Tradition as a Spontaneous Order

[Originally published in the Front Range Voluntaryist, article by Insula Qui]

When we think about libertarianism it is easy to conceptualize libertarians as people who have no care for anything higher than themselves and are even individualistic to a fault. If you have talked to a sufficient amount of libertarians, chances are that you have come across someone who makes arguments that go completely against common decency.

This is one of the greatest problems in libertarianism, there is a streak of refusing to properly explain the importance of tradition when it comes to liberty. This is not to say that we need a war on drugs or that we need to stone adulterers. But rather libertarians tend to completely ignore everything related to expected social norms, even when they are not imposed violently. And it is easy to conceptualize norms as a sort of restriction upon the independent will and personal liberty of someone. But to know why libertarians are wrong on this, we need to apply methodological individualism to history.

Basic libertarian theory establishes that society is formed out of a spontaneous order. The interests of individuals form co-operative bonds which then create society as a concept. This view is useful because it helps us see society as something co-operative and personal. The problem with libertarians is when they deviate from this view. And that is often the case when we come to the subject of tradition.

We tend to ignore that tradition is similarly formed out of co-operative individual bonds. It’s never as if a king decreed that everyone ought to hold one another to certain moral standards and to shun behaviors that go against accepted morality. Obviously kings on occasion enforced the customs of the land, but the customs emerged spontaneously first. Not only is society co-operative, past societies which created tradition were similarly co-operative, this means that the view of society as a spontaneous order should also apply to inter-generational exchange and past societies.

And tradition is just inter-generational exchange, morals and standards passed down from the older generation to the younger generation. Tradition is a similarly spontaneously emerging order, it is in no way lesser than the order of our current era, it would be very unwise to assume that only the current society is correct. And because tradition embodies the inter-generational transfer of countless generations, we can even call tradition the spontaneous order of civilization. Tradition is outside the state, formed by the people and it should be one of the most libertarian things.

But even though tradition is best characterized as the spontaneous order of civilization, it’s so often rejected by libertarians as we tend to think that we know better than anyone before us could. Since we live now and not in the past, we are better at absolutely everything and have no need for tradition, but to do so would be to ignore the origins of tradition. The societies we live in were built by those people from whom the traditions that we have in our societies originate from.

The entire process of replacing the uncivilized man with something much better and something much greater is facilitated by the same people who created this tradition. Without the wisdom of the people who created tradition, we would not even have a society or a civilization. These millions of people who have lived through hardships that we can’t even imagine have come up with ways to deal with relationships, the self, purpose in life and every existential question there is.

This tradition was not born out of some baseless desire to repress people and not let them be themselves and it certainly is not something that we have grown out of. Our social progress and knowledge may be unparalleled and we may be at the farthest point in history where anyone has ever been, but this does not erase the necessity to answer fundamental existential questions. And if there is one thing that modern society has a problem with, it is those existential questions.

We may have the best medicine, we may have the best economies, we may live in times where everyone can access all information from home. But that does not make us any wiser, we can’t learn wisdom simply from thinking about it hard enough or using scientific formulas. We have disrupted the process of civilization by rejecting tradition. When we come face to face with strife and when we are challenged towards ourselves, maybe the right thing to do is look backward.