WE UNWORTHY INHERITORS

The Liberalism/Conservatism Of Edmund Burke and F. A. Hayek: A Critical Comparison (Linda C. Raeder, Humanitas)

All that has been said of Burke's reverence toward society could be said of Hayek as well, with one significant exception: the reverence Hayek reserved for the "grown" social order did not derive from religious conviction but from his love of personal freedom and his lust for the advance of knowledge. For Hayek, like Burke, believed that the institutions of freedom he cherished emerged from an undesigned and spontaneous evolutionary process utterly dependent upon the distilled knowledge embedded within inherited traditions and institutions. He was captivated by the wondrous order-within-complexity generated by this suprarational social process and wished to defend it against that rationalistic mentality which refuses to comprehend the significance of tradition and custom. For Burke, historically evolved society was, in its essence, a spiritual phenomenon; for Hayek, it was a vehicle for the growth of knowledge and the fulfillment of human potential.

Hayek's aim, one might say, was to "complete" Burke's thought: to provide scientific support for Burke's conserving politics; to justify his reverence toward historically grown cultural traditions; to explain more precisely why and in what sense "the individual is foolish . . . but the species is wise." Hayek was deeply impressed by Burke's insight that inherited rules and institutions embody the cumulative knowledge and experience of preceding generations, and he developed that insight into an elaborate theory of cultural evolution. His main point was that the process of cultural advance is utterly dependent upon the absorption and transmission of the cultural inheritance over time. According to Hayek, received tradition is not only the foundation of civilized society, but of the structure of mind, reason, moral values, language, perception, behavior-in short, of all the learned rules whose observance distinguishes the human from the animal. For Hayek as for Burke, the contemptuous dismissal of "irrational" tradition, the desire to "wipe the slate clean" and design society anew, merely testifies to a profound ignorance regarding the nature of social reality.

Perhaps no other area of Burke's and Hayek's thought is as congruent as their understanding of the role of reason in human affairs; their views are so close as to suggest that Hayek's thought on this issue is merely an elaboration, although quite an extensive one, of Burke's theme. Hayek developed several of Burke's most crucial insights: 1) the priority of social experience (or "tradition") over reason; 2) the notion that inherited social institutions embody a "superindividual wisdom" which transcends that available to the conscious reasoning mind; and 3) the impotence of reason to "design" a viable social order. Hayek learned from Burke, in short, that civilization is not the creation of the reasoning mind, but the unintended outcome of the spontaneous play of innumerable minds within a matrix of "nonrational" or "suprarational" values, beliefs, and traditions. Burke's insights into the limited role of reason in the social process became nothing less than a cornerstone of the Hayekian theoretical edifice.

Burke and Hayek, then, shared a common enemy as well as a common understanding: Enlightenment rationalism. Perhaps the most characteristic attribute of Enlightenment thought was its cavalier dismissal of "irrational" tradition as mere superstition and prejudice. Through Enlightened eyes, inherited values, institutions, and customs appeared as the very embodiment of ignorance, "reason" as the tool that would liberate man from the ancient fetters of oppression. Indeed, individual "reason" was endowed with a most profound and exclusive constructive authority.

Hayek argued, on the contrary, and Burke would undoubtedly concur, that there is an ""intelligence" incorporated in the [inherited] system of rules of conduct [as well as in] man's [explicit] thoughts about his surroundings." It is fair to say that for Hayek and for Burke rationality is as much an attribute of the social process as of the individual mind, a quality found "not [only] in the isolated individual consciousness but [also] in the network of [evolved] social institutions." The crucial aspect of such a view is that "men are in their conduct never guided exclusively by [conscious rational understanding] . . . but always also by rules of conduct of which they are rarely aware, [and] which they certainly have not consciously invented."

