Put the invisible hand to your heart

When I first read "1984", the 1949 novel by English author George Orwell that popularized the expression "the Big Brother is watching you", I was not only shocked by the level of surveillance that the government exerted on its citizens, but first and foremost I was haunted by the incessant work of the Ministry of Propaganda printing over and over again history books and old newspapers to "update" their telling of past events in line with the official version. This is nothing more than an exaggerated example of the famous adage "History is written by the victors", often attributed to Winston Churchill but with a much longer trajectory.

In real life it is very rare to see history books destroyed and replaced with "corrected" versions, but it is true that the version of the winners (those who happen to control the narrative) can survive uncontested for decades or centuries before the dissemination of existing information and new discoveries end up doing justice. This was indeed the intent of Fidel Castro's 1953 speech "History will absolve me", where he posited that, once all facts were known and its consequences weighed out, later generations would find his actions fully justified. The situation in Cuba is still harrowing by many measures, but we never know what the future will bring and, paraphrasing the 1992 song by Swedish pop group Roxette, never is a long time.

Photo: Michael Taggart

One particularly pervasive way of re-writing history is a phenomenon called "invisibilization", of which there are numerous examples. The recent Me Too movement has stirred away once more the fact that many female scientists, artists and entrepreneurs throughout history has been just as apt in their activities as their male counterparts but very few of them have found any resonance in the history books, to the point that one might be tempted to think that science, art and business were entirely driven by men. The same happens with non-whites and non-Western people of relevance, which usually lose their white, Western counterparts. The Pythagorean theorem is known as the Gougu theorem in China and is probably older than its Greek counterpart. The Gauss-Ostrogradsky theorem was attributed only to the German mathematician for many years before the key contributions of the Russian were admitted. Still today, the discovery of the double helix in the DNA is widely attributed to Watson and Crick (who jointly won the Nobel Prize for the discovery), with almost no mention of Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray crystallography methods were essential to the discovery.

But the reason why I wanted to write today about the different versions of history (or at least different levels of attention) is due to an article that Karen, my never sufficiently praised source of inspiration, forwarded a few days ago where it was pointed out the substantial disparity in the historical relevance of the two major works of Scottish economist Adam Smith: while almost everyone knows and cites "The Wealth of the Nations" extolling the advantages for the free-market capitalism, very few have payed any serious attention to his "Theory of Moral Sentiments", which is actually where he introduced the concept of an invisible hand that drives the decisions of humans in a direction that ultimately benefits the society. It is particularly striking that he starts this 1759 treaty with a prologue admitting that some actions cannot be explained by self interest alone.

For more than 250 years now the leaders of our Western societies have defended the tenets Smith's magnum opus while absolutely disregarded important aspects of his earlier work, and all that even if there is already more than sufficient proof that, left completely unrestrained, once certain individual reach a certain level of power their self-interest almost unavoidably leads to situations of monopolistic nature where the society is, to all effects, at the disposal of the individual and defenseless against them. Fortunately, already back them Smith acknowledge that we all (or most of us) can feel rewarded by the well-being of the others even if we obtain no further benefit than the pleasure of seeing such happiness. I do not believe that we have changed substantially in the intervening time, and if we put our (invisible) hand to our hearts we will have to admit that letting self-interest driving our lives is neither the most successful nor the most fulfilling strategy in the long term. Perhaps one of these days we will see a change in the paradigm. Have a nice weekend.