Seventeen years before inventing modern economics with his “Wealth of Nations,” Adam Smith invented modern morality in his runaway 1759 best seller, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” In a famous passage, the 36-year-old Smith mused about the limits of compassion in ways that ring down the ages to today’s tragic tsunamis.

“Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake,” Smith wrote. “And let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connection with that part of the word, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity.

“He would, I imagine, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could be thus annihilated in a moment.

“And when this fine philosophy was over,” Smith continued, “he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquility, as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which would befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he were to lose his little finger tomorrow, he would not sleep tonight; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the more profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.”

Smith’s point – and he was not the heartless laissez-faire caricature that conservatives make him out to be – was that compassion as a force for human good was ultimately narrow and unreliable, because our emotional attention was narrow and unreliable.

The chief difference between the era of Smith’s China parable and today’s tsunami is communications technology. In 1759, an educated European might have read a few lines about China in a newspaper weeks later. Today, over 90 percent of humanity knows what befell Asia within hours.

While we love to bash the media for it shortcomings, the very fact that modern media creates this cliched “global village” makes it more likely that we’ll feel sympathy and compassion in the face of unearned suffering, and be moved to act. We can’t avert our eyes.

Or can we? Though our near-instant awareness of suffering is light years from Smith’s day, our attention – and our moral resolve – is still arbitrary and pinched. More than 150,000 people perish in tsunamis (so far) and the world’s wealthy governments together stand ready to offer a day’s worth of spending at the Pentagon to help.

Meanwhile, a million Rwandans die via genocide in the 1990s and the world does nothing. A tidal wave of manmade carnage proceeds in the Sudan as you read this and the world does nothing. (Iraqi war critics should at least be honest enough to note that we cannot add this sentence: “Countless innocents are tortured by Saddam Hussein each year and the world does nothing.”)

The philosopher Martha Nussbaum, in her important 2001 book “Upheavals Of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions,” turns Smith’s insight about the unreliability of individual compassion into a case for creating better public institutions. She essentially asks: Why should our collective response to suffering depend on the whim of what a few people holding cameras decide to point them at? Why should it be limited by what current leaders think they can risk explaining to the rest of us?

Far better, in Nussbaum’s phrase, to build into our public institutions a “properly educated compassion.” Then we could smooth out society’s moral responses to suffering as easily as public companies smooth out their earnings!

It may take us another century or two to get there. And it may be some unimagined successor to the United Nations that finally evolves in ways that help all of us honor our better angels.

But as the tsunamis remind us, the way communications technology enables us to continually widen our moral attention – from family, to city, to country and eventually to all humanity – at least gives us the possibility of doing better. Maybe that’s hope enough in a moment filled with incomprehensible reminders of what Smith aptly called “the vanity of all the labours of man.”

Matt Miller is a syndicated columnist and author. Reach him on the Web at www.mattmilleronline.com.