Adam Smith’s Guide to Parenting
When my children were little, we spent a lot of time in Edinburgh’s many parks and gardens. From the stately Moray Place Gardens to the modest patch of fenced-in grass across from our flat, each outdoor space has its own set of rules. No tree climbing in the Botanical Gardens; no disposable BBQs on the grass in the Meadows; no ball games in Moray Place; no cycling on Arthur’s Seat; no dogs off leads here.
My daughter’s relationship to these rules was ever-changing. Before her brother came along, she would blithely comply. But after Callum was born, while I was stuck on a bench breast-feeding baby brother, she’d swing on tree-branches in the Botanics, while levelling a penetrating stare at me. Or she’d toss balls in no-ball zones, glancing at other garden goers to see how they reacted to this breach of the rules. But when Callum was old enough to walk, she became the prime enforcer, lecturing her little brother on the rules the moment we arrived.
When we travelled to the US to see family, things got even more interesting. Or should I say more confusing. My husband grew up in Maine and spent his childhood running freely through the woods––climbing trees, building forts, chasing other kids away from his fort. So, whenever we travelled back to see his family, Nicole would toddle outside the very first morning and stand there blinking before some vast expanse of land. Then she would look up and ask, ‘Daddy, what am I permitted to do?’
This drove Tom nuts. He’d wave at the grass and trees behind his parents’ house, or at the dry wash behind my mother’s ranch in Arizona and sputter, ‘Just––you know… play. Just… run around outside.’ And she would––with gusto. But there was always an initial hesitation, a pause while she assessed her surroundings and wondered, what are the rules in this outdoor space? what am I permitted to do here? Now, at age of sixteen, most of her energy goes into doggedly pushing back against every rule she encounters, often well past the breaking point. (I doubt there’s a student at her secondary school whose uniform is less uniform.) But one of the first lessons she absorbed as a toddler was: assess your surroundings, take note of what is being asked of you in this shared space, then act in a way that takes into account the comfort of others.
Philosophically, this is pure Adam Smith. His Theory of Moral Sentiments proposes that individuals acquire their moral sense through a process that aligns with what my daughter used to do in the gardens of Edinburgh. As Nicole learned to note where she was, then calibrate her behaviour so as not to unduly impinge on others (for example, by accidentally hitting them with a ball or breaking branches off a rare tree by climbing it), I was witnessing her acquisition of virtue. Society, Smith writes, is ‘the looking-glass by which we can, in some measure, with the eyes of other people, scrutinize the propriety of our own conduct’ and thereby learn to act in a ‘beneficent’ manner. When deciding how to act virtuously, Smith claims, we do not look to God or to scripture or to some higher authority. We look to each other. We rely on those around us to reflect back to us the ‘merit or demerit’ of our actions, thereby constructing an internalized ‘Impartial Spectator’ derived from what society thinks, which then guides us when deciding what to do in different situations:
We endeavour to examine our own conduct as we imagine any other fair and impartial spectator would examine it. If, upon placing ourselves in his situation, we thoroughly enter into all the passions and motives which influenced it, we approve of it, by sympathy with the approbation of this supposed equitable judge. If otherwise, we entire into his disapprobation, and condemn it. [1]
Smith’s ideas seem to anticipate contemporary theories of child development. Substitute ‘mother’ for ‘society’ and you are not far from D. W. Winnicott, who views ‘sympathy’ as crucial to our well-being. He writes: ‘A sign of health in the mind is the ability of one individual to enter imaginatively and accurately into the thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears of another person’. [2] To be sure, Winnicott’s terms differ. Writing in the latter half of the Twentieth century, he is not talk about fostering virtue. As a psychoanalyst and paediatrician, he thinks in terms of mental health. In a sense then, Smith and Winnicott are talking about the same thing. What the Eighteenth century referred to as ‘sin’ and ‘virtue’ we in the 21st century we might call ‘mental illness’ and ‘wellbeing’.
