Hayek en het conservatieve versus liberale gedachtegoed

Nogal wat mensen vinden het moeilijk te bepalen in welke mate ze zich dan wel beter thuisvinden in het conservatisme dan wel het (klassiek-)liberalisme. Hayek beschreef zichzelf expliciet als een liberaal en niet als conservatief.  In onderstaand schema respecteren we zijn eigen positionering maar maken we duidelijk dat hij met vele conservatieven wat Thomas Sowell een "constrained vision" noemt, deelt. Sowell stelt dat de "unconstrained vision" erg leunt op het geloof dat de menselijke natuur essentieel goed is. Aanhangers wantrouwen decentrale processen en geloven in grote maakbaarheid. Sowell verwijst naar hen als "the self anointed." Mensen die eerder de "constrained vision" aanhangen, zouden minder op zoek zijn naar "ideale" oplossingen en leunen op traditie.

(Voor Sowell over de constrained vision:https://theindependentwhig.com/haidt-passages/sowell-constrained-and-unconstrained-visions/sowell-the-constrained-vision/)
(Voor Sowell over de unconstrained vision: https://theindependentwhig.com/haidt-passages/sowell-constrained-and-unconstrained-visions/sowell-the-unconstrained-vision/ )

Onderstaand schema maakt met name het onderscheid tussen rationalisme en opvatting van sociale evolutie als fundamentele kenmerken. Dit brengt wellicht meer klaarheid (1). Velen associëren de "Verlichting" louter met de Franse. Het is essentieel deze echter te vergelijken met andere tradities.

De Franse Verlichting versus de "Britse/Schotse traditie" 

Hayek: "What we have called the “British tradition” was made explicit mainly by a group of Scottish moral philosophers led by David Hume, Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson, seconded by their English contemporaries Josiah Tucker, Edmund Burke, and William Paley, and drawing largely on a tradition rooted in the jurisprudence of the common law. Opposed to them was the tradition of the French Enlightenment, deeply imbued with Cartesian rationalism: the Encyclopedists and Rousseau, the Physiocrats and Concordet, are their best-known representatives. Though these groups are now commonly lumped together as the ancestors of modern liberalism, there is hardly a greater contrast imaginable than that between their respective conceptions of the evolution and functioning of a social order and the role played in it by liberty. The difference is directly traceable to the predominance of an essentially empiricist view of the world in England and a rationalist approach in France. The main contrast in the practical conclusions to which these approaches has led has recently been well put, as follows: “One finds the essence of freedom in spontaneity and the absence of coercion, the other believes it to be realized only in the pursuit and attainment of an absolute collective purpose”; and “one stands for organic, slow, half-conscious growth, the other for doctrinaire deliberateness; one for trial and error procedure, the other for an enforced solely valid pattern."

                                                               —Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of liberty, pp110-

Klassieke economen en founding fathers

Bij de klassieke economen was er niemand die de rationalistische positie innam. Adam Smith staat natuurlijk bekend voor zijn analyse van de spontane orde en het waarschuwen voor de overmoed van de rationalistische positie. Een van de redenen overigens waarom Edmund Burke zo'n grote bewondering had voor Smith. 

Citeren we even Smith die gevat op het gevaar wijst van de illusie van de maakbaarheid van de maatschappelijke ordening:

“The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it.He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.”

 —Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759

Adam Smith had ook een grote invloed op de founding fathers van de VS waar hij ondermeer James Madison inspireerde voor zijn opvattingen dat een grote republiek toch kon functioneren dankzij het federalisme. We kennen Jeffersons druk geannoteerde exemplaar van de Wealth of Nations maar deze volgde Smith niet in zijn anti-rationalistische opvattingen die deze overigens deelde met Hume, Adam Ferguson en anderen. 

Jefferson zetten zich af tegenover tradities en gebruiken of zoals Hayek stelt: "Thomas Jefferson believed with a characteristic rationalist misconception—that we “ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and . . . suppose what they did to be beyond amendment.” (  —Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of liberty, pp122

Nochtans veronderstelden de sociale evolutiedenkers niet per se dat vroeger mensen zomaar wijzer waren maar hun inzicht was eerder dat wat tot stand was gekomen als resultaat van het experimenteren van vele generaties meer ervaring bevat dan wat een individu kan bezitten. 

