Since Townhall.com has a facility for making comments on articles, I offered some comments on Nathaniel Blake's piece on the need for Evangelicals to make their peace with evolution.
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Spontaneous order
by Karl, Feb 24 2006 08:58 PM
One thing I've noticed, which I find very interesting, is this: Both the Left and the Right believe in spontaneous order. And both sides of the political spectrum reject it.
The Left uniformly believes that a complicated system like an economy has to be run by a central planner of some sort – government regulators, planning bureaus, ministers of finance, and so on. They continue to believe in Planned Economies despite nearly a century of empirical evidence showing them not just wrong, but pathetically wrong. Nevertheless, the need for Central Planning is an article of faith for the Left. Yet the Left has no problem with the notion that life can form spontaneously, under the unguided operation of natural law.
The Right, at least since Hayek, is at least willing to accept that spontaneous order can arise in an economy. With a few carefully chosen rules, Adam Smith's invisible hand can pilot the entire economy without the need for a central planning department. Even though no one individual can gather together all the parts needed to manufacture a pencil, the economy, as a whole, responding to a small number of very simple rules, creates billions of pencils, and ships them where they need to go, and sells them for enough to pay for all the parts and labor that went into making them – smoothly, and automatically. Yet the Right, as an article of faith, can't believe that the complex orderly system we call life could possibly arise without the intervention of a central planner.
In both cases, I believe we're seeing the result of people willing to find meaning in only one specific form, and unable to recognize meaning in any other shape, even when they trip over it.
Of course, other people have the ability to comment, too. Here are a couple of comment chains:
Uhm, no....
- by cylarz, Feb 24 2006 09:32 PM
You fail to make a distinction between intelligent human beings making decisions in their economic best interests, versus unintelligent animals/plants/microbes/nonliving chemicals making decisions leading to the ascension of human beings.
An economy, for all its complexity, is mere child's play compared with the incomprehensible sophistication found in the nuclei of even the simplest one-celled lifeforms. Do you honestly believe there is even a scintilla of similiarity between the human-directed processes which form a car, when compared with the supposedly random processes which form DNA in cells?
You're correct in your criticism of the Left's refusal to embrace the invisible hand...however, your shots across the Right's bow are incorrect and shot through with faulty logic. Stating that an economy can arise as a result of intelligent (ordinary) people making self-interested decisions is one thing...stating that nonliving chemicals can decide to form microbes who can decide to form plants who can decide to form animals who can decide to form humans is something else entirely.
The simple observation that buyers/sellers are intelligent and amoebas are not, trips up your entire analysis.
by Karl, Feb 24 2006 09:50 PMYou fail to make a distinction between intelligent human beings making decisions in their economic best interests, versus unintelligent animals/plants/microbes/nonliving chemicals making decisions leading to the ascension of human beings.No, I decline to make that distinction, because I don't believe it's relevant.Do you honestly believe there is even a scintilla of similiarity between the human-directed processes which form a car, when compared with the supposedly random processes which form DNA in cells?First: the laws of physics and chemistry are not random. You've got to stop chasing that red herring.
Second, in one very important way, I do believe that.
You cite the human-directedness of processes in our economy as somehow distinct from unguided (remember – not "random") laws of chemistry and physics in natural systems. I say you miss the point completely.
If you've read any of Thomas Sowell or Milton Friedman (or David Friedman) on price theory, you've read how prices signal the relative abundance of goods, and the demand for those same goods, throughout the economy.
The evolutionary view sees prices resulting from the interaction of simple rules across an entire economy. The person who sets the selling price of any good does so in response to local conditions, and not with any thought of sending signals to producers in Maine or competitors in New Mexico.
Molecules combine with each other in response to the laws of chemistry. Living things reproduce, mutate, adapt, and become subject to natural selection based on the laws of physics and chemistry, and subject to their local environment.
Living things are not striving toward any teleological goal any more than the guy setting the price of windshield glass is striving to aim the economy toward any ultimate goal.
If you could show that even a small fraction of people in the marketplace are intelligently guiding the economy toward an ultimate goal, you might have a case. But you don't, because you can't, because they're not.
Economies grow through choice
by David, Feb 25 2006 12:06 AM
The point of Adam Smith is that intelligent people will make good deliberate choices that benefit themselves and others. Your point is clever by half. The point of evolution, is that radom non-intelligent events produce intelligence and order.
Choice to do what?
by Karl, Feb 27 2006 02:48 AMThe point of Adam Smith is that intelligent people will make good deliberate choices that benefit themselves and others.True, as far as you went. The other half of Adam Smith's thesis – the important is that while intelligent people are making good deliberate choices, these choices are not made with the intent of benefiting others, and particularly not with the intent of benefiting the economy as a whole.It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.My point, clever as it may be, stands unrefuted.
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