Full transcript of this episode:

Hello and welcome to the Sensibly Speaking Podcast. This is Chris Shelton, the Critical Thinker at Large coming at you for show #91 and this one we’re calling When the Left Isn’t in the Right. Of course, this podcast is available through iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play as well as here on YouTube with video, although this week you’re just going to be seeing my happy mug talking at you for a while.

I’ve been correctly accused of having left-wing tendencies, although I am definitely more of a centrist at this point and am someone who is willing to consider most any idea if it helps move this ball of civilization down the road for another day. I’m not about identity politics but most important of all, I’m against extremism in almost any form – left, right or center.

So this week, my friend Nick helped me with some historical research so we could present a long-term look at progressive or liberal thinking and point out some things wrong with it. As with so many things us human beings dream up, sometimes our best of intentions can lead to some of our most horrific blunders and even tragedies and I think it’s a good thing for any of us who think we are engaged in crusades to save the world to stop what we’re doing and maybe look around and make sure we know what we’re talking about. Yes, some of the more infamous people in history did just want to watch the world burn, but there were far more people whose hearts were in the right place, who had what they thought were honestly the best of intentions but whose beliefs and actions led them down roads to atrocity. And just because we have the benefit of knowing what they did and why they did it is no guarantee that we won’t do the exact same thing because we think that we’re so much brighter and smarter and wiser than our forefathers. So let’s take a ride in the Wayback Machine, dialing it back to 1707. Our journey begins with the union of England and Scotland in what was called the Treaty of Union and created what we still call Great Britain.

Not everyone was pleased with the union at the time, but in hindsight, one thing is certain: the 1700s were significantly more peaceful than the 1600s, which saw, among other major violent events, a civil war culminating in the beheading of King Charles I in 1649. That’s one way to enact political change, but maybe there are more reasonable roads. In Scotland, the 1700s and early 1800s were to be a period of rapid progress in technology, science, arts, and social thought, so later historians called this period the Scottish Enlightenment.

A major figure of the Scottish Enlightenment was Adam Smith, a professor at the University of Edinburgh. In his day, economics wasn’t yet recognized as a standalone discipline, so no one thought of him as an economist but instead he was a professor of moral philosophy. He was first made famous in 1759 with the publication of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, followed in that oh-so-famous year of 1776 with his most famous work, or infamous depending on how you look at it, entitled The Wealth of Nations. This was his magnum opus and is thought of today as the first modern work of economics, earning Smith the title “the father of economics.” Now what’s interesting is that the moral insights into human nature in these two books are very different, yet, in the end, not incompatible.

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith explicitly stated his belief that people are natural altruists. He wrote:

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.

Almost two decades later, in The Wealth of Nations, he put forward a somewhat different take:

Every individual endeavors to employ his capital so that its produce may be of the great...