The Eric Metaxas Show - Ryan Patrick Hanley (Encore)

Episode Date: April 23, 2020

Professor Ryan Patrick Hanley looks into Adam Smith not only as the founder of modern economics, but also as a philosopher who expounds on what qualities will develop an “excellent and praiseworthy character.” (Encore Presentation)

I'm not the announcer, Todd Wilkerson, but I sound so much like him that Eric asked me to take over. Evidently, Todd was caught stealing again. Oh, it was nothing big, just some toilet paper out of the studio bathroom and little soaps and some poppery. But still, Eric said it was the principal of the thing. So he fired Todd's behind just like that. And now your host, Mr. Law & Order. Eric Woodson. I have really no idea what he's talking about, or even if that introduction has any relationship to this program.

This is a sophisticated program. We frown on Todd and his ilk generally. We try to have intelligent conversations with intelligent guests. Typically, we fail, but today we will succeed because I have sitting in the studio a professor of political science from Boston College. He's had visiting appointments or fellowships at places like Yale, Harvard, and the University of Chicago, just to name a few at the bottom of the barrel. and he's the author of many studies on Enlightenment Political Philosophy, including Adam Smith and the character of virtue. And actually, it is about Adam Smith.

We will be talking today because there's a new book called Our Great Purpose, Adam Smith on Living a Better Life. Ryan Patrick Hanley, welcome to the program. Thanks very much. It is a joy to be here. I am really so thrilled to have you. I did see a review of this book in the Wall Street Journal, And I read it and I thought, holy cow, this is exactly the kind of thing that I want to talk about, that I want to learn about, and that I want my listeners to learn about.

I really feel like part of what we try to do on the show is educate people on the sort of thing they're not going to bump into on TV or unless they're reading the Wall Street Journal carefully. It is about as central as it gets, the link between freedom and virtue. So for people who don't even know who Adam Smith is, if you don't mind, start. there. Of course. So Smith is an 18th century philosopher whose life has, his sort of afterlife and legacy comes from his contributions as an economist. And so Smith is famous as, for economists today, as being one of the founding fathers of their discipline. And he's particularly famous for having not just been a social scientist and a founding social scientist, but also his name has come to be associated, at least in the popular imagination and the pages of the Wall Street Journal, with a

particular vision of economics. And that's, it goes under lots of names today. It wasn't his word, but the word capitalism is the one that tends to be associated with Smith, but a free society, a market-driven society, what Smith called a commercial society, which was the vision of a free economy that he was an ardent advocate for. Okay, so Adam Smith, his most famous book published in 1776, The title, of course, now escapes me. The wealth of nations. How could that escape me? The wealth of nations by Adam Smith.

This is an absolute classic in intellectual history. I mean, the wealth of nations by Adam Smith, 1776, a landmark work. I don't really know who his forebears were, but we get from him our modern idea of the free market. And is he the one who coined the famous phrase? the invisible hand of the market? Yeah, so the invisible hand is a metaphor that has, as we scholars like to ferret out earlier references to it. So you can find it actually in Protestant sermon literature throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, for example. But Smith is certainly the one who takes it and uses it as a metaphor for a dynamic market economy that promotes growth through the operations

of, as he called, the invisible hand, rather than the visible hand, shall we say, of the state or of the government. Okay. Now, I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that it was very late in life that I really understood how the free market works or is supposed to work, and that virtue plays a role in it. I wrote a book called If You Can Keep It. And I always say this proudly and ashamed at the same time that sometimes it's in the writing of a book that I discover something so fundamental I'm embarrassed, but then I'm thrilled that I've discovered it and I want to tell the world so that other people who don't know about it get it. And it's really at the heart of your book, our great purpose. But this idea that the concept of capitalism and the free

market are basically amoral unless you have virtuous people who comprise the free market. So if people want better pornography and better drugs, the free market will deliver that. If people want good things, the free market will deliver that. The same thing with democracy. If people want to elect that off Hitler, they can elect that off Hitler. So there's nothing inherently moral. It's just the possibility of good that exists there, which of course does not exist in socialism or in communism. But I think that we're living in a time when this has been largely forgotten. You have these free market capitalists who simply think the free market will deliver freedom along the lines of 1776, and that's been proven wrong, you know, in China and in all kinds of other places.

