202. Is this conservative?

In this blog I have shown scepticism concerning human rationality and the ability to conduct intelligent design of institutions and society. Socialists tend to overestimate that ability. I share this view with conservatives. Does that make me a conservative?

Conservatives add two things with which I disagree.

First, a neo-liberal conservative, such as Friedrich von Hayek, godfather of neo-liberalism, argues that since rational design of society is bound to fail, things should be left to the market mechanism.

That mechanism allows for, and utilizes, the spread and variety of local information, knowledge, views and preferences that central planning could never cope with or allow. Thus, it offers maximum freedom. Competition, said Hayek, is a discovery process.

I agree with that. However, there are deep, various and fundamental market imperfections and distortions that necessitate state intervention, in order to even enable markets, and to prevent or compensate their perverse effects.[i]

For an alternative view, there is a source of inspiration in the logic of evolution: it yields novel forms of life without prior intelligent design. That, I propose, yields a fruitful way of looking at markets. There are similarities in the logics of markets and of evolution, though there are also important differences. From an evolutionary perspective, economic policy may take the form of setting conditions to enable and constrain an evolutionary process.

In sum: one should not be naïve: neither concerning human capability of rational design, nor concerning the operation of markets.

Second, from limited rationality in the design of society conservatives conclude that one should respect what has proved itself in surviving the vicissitudes of history, the teeth of time.

And indeed, what has survived in evolution has shown ‘fitness’. However, at the same time the consolidation and uncritical acceptance of what has survived suffocates and suppresses ideas, blinds and subdues people, and protects and preserves powers that have entrenched themselves in institutions designed to maintain the status quo. Here, the comparison with natural evolution begins to fail. In evolutionary terms, present practices and positions mould the selection environment to serve their survival. Then evolution fails.   

Here, as elsewhere in this blog (item 50), I am reminded of Foucault, who showed how established customs and institutions shape views and expectations, making them self-evident, to the point that even casualties of the established order accommodate to them, take them for granted.

As I also argued before (in item 127), the virtue of democracy is not that it yields perfect designs or solutions but that it ensures that imperfect ones are allowed to fail and be replaced, in contrast with authoritarian regimes that can maintain mistakes.

While rational design is imperfect, the hallowing and consolidation of what has survived as rational is worse. This delusion goes back to the philosopher Hegel, with his motto that ‘the actual is the rational’. Illusions of perfect intelligent design are tragic, the confirmation as rational of what has survived is dishonest. It serves the self-service of established powers.

Rational perfection being an illusion, we must allow for an ongoing stumbling of imperfection rather than fossilizing the status quo.

So, after all, I am not a conservative, I think. 

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[i] I discussed this in my 2014 book How markets work and fail, and what to make of them, Edward Elgar