Welcome to Jonathan's Tremendously Wonderful Blog

I used to have a blog. It went by the whimsical title "Rayguns are for Hobos and Communists." I haven't posted there in months. Perhaps I ran out of things to say. So, I've decided to start a new blog, with the more down-to-Earth title "Jonathan's Tremendously Wonderful Blog." It is here that I shall wax upon whatever intrigues (more often than not read "amuses") me at the moment. Statements from students or conversations overheard while doing my Hebrew homework at the local divinity college might be frequent sources of said amusement.

Take this tremendously wonderful statement I recently heard uttered by one of my students: "The problem I have with Adam Smith's invisible hand is that no one has ever seen it." Now, the invisible hand is a metaphor and it goes without saying that one cannot actually see metaphors, and come to think one cannot actually see the invisible either. Oh, undergraduates, how you fill my days with mirth and joy.

Of course, Adam Smith's invisible hand is a craptastic concept. Oh, sure, it works as descriptions of the global market economy go, but when it comes to moral philosophy it sucks buttock. I use the term "moral philosophy" intentionally, 'cause back in the day (i.e. 1776) what we now call economy was a branch of moral philosophy. Under the regime of the invisible, so says Smith, private vice becomes public virtue. It's all well and good that people are greedy and avaricious; it is what leads them to spend money on luxury goods, and that helps drive the world market. Sloth leads them to invent ways to produce more with less work, and this too drives the world market (don't forget that Smith was writing at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution).

The problem, of course, is that sin has gone out of fashion. Our public policies do not reckon seriously with the fact that not all behaviours are equally good, either for the individual or, more crucially, for the group. Oh, sure, we still recognize this on the big ticket items, like murder. However, in our zeal to become more inclusive we have perhaps given insufficient thought to what we were including. Should we, for instance, be inclusive of the attitude which says that my own self-gratification is a greater good than the basic dietary needs of people living overseas, or even in our own cities? Two hundred years in and we still face such crippling problems as world hunger, so I am wondering when, exactly, private vice will pay up to public virtue.

If we take a long hard look, we might see that what is invisible is not the giant hand of the global market but rather our own sinfulness. That we can see, if we only have eyes with which to see.