And so when I saw your book, Our Great Purpose, Adam Smith on Living a Better Life, dealing with that aspect of it, I just said this is about, if you, forgive me, it's about as important as it gets right now. So that's my very long way of saying, I'm thrilled you wrote the book. But just tell us more about what I have this, you know, fleeting grasp of. You are a scholar, and you've dug into this. So tell us what you've learned and what you do say in this book about Adam Smith and this idea of purpose. Well, sure. I mean, the book, I have to say, was a joy to write, and it's a joy to write now and to be intervening in contemporary debates. I mean, speaking of debates, so we've got tonight, we'll see another democratic primary debate. And you were mentioning the idea that the idea that capitalism is amoral, morally neutral, as it were.

as the rhetoric has heated up around the campaigns, and certainly over the past several years, even predating this Democratic campaign. Right. It's not simply that capitalism is amoral. It's that capitalism is downright immoral. Well, according to people who misunderstand capitalism, that's the whole idea, because aren't they reacting to Gordon Gecko-type capitalism? It is an amoral slash immoral kind of capitalism that doesn't really – I mean, I guess that's my – My question is, are they reacting to actual capitalism or to capitalism as they have come to misunderstand it? No, it's a great question.

And I think that you've put your finger on something very important, not least because I, too, start the book in the first chapter with Gordon Gecko. And the popular image that greed is good as Gecko so memorably proclaimed in the movie Wall Street. You know, that has been sort of for many people for a long time synonymous with what pre-markets stand for and are. about. But I think that if one reads Smith, and this is what I hope to do through the book, is encourage people to take up Smith, take up Smith's moral philosophy and see how it works with his vision of a free market, I think that if one reads Smith, one sees very quickly that Smith never praised the idea simply that greed is good or that capitalism is good because it promotes greed. On the contrary, for a free market order to work, to be sustainable, to create the sort

of growth from which all can benefit, there are a set of virtues that are, in fact, necessary for a culture to sustain, to teach, to respect, to encourage, and that those work not in discord with the free market, but in fact are both promoted by and necessary for market activity in its truest sense. Well, it's wonderful to hear you explain it so brilliantly because I have to say, as I said earlier, this is so central. And the misunderstanding of capitalism and freedom are so oddly, almost ubiquitous at this point that you find yourself having to explain the basics. What is freedom?

What is capitalism? What is the free market? I mean, the issue with China right now is a good example. I feel like we've had presidents on both sides of the aisle, Clinton and both Bushes, in many ways misunderstanding how freedom works, how the market works. And so when you take virtue out, you have a naive view that if we simply introduce free market forces into a place like China, it will lead to freedom. It might, but it need not. And we've seen over the last 20 or so years, in fact, it has not.

The free market has allowed China to oppress its people more rather than less. No, this is a profoundly important point. And I think one of the reasons why it's necessary sometimes to go back to these dusty old tomes from the 18th century, One thing that Adam Smith, that other Enlightenment philosophers, David Hume, another great influence on the founders, Montesquieu, one of the founder's favorites, all of them understood and agreed with the proposition that for markets to flourish, for free governments to be sustained, that a certain ethos or habit within the people was necessary. Okay, that's exactly what we're going to pick up when we come back from the break. Habits of the Heart, Virtue, will be right back. Our Great Purposes, the book.

Ryan Patrick Hanley, my guest. What do you think of when do you think of the BGs? I'll bet it's not Adam Smith. Well, tough luck, because on this program, we go from the Sublime to the Ridiculous, from the Ridiculous of the Sublime. I'm talking to one of the leading Adam Smith scholars on the planet. His name is Ryan Patrick Hanley.

He is at Boston College. And the new book is Our Great Purpose, Adam Smith, on Living a Better, You were just saying about the habits that Smith and others saw as necessary. Talk about that. Yeah, indeed. So Smith thought that for free markets to be sustainable, to operate in such a way that they would have continued growth and indeed growth that benefited all sectors of the populace, that it was important to encourage, to cultivate a certain set of virtues.