Both Smith and Winnicott place the sympathetic imagination (or what we might call ‘empathy’) at the centre of human development. And, having spent many anxious hours fretting over how my inept mothering might be impacting my children, I can’t help thinking maybe it’s time we take a lesson from the Eighteenth century and shift our focus away from parents and back to society. What if society were forced to bear some of the weight of responsibility that we now place on mothers? What if all those scolding, moralizing, quasi-religious child-rearing manuals—as terrifying to a new mother as any sermon by John Knox or Jonathan Edwards (telling us, effectively, that we are all sinners in the hands of an angry child)––placed far more emphasis on society at large? What if we started viewing what we said and did in the broader public sphere (especially the digital public sphere) as having the same impact on children as a mother’s actions? What if we brought our ‘Impartial Spectator’ to bear on everything we typed out and shot into the digital ether? What if we were to extend our sympathy towards the recipients of all those ill-considered, reactive word-blasts fired off and imagined, before posting them, how these sharp barbs of text would feel if we were on the receiving end?
All writers have ideas for books they will never write. Mine is Adam Smith’s Guide to Parenting, an attempt to de-throne mummy and re-anoint society as the prime mover in child development. What a gift to parents this would be! Instead of the doctrinaire pap currently pedalled by middle-class parenting manuals (you must breast feed! don’t ever leave them to cry!), all based on the unshakable assumption that every response to your child’s distress is indelibly moulding her psyche, Adam Smith’s Guide to Parenting would propose that family is but one piece of a much larger sphere of beneficent influence. The fundamental message of the book would be: Relax, Mum, it’s not all on you! Let the nursery nurses do their part. Leave her with granny for a few hours. Day care is a positive good, not something to feel guilty about. Let the rules of the garden do their work.
Before Marx, Freud, or Foucault came along, Adam Smith recognized that other people shape our sense of right and wrong; he simply felt far more optimistic about this anti-authoritarian, non-religious process than we might. And why not? In Smith’s time, Scotland had just emerged from centuries of sectarian violence and destructive religious factionalism driven by arguments over whose version of virtue would get you to heaven. (Or, more accurately, get a tiny wee handful of us to heaven.) Then along comes Smith and his ilk (Hume, Reid, and Ferguson) laying out a philosophy of virtue that does away with all that destructive sectarian bickering. Smith felt confident that the mirror of society’s gaze would teach Scots virtue far better than the likes of John Knox or the Covenanters or any number of grim Presbyterian ministers who’d been peddling their doom-laden cosmologies for centuries. We don’t need rigid doctrines! Smith is in effect saying. Of course, he could not be too explicit about this, given that he was teaching would-be clerics at Glasgow University, but it’s very much the spirit that informs his view for he was close friends with David Hume whose conception of sympathy Smith places at the heart of his theory. Both men believed that individuals could acquire virtue without relying on religion (a radical notion at the time). Smith is essentially saying: we don’t need to squabble over doctrinal purity. We don’t need to fight and die over whose version of scripture is true in order to be virtuous. We only need one another, out-of-doors, together in a fenced garden, exercising our inborn faculty of sympathy (or ‘fellow-feeling’) and adjusting our behaviour accordingly. It’s a lovely idea and not at all Utopian. Thinkers like Adam Smith were not naïve. They were very clear-eyed about the ills of society, but experience had shown them that, by and large, there were enough sensible people to get us through.
Society—then and now—is far from ideal and always will be. But society does not need to be ideal, Smith might say, so long as being sensible is a virtue fostered in us from birth. Nowhere is the process of fostering this virtue illustrated more exquisitely than in a Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. [3] Austen’s novel depicts a deeply flawed society, rife with shallow people ruled by venal impulses that go unpunished. Consider the ‘cold-hearted’ John Dashwood, the manipulative Lucy Steele, the caddish Willoughby, the wretched Fanny Dashwood, and the tyrannical Mrs. Ferrars, all of whom are rewarded financially and socially for bad, even cruel, behaviour. And yet, Austen’s novel balances this social venality with characters like Elinor Dashwood and Colonel Brandon whose virtues and good sense have an improving effect on those around them. And I mean ‘virtue’ in Adam Smith’s sense of the word. These characters engage in acts of sympathetic imagination, then proceed to act on the basis of what that ‘fellow feeling’ reveals. Time and again Colonel Brandon and Elinor Dashwood rely on an ‘impartial spectator’ to help them discern how to act kindly towards others.
