Accounting for taste in our professions

Adam Smith’s guide to career satisfaction

I am currently re-reading one of my all-time favorite books, Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. It’s a shame that the book is written in eighteenth-century English and bears such a impenetrable title, because while it can be a challenge for twenty-first century readers, it is one of the most insightful books on any subject I’ve ever read—and it’s subject just happens to be one of the most important of all: how we live well with others. I already have so many notes from this re-read that I’m thinking about starting a series of posts just on this book. But for now, I want to share some thoughts that this book inspired about career satisfaction.

Smith’s work is most famous for introducing the concept of the “impartial spectator.” Let’s imagine a hypothetical situation where you find a wallet with cash inside lying on the sidewalk. You have two options: take the cash and keep moving, or return it as is to the owner. Now imagine that you see someone watching you from across the street. Under the eyes of that observer, you would probably feel ashamed to just take the money, and you would probably want to, earn their respect by returning it.

Smith’s impartial spectator works in the same way, except that instead of speculating about the judgment of an actual observer, we imagine how such a figure would judge us. In fact, such a figure has to be imaginary in order for it be impartial. That person across the street: they might like us or hate us, or they might like or hate the owner of the wallet. An actual human would approach the situation with with preset biases that would affect their judgment. True objectivity is only possible in our dreams.

And we want our spectator to be impartial because what we really want—or should want—is not praise itself but to deserve praise. As Smith famously wrote, “Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love.” Depending on the spectator’s biases, winning their respect might be so easy as to be meaningless. If that sidewalk observer was your mom, and you took the cash from the wallet, she’d no doubt come up some excuse for your behavior and find a reason to consider you praiseworthy anyways. She’s your mom! And as great as your mom is, winning her praise is probably not the greatest accomplishment on your resume. But winning the respect of a neutral observer, someone who does not know you from Adam—that is meaningful. That is worth aspiring for.

This does not, however, mean that praise is meaningless. Praise is can motivating, often more so than the imaginary judgment of an observer who doesn’t even exist. No matter how good we strive to be, we will struggle to be virtuous without some positive reinforcement from actual spectators: “Very few men can be satisfied with their own private consciousness that they have attained those qualities, or performed those actions, which they admire and think praiseworthy in other people,” Smith points out,  “unless it is, at the same time, generally acknowledged that they possess the one, or have performed the other; or, in other words, unless they have actually obtained that praise which they think due both to the one and to the other.“ If, when we return the wallet, the owner were to barely mumble “thanks” and refuse to acknowledge our effort, we would probably take a little less proud in our good deed, and we would probably be a little less likely to be so honest the next time.

But praise can be a double-edged sword, for not all those who deserve praise receive it, and others are honored beyond their just deserts. If we are praised, how can we be sure that we are not in the latter camp? Or, even worse, what if we are overlooked for works that we know—we believe—we hope—are praiseworthy? Praise can be a fickle guide, especially when it is the only guide we have. “The agreement or disagreement both of the sentiments and judgments of other people with our own, is, in all cases, it must be observed, of more or less importance to us, exactly in proportion as we ourselves are more or less uncertain about the propriety of our own sentiments, about the accuracy of our own judgments.” To clarify: the less confident in what the impartial spectator would say, the more we give heed to the “sentiments and judgements” of actual people around us, unreliable though their approval may be.

No where is this principle more true than in our chosen professions. While earning power is most people’s top concern in their career, they still want more than just a pay check for their life’s work: they want to be excellent in their work, and they want their excellence to be appreciated. But, as Smith understands, the role of praise in different careers ranges widely. “There are,” Smith writes, “some very noble and beautiful arts, in which the degree of excellence can be determined only by a certain nicety of taste, of which the decisions, however, appear always, in some measure, uncertain. There are others in which the success admits, either of clear demonstration, or very satisfactory proof.” That is, some professional standards are obvious to everyone: we know an excellent mechanic when the engine roars back to life. But other pursuits have no such obvious markers; beauty in those fields is only in the eye of the beholders.