And that led him, in the one hand, to be actually a great proponent of education. And in the end of the book, The Wealth of Nations, he proposes a fairly thick set of educational institutions designed to educate the populace. But he also thinks that beyond what happens in classrooms, the reading, writing, arithmetic, 3Rs sort of thing, that was also important to educate the character, educate the soul of the human being, so that they were able to both use their freedom responsibly in a free society, but also to be able to participate in a commercial society, a capitalist order, in such a way that they could pursue their self-interest, but to do it in a way that was both, as I say in the book, good for themselves as well as good for others. Okay, this is a huge concept. The idea that ultimately, in the progress of the soul, if we are aligning our souls with God's will, I can say that as a Christian, I don't know how else one would put it. But the idea is that we realize that our affections when we're born are not properly ordered and that what we want is selfish.

But ultimately, if we care about what is right and wrong, we live long enough so that our affections become ordered in such a way that what we want is the same as what will help other people, not just ourselves, right? Okay. So what I find interesting is that Adam Smith makes it clear that this system, this free market system, this capitalism does not work without a moral and virtuous populist. You know, that the same things that some of our founders here in America said about the Constitution and our system of government, Smith is saying at roughly the same time the same thing about his economic system. Indeed. And in fact, Smith was well known to the founders. In some cases, personally, Benjamin Franklin had come over to visit him. And the founders recognized in Smith and indeed the whole Smith, not just the free market economic Smith, but also Smith, the theorist of ethics and of virtue and of character, that Smith, if you take those two sides of his package together and put them into one, that he is giving guidance for a commercial. system, not unlike the nascent system at the time of our nation's birth in the late 18th century. And so I think one of the things that the founders recognized in Smith and that made him so attractive was this idea, you were getting back to what you had mentioned about how we're made and sort of self-interest. It's that Smith thought that self-interest was natural to us and that, in fact, a healthy commercial order had to encourage this. But at the same time, and this is where

I think Smith becomes really interesting, Smith separated the idea of self-interest. Smith separated the idea of self-interest from, say, selfishness. And so getting back to Gordon Gecko, this idea that greed is good, that's not really what Smith is after. He does think that it's natural, normal, and healthy for individuals to pursue their interests in an economic order. But he also recognize that there have to be limits to this, that there are certain ways we can pursue our self-interest that can be healthier and less healthy. And in fact, there's other parts of our nature, rather than simply being made to pursue our self-interest. We also of other interests, if you will, including a desire that others around us in our communities

are also healthy, free, and able to pursue their own interests. Right. If we're healthy and good people, but obviously there are people who care only about their own profits, let's say. And so let's say I only care about my own profits. And I say, you know what, I am willing to work with people or governments that are enslaving others, that are treating people like dirt. But if I can get my stock price a little bit better. If I can make a little bit of money, I'm going to turn a blind eye to evil, to the mistreatment of other human beings. Adam Smith clearly says at some point, you have to make some decisions about when do you say I will take a little bit less profit

for another good. Yeah, and here's where Smith's ideas about human nature, I think, becomes so interesting. So as we've mentioned, Smith clearly thought that human beings are, to some degree, self-interested. We're simply hardwired that way. But he also thinks that we're hardwired to have something else within us. And he gave this a specific term, and it became one of the terms that his moral philosophy is well known for. And that's the concept of sympathy. Smith thought that it was natural, not just for us to be concerned with our own bottom line, but also that it was natural for us to be concerned with the feelings, the interests, the happiness of others around us. And that when we see other people affected in a certain way, we feel a bit of what they're

feeling. And this idea of sympathy, feeling, Smith himself translates this as fellow feeling is one of his favorite terms. And so, you know, to get back to this idea of, this is one of the challenges of global capitalism. If you're looking out for your bottom line, if you're looking out for shareholder value, a maximized profit. Of course, you're trying to gratify one side of your nature. But there's always this other side, the sympathetic side, that Smith thinks we also have to do justice to. How are our actions affecting others? And sometimes that's very hard, especially when those others are on the other side of the planet.

It's not clear exactly how we're affecting them. But within our own direct communities, the people that we see and live with, this idea of not just gratifying our self-interest, but also asking in a sympathetic way, where are they coming from? What are they feeling? What are they going through? That's also natural to us, Smith. Well, one of the contemporaries of Smith is someone about whom I've written William Wilberforce. And this is a classic case of what we're talking about.