 John Adams las met verschrikking dat Jefferson op een moment zelf begon te suggereren dat elke generatie zijn eigen grondwet moest schrijven. Adams beschouwde een grondwet net als iets dat vele generaties moest overspannen. James Madison was in tegenstelling tot Adams wel in staat om Jefferson te waarschuwen dat dergelijke ideeën een hoog ivoren torengehalte hadden.

Implicaties voor de democratie

Zowel conservatieven als liberalen die de "constrained vision" delen, gaan erg terughoudend zijn om wijsheid te zoeken in de meerderheidsregel.

Dat dit voor Hayek opgaat, maakt volgend citaat uit de "Constitution of liberty" al duidelijk:
"Majority decisions tell us what people want at the moment, but not what it would be in their interest to want if they were better informed; and, unless they could be changed by persuasion, they would be of no value.  The argument for democracy presupposes that any minority opinion may become a majority one." (  —Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of liberty, pp175-

En net daarna volgt dit met extreem hoge relevantie voor vandaag:
"It would not be necessary to stress this if it were not for the fact that it is sometimes represented as the duty of the democrat, and particularly of the democratic intellectual, to accept the views and values of the majority. True, there is the convention that the view of the majority should prevail so far as collective action is concerned, but this does not in the least mean that one should not make every effort to alter it. One may have profound respect for that convention and yet very little for the wisdom of the majority. It is only because the majority opinion will always be opposed by some that our knowledge and understanding progress. In the process by which opinion is formed,it is very probable that, by the time any view becomes a majority view, it is no longer the best view: somebody will already have advanced beyond the point which the majority have reached."
  —Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of liberty, pp175-


(1)
Hayeks opvattingen hierbij hadden grote implicaties voor zijn denken rond de economische ordening ("spontaneous order vs. planning"). Een aan te bevelen artikel in die context is zijn "The Use of Knowledge in Society": http://home.uchicago.edu/~vlima/courses/econ200/spring01/hayek.pdf

JM Keynes on the economist:

“The master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts .... He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher—in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular, in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man's nature or his institutions must be entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood, as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near to earth as a politician.”

Adam Smith books

Nationalisme en verlichting

Voor diegenen geïnteresseerd in de combinatie nationalisme en de verlichting: Hans Cohn, the Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background

Klassiek stelt men de Verlichting gelijk aan universalisme, de rede tegenover nationalisme met focus op het lokale, tradities, collectiviteit. Hans Cohn brengt daar zware nuances in aan. Hij zoomt ook in op gespannen relatie tussen bepaalde conservatieven en nationalisme: ' At the same time, nationalism was eschewed by classical conservatism (but not for the reasons that liberals eschewed nationalism). Classical conservatives like Prince Klemens von Metternich of Austria was weary of romantic nationalism because his nation (the Austrian Empire) was multi-ethnic composed of: Czechs, Austrians, Hungarians, Croats, and many, many other notable ethnic groups (Poles, Romanians, Slovaks, etc.). In addition, romantic nationalism threatened the agrarian order from which classical conservatism was premised and built upon—the primary reason why classical conservatism lamented the rise of nationalism."

Ook het klassieke tijdsschema stelt hij in vraag waarbij nationalisme als een louter 19de eeuws fenomeen wordt gezien: " By the end of the seventeenth century, therefore, England had become the first “nation” in the modern sense of the term. Having overcome the bounds of absolutism, and having reached a sense of common peoplehood, modern nationalism had been established. In continental Europe, however, the transition would be defined by strife and a far more consequential, eighteenth century, revolution "

Cohn ziet nationalisme en de Verlichting met elkaar verweven: " in the eighteenth century the free personality emerged in all fields of human activity –political, cultural and economic. But this new order posited the grave problem of how to reconcile the liberty of the individual with the exigencies of social integration, how to subject man to a law which could no longer claim the authority of an absolute lawgiver outside and above men. In this situation nationalism was to become a tie binding the autonomous individual into the partnership of a community.”

Cohn wijst fijntjes op tegenstellingen tussen de conservatieve positie en nationalisme ondermeer door de figuur van JJ Rousseau, vaak veracht door conservatieven maar cruciaal voor nationalisten. In welke mate zien jullie jezelf als conservatieven noodzakelijk ook als nationalist.

