I am not sure that respect for the productive (and the processes that allow them to be productive in a singularly benign fashion) is deeply rooted in our political consciousness, or ever was, as Deirdre McCloskey seems to propose in her illuminating presentation below; the opposite attitude is not only politically correct in our days, it has been popular for a long time. In highly developed Germany, Nazism was utterly anti-capitalist (as was the Weimar Republic dominated by totalitarian parties, and social democratic post-War Germany), and the Jews were a widely despised symbol of the forces that have made mankind rich.
I tend to think, capitalism-and-freedom survive because they work so much better than anything else. In this way, they create a corridor of success from whose purest and most efficacious part, the corridor's middle lane, you may deviate in this or that direction. However, the farther you veer away from the center section the more the deviation begins to hurt - and people tend to return to the middle, as the Germans's did after 1945.
Unfortunately that is only true for the few countries that have had the fortune of developing, at an early stage in history, by human action but not by human design the fundamental institutions of capitalism-and-freedom.
Political awareness of the unrivalled benefits of capitalism-and-freedom, I suspect, has a negligible role to play in the success story of the free world.
We stumbled into it. And we keep stumbling.
Mind you, this need not be bad news altogether. Within the corridor of success, there is leeway to accommodate all manner of novel comportment and social experimentation, while such probing is rather strictly bounded, at the end of the day. The trials may affect the shape of the corridor, and it may get twisted in unexpected directions. But such is the character of a spontaneous order whose detailed outcome no one can predict.
Hayek tends to invoke the term spontaneous order to highlight the beauty and cybernetic strength of important institutions of freedom, especially the free market. What he does not seem to appreciate sufficiently, however, is that freedom herself accelerates the process by which new permutations are generated in a spontaneous order. Significantly, this may mean that liberty produces her own challenges and rivals to a larger degree than may appear desirable to the purist liberal (European sense of the word). And this may be her inescapable nature.
Viewed within the framework of the corridor of success, we may find ourselves blessed with a dynamic self-equilibrating process that admits more freedom-averse currents than the ordinary liberal will countenance, thus enhancing and accelerating the experimentation while keeping it within relatively safe and long-term promising limits.
UPDATE
In my above reasoning, I am almost certainly underestimating the importance of liberty-conscious activists, opinion-makers and politicians in the history of freedom. In Germany, for example, up to the middle of the 19th century, the educated were liberals almost to a man. However, often submerged in countervailing currents, the work of the politically active/effective liberal is immensely difficult, especially today; in order to understand the dimension of the liberals' efforts, their difficulties and options, I would like to think, it might be helpful to consider the implications of my theory of the corridor of success. What is more, with our rightfully keen eye for the white and the black, we should not forget to reward ourselves with an eye for the pleasantly grey as well.
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