Travelling around the crowded bazaars and haats of India, it becomes obvious to the trained mind that there exists a “natural order,” that illiterate people are ethical, that they are all “rule-following animals.” The question then arises: Where did these ethics and rules come from?
When I was a student at the LSE, one of my professors, lecturing on the market-state debate, haughtily dismissed anarcho-capitalist thinking with these words:
“Even a village fair requires a policeman.”
Yet, this admonition rings hollow in India. Here, the policeman is invariably a predator. His role in the market is far removed from what my professor at the LSE thought it should be. And it is this fact that reinforces the fundamental truth that a natural order exists. If so, we must study how it comes about. We must study how this ethical behaviour emerged.
It is precisely when we ask ourselves this fundamental question that Friedrich von Hayek’s insight into the evolution of ethics becomes crucial to any understanding of this natural phenomenon. Hayek, as I have recently blogged, wrote that our ethics lie “between instinct and reason.” What this means is that we have overcome our instinct to plunder – but have not reasoned why. These ethics that we follow in markets have evolved. They have not been objectively designed by anyone. They have been passed down from generation to generation, and learnt by imitation. Let us try and understand the process.
We must begin with the fundamental axiom – that man “acts.” We study “human action” – and that is interpersonal exchange. We must theorise as to how human beings came to be possessed of ethics that make peaceful interpersonal exchange possible. At the core of our investigation sits the truth that the “end” we pursue through our actions is always the acquisition of “desired objects.” If we had been governed by our animal instincts, we would snatch and grab all that we desire. We would not exchange. Yet, the fact remains, visible to all who care to observe, that all our illiterates carry out exchanges in the market; they do not grab and run. It is because of their ethics that there is a “natural order.”
Praxeology teaches us that the human mind possesses a logical structure, that there are “laws of thought,” that we are powered by a “sense of gain.” This implies that human minds in ages past came to the realisation that there was more to gain in social co-operation under the division of labour than under either savage barbarism or isolated self-sufficiency. The newcomer to Rome thus followed the “rules of the game” and did in Rome what the Romans do – which is exchange. But no one reasoned more than that. The newcomer, finding life in Rome better than life in the jungle, settled down to it. His children followed his example. People did whatever they thought gave them a better life, whereby they gained.
The Action Axiom does not concern itself with legal niceties like self-ownership and original appropriation of the fruits of nature. Murray Rothbard’s Ethics of Liberty refers to self-ownership and original appropriation as axioms, but these are more in the nature of legal “maxims” than fundamental praxeological axioms.
All human action in markets is directed towards “ends.” The end in question is the acquisition of desired objects. It is in this pursuit that man discovered a novel “means” – giving up something in exchange for whatever was desired. In all these exchanges, both parties gained. The exchanges occur for this reason alone. And, being win-win games, people go on repeating such actions. But no one reasons why.
Hayek’s insight that we learn these ethics by imitation is also worth noting. A child, desirous of a chocolate, will see his father buy it for him. He will learn that if he wants chocolates, or anything else, this is the way in which he must proceed. Thus, it becomes crystal clear, the natural order around us persists not because of any “objective ethics” but rather through an ethical system that lies “between instinct and reason.” Civilisation is artificial. Civilisation is learnt behaviour. And this is how it arose. This is why it persists.
Nowhere else does this conclusion ring truer than in India. Here, police stations are all located in cities and towns, never in villages. The majority of the population lives in a “natural order,” far removed from the attention of the police. And, whenever a policeman is seen ambling around an urban market, all the rule-following animals there know that a barbarian is in their midst, someone who will snatch and grab whatever he wants.
This natural order is India’s strength. It shows that we are a highly civilised people. We are not a nation of barbarians. We are all rule-followers. We all operate “between instinct and reason.” We possess a deep-rooted “commercial culture.”
Thus, liberal democracy is not the “end of history.” There is something higher on the evolutionary scale than democracy.
And that is Natural Order.
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