Opinion | The invisible hand of humanitarian activism
4 min read . Updated: 24 Mar 2019, 11:44 PM ISTIt is self-interest that creates capitalism and also self-interest that delivers human welfare
Are activists better people than us? Why do they fight for the welfare of impoverished farmworkers? Why do they dedicate their lives to protect forests and tribals from corporate miners? Why do cable-held bridges across shallow seas remind them that humanity is in a crisis? What does their dedication to the miserable say about most of us who merely pursue our craft with diligence and take care of our families?
No one asks why people do noble things. We are trained to believe that it is a fundamental property in humans and that activists have more evolved faculties of empathy. But if we keep staring at the good folks, their halos dim. They are lawyers whose prime time debates drive their private practice, journalists who receive career-saving grants from wealthy Nehruvian philanthropists who dislike the rise of vernacular strongmen, and artistically limited academics and writers who find respect in the safe refuge of righteousness.
Practical people, the executive class for instance, point to this assembly of noble activists and accuse them of hypocrisy. Some activists themselves admit the charge. They accept that they despise inequality but do send their ordinary children to expensive American universities. They admit to many other “contradictions". A contradiction is hypocrisy in good people. Practical people point to the dichotomy between the public postures and private actions of activists and declare that the good folks are inherently useless. This is a wrong analysis.
Activists are highly useful to society—not because they are noble, but because they are selfish. The defence of activists lies in the very defence of all of capitalism—“the invisible hand".
It is a phrase that is today associated with the 18th century economist Adam Smith. He first used it to make fun of religions that did not resemble Christianity, but the phrase is more serious in his 1759 classic, The Theory Of Moral Sentiments. The phrase and its exaggerated modern interpretations underpin theories that explain why capitalism works and why it is moral. Smith’s “invisible hand" leads the selfish rich to perform accidental collateral good deeds. “…Thus without intending it, without knowing it, [they] advance the interest of the society".
The idea is that through our selfish acts, we end up expanding the economy and doing good more efficiently than altruism. Selfish acts also fund the greatest do-gooder of all, the government. Isn’t it true that in any loan waiver to poor farmers, there is a bigger contribution from the reviled young banker than the pious rural activist?
The economist Thomas Piketty told me in an interview that he is not so bothered by the near absence of philanthropy in India. For the welfare of the poor, according to him, the tax paid by the rich is superior to philanthropy. If we scale down the characters in this analysis, we can argue that a tax-paying youth who is led by Smith’s invisible hand is far more beneficial to society than the conscientious young person who would love Piketty.
But the noble, too, are led by the invisible hand. The origins of activism lie in an old elite’s loss of privileges once a new elite takes over. Old-money millionaires accuse new billionaires of corruption because these billionaires have made it expensive to be rich in India. The old urbane elite of journalism accuse the profession’s new provincial elite of being loud and reverential. Mohandas Gandhi himself rebelled in South Africa once he found he would not be accorded a white man’s status.
Also, the affluent require meaning in their otherwise pointless lives. There can be no greater meaning than the feudalism of serving those who are weaker.
So altruism is the same thing as selfishness. It is the same invisible hand of self-interest that leads activists, especially those who do not have serious mental illnesses. Their selfishness and their war to preserve their prestige, all masqueraded as a natural force of goodness, creates streams of information, reassures the marginalized that someone cares for them, delays degradation of the environment and creates political opposition to powerful companies.
There are economists who do not like Adam Smith’s “invisible hand". They argue that human selfishness would achieve nothing without the regulatory force of compassion, like government, for example.
I imagine that in their view, Smith’s “invisible hand" is very similar to Diego Maradona’s “hand of god". During a quarter final of the 1986 football World Cup, the Argentine legend Maradona used his hand to score a fraudulent goal, which he later described as a goal scored “a little with the head of Maradona and a little with the hand of God". The mystical hand is so often an intervention of lethargic immorality that is attributed to a higher force.
Scholars such as the anthropologist David Graeber and the economist Joseph Stiglitz who do not admire “the invisible hand" point to the power of altruism. Stiglitz reminds us that many technologies emerged from government projects, like the internet itself. But then isn’t it true that politicians, bureaucrats and scientists themselves are impelled by selfish reasons, making their altruism accidental? There is self-interest that creates capitalism, and self-interest that creates humanitarianism.
Stiglitz is wrong when he says Smith’s hand is invisible because “it is often not there". There is not one but two invisible hands that run the world.
Manu Joseph is a journalist, and a novelist, most recently of ‘Miss Laila, Armed And Dangerous’.