David Shemano wrote: > Hayek was big defender of the common law, meaning judge made law > decided on a case by basis, building on prior cases through > precedent, developing over generations, as opposed to code law > (e.g., the Napoleonic Code), meaning the legislative branch > creating statutory law intended to address in absract all > circumstances. Hayek would argue that the common law is > preferable, because law is created in a dispersed manner from > below (i.e., law is created based upon specific circumstance at > almost an invididualized level with ability to evolve over time), > as opposed in a centralized manner from above (i.e., law is > created based upon abstraction and then with little ability to > evolve because of codification). So Hayek would say the common > law is an example of spontaneous order because there is no > centrailized authority directing it (spontaneous), but it is > quite efficient (orderly).
This kind of reasoning is the real road to serfdom; serfdom not only vis-à-vis the spontaneous social order, but also vis-à-vis the natural order. To see its real import, Hayek's argument needs to be pushed to its further conclusions. It is more than a rationalization of the reversal of every human achievement in history. It is a rationalization of the reversal of the process of natural evolution on earth that led to the emergence of specifically human labor, human speech, the human mind, human consciousness. And it can be extended further (although Hayek or his defenders would not go there): it offers an argument, not only for the reversal of the direction of human history (ultimately determined by the expansion of the productive force of labor), but also of all natural evolution. The ideological strategy is to take the side of a spontaneous social structure whenever it is confronted by an attempt to introduce a conscious social order. In that logic, it has to take the side of sheer biological order against any sort of specifically social order; and the side of inert natural order against any form of life. After all, just like life evolved "organically" out of a lifeless nature, social life emerged out of animality, and the efforts of socialists, Marxists, etc. to introduce conscious forms of social organization is as "organic" a result of the status quo as its defense by its ideologists. Statutory or code law is as "organic" a product of history as common law. The issue is not which one is the legit child of history and which one its bastard product, but rather how the synthesis of these two approaches will proceed. I'm not an expert in the history of jurisprudence, but it seems to me that statutory law (and more coherent political systems) resulted from the need to unify and provide coherence to the contradictory mishmash generated by the causistic development of the law. In a sense -- and paradoxically -- Hayek's argument is *scientific* in the sense that it does anticipate the ultimate fate of human life. There is no doubt that humanity will at some point succumb to universal decay, because being a subset of the universe, humanity cannot escape its laws -- e.g. the law of entropy. Conscious human life is social order emerging out of natural chaos. Life in general is order emerging out of natural chaos. But that is only at the expense of an increase in the pace of overall entropy in the universe. That is the cost of life and self-reflecting life. And the impetus for communism, if it is to make any sense at all, is as a conscious, organized, self-aware extension of the drive inherent to human life to fit our environment to our historically-developed designs. To say it a bit differently, if the second law of thermodynamics had human consciousness (which is, in its face, a self contradictory assumption to make), or if it had a sort of a human spokesperson, that spokesperson would be Hayek. Since, ultimately, human history and livable conditions in the universe are doomed by this natural law, human life (and life in general) will be destroyed. So, since mindful living will succumb to mindless life, why think at all? If life is to end, why live at all? The real issue is whether we should assist this and turn human history in the conscious suicide of our species or, instead, consciously fight against it with all our powers. Hayek's is the ultimate *ideology*, because -- if you push his logic to the extreme -- it not only defends the *social* status quo, it views the natural status quo as being threatened by the emergence of every form of life. Because even the most archaic type of bacteria metabolizes natural disorder in order to produce biological order (cum accelerated entropy). So, it was to be expected that the universe would evolve life and then, within it, conscious life, and within it, a human capable of articulating a compelling ideology in favor of everything that is contrary to human life and life in general; an individual that would call for the reversal of bacterial life to inert thermodynamics. What I'm suggesting here is that Hayek's argument has -- inter alia -- ontological, epistemological, and political implications that are fundamentally opposite to what is specifically human (and even specifically biological), in contrast to the rest of nature. I'm also showing that it is fundamentally self contradictory, because it brandishes an abstract, rational, general argument against rationality, abstraction, and generality! It uses Aristotelian logic to show that Aristotelian logic is an aberration. The Greeks (e.g. Euclid) should have not derived conscious general geometric (abstract mathematical) theorems, thus generalizing intuitions that the Egyptians and Mesopotamians had painstakingly, but still unconsciously (i.e. mixed up with heavy traces of concretion), developed. Instead, every measurement problem, every spacial problem coming their way as a result of their need to construct houses, or temples, or what have you should have been kept empirical, tied to concretion and particularity (individuality, in fact); never raised to a general theoretical level. Every science is an aberration. A general science of medicine has no place given the irreducible individual differences among humans. Etc. Fragmentary, pre-rational, intuitive, casuistic "knowledge" is supposed to be superior to rational, generalized, abstract knowledge. Trotsky said that there's nothing more practical than a good theory. Hayek has it that there's nothing more practical than the lack of theory, period. I say more on Hayek here: http://juliohuato.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/round-2-on-the-comments/ In brief, the practical political implication of Hayek's argument, as reduced to its own absurdity, is the subsumption of human life to the existing social order and, ultimately, to the natural order. It is practically impossible, except in the form of anarchy, social dissolution, animality -- because it is inherent to the human condition not to relent to the environment given to us by nature or prior history, but instead to conform it to our own designs, which cannot be but in the form that the fruits of human consciousness take. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