Cohn voert Jefferson op als het toonbeeld van de Verlichting die niet tegenstrijdig was met nationalisme. "Jefferson was the “founding father” of American nationalism, which made the United States the only nation to be founded by a true man of the Enlightenment." Zoals hij het stelt: “Thus, over a long life which stretched from the zenith of Voltaire’s influence to that of the Restoration and the Holy Alliance, the American apostle preserved his faith in the Enlightenment and its universal blessings. In the fifty years from July 4, 1776, to Jefferson’s death on July 4, 1826, what had been a promise and intention had become the firm foundation of the American republic.”

Review of Larry Siedentop, The invention of the individual

Over the last 20 or so years, there has been a revolution in mainstream philosophy and history--reexamining the relationship between Christianity and modernity: liberalism, secularism, and democracy, etc. Larry Siedentop has joined the ranks of Philip S. Gorski (at Yale), Eric T. Nelson (at Harvard), Charles Taylor (Emeritus Professor at McGill), and the long deceased, but highly influential and respected, Talcott Parsons (at Harvard) who have re-asserted a formerly forgotten widely held belief in the academy--Christianity, regardless of the "God Question," helped give rise to cherished Western principles and values. In "Inventing the Individual," Dr. Siedentop examines the notions of individualism in the early Christian community and historical process. Primarily looking upon the works of the Apostle Paul, his epistles--found in the New testament, Saint Augustine and his work City of God (Penguin Classics), and then Medieval theologians and philosophers, like William of Ockham and Saint Thomas Aquinas among others, Siedentop highlights how these Christian works came to found the foundation for Western liberalism, individualism, and secularism (all good ideas in Siedentop's mind).

Paul's theological egalitarianism, "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for all are one in Christ Jesus," etc. (Gal. 3:28), Augustine's separation of the two worlds (the "two cities": the city of man, and the city of God)--a precursor to secularism, which is not anti-religion, but the separation of matters of the temporal world ("city of man") and possible divine world ("city of God"), Ockham's nominalism (the idea that abstracts exist), and Aquinas's pioneering work in Natural Law all helped slowly build the foundations for liberalism and individualism. Lest we forget that liberal social contract theory, from Hobbes, Locke, Pufendorf, and Grotius, etc. have their foundation, or minimally, some influence, from Natural Law theory which is rooted firmly in the Christian/Catholic tradition. In fact, some conservative critics of liberalism have attempted to pin down liberalism as a modern reincarnation of Medieval Nominalism (cf. Richard Weaver, d. 1963), so again, Siedentop's discussion of Ockham's Nominalism and its influence on the direction of Western understanding of human freedom (pp. 313-319) are incredibly important and insightful, but nothing "new" in the same sense that others have already made these assertions (but in a negative means as opposed to Sidentop's more neutral to celebratory tone). Indeed, even atheist and agnostic scholars and philosophers, not associated with the "New Atheism" of recent fame, have also "rediscovered" Paul's philosophy of individuals and community have begun a "critical" re-examination of Paul and early Christian philosophy through Marxian lenses (cf. John Milbank, Slavoj Zizek, and Creston Davis).

Siedentop's work, most appropriately, can be seen as a scholarship in the field called "political theology." Political Theology is not theocracy, or religious fundamentalism guiding law, but the analysis of how theological principles and ideas have come to influence "secular" institutions. This is where Sidentop's work shines most brightly. He eruditely shows what had been accepted in the Academy long ago, but only recently has been gaining new popularity in the present: religious ideas and principles inexorably influenced Western institutions that we still have today. While Siedentop largely defends modernity as the product, or child, of Christianity, he also offers a cold question for future.

In recent times, the West has been embroiled in a "civil" war between religious conservatives on one side and secular agnostics, atheists, and even anti-institutionalists (mostly referring to being anti-Church and anti-religion) on the other (sometimes better referred to as the "culture wars"). Siedentop argues that this "disturbing" civil war is harming the fabric of Western civilization. Indeed, even learned religious leaders, like Pope Benedict XVI, in saying that his primary mission was the confrontation of secularism, made a huge error in not recognizing the contributions to secularism from Christianity itself (p. 360). This civil war is the product of BOTH sides not really understanding their own history and heritage. As the West is moving into the 21st Century, and with recent conflicts with the Islamic World, the serious question remains whether secular and religious forces in the West will unite to realize its shared heritage, or continue to wage a bitter, destructive, and ultimately needless, if not "disturbing" civil war.

