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This is a book review: Paul Rubin, Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary Origin of Freedom (Rutgers University Press, 2002 |
Hayek's evolutionary approach both to epistemology and cultural history is an alternative to the woolly concept of Natural Law. |
- Evolution, Hayek and Scientific Progress*
By Patricia Lança
Many liberals of all stripes persist even today in seeking
justification for their beliefs in the concept of so-called
Natural Law. As Friedrich Von Hayek pointed out it is a
fruitless search and to understand how society really works
requires looking in other directions. What he himself
favoured was an evolutionary approach both to
epistemology and cultural history. A firm opponent of
scientism, he wrote an entire book, The Counterrevolution
of Science, criticizing the mechanical use of scientific
methods in the social sciences. Hayek was nevertheless a
lifelong defender of the scientific method along the lines
proposed by his friend Karl Popper. Hayek described the
conclusions of a lifetime’s study in his last great work Law,
Legislation and Liberty.
Progress in science is often blocked by the absence of
appropriate instruments. Think of astronomy without the
telescope; navigation without sextant or compass; medicine
without the microscope. In their turn the social sciences are
handicapped by gaps in information from the natural
sciences. If this is absent or faulty they too are blocked.
Rousseau was convinced when he wrote his Discours sur l’
origine de l’inégalité in 1755 that he was producing a
scientific work in the field of anthropology. Hobbes before
him, while reaching different conclusions, was similarly
convinced he was writing scientifically about man in the
state of nature. Since classical antiquity philosophers, later
followed by theologians, looked to ‘Natural Law’ for a guide
to jurisprudence, ethics and politics. In the eighteenth
century Rousseau and some of his contemporaries
popularised the idea of the rights of man as being ‘natural
rights’. Through no fault of their own they were basing
themselves on false premises regarding the origin of man
and the age of the earth.
Even in the time of the Encyclopedists anyone brought up as
a Christian accepted the Old Testament narrative while the
Greeks and Asiatic civilizations had their own mythical
explanations. So despite fleeting consideration by Augustine
and then Aquinas of incipient evolutionary ideas, we had to
wait for Wallace and Darwin in the nineteenth century for
the door to be opened to a scientific explanation. It was
only in the twentieth century, with new technology, that
more soundly based knowledge was attained about the age
of the earth and its various forms of life. The discovery of
radioactive decay in organic matter and the invention of
instruments for its measurement (radio-carbon dating)
revealed astounding facts which illuminated and advanced
palaeontology. With these tools research into the Pleistocene
period provided solid indications that the human race, homo
sapiens sapiens, is immensely older than had been thought:
that people physiologically like us roamed the earth as long
as 150,000 to 250,000 years ago. Pre-history began to give
up its secrets. Remains left by time, fossils, geological strata,
etc., could now be observed and and dated with modern
technology. In the last fifty years we have at last been able
to pursue scientifically based revision of a whole swathe of
assumptions. In consequence most of these have crumbled
along with their philosophic extrapolations.
As always resistance to the new knowledge has proved
stubborn. In recent years there has been a revival of
hostility to Darwinism, perhaps related to the growing
political strength of the Christian Right in the United States
and the strident opposition to it of leading Left ‘Liberals’.
Recent polls in the USA show that half the population still
believes the earth to be no more than 6,000 years old and
the theory of evolution to be a wicked heresy. These beliefs
are especially characteristic of members of protestant
fundamentalist sects, some of whom even own and run
universities and have members in federal and state
government. The media report renewed disputes reaching
the courts over how biology should be taught in schools,
reminding us disagreeably of the infamous Scopes trial of
1925 when a school-teacher was tried in court for teaching
Darwinism in his biology classes.
Considering that some eminent researchers in palaeontology
and genetics are themselves priests; it is perhaps not
surprising to find that the Catholic Church has a very
different approach. When school authorities in Italy recently
recomended that a form of creationism be taught in biology
lessons, the Vatican intervened rapidly. It advised against
the recommendation pointing out that the Bible and science
belong to different categories and should not be confused:
the Divine does not belong to the area of science nor does
the latter to that of the Divine. Recent Popes have given
their views on Darwinism and these are in marked contrast
to those of the protestant fundamentalists.
