Author: Thomas Fleming

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Feature / Fleming / From Under The Rubble

3 Feb, 2018

Welcome to the World of Stephen King

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Stephen King, on learning of a train crash in which Republican members of Congress were shaken up and the driver of a garbage truck was killed, tweeted: “A trainload of Republicans on their way to a pricey retreat hit a garbage truck,” King noted Thursday. “My friend Russ calls that karma.” King was immediately attacked and he later apologized for his indiscretion. If we wish to be kind, we might recall that King was a suicidal alcoholic who drank mouthwash, when he could not get real booze, and ink when he could not get mouthwash. If we probed deeper, we...

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Feature / Fleming

15 Jan, 2018

A PS on Trump’s Dirty Mouth

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When I posted my comments about Trump on Facebook, some “friends” seemed to think that I was endorsing or defending his language.  I added this clarification: I am far from accepting, much less endorsing, such speech. As an observer of political reality, though, I refuse to indulge in idle speculation about a world that no longer exists. I find very little in public life to be even minimally acceptable, from the poor English, incomprehensible reasoning, and indeceny in broadcasting to the filth of popular music to the pornography of movies and television. I do not go out to movies, even...

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Feature / Fleming

15 Jan, 2018

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Legacy of the Doctored King

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This morning my wife, who has a bad habit of following the news,  asked me about the “legacy” of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “I know he plagiarized his dissertation and just about every major speech or statement he made, advised soldiers to betray their country during the Vietnam War, maintained significant contacts with Communist agents, and betrayed his wife incessantly and with teenage girls.  But, to be fair, a lot of great men have had feet of clay.  What are his positive accomplishments that would be worth celebrating?” It’s not only a fair question but a valuable one.  Before...

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Fleming / On the House

12 Jan, 2018

The Haiti We Shall Always Have With Us

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This is from a web piece posted in 2004 When will there be peace and stability in Iraq? When will the United States be able to sign off on an Iraqi democracy and bring the troops home?” Many Americans have been asking these question over the past six months. The obvious answer to both questions is: “Never.” The foreign-policy leaders of the Bush administration know that Iraq, like Afghanistan, has no cultural or historical basis for a democracy. They also know that we are increasingly hated by all parties, and that the rising resistance to U.S. occupation will invite more...

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Fleming / From Under The Rubble

12 Jan, 2018

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

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Question:  Is everyone angry with Trump for using the vulgar language we hear everyday on the street or for telling the plain truth about Haiti.  I have even heard American blacks refer contemptuously to “Hessians”–and they were not talking about German mercenaries in the American Revolution.   I suppose there must be some place with more hapless, dependent, filthy, and violent people, but none with a history like Haiti’s.  It took a witchdoctor like Papa Doc Duvalier to impose any order, and these days all they seem to be doing is to lie around waiting for another hurricane to give...

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Autodidact / Feature / Fleming

11 Jan, 2018

Adam Smith: The briefest of conclusions

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There is much that is useful in Hutcheson and Hume, who correct many errors of the Enlightenment, and there would be little point to denying the significance of Adam Smith as the first person who comprehensively demonstrated the superiority of the free market over all the deluded wise men who think they can regulate and plan an economic system:  Although we are free to reject the selfish individualism of Mandeville and Smith, their analysis gives us true insight into the way social and economic systems actually work. It is quite another thing to say that it is our human destiny...

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Autodidact / Fleming

4 Jan, 2018

The New Index: Adam Smith, Part 4

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Individualism Smith derived his much of his approach to moral questions from his teacher Hutcheson, but he also broke with his mentor on a central point.  Hutcheson had grounded the moral sense exclusively on benevolence, which promoted the greatest happiness of the greatest number (He appears to have been the first to formulate the utilitarian calculus), and he regarded self-love or, as we should say now, concern for self interest or self esteem as contaminating any virtuous motive. Smith, by contrast, thought this left too little room for the power of self-love: “Regard to our own private happiness and interest,...

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Autodidact / Fleming

2 Jan, 2018

The New Index: Adam Smith, Part 3–Impartiality (On the House: Free to Subscribers)

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(Much of what is in these paragraphs has been lifted from The Morality of Everyday Life.) Although he is held up as an exemplar of the Scottish Enlightenment that is supposedly in conflict with the French Enlightenment, Smith was profoundly influenced, not only by the economic ideas of the Physiocrats, but also by the Philosophes’  attack on tradition, religion, and conventional morality.  While not an immoralist, so far as I know, Smith’s contribution to moral philosophy would not have offended his French colleagues. His Theory of Moral Sentiments begins with the common-sense observation that morality is not invented by isolated...

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Fleming / Free Content

31 Dec, 2017

The New Index: Adam Smith, Part 2

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Adam Smith Adam Smith, perhaps the most influential political thinker produced by Britain in modern times, was born in 1722, a posthumous child of a customs collector from Aberdeenshire.  Smith’s interests in his early years were largely literary and classical, and his family had destined him for the Anglican clergy, though at some point he gave up both the career and religion of a Christian minister. He studied moral philosophy under Francis Hutcheson at Glasgow University and came strongly under the spell of Hutcheson’s anti-rationalist common sense philosophy that emphasized benevolence. He proceeded from Glasgow to Balliol College, Oxford, where...

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Fleming / Free Content

30 Dec, 2017

The New Index: Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments

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This series, in its unrevised form, was posted in Summer  2005.  I thought it was lost forever, but Allen Wilson has been kind enough to send me dozens of old pieces that have disappeared from the old website. Part One:  Capitalism 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence, was marked also by the publication of Adam Smith’s path-breaking book on economics, The Wealth of Nations. This is no accident, according to a familiar myth put out by American classical liberals who call themselves conservatives, because America is a land of individualists who came to a New World seeking freedom...