You had all kinds of people making tons of money from slave labor. Most of the British economy was buoyed up by the slave trade and the slave labor happening. in the West Indies, on sugar plantations, and it fell to Wilberforce to say to the British population, look, this is morally wrong, this is unacceptable. We are making money in a way that is immoral. And we didn't know. Many of us have no idea what's happening across the ocean in these plantations. Many of us don't even see the slave ships.

They sail out of our harbors here empty. We don't see the slaves. They go to West Africa. They pick up the human cargo. They go across the ocean. And by the time they get back here, they're laden with rum or sugar or molasses, whatever it is. We don't see it, but we have a moral responsibility not to make our money off of the subjugation of other human beings in chattel slavery. And it took time, in a sense, for him to convince the English and many others in Europe that we can no longer turn a blind eye.

to this. And I guess it fascinates me because the Church of England was making money at the time from these slave plantations. And so it really was a moral revolution that people began to understand this. And it's around the time of Adam Smith. I just, I find it fascinating that many what we would call good people were making tons of money from some of the worst slave labor. I mean, even worse than we had here in America. And Smith was alive at that time in that very place. Indeed. I'm glad you brought up Wilberforce, because these were issues of great concern to Smith himself. Smith says some very striking things about slavery, not least of which is that there is a certain,

he used the language of heroic magnanimity, the virtue of greatness of soul, that is, the real nobility of a great person. And he associated that not with slave owners, who he said were small-souled, but in fact, or the slave merchants in that case, but in fact, the enslaved Africans. He praised into a great degree that was really striking both then and now, the real heroicness of some of these individuals that he could see as individuals. But he also – oh, I'm sorry. No, go ahead. No, I was also going to say that, I mean, one of his other great worries is, as you were talking about Wilberforce, I was thinking about the East India Company.

Oh, my gosh. Which, of course, was a way in which a lot of people were making – money in mid-18th century England. And Smith was a great critic of the East India Company, not because he was in any ways a critic of trade. He saw the benefits that trade brought. But the dangers when the East India Company was able to use certain coercive ways of leveraging their power. They had the power of the state, and they were going into a stateless realm.

And Smith saw that there can be real dangers when corporations of this sort, somewhat different from modern corporations, but are no longer subject to some of the basic concerns of rules of law. I want to come back to that exactly. Big, big issue for us today. Folks, I'm talking to Ryan Patrick Hanley, the new book, Our Great Purpose, Adam Smith on Living a Better Life, Get a Copy, it's small, it's readable, it's important. Hey, folks, I challenge you to think of at least one thing you no longer do that you wish you could. Do you miss like playing golf, maybe long walks with your spouse sleeping through the night? Are you ready to start living without pain?

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In my new book, Seven More Men, I tell the uplifting and inspiring stories of Martin Luther, George Whitfield, William Booth, George Washington Carver, Sergeant Alvin York, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Billy Graham. Each of these men have the courage to surrender themselves to a higher purpose for the sake of others. Become acquainted with these seven incredible heroes and your life will be immeasurably richer. Order your copy of Seven More Men Today. For more info, go to my website, ericmataxis.com. Westbound 7.47. Hey folks, I'm talking to Ryan Patrick Hanley of Boston College. His new book is called Our Great Purpose, Adam Smith, on Living a Better Life.

Economic Big Shots have called the book a brilliant and original way to encounter Adam Smith, a book that will still be read in 50 years. It does have the feel of a small classic. And what I'm so happy about Ryan Patrick Hanley is that you, you look at Adam Smith, not just as an economist, because he was never just an economist. He is a philosopher who leans into the world of economics and invents modern economics, but he's a philosopher. And I think that the balkanization of disciplines that we've seen in our time has really destroyed

our ability to have an integrated, holistic view of truth and knowledge. And you cannot talk, and this is the point of your book, you cannot talk about economics and the free market without the moral component. And many of us have been led to believe that you can. Gordon Gekko, greed is good. That's complete nonsense. You have to really understand it. Smith understood it.

