Richard Ebeling on the Future of the Free society

Dear Pete,

I read your recent post on "Coordination Problem" concerning the future of Public Choice, and your referring to the significance of both Vincent Ostrom's and Hayek's ideas for preservation of a free, and "democratic" order.

If one reads both Ostrom and Hayek one sees a certain "tension" of how exactly to preserve a free society.

Hayek emphasized the the advantage of the market order, and its "spontaneity," is that it enables a vast number of people to associate for mutual improvement of their circumstances without anyone needing to understand the nature of how the overall "system" works and coordinates the actions of all those participating in the social system of division of labor.

It is, indeed, not even necessary, per se, for those participants to understand the historical origin of the social "rules" of custom and tradition in the context of which they cooperate, or how or why these evolved "rules" assure survival and improvement of the human condition.

It is sufficient if all the members of society follow those rules (including the price signals of the competitive market) for the "system" to successfully function and have the adaptive ability to develop over time as a part of the unintended consequences of the process as a whole.

Yet, there is what we might call the meta-level for the "system" or "order" to function and prevail in the long-run. And this gets us to Vincent Ostrom's contribution, especially in his book on the Democracy and de Tocqueville's "Challenge."

For a democratic (read: a "freedom society") order to be sustainable it is necessary for a certain attitude of beliefs and values to prevail, a particular "habits of the heart" as Ostrom emphasizes, that is reinforced by a complementary "language" of meaning and understanding, and a confidence in the importance and possibility of free association as the primary avenue for men to solve their common problems (both "economic" and "political").

Such "habits of the heart," and meanings in the use of language, and confidence in free association has been severely undermined in our society -- an undermining that has been at work for far more than a century.

Thus, the task for friends of freedom must be more than reasoning among themselves -- and to other social scientists with whom they interact -- that it is necessary to think in terms of broader institutional alternatives, as essential this may be.

There is the issue of how do we foster a return to and a more refined set of those beliefs and values among the members of society, when it has been so significantly weakened or even partly erased from the societal memory.

And furthermore, how to retain it, when the very logic of a Hayek's understanding of a free society that when in existence it is not necessary for people to have a cognitive appreciation by them for the market order (and general free society) to function.

They merely exist as the "taken-for-granted" norms that "everyone just 'knows' to be 'right'," as societal "prejudices" (in the sense that Robert Nisbet used to use that term).

How do you generate a change in "prejudices" consistent with liberty rather than political paternalism and mirages of social justice?

The reason why "democracy" still exists and "works" in America is the existing residues of those elements that Ostrom focused on. They do not exist in any similar way in, say, Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria (to just mention those places some American intellectuals -- "left" and "right" -- have dreamed of "creating" democratic societies).

How do you change the institutional setting and "rules" when those in society who live and act within the rules have lost many of the "prejudices" that preserved a free society in the past, and have no cognitive understanding of why the change in the "rules" over the last hundred years has weakened the social order that gives them degrees of freedom and prosperity?

In a nutshell? How do we bring about a rebirth of the "habits of the heart" and the language of liberty without which it is difficult to see how we may return to the path that we lost?

Comments

[Xerographica]

We bring about the rebirth by promoting civic crowdfunding...

"Crowdtilt is also in discussions with the San Francisco Parks and Recreation Department about new tax structures that let citizens dictate what projects their taxes fund." - Rebecca Grant, Crowdtilt unveils Crowdhoster to ‘infect the world’ with crowdfunding

Civic crowdfunding would effectively solve the public sector's knowledge problem. Once libertarians stop threatening to throw the baby out with the bath water, the other side will become more receptive.

Some on the other side already recognize the necessity of costless exit...Velazquez: Funding war should be taxpayers’ choice.

[Troy Camplin]

Identify the rules. Identify the language. Use the language. Can you find the poets you need to create stories demonstrating the rules and using the language? That's what you need.

[Richard Hammer]

I propose an analogy in the human use of fire. Humans observed fire for a long time before they began to understand ways to make or control fire. We who aspire to live in a free society are in the early stages. We observe a free society and ponder how it happened. We are still developing the language to describe what we hope to achieve.

But the problem is greater if you take "we" to mean everybody in the American democracy. The first users of fire did not await a majority vote, I suppose, among all cave dwellers.

Twenty years ago I started a project (the Free Nation Foundation http://freenation.org ) in which I aspired to develop descriptions of critical institutions which make free nations possible. Although that project slowed to a standstill after seven years, for want of collaboration and support, I still believe it achievable. As with the project of building and controlling fire, "we" do not need a majority vote. We can make rapid progress if we turn inward to work with other people who share the value of a free society.

http://richard-o-hammer.org

[Roger McKinney]

I think the problem goes very deep. People see the state as the only power that can transform human nature and save us from ourselves, as Richard Pipes wrote in Property and Freedom:

“Philosophic socialism was a pure intellectual movement led by ‘those men who,’ in Trollope’s words, ‘if they had hitherto established little, had at any rate achieved the doubting of much.’ In their thinking, the materialistic conception of man played a central part. Locke’s theory of knowledge, expound in The Essay on Human Understanding (1690), which claimed that human beings have no ‘innate’ ideas but form ideas exclusively from sensory perceptions, remained in England an abstruse epistemological doctrine, devoid of political significance. In France, however, it was applied to politics, providing a theoretical basis for the conviction that by properly shaping the human environment – the exclusive source of all ideas – it was possible so to mold human behavior as to create an ideal society. And the ideal society, much as Plato had envisioned it, was characterized by equality.” 39-40.

The biggest enemy of freedom is the idea that people are born innocent and are basically good. rdmckinney.blogspot.com

[Erwin Dekker]

Fascinating post. I would like to think that this erosion of support for a society's norm and values was in fact one of the major if not the major issue for the Austrians. Hayek's 'revolt against civilization' was very much an attempt to analyze the origins of this erosion.

One can find this issue in various Austrian authors, Mises makes this point about the respect for property in his book on Socialism (liberalism has debased property into a utilitarian, worldly matter). Schumpeter writes about the erosion of family values in CSD, Wieser already wonders what supports the govern norms (Sitte) and it is central in much of Hayek's work. An example from Hayek's work is the gold standard, which he admits rests on a fiction which probably cannot be uphold any longer (although the effects of this fiction were very useful). Much the same applies to his ambivalent attitude towards religion (useful for others, but it does not stand up to critical scrutiny).

In fact Popper's concept, which Hayek uses frequently, 'the strain of civilization' is an expression used to explain this revolt against civilization, against the governing morality and the governing norms. I show the importance of these insights for their overall body of work in my recent dissertation 'The Viennese Students of Civilization'. I there however also show that Hayek offers little hope to suggest that such norms will be supported in our modern society. He suggests and hopes at some instances that such support might come from markets themselves, but I doubt whether that is sufficient.

In my dissertation I suggest that one could think of other sources for this support. As a non-American I am always impressed with the appeal to the constitution for the maintenance of certain values and norms in the USA. And as Bartley suggests in The Fatal Conceit one could also think of the work of Johan Huizinga on play, as a formative element of our culture. According to Huizinga plays has helped to shape both market norms and law in the history of our civilization.

[Troy Camplin]

Sounds like a job for the poets.