Rationalism and Hayek in Conflict: Feminist Practice

Today, I’ll explore what a feminist response, at least a libertarian feminist response, to those concerns might look like. Even if a reader doesn’t agree with feminism’s conclusions about which social institutions are bad, I hope the discussion will provide a good example of how other rationalist reform programs might proceed.

The first thing is to push back a little against Hayek’s analysis. Is it really beyond human capacity to redesign aspects of the social order? And are the risks of meddling as grave as is commonly suggested by Hayekians, Hayek himself, and thinkers in the mold of Burke? The second thing is to adjust reform efforts to accommodate Hayekian insights about how customs spread and die out.

Judge Richard Posner nicely deflated concerns that changes in social customs and institutions would cause society to collapse during the oral arguments for a pair of recent gay marriage cases. (You can find the audio clips containing these quotes here. [Embedded audio in that Slate piece is broken; see link in footnotes. - Ed.]) He points out that the threatened potential impact of changing even relatively minor social institutions is often overblown:

He argues that to be sensible, deference to tradition must be limited; otherwise, it preempts every attempt to make any change:

Posner also identifies a time in the past when a social institution was changed for the better, citing the decision in Loving v. Virginia, a case about interracial marriage and the “miscegenation” laws that forbade it:

Sometimes, an attitude of deference to tradition must be overridden. Hayek concedes that there are times when the law must be reformed, and though he wasn’t talking about customs at the time, the argument can be consistently extended beyond legal rules to informal cultural rules. In Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Hayek refers to evolved legal rules of the type “discovered” in common law courts as “law,” and invented legal rules of the type created by legislatures as “legislation.” Although he largely denounces the replacement of law by legislation, he does concede that legislation, that is, the rational construction of norms, can be warranted in some situations (pp. 117-8):

Likewise, the recognition that some hitherto-​accepted customs are unjust may require revisions of whole sections of a culture’s traditions. The question then becomes how to bring that about. That effort can be made easier by taking Hayekian concerns to heart.

One way we’ve seen customs change in the past is for the form of the custom to be retained while the meaning shifts. The best example I can think of is saying “Bless you!” when someone sneezes.

No sane person still believes that illness is caused by demonic influence. Yet many people, atheists included, will still say “Bless you!” when someone sneezes. Then and now saying “Bless you!” is a conventional way to show concern for someone, although now it has lost much of its religious connotation. The form of expression was retained while extraneous parts of the substance—belief in evil spirits—faded away. Now, it’s more-​or-​less taken only as an expression of concern. Some existing gendered customs may be salvageable in this way.

In “Being a Good Rationalist,” I discussed the difficulty of constructing a new language versus letting one emerge. The same difficulty holds for inventing new words and constructions in an existing language. For example, getting novel pronouns to catch on, as some feminists have suggested, is a daunting task. New pronouns like these either attempt to be gender-​neutral or attempt to give speakers a way to refer to people who don’t neatly fit “he” or “she.” Language isn’t immutable, but change comes only gradually and almost never as the result of a centralized effort to impose new usages. For some purposes, there’s probably no alternative to a protracted effort to get people to adopt new words. In other cases, though, easier gains might be had—and indeed have been had—by getting people to adapt their usage of words they already understand, for example, by sometimes using “she” to refer to a hypothetical person of indeterminate gender rather than always defaulting to “he.”

Last week, I talked about how certain dating rituals constitute a kind of language that helps us signal our affection for existing partners or romantic interest in potential new partners. An understanding of Hayek suggests that a better fix than uprooting these rituals might be to make them less gender-​specific. That would mean, for example, normalizing practices like a woman bringing me flowers to signal interest. Right now, that would signal neediness or desperation on her part because the default is for the male partner to be the one who does the inviting. If enough women started asking men out on dates, and enough men stopped penalizing them for it, that could change.

More generally, publicly visible transgressions of bad norms have a lot of potential to rob those norms of their potency. This principle is a big reason for the effectiveness of civil disobedience in getting rid of unjust laws and policies.

This obviously hasn’t been a complete discussion of rationalist social change methods, or even of feminist social change methods. I hope, however, that the examples I have given are suggestive of the proper sort of attitude a rationalist reformer should have—informed by Hayekian concerns, but not cowed by them.