See this article by David Henderson for a short and clear discussion of Hayek’s understanding of knowledge in light of the real-world problem of American incompetence, most especially when our governments move in to solve our problems or those of Afghan tribesmen.
Professor Henderson puts the situation simply by saying: “Who has the relevant information about your current circumstances? You do.”
The article started me thinking about how I’d speak of these truths in terms of my worldview, a Thomistic existentialism updated to consider modern empirical knowledge. This article is a small step towards the goal of using the powerful conceptual tools of modern mathematics and physics to speak of the complexities of community life in the modern world. For example, differential geometry would allow us to speak of more complex paths than are possible in the ‘Euclidean assumptions’ of traditional thought. I’ve written on this general topic before in Mathematical Physics and Moral Philosophy and Defining Landscapes and Possible Paths, Not Determining Paths.
True freedom of Creation and and creature, even if limited, implies strongly that all of the information ‘needed’ to control a situation doesn’t even exist when a would-be controller would need it, but the information is coming into existence as the situation develops — as always, I deny any true split between the abstract, such as the models of how markets operate, and the concrete, actions of buyers and sellers. The actions and the knowledge are one since concrete being is shaped from abstract being and is realized as a narrative plays out. The abstract remains in the concrete. So the knowledge of the price I can get by bringing my tomatoes into the farmers’ market this afternoon comes to exist as I offer to sell them and others offer to buy them, perhaps at a lower price than I expect. Or perhaps I profit from a bidding war caused by a shortage of fresh tomatoes that day. And maybe I learn to my sorrow that a big-box grocery store has opened down the road and is selling cheap tomatoes from California or Chile or some other foreign land.
My knowledge comes into existence as I respond to my environments, to the Universe as I understand it, to all of God’s Creation as I understand it. My environment is always being changed by my actions and the actions of others, perhaps the actions of corporate executives in Cincinnati and their bankers in New York City. I can write in similar ways about my knowledge of the world or of all Creation, but those are far more complex forms of knowledge and are affected by a variety of bodies of knowledge of longfar agoway acts and of distant structures and relationships. Of particular relevance would be the complications of modern societies where some have the power to effect the lives of human beings they’ve never seen and one man, Henry Ford with his mass-produced automobiles, or a small group of men, the leaders of Europe in 1914 with their mass-produced death, can reshape human lives for centuries.
Locally, there is a community at the farmers’ market even if it’s ephemeral, at least as a community of buyers and sellers. And we must remember what the American historian, Carroll Quigley told us:
The truth emerges in time through a communal response.
Notice the qualifications which deny truth can be held by an individual at a point of spacetime — “emerges in time” and “through a communal response”.
The truth, that is — the perfect knowledge, of the current situation for tomato-sellers in the farmers’ market exists in the community of buyers and sellers, in a manner of speaking. But markets are dynamic, partly because of external factors but also because of the interactions between human beings in those markets. This sort of knowledge is only ‘truth’ by analogy because it probably never quite comes into firm existence. If it does, it will be for just a short while before changing conditions bring about a new equilibrium which itself will prove to be ephemeral. This isn’t to say that markets, or any other human environments, are so unstable as to be chaotic. It is to say that they are dynamic in a way analogous to a living creature although they might rapidly pass through more stages in a few days than a human being will pass through in 80 years. And it is to say that we need to enlarge our understanding of truth to include knowledge of narratives.
The implication is that we can’t know a dynamic creature because it will be significantly different in months or years and maybe even in hours. That’s not quite true. As I’ve noted before, Plato and the Bible agree that ‘to know’ a living creature is to be intimate with that creature. When a man knows his wife, he is intimate with her in a sexual way, but not only in that way. We can hope. If he is intimate with his wife in other ways, then he participates in meaningful ways in her journey through life, in her story which is part of the story God is telling. A man then knows not only his wife’s body but also her story.
We know reality by being actively engaged in reality, though my idea of such an active engagement is different in some ways from that of many human beings, certainly of many of my fellow Americans. Intellectual engagement, spiritual engagement by way of prayer and worship, is not only active but also more active, more true, than physical activity on the part of sleepwalking members of modern herds. Contemplating the meaning of Jacques Barzun’s history of the past 500 years in the West, From Dawn to Decadence, is active while turning on the television generally is part of a stretch of time experienced in a passive way.
Why are we losing our freedoms? Is it because we’re under attack by fanatics who hate our freedoms? Or is it because we Americans have destroyed our various sorts of human communities, forgetting that even individual freedom is exercised in local communities?
I would suggest that we have forgotten that families and church communities are composed of individuals, some of them morally mature, who come together to do things and grow things and make things. We have forgotten because we accepted the invitation of our political and economic masters to become self-centered individuals and to enjoy the supposed pleasures of life as lemmings in mass marketplaces. We have become consumers rather than producers. We no longer even produce our own local and communal understanding of reality, choosing instead to consume one or another canned version that suits the purpose of one of our masters.
We chose not to become individuals who are citizens of flesh-and-blood communities organized to some moral purpose, raising children or worshiping God or making our livings in a way that allows us to mature and to participate in all these communities. If we accepted these roles as members of multiple local communities, if we matured to fulfill these roles, we would be able to perceive our local environments so that we could respond, as individuals but mostly as members of these local communities.
The truth emerges in time through a communal response.
We have to remember that the communal response is itself the result of acts of individual members of the same or interacting communities. In order for proper responses to be made, rather than invitations to a conflict, even a local farmers’ market has to have a substantial measure of moral structure built from the moral characters and particular habits and beliefs of those who participate in that market. See Networks of Public Spaces Rather Than One Square for a short discussion of the research of a mainstream liberal professor at Harvard which supports this idea that communities with a particular moral structure are necessary for social peace and proper interaction. (The professor, Robert Putnam, was very upset by his discovery that you can’t just throw together a variety of human beings with different beliefs and moral habits and have them spontaneously form a thriving and peaceful community. Most liberals, right-wing as well as left-wing, seem to be ignoring this work which is very disturbing to modern political and social beliefs.)
In this context, the lesson to be learned is that the sort of marketplace knowledge discussed by Professor Hayek and his follower, Professor Henderson, is not basic knowledge about reality. It is information gathered from our environments by active exploration and response of a sort conditioned by basic beliefs and habits and then organized by way of basic beliefs and habits.