Hayek--reactionary or evolutionary?

Bjorn Staerk blog has the latest in his series on Hayek's the Constitution of Liberty.

A fascinating figure in modern history, Friedrich Hayek was often branded as a reactionary for his views on political science. He was an economist by trade, with his primary achievement there being in the field of monetary theory.
I think it's bizarre to call Hayek a reactionary considering what his point of view was, which Staerk gets into in his excellent post.

To say that Hayek was a defender of tradition is to massively oversimplify. Hayek was a strong believer in science and reason--in fact, the basis for his beliefs concerning tradition has to do with the evolution of ideas and cultural rules.

I confess that I did not read The Constitution of Liberty, but I did read the Fatal Conceit, and he talks a great deal about the evolution of rules in a society.

The gist of what Hayek had to say on the subject was this: yes, there are no doubt certain things about our traditions that could be improved, if we studied them. As an economist, he was more than willing to admit that changes could be made in economic policy that would be for the better.
However, in complex societies that had evolved over thousands of years, having the conceit to say that the status quo needed to be thrown to the wind for revolutionary improvement, when we know so little about how mass behavior works and how to effectively encourage it to do certain things, can only end in disastor.

For that reason, Hayek said that it was necessary to preserve most of our traditions--simply because they had helped us to survive until now.

An example might help clarify.
There was a drought one summer in Connecticut, and my family and I went for walk. We found a stream, which had dried up so much that there was no upstream for the trout to get to. Yet, they kept trying to swim and jump up to where the stream had been--many getting trapped out of the water as a result. It was clear that if there wasn't a good period of rain soon, those fish were going to end up dead.

I told my dad, "that's so stupid. Wouldn't it make more sense for them to just spawn where they are now?"
To which he replied, "It isn't about what makes the most sense. It's about what's always worked."

The revolutionary perspective is: we see problems with this tradition. We need to start over.

Hayek's perspective is: our tradition is what's kept us alive up until this point. If you're going to advocate change, you need to do it with our current tradition as your starting point; you won't get anywhere with a blank slate.

In fact, if you wipe out tradition, you wipe out all the tools necessary for change. Without a tradition of rationality, there would be no means to attempt to figure out what the best course of action would be from that starting point.

Karl Popper, a good friend of Hayek's and my personal favorite philosopher, wrote a good article on this entitled "Towards a Rational Theory of Tradition", which can be found in his book Conjectures and Refutations (ironically enough, he dedicates the book to "F. A. von HAYEK")
In the article, he wrote that he felt rationalists had long neglected coming up with a theory of tradition. Tradition which plays such a prominent role in everyone's life; our musical tradition almost entirely determines the range of our tastes in that area, our moral tradition determines how most of us make our decisions as well as how we judge decisions in general, and the tradition of rationalism has given us science.

I am firmly convinced that Popper and Hayek were on the right path--tradition needs to be studied as a phenomenon, and the need to understand it is far more real and pressing than the need to rebuild it.