The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, an 18th century comic novel, read only by a few devoted aficionados of the bizarre, might seem an unlikely source of economic insight.
But Sterne, an Anglo-Irish Anglican priest based in a deep rural Yorkshire parish, was a creative genius who challenged all orthodoxy at the gallop, and for those who are undeterred by thickets of barely penetrable prolixity, he offers in equal measure wit and wisdom relevant to our contemporary disputes. (Quotations from the novel follow the original orthography)
Tristram Shandy was published in 1759; Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations in 1776. The relevance of this is about to unfold.
Here follows an excerpt from the nook. This is the context: Walter Shandy, amateur philosopher and polemicist, has just been informed of the existence of a miraculous invention, the “wind chariot”, which can fly groups of passengers long distances in quick time merely by harnessing the free energy of the wind (the invention is of course fictional). Walter, his brother Toby, and a visitor, Dr Slop (present to help with the delivery of Mrs Shandy’s baby) are momentarily in agreement regarding the wonderful benefits humankind will enjoy as a result of the invention of the flying chariot.
A flying chariot
Dr Slop says:
“… it would be excellent husbandry to make use of the winds, which cost nothing, and which eat nothing, rather than horses, which (the devil take ‘em) both cost and eat a great deal.”
But Walter, having bethought himself further of the matter, disagrees as follows:
“… it is precisely because they cost nothing and because they eat nothing that the scheme is bad – it is the consumption of our products, as well as the manufacture of them, which gives bread to the hungry, circulates trade, − brings in money, and supports the value of our lands …”
Is this not a breathtaking insight, coming as it does some 270 years ago, and 17 years before Adam Smith’s great work is published?
No, it does not quite formulate the mechanism of the “hidden hand”, but it echoes the famous phrase Smith was later to formulate − “It is not from the benevolence of the … baker, that we expect our [bread], but from his regard to his own interest,” (mildly modified by me) − and it embodies the insight that the value of assets and the source of all wealth is trade, and trade cannot take place without invention, production and consumption, all undertaken at a cost. Not only is wealth created, but the interchange of human relations involved in trade creates communities, societies and – ultimately − nations.
Fools’ gold
This exchange of views puts me in mind of the chimerical lure of free stuff (in Walter’s case the wind), a fool’s gold, which many erroneously regard as a miraculous means of wealth creation – free stuff like oil, gas and minerals, provided freely by a blind providence, the random geographical provision of which in bountiful quantities has so impoverished and corrupted countries such as Angola and Congo, and which has produced the sterile economies of the oil-rich Middle East; free stuff also like the endless supply of impossibly cheap products that can be bought from China (for instance), thereby saving importers the onerous task of making the products for themselves.
If you look beyond the tariff wars to the vision which propels them, it is Trump’s unlikely sense of common purpose with Sterne’s 18th century fictional character, Walter Shandy, his vision that the business of making and trading is not only the true source of wealth, but the grounds also of the human potential for nobility and the means of cultural enrichment – the American ‘greatness’ for which Trump is nostalgic.
It is the Walter Shandy view of things that catapulted commodity-poor countries such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and Malaysia to economic and cultural pre-eminence.
Depersonalised trade
Walter could not foresee the digital transformation of trade that would ensue centuries after his death, but his insight accords with my view that − by obviating human-to-human contact − online transacting diminishes the richness of life and our potential for personal growth.
If trade is to be treated purely as a monetary transaction, we lose a dimension wherein our cultural life can be enriched. Online transacting is creating a depersonalised dystopia characterised by man-machine relationships; I am sure Daily Friend readers will have noticed that web-based suppliers of goods and services refuse to supply telephone contact details, thus making it impossible to speak to a human being.
I refuse to book a holiday or leisure break at my computer keyboard. I want to talk to a someone because doing so is part of the fun of living, and through it I might even make a friend. It is de rigeur for snobs and Greenies to derogate shopping malls, but give me a vibrantly peopled shopping mall any day over a disembodied relationship with a web page.
