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foist on our children, with whom we supposedly sympathize so much. There is nothing in
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
that resembles the improbably colored and far more improbably noncarnivorous tyrannosaurus on children's television. Singing along with 'Barney can be your friend, too / If you just make believe him,' leads, at best, to churnings of froth such as
Oceana
. Kim Jong Il is said to be an avid movie fan, and probably leads the imaginative fantasy life that goes with large collections of DVDs.
    The imagination that Smith describes is the strenuous imagination of an Einstein or a Newton, with all the discipline that this implies. 'Self-command is not only itself a great virtue, but from it all the other virtues seem to derive their principal lustre,' Smith writes. 17 And, 'In the common degree of the moral, there is no virtue. Virtue is excellence.' 18
    This hard, creative work that imagination does links the moral sympathy central to
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
withthe material cooperation central to
The Wealth of Nations
. The imagination also has to make a creative effort to divide labor and conduct trade. Sympathy and cooperation are the more-conscious and less-conscious sides of what allows civilization to exist. They are the 'principles in his nature' that man has, 'which interest him in the fortune of others'.
    It applies to this man. I'm more or less conscious of when I'm being good with the family at home on the weekend, and I'm more or less unconscious at the office on Monday morning.
    Smith saw the moral potential in both our interest in others and our self-interest. When we give somebody a bottle of whiskey, we know we've benefited somebody else. When the family gets to be too much for us over the weekend and we drink that bottle of whiskey ourselves, we've also benefited somebody else – the distiller, the bottler, the liquor store owner. Feeling disjointed and discordant on Monday, we don't realize this, unless we work at 'inventions of the imagination, to connect together the otherwise disjointed and discordant phenomena of nature'. The apparatus of unintended benefit was what Smith meant by the 'invisible hand', a concept he first put forth in
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
. 19
    If we don't do the difficult job that imaginative sympathy requires, we put ourselves into what Smith called 'the vilest and most abject of all states, a complete insensibility to honour and infamy, to vice and virtue'. 20 Villains are imaginative only in the public imagination. The corporate scandals of recent years may seem to be the highly inventive and original schemes of evil genius. But when the obscurities ofaccounting and finance are brushed aside, a prosaic hand in the till is revealed.
    Policemen, prosecutors, bartenders, parents, and anyone else who has seen wrong done in large amounts can testify to Hannah Arendt's characterization of Adolf Eichmann's behavior: 'banality of evil'. Banality is the main constituent in criminal thinking – among chiselers and mopes as well as upper-echelon Nazis.
    It's a mistake to read the
The Wealth of Nations
as a justification of amoral greed.
Wealth
was Adam Smith's further attempt to make life better. In
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
he wrote, 'To love our neighbor as we love ourselves is the great law of Christianity.' 21 But note the simile that Christ used and Smith cited.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
is about the neighbor.
The Wealth of Nations
is about the other half of the equation, ourselves.
    It is assumed, apparently at the highest level of divinity, that we should care about ourselves. And logically we need to. In
Moral Sentiments,
Smith insisted, paraphrasing Zeno, that each of us 'is first and principally recommended to his own care', 22 and 'endowed with the principle of self-love'. 23 A broke, naked, hungry, and self-loathing me is of no use to anyone in the neighborhood. In
Wealth,
Smith insisted that in order to take care of ourselves we must be