Our Great Purpose by Hanley Ryan;

Author:Hanley, Ryan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2019-07-04T00:00:00+00:00

XVIII

“When he views himself in the light in which he is conscious that others will view him, he sees that to them he is but one of the multitude in no respect better than any other in it.”

Or: you aren’t any better than anyone else—and nobody else is any better than you.

The impartial spectator is quite a guy. For he—and he alone—makes it possible for us to see ourselves as we really are. In particular, and as we saw at the very end of the last chapter, he allows us to “see what relates to ourselves in its proper shape and dimensions.” But what exactly does that mean? Exactly what perspective on ourselves does he provide? As it turns out, it’s an extraordinary perspective, and one that most of us are likely to find at least at first (and perhaps for a long time after) very hard to swallow: that we are just “one of the multitude,” in fact “in no respect better” than any other person in that multitude.

This is quite a claim. Smith here tells us that if we do our job well and fully inhabit the perspective of an impartial spectator of ourselves, we’ll come to realize that we have no claims to thinking ourselves better than others. Now, in saying this, Smith knows that he’s asking a great deal of us. He himself, after all, told us way back at the start of this book that we’re hardwired to think that our own selves and our own needs come first. He’s also told us that our world rewards people of different status differently, showering recognition on the elite while overlooking the downtrodden. So Smith, maybe better than anyone, knows what he’s up against in making this point—which is probably why he calls this the “hardest of all the lessons of morality.”1 Of course, the simple fact that a lesson is hard doesn’t make it worthwhile. So why does Smith think that this particular lesson is so necessary for us to learn?

To help get our heads around this, I’d like to invoke the wisdom of my grandmother. She wasn’t an academic, or even college educated, and I’m fairly sure she never read Adam Smith. But she understood as well as anyone what Smith is after here. She showed this in something she often said to her children, usually while wagging a finger: “Nobody is better than you, and you’re not any better than anyone else!”

The first part of my grandmother’s exhortation was surely shaped by the experience of living in an immigrant family in a new land in which there were no shortage of those who assumed their superiority to you. To believe, in that context, that nobody is better than you was to affirm the conviction of your inherent dignity, a dignity that transcends inequalities. That’s a crucial service of this exhortation. But it’s also the easier part of the exhortation to embrace. The harder part is the second part: acceptance that you’re no better than anyone else.

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