STANDPOINT
God, Hayek and the Conceit of Reason
_JONATHAN NEUMANN_
(http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/writers/?showid=Jonathan Neumann)
January/February 2014
A quarter of a century ago, Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992), winner of the
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, published his final contribution to
his considerable corpus, an eloquent exposition of his enduring concerns.
But The Fatal Conceit (1988) sought not to recapitulate the intricacies of
his economic thought (despite its subtitle,"The Errors of Socialism"), or
to revisit his postulated and widely celebrated connection of economic
collectivism and political tyranny. Rather, he was now, four years from his
death, occupied in this short and forgotten volume with one of the most
fundamental questions of humankind: the basis and preservation of our
civilisation.
By civilisation, Hayek meant the "extended order of human cooperation",
also known ("misleadingly") as capitalism. This order, and, more
specifically, the traditional morality upon which it rested, Hayek claimed,
has been
enabled by something other than human instinct and other than reason. The
fatal conceit itself, he explained, is excessive faith in reason, based on an
erroneous and dangerous notion that we can construct what in fact we must
inherit or learn. This conceit is fatal because it results in the collapse
of society and the return to savage instinct. Rather, morality lies between
instinct and reason, and "learning how to behave is more the source than the
result of insight, reason, and understanding".
Unlike his economic and political philosophies, Hayek's moral philosophy
is less known, and yet it formed the culmination of his life's work. His
critique of reason is profound, but his own understanding of traditional
morality is found lacking, and he appears to have agreed.
Hayek sees the centralising impulse of contemporary Western political
economy as stemming from a "presumptive rationalism" which he calls
"scientism"
or "constructivism", and which expresses the "spirit of the age". This
presumption is the product of a "litany of errors", which he seeks to
disentangle and expose. Specifically, he cites four basic philosophical
concepts
which, during the past several hundred years, have formed the basis of this
way of thinking: rationalism, which denies the acceptability of beliefs
founded on anything but experience and reasoning; empiricism, which maintains
that all statements claiming to express knowledge are limited to those
depending for their justification on experience; positivism, which is defined
as
the view that all true knowledge is scientific, in the sense of describing
the coexistence and succession of observable phenomena; and
utilitarianism, which "takes the pleasure and pain of everyone affected by it
to be the
criterion of the action's rightness".
Hayek asserts that "in such definitions, one finds quite explicitly...the
declarations of faith of modern science and philosophy of science, and
their declarations of war against moral traditions", because "the leading
moral
traditions that have created and are creating our culture...cannot be
justified in such ways".
To clarify, Hayek induces from these definitions several related
presuppositions on the part of the critics of traditional morality: that it is
unreasonable to follow what one cannot justify scientifically or prove
observationally; that it is unreasonable to follow what one does not
understand;
that it is unreasonable to follow a particular course unless its purpose is
fully specified in advance; and that it is unreasonable to do anything unless
its effects are not only fully known in advance, but also fully observable
and — as far as utilitarianism is concerned — seen to be beneficial. When
morality is founded on reason, moreover, it follows that what is
unreasonable also becomes morally dubious.
The problems with these approaches, Hayek explains, are that they show no
awareness that there might be limitations to our knowledge or reason in
certain areas; they do not consider that part of science's task is to discover
those limits; and they show no curiosity about how the extended order
actually came into being, how it is maintained, and what might be the
consequences of undermining or destroying those traditions which did create
and do
maintain it.
The connection between constructivist rationalism (the construction of
morality from scratch) and socialist thought, Hayek argues, is that they both
flow from conceiving order as arrangement and control on the basis of
accumulation of all the facts. But, as Hayek earlier showed in his landmark
1945
essay, "The Use of Knowledge in Society", the extended order could not be
such an order, for accumulation of all the requisite facts is simply
impossible. Now he asserts that, similarly, the practices of traditional
morality
not only do not, but cannot, meet the requirements or criteria demanded by
scientism. Hence they are necessarily "unreasonable" and "unscientific".
