Londen, 1723. Bernard
Mandeville, physician, hobby writing, suddenly rose to fame by arousing
indignation among the conservative Christians and country
elite, and hidden smiles and winks from the modern
and vibrant London city community.
This was caused by a book
The Fable of the Bees in which he elaborately explained a
400 line satirical poem he had published earlier:
The Grumbling Hive. The explanation
centres around the
poem's "Moral": the economy of a nation benefits dramatically from the abundant vices
of its citizens; and a general loss of such vices would be a national calamity worse than any other
imaginable, raging pestilence not excepted.
Christian officials requested Mandeville's arrest and prohibition of his
book, but failed. Other champions of conservative morality wrote condemnations stuffed
with big words and gross misunderstanding of Mandeville's intelligent line
of thought on how human psychology bears on economics. The moral indignation
- sometimes bordering outright panic - completely blocked a cool, detached analysis of
the imperfections Mandeville's reasoning surely had. That started only
when half a century later the indignation was sidelined by a new generation of
economists and philosophers. Tactically, those
wise scholars gradually changed the moral
associations of Mandeville's concepts by calling them ever more neutral
names: "vices" became named "passions" (already in Mandeville), then "pleasures",
and finally "demand" and "utility". Thus his reasoning was made ready to find
its way to
mainstream economic ideology and the standard phrasing in which nowadays
vain, greedy and untrustworthy public figures from all shades of
intelligence, still using the same cheap vicious tricks unmasked by
Mandeville three centuries ago, address their eager audiences, who in the
same three centuries did in no way part with Ignorance - a "necessary
ingredient in the mixture of society". To relive the passion of Mandeville the
thinker, author and true connoisseur of Pride,
of playfully but neatly
putting his well taken message in the least flattering of possible phrasings,
will forever remain a Modest, Temperate, Praiseworthy and Affordable joy.
To The Grumbling Hive!