Indeed, the novel’s plot involves Elinor’s sister, Marianne Dashwood, learning to do the same. How does she learn? The way all adolescents learn important lessons: the hard way, by making mistakes and suffering the consequences. But most crucially she learns from her sister’s example. Elinor teaches Marianne how to govern her emotions and modulate her actions through the soft, steady influence of her own behaviour. An entire chapter in Adam Smith’s Guide to Parenting could be devoted to this aspect of Austen’s novel, for Austen tells us outright that that Marianne is not going to learn this lesson from her mother. Quite the opposite: Mrs. Dashwood nourishes Marianne’s unhealthy tendency to wallow in emotion and act on first impulses. Austen does not depict this flaw in Mrs. Dashwood as a terrible dysfunction in the Dashwood family. Mrs. Dashwood’s tendency to lose herself in sentiment is not a grave maternal short-coming, debilitating Marianne for years to come. We are not, thank goodness, in for a trauma plot. Elinor has emerged from her mother’s care none the worse, for Austen tell us that she ‘possessed a strength of understanding and a coolness of judgement, which qualified her, though only nineteen, to be the counsellor of her mother’. Elinor has grown up alongside Marianne, experienced the same domestic environment, yet she has learned ‘how to govern’ her ‘strong’ feelings and helps her sister do the same.
Austen does not feel obliged to probe or account for Elinor’s good sense. But one thing is very clear: the source of Elinor’s ‘sense’ is no their own mother, and that’s okay. Elinor has learnt this crucial skill outside the maternal sphere and so does Marianne. Only when Marianne is away from her mother, staying in London with Elinor as her sole familial companion, does Marianne learn how to step outside her own feelings and reflect on the impact her behaviour has on others, then calibrate her actions in such a way that they cease to hurt those she loves—and cease to endanger herself. Marianne refers to this change in her own temperament as an ‘atonement’, which signals the moral implications of Marianne’s behaviour, since for Austen, as for Adam Smith, sentiment and morality are intertwined. The way one handles and responds to one’s emotions is a moral issue, because these responses affect those around us, whether in our house, our workplace, our shared garden, or whatever online spaces we inhabit. Marianne’s inability to govern her emotions has acute moral implications––which, under Elinor’s benevolent and sensible influence, Marianne comes to realise and duly changes her ways.
But what if Marianne’s missteps were broadcast and preserved on various digital platforms? What if Marianne’s catty, immature remarks about Colonel Brandon (‘he has neither genius, taste, nor spirit […] his understanding has no brilliancy, his feelings no ardour, and his voice no expression’) had been posted on social media for all to see? Would he still have married her, or would those hurtful words have cut too deep? How do two-dimensional digital spaces impact our moral sense? What sort of ‘impartial spectator’ might get constructed from over-exposure to the extremities of social media, and can we even call what might emerge ‘impartial’?
As we confront how time spent in digital spaces impacts socialization and child development, we could do worse than look to Adam Smith and Jane Austen. Both writers, in their own ways, dig deeply into questions such as how do individuals acquire a moral compass? What does this process look like? What might endanger it, and alternately, what conditions might nourish and help it to flourish? And what steps might society have to take––personally and politically––to ensure that there are just enough sensible people to see us through?
-
Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments. Amherst (NY: Prometheus Books, 2000), p.162.
D. W. Winnicott,‘ Cure’ in Home is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst. Clare Winnicott, Madeleine Davis & Ray Shepherd eds. (New York & London: WW Norton 1986) pp. 112-122.
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002).