"Consider this, consider this the hint of the century..." (REM, "Losing My Religion")
F.A. Hayek (from The Fatal Conceit):
Unlike genetic properties, cultural properties are not transmitted automatically. Transmission and non-transmission from generation to generation are as much positive or negative contributions to a stock of traditions as are any contributions by individuals. Many generations will therefore probably be required to ensure that any such traditions are indeed continued, and that they do indeed eventually spread. Mythical beliefs of some sort may be needed to bring this about, especially where rules of conduct conflicting with instinct are concerned. A merely utilitarian or even functionalist explanation of the different rites or ceremonies will be insufficient, and even implausible.
We owe it partly to mystical and religious beliefs, and, I believe, particularly to the main monotheistic ones, that beneficial traditions have been preserved and transmitted at least long enough to enable those groups following them to grow, and to have the opportunity to spread by natural or cultural selection. This means that, like it or not, we owe the persistence of certain practices, and the civilization that resulted from them, in part to support from beliefs which are not true - or verifiable or testable - in the same sense as are scientific statements, and which are certainly not the result of rational argumentation. I sometimes think that it might be appropriate to call at least some of them, at least as a gesture of appreciation, `symbolic truths', since they did help their adherents to `be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it' (Genesis 1:28).
Even those among us, like myself, who are not prepared to accept the anthropomorphic conception of a personal divinity ought to admit that the premature loss of what we regard as nonfactual beliefs would have deprived mankind of a powerful support in the long development of the extended order that we now enjoy, and that even now the loss of these beliefs, whether true or false, creates great difficulties. In any case, the religious view that morals were determined by processes incomprehensible to us may at any rate be truer (even if not exactly in the way intended) than the rationalist delusion that man, by exercising his intelligence, invented morals that gave him the power to achieve more than he could ever foresee. If we bear these things in mind, we can better understand and appreciate those clerics who are said to have become somewhat skeptical of the validity of some of their teachings and who yet continued to teach them because they feared that a loss of faith would lead to a decline of morals. No doubt they were right; and even an agnostic ought to concede that we owe our morals, and the tradition that has provided not only our civilization but our very lives, to the acceptance of such scientifically unacceptable factual claims.
The undoubted historical connection between religion and the values that have shaped and furthered our civilization, such as the family and private property, does not of course mean that there is any intrinsic connection between religion as such and such values. Among the founders of religions over the last two thousand years, many opposed private property and the family. But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus, the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family (and anti-religion), is not promising. For it is, I believe, itself a religion which had its time, and which is now declining rapidly.
So far as I personally am concerned, I had better state that I feel as little entitled to assert as to deny the existence of what others call God, for I must admit that I just do not know what this word is supposed to mean. I certainly reject every anthropomorphic, personal, or animistic interpretation of the term, interpretations through which many people succeed in giving it a meaning. The conception of a man-like or mindlike acting being appears to me rather the product of an arrogant overestimation of the capacities of a man-like mind. I cannot attach meaning to words that in the structure of my own thinking, or in my picture of the world, have no place that would give them meaning.
Perhaps what many people mean in speaking of God is just a personification of that tradition of morals or values that keeps their community alive. The source of order that religion ascribes to a human-like divinity - the map or guide that will show a part successfully how to move within the whole - we now learn to see to be not outside the physical world but one of its characteristics, one far too complex for any of its parts possibly to form an `image' or `picture' of it. Thus, religious prohibitions against idolatry, against the making of such images, are well taken. Yet perhaps most people can conceive of abstract tradition only as a personal Will. If so, will they not be inclined to find this will in `society' in an age in which more overt supernaturalisms are ruled out as superstitions? On that question may rest the survival of our civilization.
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F.A. Hayek (1899—1992) was an Austrian economist, social theorist, and political philosopher. He is best known for his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom, in which he argued against the perils of collectivism, and for his opposition to Keynesian economics. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1974 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991.
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