[This is part of a series of posts on Friedrich A. Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty. Here's the full list.]

If the future is unpredictable, and the present is too complex for one person to understand, planning a society from scratch is impossible. The laws of society must be discovered by trial and error, not written like a computer program. Some things are possible, other things are not. History doesn't tell us everything that is possible, but it's the only reliable guide we have.

This means that political change must respect history, must respect what's known to work. Brand new ideas should be introduced gradually, because we don't know what they'll lead to. Only when we already know from the experience of other societies that we're moving in the right direction is it okay to make big leaps. History speaks in favor of radical change and new ideas, but not in favor of both at once.

This is how I would paraphrase what Hayek calls the British tradition of liberalism, a cautious and evolutionary approach to political change. British concepts of freedom and democracy evolved gradually over time, building a system of civil rights one step at a time. Even the American revolution, I would add, was a product of this evolution. Civil rights and other liberal ideas had been experimented with in Britain and the American colonies for two hundred years before they were written into the American constitution. The constitution contained many new radical ideas as well, but much of the success of their revolution, as opposed to the French one, came from their solid foundation of old radical ideas. Ideas that had been tested, and were known to work.

What Hayek calls the French liberal tradition, rooted in the revolution, is by contrast a careless approach based on exaggerated faith in human reason. Reason is a good thing, of course, but there's a difference between applying reason to a difficult problem and letting confidence in your reason fool you into believing that the problem is simple. Reason and over-confidence walk hand in hand. In science, we have the scientific method to compensate for this, but there is no such method for politics, so over-confidence has remained there, an eternal temptation not only for socialists, but for modern technocrats and planners. We see it clearly in the assumption that fixing problems is just a matter of political will, and in the joy with which politicians present their new reforms. Society is thought to be comprehensible and designable.

But as discussed earlier, society is a massive complex of distributed knowledge, much of it beyond our conscious understanding. These structures have evolved by a gradual and spontaneous process of adaptation by individuals. The rational top-down approach is thus misguided.

While the rationalist tradition assumes that man was originally endowed with both the intellectual and the moral attributes that enabled him to fashion civilization deliberately, the evolutionists made it clear that civilization was the accumulated hard-earned result of trial and error; that it was the sum of experience, in part handed from generation to generation as explicit knowledge, but to a larger extent embodied in tools and institutions which had proved themselves superior - institutions whose significance we might discover by analysis but which will also serve men's ends without men's understanding of them.

By evolution, Hayek is not referring to social darwinism, an uneducated biological excuse not to care about poor people, but to the evolution of the ideas and knowledge that are built into society's structure. We have no justification for saying that people who suffer from the status quo are morally inferior. The point is rather that an evolved structure has value in itself, simply because it works.

Hayek sees a paralell here to the Christian idea of the sinfulness of man vs the humanistic faith in the potential of man:

Even such a celebrated figment as the "economic man" was not an original part of the British evolutionary tradition. It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that, in the view of those British philosophers, man was by nature lazy and indolent, improvident and wasteful, and that it was only by the force of circumstances that he could be made to behave economically or would learn carefully to adjust his means to his ends.

We don't have to embrace original sin or extreme cynicism to appreciate that a working political system can't assume that people are rational and benevolent. Some are, others are not, and just as the weakness of utopian ideologies like communism or objectivism is that they hope to rewrite human nature, the strength of pragmatic liberalism is that it works with what we already have. A crowd can be smarter than an individual not because it consists of exceptional individuals, but because the crowd cooperates in a way that utilizes their combined intelligence.

This reliance on self-adaptation beyond our control and understanding walks hand in hand with respect for traditions, a willingness to accept that a custom may be useful even if we don't see why:

The scientist, when asked to accept a generalization in his field, is of course entitled to ask for the evidence on which it is based. Many of the beliefs which in the past expressed the accumulated experience of the race have been disproved in this manner. This does not mean, however, that we can reach the stage where we can dispense with all beliefs for which such scientific evidence is lacking. Experience comes to man in many more forms than are commonly recognized by the professional experimenter or the seeker after explicit knowledge.

Where do you draw the line between healthy and excessive respect for tradition? Hayek has no answer for this, and neither do I. Personal preference is probably decisive anyway: Social conservatives will hear in this an argument for Christian family values, and social liberals like myself will not. We can at least agree that traditions should be respected and not abandoned without good reason, even if we disagree on what those good reasons are.