Thus, Siedentop's work is much needed, and hopefully, is not going to be under appreciated by emotivist secularists and Christians who will likely see Siedentop as either "giving cover to Christians" or conversely, "giving cover to secularists." However, one area where Siedentop work falls a bit short, as opposed to Charles Taylor's "A Secular Age" is the brevity of "excessive" footnoted scholarship employed by Dr. Siedentop. While Taylor's A Secular Age is far longer, it is also more extensively footnoted, whereas Siedentop opted for a more accessible and popular style, at the expense of extensive footnoting. Regardless, "Inventing the Individual" is a timely work that is the next wave in modern scholarship finding the roots of Western liberalism.

Review of N. Elias, The Civilizing Process

Norbert Elais' The Civilizing Process is an explanation of the rise of the modern nation-state, and the process by which state formation engendered changes in the psyches and day-to-day manners of modern citizens. In short, his argument is that the functional complexity of post-medieval Europe went hand-in-hand with a sublimation of man's baser instincts. Upon first glance, the reader immediately wonders about the relevance of findings such as "in medieval society people generally blew their noses into their hands" (126). The dominant explanations for the rise of the modern nation-state have usually been based in economics (Marx, Polanyi, Moore, North & Thomas) and not in the sort of etiquette, manners and social customs that are the key operating concepts in Elias' work. However, Elias makes a convincing case that such customs deserve predominant explanatory weight, being vehicles of social control that lay the psychological groundwork for the nation-state. Such a finding helps political scientists answer the persistent question of why Western political institutions fail when placed into unfamiliar Third-World social environments. Most analysts have chalked this up to unequal economic development, but Elias would probably favor an argument emphasizing the lack of a "civilizing" process in Third-World societies. Such an explanation--like Putnam's reasoning in revealing Southern Italy's "civic culture" to be bankrupt--is admittedly open to criticism of essentialism, cultural determinism, and other postmodern shortcomings, but at a minimum, it certainly alerts us to pertinent, non-economic variables at work in the development-democracy relationship.
Elias selects three comparative cases, France, England and Germany, and performs a content analysis of medieval texts on manners, etiquette, and the transformation of the nobility from warriors into courtiers. These texts are the empirical evidence offered for his key variable, pan-European courtly manners delineated by social structure (classes and "monopolies" of power). The other key variable (it's rather unclear which one is "dependent" on the other) is the rise of the nation-state, which was brought about by an exogenous variable (population growth) as well as two intervening factors: 1) the decline of the nobility relative to national absolutism (both economically and militarily); and 2) the rise of a money economy. Elias shows how centrifugal forces in these societies (mainly the warrior-noble class) resisted the "integration" of absolutism/nationhood, but that these forces in the end were overcome by economics coupled with the centripetal social groundwork of pan-European "civilite" and social customs, leading to an increasingly complex interweaving of social functions. "Society was `in transition' . . . `Simplicity' . . . had been lost. People saw things with more differentiation" (61). "Social control was becoming more binding . . . with the structural transformation of society . . . a change slowly came about: the compulsion to check one's own behaviour" (70).
The near totality of Elias' evidence is qualitative, often selected from medieval writings and secondhand observations. Although he means to proceed inductively from these facts, Elias often reads like a deductive historian, especially when positing lawlike generalizations such as "the more or less sudden emergence of words within languages nearly always points to changes in the lives of people themselves, particularly when the new concepts are destined to become as central and long-lived as these" (48). In fact, his entire thesis can be summarized with another of his apparently deductive axioms: "The growth of units of integration and rule is always at the same time an expression of structural changes in society, that is to say, in human relationships" (254). Marxists, of course, would say that such social changes are themselves dependent upon changes in the relations of production, but Elias gives equal weight to social causes as to economic ones. The economy is by no means neglected in his analysis, since he gives currency, demand for property, and population growth prime explanatory roles in his causal process (despite the fact that there is no quantitative evidence given for these socioeconomic correlations, unlike the analysis of the same topics by North & Thomas). However, Marxists would surely have a fit over Elias' assertion that the civilizing process leads to a wholesale leveling of distinctions between social classes (430), as well as his claim that the modern state arose out of a virtual stalemate between the bourgeois and the nobility (327).
On the topic of state-society relations, Elias makes the provocative argument that for the past 300 years, "monopoly rulers" (including, but not limited to, absolutist kings) are mere functionaries, with the real power resting in the hands of their "subjects" (271). "Control of the centralized institutions themselves is so dispersed that it is difficult to discern clearly who are the rulers and who are the ruled" (315). Of course, under an instable balance of power (including today's Third World) the playing field is presumably up for grabs between different classes and parts of the state, but in a developed society, Elias would argue that the internalization of "civilized" norms means that the "strong" state, while resting on a cohesive social order, is not as autonomous from social forces as one might think.

