The Fish and the Water
What Adam Smith named the Invisible Hand in the market, this project names Peace. Neither is visible from inside.
Image: Calm waters of Lake Michigan viewed from the Lake Michigan Overlook, Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, Michigan. Photograph by the National Park Service. Public domain (17 USC § 105; work of a National Park Service employee created in the course of official duties). Available via Wikimedia Commons.
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“How’s the water?”
— the parable of the fish
There is a parable — old, folk, more than one tradition claims it — that goes something like this.
Two young fish are swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, Morning, boys. How’s the water?
The two young fish swim on for a while. Eventually one of them looks over at the other and says, What the hell is water?
That is the parable. It is a simple parable and it does most of its work by not explaining itself.
What the fish do not ask is the medium they are in.
In 1776, in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith named a similar phenomenon in economics. He observed that the individual, “by pursuing his own interest, frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.” He called this the invisible hand.
It was, he said, a pattern that emerged from countless individual actions without any of the actors intending the pattern itself.
Smith is Chapter Nine of the volume this newsletter accompanies.
The Invisible Hand is not a conspiracy. It is not a design. It is not a person or a committee or a policy. It is a structural pattern that emerges from ordinary human behavior operating under certain conditions. The market participants do not see it. They see prices, contracts, transactions. The hand is not visible from inside the market.
This project takes Smith’s insight and applies it to peace.
Peace is the medium the fish do not see.
Peace is not the absence of war. Peace is the water. It is the working condition — the maintained set of structural arrangements — inside of which ordinary human life becomes possible. Children go to school. Farmers plant crops. Trade moves across borders. Marriages are performed. Books are written. Elections are held. Grandparents die at home surrounded by their families rather than in mass graves.
When peace is working, the people inside it do not see it. They see school, harvest, trade, weddings, books, elections, grandparents. They do not see the medium that made all of it possible.
They do not, most days, ask how’s the water?
The people who do ask the question are the people who have already begun to see it.
The line of witness this project tracks is the line of people who named the water — so the fish could begin to see it.
Smedley Butler in 1935 named the racket by naming the water it was extracted from. Frederick Douglass in 1852 named the water the Fourth of July did not name. John Newton in 1788 named the water the slave trade was defiling. Robert Burns in 1795 named the dignity of the man that the rank had obscured. Katharine Lee Bates in 1893 named the country beside the country’s flaws. Thurgood Marshall in 1954 named the constitutional water in the case that broke the seawall of Plessy. Dwight Eisenhower in 1961 named the apparatus he had built across the water it was displacing. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1967 named the war the Riverside Church congregation could no longer un-see.
Each of these witnesses did what the older fish in the parable did. They asked, in a hundred different registers, How’s the water?
The question is not innocent. The question is the beginning of the seeing.
You are now a fish.
The question is not whether the water is around you. It is. It has been. The medium of ordinary life — the maintained structural arrangements that allow you to read this on a phone or a laptop in a quiet room without artillery in the distance — is around you now.
The question is whether you have started to see it.
The moment the fish asks what the water is, is the moment the fish becomes something more than a fish. The moment the citizen asks what the peace is, is the moment the citizen becomes something more than a beneficiary of it. The moment enough citizens ask the question, is the moment the maintenance of the peace becomes a public act rather than a background condition.
Peace Racket, Volume I traces the line of witness from Adam Smith in 1759 forward — available in paperback, hardcover, and Kindle. Peace Racket, Volume II is being written now. The invisible hand of peace is visible only from the outside; the volume is written from the outside so the fish can begin to see the water. The next paragraph is the one you write.