Positive Liberty

Jonathan Rauch has a piece in Reason Online that shows very well why he has emerged as one of the premier advocates of same-sex marriage. In it, he squarely addresses some of the best secular conservative arguments against the freedom to marry. He makes very interesting use of Hayek’s Why I am Not a Conservative, an essay that I’m clearly going to have to read.

Interestingly, Virginia Postrel’s The Future and Its Enemies had a quote from this same essay. (As many of you may know, Postrel also runs an excellent blog.) While my upbringing and many of my political instincts have often been conservative, I find the following line of thought from Hayek persuasive:

As has often been acknowledged by conservative writers, one of the fundamental traits of the conservative attitude is a fear of change, a timid distrust of the new as such, while the liberal position is based on courage and confidence, on a preparedness to let change run its course even if we cannot predict where it will lead… Conservatives are inclined to use the powers of government to prevent change or to limit its rate to whatever appeals to the more timid mind. In looking forward, they lack the faith in the spontaneous forces of adjustment which makes the liberal accept changes without apprehension, even though he does not know how the necessary adaptations will come about.

Scott’s reply was something like, “Wow. That’s self-serving.” Then I explained to him that the year was 1960, and Hayek’s only supporters were conservatives.

Rauch’s piece above complicates the situation, though, because Hayek was emphatically not a supporter of change for change’s sake alone; on the contrary, he often favored incremental changes, based on the fundamentally conservative notion that the existing social structures have probably evolved for reasons that we can’t fully comprehend ourselves. Rauch considers what Hayek’s thought might tell us about the gay marriage debate–using a light touch, and none of the crude anachronism that I’ve complained about in the past. Go read it.