Consequently, Smith continues, in these less objective pursuits, “anxiety about the public opinion is always much greater.” It is a cruel irony: the harder it is for people to agree on what counts as high achievement, the more desperate we become for actual recognition. A salesperson will care far less about the praise of their peers than they will about their commission checks, while a writer will be acutely sensitive to every slight, snub, or critique. The fewer objective standards there are, there more we cling to subjective ones.

Maybe I’m so struck by Smith’s point because it explains my own profession so well. For there are few fields that find it so difficult to measure excellence as college teaching. Grades are virtually meaningless as markers of knowledge transmission, course evaluations are often determined after the first couple of weeks, and it is basically impossible to compare the teaching effectiveness of, say, a first-year writing instructor with that of a graduate-level engineering professor. Even scholarship, academia’s coin of the realm, is deviously hard to compare. This is especially true of literary studies, where “impact” and “relevance” are fickle standards always shifting with the idiosyncratic interests of scholars, who migrate like grazing cattle from unexplored field to the next.

Consequently, college professors are often incredibly thin-skinned not only about criticism of their own teaching but also about the praise of their peers. Every time I hear a student share how much they love one of my colleagues—which is, let’s be clear, a wonderful thing, students should have great professors in every single one of their courses!—I find myself privately reacting, with Bambi-eyed self-pity, “You mean more than me?” Of course they don’t! A compliment of one does not entail an insult to another! But the thought comes unbidden all the same.

That such compliments could completely put me at ease. I have been fortunate to receive my fair share of student appreciation, but I always have to hold that at arm’s length. Smith’s insight suggests that without a clear impartial spectator, not only will I become overly sensitive to criticism, but that I will also become too complacent with praise. After all, if the course evaluations are good, the instinct is to just run it back: why fix something that’s not broken?

Fortunately, Smith’s philosophy charts a path towards a better way. For one, having recognized how my line of work can distort my internal compass of excellence, I can steer my mind towards healthier forms of self-evaluation. True satisfaction in teaching and other such fields requires an even greater determination to resist the siren song of praise (or the paralyzing alarm of critique) and develop a meaningful marker of progress. I might compare myself not to peers but to role models who inspired me to imagine what excellent teaching could look like. I can reflect on the professors who impacted me the most and ask, “How would they teach my class?” If I feel like I could earn their respect, I am much more at ease about student evaluations and peer assessments, be they negative or positive.

Plus, I can remind ourselves that, as the saying goes, there is no accounting for taste. In professions defined more by taste than achievement, excellence will, inevitably, please some while leaving others cold. If writers and teachers are more sensitive because they worry that their critics might be right, it would do them good to remember that, at some times and for some people, of course their critics are right.  No writing and no teaching can reach everyone all of the time. When I choose an audience, I am excluding even as I include; this is a hard reality that teaches me to let go of the dream of pleasing everyone.

Of course, disregarding your audience or resisting praise entirely is neither possible nor desirable. And it can be self-defeating to obsess over whether we are too dependent on attention. The love of praise and of being praiseworthy are twin emotions, conjoined in our hearts, that are impossible to fully disentangle: “The man who desires to do, or who actually does, a praiseworthy action, may likewise desire the praise which is due to it, and sometimes, perhaps, more than is due to it. The two principles are in this case blended together.” Could we even tell the difference between them? “How far his conduct may have been influenced by the one, and how far by the other, may frequently be unknown even to himself.“ Fretting too much about our motives is too precious a way to live life.

But when we find ourselves paralyzed by criticism, or fretting about recognition, we should take solace in remembering that what feels like a lack of self-confidence is really the natural reaction to working in a field without objective measures of success.

That recognition might not be a substitute for confidence itself, but it can provide enough relief from the burden of status anxiety to allow us to pursue more lasting, meaningful forms of excellence.