Spontaneous Order and Existential Risks, and More General Considerations About the Relevance of 20th Century Thinkers
An ambitious biography of Friedrich Hayek by Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger has been recently published. It is actually the first volume, covering Hayek’s life until his departure to Chicago in 1950. A second volume covering the rest of his life is planned. As is often the case with biographical accounts that cover the life of intellectuals during this period in Central Europe, I’m finding this one fascinating for what it shows about the incredible intellectual richness of this region of Europe during the interwar, despite troubled political times. I have also taken the opportunity to completely read for the first time the three volumes of Hayek’s Law, Legislation, and Liberty. This is probably Hayek’s major work outside his purely economic contributions, at least the most ambitious. As it is well-known, it is there that Hayek develops his criticism of the concept of “social justice” and more generally his whole account of law as abstract rules of individual conduct that have spontaneously evolved from a cultural evolutionary process.
While reading this work (I’m currently in the middle of the third volume), it struck me that while still largely valid and interesting – even though that does not mean that I agree with everything Hayek is saying, the content sometimes sounds outdated in a twofold sense. First, obviously, it echoes debates that were occurring at the time the book has been written (the 1960s and 1970s) but which has not as relevant today. I’m thinking here notably of the overall concern with “socialism”, at least under the form of a general planned economic system. Second, some of the ideas Hayek develops are – again, obviously – oblivious to contemporary concerns and, because of that, may appear to the contemporary reader as misguided. This should not be a surprise I guess. This is probably the fate of any scholarly work, at least those of this scale and scope. Something similar for instance can be said of John Rawls’s political philosophy – see my post on what it means to be a post-Rawlsian.
Now, just to illustrate the second aspect that makes some of Hayek’s ideas outdated, consider the following quote about the nature of the rules of conduct constitutive of the spontaneous order (my emphasis):[1]
“Most rules of conduct are not derived by an intellectual process from the knowledge of the facts of the environment, but constitute the only adaptation of man to these facts which we have achieved, a ‘knowledge’ of them which are not aware and which does not appear in our conceptual thought, but which manifests itself in the rules which we obey in our actions. Neither the groups who first practiced these rules, nor those who imitated them, need ever have known why their conduct was more successful than that of others, or helped the group to persist.
It must be stressed that the importance we attach to the observation of particular rules does not simply reflect the importance of particular ends which may depend on their observance; the importance attached to rules is rather a compound result of two distinct which we shall rarely be able to assess separately: the importance of particular effects and the frequency of their occurrence. Just as in biological evolution it may matter less for the preservation of the species if no provision is made to avoid certain lethal but rare effects than if a frequently occurring kind of event doing only slight damage to the individual is avoided, so the rules of conduct that have emerged from the process of social evolution may often be adequate to prevent frequent causes of minor disturbances of the social order but not rare causes of its total disruption.”
These paragraphs appear in a section where Hayek is mounting a critique against the “anthropomorphism” and “constructivism” of utilitarianism, i.e., the tendency of the utilitarian to interpret the product of social evolution (the rules of personal conduct) as the result of an intentional design by “society” conceived as a person. This criticism figures as a part of Hayek’s general thesis that rules of personal conduct are the nonintentional product of human action. A very important corollary of this thesis is that – as the first paragraph of the above quote suggests – no one can have a full understanding of the overall justification of these rules, especially why they have emerged and successfully evolved in a community. Rules are just there and we just have to follow them because it is thanks to them that the social order is maintained.
I have emphasized the last part of the quote because it makes a striking assertion in light of recent debates about longtermism and existential risks. Hayek presents his claim that rules of personal conduct are (unintentionally) designed to cope with frequent but minor disturbances but not rare risks of total disruption as an empirical one, based on a biological analogy. At the time when Hayek was writing these lines, concerns with existential risks were far less pressing. But for the contemporary reader, this claim – if we grant that it is true – may sound as a normative argument to reject the “Great Society” that Hayek defends. If rules of personal conduct and the social order, in general, have evolved only to cope with relatively frequent but minor risks, then this is a good reason to endorse a form of constructivism to try, as best as we can, to mitigate less probable but also far more serious threats.
Of course, Hayek’s answer is just that this kind of constructivist endeavor is doomed to fail and will bring nothing but totalitarianism. This might be partially true. We should not underestimate the fact that existential threats like climate change are threats to humanity, but also threats to liberal democracies. When what is at stake is the survival of humanity, it is fairly easy to argue that mitigating an existential threat justifies any form of coercion. As I have argued in other posts, this also singles out the political blind spot of the longtermism movement.
On the other hand, Hayek’s thesis builds on a probably exaggerated debunking of human reason. The idea that the market and more generally the social order depend on the distribution of knowledge among the members of the society such that no one can act while knowing all the relevant parameters is one of the most important that has been developed in philosophy and social sciences. But it does not imply the more debatable claim that all forms of constructivist attempts are doomed to fail. This was not Hayek’s claim by the way, as he was also prone to recognize the role of “organizations” as constitutive parts of the spontaneous order. Now, the question is how the attractive properties of this spontaneous order can be preserved while allowing for the required forms of constructivist interventions aiming at revising the rules of personal conduct, and planning ahead of the realization of existential risks. On this, Hayek’s work is not of great help.[2]
[1] F.A. Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty. Vol 2: The Mirage of Social Justice (Chicago University Press, 1976), pp. 21-22.
[2] But maybe this can be done within a Hayekian framework. A great source of inspiration here could be the work of the late Gerald Gaus, especially his last book, The Open Society and Its Complexities. See my review here.