some responsibility for others to collapse entirely. At its most extreme, the modern paradigm for the morally vacuous individual is the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann was the obedient bureaucrat directly responsible for the transport of millions of Jews to the production lines of the Nazi concentration camps. Hannah Arendt’s account of his trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, presents Eichmann as the personification of the modern form of evil: the soulless product of a materialistic, mass society; an individual who has lost the capacity to be the moral authority of his own life.36
According to Arendt’s account, Eichmann was no anti-Semite. In fact, during the trial, Eichmann took pains to point out that he had good reasons for being sympathetic to Jews. He was indebted to a distant uncle who offered him a job during the Depression and who was married to a Jewish woman. Eichmann had returned the favor by allowing the uncle and his wife to escape while the “final solution” was still under way. At one point during the war, Eichmann had committed the crime of Rassenschande, or “racial defilement,” by taking a Jewish mistress. Further, his psychological examination revealed him to be “thoroughly normal” with some very “positive attitudes” to family and society.37
Eichmann pleaded “not guilty in the sense of the indictment,” meaning he never directly killed a Jew with his own hands, and he certainly did not feel he was an innerer Schweinehund, a foul and corrupt person. He made it clear, as many of the Nuremburg war criminals did, that he “was doing his job and obeying orders” and that he would only have had a bad conscience had he not done what he was told. Though a nonreligious person, he said he felt “guilty before God” but added more revealingly that he thought “repentance is for little children.”38 For Eichmann, morality had shrunk to obeying orders. Repentance and, by implication, conscience, that inner tension we feel when there is a conflict between satisfying external authority and personal feelings of empathy for others, were childish. Eliminating conscience helps eliminate the tension of emotional conflict. Inner life is simplified. Just obey orders.
The psychologist Stanley Milgram was so disturbed by the implications of Arendt’s analysis that he devised an ingenious, and now infamous, experiment to test empirically the degree to which average Americans would follow the orders of an authority figure to inflict physical pain on someone else.39 In the name of a bogus memory experiment, a scientist urged the subject to give “dangerous” electric shocks to a second subject for failing to memorize word pairs. The second subject was restrained and hidden from view in an adjacent room but could still be heard. Though no shock was actually administered, the second subject would scream as if in intense agony. The results revealed that over half the subjects continued to give 350-volt electric shocks to a restrained, screaming victim pleading to be released and then falling ominously silent. Such obedience was induced by nothing more coercive than a scientist in a white coat intoning, “The experiment must go on.…You have no other choice than to proceed.” Milgram’s experiment records in painfully precise detail how quickly the anxiety of moral conflict in the increasingly isolated individual gives way before the simple habit of obedience to socially sanctioned authority.40
The psychological damage of Liberalism’s institutions is real and ubiquitous, and in Milgram’s experiment, this becomes measurable in terms of choices made and voltage delivered. Yet we are only shaping ourselves in the ways society asks of us, whether our job is to please the boss or to please the client. For example, one of the largest marketing agencies, Initiative Media, conducted market research to help develop an advertising strategy targeting children; the idea was to give children cues to help them nag their parents more effectively to purchase the product. The research revealed that ads could manipulate children into a type of reasoned nagging that would be more effective than repetitious whining. When the director of strategy was asked whether she thought it unethical to make money by manipulating children, she reflected for a moment: “Yeah. Is it ethical? I don’t know.” Then she quickly recovered, smiling enthusiastically, “Our role at Initiative is to move products. If we move products …we’ve done our job.”41 In a culture where the overriding ethical imperative has been narrowed to doing one’s job, earning a living, and maximizing profits, there is no sense of responsibility for one’s larger impact on society and nature. Ethics dwindles to an afterthought.
Calculating the Cost of Ethics
Adam Smith was a moralistic thinker who was deeply concerned with society as a whole and well aware that there was more to the good life than material wealth. In making the case for the invisible hand of the free market, he also made a number of critical assumptions and qualifications that we would do well to consider. For example, the nation was still small and relatively homogenous, so he could assume something of a shared moral universe. Since markets were smaller, even when national, the parties to any economic transaction would likely live closer to the consequences of their actions, and they would naturally feel a greater responsibility for the impact on their shared community. Smith was opposed to monopolies, and he assumed that individual businesses would not become large enough to distort the competitiveness of the free market. Most revealing for the present, Smith wanted to outlaw the corporation as fundamentally flawed, since it separated ownership from decision making. The ubiquitous idea of limited liability meant shareholders were only liable for the money they invested, reaping the benefits but taking no moral or legal responsibility for the behavior of the corporation.
In the United States, the problem of “corporate mischief” was compounded after the Civil War as an unintended consequence of the Fourteenth Amendment. Passed in 1868, this amendment to the Constitution was designed to protect the civil liberties of freed slaves, its “due process” clause stipulating that no state should deprive “any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law.” This was immediately seized on by clever corporate lawyers to argue that a corporation was in fact a “legal person,” and so corporations should enjoy the freedoms and rights of a person. Between 1890 and 1910, corporate lawyers invoked the Fourteenth Amendment 288 times to serve business interests, while African Americans claimed its protection on 19 occasions.42
Perhaps most importantly, we tend to forget Smith’s model also assumed wide distribution of knowledge of the whole, since voluntary transactions could only be mutually beneficial if all parties had full access to “relevant information.” Here, right at the inception of free-market capitalism, is an implicit requirement that something akin to wisdom needs to balance short-term self-interest. I will return to this remarkable caveat later on.
Today few of Smith’s assumptions hold. We face a global and growing economic machine that penetrates almost all aspects of modern life, with an overwhelming variety of moving parts and players. We have moved from Smith’s world of nations to one increasingly dominated by competing multinational corporations, with incomes that can dwarf the GDP of national economies. Of the 150 largest economic entities on the planet, fewer than half are nation-states. The rest are unelected, undemocratic, multinational corporations, which are free to come and go, manage themselves, shape markets and mass culture, manipulate global finance and government policy — all to serve the bottom line of private profit.43 Not only is relevant information often hidden, but global markets that make honest attempts to grasp the whole seem almost beyond reach. Obviously, total knowledge is an impossible standard, but as we will see later, dedication to the truth quest provides criteria and methods for developing a “truth of degree” that balances hubris with humility, greed with generosity, and love of wealth and comfort with love of beauty and learning.
Over the past century, as global economic reality has become overwhelmingly complex, centralized, and susceptible to self-interested manipulation by banks and financial institutions, the popular understanding of the economy has become even more simple-minded and ideological. One of the most influential expressions of this comes from Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, whose free-market fundamentalism helped inspire the progressive deregulation of much of the current American economy. Beginning in the 1960s, Friedman advocated a stripped-down, simplified version of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, asserting that the only social responsibility of business is to maximize its profits. A business will do more good for society, Friedman insisted, by pursuing its own profits than by consciously attempting to work for the collective