One of the most engrossing of Adam Smith’s illustrations is the parable of the poor man’s son, who pursues wealth successfully yet in old age “curses ambition, and vainly regrets” having sacrificed “the ease and indolence of youth” to become rich.
The story is a riddle. I will argue in this piece that the riddle might be fittingly answered through a continuation of the story.
Smith tells the story in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), introducing us to:
The poor man’s son, whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition, when he begins to look around him, admires the condition of the rich.
By citing an angry heaven, Smith portends a curse. The son will come to understand that his ambitions were largely misguided, but not until he has devoted much of his life to them. The story is one of “deception.”
The story is paradoxical. I call it Smith’s visible parable.
From Adam’s rib, however, we may make an invisible parable, about Eva, daughter of the poor man’s son. She tastes knowledge of the visible parable while eschewing forbidden fruits. She resolves the paradox.
The Visible Parable
The poor man’s son imagines a distant idea of felicity that “appears in his fancy like the life of some superior rank of beings.” He imagines that if he attains a palace, a carriage, and a team of servants “he would sit still contentedly, and be quiet, enjoying himself in the thought of the happiness and tranquillity of his situation.”
For this man, the appeal of wealth relates to what Smith calls “fitness.” The fancy for fitness is explained first for watches and other “trinkets.” A watch helps us to be punctual. But also, as Adam Smith tells us, we value “productions of art” for their perceived fitness for serving certain ends associated with them, as we associate punctuality with watches. A watch that runs a few minutes fast every fortnight still allows us to be punctual, but we dislike it for its imperfect fitness. We might discard it, even though it can keep us punctual.
The poor man’s son admires luxurious fitness and thinks that it can realize his “idea of a certain artificial and elegant repose.” In order to arrive at that happy state, “he devotes himself for ever to the pursuit of wealth and greatness.” He labors unrelentingly to distinguish himself in some profession. “He makes his court to all mankind; he serves those whom he hates, and is obsequious to those whom he despises.”
The poor man’s son, over several decades, indeed, arrives at wealth.
It’s disappointing. For one thing, “he begins at last to find that wealth and greatness are mere trinkets of frivolous utility.” Throughout TMS, Smith teaches that “what constitutes the real happiness of human life” is not so much one’s material condition as one’s moral condition. For another thing, one’s estate will go sideways if not diligently led and maintained. The gardens of magnificence, the teams of servants, the operations of enterprise are “enormous and operose machines” that “must be kept in order with the most anxious attention, and which in spite of all our care are ready every moment to burst into pieces, and to crush in their ruins their unfortunate possessor.”
Smith sketches the floating image of felicity in the mind of the poor man’s son. But he suggests a different, furtive motivation: “that love of distinction so natural to man.” Smith says that, whether consciously or otherwise, we “pay more regard to the sentiments of the spectator, than to those of the person principally concerned, and consider rather how [our] situation will appear to other people, than how it will appear to [ourselves].” Indeed, Smith suggests that the son “does not even imagine that [the rich] are really happier than other people: but he imagines that they possess more means of happiness.”
Furtively yearning for a sort of distinction that turns out to be empty, the son toils for a lifetime without realizing his true motivation. He tells himself, rather, that he strives to arrive at an elevated felicity. Decades of industriousness seem to have been fueled by his failure to know himself; his failure to befriend himself; his self-deception.
Smith himself affirms philosophizing but warns us not to expect too much from it, saying that, while philosophy attempts to defend man from fear and anxiety, it does so “in vain.”
After amassing material wealth, he learns not only that it does not elevate one from the common boat of humankind. Neither does it relieve one of continual calls to responsibility. “In time of sickness or low spirits … the pleasures of the vain and empty distinctions of greatness … are no longer capable of recommending those toilsome pursuits in which they had formerly engaged him.” Smith calls the impetus a “deception,” and one that the once-poor man now curses and regrets. In time, the son learns that he was prey to deception.
