THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Friday, September 20, 2019 |A
What the Invisible
Hand Can’t Grasp
Our Great Purpose
By Ryan Patrick Hanley
(Princeton, 156 pages, $17.95)BOOKSHELF| By David J. Davis
N
ot long after Adam Smith’s resignation from the
University of Glasgow, his successor, Thomas Reid,
summarized Smith’s philosophy in a series of
lectures as “selflove variously modified.” Thus began a
long tradition of grossly oversimplifying Smith. Today
undergraduates learn that he shaped classical economic
theory, which is outlined in the first section of his second
book, “The Wealth of Nations” (1776). In this standard
narrative, Smith’s thinking is mostly about capitalism, the
invisible hand of the free market, natural and market
prices, and the division of labor.
In “Our Great Purpose,” Ryan Patrick Hanley argues that
Smith’s larger moral system—first set out in “The Theory of
Moral Sentiments” (1759)—transcends such stereotypes and
offers contemporary society a workable model of virtue
ethics. The pity is that we do not see it, in part because of
Smith’s brilliant criticism of mercantile economies, which
has cast the rest of his philosophy into shadow.
Mr. Hanley, a professor of
political science at Boston
College, shows that the
attention paid to one portion of
Smith’s writings in “The Wealth
of Nations” has created a kind
of intellectual myopia. It is as if
we continue to watch the same
20 minutes of a movie sequel
without watching the first
installment or finishing the
second. We miss vital plot points
as well as the overarching vision.
We miss Smith’s sustained critique
of the dangers of consumerism,
what Smith called the “trinkets of
frivolous utility.” We miss that Smith spoke up
for the poorer classes. We miss that virtues like prudence,
self-command and benevolence characterize his philosophy
better than unfettered trade or the acquisition of wealth.
According to Mr. Hanley, Smith believed that human
beings were created for something more than self-
gratification, because “trinkets and baubles may bring us
pleasure and comfort” but “happiness is something entirely
different.” Smith demonstrated that the market economy
provides a degree of liberty that creates the most
opportunities for the most people. But this claim is only the
first part of the sequel. The capitalist market is a suitable
context for pursuing happiness, but it is not, in Smith’s view,
the agent of happiness.
“Our Great Purpose” fashions a useful lens through which
to view Smith’s full philosophical project and intellectual
style, a style that Edmund Burke said was more akin to
painting than to writing. Smith had a way of pulling all
aspects of human society together, from eating and drinking
with friends to trading on the stock exchange. To separate
them destroys the larger picture.
Mr. Hanley clearly lays out the logic behind this artistry.
Close readings of passages with crisp commentary make
“Our Great Purpose” an accessible primer to some of Smith’s
overlooked ideas. Readers will meet an unfamiliar Smith in
passages like this one: “All the members of human society
stand in need of each other’s assistance....Thenecessary
assistance is reciprocally afforded from love, from gratitude,
from friendship, and esteem.” Without these virtues, society
merely subsists, becoming a series of “mercenary exchange[s].”Mr. Hanley’s analysis also emphasizes Smith’s tendency
toward a Stoic kind of balance. The self-interest of “The
Wealth of Nations” is balanced with the notion of sympathy
that Smith championed in the “Moral Sentiments.” Most
human beings want attention and self-exultation, he noted,
but we also want to love and be loved. Neither ascetic nor
hedonist, Smith posited “a way to live that allows us to
realize both sides of our nature,” as Mr. Hanley puts it. In
other words, we should not be satisfied with choices like
individualism or social-mindedness, the self or society. We
should want both.
While Smith never advocated “a single best way for all
people to live,” Mr. Hanley notes, the “Moral Sentiments”
presents useful ways forward. Most important, the success
and failure that affect a person’s happiness, in Smith’s view,
rest in the imagination, which he judged to be a boundless
hoard of human potential. The imagination—not a person’s
bank account, class, ethnicity, gender or intelligence—is the
force behind human flourishing. We rely on it to bridge the
seeming gap between our compulsion to act and our desire
for peace and quiet.
Our imaginations allow us to “step outside ourselves,” as
Mr. Hanley writes in summarizing Smith’s argument, “...so
that we can see ourselves in that impartial light in which
the rest of the world sees us.” This “impartial spectator”
teaches us about ourselves, providing us “with the resources
to...correctourjudgments in the real world.” Smith is
optimistic that truly seeing the less appealing parts of our
nature “makes us more likely to make changes” to our lives,
both for ourselves and for those we care about. These self-
corrections help us embrace what Smith called our “real
littleness,” a true reflection of ourselves in relation to
others, so that our ideas about ourselves more closely align
with reality, whether that reality has to do with the
marketplace, complicated family situations, the joys of
friendship or toxic work environments.
