The invisible boot

Adam Smith has been something of a hero of mine ever since I read Samuel Fleischacker's book on distributive justice. Not because of his famous idea that selfish actions by the rich result in a beneficial trickling down of wealth to the poor but because he was among the first people in the West to recognize and promote the fact that poor people are human and deserve help. (I suppose Jesus and others had similar ideas, but they do not seem to have caught on as much as one might have hoped. In Fleischacker's story Smith is a key player.)

But what about that invisible hand? As I understand it, the idea is roughly this. If I buy a laptop, for instance, then although I am only interested in myself I accidentally pass on some of my wealth to the employees of the laptop shop, some shipping company, people who manufacture laptops, people who make or mine laptop components, and so on. Mostly this is a good thing. But some of those components come from mines run by gangsters and warlords. The same invisible hand that helps some workers also encourages rape and slavery (or at least forced labor and extortion, which sounds like the same thing to me). I don't deny Smith's insight, but the fact that the invisible hand gives the finger to so many should not be ignored either.

And I always link this in my mind with George Orwell's essay on politics and language. Orwell writes that:

In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.

This is questionable, of course, but the idea that honesty and clarity are related to concreteness seems important and true. When someone is suspected of speaking bull it can be very useful to try to trace their words to some concrete particular to which they refer. This is a lesson from Hume, I suppose, and it's one I think of when I think about Frege and Wittgenstein, even if Orwell, Hume, Frege, and Wittgenstein don't exactly say the same thing. They all favor clarity of meaning in their various ways, and connect this with distinguishing what only superficially appears to have meaning from the genuinely meaningful, as revealed by deeper investigation. It's hard to make Wittgenstein sound as though he belongs in the same camp as Hume and Orwell on this, but morally he does, even if his philosophy of language is very different. In a word what they all oppose is bullshit.

In the cases of both words and objects one can, and should, dig a bit, or think a bit, or do whatever it takes, to see their true meaning, their place in the workings of human life. Like language, bullshit is things we do. And when we see these workings clearly, when we achieve an overview of the whole machine, as it were, there are some things we will not say. And some things we will not buy or perhaps even use. The point seems obvious to me, and I wouldn't be surprised if it had been made before and often, but I don't remember coming across it. Not the point that consumption should be ethical, that is, but the point that exposing and avoiding bullshit involves not only analysis of language but analysis of economics, politics, and, in short, behavior. I should probably read Gavin Kitching's and Nigel Pleasants' book (actually there's no 'probably' about it), but if anyone in that collection makes the point I haven't heard about it. And it seems like the kind of thing that ought to be huge: that what (good, Wittgensteinian) philosophy aims to do with/for language (clarification through analysis of use, roughly speaking) could and should be done for economics. This isn't what I understand economists or sociologists or political theorists to do, but maybe outside what I know as the mainstream there are great things being done.  

It's (perhaps not really) surprisingly hard to find information about what our purchasing choices mean on the ground. Occasionally you hear that buying drugs helps fund terrorists or that there are sweat shops in Asia or that animals are badly treated on factory farms, but it seems to me that all this information and more ought to be gathered together and publicized widely. Perhaps even studied in schools and colleges. Is anyone doing this? Are there books or websites I should know about? I hope so. There are organizations and publications like Ethical Consumer, but their work seems a little haphazard to me. A quick look at their website shows that they don't like corrupt banks and they do like badgers, but I don't see anything that would help prioritize these matters. Where is the most harm being done? If I have limited outrage or limited patience for researching the ethics of consumption, where should I focus my energy?
     
Let me say in more concrete terms what I have in mind. I'm looking for the following kinds of information:

• in what industries (the biggest ten or twenty, for instance) is most money made and are most people employed?
• what are the benefits and harms, the pros and the cons, of these industries?
• what can we do to reduce or remove the worst harms?

That's really about it. A lot of effort has been put into identifying the most worthwhile charitable organizations to give to. I'm looking for something similar as far as politics and economics goes. What are the most important companies to boycott and, at least as importantly, to support? That all sounds very utilitarian, but a question that seems related to me is: why aren't there more papers like Cora Diamond's "Eating Meat and Eating People"? This is a defence of vegetarianism at least in part on the basis of pointing out "a kind of inconsistency, or confusion mixed with hypocrisy [...] in our ordinary ways of thinking about animals..." There is, I think, a lot of inconsistency like this. Maybe not of the kind that takes sophisticated thinking to bring out, but inconsistency that could do with being brought out all the same. So I might be asking for better journalism, not more Cora Diamonds. Is it too clunkingly practical to want a list of the worst inconsistencies, and to want this list made very prominent along with practical advice about what one can do about it? I'm sure these things can get very complicated, but that's not an excuse for doing nothing.     

Apparently it's very hard to say what the biggest industries are because "biggest" can refer to profits or turnover or number of employees, and doubtless other things too, and there are questions like whether a gas station is part of the retail industry or the oil industry, and so on. But we surely could agree on some reasonable if imperfect standard if we wanted to. And people often do want to make claims about what the biggest industry in the world is, or what the top ten are (especially if they want to claim that some illegal industry is one of the top ten, for instance). So why not agree on some standard and go from there? At the moment people seem to choose arbitrarily to get worked up about, say, the environment or Wall Street or drugs or the sex industry, or try vainly to battle every evil in the world simultaneously. No doubt there is some vague feeling that it's arbitrary which causes one chooses to champion, but we ought to (and do really, I think) care about which causes are more important than others, which affect more people more seriously.

As silly and superficial as my desire for rankings might seem, or be, another way to say what I mean is to talk about depth or thinking things through. We might know about blood diamonds and avoid buying them, but many people don't. And does anyone (including me) seriously consider going without electronic devices because of the conflict minerals most of them include? It's easy to avoid blood diamonds if gemstones don't regularly feature on your shopping list, but give up my iPod? No way. And yet we claim to care about human rights a lot, as if nothing matters more. Why isn't our hypocrisy pointed out more loudly? Because it's boring, I suppose. What does that say about us?

I could go on. People disagree about whether drugs, or which drugs, should be legal, but why so many people take drugs in the first place seems to be largely ignored. Is it just because it's hard to answer the question? Or do we not want to think about despair? It's not so much the digging that I think we're reluctant to do. It's the hardness of the reality we would find if we dug deep enough. But aren't we ashamed of this cowardice/dishonesty?

We have a market for news and opinion, and bad news doesn't sell. What I'm asking for is basically a more nagging kind of NPR or PBS. It's no mystery why we don't have that. But it still seems symptomatic of something bad that we don't have it, and I think there really would be a market for practical advice about the biggest problems facing the world and what consumers can do to help. Maybe I should start up a website called "Degrees of Obscenity" that would rank the worst evils encouraged by our way of life and suggest practical steps we could take to reduce them.

I feel as though this is all half-baked but I haven't posted anything for a week so maybe it's time to hit 'publish' and see what happens.