Where do human rights, reason, morals, religion, and government come from? F.A. Hayek’s cultural evolution vs. Rothbard’s ‘gang of thieves’

Human rights, reason, government, as well as everything about humanity come from, as 1974 Nobel laureate in Economics F.A. Hayek tells us, “processes of selective evolution”.

“We understand now that all enduring structures above the level of the simplest atoms, and up to the brain and society, are the results of, and can be explained only in terms of, processes of selective evolution…” (Hayek F. , 1981, p. 158)

If we envision mankind 20,000 years ago, we would see a sort of petri dish of competing cultures(languages/concepts/rules/laws) that are being ‘naturally selected’ based on their ability to grow the groups that contain them relative to other groups. Customs/concepts/rules/religions/etc. that inadvertently cause their respective social orders to grow whether it’d be via conquest, successful defense, migration into, imitation, etc., expand their order and the very customs/concepts/ideologies/etc. which helped them thrive.

Every rule/law has an effect in the productivity/growth/fitness/survival of a social order. Given that a society is likely to have hundreds of such rules it is impossible to know the exact impact of any one of them when considering the overall growth/stability/fitness/competitiveness of a society/order. For simplicity’s sake let us focus on just one rule, what is the optimal punishment for theft? Let’s assume that in culture/tribe A when a man steals he is killed which might deter many thefts but decreases the number of people in the group and all the productivity that this person might contribute in the future. In tribe B they cut off a hand, in tribe C they cut off a finger, and in tribe D 10 lashes. Let’s assume that tribe A’s custom/rule of killing the thief actually proved to lead to a “fitter” social order. Perhaps it turns out that cutting off the hand led to an unproductive person that became a big drain on rest of tribe and a weak/useless fighter when it came to offense/defense so it was better if he was dead. And that cutting off a finger and lashes proved to not be enough of a deterrent which led to many thefts and retaliatory violence which turned out to be more costly than losing a member of the tribe. Once again for simplicity’s sake let us assume that this was by far the most important custom/rule affecting the growth/fitness of the social order, and that because of this, tribe/culture A eventually displaced the others so that its kill-thieves rule/custom survived while the other punishments disappeared. The kill-thieves rule, is the result of human action, yet not the result of conscious human planning or design with the reasoned or conscious goal of having a more competitive/fit social order. The real designing of this rule or cultural element was made, not by innate instinct or human reason, but by ‘natural selection’/competition/‘group selection’/‘cultural evolution’.

Omnipresence, the ability to be everywhere at all times is another very useful concept that would provide a great benefit to religions that used it to describe their God (which happens to be yet another culturally evolved concept). Without God’s omnipresence you could get away with breaking the rules that give society order and only have to face the consequences brought upon you by fellow men. But if God is everywhere, watching your every move, you will be much more likely to follow those rules that give your society a productive social order. You might be able to steal and leech off of others and not get caught but God can see everything, not only is he everywhere all the time, he can even read your “impure” thoughts, so the idea of breaking the social rules that give society order are prevented from entering a brain before they can even lead to action. A similar case can be made for the concepts of sin/evil/etc.

So we have very briefly discussed two traditions, one related to the punishment of a behavior (theft) that can weaken an order, and one that helps members adhere to rules which are beneficial to the order (omnipresent God). And we can easily imagine how they could be naturally selected as they help the groups that house them be more competitive relative to others.

This concept of cultural evolution allowed Hayek to identify a sort of third dimension or mechanism for discovering knowledge which was neither instinctual (tied to our genetics/biology), nor the result of our reason. We are now in a position to understand F.A. Hayek when he summarizes:

“Culture is neither natural nor artificial, neither genetically transmitted nor rationally designed. It is a tradition of learnt rules of conduct which have never been ‘invented’ and whose functions the acting individuals usually do not understand”

Cultural evolution is the key to understanding the emergence and evolution of various social institutions which have transformed men from the ape-like tribal order to the current world-wide market economy. We can now better understand what Carl Menger referred to as “unintended results of historical development”, Menger writes:

“There exists a certain similarity between natural organisms and a series of structures of social life, both in respect to their function and their origin…Natural organisms almost without exception exhibit, when closely observed, a really admirable functionality of all parts with respect to the whole, a functionality which is not, however, the result of human calculation, but of a natural process. Similarly we can observe in numerous social institutions a strikingly apparent functionality with respect to the whole. But with closer consideration they still do not prove to be the result of an intention aimed at this purpose, i.e., the result of an agreement of members of society or of positive legislation. They, too, present themselves to us rather as “natural” products(in a certain sense), as unintended results of historical development. One needs, e.g., only to think of the phenomenon of money, an institution which to so great a measure serves the welfare of society, and yet in most nations, by far, is by no means the result of an agreement directed at its establishment as a social institution, or of positive legislation, but is the unintended product of historical development. One needs only to think of law, of language, of the origin of markets, the origin of communities and of states, etc.”

