FOR members of the animal kingdom ‘making a living’ is an imperative. If they don’t they ‘make a dying’. A human has to make a living wage or a profit, the latter being true because we flatter ourselves if we think we are not members of that kingdom and that, therefore, we are above such imperatives. We are thrown into this dynamic situation merely by being alive and have no say in the matter. From here it’s a short step to Adam Smith’s view of economics; the self-interest of individuals, driven by the imperative to survive, creates markets where prices are naturally lowered by competition to the good of all. So far, so Darwinian. And of course ‘self-interest’ has nothing to do with selfishness which is a different and moral issue which only arises much further downstream of all this. The former is something we have no say in. Take an interest in yourself and your family or die. It’s a bit like putting your own oxygen mask on first in an airliner so that you are in a condition where you can help others.
All of the above inevitably creates societies where some businessmen and women are more ‘successful’ (in both Darwinian and financial terms) than others. Human societies being what they are – social – those businessmen will also be involved in political nexuses. Business and politics cannot not interpenetrate as humans can be many things at once. The result of this is that those of other economic persuasions than the Adam Smith ones will always level the accusations of selfishness and corruption against the conservative businessmen who might accept the Adam Smith analysis. And, human nature being what it is and free will being what it is, there will be a proportion of successful businessmen who can justifiably be impugned for those sins. You could even extend this to say that whatever the proportion of the whole number of businessmen are involved, it might be the case that a similar proportion of the transactions of most businessmen might be impugnable on this basis because the business world is tough and Darwinian. But this occurrence of sin is no higher than that of other sins in other spheres and is not due simply to the fact of such people being businessmen. There is nothing inherently wicked about being a businessman. It is merely evidence of general human frailty and susceptibility to temptation. There will be some truly reprehensible characters in the business world but the majority of businessmen will be generally good people out to make a living.
Donald Trump is a Republican businessman who, true to that caste, is unashamed of and even celebrates that métier and that milieu. I’d guess that in his sharp-elbowed and unforgiving world he has done some shady deals, but that they would not entirely define his character. They are more a testimony to the world within which he has chosen to operate. For those on the left, however, the mere fact of operating in that ‘capitalist’ (a word I choose not to use personally as it seems a prescription coined by Karl Marx precisely to demonise the operations of the world of normal trade) milieu as a player means that he can only be completely selfish and corrupt.
When Trump pulled off his extraordinary Gaza deal and gave hope to the whole region with the assistance of the leaders of several Muslim countries including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Indonesia, Jordan, Egypt and Turkey, there were voices on the left who presumed to have a window into his soul to such an extent that they could confidently pronounce that it was all down to venality and vanity: he wants to make money out of the deal and he wants to be lionised by the Nobel Peace committee for bringing it home and that’s enough to sum up and dismiss him. No room was left in his soul for a real desire to stop a long-perpetuated massacre.
I’d suggest that there certainly is room for that but that there might be something else in addition. Once the influence of religion died in the West its citizens were left with the problem of how to navigate the moral world. Many have solved this by setting up new ethical religions. They do this by choosing figures on the opposite political side from themselves and then building new demonologies around them. In these demonologies the normal complement of flaws that all humans have are magnified until they are turned into pure demons, a priori of any argument or of any action they might take. From these created moral triangulation points, whole moral landscapes are created. This means that, because the created demon is needed for purposes of navigation, no action of Trump’s can ever be allowed to testify to anything other than the irredeemable purity of his wickedness. If is allowed that any action of his is motivated by anything else, the whole moral shebang collapses. So we can be certain that whenever his opponents look into his soul they will always ascribe any action to the basest of motives.
So what is the good motive I detect, apart from the genuine desire to stop the killing? As I mentioned earlier conservatism and conservative economics have long been demonised to the extent that the creed has been all but delegitimised on moral rather than intellectual grounds. Just look at Theresa May cravenly apologising for the Conservatives being the ‘nasty party’. This demonisation of the right of the healthy political tension that has, until now, rescued us from civil war is what might be seen as risking plunging us into it. If you disable one side of the debate you remove the possibility of ‘jaw jaw’ and only ‘war war’ is left.
For some strange reason, in spite of his general isolationism, many on the left accuse Donald Trump of being a warmonger, something else that conservatives are supposed to be. What better way could there be to rehabilitate conservatism morally than by deservedly winning the Nobel Peace Prize? It may not be simply a question of vanity or that favourite word which the left always apply to him: narcissism. There may be more to his character than meets a superficial survey. Humans are always more complex than their caricatures. It may be that by receiving personal applause he is inadvertently achieving a great deal more: possibly the removal of conservatism from the demonologies. Or it may be that he knows what he is doing and we underestimate him.
