In Acadia National Park in Maine, parking is difficult. If you want to drive to the trailhead for your hike, it’s best to get there by 7:30 am.
For those who prefer to sleep in, a comprehensive system of propane-powered buses sponsored by L. L. Bean will help you make good use of your day.
Yet there are those who insist on parking aggressively outside the designated spots, making it very difficult for other cars to exit the lot and, perversely, putting their own car at risk of being sideswiped as drivers maneuver around them.
This seems to my wife and me to be a new phenomenon. Whether this is a new boorish trend or not, it serves as a miniature that prompts us to consider a larger issue.
The point is not that bad parking is among the great moral crises of the age. The point is that freedom depends on thousands of small acts of self-limitation that no law can efficiently command. A society that cannot count on those small restraints will eventually demand larger restraints from the state.
Government can be small and coercion rare when people govern themselves.
Propriety Before Policy
Those who split the world into binaries—voluntary exchange on one side, state coercion on the other—miss a lot. They miss the enormous third thing Adam Smith described: the unenforced realm of “propriety,” the decency, manners, and mutual forbearances that no contract specifies and no statute compels.
If we want less state, we must have more propriety. A friend of liberty has a larger stake in the moral condition of society than the statist does.
When something goes wrong, the statist always has a fallback: another rule to write, another sign to post, another penalty to impose. The friend of liberty has a different burden. He must be able to show that ordinary people can restrain themselves before the state has to do it for them. Smith observed in The Theory of Moral Sentiments,
To feel much for others, and little for ourselves, that to restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent, affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature; and can alone produce among mankind that harmony of sentiments and passions in which consists their whole grace and propriety.
Self-government rests on people yielding their excessively selfish passions to what Smith called the “impartial spectator” inside them. Shrink the state, and you don’t get a vacuum; you get whatever moral order the impartial spectator is capable of sustaining.
That is why I worry when people cheer for the collapse of the state. If the habits of self-command are weak, the disappearance of formal restraint will not produce ordered liberty. It will expose how much disorder the state had been containing. Blocking a car today is not the same as seizing a business tomorrow, but it belongs to the same moral continuum: the refusal to treat another person’s claim as real.
What Adam Smith called “self-command” is the price of admission to a free society. The alternative to governing yourself is being governed. Smith wrote, “Self-command is not only itself a great virtue, but from it all the other virtues seem to derive their principal lustre.”
Saying you have no self-command is a lie: “To act with the most perfect propriety, requires no more than that common and ordinary degree of sensibility or self-command which the most worthless of mankind are possessed of.”
If we have no self-command, it’s because we have chosen not to practice it: “Exercise and practice have been wanting; and without these no habit can ever be tolerably established.”
Every ungoverned impulse manufactures demand for a rule, a sign, a camera, a cop. The bad parker is unwittingly lobbying for the Leviathan by making an empirical case against freedom, demonstrating that free people can't be trusted with a parking lot.
We may rise at dawn and take the good spot. What we may not do is “justle,” as Smith called it—to take by friction from others what we failed to earn by waking early. The bus is the fair-play remedy. It lets the latecomer bear his own lateness instead of shifting that cost onto everyone else exiting the lot. Propriety requires either getting out of bed early or taking the bus.
“The Man Within the Breast”
Smith believed we can rise above our conditioned programming and our passions. The part of our mind that reacts according to the Larry David principle in Curb Your Enthusiasm—“me first, that’s the rule”—is interested only in changing the external world. We can do better than Larry.
Smith’s answer is to point us to the impartial spectator, the inner voice that evaluates our conduct without bias. Ordinary goodwill is not strong enough to restrain our most powerful selfish impulses. What checks self-love is a deeper authority within us: reason, moral principle, and conscience—the impartial judge in the breast who weighs our actions and demands that we answer for them.
Our impartial spectator brings to our awareness “the real littleness of ourselves” and “the deformity of doing the smallest injury to another in order to obtain the greatest benefit to ourselves.” Smith’s moral education is to teach us to lower the volume of our own claims until they can be weighed alongside the claims of others.
Smith is saying that self-love distorts our sense of proportion: a minor inconvenience to ourselves can feel more urgent than a grave matter affecting a stranger. Left to our untaught feelings, we naturally give our own small interests more emotional weight than the much greater interests of people outside our circle.
The parker blocking the exit has refused the one thing the impartial spectator demands—to “humble the arrogance of his self-love, and bring it down to something which other men can go along with.” He treats his inconvenience as heavier than the friction borne by every car in the lot. He has not grasped that “he is but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it.”
Smith instructs us to take the viewpoint of our impartial spectator:
Before we can make any proper comparison of those opposite interests, we must change our position. We must view them, neither from our own place nor yet from his, neither with our own eyes nor yet with his, but from the place and with the eyes of a third person, who has no particular connection with either, and who judges with impartiality between us.
Can a person turn to his impartial spectator despite his own distress? Smith understood that our first and strongest attention goes to ourselves. Our private hurt presses so forcefully on the mind that it takes real effort to step back and see the matter as an impartial spectator would see it. Our feelings keep dragging us back into our own grievance. In that condition, we have not yet taken the viewpoint of the “man within the breast.” We have not fully identified with the inner judge who can look at our conduct from the outside and measure it fairly.
“Untaught and undisciplined feelings” is what we all experience, and it is only our conceit that believes our reason and willpower will overcome the gravitational pull of the darker side of our mind. Therefore, we need more than good intentions. We need deliberate moral formation: reflection, practice, example, correction, and the habits that train us to listen to the impartial spectator before our untaught feelings take over.
Does not the future of self-government depend on our willingness to overcome that gravity? If liberty requires self-command, then the next question is: how do we cultivate the inner spectator to be strong enough to restrain us when no one else will? In the second part of this essay, I will consider what Smith recommended.