While Mr. Hanley is not the first to point to the “Moral
Sentiments” as a key to unlocking Adam Smith’s thought, he
communicates the elegance and difficulty of Smith’s philosophy
without portraying it as quixotic. Smith deftly connected all
human activity into a single, philosophical portrait, and
“Our Great Purpose” makes a compelling case for us to
study it closely. By avoiding the all-too-familiar Smith, Mr.
Hanley reunites all the parts of Smith’s philosophy, bringing
sympathy out of the shadows of self-interest.Mr. Davis is a professor of history at Houston Baptist
University.Virtues like self-command and benevolence
characterize Adam Smith’s outlook better than
unfettered trade or the acquisition of wealth.The Brief Splendor of Autumn, and of Keats
T
he autumnal equinox
isn’t until Monday, and
my favorite football
team has already lost to its
archrival. Fortunately I have a
fall ritual that never disap-
points: Every September I read
John Keats’s “To Autumn.”
That tradition has special sig-
nificance this season, the ode’s
200th anniversary.
I’ve loved “To Autumn”
since I first read it in college. I
was entranced then, as now, by
the way in which the poem
captures this season’s fleeting
beauty. From its famous open-
ing line (“Season of mists and
mellow fruitfulness”) to the
quiet music of its final image
(“gathering swallows twitter in
the skies”), it evokes the deli-
cate abundance of these
weeks. Keats’s writing affects
me the way the season itself
does: I wish the poem would
last longer even as I know its
power lies in its brevity.
The brevity of Keats’s own
life adds a tragic poignance to
his poetry. He wrote much of
his best verse when he was 23.
He had abandoned a medical
career to devote himself to po-
etry two years earlier. He pub-
lished his first collection in
1817 and a long poetic romance
in 1818. Undeterred by bad re-
views and meager sales, he
continued writing even as hecared for his sick brother,
Tom, who died of tuberculosis
in December 1818. (Their
mother had died of the same
disease eight years earlier.)
John Keats’s resolve bore
fruit. In January and February
1819, he wrote the dark ro-
mance “The Eve of St. Agnes”;
in the spring, the haunting bal-
lad “La Belle Dame Sans
Merci” and a handful of fine
sonnets; and over several
months, the six poems that wenow know as his Great Odes,
including “To Autumn.”
These odes also include
“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” with
its famous statement:
“ ‘Beauty is truth, truth
beauty,’—that is all / Ye know
on earth, and all ye need to
know.” The power of artistic
expression is more tenuous in
“Ode to a Nightingale,” com-
posed in the May of Keats’s an-
nus mirabilis. Its speaker
yearns to escape the pain of
everyday life “on the viewless
wings of Poesy,” only to find
the spell is ephemeral. The
poem’s influence lingers: F.
Scott Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett,
Jackson Browne and the Brit-
pop band Blur all pinched its
phrase “tender is the night”
for their own purposes.
Not everything Keats wrote
that year was excellent. He
abandoned a long poem he had
started the year before, tried
rewriting it, and again left it
incomplete. He wrote a trag-
edy that wasn’t staged until
1950 (no tragedy there). He
started and abandoned a sec-ond play. And he used the
word “adieu” an awful lot. The
forgotten duds amid famous
successes remind us that Keats
could have used some ripen-
ing.
But 1819 would be his last
year of writing poetry. The fol-
lowing February, Keats
coughed up some blood. He
knew what that meant. He
wrote to a friend, “That drop
of blood is my death-war-
rant;—I must die.” Keats
moved to Rome in the hope
that the climate would miti-
gate his tuberculosis. He died
there in February 1821.
Keats had asked to have his
headstone inscribed, “Here lies
one whose name was writ in
water.” An epitaph full of
beauty—but, as 200 years have
shown, not truth. The seasons
turn, yet Keats reminds me
still that fleeting splendor has
a captivating power of its own.Mr. Scalia is a co-editor of
Justice Antonin Scalia’s book
“On Faith: Lessons From an
American Believer.”By Christopher J. Scalia
The poet wrote his
masterworks at age23. He died at 25.
OPINION
Coming in BOOKS this weekend
Civil War, Reconstruction and the Constitution • Blood
libel on American soil • Joseph Epstein on the myth of
the meritocracy • The jurisprudence of Clarence Thomas- The lost world of Frances Hodgson Burnett • & more
House Judi-
ciary Commit-
tee Chairman
Jerry Nadler
held another
spectacle of a
hearing Tues-
day as part of
his impeach-
ment drama-
turgy. Former
Trump cam-
paign manager Corey Lewan-
dowski testified to a thronged
hearing room and was grilled
on Russia interactions and
Oval Office discussions. The
day produced no new infor-
mation, yet cable stations
broadcast it live and newspa-
pers ran breathless coverage.
