Hayek’s Wings

Hayek uses an analogy of wings for the requirements for a well-​functioning extended order. He speaks of a universality: “[T]he development of wings is apparently the only way in which organisms can become able to fly.”² And yet: “[T]he wings of insects, birds, and bats have quite different genetic origins.” Hayek understands that a liberal society will be particularistic in its embodiment, and yet different liberal societies will be alike in broader ways, which qualify them as liberal. There is both a universal aspect and a particularistic aspect to what we call “Hayek’s wings.”

As wings provide lift, certain cultures—beliefs, mores, practices, institutions, etc.—provide lift to the human being as embodied in a society. The “wings” metaphor is applied society-​wide. Hayek’s wings are societal cultures of a significant classical-​liberal character, beginning with a respect among neighbors for one another’s stuff and, secondly, a decent regard on the part of the governors for the stuff of the governed. The elements range along a continuum, the wings being stronger or weaker.

In our view, the development of Hayek’s wings depended historically on the Christian tradition. In Christianity, every soul is a beloved creation of God and is made in His image. Hayek’s wings accord dignity to every person. Hayek’s wings include norms of personal responsibility, self-​restraint, and a healthy distrust of concentrated power. In the Christian tradition, the universe is created by God; humans live inside of God’s house. The challenge that God gives humans is to figure out His house rules and to learn to abide by them, by way of intellect and conscience. The Christian orientation instills belief in higher law—that is, a law against which governmental law can be judged and condemned as unlawful. Governors or rulers themselves are to discover and abide by the rules of a higher lawgiver. Historically, it was within western Christendom that classical-​liberal wings developed most fully. Hayek himself was not particularly religious, but The Fatal Conceit concludes with reflections on how the spirit of liberty depends on the spirit of religion—including a cultural conviction of higher law.³

Hayek explains how human beings came to live in an extended order that was produced not by “human design or intention.”⁴ Humans adopted rules that checked clannish instincts and made wider cooperation possible. Those rules, he says, were passed down by “tradition, teaching and imitation, rather than by instinct, and largely consist of prohibitions (“shalt not’s”) that designate adjustable domains for individual decisions.”⁵ Liberty, he wrote, is “as much the effect as the cause of the institutions we build.” Hayek warned of new developments “that gradually undermine and destroy the spirit that sustains [liberty].”⁶

In life among neighbors and other jural equals, the “shalt nots” direct people to refrain from messing with other people’s stuff—“stuff” being person, property, and promises-​due. Adam Smith denominated the set of “shalt nots” as commutative justice between jural equals.⁷ Next, flipping duties to correlative rights, the “shalt nots” provide a principle—the liberty principle—that can be made central in that culture’s attitude about government.

From the point of view of higher law, government may initiate coercion sometimes; indeed, the government is the special player which institutionalizes doing just that. But a culture may generate and venerate a presumption of liberty. Any exception to the principle bears the burden of proof. This presumption of liberty is the spine of classical liberalism. During the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, that cultural program enjoyed a certain ascendancy.

Government is a paradox. In Federalist Paper 51, James Madison wrote:

Getting governors—institutionalized coercers—to control themselves is the real challenge. Hayek’s wings, then, may be said to consist of robust allegiance to commutative justice among equals and a political culture that maintains a stable, functional government and a presumption of liberty in government policymaking. The culture must keep the governors from using their powers to serve their vanities and other vices, rather than adhering to the path of virtue—which, along Christian lines, corresponds to advancing the good of the whole.

Again, the moral and political rules for a modern liberal order are not hard-​wired into human nature. Hayek offered another analogy: There may be “fundamentally only one way to develop a phonetic language,” so that the common features shared by all languages do not prove that “they must be due to innate qualities.”⁹ All languages have common features, not because all humans throughout human history were born to talk but because certain linguistic features arise naturally as the only paths of communicative advancement and enrichment.