So where do human “rights” come from? “Rights” are just a concept that embodies the current culture’s ideas as to how people should be treated, and ultimately comes from this process of cultural evolution. I should add that there is no such thing as “natural rights” or “natural law”, or some human-reasoned ideal of what morals/ethics/rights/rules we should follow. All that seems to exist is ‘natural selection’/competition selecting among competing orders/ideas/rules/etc. Various thinkers who had the fortune of stumbling upon the vitality of individual freedom for socioeconomic prosperity attempted to use their reason and understanding of economics to design/discover some ideal moral/ethical code, the most famous of these might be people like Ayn Rand(Objectivism), Murray N. Rothbard (Natural Law), Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Argumentation Ethics), and more recently Stefan Molyneux (Universally Preferable Behaviour). These are wonderful intellectual achievements and competing suggestions for morality, but the ultimate designer of our complex and ever-changing social order and the rules/“morals”/“rights” that sustain it is ‘natural selection’/competition. These proposed ‘ethical systems’ are all sort of “centrally” planned moral/ethical codes which will always under-perform compared to what we should be striving for, competitive moral/legal systems, or to borrow Edward Stringham’s terminology “Private Governance”. By privatizing anything, including the legal/ethical system, we are allowing competitive discovery of what is best, which is precisely what natural selection has been doing for millions of years without our being aware of its culture/legal/moral/linguistic/economic achievements(until Hayek really nailed it). The best we could probably do is to help preach an understanding of economic freedom and allow for competitive moral/legal systems to continue to evolve in ways our reason can’t possibly predict. Which brings us to our next question.

What about human “reason”? It too has far more to do with cultural evolution than most realize. Imagine the following cruel scenario. A baby is taken from his mother at birth and raised by plain-looking mechanical arms. No human being looks at him in the eyes implying there is a “self” behind them. He is never spoken to and thus never picks up a language which is crucial for thinking. For example, the great economist Ludwig von Mises writes:

Thought is bound up with speech. The thinker’s conceptual edifice is built on the elements of language. The human mind works only in language; it is by the Word that it first breaks through from the obscurity of uncertainty and the vagueness of instinct to such clarity as it can ever hope to attain. Thinking and that which is thought cannot be detached from the language to which they owe their origin.

Henry Hazlitt makes the same point while elaborating further:

[referring to man in general]He could not think at all(or only at the level of a chimpanzee) if he did not inherit from the society and civilization in which he was born the priceless gift of an already created language. Without this he would not only be unable to reason logically, he would have nothing worthy to be called a “concept”. He could not frame a sentence; he could not even name things. We think in words, even in conversations. Our language, concepts, and logic are part of the social inheritance of all of us… As the great nineteenth-century philologist Max Mueller put it: “To think is to speak low. To speak is to think aloud”. The corollary of this is tremendously important. A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one’s vocabulary and the greater one’s awareness of the fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one’s thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing. We are told that the Tasmanian method of counting is: “One, two, plenty.” This points to a very significant truth. Man could not even count, certainly not beyond the number of fingers on his hands, until he had invented names and symbols for numbers. For in speaking of the need for language for thought, we must, of course, include symbols as an integral part of language. It is amazing how recent in human history are even the Arabic numerals, the denary system, and elementary signs for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division…

Man can be seen as having a potentially very powerful computer/brain that has the potential for reasonable and logical thinking but what makes the computer truly useful is the operating system and software that is loaded on to it as it “grows up”, in other words, the cultural/legal/linguistic concepts/traditions it absorbs. How would this unfortunate person “think” as an adult? Hayek writes

“It may well be asked whether an individual who did not have the opportunity to tap such cultural tradition could be said even to have a mind”

My guess is that a bonobo, raised among humans and taught some rudimentary sign language would act far more reasonably than this “culture-less” person.

Hayek summarizes his insights beautifully in this brief clip(thanks José Manuel González!):

It is natural selection and its inherent competition between cultures/groups that inevitably selects for a more reasonable culture because a more reasonable culture leads to more productivity and growth. Hayek again:

“The basic contention of theory is rather that competition will make it necessary for people to act rationally in order to maintain themselves. It is based not on the assumption that most or all the participants in the market process are rational, but, on the contrary, on the assumption that it will in general be through competition that a few relatively more rational individuals will make it necessary for the rest to emulate them in order to prevail. In a society in which rational behavior confers an advantage on the individual, rational methods will progressively be developed and be spread by imitation. It is no use being more rational than the rest if one is not allowed to derive benefits from being so. And it is therefore in general not rationality which is required to make competition work, but competition, or traditions which allow competition, which will produce rational behavior.” (Hayek F. A., 1981, pp. 75–76)(emphasis mine)

This previous quote should remind one of those cultures or religions that are very rigid and punish those whose thinking goes against religious dogma and thus keep society stuck in “unreasonable” superstition.