But the beauty of Hayek's argument is that we don't have to agree on which traditions are valuable, and which are outdated, for this, too, can be subject to trial and error. Conservatives can go one way, and liberals another. The results from their experimentation - the failure or success of competing lifestyles - will in turn provide feedback for society as a whole, and be encoded into new traditions. A free society is self-correcting, it is forever trying new things and learning from them. For everyone to settle on one way of life is dangerous:

It may well be that a nation may destroy itself by following the teaching of what it regards as its best men, perhaps saintly figures unquestionably guided by the most unselfish ideals. There would be little danger of this in a society whose members were still free to choose their way of practical life, because in such a society such tendencies would be self-corrective: only the groups guided by "impractical" ideals would decline, and others, less moral by current standards, would take their place. But this will happen only in a free society in which such ideals are not enforced on all. Where all are made to serve the same ideals and where dissenters are not allowed to follow different ones, the rules can be proved inexpedient only by the decline of the whole nation guided by them.

So Hayek's argument for respect for tradition is paradoxically an argument for freedom from tradition. In the giant experiment of human history, there is no worse mistake than investing all our faith in one narrow ideal of behavior. We should respect traditions, but also diversify our portfolio.

Respect for traditions is then not about ancestor worship, but about faith in self-grown and ever-changing institutions, created through the daily interactions of individuals, interactions a free society encourages:

Those who believe that all useful institutions are deliberate contrivances and who cannot conceive of anything serving human purpose that has not been consciously designed are almost of necessity enemies of freedom. For them, freedom means chaos. To the empiricist evolutionary tradition, on the other hand, the value of freedom consists mainly in the opportunity it provides for the growth of the undesigned, and the beneficial functioning of a free society rests largely on the existence of such freely grown institutions. There probably never has existed a genuine belief in freedom, and there has certainly been no successful attempt to operate a free society, without a genuine reverence for grown institutions, for customs and habits.

A cautious embrace of chaos. That may be as good a definition of the liberal attitude as any.

(Update: Sophistpundit has more.)

Which is why historical revisionism is so profoundly dangerous.

http://www.strauss.za.com/phl/ph_sg_libhis1998.html

In 1911, there was an epidemic of bubonic plague in Manchuria. This was large enough to worry all the usual governments and international organisations - there were fears of a new Black Death - and so much effort was put into containment.

Now, it was soon discovered that the carriers of the fleas which in turn carried the Pasteurella pestis bacillus were marmots, large burrowing rodents who were hunted for their skins. It was also discovered that the nomadic tribesmen who had hunted marmots for centuries were largely unaffected. Mostly affected were the Chinese hunters who had just poured into Manchuria following the collapse of the Manchu dynasty and the lifting of all controls on movement into the region.

The reason for this difference was that the native hunters followed certain customary rules that tended to minimise the risk of infection. They never trapped marmots, but only shot them. If an animal moved sluggishly, it was left alone. if an entire colony showed signs of infection, the hunters would at once pack their tents and move on.

Only in 1894 had the causes of bubonic plague been identified. Before then, its means of transmission had been an absolute mystery. Yet here was a nation of illiterate nomads not only doing as the newest research might have advised them, but doing it by custom since time immemorial. Asked why they acted so, they gave the most bizarre mythological justifications that said nothing about the avoidance of infection. There was no talk of some divinely inspired ancestor whose teachings had avoided the anger of the gods, or whatever. All the evidence pointed to a long history of slight and unconscious adjustments to environment. As with a purely natural selection, there had been small revisions of habits. Those contributing to greater well-being had been copied and passed on to later generations as ritual.

Ignorant of epidemiology, the Chinese hunters were rational enough to sneer at these rituals. Even if at second hand, they enjoyed the fruits of Western science and technology; and the Manchurian natives lacked the philosophical framework to justify customs in general for which they had no specific justifications. The Chinese went about their business of catching their marmots in the most cost-effective manner. They died in their thousands, and sent the bacillus down the new railway lines towards the rest of humanity. It was only because the causes of plague were now understood that the bacillus did not sweep the world again as it repeatedly had in the past.(46)

We cannot know all the reasons that cultural practices work.

Bjorn, an excellent interpretation of Hayek at his most difficult.

I largely share Hayek's vision. We can either appeal to absolute moral and political principles, or we can appeal to our common traditions. In a democracy, where absolutes (whether Christian or environmentalist) come in conflict, the only arbitration possible is provided by our forefathers, who confronted and resolved problems similar to our own. In political or moral disputes, reason can describe the problem within the environment; the course of action to be followed will come out of the habits and customs that have molded our behavior.

Still, I have trouble finding the line in Hayek's thought that divides what is from what ought to be. American traditions include a strong belief in the equality of men, and a toleration of slavery first, and later of racial discrimination. To what principle can we appeal, when traditions go to war with one another?

You suggest that the very conflicts generated by individual differences in moral perspective will fuel moral progress: trial and error. In my optimistic moments, I agree. So long as the system is free, trial and error works to advantage. If power settles the question, though, we leave Hayek behind and enter a Hobbesian universe, in which might always makes right.

This entry inspired an entry of my own on Hayek, Popper, and a rational theory of tradition.

If you're interested, you can view it here:
http://sophistpundit.blogspot.com/2005/03/hayek-reactionary-or-evolutionary.html

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