Hayek insists, though, that this is not "news", for David Hume
(1711-76) observed centuries ago that "the rules of morality are not the
conclusions of our reason".
And this is not simply the case with traditional morals (including God,
sex, family, and — particularly of interest to Hayek — private property,
saving, exchange, honesty, truthfulness and contract), but "is also true of
any possible moral code, including any that socialists might ever be able to
come up with". Hence were we to pursue this perilous path — as "all
versions of scientism have advised" — we would soon "be back at the level of
the
savage who trusts only his instincts". No argument about morals, therefore,
can legitimately turn on the issue of scientific justification, because it
cannot be achieved, so nothing can be gained-but everything can be lost.
Having established the limits of reason in a construction of morality,
Hayek begins, however, to take a dubious turn. He asserts that "while our
moral traditions cannot be constructed, justified or demonstrated in the way
demanded, their processes of formation can be partially reconstructed, and in
doing so we can to some degree understand the needs that they serve". He
sees this as a historical or natural-historical investigation, resembling
what followers of Hume called "conjectural history", and not as an attempt to
construct, justify, or demonstrate the system itself.
Why would we want to engage in such "rational reconstruction?" Because
doing so enables us "to improve and revise our moral traditions by remedying
recognisable defects by piecemeal improvement based on immanent criticism,
that is, by analysing the compatibility and consistency of their parts, and
tinkering with the system accordingly".
On the face of it, this may appear uncontroversial: after all, all moral
systems, whether utilitarian, Revealed, or other, are tinkered in this way.
Indeed, tradition itself is largely the accumulation over the ages of the
sort of gradual "adaptations to the unknown" that Hayek is describing. On
such a reading, Hayek's enterprise is modest, and he is simply encouraging
intellectual humility in the encounter with traditional morality.
But there is a pivotal difference between traditional moral tinkering and
that which Hayek is suggesting: those traditional moral systems usually had
Revelatory foundations and an associated telos which made the improvements
philosophically coherent and intellectually rigorous. One wonders, then,
what Hayek understands to be the source of traditional morality, the means
by which morality can be tinkered with, and the end to which morality aims.
Put differently, what is it, according to Hayek, that justifies traditional
morality?
In trying to provide a "rational reconstruction" of morality, and thereby
understand its formation, Hayek recognises the dilemma, finding himself "in
the embarrassing position of wanting to claim that it must be
the...economists" who are most able to explain those moral traditions that
made the
growth of civilisation possible. It is embarrassing because these are the same
specialists who are "infected with constructivism". This recognition is
instructive for two reasons. First, because it is surely not coincidental that
those best placed to comment on the formation of morality (its source,
development and, based on its successes, purpose) are also those most inclined
to construct a new morality, a relation that calls into question Hayek's
insistence on the differentiation between construction and reconstruction.
Second, because Hayek betrays a tacit telos of morality as he understands
it. In speaking specifically of "those moral traditions that made the
growth of civilisation possible", he indicates why he considers traditional
morality to be important; it emerges that a moral system is evaluated by its
propensity to "nourish larger numbers" of people and enable its adherents to
"outstrip others whose morals were better suited to the achievement of
different aims".
Hayek anticipates this reaction, though, and notes that, "although this
morality is not 'justified' by the fact that it enables us to do these
things, and thereby to survive, it does enable us to survive, and there is
something perhaps to be said for that" (emphasis is his). In a sense, Hayek is
of
course correct: there is a great deal to be said for survival. But the
insight is also deeply tautological, and it sheds further light on his
affinity to Hume and reliance on "immanent criticism". In effect, the
assumption
underlying Hayek's approach is that we should aspire only to maintain and
improve our material condition, without much thought as to whether such a
goal is morally desirable. The system becomes its own justification, and the
only rationale that we can advance is that it has enabled us to survive.
Morality thus becomes the means by which we live together and prosper
materially, rather than vice versa.