Walter, a product of his time, combines a delightfully ruthless high-handedness with his clairvoyant demand-side economics in saying:
“… if I was a prince I would generously recompense the scientific head which brought forth such contrivances – yet I would as peremptorily suppress the use of them.”
The succession of ideas
I could end my brief homily there, but on the assumption that the interests of Daily Friend readers extend beyond matters economic, political and the tactics of survival, and furthermore in recognition that Tristram Shandy is a much-overlooked work of genius, I would like to offer a few other startlingly prophetic insights arising from the comic exchange between the Shandy brothers and Dr Slop. Walter and Toby are forever locked in disputes arising from their manifold philosophical expositions – although Toby frustrates Walter’s teeming brain by way of his guileless common sense. We find them puzzling over the concept of time and its varying rates of effluxion:
“‘It is two hours and ten minutes …’ cried Walter, looking at his watch, ‘since Dr Slop … arrived – and I know not how it happens, brother Toby – but to my imagination it seems almost an age.’”
Walter assays his own answer to his question in the form of:
“…a metaphysical dissertation upon the subject of duration and its simple modes, in order to shew uncle Toby, by what mechanism and mensurations in the brain it came to pass, that the rapid succession of ideas, and the eternal scampering of the discourse from one thing to another, since Dr Slop had come into the room, Had lengthened out so short a period, to so inconceivable an extent”.
Toby unseats Walter from his elevated philosophical position by responding:
“Tis owing entirely to the succession of our ideas.”
Einstein and space and time
How Toby is so ingenuously able to dispose of so complex a question is distressing to Walter, precisely because, relates Sterne:
“… uncle Toby, who … generally took everything as it happened, and who, of all men in the world, troubled his brain the least with abstruse thinking − the ideas of time and space, − or how we came by those ideas − and of what stuff they were made – or whether they were born with us – or we picked them up afterwards when we went along … and a thousand other enquiries and disputes about INFINITY, PRESCIENCE, LIBERTY, NECESSITY and so forth …”
On the face of it, this might be written off as no more than humorous high-level badinage, but what a wealth of intellectual suggestiveness it camouflages. Our experience of time, uncle Toby avers, arises entirely from “the succession of ideas”.
In terms of this view of things, time is not a phenomenon measured by clocks, but a product of human consciousness. This makes Toby my invaluable ally in the case I have raised against Einstein, who makes the error, I am hubristic enough to suggest, of treating time as a property of the universe, when it is instead a malleable human experience, unquestionably different for a prisoner awaiting execution and a motorist stuck in the traffic.
Periodicity is of course a property of the universe, but periodicity is not time, and I am grateful to Toby for his innocent endorsement of my maverick views.
Again, I wonder if I am the only reader to be stopped dead in his (or her) tracks by Toby’s comfortable manner of prefiguring a phrase − “time and space” − that was only to come into currency in the post-Einsteinian 20th century world? And when Toby wonders if our most insightful ideas are born with us, I can’t help a mental flash forward to the concept of “tacit knowledge” – knowledge that we don’t know we know − and which is the basis of creativity and our ability to arrive at solutions to complex problems, a hypothesis outlined by the great Hungarian-born polymath, Michael Polanyi.
A sexual innuendo
You may be inclined to think all of this is just cock and bull, and if you used that very same metaphorical turn of phrase in responding to my unlikely panegyric, you would have unintentionally echoed Sterne’s own disclaimer, for the last words of this great and delightful book, which I am now reading for the fourth time, are: “‘Lord! Said my mother, what is all this story about?’ ‘A COCK and BULL’, said Yorick – ‘and one of the best of its kind I have heard.’”
[Image: Incorporating an image of the frontispiece and title page of Vol. III of an early edition. https://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1523/the-sentimentality-of-sternes-tristram-shandy-a-mind-and-body-story]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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