Like gardeners, free marketeers begin by observing—and respecting—the world around them
Georges Seurat: The Gardener, 1882. Image by Wikimedia Commons
Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek believed gov't shouldn't “shape” the economy through mandates, but instead “cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment” (as with gardening). Below, Law & Liberty elegantly expands on this pillar of free marketism—that “grown” economics fulfills our needs far better than “invented” top-down principles.
[Michael Oakeshott, the late English political thinker said] that when we engage in the project of “inventing” institutions from so-called “first principles" ... the answers we come up with are bound to be less effective and less suited to the character and dispositions of the people called to live under them than the answers that have grown up over generations of careful and controlled experimentation... This contrast between the “grown” and the “invented” or “designed” is, for me, the key one.
Let me make a small digression and offer a practical example of what is at stake: The late Norman Barry, a British professor of political thought, told me he knew of two American universities built near one another at roughly the same time. In the first, the rationalist designers laid out a campus that looked spectacular from the air, with lovely landscaping and curving symmetrical pathways that gave the whole a pleasing aspect—at least from 30,000 feet. To do so, however, those pathways had to follow routes that were inconvenient and awkward for those on the ground who were using them to get to where they needed to go, which is actually the purpose of pathways. The campus became a battleground between authorities trying to get people to respect their utopian but impractical “first principles” or “invented” design and the students who were late and needed to get to class.
The other campus, under the authority of traditionalists, took a different tack. They built their buildings but held off landscaping for a year or two so that they could observe where students actually wanted to go and the paths that they trod to get there. Once established, the university simply paved over the paths and landscaped around them. The result was not so nice to look at from the air, but resulted in a harmonious relationship between the authorities and those who were trying to get from their dorm to the lecture hall and then the cafeteria. Put another way, the pathways on the campus “grew” out of the needs and experiences of those who had to use them.
Those who think of society more as a garden than a machine might be called “gardeners.” They see humans as autonomous beings whose choices and actions allow the unfurling of their character over time, not as dials to be twiddled. … Gardeners in nature are mindful of the fact that while they certainly wish to put their stamp on their garden, they are very far indeed from being in total control. They are only one participant among many, not master of all the others. …
The alternative to the gardening metaphor is that of the engineers or designer. Designers believe that institutions derive their legitimacy from their conformity to some set of abstract first principles, such as, say, that all authority derives from “the people” or that “democracy” must always trump established interests, or that perfect equality of outcome is the ideal social arrangement.
They further believe that the worth of institutions can be determined by how their results conform to an abstract pattern that they find aesthetically pleasing. Thus an economy that does not produce identical outcomes for men and women, or whose income distribution is too “skewed” or whose distribution of jobs among ethnic groups is not as these “designing minds” think it ought to be, or a city that is “too” dispersed or “too” reliant on cars instead of transit, or a voting system that “underrepresents” certain groups relative to their weight in the population, is an arrangement that is morally suspect and subject to correction or preferably wholesale replacement by something “better.”
The traditionalist gardener, by contrast, thinks human action does not proceed from abstract first principles, but from messy and very un-theoretical practical experience of what works and has passed the test of time and is acquiesced in by the population regardless of how “quaint” or “inefficient” it appears to those who value only abstractions and not practical success.
Marxism or radical feminism or Chavismo or progressivism or any of the other fashionable critiques of liberal capitalism start from theoretical premises: society is corrupt because of inequality or sexism or colonialism and because it does not measure up in theory, it must be discarded and replaced with one “designed” to eliminate the evil du jour.
But what our society’s critics do not realize is that those who think the liberal-capitalist order worth defending are not engaged in the same enterprise as they are.
Liberal capitalism was not “designed” by anyone. … The society we have inherited grew up out of the experience of uncounted generations of those who went before us. The job of gardeners is therefore not to theorize, but to untangle and interpret, to understand not to design, to respect the seasons and the nature of the garden’s residents, to create the conditions in which the garden can flourish.
Read the whole thing here.
Follow Opportunity Now on Twitter @svopportunity
Go Deeper:
Opp Now enthusiastically welcomes smart, thoughtful, fair-minded, well-written comments from our readers. But be advised: we have zero interest in posting rants, ad hominems, poorly-argued screeds, transparently partisan yack, or the hateful name-calling often seen on other local websites. So if you've got a great idea that will add to the conversation, please send it in. If you're trolling or shilling for a candidate or initiative, forget it.