Burke regarded the Enlightenment, as one of his interpreter's put it, as a "destructive movement of the human intellect, . . . [an intellect] free from all social restraints, . . . [convinced it can] remodel society" in any image it chooses. Hayek regarded the same phenomenon-the "constructivist" mentality that recognizes no limits to the authority or competence of human reason-as a grave threat to the preservation of civilized order. For, Hayek argued and Burke apprehended, the preservation of free government and civilized society depends upon man's willingness to be governed by certain inherited rules of individual and collective conduct whose origin, function, and rationale he may not fully comprehend. The rationalist contempt for tradition, by contrast, is typically accompanied by the demand for the radical reconstruction of traditional moral and legal rules; from Rousseau through Rawls, the construction of new moralities and legal systems has been a major preoccupation of social theorists. Perhaps no other thought is as uncongenial to the modern rationalist temper as the idea that man is not free rationally to determine or "choose" his ethical or legal framework; modern thought bears little trace of that "strong impression of the ignorance and fallibility of mankind" that long served to suppress such rationalistic hubris. Both Hayek and Burke warned, however, that the endeavor to destroy inherited customs, morals, and prejudices must also destroy the humanistic liberal society engendered and sustained by such phenomena.

Hayek points out, moreover, that the exaggererated regard for the constructive power of "reason" which stems from ignorance of the significance of evolved social phenomena typically generates a demand to rationalize the social process through the coercive agency of government. To restrict action, however, to only that in accord with some preferred conception of the "rationally permissible" would smother the trial-and-error process whereby mankind advances; to eliminate the spontaneous and undesigned must induce the decline of both human intelligence and civilization, both of which progress only by grappling with the unknown and the unpredictable. Thus, we have good reason, as Burke recognized, to be ". . . afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason . . . [and to honor the fact that] . . . individuals do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages." Reason, both Burke and Hayek warned, "is like a dangerous explosive which, handled cautiously, may be most beneficial, but if handled incautiously may blow up a civilization." [...]

Although Hayek rejected natural-law doctrine, he did share Burke's belief in the existence of an objective body of obligatory moral and legal rules. For Hayek, the traditional moral values that have shaped Western civilization, while not absolute, immutable, or universal, are nevertheless binding for those who wish to preserve constitutional government-the political expression of those values. This is because the inherited rules and values that have structured the evolution of Western society constitute the irreplaceable foundation of the advanced liberal order (values, Hayek observes, are the "source of all factual orders"). Thus those who would preserve that order are not free to "revalue all values" or to abandon traditional Judeo-Christian morality merely because they may not comprehend its significance or appreciate the restraints it imposes; for such action, Hayek maintains, would entail the destruction of the kind of free and civilized society engendered and sustained by that morality.

If one is religious in the Burkean sense, Hayek's functionalist argument will no doubt seem deeply unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, in an age when the religious truths that guided Burke's unhesitating step no longer inform the dominant worldview, Hayek's appeal to rational comprehension may be indispensable to the preservation of civilized values and free government. For Western society presently stands at a curious juncture. The authority of the moral and political traditions whose observance generated the liberal order has eroded in many quarters, and it has been suggested that we are living on the "moral capital" of an earlier era. Hayek obviously hoped that rational insight into the function served by inherited moral and political traditions in regard to the maintenance of civilized society may supply the want of traditional authority-religion and custom-increasingly characteristic of our time.

As Ms Raeder suggests, Hayek's functionalism must be preferable to many bad alternatives, but does dissatisfy. In its desire to have us act as if there were an Absolute, but not recognize one, it is a near-prototype of what Richard Rorty has called freeloading atheism. It seems a better solution might be to employ both reason and faith together--once accept that morality is necessary to the liberal order that we desire and then reason back that such morality is dependent on an Absolute and we are arrived at the point where our faith in the good leads back to a faith in the God who makes it possible. That's a substantially different faith than an Old Teestament patriarch, in whose life God intervened repeatedly and vocally, may have had, but it's faith nonetheless. If it's ultimately irrational, very well: why should reason be the test of faith rather than vice versa? Posted by Orrin Judd at May 10, 2003 11:55 AM