A couple of sentences later Hayek criticizes…

“those who are inclined to argue that competition will not work among people who lack the spirit of enterprise: let merely a few rise and be esteemed and powerful because they have successfully tried new ways, even if they may be in the first instance foreign intruders, and let those tempted to imitate them be free to do so, however few they may be in the first instance, and the spirit of enterprise will emerge by the only method which can produce it. Competition is as much a method for breeding certain types of mind as anything else: the very cast of thinking of the great entrepreneurs would not exist but for the environment in which they developed their gifts.” (Hayek F. A., 1981, p. 76)

The social institution of government arose because it was the enforcer of those rules/customs (like punishment of theft) which led to the stability/growth/fitness of the social order. Some sort of government or tribal power structure has been with man long before we even became homo-sapiens, especially to coordinate war/defense. War is one of the main reasons why we are social to begin with. Teaming up with others to kill and rape provides great evolutionary advantages. First you increase the economic pie available to your tribe/gene-pool by coordinating a raid and killing other men and children, and then you increase your reproductive success by raping the women and making them your wives. Towards the end of WWII, Russia’s Red Army is estimated to have raped over 2 million German women. As renowned evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker writes:

“… men go to war to get or keep women –not necessarily as a conscious goal of the warriors(though often it is exactly that), but as the ultimate payoff that allowed a willingness to fight to evolve. Access to women is the limiting factor on male’s reproductive success. Having two wives can double a man’s children, having three wives can triple it, and so on. The most common spoils of tribal warfare are women. Raiders kill the men, abduct the nubile women, gang-rape them, and allocate them as wives.” (Pinker, 1999, p. 510)

With respect to infanticide, Matt Ridley, while summarizing some of the work on the subject by scientist Sarah Hrdy, writes:

“In her study of the langurs of Abu in India, Hrdy discovered a grisly fact: The murder of baby monkeys by adult male monkeys was routine. Every time a male takes over a troop of females, he kills all the infants in the group. Exactly the same phenomenon had been discovered in lions a short time later: When a group of brothers wins a pride of females, the first thing they do is slaughter the innocents. In fact, as subsequent research revealed, infanticide by males is common in rodents, carnivores, and primates. Even our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, are guilty… By killing their stepchildren the males would halt the females’ milk production and so bring forward the date on which the mother could conceive once more. An alpha male langur or a pair of brother lions has only a short amount of time at the top, and infanticide helps these animals to father the maximum number of offspring during the time” (Ridley, 2003, p. 213)

We should quickly note that it is to a large degree thanks to the flexibility of our minds and their ability to override instinct, that we have been able to absorb a culture that is more peaceful.

The great economist and Libertarian author Murray N. Rothbard writes that “the State is the enemy of mankind”. Well, yes to some degree but also no. Many people, myself included, can somewhat sympathize with this statement, states/governments do awful things like wars and oh so much more, but the truth is that governments, regardless of their horrible history in terms of wars/slavery/oppression/etc. got mankind to where it is by providing the aforementioned functions better than the existing competition. Rothbard also famously refers to government “as a predatory gang of robbers, enslavers, and murderers” which although from a linguistic perspective can be seen as true since taxes can be seen as theft/robbery by those who don’t want to pay them/etc., it is a statement and way of looking at the government which does not represent its actual function and evolution. Gangs of robbers are a conspiracy for the purpose of theft which is clearly identified as such by the social order at large, yet governments/states with their taxation/theft, as Carl Menger wisely states, “do not prove to be the result of an intention aimed at this purpose”. This sort of mindset Rothbard is preaching, where everything that is the result of human action is the result of conscious human planning or intent/design/conspiracy, is what you get when you are not aware of or ignore the Hayekian/Mengerian/etc. ‘cultural evolution’/‘third dimension’ for vital factors as to why things are the way they are. Thinking along similar lines Rothbard writes “Since production must always precede predation, the free market is anterior to the State” which I believe is an intellectual error. The so-called ‘free market’ and State are complex social institutions which have co-evolved. Primates exchange favors, they have hierarchies/‘proto-governments’. Rothbard is basically saying with 100% certainty and distinction that the chicken came before the egg (or vice versa). If Rothbard wants to find the original “gang of robbers” who came up with the idea of setting up a state to conspire to rob and fool everyone he will need to find the geniuses that invented the market, money, private property, etc. and refer to Menger, Mises, and Hayek as misguided for not observing the obvious.

