CONSERVATISM IS ANGLOSPHERIC; THE rIGHT IS CONTINENTAL:

[P]ractical action for the fusionist philosophy requires synthesizing both freedom and beliefs. Meyer is universally acknowledged as the intellectual who crafted fusionism as an explicit doctrine. He was a serous thinker with a master's degree from Oxford, but he was also clear that he was greatly influenced by the great modern philosopher and Nobel Laurate F.A. Hayek, who had provided the epistemological (if not transcendent) basis for the fusionist synthesis.

As early as 1945, Hayek had distinguished between monistic rationalists of the "French and Continental" type, such as René Descartes and Voltaire, and pluralists like Locke, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Tocqueville as providing very different bases for understanding reality.

In his 1964 essay "Kinds of Rationalism," Hayek more comprehensively described the differ­ence between a "constructivist rationalism" that starts unambiguously from single monist essences and deduces all conclusions from them; and a "critical rationalism" that employs multiple reasoning methods--rationalism, empiricism, intuition, and traditional common sense. The philosopher of science Karl Popper, in "Towards a Rational Theory of Tradition," even gave tradition the preeminent place in the process of understanding, identifying it as the first reality we can comprehend, from which all else is reasoned.

Hayek characterized "constructivist rationalism" as the assumption that the methods of pure reason and physical science can answer all social questions through abstraction, and "critical rationalism" as that which takes better account of complexity and unpredictability in the physical and social worlds through synthesizing different elements. As Hayek explained, critical rationalism "is a view of mind and society which provides an appropriate place for the role which tradi­tion and custom play" in the development of science and societies. It "makes us see much to which those brought up on the crude forms of rationalism are often blind."

Constructionist rationalism particularly fails in relying upon analogies to physical science that vastly underestimates human complexity, pointing to the complexity of a single human brain, in which the number of interneuronic connec­tions in a few minutes might exceed the number of atoms in the solar system. Hayek was especially skeptical of the notion that rationalizing experts in central governments relying on inefficient bureau­cracies, imperfect understanding of the facts, and inherently limited scientific methods could somehow perfect human nature--calling this presumption a modern "superstition" that would mystify future generations.

Hayek considered both rationalist constructivism and empirical historicism too narrow alone but all information as possibly useful. He does not even totally reject revelation, concluding that "paradoxical as it might appear, it is probably true that a successful free society will always in a large measure be a tradition-bound society." His The Fatal Conceit found simple constructivist utilitarianism "insuf­ficient." Even if Western society's beliefs are only symbolically true, he argued, those like himself who were "not prepared to accept the anthropomorphic conception of a personal divinity ought to admit that 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 we now enjoy, and that even now loss of these beliefs, whether true or false, creates great difficulties."

Hayek identifies the narrower constructivist rationalists as Plato, Descartes, Hobbes, Bentham, Marx, Keynes, Rousseau, Hegel, and the positivists. His own critical rationalists included Aristotle, Cicero, St. Thomas, Locke, Montesquieu, Hume, Adam Smith, and Popper, who all give tradition a broad role in social life. Both Locke and Jefferson explicitly relied upon a Creator in their Declaration and Second Treatise to justify human freedom. In his The Reasonableness of Christianity, Locke even emphasized that the ancient philosophers attempted to base their ideals on rationalism alone; but their teachings of truth had little effect. "The philosophers showed the beauty of virtue" but they "left her unendowed," so that "few were willing to espouse her" until an empirical "immortal weight of glory" that was the Incarnation made it real to many peoples.

Tweet   @brothersjudd