I use Adam Smith only as an example _ in this case of the idea that free enterprise is the best economic system. People like to encapsulate both virtues and evils in the form of heroes or villains. A person becomes a quick lucid symbol of an entire ideology. And, as a symbol, is stripped to the bare essentials. Scholars later point out that all heroes have warts, all ideas are complex. Jefferson owned slaves. Smith allowed for government interference. Then the lesser thinkers among us seize on bits and pieces, quotes or thoughts, to buttress our own, usually logically fragile and factually thin ideologies.
Complex writings of any type _ philosophical, religious, scientific, historic _ are complex. They necessarily consider contradictions, often without easy resolution. But all that is embedded in a larger context frequently ignored by strident acolytes.
My point really is not exactly about Adam Smith per se, but about a tendency surrounding heroes. Educators have taken to claiming that merely learning something is equivalent to knowing something. That is not true Reading about Adam Smith’s thinking is like reading about Henry the 8th feasting. It will put pictures in your mind, but you will still be hungry and need to eat something real.
Similarly unless you think deeply about what you learn by reading, you will be just as ignorant as you were before. And isolating little snippets to quote does not make you smarter.
HuntingtonHarborThoughts 