As advanced language is not characteristic of primitive man, neither are Hayek’s wings. They have recurred in diverse embodiments because they emerged as the only way to sustain a flourishing extended order among strangers. Useful here is the concept of natural convention, which transcends the stark separation between nature and convention.¹⁰ Language is a natural convention in that it is natural for some set of language conventions to emerge. The conventions are historic and somewhat particularistic, but the concept, language, is general and natural, at least in some of the important senses of “natural.” Like language, commutative justice and governmental authority are natural conventions.

“Man is not born wise, rational and good,” Hayek reminds us, “but has to be taught to become so. It is not our intellect that created our morals; rather, human interactions governed by our morals make possible the growth of reason.”¹¹ If we do not tend Hayek’s wings, they will not endure. As Hannah Arendt suggests, every generation is invaded by barbarians—we call them our children.¹² Arendt emphasizes that Hayek’s arc of moralization vitally depends on how children are brought up.

These classical liberal wings can produce real lift. They create room for people to cultivate wisdom and virtue, build loving relationships, contemplate existential questions, and develop sublime and enduring expressions of the human experience. Adam Smith taught that, beyond the basics, material condition is less important to human well-​being than moral condition.¹³ Thus, moral condition looms large in our concept of civilizational “lift” or ascent.

Polities in the West used to fly much better. Today, we can see and feel the atrophy. Our wings are still there in form, but the function is waning.

There is bidirectionality in causation between a society’s morals and its rulers (that is, the conduct of rulers and hence the selection of who is to be a ruler). Each is partially “downstream” of the other, making a diachronic spiral: Morals affect rulers which affect morals…

Now, let’s extend Hayek’s “wings” analogy to ponder the path of liberal orders. Imagine a spectrum of societies varying by the degree to which each has a stable, functional political system with veneration of liberal sensibilities. At the healthy end are soaring birds. Think of Tocqueville’s America of the 1830s, while recognizing the peculiar institutions and practices that deeply marred the spirit of liberty. Societies with both robust liberal institutions and a living moral character, which Tocqueville related to the spirit of religion,¹⁴ have strong muscles and plumage. They generate real, sustained lift.

As its moral underpinnings degrade and governmentalization expands, a society slides down the spectrum. Before a species loses flight altogether, its wings may atrophy and continue to enable only short, clumsy flight, as with chickens and turkeys, whose ancestors flew much better than they do. Much of the West today finds itself in the turkey stage. The United States maintains more lift than most European nations, but in both cases the moral and cultural underpinnings are weakening.

Next, consider birds whose wings have become vestigial, such as ostriches and emus. They can no longer fly at all. Such flightless birds might be used as an analogy for societies that once had functioning liberal wings—moral underpinnings and wholesome constitutions, courts, elections, etc.—but now have degraded morals and institutions. The wings may even be ostentatiously fanned—“Democracy!,” “Freedom!”—but they are atrophied. The propaganda is phony.

Another way to extend the analogy of societal flight is to consider a society that never had homegrown cultural wings but did develop some glide capacity. They might be likened to flying squirrels. Flying squirrels attain altitude, not by propulsion in a general medium (air), but by clambering up objects, such as trees. Perhaps the flying-​squirrel society makes use of modern technology, and perhaps its rulers give lip service to individual rights, rule of law, and democracy, and even manage limited ascent when the cultural winds are favorable. Some people “get ahead.” They clamber upward in material altitude, but that might not correspond to moral altitude. Once that altitude is lost, however, they come back down to the ground and must climb over people to “get ahead.” Genuine flight is not society-​wide, so such a society cannot be said to have Hayek’s wings.

But let’s return to societies that had had strong wings, as in Europe and its extensions like the United States. The wings are atrophying. With declining moral and cultural underpinnings, liberty is subverted and made subordinate to interests whose language reflects their unwholesomeness. During COVID, many Western governments subordinated the presumption of liberty to the whims of supposed experts, accompanied by censorship of dissenting views as “mis-” or “disinformation.”

