The Theory of Moral Sentiments - Adam Smith [10]
It is easy to see that there is some real tension here between Smith’s firmly articulated empirical view and the scientific evidence for genetic differences between individuals within the same race or nationality or class. It is not so important whether the quoted statement is correct. What is really important to appreciate is that Smith’s epistemic generalization reflects not only what he very much wanted to believe, but also what he thought would be the right assumption to make—that differences between groups largely reflect differences of education and opportunities rather than differences of natural talents—when dealing with groups of people without any pre-identified genetic differentiation among them.27
It is not only that the working class has much less access to education—and good education in particular—than people of rank and fortune, but also that the work of the working class gives them far less occasion to cultivate their minds than the work of the privileged.
The employments of people of some rank and fortune, besides, are seldom such as harass them from morning to night. They generally have a good deal of leisure, during which they may perfect themselves in every branch either of useful or ornamental knowledge of which they may have laid the foundation, or for which they may have acquired some taste in the earlier part of life.
It is otherwise with the common people. They have little time to spare for education. Their parents can scarce afford to maintain them even in infancy. As soon as they are able to work they must apply to some trade by which they can earn their subsistence. That trade, too, is generally so simple and uniform as to give little exercise to the understanding, while, at the same time, their labour is both so constant and so severe, that it leaves them little leisure and less inclination to apply to, or even to think of, anything else.28
While it is important to understand Smith’s inclination—indeed, longing—to believe in the equal potential of all human beings, what is crucial to his policy prescriptions is his emphasis on the class-related neglect of human talents through the lack of education and the unimaginative nature of the work that many members of the working classes are forced to do by economic circumstances. Class divisions, Smith argued, reflect this inequality of opportunity, rather than indicating differences of inborn talents and abilities.
The presumption of similarity of intrinsic talents is accepted by Smith not only within nations but also across the boundaries of states and cultures, as is clear from what he says in both the Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations. The assumption of racial or regional inferiority of some people, which had quite a hold on the minds of many of his contemporaries, is completely absent in Smith’s writings. And Smith does not address these points only abstractly. For example, he discusses why he thinks Chinese and Indian producers are really not in any different league of productive ability from Europeans, even though their institutions may handicap them. He is inclined to see the relative backwardness of African economic progress in terms of the continent’s geographical disadvantages, having nothing like the “gulfs of Arabia, Persia, India, Bengal, and Siam, in Asia” that provide opportunities for trade to other people. Smith is also incensed by the presumption of superior racial endowments of the white man, and at one stage even bursts into unconcealed wrath: “There is not a negro from the coast of Africa who does not, in this respect, possess a degree of magnanimity which the soul of his sordid master is too often scarce capable of conceiving.”29
Or consider Smith’s odd exuberance about the nutritional benefits of the potato:
The chairmen, porters, and coalheavers in London, and those unfortunate women who live by prostitution, the strongest men and the most beautiful women perhaps in the British dominions, are said to be the greater part of