Distress in the City: The Hayekian Great Society and Our Atavistic Biases

That is already likely more people than our brains evolved to handle. If you’ve read much pop psychology, you’ve likely encountered “Dunbar’s Number.” In a paper titled “Coevolution of Neocortical Size, Group Size, and Language in Humans” anthropologist R.I.M. Dunbar looks at the brains and social group sizes of various primates and extrapolates those findings to the most troublesome primates of all: modern humans. Dunbar’s best guess is that our brains are evolutionarily attuned to a social ingroup of about 147.8 individuals (p. 682).

The pool of people with whom we cooperate and coordinate in modern society is much, much larger than either the number of people we know or the number of people our brains are wired to count as part of our tribe: not thousands or even millions of people, but billions.

If I live in a small town, it may indeed be possible for me to know everyone I see as I go about the business of living—their name, their face, even their likes and dislikes and their relative strengths and infirmities. I might face the prospect of needing to “stay on the good side” of everyone I meet, or at least certain community leaders, and I may be thereby constrained in the risks I feel safe taking. This experience of life might give me the illusion that the order of modern civilization rests on the same basis as the unity of the tribe.

No such illusion is possible if I live in a city. That can be uncomfortable, but it also represents an opportunity for us to deepen our appreciation of the means by which modern civilization holds itself together.

In Law, Legislation, and Liberty F.A. Hayek explores (among other themes) the biases we carry with us from our deep history living in small groups. Life in modern civilization, life in what Hayek calls the “Great Society,” requires us to coordinate peacefully not only with the type of people we would have in tribal life—people familiar to us who share our own perspective and largely share our own ends and our own knowledge about the world—but also strangers. It can sometimes be difficult to “see” the Great Society in everyday life, but it is easier in cities. Moreover, when we can see the Great Society, we are better able to resist the temptation to indulge the atavistic instincts that undermine its foundation.

It is telling that when Pool and Kochen attempt a back-​of-​the-​envelope estimate of the shortest chain of contact connecting the two most socially-​separate people in the United States they could imagine, they begin by asserting “Each hermit certainly knows a merchant” (p. 18). Hayek observes that it is the market more than any other human institution that connects us all together:

Most people are still reluctant to accept the fact that it should be the disdained ‘cash-​nexus’ which holds the Great Society together, that the great ideal of the unity of mankind should in the last resort depend on the relations between the parts being governed by the striving for the better satisfaction of their material needs. … That interdependence of all men, which is now in everybody’s mouth and which tends to make all mankind One World, not only is the effect of the market order but could not have been brought about by any other means. What today connects the life of any European or American with what happens in Australia, Japan or Zaire are repercussions transmitted by the network of market relations. (p. 315)

What is this “Great Society” Hayek mentions? For many people, the first thing that phrase brings to mind is the domestic agenda of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, but that is not the meaning Hayek intends here.

Hayek, throughout Law, Legislation, and Liberty, uses the terms “Great Society” and “Open Society” interchangeably to describe the emergent order of billions of people coordinating their plans of action in mutual peace, if not mutual understanding. Neither phrase is original to him—he borrows “Great Society” from Adam Smith and “Open Society” from Karl Popper—but Hayek’s use of the terms is distinctive.

Hayek labels the market order that holds the Great Society together a “catallaxy,” from the ancient Greek word katallattein, “which meant, significantly, not only ‘to exchange’ but also ‘to admit into the community’ and ‘to change from enemy into friend’” (pp. 309-10). A catallaxy, explains Hayek, is “the special kind of spontaneous order produced by the market through people acting within the rules of the law of property, tort and contract” (p. 310).

Whatever it is we want to accomplish ourselves—and Hayek thinks our ends ought to encompass both narrowly-​defined self-​interest as well as “public purposes” (see pp. 354-5)—we will do so in the context of “a Great Society in which the individuals are to be free to use their own knowledge for their own purposes” (p. 182, but see also pp. 188-9, footnote 14). It is through the knowledge-​transmitting power of market prices and “the freedom of choosing the ends of one’s activities that the utilization of the knowledge dispersed through society is achieved” (p. 189) and our plans of action rendered mutually beneficial (speaking generally, not necessarily in every individual case). The market accomplishes this despite the fact that we may well have never met and do not share a common purpose. “That we assist in the realization of other people’s aims without sharing them or even knowing them, and solely in order to achieve our own aims,” says Hayek, “is the source of strength of the Great Society” (p. 311).

