HAIDT VS HAYEK (ET AL) : WHAT THEY FAILED TO GRASP
(reposted from a comment to boettke)
First, Haidt provides the first empirical comparison of competing moral codes. Second he demonstrates that they are evolutionary in origin. Third that each represents a conflict in the male female reproductive strategy – with us as male outliers. Fourth, that this reproductive strategy is heritable, and not voluntary.
Fifth that our political preferences reflect our reproductive strategies. And that we vote our moral codes and nothing more. And do nothing but attempt to justify them. So our arguments are futile. (This reflects the trend for pragmatic and empirical governments to evolve into empirical and moral -ie: pseudoscientific – governments – even in China)
And sixth that democracy gives voice to those competing reproductive strategies.
What he fails to grasp, but Emmanuel Todd does, is that the family structure, is a compromise between these competing strategies.
What neither grasps is that universal democracy under redistribution allows the female majority to exercise their reproductive strategy to undermine the family, and the compromise, between the genders that the family constructs.
So redistributive democracy without the universal absolute family, and with the immigration of traditional non-nuclear families en mass, creates a competition between family structures, which must, without question, and against all possible argument, create demand for the expansion of the state, a reduction in willingness to redistribute, and increase in political over competing morals, friction, and the necessity for an authoritarian government.
We must realize that cosmopolitan libertinism and open immigration are fallacies if the jewish enlightenment just as much as Kant’s apriorism is a continental justification for german authoritarianism and duty, just as much as the anglo enlightenment’s fallacy of an aristocracy of everybody is a justification for naval merchants to seize political power from agrarian gentry.these are necessary strategies to justify the needs if unlanded, landed, and island peoples – and the family structures they employ.
The conservatives were right that normative capital is the requirement for the high trust society that reduces transaction costs sufficiently that free trade and universal property rights and a weak state are possible and rational. Without those aristocratic egalitarian norms, and the absolute nuclear family that suppresses all free riding and provides a universal reproductive compromise , liberty is neither possible nor preferable.
Libertine cosmopolitan libertarians were wrong.
Unfortunately, Hayek, mises, popper and their followers failed, just as did their peers in logic, math and physical science to solve the problems of epistemology, ethics and politics when our ethics math and science had to accommodate greater than human scale at the end of the nineteenth century.
When I publish this fall (fingers crossed) I will fill in the blanks. And solve the problem.
If you want to chat about Haidt, and the implications of current research on politics, then I’ll put the time in.
There is a reason western families produced armies and muslims had to rely on slave armies. There is a reason Catholics are poorer than Protestants: family structure.
Family matters.
Source date (UTC): 2014-06-24 04:21:00 UTC
Leave a Reply