A House Oversight sub-
committee held its own hear-
ing Wednesday. The room
was almost empty; all but a
few Democratic members
didn’t even bother showing
up. Apart from Fox News and
a few conservative publica-
tions, news organizations ig-
nored it. The featured—and
substantive—witness: Justice
Department Inspector Gen-
eral Michael Horowitz.
This is today’s Washing-
ton: theater upstaging truth.
The headlines go to a long
debunked “collusion” and
“obstruction” narrative that
liberal and media partisans
refuse to quit. A press black-
out is meanwhile imposed on
those investigators—includ-
ing Mr. Horowitz—who have
rooted out gross misconduct
by the officials at the Federal
Bureau of Investigation who
first spun that narrative.
In contrast to the Lewan-
dowski moment, Mr. Horo-
witz’s testimony was infor-
mative and significant. And
Mr. Horowitz Speaks
in contrast to former special
counsel Robert Mueller’s
vague testimony, the inspec-
tor general demonstrated a
whip-sharp command of
facts. He was officially there
to talk about a standards-
and-training panel, the Coun-
cil of the Inspectors General
on Integrity and Efficiency, of
which he is chairman. Yet it
was inevitable Republicans
would ask about his recent
and forthcoming reports on
FBI behavior during the 2016
election. Mr. Horowitz is a
straight arrow and he refused
to provide political talking
points. Yet his answers were
candid and damning.
The real merit of the hear-
ing was to bring home the
magnitude of the leaking and
lying offenses by former FBI
Director James Comey (as de-
tailed in an August 2019 in-
spector-general report) and
former acting Director An-
drew McCabe (as detailed in
a February 2018 inspector-
general report). It was mo-
mentous to hear Mr. Horo-
witz acknowledge that his
office found enough wrong-
doing to require criminal re-
ferrals to the Justice Depart-
ment for two successive
heads of the FBI.
He expanded on how grave
a problem it is for senior
law-enforcement officials to
think they get to operate out-
side rules and procedures.
Asked by Georgia’s Rep. Jody
Hice why he’d chosen in his
August report to score Mr.
Comey for setting a “danger-
ous example” in leaking his
Trump memo, Mr. Horowitz
blew up the former director’s
claim that his actions had
been necessary or justified.“Our concern,” Mr. Horo-
witz said, “was empowering
the FBI director, or frankly
any FBI employee or other
law-enforcement official,
with the authority to decide
that they’re not going to fol-
low established norms and
procedures because in their
view they’ve made a judg-
ment that the individuals
they are dealing with can’t be
trusted.”Put another way, Mr.
Comey wasn’t entitled to leak
sensitive FBI information
simply because he didn’t like
Donald Trump. Mr. Horowitz
later repeated that such be-
havior was “completely in-
consistent with department
policy.” And he went out of
his way to remind the com-
mittee that a 2018 inspector-
general report had also “criti-
cized [Mr. Comey] for
usurping the authority of the
attorney general to make
prosecutorial decisions.”
Mr. Horowitz also con-
firmed a crucial new detail
from his August report. The
FBI has always maintained
that the sole purpose of Mr.
Comey’s Jan. 6, 2017, briefing
of President-elect Trump was
to inform him of Russian in-
terference and about a “sala-
cious” portion of the Steele
dossier. But the Horowitz re-
port suggested that, in fact,
Mr. Trump was already a tar-get of investigators and that
Mr. Comey was using the
meeting for evidence-gather-
ing. Ohio’s Rep. Jim Jordan
asked: So this “wasn’t just in-
formation going one way;
they were trying to get infor-
mation from the president as
well—is that right?” Mr. Hor-
owitz: “That’s what we’ve re-
ported.”
Perhaps Mr. Comey’s can-
dor—with Mr. Trump, Con-
gress and the nation—will be
a subject in Mr. Horowitz’s
upcoming surveillance report.
The inspector general was
mum on its contents, though
he confirmed that it is cur-
rently undergoing classifica-
tion, after which his office
will still need to write up a
“public” version. And he dis-
closed that his office has had
“communications” with U.S.
Attorney John Durham, who
is also investigating the FBI’s
actions.
You might think an inspec-
tor-general report that exco-
riates the former head of a
powerful agency might be
worthy of bipartisan atten-
tion. Think again. Democrats
avoided Comey questions
Wednesday, and Mr. Horowitz
told Mr. Jordan that neither
the Oversight nor the Judi-
ciary committee has asked
him to testify on the August
report. Mr. Horowitz was also
unaware of any request for
testimony on his upcoming
report on FBI surveillance.
Democrats talk a lot about
their dedication to “over-
sight” and “truth.” And the
media keep promising not to
let democracy die in dark-
ness. This week’s tale of two
hearings proves otherwise.
Write to [email protected].Never mind Nadler’s
impeachment circus.
