Smith/Darwin, Society & Snowflakes

In the comments of this post, Steve Horwitz writes:

Darwin borrowed the whole notion of competition and evolution FROM social scientists such as the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers (Hume, Smith, Ferguson et. al.). He was reading Stewart's biography of Smith on one of the Beagle's voyages. Evolutionary biology might more properly be called "Natural Smithism" than any social system being called "social darwinist."

This tracks with my research, too:

Some say Darwin borrowed from Adam Smith when he formulated the theory of evolution. As the late naturalist Stephen Jay Gould writes, “the theory of natural selection is a creative transfer to biology of Adam Smith’s basic argument for a rational economy: the balance and order of nature does not arise from a higher, external (divine) control, or from the existence of laws operating directly upon the whole, but from struggle among individuals for their own benefits.”

The intimate intellectual connection between Smith and Darwin should be enough to make the contemporary leftist uncomfortable. Good. (And I would caution anyone against conflating the logic of the Darwinian algorithm as applied to human socio-economic interaction with Spencerian social darwinism.) But Horwitz goes on to share this post, which evokes an aesthetic share by those with Austrian/Atheist sensibilities.

Here’s a particularly lovely passage:

When I see that snowflake, it engages my reverence for the beauty of the undesigned order of the natural world. Look at the symmetry and detail of that snowflake, and then consider that is the product of undesigned natural processes. I find it an object of awe that natural processes can produce a thing of such detail, complexity and beauty. It is said that only God can make a snowflake. Well for those who understand the science, or who are atheists, we know that you don't need God to do so. But even to an atheist like myself, the spontaneous order of nature can (and should!) generate the same awe, reverence, and wonder that the contemplation of God generates in those who believe. Unfortunately, whenever my wonder at the beauty of nature is engaged, it is with a tinge of frustration.The frustration I feel is that so many smart and caring people seem unable to see and appreciate the identical processes of undesigned order in the social world. "Social snowflakes" are all around us, yet precious few seem to be able to understand and appreciate them to the degree we do the snowflakes found in nature. And too many people think that these "social snowflakes" require a "Creator."

That snowflake produces in me the same aesthetic-emotional reaction I have when I begin to think about Leonard Read's "I, Pencil," or when I ponder the intricate, detailed, complex, and beautiful processes by which Chilean grapes appear in my grocery store in rural New York in the middle of winter. The pencil and the grapes are "social snowflakes": they look simple, but when we hold them still and examine them with the analogous level of detail as that photo produces in the snowflake, they turn out to be the products of extraordinarily complex and intricate social processes that were designed by no one. My aesthetic reaction of awe and wonder is a response to what Pete Boettke, in a perfect turn of phrase, recently referred to as "the mystery of the mundane." What is more mundane than a snowflake? And yet what, it turns out, is more beautiful and complex than a snowflake? And in the way their mundane surface appearances hide processes of production whose awesome complexity was the product of human action but not human design, and should equally be a source of aesthetic and intellectual contemplation, the pencil and grapes are indeed "social snowflakes."

And the product of social ecosystems. That such complex, intricate and beautiful states of affairs as natural ecosystems can emerge from something as simple as molecular chirality (or “handedness”) should appeal to our natural aesthetic (see the work of Stuart Kaufmann). I welcome those, like Horwitz, who would extend such reverence to the emergent orders of humanity, a humanity whose interactions are an extension of nature, not at odds with it.

(The question of whether human social interaction is more Lamarckian than Darwinian is an interesting one, but one I’ll leave for another post.)