Hayek Concluded

Last summer my wife was in Finland with the four kids and I went for a hike with Mark Schneider from Electrical. En route, we walked up over an obscure mountain in the Catskills (he's a marathon runner) and while huffing along to keep up he mentioned that a friend of his named Ted Burczak had written a book entitled Socialism After Hayek.

I had never heard of Hayek, so got the book.

Then last week, Glenn Beck said that Hayek was the most important author in the history of the world. 1.2 million copies sold.

I took it down off the shelf. I stopped last summer on p. 150 (it's boring and says the same thing over and over) and decided I should get to the end of it.

Then, Ted Burczak, who teaches at Denison University in Granville, Ohio (where I once interviewed), came to DeLancey NY in the Catskills, and Mark Schneider threw a party. Schneider knows how to build things and had built a giant tower in his backyard and stretched a zipline 100 feet across his yard. I don't know how to define this contraption. It was a handle you hold on to, and you fly down (gravity because of a slope), and suddenly my kids, Schneider's kids, and all kinds of other kids are going down this zipline in a frenzy of fun.

Nervous, (gravity is a b@#$X) I talked to Burczak about my Marianne Moore project, and how one of the problems was figuring out her economics. She thought, for example, that Roosevelt was "our Hitler." Or that's how she explained Roosevelt to a British correspondent named Bryher.

Hours elapse. Watermelon is eaten. Cookies, muffins, and iced tea. We talk about fastest routes between the Catskills and NYC. A bucket full of water balloons are brought out and children arm themselves, and I am released as the scapegoat, and fly around the lawn, getting hit, and hitting in return.

While I'm running, I think about Hayek. Hayek writes,

"There is at present a great deal of muddleheaded talk about 'planning to equalize standards of life.' It is instructive to consider in a little more detail one of these proposals to see what precisely it involves. The area for which at the present moment our planners are particularly fond of drawing up such schemes is the Danube Basin and southeastern Europe. There can be no doubt about the urgent need for amelioration of economic conditions in this region, from humanitarian and economic considerations as well as in the interest of the future peace of Europe, nor that this can be achieved only in a political setting different from that of the past. But this is not the same thing as to wish to see economic life in this region directed according to a single master-plan, to foster the development of the different industries according to a schedule laid down beforehand in a way which makes the success of local initiative dependent on being approved by the central authority and being incorporated in its plan. One cannot, for example, create a kind of Tennessee Valley Authority for the Danube Basin without thereby determining beforehand for many years to come the relative rate of progress of the different races inhabiting this area or without subordinating all their individual aspirations and wishes to this task" (227-228).

I thought of Bush's plan to somehow dismantle Iraq and Afghanistan and remake them in America's image of a multicultural and feminist state, with voting, and fairness, and how the locals are expected to sign on to this mad plan. And I thought, why not instead try to change Lyme Disease, and use helicopter gunships in Connecticut to clear the state of deer, snapping the chain that can lead to Lyme?

Why not instead go into the Congo and try to make gorillas literate enough to stand for political representation.

The task would be just about as hopeless.

Meanwhile, Deepwater Horizon is leaking millions of gallons of oil all over the Gulf, and should we instead use billions of dollars to increase literacy for women in Afghanistan while Mexicans pour over our borders, kidnap our children, and put them up for ransom?

Where are our priorities?

All kinds of kids went down the zipline. Wife went down, even my four-year-old went down. I don't like speedy stuff.

I got home and ants had attacked an apple tree out back, and so I found tanglefoot, a sticky substance, and pasted it around the base of the tree so that they couldn't go up and down. This freed the tree of ants in the last two days (ants farm aphids on apple trees, getting the aphids to suck juice out of the tree's leaves, and then squeezing sugar out of their rear ends to bring back to the Queen).

Ants are totalitarian socialists, and think nothing of enslaving other whole species in their drive to conquer.

And I thought more about socialism, and how Hayek (Burczak, one wonders, if he was, initially, attracted to Hayek because of the similarity of the last two letters in the name, just as I read Charles Olson because of his namesakeliness), makes us ask about the wars into which we are conscripted.

The war on poverty, the war in Vietnam, the war on ants in the backyard. Hayek says wars utilize and mobilize all our attention on one thing, and sometimes this is necessary, but it shouldn't be the norm. And I thought about how race, gender and class asks us to mobilize toward a war of equality in which all groups are brought to the same level. Why the heck should I care about this? I am a lot more concerned about the wellbeing of bacteria on Mars, for instance, is that necessarily bad?

Even if it could be done, why shouldn't I care instead to rather put up a great wall of China (cups and saucers hundreds of feet high) against the Mexican border, or why not mobilize the whole country toward the eradication of Lyme Disease, in which everyone goes ballistic against the deer and mice population, and we eradicate them all at once with helicopter gunships. Even sending down daisy cutter bombs into herds of Bambis and their moms, blowing their little stripes and polka dots all over the green forests of Abercrombie and Fitch?

Why must all our values coalesce around a single goal?

Why shouldn't some of us just sail down the zipline, while others make cupcakes to order, and others stomp on ants, and yet others throw water balloons, and yet others lament the growth of Lyme Disease to 1% of the American population, and still others worry about what will happen to Lyme bacteria if we commence a war on it, worrying about the lack of bacteriological diversity in American ticks, or how gorillas need to become literate, so that they can commence gorilla theatres in the depths of the Congo, for which they can write to the UN for funds for better costumes?

And why can't others worry about the aesthetic needs of ants, and whether or not they are sufficiently entertained while squeezing the aphids' butts on my apple tree out back?

It is TOTALITARIAN to subordinate all of life to one goal, or set of goals, as determined by a planner.

Hayek argues that the Victorian era was actually more progressive than our own because there was a lot more room for individual eccentricity and smaller areas of concern. He says that when countries like Ruritania are safe in our midst from the bizarre need of powerful countries to improve them according to a fixed schedule, we will all be better off.

His final sentence reads, "The guiding principle that a policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy remains as true today as it was in the nineteenth century" (238).

I don't know why Glenn Beck liked this book. I guess it is anti-socialist. That's good. But it's a far cry from nutty Ayn Rand, which is the other author Beck ballyhoos. Rand is also pro-business, and pro-genius, but doesn't have any touch of tenderness. Hayek is a very tender soul who relishes eccentricity, and is a kind of postmodernist in that he is against any kind of metanarrative seizing the collective imaginary and forcing us down a planned road.

Hayek impliess that James Madison felt the same way as he did in his notes for further reading (at book's end).

Next books up: Burczak's Socialism After Hayek, a book on Madison, another book on Marianne Moore (that accuses her of Orientalism), a book about frivolity (by William Gaddis). Any other suggestions?