Mandeville--Vice Is Virtue

 

It is patent to the reader by now that I am very interested in the historical, philosophical writings and theories of fellow egoists. I was reading Phillip’s Harth’s introduction to Bernard Mandeville’s book; I will quote Harth below from Pages 16 and 17, but it occurred to me that I can make the argument, with some success, that Mandeville’s more crudely and implicitly than Ayn Rand advocates that selfishness is virtue and selflessness is vice.

 

Let me quote Harth: “The most noticeable characteristic of this beehive or nation, is its addiction to vice, especially to ‘Fraud, Luxury, and Pride’.”

 

My response: Mandeville satirically lampoons the virtuous pretensions of his fellow Englishmen, but he is not doing this to highlight their hypocrisy for the sake of bolstering actual virtue. Instead, Mandeville does not deny that human sin and folly are rife and rampant, but they produce goodness not evil, at least indirectly, from his point of view.

 

Let us continue with the quote: “Up to a point this sounds like any Juvenalian satire that rails against the vices of the age to the applause of all good citizens. But there are several important differences which indicate, from the outset of his career, Mandeville’s refusal to adopt conventional satiric terms. In the first place, instead of condemning the bees for their vices, he goes to great lengths to show that the happiness and prosperity of the hive depend directly on these very faults. ‘Thus every Part was full of Vice, Yet, the whole Mass a Paradise,’ he declares in a line which was the forerunner of his more famous phrase, ‘Private Vices, Publick Benefits’. The explanation of this paradox is that full employment, which is the basis of national prosperity, and a brisk trade, which is necessary for the continuance, are the immediate consequence of immorality.”

 

My response: In part the activities of these citizens are vicious or sinful in accordance with traditional values. In part some of the secular, worldly activities based on worldly, secular human appetites and desires, these demands create much employment and brisk economic activity.

 

Mandeville must refer to many actually or potentially beneficial (beneficial privately and for the whole society), egoistic, secular activities by citizens fulfilling their own desires as sinful and worldly, to make his argument understandable to his late medieval audience. Altruism, self-denial, and selflessness are Christian ideals always lauded, and little lived up to. Mandeville argues that traditional virtues would lead to a poor, rural, humble nation.

 

If he was allowed to argue that enlightened self-interest, egoism, reasonable seeking after prosperity, money and material goods, worldly comfort, happiness and enjoyment, luxury are virtuous because these material comforts set the stage for a highly self-esteem rational egoist to to=ake things to the next level and maverize. Now, neither he or Ayn Rand ever laid out such an argument, I submit that their explicit (Rand) or implicit assertion that self-interest and worldly success lead to personal virtue, then the stage is set for maverized individualists to arrive on the scene deep into the 21^st century..

 

Mandeville is a product of his time so worldly egoistic virtues must be lumped together with actual vices, so Mandeville cannot directly, explicitly declare that selfishness is virtue, and that altruism is vice, so he asserts it indirectly and implicitly with his famous phrase that private vices lead to public benefits. I recommend that my clarification of the assumptions behind this famous phrase, laid out up above, solves this paradox.

 

Harth shrewdly points out that Mandevile’s utilization of satire to point out the vice, pretensions, airs, and hypocrisy of the English is not the traditional Juvenalian satire intended to help its people reform themselves as good Christians, altruists and selfless, pious churchgoers.

 

Mandeville utilizes satire to draw attention to how personal “vice” benefits all. That reaction to existent vice, real or putative, is what infuriated and aroused Christians and traditionalists.

 

Hardy continues: “Furthermore, the denouement of Mandeville’s fable seems at first sight to betray the expectations we bring a moral fable, in which the vicious are punished for their crimes. Under ordinary circumstances we might expect that the wicked bees, despite temporary prosperity, would ultimately come to grief as a result of their numerous sins. But while misfortune does become their lot, this reversal comes about when the knaves are suddenly turned honest. With the ensuing absence of crimes that create employment and of vices that foster trade, the professions decay, commerce dwindles, thousands of unemployed emigrate and the hive’s prosperity comes to an end.

 

The members of this wicked community do, therefore, become the victims of divine chastisement, but for a totally unexpected reason. These creatures, at the height of their prosperity, have been accustomed to deplore with apparent aversion the vices of the hive from which all of them derive some benefit. ‘Good Gods, had we but Honesty!’ is the everlasting complaint of this wicked flourishing, yet grumbling hive . . .”

 

My response: Note the paradox occurring once more: the vicious are punished for their crimes in the next world but they are also punished in this world, not by God, but trapped by their own altruistic, anti-worldly, feudal economics—they become poor, unimportant and scattered.

 

Mandeville prefers a strong British nationalism where a great nation arises based on mercantilism, proto-industrialism, trade, and consumer consumption that grows and make the nation rich, powerful, urban, modern and prosperous. Mandeville is prophetic in encouraging the English to forsake their medieval, agrarian, feudal, altruistic Christian past for an early modern, urban, seafaring, and the potential growth of capitalism and industrialism and large secular society.

 

Mandeville notes that the vicious and sinners are punished in this world, not by God, for their worldly transgressions, but by being virtuous, honesty and unworldly, they then are no longer a great, growing, rich, powerful hive. Here is another Mandevillan paradox at work.