Joan Marcus
What would Adam Smith do if he’d lived long enough to see the crazy world he helped think into existence? Specifically, how long would the father of economics marvel at all the wealth and prosperity free markets brought to many corners of the globe before wishing to punch in the face those who continue to use his words to justify so much greed and depravity?
We get an answer, of sorts, in Pulitzer Prize winner Bruce Norris’s play “The Low Road,” a stinging and sidesplitting indictment of the damage often done in the name of capitalism, which recently opened at New York’s Public Theater.
In the play, an 18th-century striver named Jim Trewitt, who may be the bastard son of George Washington, happens upon a page from a draft of Smith’s soon-to-be published “The Wealth of Nations” — the part about the “invisible hand.” His reading, or misreading, of the passage forges a twisted, though familiar, worldview in which any number of heinous crimes can be rationalized as the sort of healthy pursuit of self-interest that pays dividends to the common good.
Adam Smith himself narrates the play’s action, which shifts between the 18th and 21st centuries (including the most spot-on, hilarious portrayal of an economic summit ever put to stage, page or screen). Smith tells Trewitt’s rags-to-robbery-to-murder-to-rape-to-riches tale with wit and ironic detachment. But the Scottish philosopher finally tips his hand during Trewitt’s trial, no longer able to hold back his disgust as the sociopath defends his behavior in a flowery speech that further bastardizes “The Wealth of Nations.”
“I was just talking about this moment the other night with Danny Davis, who plays Smith,” Norris, the playwright, told MarketWatch. “As Trewitt makes his final plea, Smith has a look on his face like, ’Oh, what have I done?’ ”
Smith would probably be somewhat baffled by the way his handiwork has been put to use.
In the million or so words Smith wrote, the phrase “invisible hand” appears only three times, and only once, in “The Wealth of Nations,” in the way it is mostly understood today:
| … [H]e intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. |
The two caveats — “nor is it always” and “frequently” — as well as the context of the idea in the larger work are often omitted when the line is parroted back as a fairly lazy shorthand for faith in a more laissez-faire system. As with so many selective readings from scripture and other founding texts, the phrase has been used to advance many ideas Smith would balk at. (Economists do seem partial to metaphors about hands and feet: An invisible hand may guide the economy, but the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, +0.47% takes a random walk.)
Smith’s view was certainly more nuanced than some politicians and pundits would admit. In the famous opening to his “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” an exploration of why people care about each other even when it’s not in their self-interest, he notes:
| How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. |
And, later, adds that these sentiments are not limited to the virtuous among us: “The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it.”
Norris’s play seems to dispute the latter point, given that with a guy like Trewitt, a sort of cross between Tom Jones and Patrick Bateman, whose everything-for-the-bottom-line ethos is not unlike those of certain corporations, seems wholly without sympathy.
The Texas-born Norris said the idea for the play, which made its debut in London in 2013, was inspired by listening to the persuasive way politicians such as Paul Ryan “spout self-serving ideologies.”
But he’s not trying to make an academic economic argument here, Norris said. As one of his characters notes, “If you want to effect political change, a play is the most inefficient way of doing it.”
“Plays work in a more subtle way,” Norris said. “Maybe they adjust your thinking, at least for two hours or so. What interested me here is exploring why people tell certain stories about money — and why they want to believe in those myths.” And given that money itself is a fiction, fiction itself may be one of the best tools to understand it.
Norris is equally hard on the naiveté of many opponents of capitalism’s darker sides. The foil to Trewitt in the play is a slave named John Blanke, who, despite his superior intellect and sensibility, proves no match for the ravenous entrepreneur. Nor do his benefactors, the wealthy family that pays for his freedom and the religious community that takes him in.
Setting the play in the Revolutionary War era is fitting, as that annus mirabilis of 1776 saw the publication of two pillars of the Enlightenment: The Declaration of Independence and “The Wealth of Nations.” This allows Norris to explore what he calls “the founding schizophrenia” on which America is built.
After all, in addition to the 56 revolutionaries who put their John Hancocks to the Declaration, the document was also signed, in a way, by Smith’s invisible hand.