And it seems to me that he'd be horrified to see how some free market people today don't get that piece. Yeah. And so I think there's a great historical point here and a really important contemporary point here. And so the historical point that has to do with Smith is that, yes, Smith is known today as an economist, but he made his living as a professor of moral philosophy. And so if you open up any of his books, as any of his readers in the 18th century, or even today would see on that first

page, it wouldn't say Adam Smith economist. It would say professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow. And so his economics, quite literally, comes out of his moral philosophy. The book that we know today, The Wealth of Nations, it began as a series of lectures to his undergraduates in his moral philosophy course. Now, that's a really different way of looking at economics. And that also, I think, it's not just important for, you know, scholars like me and the eggheads that are thinking about trying to get the historical story right, but I think it's important for the story we tell today about the significance of economics in contemporary life. Economics is not just, or we should say the economic realm is not just one side of life that

can be sort of put off into the corner separated from the rest. Right. Smith understood that economies themselves, as we were talking about before, not only depend on certain moral virtues, but they can also have certain effects and indeed morally beneficial effects. For Smith, one of the most important, perhaps the most important, is indeed the way in which it can alleviate poverty and raise the condition of the least well-off in society. And that from the very first page of the wealth of nations on is one of the great stories about Smith, not just the opportunities that the free market gives so that the rich can get richer, but as a moral philosopher,

and a deeply ethical person might be concerned to say, how exactly a free market society might promote the betterment of the condition of indeed the poorest among us. Okay, see, to me, this is the key, and this is what's been lost. The reason socialism is so popular with young people is because they have this wonderful moral conscience, which is absolutely as it should be. But they have been persuaded that capitalism is not the capitalism of Adam Smith, but But it's the capitalism of Gordon Gecko. It's the capitalism of the East India Company of selfish actors who don't really care about the

betterment of others and using their gifts and their abilities and their opportunities to better others, but simply about their own bottom line. So it's selfishness in the wrong way. And I think that we see this today with the NBA in China. They understand we can make many billions of dollars. But in order to do that, we might need to turn a blind eye to a totalitarian dictatorship that is doing monstrous things to human beings. And I think most of us in America would say, you know, that's not any more ethical than what the East India did to the people in India, you know, before, Wilberforce got involved and allowed missionaries to go there and to bring some Western values. They were just sort of robbing and plundering and pillaging in a way.

They really didn't care about those people. And so it seems to me that what we need to revisit, which is what you do in your book, is this inevitable moral component of the free market. Otherwise, people will rightly say we would rather vote for socialism. Yeah. And this is one of the joys of teaching Smith, especially to young people, to undergraduates, especially in our current day and age, where the lore of democratic socialism is more prominent than certainly ever.

I've seen it in my lifetime. And so a number of my students naturally come to Smith as skeptical. They're decent human beings. They believe and they say they believe in social justice. And they have very particular conceptions of what that means. And by reputation, one would think Smith would stand outside of that insofar as he is a quote-unquote capitalist. What they discover, or I hope they discover if they've done the readings for the sessions, is that as soon as you crack open Smith's books, you see that the justification, why commercial,

societies, free market societies, are good societies, are precisely because of the way in which, as Smith says, they create a quote-unquote universal opulence. That is, not just enabling the rich to get richer and an ever-expanding inequality, but to bring up those at the bottom. And when I ask my students, what do you mean by social justice? Typically what they mean. And I teach, I should say, at a Catholic Jesuit university, and sometimes my students are theologically grounded and have a sense of the richer conception of social justice, but many of them say very directly that they believe that the poor should be treated better than they are, to which we open up Smith and we start reading about what his concerns were. And not always, but many times, they're pleasantly

surprised and find that he's actually a very useful ally for what it is that they would like to see come about. Well, this is why I guess I think the timing of your book is, is something important because we really are living at a time where we've been given this false choice between socialism and this kind of naked greedy capitalism. We need to see that there's another way. We're going to be right back, folks. I'm talking to Ryan Patrick Hanley. The new book, Our Great Purpose, Adam Smith, on Living a Better Life. One stoves away. One stoos away. Hey, folks, I am talking about Adam Smith.

with one of the top Adam Smith scholars living. His name is Ryan Patrick Hanley. He's not only living and breathing. He's doing it right here in our studio. Thank you for coming by from Boston. This is a small book. It seems like a delightful book. It doesn't seem intimidating.