Pope Pius XII in the encyclical Humani Generis (1959)
admitted the fact of human evolution. In 1981 Pope John
Paul II addressed the Pontifical Academy of Sciences to
point out the distinction between, on the one hand, the Bible
as a religious text which conforms to the cosmology of its
time and, on the other, a scientific treatise.
The present pope, Benedict XVI who is particularly
interested in following the controversy in America, accepts
as scientific the discoveries concerning the Pleistocene and
also insists on the separation of the scientific and the divine.
There is, however, no basis for reports in the American
Press that the Vatican agrees with the American school of
thought known as ‘intelligent design’ and in fact criticizes it
for presenting itself as part of science. Vatican documents in
English on these questions may be consulted on the internet
site: www.chiesa.espressonline.it
So notwithstanding what evolutionary biologist Richard
Dawkins has to say in his strident campaign against God, it is
clear that taking the theory of evolution seriously does not
necessarily imply being an atheist or reneging on religion.
In the light of these developments it is now evident that
some aspects of political science, jurisprudence and ethics
require new approaches. All these areas were developed
on the basis of pre-scientific notions regarding the age of
the earth and of human society and the time has come to
dispose for good of myths about the noble savage, the
superiority of tribal society or any kind of ‘golden age’
before the ‘unfortunate’ advent of civilization. The corollary
follows that the concept of Natural Law and the related
doctrine of natural rights are now archaic and constitute
legal fictions which may have been of use in their time but
have now been definitively overtaken. Another related
myth which should also be destined for the scrap-heap is
that of multiculturalism.
It is clear that Hayek was on the right track when he
developed his evolutionary approach to the interpretation of
culture, social institutions, politics and ethics, whose roots
should not be sought in what amount to legal fictions, but
in a scientific analysis of human cultural evolution. In any
event, the traditional approach was always problematical
and frequently led directly to relativism so as to conciliate
the inherent contradictions in the concept of some sort of
natural law that would be applicable to all humanity. It was
always only too painfully obvious that this could not be done.
An analysis of the implications of the new paradigm offers a
wealth of hints for a more convincing interpretation of social
and political phenomena. The possibility is opened in the
field of ethics for a genuine universalism susceptible of
general acceptance and the clarification of the concepts of
good and evil.
Paul Rubin, in his book Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary
Origin of Freedom (Rutgers University Press, 2002) offers a
valuable contribution to the discussion of the repercussions
of the new scientific disciplines. The author is professor of
Economics and Law at Rutgers University in the US and a
self-confessed former libertarian whose mind was changed
by studying evolutionary sciences. He shows impressive
familiarity with them and a list of his chapter titles indicates
the scope of the book and its relevance for liberals:
Evolution and Politics;
Membership and Conflict;
Altruism, Cooperation and Sharing;
Envy;
Political power;
Religion and the Regulation of Behaviour;
How Humans Make Political Decisions;
Relevance of the Pleistocene for Today.
Ruben describes what specialists in evolutionary psychology
call the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness or EEA,
the name given to the last 150,000 to 200,000 years of the
Pleistocene. During this period humans lived in bands of 50-
150 individuals and made their living as hunter-gatherers.
The conjecture is that in the course of this immense stretch
of time humans experienced genetic changes which became
to some extent ‘hard-wired’. In other words, characteristics
favourable to the survival of our ancestors (the others
would obviously not leave descendants) would tend to be
perpetuated and become inbuilt dispositions (not qualities)
which, depending upon the environment in which they
developed, would result in behavioural manifestations some
of which persist to this day. Needless to say what might
have promoted survival in groups of 50-150 are likely to be
unsuitable for life in communities of millions.
