A Fatal Concession

The Fatal Conceit is an exciting and stimulating book, which pithily restates many of Hayek’s earlier arguments and adds new and connecting ideas. It is also a hard-nosed critique of the rationalistic conceit referred to in the title, and in this regard it brooks no other nonsense than a few half-hearted concessions to religion at the end. Since Hayek undoubtedly meant these to be a sort of Humean teaser, it would be ungrateful not to let oneself tease, and I am happy to oblige—speaking as one agnostic to another.

Hayek’s train of reasoning is, in brief, as follows. Religious beliefs “are not true or verifiable or testable—in the same sense as are scientific statements, and are certainly not the result of rational argumentation” (p. 137). As a consequence—I take it—he feels “as little entitled to assert as to deny the existence of what others call God, for I must admit that I just do not know what this word is supposed to mean” (p. 139). However, far too often this sort of rational assessment of religious belief has led intellectuals to assess in similar terms the role of religion in the development of society and thus to debunk its importance. According to Hayek, this move is another installment of rationalistic hubris, and the fatality here is an understanding of the role religion has played in bolstering those rules of conduct that made possible an extended, and expanding, social order. Often such rules have appeared incomprehensible and unjustifiable when inquired into by rational methods, but religion has substituted like a charm, as it were, thus securing a long-term beneficial order. This line of argument leads Hayek the agnostic to offer a conciliatory handshake over the garden fence to the neighbor, whose habitual religiosity helps keep up the good work—albeit out of beliefs that can only be characterized as “symbolic truths,” and that only “as a gesture of appreciation” (p. 137).

While the habitual Christianity and Judaism of the suburbs richly deserve this sort of condescension, especially if one could discern a stronger vein of irony in it, we are here in danger of being drawn into an idyl that may blind us to some harsher and more pervasive aspects of the role of religion in society.

In a different context Hayek maintains that, “Mere existence cannot confer a right or moral claim on anyone against any other” (p. 152). However, exactly the opposite idea has been central to most forms of the religion which, I take it, Hayek particularly would credit with support for the extended order: simply by being created one is entitled to the assistance of the creator’s other creatures. And more often than not the idea has been that such rights, claims, or entitlements should be honored collectively through political arrangements. Today leaders of virtually every strand of Christianity present at the heart of their gospel the “Mirage of Social Justice”—but here produced by a conceit of eternal reason. More often than not the whole litany is presented in the sort of hollow rights-terms Hayek so aptly unmasks, making the case even less acceptable as a supplication.

When Hayek suggests that “the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family” (p. 137), he is greatly at variance with the truth. The dominant strands of Christianity—to say nothing of several other “main monotheistic” beliefs (p. 136)—are not friends of the system of several property at the core of Hayek’s extended order of humanity. He cannot simply confine his criticism to the abominations that go under the name of “liberation theology”; he will have to include most “social” statements that issue from the Vatican—or its travel department, from Anglican synods, from Presbyterian general assemblies, and so forth. He will there find forms of welfarism so unctuous that they are likely to survive a great deal longer than the declared socialism which he has fought so well for so long.

As for the family, Hayek is probably right in a different sense than the one intended here, but one more in keeping with his general thesis. Rather than lending support to “the” family, it would seem that most forms of Christianity and reform Judaism are lending feeble and unprincipled comfort to what may be a fundamental transformation of family patterns in developed societies. As divorce, re-marriage, single parenting, etc. have developed on a large scale—to a large extent in response to market forces—the various confessions have spinelessly shed one principle after another to stay in the popularity-ratings. To the extent that this may smooth the transition, if such it is, this religious support is of course welcome. But don’t let the perhaps benign effects of this and similar pieces of clerical opportunism blind us to the over-all pattern of the social role of religion in modern society.

The fact is that the major monotheistic religions are— deeply and inherently—morally promiscuous. Sometimes they have played the supporting role in the development of the great order of humanity that Hayek ascribes to them; more often they have not. At the moment most Christian confessions, at least, are as far removed from his ideals of individual freedom through spontaneous order and spontaneous order through individual freedom, as is any left-over socialist, as it were; and he should have no more patience with the sanctimonious conceit of the former then he has with the latter.

Hopefully it is superfluous to point out that this admonition does not entail a rationalistic debunking of any and every role for religion in the development of the abstract social order. That is a matter for judgement, and no conceit.