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| 2011 publication |
Future historians will probably regard our era as an age of collective folly—a time when large numbers of highly intelligent and influential people fervently believed (despite Adam Smith’s clearly expressed sentiments to the contrary) that society and polity should also be ruled by the same invisible hand that governs a market economy.
The material abundance of the Gilded Age had sown doubts in Keynes about the supposed scarcity of resources, but it was the ravages of the Depression that made him certain the old order had it wrong. Clearly the trouble was not a shortage of production.
Keynes’ admiration for Burke was unusual in Bloomsbury. The group understood the French Revolution as the fundamental juncture in modern politics—the great barrier separating conservatism and their own progressive liberalism.
The authorities that conservatives first defended were particular and personal: local squires and judges, clergymen, and teachers, but authority has grown impersonal: the state’s legal authority (to have the final say); the market’s economic authority (to deny those who cannot pay); society’s normative authority (to police ethical and cultural standards).
But it is in fact individualism and not sociability that developed over the course of human history. That individualism seems today like a solid core of our economic and political behavior is only because we have developed institutions that override our more naturally communal instincts.
This is also the aim of other “dangerous” activities, from sports-car racing and mountain climbing to antisocial behavior like vandalism and shoplifting. The “thrill” each affords comes from “you” pushing the robot aside.
Just as your inability to play a Chopin sonata on the piano is not a personality or character problem. It’s always and only a matter of practice.
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