A fortiori, adaptiveness at the cultural level favourable to
survival of the group would follow the same type of pattern.
Habits and institutions that were successful in promoting
group survival would persist and become traditional without
anybody decreeing this should be so. This was of course the
point of view of Hayek whose insistence on spontaneous
rather than deliberately managed order and the
development of culture according to implicit rules of
adaptability did not please some members of the extremist
school of libertarians. He especially provoked the wrath of
the father of anarcho-capitalism, Murray Rothbard who was
an adept of Aristotelian and Thomist interpretations of
Natural Law. Rothbard proposed a deductive system based
on the tautological principle of self-ownership as the
philosophical basis for his brand of libertarian philosophy.
Inevitably he became a ferocious critic of Hayek.
The latter considered Rothbard to be guilty of what he called
‘constructive rationalism’: the construction of a deductive
system on the basis of a priori principles. It was a collision
between a sophisticated version of British empiricism and a
primary form of French cartesianism. Hayek held that
constructive rationalism, as opposed to his own critical
rationalism, had always been the enemy of freedom.
Rothbard, a stubborn believer in Natural Law and an
outworn epistemological framework, considered Hayek to be
an irrationalist.
In a written review in 1958 of the manuscript of Hayek’s
The Constitution of Liberty, he classified it as being:
‘surprisingly and distressingly, an extremely bad, and I
would even say evil, book.’* *
Ruben, however, is clearly in tune with Hayek. The intention
in his book is to show readers how much we have to learn
from the new evolutionary disciplines. We can find profound
roots in pre-history for much behaviour of contemporary
humans and hence better understand how to cope with
them. Similarly many social phenomena now become
understandable as vestiges of stratagems developed over
the millennia to protect society and life in common.
For example, there is no indication that pre-historic man
lived in a state of primitive communism or matriarchy as
claimed by Marxists and radical feminists. What there is in
reality is confirmation that the scarcity of resources imposed
some rules of sharing and a kind of equality in consumption
that would prevent death from starvation and ensure group
survival. Other examples of the evolution of customs tending
to favour the survival of societies are the replacement in
successful societies of the natural polygamy of primates by a
regime of monogamous marriage. Polygamy may
occasionally have been a favourable cultural practice for the
solution of the demographic problem in the case of war or
disease decimating the male population. Nevertheless every
polygamous society tends to be unstable because part of the
young male population is deprived of the possibility of
marriage. Ruben suggests that this may account for the fact
that polygamous societies are generally governed by
dictatorships, because strong authoritarian rule is the only
way to manage large masses of rebellious and unhappy
young men. One might add that here may be a clue to the
attraction of terrorism in certain types of society.
The origin of envy may lie in an innate tendency which
might have been useful for inspiring the indolent or less
talented towards greater effort in hunting or productive
activity. Ruben suggests that it is here perhaps that we may
find the roots of class conflict which the Communist
Manifesto considered to be a permanent feature of History.
On the other hand our persistent tendency towards altruism
and sharing may explain the lasting fascination, against all
the evidence, with the idea of socialism.
The absence of the State during the Pleistocene until the
beginnings of agriculture and sedentarism, implies that the
human race spent the overwhelmingly greater part of its
existence in conditions of relative freedom in the wilderness,
conditioned only by those rules evolved to promote the
survival of the group. Hence, according to Ruben, our
preference for the absence of coercion and our love of
liberty.
He provides many more examples and the reader can
probably tentatively add still more. It is, of course, clear
that these are untested conjectures but they are highly
suggestive and indicate paths for both genetic research and
sociological theorizing. If they prove fruitful they could be
decisive for a new advance of the classical liberalism that
should be the inspiration of conservatives instead of its
name being hijacked by the Left. They should also inspire a
widened recognition of the work of Hayek and deepened
appreciation of his extraordinary foresight.
ª Published in The Salisbury Review, London, June 2007
*ª David Gordon, Von Mises Institute
~~~«»~~~
B O O K S
F.A. Hayek
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