Cities confront us with the fact that we live in a Great Society of billions of individuals, and city life exposes us to the comings and goings of people whose purposes we do not know, much less share. It is in part for this reason that the liberal values supporting the Great Society emerged in cities, and only later spread outward. Hayek describes the process thus:

[T]he moral views underlying the Open Society were long confined to small groups in a few urban localities, and have come generally to govern law and opinion in the Western world so comparatively recently that they are often still felt to be artificial and unnatural in contrast to the intuitive, and in part perhaps even instinctive, sentiments inherited from the older tribal society. The moral sentiments which made the Open Society possible grew up in the towns, the commercial and trading centres, while the feelings of the large numbers were still governed by the parochial sentiments and the xenophobic and fighting attitudes governing the tribal group. (p. 349)

The preeminent urbanist Jane Jacobs described something like a Hayekian emergent order in the section of The Death and Life of Great American Cities dealing with the comings and goings on a city neighborhood’s sidewalks:

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance—not to a simple-​minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations. (p. 50)

Part of this “sidewalk ballet” entails important, even life-​or-​death encounters with people we have never met before and will never meet again. Jacobs tells an anecdote (p. 54) about two strangers who came together with Jacob’s neighbors to save the life of a boy who had fallen through a plate-​glass window. One stranger applied a tourniquet that stopped the bleeding; the other, when a woman took part of his cab fare out of his hand to call the hospital from a pay phone, followed her to give her the rest of it just in case. How did everyone know what was to be done in that situation, despite many of them never having met? Hayek, although talking in the context of economic decisions rather than medical emergencies, explains:

What makes men members of the same civilization and enables them to live and work together in peace is that in the pursuit of their individual ends the particular monetary impulses which impel their efforts towards concrete results are guided and restrained by the same abstract rules. … The action, or the act of will, is always a particular, concrete and individual event, while the common rules which guide it are social, general and abstract … What reconciles the individuals and knits them into a common and enduring pattern of a society is that to these different particular situations they respond in accordance with the same abstract rules. (p. 192)

With this in mind, it becomes clear why cities, and civilization, are inherently cosmopolitan—and why liberalism is too. To reap the Great Society’s benefits, we must learn to treat the stranger as not a threat or a rival but a fellow “citizen of the world.” Failing to do so has dire potential consequences.

Hayek argues that although we moderns still long for the intelligibility and unity of purpose of the small tribal group, this bias leads us to erode the foundations of the Great Society:

If we all occasionally feel that it is a good thing to have a common purpose with our fellows, and enjoy a sense of elation when we can act as members of a group aiming at common ends, this is an instinct which we have inherited from tribal society and which no doubt often still stands us in good stead whenever it is important that in a small group we should act in concert to meet a sudden emergency. It shows itself conspicuously when sometimes even the outbreak of war is felt as satisfying a craving for such a common purpose; and it manifests itself most clearly in modern times in the two greatest threats to a free civilization: nationalism and socialism. (p. 313)

For long stretches of Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Hayek speaks of the threat our atavistic instincts pose to the Great Society only in generalities, employing terms like “socialism” and “distributive justice” that obscure more than they illuminate. Hayek’s narrow, concrete concern is that groups united by their respective common interests will use the power of the state to override the abstract property-​and-​contract rules that facilitate and regulate the flow of resources in the Great Society’s catallaxy, instead assigning resources to groups directly and explicitly. It’s a problem with deep roots:

The whole history of the development of popular institutions is a history of continuous struggle to prevent particular groups from abusing the governmental apparatus for the benefit of the collective interest of these groups. This struggle has certainly not ended with the present tendency to define as the general interest anything that a majority formed by a coalition of organized interests decides upon. (p. 187)

We have seen Hayek says cities were the incubators for the moral ideas underpinning the Great Society. Because cities push back against our tendency to view the world through the lens of tribal loyalties, they may also play a role in protecting those ideas from the biases that threaten them.