...But is it Christian?

Soon after writing my last blog post, I was reminded by a couple of other blog posts (here and here) that there are many Christians out there wondering what the proper political orientation is from a biblical perspective, and that Hayek's liberalism isn't exactly drawn straight out of scripture (Hayek himself was agnostic). Where does that leave me? Am I being true to my faith, and trying to build a consistent Christian worldview? Or am I simply picking and choosing what I want to believe?

The Party of Life: the liberalism of F. A. Hayek

The postscript to Friedrich Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty is entitled, "Why I Am Not a Conservative." For Americans aware of Hayek's influence on political developments of the past half-century or so, this title may be astonishing. Aren't conservatives the very people most influenced by and most appreciative of Hayek's work? How can he devote a whole essay to why he isn't one of them?

The whole essay is indeed confusing for Americans, and from the tone of the essay one senses that Hayek was exasperated at the confusion Americans have created over the terms "liberal" and "conservative." As I've written before, the two terms scarcely mean in American today what they have traditionally meant; the term "liberal" has probably suffered more distortion even than "conservative." For this reason most Americans reading the essay will probably experience a great deal of confusion over who exactly Hayek is talking about, excepting those who are very knowledgeable about the history of ideas. Nevertheless, this is precisely what makes the essay so relevant. It is, in some sense, Hayek's warning not to do exactly what we have done: we have so closely associated his ideas with American conservatism that we can't tell what he was actually saying.

Government imitates Arrested Development

From The Washington Times:

"Republicans wanted more tax cuts. Democrats wanted more spending. They got both in the tax-cut deal President Obama struck with the GOP, and it's the federal budget that will take the hit.

Just 10 days after Mr. Obama's deficit commission sounded an alarm over the long-term health of the government's finances, the Senate is slated to vote Monday on a tax cut and spending package that will add $857 billion to the federal deficit in the upcoming years, likely setting a new records for red ink."

Wow, that's a new one. Republicans wanted to tax less, Democrats wanted to spend more. So their brilliant compromise is to do both.

It reminds me of that scene on Arrested Development season one when Maeby convinces George Michael that they can just throw away one banana for each dollar they take from the cash register:

Maeby: I can’t believe I volunteered for this. This is my stupidest rebellion ever. (taking money from the register) Hey, you want to go play skee-ball?

George Michael: Well, this is the cash drawer. My dad’s going to come by at the end of the weekend and the number of bananas has to match the amount of money in here.

Maeby: Oh, so it all has to even out?

George Michael: Exactly.

Maeby: Easy. Banana... (throws a banana into a garbage bin...) Buck. (and takes a buck from the register) Banana... Take a buck. (doing it again as George Michael just watches)

Oh, but not to worry. The government knows what it's doing:

"Republicans and Democrats who support the deal point out that the country's short-term economic problems are paramount, and argue that without economic growth, the long-term budget picture would look gloomier still."

Because, as we all know, short-term happiness is the most important key to long-term success.

Symbol and Meaning

I made an abbreviated effort to express my current epistemology of mathematics, in which symbols take on a primary role, to one of my fellow grad students. His response was, "But they're more just than symbols."

Just symbols? I can see where he's coming from. Anyone who's tried to explain mathematics to someone else knows the frustration of trying to express concepts as more than mere symbolic manipulation. As grad students we're expected to teach mathematics to students who are often pretty uninterested in math, and who have often been taught their whole lives that math is nothing but symbols which have no connection to the real world. Trying to convince these students that there is real meaning behind these symbols can be exceedingly frustrating, especially if they care about their grades but not about the material. Students who try merely to memorize symbolic manipulations without understanding any of the concepts will do poorly in a college calculus class, and the worst part is they might not ever know why.

Divine Justice, Human Tyranny

The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it; but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. John 3:8

Is God sovereign over history, or not? Is he sovereign over nature, or not?

It is common for people to cite the horrific events of history as reason either to doubt God's goodness or to doubt his sovereignty, with the result either way that we doubt his existence. It is now also fashionable these days to cite the very mechanism by which human beings came into existence--biological evolution--as evidence that God doesn't exist.

Christians, in response, are prone to answering with theological excuses connecting the fall of Adam with the taint of nature. I won't argue the biblical merits of these excuses one way or another. What I'm interested in is the underlying principle behind such arguments. The complaint is that God doesn't share a basic sense of justice with humans; the defense is that, "Well, yes he does, it's just hard to see it at first."

I question whether this is the proper response to such complaints. Not only does it undermine God's power, but it feeds the human presumption that his own sense of justice is necessarily correct. Yet the same experiences which cause us to question God's justice should perhaps more often cause us to question our own.

Individualism and force

I think I can summarize Hayek's individualism as follows.

There is a false kind of individualism which tells us that we can be free of all force. Taken literally, of course, this is just silly. We will never be free of the force of gravity, or any of the natural forces acting on our bodies at all times. Yet we are tempted to think that what is true of natural forces is not true of cultural forces. We think that individuals can be completely independent of everything except his own will.

This is simply mistaken. In any society, the individual will be subject to pressures from all around him: obviously from people he knows, less obviously yet no less truly from people he doesn't know, and still more indirectly from the institutions which shape his culture. There is no escape from these forces, any more than we can escape the laws of nature.

The only question from a political point of view is, shall the individual be subject to personal or impersonal forces? Shall the individual be coerced into abiding by the will of one or several other individuals, or shall he be free to choose his own path through the set of cultural forces which press against him? By distributing power equally among all individuals, we do not free him from all societal forces, but only from the will of arbitrary rulers.

In traditional terms, we might say man is either subject to the will of other men or subject to the will of God alone. Hayek doesn't see it that way, but it is still helpful to convey the crucial point: the forces to which man must be subject are either personal and arbitrary or impersonal and abstract. These are the only choices.

Americans are largely plagued by false individualism. Our politicians on the Left and on the Right promise us that they will free us from the forces which necessitate difficult choices on our part. The more we buy into this, the more we simply trade impersonal abstract forces for personal ones. Sometimes it's natural to favor personal over impersonal force; impersonal forces are more difficult to understand. But when force is allowed to come from select individuals, then we are all subject to their personal agenda. If these select individuals were divine, this wouldn't be a problem. Since they are not, we will usually suffer for it in the end.

A meditation on progress

In Chapter Three of The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek sets out to justify a measured form of progress. He begins,

Writers nowadays who value their reputation among the more sophisticated hardly dare to mention progress without including the word in quotation marks. The implicit confidence in the beneficence of progress that during the last two centuries marked the advanced thinker has come to be regarded as the sign of a shallow mind. Though the great mass of the people in most parts of the world still rest their hopes on continued progress, it is common among intellectuals to question whether there is such a thing, or at least whether progress is desirable.

Up to a point, this reaction against the exuberant and naive belief in the inevitability of progress was necessary.... There never was much justification for the assertion that "civilization has moved, is moving, and will move in a desirable direction," nor was there any ground for regarding all change as necessary, or progress as certain and always beneficial....

But if the fashionable disillusionment about progress is not difficult to explain, it is not without danger. In one sense, civilization is progress and progress is civilization. The preservation of the kind of civilization that we know depends on the operation of forces which, under favorable conditions, produce progress.