QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Tue 15th June 2010, 9:00am)
Raising this back to consciousness for the sake of current discussions on the CPOV List.My 2 Cents —QUOTE
What's Up the Sleeve of the Invisible Hand?
It's a natural human tendency, when faced with overwhelming complexity, to wish it all away with some radically simplifying belief or mythology. That would be my guess as to why the Myth of the Invisible Hand is every bit as popular on the Internet today as Jolly Old Saint Nick and visions of sugar-plums <feel free to insert your local color here> are in the fantasies of pre-critical children.
That is probably why variations on the theme of Adam Smith's “Invisible Hand†are such frequent topics of discussion at The Wikipedia Review. Against that backdrop I personally find that the best resource for trying to understand the conversion of ethical motives into economic motors lies in the work of Max Weber, beginning with his analysis in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
Gee, I'm glad you reposted this, since it gives me the chance to say "bullshit." I think the idea of the above, is that Adam Smith is literally worshipped, primarily by right-wing God-fearing conservatives, who equate the evolutionary behavior of markets with the Protestant Ethic, and are therefore somehow "anti-progressive," inasmuch as this helps them deny giant capitalist conspiracies. Which, in turn, ironically take the place of "Intelligent Design" in the sphere of
left wing economics.
This debate on the biological side goes back at least to Darwin's deliberately reading Adam Smith when he was trying to work out his idea of "apparent top-down design by means of bottom-up uncomplicated simple behavior." Thus "explaining" why the natural world appears designed, without actually being designed. And at the same time "explaining" why honeybees, ants, and beavers all look like they earnestly display the Protestant Ethic of accumulation for accumulation's sake, which Protestants have long taken to be a Providentally-assigned behavior, which stands as symbolical on its own. Consider the number of honeybees and ants that populate protestant sermons.
When in fact, all these creatures are none of them ethical, moral, foresighted, religious, thrifty, or even "industrious vs. lazy" in the way we understand these terms. They simply behave as their genes tell them too, end of story. The result appears vaguely capitalistic, because in many environments, only accumulation far past present consuption levels, will allow future survival.
Consider the squirrel as capitalist, mindlessly collecting more acorns than it can ever eat that year. We now know that forgotten caches of nuts sprouting later, play an important role in the dispersion of trees, even though what squirrels do, is surely not for the benefit of oaks. It's almost like some invisible hand helping oaks along, though. (IMG:
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If we could ask squirrels, surely that's the way THEY would justify it all--- no? (IMG:
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As I've noted, Marx, during Darwin's lifetime, agreed with Darwin about the struggle between creatures to survive, as well as the amoral barbarity of the natural world. But Marx went on to accuse Darwin of simply recreating, in his theory, the economic underpinnings of his own English society. In other words, Marx held the Darwin was wrong, simply because his theory of "apparent design" in biology was too much like Smith's "apparent design" in macro-economics, which in turn Marx thought was wrong. Because macroeconomics (so said Marx) was instead due to Marx's own "designing deity": class-struggle and the intelligent actions of (evil) self-interested individual capitalists and capitalist classes.
But this is just one more instance of the dishonesty of Marx. He himself was a thorough-going atheist. Saying Darwin was wrong about where species came from, puts Marx under the intellectual obligation to say where instead they DO come from, and doing it without invoking a giant design conspiracy. He didn't, and couldn't, have done any such thing. Obviously Darwin is correct about nature, unless one demands a God to do it all. The cognitive dissonance would doubtless have been too much for Marx to admit that. Because as it is, Marx, always eager to play the Big Intellectual, leaves his readers without any answers at all. Biologists who were truly Marxists would need to give up, and frame no theories at all. They'd simply have to go back to being mere stamp collectors, and descriptive naturalists.
Good luck with that, you Commies. (IMG:
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Worshippers Of The Unseen Butterfingers (WOTUB), Critical Reflection ⇒ Making The Invisible Hand Visible
Jon Awbrey Worshippers Of The Unseen Butterfingers (WOTUB) 
