- Hayek, Friedrich A.
The Fatal Conceit.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.
ISBN 0-226-32066-9.
-
The idiosyncratic, if not downright eccentric, synthesis of
evolutionary epistemology, spontaneous emergence of order in
self-organising systems, free markets as a communication
channel and feedback mechanism, and individual liberty within a
non-coercive web of cultural traditions which informs my
scribblings here and elsewhere is the product of several decades
of pondering these matters, digesting dozens of books by almost
as many authors, and discussions with brilliant and original
thinkers it has been my privilege to encounter over the years.
If, however, you want it all now, here it is, in less
than 160 pages of the pellucid reasoning and prose for which
Hayek is famed, ready to be flashed into your brain's
philosophical firmware in a few hours' pleasant reading. This
book sat on my shelf for more than a decade before I picked it
up a couple of days ago and devoured it, exclaiming “Yes!”,
“Bingo!”, and “Precisely!” every few pages. The book is
subtitled “The Errors of Socialism”, which I believe both
misstates and unnecessarily restricts the scope of the actual content, for
the errors of socialism are shared by a multitude of other
rationalistic doctrines (including the
cult of design in
software development) which, either conceived before
biological evolution was understood, or by those who
didn't understand evolution or preferred the outlook of
Aristotle and Plato for aesthetic reasons (“evolution is so
messy, and there's no rational plan to it”),
assume, as those before Darwin and those who reject his
discoveries today, that the presence of apparent purpose
implies the action of rational design. Hayek argues (and to my
mind demonstrates) that the extended order of human
interaction: ethics, morality, division of labour, trade,
markets, diffusion of information, and a multitude of other
components of civilisation fall between biological
instinct and reason, poles which many philosophers consider a
dichotomy.
This middle ground, the foundation of civilisation, is the
product of cultural evolution, in which reason plays a
part only in variation, and selection occurs just as brutally
and effectively as in biological evolution. (Cultural and
biological evolution are not identical, of course; in
particular, the inheritance of acquired traits is central in
the development of cultures, yet absent in biology.)
The “Fatal Conceit” of the title is the belief among
intellectuals and social engineers, mistaking the traditions
and institutions of human civilisation for products of reason
instead of evolution, that they can themselves design, on a
clean sheet of paper as it were, a one-size-fits-all
eternal replacement which will work better
than the product of an ongoing evolutionary process involving
billions of individuals over millennia, exploring a myriad of
alternatives to find what works best. The failure to grasp the
limits of reason compared to evolution explains why the
perfectly consistent and often tragic failures of utopian
top-down schemes never deters intellectuals from championing
new (or often old, already discredited) ones. Did I say I
liked this book?
March 2005 