The real action was at
a Wednesday hearing.POTOMAC
WATCH
By Kimberley
A. Strassel
Detroit
A mob de-
scended on
an old church
in Detroit
last Sunday,
but it didn’t pose a riotous
threat. Rather, the group rep-
resented a special opportunity
to pack the pews. “It’s won-
derful to see such a great
crowd,” said Father Maurice
Restivo during his homily at
Ste. Anne de Detroit.
This was the 49th gather-
ing of the Detroit Mass Mob, a
group formed five years ago
on social media to promote
big turnouts at the city’s
Catholic churches. “Our
grandparents built these
churches,” says Thom Mann, a
retired financial adviser and
one of the main organizers.
“They’re beautiful and people
like to see them full.” Too of-
ten, they’re empty.
Detroit was once the
fourth-largest U.S. city, with
more than 1.8 million resi-
dents in the 1950s. Today its
population has fallen to fewer
than 700,000, thanks to tur-
moil in the auto industry, ra-
cial unrest in the 1960s, and
the subsequent “white flight”
to the suburbs. One sad fea-
ture of this deterioration is
apparent on Sunday mornings,
when the city’s impressive
Catholic churches hold Masses
for dwindling numbers of pa-
rishioners. Other cities in the
Great Lakes region have suf-
fered similar setbacks.
In 2010 Christopher M.
When a Mob Descended on Mass
Byrd of Buffalo, N.Y., decided
to respond. Working with the
leadership of St. Adalbert’s
Basilica, where about 50 peo-
ple would show up for a typi-
cal Mass on Sunday, he urged
everyone who followed the
church on Facebook to attend
on a scheduled date and time.
More than 300 joined his pi-
ous flash mob. “It was a very
nice one-day boost in the
pews and the collection bas-
ket,” Mr. Byrd notes.
This initial achievement en-
couraged Mr. Byrd to scale up
and involve more churches. In
2013, the Buffalo Mass Mob
held its first formal event,
promoted almost entirely on
social media. Facebook, Twit-
ter and the like are often
blamed for social division, but
in this case they have united
people in worship. Again, hun-
dreds came.
Mr. Byrd and his allies kept
it up: This Sunday, the Buffalo
Mass Mob will sponsor its
35th event, at St. Bernard in
Buffalo’s Kaisertown neigh-
borhood. The idea spread to
other cities such as Cleveland
and Pittsburgh.
The Detroit Mass Mob has
enjoyed the most success,
with six events this year and
crowds that have exceeded
1,000 people. The noon Mass
last Sunday drew about 675 to
Ste. Anne de Detroit, dedi-
cated to the mother of the
Virgin Mary and sometimes
called the city’s “mother
church.” Headquarters to the
second-oldest continuouslyoperating parish in the U.S.,
the church holds records that
date to 1704, marking the
baptism of the daughter of
Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac,
the French explorer and sol-
dier who founded Detroit.
Only the parish in St. Augus-
tine, Fla., started by Span-
iards in the 16th century, has
an older set of uninterrupted
annals.The Detroit mobsters par-
ticipated in a bilingual Mass,
with readings and the homily
delivered in English and
French. It coincided with an
annual festival on church
grounds that honors the city’s
French and Native American
roots, with food, music and
re-enactors.
Spanish is spoken at Ste.
Anne’s as well. Most of its
regular parishioners are His-
panic, from a nearby neigh-
borhood. The church itself sits
close to the Ambassador
Bridge, which spans the De-
troit River, the only place
where you can drive south
into Canada.
Most of the Mass-mob visi-
tors were older, with fewer
baby carriers in the nave or
minivans in the parking lotthan a suburban church would
see on an ordinary Sunday.
They also appeared to have a
special interest in Ste. Anne’s
beauty and history, judging
from the large number who
stayed for a post-Mass talk on
these subjects.
The current brick church
was built in 1886 as a two-
towered Gothic-revival struc-
ture. An architectural gem, it
features a vaulted roof, a mas-
sive organ, and Detroit’s old-
est stained-glass windows,
saved from an earlier build-
ing.
The central figure in its
history is Father Gabriel Rich-
ard, who served as pastor in
the early 1800s. He set up
schools, published Detroit’s
first newspaper, and was a
founder of the University of
Michigan. (An exhibit dedi-
cated to his legacy is open at
Ste. Anne’s through Oct. 15.)
He also knew something
about urban comebacks. After
a fire devastated Detroit in
1805, Richard offered the
words that today serve as De-
troit’s motto: Speramus me-
liora; resurget cineribus.
Translation: “We hope for bet-
ter things; it shall arise from
the ashes.”
The Detroit Mass Mob will
rise up again on Oct. 20 at St.
Francis D’Assisi. “If people
keep coming, we’ll keep doing
them,” says Mr. Mann.Mr. Miller is director of the
Dow Journalism Program at
Hillsdale College.A Facebook-driven
movement to revive
churches in America’s
Midwestern cities.HOUSES OF
WORSHIP
By John J.
Miller