Phillip Harth, in his introduction to Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees, writes this on Pages 20and 21: “A second kind of vice, which receives scant attention in The Grumbling Hive, is referred to there as ‘pride and luxury.’ A few stanzas mention its prominence among the bees and the disastrous consequences of its disappearance, but it is overshadowed in the poem by the attention given to fraud and its antithesis, honesty. By the time he came to publish The Fable of the Bees, however, Mandeville had arrived at the realization that national greatness relies much less on crime than on other, more prevalent, vices, which, while exempt from the law, are condemned by religion. Fully half of the remarks in the Fable are concerned with this subject. Some, such as Remarks I, K, and M, argue the importance of avarice, prodigality, pride and similar sins in insuring that the demand for consumer goods will always equal or exceed the supply. Others, such as Remarks L, P, and Y, insist that luxury, although counted as a sin, is responsible for most of the consumption which creates full employment and increases national wealth.”
My response: I do not think Mandeville was pro-vice so much as he wanted people to be worldly, a bit materialistic, consumption-oriented and filled with worldly desires. In medieval, Christian terms these worldly wants were called sin or vices, and within moderate consumption levels, are what make people fulfilled, happy, virtuous and complete,
Mandeville could only use the moral concepts and words of his generation, but he seemed to anticipate that worldliness “vices” gave us public benefit, and I would argue also private benefits, because capitalism, worldliness and individualism within reason, make people virtuous, and this new set of ethical values, egoism, materialism and worldliness were horrors to the medieval mindset that Mandeville upended.
Mandeville was not pro-vice or immoral, so much as he was introducing modern Western ethics to the English world.
No comments:
Post a Comment