And as I said before, I think the ideas that you're putting forth here are so central and so ignored right now where people are so ignorant of them. this idea when we talk about profit again, it's my thesis that what happened in the 90s when Clinton said, okay, we'll give most favored nation status to China. And that will be a way of bringing liberal values of freedom and liberty into this world of China. But they didn't do it with any conditions.

And China, because it was not really. attuned to what you talk about in this book, the moral aspect of capitalism. They simply use capitalism the way the devil can use capitalism or democracy. You can do terrible things with a good thing. And I feel like this is happening now, as I mentioned earlier, with the NBA. They simply don't understand that those of us who have freedom have an obligation to use our freedom to promote freedom, not simply to use it to make ourselves freer and richer, but to help those around the world. And you use these beautiful terms from Adam Smith, universal opulence. That seems to have been lost. And it's one of the reasons I'm just so excited that you have written this book because this needs to be understood.

Yeah. And, you know, one of my hopes was to not just set those story right about Adam Smith, but to give people something to think about as we all live our own lives. You know, we're all trying, myself very much included, we're all trying to live better lives. And so the idea of writing the book was to write, as you mentioned, a short book and indeed with short chapters that I hope will be. They're designed not to be intimidating. Smith is an 18th century philosopher and his prose can get pretty tough sometimes. But each of the chapters begins with a very short quote from Smith. I give my little interpretation of the quote. and then I explain a little bit about what might be behind there as far as I can tell.

And in so doing, we try and raise a lot of themes that I hope will actually speak to people's lives today, but especially to one that you just mentioned, Eric, that I think is really important, which is, you know, commercial societies, capital societies give us great amounts of freedom, but they don't tell us how to use our freedom. And Smith was deeply attuned to the idea that there are better and worse ways to use our freedom. And in fact, one of the concepts that Smith was deeply interested in and really even troubled by is that in commercial societies, every now and then we have people that become, to use his word, corrupted. That is, in pursuing some of these goods, genuine goods of what he calls bettering our condition, making a buck, getting our name out there, that sometimes it can be too easy to succumb to that altogether. And instead of simply pursuing our own betterment, sometimes we become a little bit of.

little enslaved to some of these ideas and lose our center, lose our capacity to use our freedom well, and we just start following these things, chasing them in ways that sometimes can really make us miserable. So one of the things Smith encourages us to do, and that I hope that I do a little bit of in the book, is to get people thinking about sort of not, is it good or bad to pursue our self-interest, but in what ways can we do that that might be both healthier for ourselves, healthier for others, and in fact, give us a chance to develop ourselves in ways that will promote genuine and lasting happiness. Well, I have to say, this is the kind of book.

Again, it's a small, beautiful little book. I would like to think, and I'm not the author, but I would like to think that people would give this book to anyone going on to Wall Street, somebody going to get their MBA, somebody going into finance. Those kind of young people need to read this and understand this. And I hope people listening will be thinking of someone, some young person in particular, who says, I want to make money. I want to go into finance. I want to go to Wall Street.

I want to do any of those things. Give them this book and insist that they read it. Otherwise, they are throwing themselves into something that they don't understand and they may wake up a long time in the future. and be sorry. It seems to me that they need this kind of grounding. So I mean, forgive me for the embarrassing commercial, but I just think that it's important that we understand these things. And one of the ways to do it is to give it to people who have said, I want to go into finance and I'm excited and, you know, so that they can understand it a little bit better. I cannot ignore the tie you are wearing Ryan Patrick Hanley. That looks to me like it might be Adam Smith. Indeed it is. These were

at one point in time. I mean, I'm a child of the 80. So I remember back in the Reagan years, we're on Capitol Hill. If you were a free market Republican, you were seen in the great fashion item of the Adam Smith tie. It's a beautiful tie, a red tie with these small cameos of Adam Smith. I want to ask you, in this book, and there really are delightfully short chapters, You don't shrink from talking about religion or faith because it's obvious that Smith himself would not and did not shrink from that. What do you say? Do you say anything in the book about God or about Christian faith?

