Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right....
Following the publication of an edited version of this article by Andrew Neil in The Spectator, I was inspired to read F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, which as well as being breath-takingly prescient in its discussion of the seemingly inevitable Gramscian direction taken by British society in the 60 years since its publication, and generally thoroughly incontrovertible in just about every assertion it makes or argument it proffers, has crystallised an argument that has been germinating at the back of my mind for the last couple of years, and especially since I read in the same periodical a few months earlier an attack on Darwinism and Darwinists by Paul Johnson.
Neil's article dissects Hayek's notions of constructivist rationalism and evolutionary rationalism, the former wherein it is held that "all social institutions are, or ought to be, the product of deliberate design", the latter wherein it is held that "there exist orderly structures which are the product of the actions of many men but are not the result of human design". Needless to say, and while both have wider ramifications, in terms of socio-economics the former boils down to statist/fascist collectivism, the latter to free-market individualism.
So in crude terms the Left buys the constructivist ethos, from Descartes via Marx and Keynes; the Right buys the evolutionary ethos, from Smith and Locke via Hayek to Friedman and Rand. The Left believes in central planning, in the benign, incorruptible magnificence of the state, in the state as enabler and provider; the Right believes that "for all its apparent duplication, unfairness, inequalities and instability, the market economy leads to wealthier, freer and fairier societies than all the great plans of constructivism". (Perhaps that is being excessively kind to Ayn Rand, for whom selfishness was always a philosophical, Objectivist end in itself and not merely a function of the logical axiom that no man can fully understand the entire system and so is better off looking after his own part of it.)
So far, so obvious. "Wow, Novus," I hear you gasp. "Do you really mean to tell us that the Right is into free markets and the Left likes to control stuff?" Like, duh. The very obvitude of these remarks serves only to underscore the paradox I've been mulling over, as personified by the arch-conservative Paul Johnson. Once described, ironically if my 11-year-old understanding was up to the job, as a journalist of "shining human qualities" by Stephen Fry, Johnson represents the closest thing we have to that American cliché, the Christian conservative.
Hayek wrote, in the appendices to his book The Constitution of Liberty, an essay entitled Why I Am Not A Conservative, in which he described himself as a traditional (ie British) liberal, an Old Whig as it were. Nonetheless, it is in modern Britain most likely to be Conservatives (or at least conservatives) who subscribe to his economic theories (or libertarians like me, a state not so far removed from Hayek's own trad. liberalism). We can therefore assume that of Paul Johnson, and indeed it is the case. The Left, of course, is routinely left aghast at the beliefs of a man like Johnson: the concept of divinity is anathema to them.
The paradox, of course, is in the dichotomy between the economic and theological views held by both the Left and the Right. How can a Leftist believe on the one hand that society functions best when guided by the benign, omniscient hand of the state, yet on the other hand believe, according to Johnson, that "everything in nature is random, pointless, proceeding from nothing ... and that there is no more moral significance in a living creature ... than in a pinch of dust"? Conversely, how can a man like Johnson believe in the random, amoral machinations of the market yet reject the same ideas in the natural world in favour of creationism? For surely there is nothing dreamt of in our philosophy so wholly constructivist as the idea of a creator, and there is nothing that so closely resembles the free market as the idea of natural selection?
Neil's article dissects Hayek's notions of constructivist rationalism and evolutionary rationalism, the former wherein it is held that "all social institutions are, or ought to be, the product of deliberate design", the latter wherein it is held that "there exist orderly structures which are the product of the actions of many men but are not the result of human design". Needless to say, and while both have wider ramifications, in terms of socio-economics the former boils down to statist/fascist collectivism, the latter to free-market individualism.
So in crude terms the Left buys the constructivist ethos, from Descartes via Marx and Keynes; the Right buys the evolutionary ethos, from Smith and Locke via Hayek to Friedman and Rand. The Left believes in central planning, in the benign, incorruptible magnificence of the state, in the state as enabler and provider; the Right believes that "for all its apparent duplication, unfairness, inequalities and instability, the market economy leads to wealthier, freer and fairier societies than all the great plans of constructivism". (Perhaps that is being excessively kind to Ayn Rand, for whom selfishness was always a philosophical, Objectivist end in itself and not merely a function of the logical axiom that no man can fully understand the entire system and so is better off looking after his own part of it.)
So far, so obvious. "Wow, Novus," I hear you gasp. "Do you really mean to tell us that the Right is into free markets and the Left likes to control stuff?" Like, duh. The very obvitude of these remarks serves only to underscore the paradox I've been mulling over, as personified by the arch-conservative Paul Johnson. Once described, ironically if my 11-year-old understanding was up to the job, as a journalist of "shining human qualities" by Stephen Fry, Johnson represents the closest thing we have to that American cliché, the Christian conservative.
Hayek wrote, in the appendices to his book The Constitution of Liberty, an essay entitled Why I Am Not A Conservative, in which he described himself as a traditional (ie British) liberal, an Old Whig as it were. Nonetheless, it is in modern Britain most likely to be Conservatives (or at least conservatives) who subscribe to his economic theories (or libertarians like me, a state not so far removed from Hayek's own trad. liberalism). We can therefore assume that of Paul Johnson, and indeed it is the case. The Left, of course, is routinely left aghast at the beliefs of a man like Johnson: the concept of divinity is anathema to them.
The paradox, of course, is in the dichotomy between the economic and theological views held by both the Left and the Right. How can a Leftist believe on the one hand that society functions best when guided by the benign, omniscient hand of the state, yet on the other hand believe, according to Johnson, that "everything in nature is random, pointless, proceeding from nothing ... and that there is no more moral significance in a living creature ... than in a pinch of dust"? Conversely, how can a man like Johnson believe in the random, amoral machinations of the market yet reject the same ideas in the natural world in favour of creationism? For surely there is nothing dreamt of in our philosophy so wholly constructivist as the idea of a creator, and there is nothing that so closely resembles the free market as the idea of natural selection?
posted by Novus at 21:52
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