SSM AND HAYEK: Jonah Goldberg replies to Jonathan Rauch

...In his excellent book, Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America, Jonathan Rauch tackles what he calls the Hayekian argument against gay marriage (you can read the relevant excerpt from his book here). According to Rauch, the Hayekian problem with same-sex marriage is simply this: We do not, and most often cannot, know the full importance of some customs and institutions, specifically the mother of all institutions -- marriage. In numerous books and essays, Friedrich Hayek explained how societies, like markets, develop organically into what he called "spontaneous orders." No single person possesses anything close to the invisible collective knowledge held by the society as a whole. In much the same way that the price of a given stock or commodity may not make sense to any individual, the collective actions of millions of individual actors via the market determine the best or most efficient or most intelligent price. ...

The only way to make the implementation of homosexual marriage un-radical is to persuade people that such a move isn't radical. And such persuasion is less dependent on reason than it is on time. Let's put it this way: Imagine that it's 1904 instead of 2004. Now, let's suppose that the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage. Imagine the social and political upheaval that would ensue. Now, according to its advocates, gay marriage is a matter of justice, so presumably legalization in 1904 would have been as warranted as in 2004. But since virtually no one was asking for gay marriage in 1904, the move would have seemed needlessly or even insanely radical, and no amount of reasonable argument would change that perception.

Rauch's version of Hayekianism says that change is necessary whenever the injustice is great. What if, instead, change is necessary when the injustice is obvious? For Rauch, of course, the injustice is already obvious. But obviousness for any individual is never the right criteria. The benefits of socialism or economic planning -- which Hayek dubbed "the fatal conceit" -- were obvious to a great mass of intellectuals and workers. No, the standard must be obviousness for the society generally.

In a sense, Rauch is uprooting Hayek by arguing that Hayek would support any reform to existing civilization that corrected the unjust, but he doesn't allow for the fact that it takes time for society to learn from the obviousness of this unjustness. ...

...It sounds awfully utopian to believe that in the span of a generation a few judges, under popular pressure, can convince the rest of society to accept an unprecedentedly radical revision of an institution that existed millennia before traffic lights, and upon which far more depends.

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posted by Eve at 1:33 AM | link

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