Just because I know that Smith was not ignorant of that component of everything that he was teaching and thinking and writing about. I do. And I think it's actually an important side of the story of Smith's larger, philosophy. Scholars right now have been debating for some time about what Smith really believed when it came to questions of religion. There's a stereotype of the Enlightenment and these 18th century thinkers as being, if not, the terms often used of daism, sort of thin belief in a creator, but not a whole lot of use for Christian dogma. And there's questions of even whether certain 18th century thinkers are atheists. And I think that, at least in Smith's case, he's a really unique voice

within this larger world of the Enlightenment. Smith was, to use a word we talked about before, deeply sympathetic to religion. And that is he first of all had a great respect for Christian belief. A lot of people debate what Smith may have thought about religion and Christianity, but I try and start with what he actually does say. And he mentions Christianity three times in his great book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. And every time he mentions the central Christian concept of love. Okay, of course, I have to cut you off because you're making an important, beautiful point. When we come back, we will continue that sentence, that thought.

Folks, this the Eric McIntaxon show, please don't go away. It's the Eric McIntaxe show. I just finished the last segment interrupting my guest, Ryan Patrick Hanley, the author of Our Great Purpose, Adam Smith, on Living a Better Life. You were just talking about this key component, this idea of love that Adam Smith references. So please continue. Yeah. And thanks for the opportunity to talk about this, because it's not a side that we often associate with Smith.

We think of self-interest and sort of a full-throated defense of capitalism is a tough, tough world. And Smith certainly appreciated how in market societies there was a certain set of hard-headedness. But there's also, as we mentioned before, this. idea that we are naturally sympathetic towards others. We're concerned for others. And Smith thought that, in fact, to put it very bluntly, love was a good and important thing, even in a capitalist society. He actually at one point in time distinguishes between two societies. He talks about one that is based upon what he calls the mercenary exchange of self-interest. That's sort of a basic commercial society, and it provides a certain structure that he thinks is a good thing. But he also

describes a society that's even a little bit better than that. It's not just dedicated to exchange, but one that also has what he calls, quote, the agreeable bands of love and affection. And it's in that society that he says we find, quote unquote, flourishing. And so one of the questions is, to what degree can we, living in this capitalist society, also recover, bring back, resuscitate some of these concerns with sympathy and love that Smith thinks makes a commercial society, frankly, a better and flourishing society. Well, it's funny because I think of companies like Hobby Lobby, they really want to take care of their employees.

They don't just say, hey, we want to make as much money we can for our, you know, for the bottom line, no, we actually care about our employees because they believe that if they take care of their employees in a way that goes beyond what the law might require, that it will bless their company and they will make more profits. It will be a better company. They don't have this short-sighted, short-term, you know, quarterly view. They're looking at the bigger picture. And it seems to me that the most successful companies would have that view.

They're thinking about the long view, not just about how can we maximize things now. And if we have to crush a few people, so what? They're actually thinking about the bigger picture. Indeed. And one of the points that Smith makes, and even as he talks about love, he's no sort of soft-hearted idea. dealist. He recognizes that, especially when he's writing as an economist, that one has to make arguments that speak to the bottom line. But one of the things that he brings out with great clarity is that, among other things, happy workers, workers who are well cared for are more

productive workers. Or workers who share in the benefits. Maybe if they have, if there are incentives there and those kinds of things, that they feel like they're a part of it, it's better than slave labor. Indeed. Well, we're out of time. I've just got to say, Ryan Patrick Hanley, congratulations on the new book, Our Great Purpose, Adam Smith, on living a better life. I sincerely hope you have great success with it because I do think it's important. And thank you for your time. Oh, you're very welcome. It's been an honor and a pleasure. And I'm really grateful for the opportunity. I just want to say in a few seconds we have here, we have some sponsors that we care about very much. I would like to think it's not true,

but it is true. They're probably going through a very tough time right now. So I wanted to kind of specially thank them, the folks at Relief Factor, who are the same people behind honor bound coffee and Mike Lindell, who of course is behind Mypillow.com. I think I've said it, oh, perhaps once or twice, that if you go to Mypillow.com, you get our whopping super 70s groovy disco discount. It's huge. It's up to 60% or even more on some products. But go to MyPillow.com, put in the code Eric or Metaxis, and then our friends. friends at Honorbound Coffee, which I love and drink this morning. We've got to ask them to make some mugs.

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