own community without necessarily thinking that our community is better or moral superior, morally superior to some other community. So he offers a vision of something like sympathetic identification that doesn't have to be premised on resulting mall on otherness, on the creation of an enemy or an external other. That being said. I think one of the real lessons of smith is the ease with which this idea of patriotism, right? A benevolent love or affection for people who are like us blurs over in practice into hatred of some other group, right? The two things are very, very difficult in practice to separate from one another. And they draw upon parts of human psychology which are deeply tied together in the human mind. So I think there is even within smith grounds for thinking that it's difficult in practice may be possible in theory, but extremely difficult in practice to separate out and distinguish a pure and benevolent and positive form of patriotism from the dangers of xenophobia, the dangers of otherness that seemed almost almost always a company, these sorts of feelings. So I guess with that I will conclude thank you all very much and um happy I guess to take some questions. Thank you. Mhm, mm. 

[0:57:12 Speaker 1] Yeah. Yeah. Mhm. Yeah. Mhm. Mhm. Yeah. Yeah, mm