Thanks to concepts that eventually coalesced in the minds of people like Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Rothbard himself and numerous others, now we can properly understand the tribalistic-anti-market nature of man, the evolution of “the market process” and thus social order, the need to privatize in order to allow competitive knowledge discovery in all areas (legal/moral) which will not only bring tremendous productive/technological advancements but will also lead to great social harmony, peace, and so much more.With this understanding we can look at history and see times where governments have inadvertently both helped and hindered their respective social orders by promoting/protecting or curtailing the economic freedom necessary for economic competition to function. Very briefly, it is the people’s freedom to choose on what they spend their money which motivates and forces competitors/producers to innovate and copy innovations from each other in order to stay competitive/alive. That’s it, it is that easy, freedom forces every social order to constantly innovate/learn due to people’s freedom to choose what they deem best. Governments are monopolies who generally get their wealth via force and are thus immune from competitive incentives so they grow in inefficiency and via their edicts/rules can paralyze competitive knowledge discovery/innovation doing great harm to their societies. Below Hayek summarizes the role of governments in commerce and provides an important history lesson:

Governments have more often hindered than initiated the development of long-distance trade. Those that gave greater independence and security to individuals engaged in trading benefited from the increased information and larger population that resulted. Yet, when governments became aware how dependent their people had become on the importation of certain essential foodstuffs and materials, they themselves often endeavoured to secure these supplies in one way or another. Some early governments, for instance, after first learning from individual trade of the very existence of desirable resources, tried to obtain these resources by organising military or colonising expeditions…

Rather, it would seem as if, over and over again, powerful governments so badly damaged spontaneous improvement that the process of cultural evolution was brought to an early demise. The Byzantine government of the East Roman Empire may be one instance of this. And the history of China provides many instances of government attempts to enforce so perfect an order that innovation became impossible. This country, technologically and scientifically developed so far ahead of Europe that, to give only one illustration, it had ten oil wells operating on one stretch of the river Po already in the twelfth century, certainly owed its later stagnation, but not its early progress, to the manipulatory power of its governments. What led the greatly advanced civilisation of China to fall behind Europe was its governments’ clamping down so tightly as to leave no room for new developments, while, as remarked in the last chapter, Europe probably owes its extraordinary expansion in the Middle Ages to its political anarchy.

“political anarchy” Just means that there is no overseeing government monopolizing legal/moral/ethical knowledge and thus preventing the superior knowledge-discovery that cultural evolution brings about.

These temporary leads when it comes to civilization and the relative quick advantage that Europeans have recently enjoyed has little if anything to do with biological differences. The cultural (NOT biological) evolutionary process which has created ‘the market process’ and its various components like trade, money, economic competition, banking/finance, and interest rate coordination… is much, much faster than the slow genetic biological evolution thus rendering slight genetic differences between races largely irrelevant. As Hayek tells us:

“With respect to what we mean by cultural evolution in a narrower sense, that is, the fast and accelerating development of civilization…Since it differs from genetic evolution by relying on the transmission of acquired properties, it is very fast, and once it dominates, it swamps genetic evolution” (Hayek F. A., 1981, p. 156)

Also:

“…biological evolution would have been far too slow to alter or replace man’s innate responses in the course of the ten or twenty thousand years during which civilisation has developed…. Thus it hardly seems possible that civilisation and culture are genetically determined and transmitted. They have to be learnt by all alike through tradition.” (Hayek’s ‘The Fatal Conceit’ page 16)

Given the lack of familiarity with the aforementioned concepts, it is quite understandable how various “race-realist” fallacies which equate civilization with white people are re-emerging. Although it is certainly true that there must be differences in mental ability just like there are differences in physical ones (blacks have on average bigger dicks), these differences are largely irrelevant. If a human being can grow up and learn something as complex as a language, which can take even the brightest of people years to master, everyone has more than enough intelligence to understand the basics of how freedom and privatization are the key to rapid socioeconomic progress. Clever economic education/marketing is the key.

With the evolutionary thinkers like Hayek, and those more focused on individuals like Rothbard, you really get the best of both worlds, you get an understanding of how evolutionary forces (cultural evolution/competition/‘third dimension’) help shape and evolve the social order(Hayek) and you also get a great understanding of how governing structures are influenced by good’ol corruption(Rothbard). I hope this brief article helps introduce some readers to Hayek’s vital evolutionary approach which is still relatively unknown or underrepresented in the popular libertarian movement.

Hayek’s final book “The Fatal Conceit”, at only 157 pages for the main text and insightful appendices, is a superb introduction and overview of Hayek’s monumental contributions and thus how the entire world works.

Check out these other related essays:

“Hayek’s Theory of Cultural Evolution: A Critique of the Critiques” by Horst Feldman

Hayek vs. Mises, Rothbard and Hoppe and the growth of the ‘Alt-Right’ (15 mins)

Herbert Spencer’s influence on Carl Menger and thus the Austro-Libertarian revolution (11 mins)

Review of Matt Ridley’s book “The Evolution of Everything” (11 mins)