Again, though, one might retort that Hayek's enterprise is more modest
than the foregoing has implied. All he is doing, perhaps, is inoffensively
presuming that suffering is generally bad; that alleviating suffering is
generally good; that largely sticking with what we know, along with occasional
marginal improvements, is the recommended course, for it has delivered the
greatest prosperity known to man; and that this agenda is threatened by
scientism and rationalism.
However, even this limited reading encounters problems of its own. Aside
from its exposure to the criticisms outlined above, one might additionally
observe that the greatest increases in Western prosperity have occurred
during the last couple of centuries, coinciding with some of the greatest
challenges to traditional morality. It is very possible that capitalism's
economic creative destruction might not be as independent of scientism's moral
creative destruction as Hayek might wish to imagine. With this possibility in
mind, a staunch moral guide is surely needed to navigate the
socio-economic upheavals of our day, and this modest interpretation of Hayek's
project,
though surely on the right lines, does not quite deliver it.
Thus, the merits of his critique of reason notwithstanding, Hayek's
approach toward traditional morality is lacking. Interestingly, Hayek,
troubled
by the inadequacies of his inquiry, appears to have agreed with this
assessment.
In his final reflections, Hayek concedes that his moral philosophy is
deficient. After all, is it truly satisfying to live as though man's, or at
least society's, moral purpose in this world is mainly to survive? In the
final chapter, entitled "Religion and the Guardians of Tradition", Hayek tries
to answer how practices that people dislike, whose effects they cannot have
anticipated, could have been passed down the generations. He notes that
"part of the answer" is the evolution of moral orders through group selection
(morality has survived because it has enabled its adherents to survive).
"But," he adds, "this cannot be the whole story." Yet, he asks, if the
beneficial effects of morality were not known in advance, whence did morality
originate? And how has morality endured despite the opposition of instinct
and, more recently, the assaults of reason? "Here we come to religion."
Like it or not, Hayek writes, "we owe the persistence of certain practices
and the civilisation that resulted from them, in part to support from
beliefs which are not true — or verifiable or testable — in the same sense as
are scientific statements". Like others, he is "not prepared to accept the
anthropomorphic conception of a personal divinity", yet "the premature loss
of what we regard as nonfactual beliefs would have deprived mankind of a
powerful support in the long development of the extended order that we now
enjoy." The loss of these beliefs now would still create "great
difficulties", hence "even an agnostic ought to concede that we owe our morals,
and...not only our civilisation but our very lives, to the acceptance of such
scientifically unacceptable factual claims."
These admissions, however, pose a further difficulty. Hayek appreciates
the role of the monotheistic religions (and those which endorse private
property) in sustaining our civilisation, and he recognises that, just as
today's specialists cannot construct a morality with knowledge of its effects,
so
these religions could not have been established by a conspiratorial elite
serving some noble lie or opiate to the masses. But he is unwilling to take
the faithful step and thereby understand these religions (and the moral
systems they profess) on their own terms. He seems to share Napoleon's
sentiment that "I do not see in religion the mystery of the Incarnation, so
much
as the mystery of the social order."
This hesitation leaves Hayek advising contemporary society to appreciate
the limits of its knowledge but calling upon man to follow laws of morality
largely based on religious ideas in which man need not believe. Why,
though, should man do so? To this, Hayek can only offer the familiar answer
that
traditional morality is the only way of which we know that civilisation can
endure. But the implication is that man should suppress instinct (and the
prospect of immediate pleasure) or disregard reason simply in order to
bequeath civilisation to the next generation. Hayek is aware of the
deficiencies of this uninspiring rationale and appears to remain dissatisfied.&
"I long hesitated whether to insert this personal note here," Hayek wrote,
referring to these remarks on religion. He decided to do so, he explained,
because hearing these arguments from a "professed agnostic" might
encourage religious people "to pursue those conclusions that we do share".
Hayek spent his life arguing for man's freedom. The Fatal Conceit was his
last contribution to that effort. The question, though, is how man should
then use that freedom. And that is the question Hayek was unable to answer
because he could not cross the faithful threshold. Nevertheless, he
recognised, in his final published words, that "on that question may rest the
survival of our civilisation".
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