Adam Smith's contributions to Enlightenment environmental thought

Adam Smith & the Enlightenment

Adam Smith and the Enlightenment

The Industrial Revolution was like an explosion of economic activity that erupted worldwide as a result of enlightenment thinking and the coalescence of many societal trends. In his book The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith documented the revolutionary paradigm shift from agricultural feudalism to mercantilism to capitalism. The world shifted from an agricultural way of life, managed by nobles and aristocrats for the "glory of God" and benefit of the church, to an urban life that involved the production of goods and products for economic consumption by the masses. Smith observed and recorded what happened. "Smith saw the economic potential of industrial technology, the specialization of labor, the factory system, and the entrepreneur" (p. 91). Also, like Bacon was, Smith was a visionary.

Like Newton, Smith was a mechanistic reductionist. Everything was clocklike, working together as a machine that could be broken into parts and analyzed. In his book he attempted to analyze progress as "a law of nature" (p. 92). He embraced a rosy dream of consumerism in which everyone was happy because plentifully supplied with all the material things that were needed and wanted. In an industrialized world, the backwardness and rudeness of subsistence economies (as he saw them) would be overcome completely and "a workman, even the lowest and poorest order, if he is frugal and industrious, may enjoy a greater share of the necessaries and conveniences of life than it is possible for any savage to acquire" (p. 93). Smith's idea of the savage was typically English. Savages were people who didn't know any better than to live as they did because they hadn't been civilized by culture. "Poverty...was the cause of the savages' fallen estate, and thus wealth must be the guarantee that humankind will live in a civil fashion" (p. 93). This concept fueled capitalism and justified the pursuit of wealth as a valued activity in and of itself.

Adam Smith invented the idea of economic growth as an engine driving society and progress. He applied the tenets of physical science to economics. Economic growth was seen as a driving force -- "matter-in-motion" -- that would transform earth into Heaven and create a new and ideal world. His idea was that through the use of science and technology, nature -- the wilderness of waters, forests, land, plants, and animals -- could be exploited for profit and used to create something different, something better that would supply society's wants. This idea underlies the philosophy of capitalism to this day and is the basic idea environmentalists are fighting -- that nature and animals are worthless except as vehicles to promote human comfort and convenience. A seal, for example, is only valuable for its fur, which can be turned into a coat and sold for good money to someone who wants to wear it. Adam Smith would not have recognized a seal as a creature with a right to live a life that is natural to its species.

To Smith, the natural world from which human beings emerged was not only insignificant and worthless, it was positively odious. He saw nothing to save, foster, or conserve about it. He thought people who lived in subsistence cultures were "so miserably poor they are frequently reduced to the necessity sometimes of directly destroying, and sometimes of abandoning their infants, their old people, and those afflicted with lingering diseases, to perish with hunger, or to be devoured by wild beasts" (p. 93). Nature was a resource to be used to create wealth. Consumption was the ideal -- everybody able to buy whatever goods were needed and wanted. And civilized Europeans were the "ideal of humanity" (p. 96).

In America and other Western nations today, we have seen the world Smith envisioned come to pass with everything he pictured a reality. People from developing countries are amazed, for example, when they visit the U.S. And find that the poor generally have roofs over their heads, food on the table, and a car to drive. But the downside of the picture is that cement pavements are everywhere and business establishments have blotted out the landscape. Even the Great Lakes are polluted with an inky layer of toxic chemical gunk on the bottom. The air isn't fit to breathe in many places. Rain forests and wetlands are diminishing at an alarming rate. The glaciers are melting, and global warming, the result of all the industry, threatens to destroy life on beautiful earth.