Smith then says that, still, the regret is perennially countered by the splendid view, felt “in times of ease and prosperity,” of “the beauty of that accommodation which reigns in the palaces and œconomy of the great.” In such times, Smith says, we cannot help but be charmed by the regular and harmonious movement of the system, the machine or economy by means of which it is produced. The pleasures of wealth and greatness, when considered in this complex view, strike the imagination as something grand and beautiful and noble, of which the attainment is well worth all the toil and anxiety which we are so apt to bestow upon it.
Even the elderly, now-rich poor man’s son may, indeed, vacillate between the darker “splenetic” view that curses ambition and the gay view that rejoices in the splendor. Smith continues by, as it were, appreciating God for the “deception,” itself perhaps the product of the love of distinction: “It is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner.” Smith now says that, irrespective of the effects on the son himself, his industriousness is still beneficial to the rest of the whole.
Smith is vague about the “profession” that the son pursued, but it seems to have been genuinely productive. Smith says the deception rouses people:
to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts, which ennoble and embellish human life; which have entirely changed the whole face of the globe, have turned the rude forests of nature into agreeable and fertile plains, and made the trackless and barren ocean a new fund of subsistence, and the great high road of communication to the different nations of the earth. The earth by these labours of mankind has been obliged to redouble her natural fertility, and to maintain a greater multitude of inhabitants.
The Invisible Parable
Smith’s parable is dialectical. It presents a paradoxical story without clear resolution. We can debate what to think of the son’s career choices. He was deceived, Smith tells us, and, at least from a certain humor, regretted his decisions. And yet, those decisions were good for humankind. Would the son still regret his decisions if he had been actively seeking to align himself with such good? Doesn’t the son know, from Cicero if not from the Bible, that his own good corresponds to such wider good? Wouldn’t the impartial spectator, therefore, reject the son’s regret over his decisions?
A dialectical discourse calls to us to extend it. Smith tells us of the poor man’s son. Let us now imagine a new protagonist, the daughter of the poor man’s son, whom we might call “Eva.” She comes of age after Smith has completed his works. She sees her father in his old age.
When Eva was young, she began to look around her, admiring the condition of the rich, but also that of certain others. Browsing her father’s library, she found books by Adam Smith. She read them and learned that by honestly laboring, inventing, producing, and trading, even if she meets only one in a thousand of the beneficiaries of her industry, she can serve the greater good. She pursues a career or business, desiring to attain that condition of the rich—from which she now expects neither ease nor felicity—but also to fulfill her duties. She understands that by earning honest income she serves the greater good.
In this parable, Eva understands Smith to be encouraging her to take up operose machines and take on the responsibilities that come with them. She knows better than to expect ease or distinction. However, she believes that the responsibilities she assumes may spare her the disapproval of both the impartial spectator and of his representative, the man within the breast. Following Smith, she accepts the responsibilities as a calling.
Eva sees prospects, not of felicity, but of a tranquility that is active and becoming. She recalls Smith’s rhetorical question: “What can be added to the happiness of the man who is in health, who is out of debt, and has a clear conscience?” She devotes herself, as her father did, to ambitious enterprises, but in a knowledge and in a spirit different from her father’s.
A strong, stoical, and sometimes stern woman, Eva has a real friendship within herself. She notes that, at the very start of his philosophy, Smith himself affirms philosophizing but warns us not to expect too much from it, saying that, while philosophy attempts to defend man from fear and anxiety, it does so “in vain.”
The main paragraph about the poor man’s son is accompanied afterward by another illustration, about “the proud and unfeeling landlord.” This figure and the poor man’s son, if not one and the same, certainly seem to be alike. The landlord, though spiritually impoverished, is “led by an invisible hand” to “advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.” With the multiplication of the species comes a regeneration of the spirit. As I see it, Smith’s parable of the poor man’s son extends through that paragraph with the invisible hand.
Smith’s visible parable is pregnant with the invisible parable of the poor man’s son’s daughter. Her story is one for the reader to unfold and take to heart.
