Mandeville--To Punish Their Hypocrisy

 

Bernard Mandeville seems conflicted: on one hand he seems to flirt with an egoistic ethics, phrasing that private vices produce public benefits. Then he complains that selfish people reap the worldly benefits of their greed and vanity, but insist upon being hypocrites, paying lip service of virtue or selflessness.

 

Mandeville seems to be irritated with people: it is almost as if Mandeville, the normative egoist and the psychological egoist, expected and wanted  people to just be unapologetic, and open, about their greed and selfishness as their real motivations, to save time and eliminate game-playing. Mandeville is not easy to decipher.

 

Here is a quote from Phillip Harth, who wrote the introduction to The Fable of the Bees by Bernard Mandeville; the quote is from Pages 19 and 20: “And it is to punish their hypocrisy that Jove, with Indignation moved, At last in Anger swore, he’d rid The bawling Hive of Fraud and did.

 

Their fate is to have their insincere petition granted and to be forced to accept as a blessing the honest poverty which is their secret aversion, ‘Then leave Complaints,’ advises the ‘Moral’ to the poem. Fools only strive To make a Great an honest Hive.”

 

Mandeville is warning the English that they cannot have it both ways: they cannot be a traditionally feudal, agrarian, scattered and poor people, or indulge their traditional vices, bit is is worth it because they are benefited by their greed vanity and worldly aims. I argue that the impoverished Christians ethical values which dominated and pervaded the thinking of his generation kept him from easily expressing a enthusiastic embracing of a thorough-going egoism that promotes self-interest but that motivation is good, and that self-denial leads to want, poverty and crime.

 

He is very either/or in his commanding them to choose: virtue and poverty which is of no value the public, or vice and riches, which enrich and empower the luxury-loving public

Mandeville seems to praise vices, fraud, theft, vanity, and hypocrisy because it is good for business, and what is good for business is good for the nation. The sinners enjoy their English prosperity and power, but then piously claim to want to return to immaterialism, plain-living and selfless dedication to others rooted in self-discipline. Jove punishes the ungrateful, pious hypocrites by granting them honesty piety in a small, rural, poor, backwards and medieval rendition of England.

 

I believe Mandeville is twisted into ethical knots by a lack of moral concepts and terms to make sense of people. If he were a rational egoist, he would accept that people are selfless and communal most of the time, but that such an existence is typical but is vice.

 

With the theory of rational egoism his book’s intent would become much more understandable and clear to the modern reader. We need and are entitled to wealth, material goods, and where we live on earth.

 

Let us continue: “As Mandeville was to explain later, the satire of The Grumbling Hives was written to expose the Unreasonableness and Folly of those, that desirous of being an opulent and flourishing People, and wonderfully greedy after all the Benefits they can receive as such, are always murmuring and explaining against the Vices, and Inconveniences, that from the beginning of the World, to this present Day, have been inseparable from all Kingdoms and States that ever were fam’d  for Strength, Riches and Politeness at the same time.”

 

My response: Mandeville wants to draw attention to the inconsistency in human thinking and behavior: they want the benefits of expressing their ‘vices’. He wants them to pursue their worldly actions to become prosperous and secularly fulfilled, without apology or regret. They can always retreat to their former medieval status of hunger, rural living, poverty and want, wasting their  time and lives being traditionally, altruistically honest and virtuous.