In the European Union, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen epitomizes the unwholesomeness that makes the wings atrophy. She has championed initiatives of censorship (the Digital Services Act, the European Democracy Shield, EU’s Age Verification Blueprint, attacks on VPNs, etc.), all under the pretense of protecting democracy. She assaults free speech by ramping up third party censorship. The goal is to shut down access to political and cultural opposition and to flood the narrative zone with Brussels’s propaganda.

Von der Leyen infamously explained, “We have tools.”¹⁵ Censorship is but one of many tools used by the EU to interfere in elections and despoil democracy. In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek spoke of “atrocities” ushered in by those whose “professed principles” have been “readily condoned by many of our so-​called ‘liberals.’”¹⁶ Also, Brussels is bent on war, to make the EU a polity with accordant powers. As Charles Tilly said, war made the state.¹⁷ The wings of European nations are atrophying under the rule of the Brussels apparatchiks.

Hayek warned us about the road to serfdom. That road includes a propaganda machine that is “destructive of all morals,” since it “undermine[s] one of the foundations of all morals: the sense of and respect for truth.”¹⁸ Promises to relieve citizens of responsibility are “antimoral.”¹⁹ The most insidious effect of government, Hayek warned, is a “psychological change,” an “alteration in the character of the people.”²⁰ Absent the daily discipline of self-​command, from which Smith noted, “all the other virtues seem to derive their principal lustre,” there can be no upward orientation or moral cultivation.²¹ Today, as Joel Kotkin suggests in The Coming of Neo-​Feudalism,²² some elites are bent on establishing a modern serfdom.

Brexit did not spare the United Kingdom from the unwholesome drift. British citizens now face a higher chance of arrest for social media posts deemed “grossly offensive” or “indecent.” In 2023, officers from 37 police forces recorded 12,183 such arrests—approximately 33 per day—a nearly 58 percent rise since pre-​COVID.²³ Such trends in the UK illustrate how greatly, as Hayek put it, their “moral sense has been blunted.”²⁴

These societies may still enjoy the trappings of a liberal society, such as decent infrastructure, legacy institutions, and wealth, but the wings are stunted. As Hayek explained in The Fatal Conceit, “cultural evolution simulates Lamarckism” and happens fast: acquired cultural traits of the parents can be directly passed on to the immediate descendants.²⁵ More broadly, cultures can spread rapidly by imitation, conquest, and election interference. Thus, von der Leyen is, in a sense, the spawner of cultural poison for hundreds of millions of Europeans and others.

We have applied the “wings” metaphor to a given society’s overall cultural and institutional state. Now, we change the application to consider a network or subgroup within a society.

Suppose the society’s ruling class remains unwholesome. Although society as whole is largely unwholesome, wholesome cultures may be continued in smaller communities.

Such smaller communities are like penguins. Penguins cannot fly, but their wings are not useless. They have become fins. Penguins dart through a different cultural medium—a subculture. Swimming becomes another metaphor for moral ascendance. In the wholesome penguin community, Hayek’s wings still provide propulsion. Wisdom and virtue are still cherished in networks of families, churches, schools, and communities. People who take virtue seriously can find one another and swim under the surface of a wider culture that is atrophied. Rod Dreher wrote of the Benedict Option—withdrawing, like Saint Benedict, into wholesome, moral communities.²⁶ In a similar manner, people with upward orientation can keep alive the spirit and knowledge of Hayek’s wings. They may, however, expect to be hunted and persecuted, like Jesus and the disciples.

The human drama is not deterministic. Modern serfdom, said Hayek, can “be averted if that spirit reasserts itself in time and the people not only throw out the party which has been leading them further and further in the dangerous direction but also recognize the nature of the danger and resolutely change their course.”²⁷ We must work to improve the prospect that our grandchildren will live in cultures that are airborne like eagles or at least seaborne like penguins. In either case, the prospect for wholesomeness depends on appreciation of Hayek’s wings.