“The veneer of civilization is always very thin, while the innate barbarity of humankind is forever very deep,” wrote the historian Victor Davis Hanson in a recent essay on the Russia-Ukraine war.[1]
Russia’s brutal destruction of civilians illustrates how thin the veneer of civilization is. There are many other examples—from the Holocaust in a country that had achieved a peak of intellectual sophistication to the protection of slavery in a country founded on the concept of freedom. And more.
So, are we barbarians or civilized? We are both.
While I can’t explain why barbarity must involve war and torture, I can offer some understanding of why our veil of civilization is often so tattered.
My source is Friedrich A. von Hayek (1899–1992). Although Hayek received a Nobel Prize in economics in 1974, he is known mostly to people of a libertarian bent, like me. To us, he is the greatest.
Why Hayek Was Important
Born in Austria, he was a key figure in the mid-twentieth-century intellectual debate over whether central planning can achieve economic growth. (A chief antagonist was Oscar Lange.) Hayek’s answer was no; the amount of knowledge needed to plan an economy can’t be known to any one person, or even a group of persons, or (as he might have said today) even multiple computers.
An economy relies on prices, he explained in a stunning but difficult-to-read article [2] that can’t be easily summarized. (I’ll try). Prices make markets work. They create incentives that lead people to align their efforts and decisions with the good of the whole.
If an earthquake destroys a tin mine, say, that sudden scarcity will lead to higher prices for tin, and people will act accordingly. [3] Consumers will buy less, and suppliers will seek out new sources. No one has to know the cause of the scarcity, but people respond as if they know, because prices provide the information they need to act.
When planners set prices or quantities—which is what planning is all about—they distort the incentives in a way that misdirects the operation of the market. The result is usually shortages and the long lines famous in the Soviet Union and Cuba—or in the United States when the government held down the price of gas in the 1970s. (Planners in well-off countries can create surpluses as well as shortages—generous subsidies for electric vehicles may lead to more EVs than consumers want to buy.)
The “Atavism Thesis”
While he didn’t specifically try to figure out why civilized people become barbarous, Hayek learned it as he went along. He was trying to understand why leftist policies are so appealing. That is the case even though they damage the economy they are supposed to guide and they tend toward totalitarianism. He developed what some call the “atavism thesis.”[4]
Hayek concluded that humans have instincts that evolved genetically, starting with humans’ predecessors, animals in a pack, and continuing when humans lived together in small bands. This evolution ended only about 12,000 years ago.
Those instincts weren’t inherently bad. In fact, they included essential emotions, such as solidarity and compassion, that kept the band alive. But they were beneficial only when people lived in small groups. The growth of what Hayek called the “extended order”—trade and communication outside the band, the modern economy—required people to act differently.
“Mankind achieved civilization by developing and learning to follow rules (first in territorial tribes and then over broader reaches) that often forbade him to do what his instincts demanded, and no longer depended on a common perception of events.”[5]
Humans have never entirely given up their early instincts, however, and that draws them to socialism and fascism, said Hayek. Socialism and fascism give them the “visible common purpose”[6] so essential in the distant past. But forcing people to share a visible common purpose is not compatible with freedom.
The wars and other horrors of the twentieth century revealed what can happen when people go back to these old instincts, Hayek wrote.
“Most people are still unwilling to face the most alarming lesson of modern history: that the great crimes of our time have been committed by governments that had the enthusiastic support of millions of people who were guided by moral impulses. It is simply not true that Hitler or Mussolini, Lenin or Stalin, appealed only to the worst instincts of their people: they also appealed to some of the feelings which also dominate contemporary democracies.”[6]
Contemporary democracies can seek the goals of socialism. But if they allow those goals to obliterate the workings of the market they may find they are planting the seeds of totalitarianism. And that is barbarity.
Image above is from the British Library collection of works. Published in 1881, this image is in the public domain.
Notes (A place for comments follows the notes)
[1] Victor Hanson Davis, “Our Spanish Civil War?” Independent Institute, April 26, 2022.
[2] F. A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review 35, no. 4 (September 1945): 519–30.
[3] Tin is Hayek’s example from 1945. It sounds quaint today but tin is widely used in electronics.
[4] One writer who has highlighted this concept is Daniel Klein, as in “The People’s Romance,” Independent Review 10, no. 1 ( Summer 2005): 5–37.
[5] F A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, edited by W. W. Bartley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988, 12.
[5] Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 2, The Mirage of Social Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 134.
[6] Hayek 1976, 134.
[Also left as a comment at Econlib.] I recently read (well: looked at every page of) the late Gerald Gaus’s book “The Open Society and Its Complexities”. He provided (I think) a somewhat more optimistic view than Hayek’s, based on subsequent decades of anthropological/sociological research. I’m not qualified to judge one way or the other, but folks interested in the matter should check Gaus out. Here’s a short and non-academic essay from him: “The Open Society and Its Friends“: http://www.gaus.biz/OpenSocietyAndFriends.pdf
I should add that in human civilization there is a role for hierarchy also—in ensuring the effectiveness of the state in national defense, enforcing agreements, etc. But the optimal scope of hierarchy is much smaller than the scope of freedom.
Social animals vary in how they create and order the use of resources. Dogs, for example, rely almost exclusively on rules of hierarchy. Apes and people often use agreement—contract—but have hierarchical instincts as well. Freedom, and civilization, are largely dependent on how well we contain the hierarchical tendencies. But those tendencies are very strong—indeed, alluring—both for those who want to lead and those who want be be led (“belong”). So the institutions and other constraints for holding them back also need to be very strong. When they become too “thin” (to use Hanson’s word) then the more primitive instincts take over.
Can we say that prices allow people to act with competence but without comprehension? Most people in market economies are competent to maneuver to their own satisfaction, but they do not comprehend why the system works or why a centrally planned command economy becomes barbaric. Without the comprehension, they too easily fall for “something for nothing” government seduction, and then for the idea that “for the greater good” brute force is often necessary.
Wallace, beautifully stated.