 During the Early Modern Period, Germany was a decentralized power which featured many states. In a learned manner, he instructs the reader on why this had been so as compared to France. However, Elias' most helpful contribution is his contention that the court system had been a means through which knights and nobles developed a super-ego. As the nobles became less powerful in time, the court system also helped the bourgeoisie become more civilized. In time, Elias argued that all classes (upper, middle and lower) became more civilized as more individuals came into contact with the bourgeoisie after migrating to the towns and cities; this process, however, was, of course, an incredibly slow one.

Zoektocht naar Beagle Snep (#findingthebeagle #findingSNEP)

Kerninformatie

1. Beagle Snep vermist sinds 26/11/2017
Locatie: Kasteel Groenendaal te Hoeilaart (Duboislaan 27)

2. Twee erg waarschijnlijke spottings***:

- vrijdag 1/12 aan Ganzenpootvijver (melding op 3/12)

-dinsdag 5/12 in bos aan Groendaal (melding op 5/12)

 3. Minder zekere spotting**:

-maandag 4/12 aan Golf Royal te Tervuren

4. Weinig waarschijnlijke spotting*:

-21/12 aan Kapucijnendreef, grote poort te Tervuren (Engelstalige melding die vond dat gelijkenis met affiche)
- onwaarschijnlijk want : - jogger met beagle  (dus bij eigenaar) meermaals gezien
                                         -ondertussen waarschijnlijker dat Snep ofwel binnengenomen is of dood is

5. Erg onwaarschijnlijke spotting: °

-10/12 te Merchtem (net op kruispunt waar gewandeld werd met Snep een maand ervoor)

6. Zo goed als zeker andere beagle:
Prins van Oranjelaan te Ukkel
Wavre
Beersel
Bolta (teruggevonden beagle)
....






Tijdslijn:

Zondag 26/11

Beaglewandeling met O, K, I en Snep.

Melding dogid, dogzzz, sites vermist

Nacht: zwaar geregend

Maandag 27/11

10u: fietsen door bos, affiches hangen

regen

Bellen politie uccle, rode,

Dinsdag 28/11

Melding Beersel 

Politie, Veeweyde

Woensdag 29/11

Zoektocht huis aan huis Laarheidestraat Beersel

rond gereden in Beersel

Wavre: spotting beagle op parking tussen Gembloux en Wavre

Donderdag 30/11

Ter plaatse

Vrijdag 1/12

Artikel in DM, Radio 2

Zaterdag 2/12

Artikels in HLN, Nieuwsblad

Zondag 3/12

Herhaling wandeling, telefoon over spotting van vrijdag om 16u aan ganzenpootvijver

Beslissing geen spoorhond maar groep zoektocht

installeren camera's aan kapelletje en parking

Maandag 4/12

Overnachting in tentje aan ganzenpootvijver

Telefoon melding spotting te Tervuren Golf

Dinsdag 5/12

Spotting 15u in bos

Overnachting Tent in bos

woensdag 6/12

opstaan 7u ,  telefoon voor zoekactie gezien nieuwe spotting

Annulering debat Nassim Taleb 

Voormiddag: zoekactie met 5 mensen

Namiddag: zoekactie met 5 anderen + fiets

B. rijdt weg en ziet beagle aan prins van oranjelaan te Ukkel

Wij rijden met auto door Ukkel

kinderen die flyers bussen : 4 maal beagle gezien; jongen met beagle= papa week ervoor beagle gezien…aan prins van orangjelaan

donderdag 7/12

Melding Spotting te Ukkel = contact met JS die woont te Ukkel: beagle loopt er al enkele jaren (dus niet Snep)=>haal terug van twitter

peter trekt foto andere beagle

vrijdag 8/12

 wandel
zaterdag 9/12

controleer vp

zondag 10/12