The idea of beauty as the reduction of all explicanda to a single explicans, of all particulars to a single head as Adam Ferguson would say, still allows for a dichotomy in the treatment of beauty; what I will refer to as the appreciation of first and second order beauty.

First order beauty is the most common conception, simply because it is the most obvious. It is beauty in an object as such, and stops there: everything exists for a purpose, and executes its function in the best way possible. It is a constructed beauty – what Hayek would call rationalist and constructivist. It is the result of deliberate design – in fact, anything human designed is done with a form of first-order beauty in mind – whether art, institutions, or urban planning. Its unifying principle is consequential -its unity is in what it does and how it does it.

Second order beauty, on the other hand, is a beauty of process – a meta-beauty. It is more fundamental, and does not necessarily exhibit first-order beauty. Yet the beauty of it is in the robustness: though it does not necessarily generate results with the most beauty in themselves, its results are always suited for its ends. Its unifying principle is procedural – the result is not deliberately constructed as such, but comes about from interactions under general rules.

The difference may be hard to grasp in the abstract, but concrete examples will make it much clearer. The difference is between Esperanto and English. Esperanto is a clean and regular language. It was constructed that way. Everything exists for a purpose, with no vestiges from older ancestors. English, on the other hand, is a messy hodge podge of two major and half a dozen minor European languages. It has constructions (for example do-support on yes/no questions) which from an a priori perspective seem outlandish.

Yet Esperanto is subject to the same rules of language change as English. Should it achieve its goal of becoming a universal second language, it will inevitably split into dialects just like any other – its beauty marred by the accidents of mass-adoption. The second-order beauty here is the process of linguistics, governed by the innate principles of Universal Grammar first articulated by Noam Chomsky. Though English as such may lack the apparent beauty that Esperanto has, the principles of universal grammar in tension with the processes of language change will always produce a language as fit for human communication, as rich in expressive power, and as easy for acquisition as any other, despite their surface differences – even with severely degraded input (i.e., the creolization of pidgins).

Another example is nature versus cities. Which is more beautiful, a forest, or a well-laid-out city? They exhibit, of course, different types of beauty. The city represents the distilled rational principles of habitation that man has learned from nature and experience, and is thus more suited to house him. Yet without conscious and deliberate upkeep and intervention, the city will eventually crumble and fall into disrepair, while the forest survives and thrives just as well without as with human aid.

Second order beauty is exemplified in spontaneous orders. Where first-order beauties require full knowledge, absolute control, and constant vigilance (and are thus easier to create on a canvas than in a society), second-order beauties provide for their own continued existence by general rules rather than specific directives, and in fact are hindered rather than helped by deliberate intervention, simply because deliberate human design can only result in first-order beauty, which becomes impossible to create as the scope makes the necessary knowledge, authority, and vigilance impossible (see Cracked.com for 6 examples of intervention hindering coordination – examples 3 and 4 with regard to nature, and the rest with regard to society as a whole).

The most pervasive example of second-order beauty outside of the laws of nature themselves is the market economy. Its general rules are property rights and contract enforcement. And though it is the result of human action, like language, it is not the result of human design, qualifying it as second-order. The robustness with which it provides for the needs of the consumer, agnostic to which particular firm gets to do so, just as Universal Grammar robustly provides for human communication agnostic to the particular grammatical constructions which do so, is what makes it beautiful.

The attempted substitution of second-order beauty with first-order beauty has been the cause of a great number of evils in human history. The theme of Hayek’s entire corpus is the repudiation of this attempt with regard to the institutions of the market. Though it, like nature, is resilient to a great degree of intervention, experience has shown that neither is impossible to break. The Soviets, in fact, demonstrated this with regard to both: land irreparably laid waste by industrial development, and an economy collapsing under the misdirection of a central authority charged with the impossible task of omniscience. The two are not unrelated, stemming both from the philosophy of man as supremely rational, and the former in fact spurred on by the latter.

A beauty which does not provide for its own continued existence is no beauty at all, which is why an appreciation of second-order beauty is absolutely essential to understanding the universe and seeking truth. Second-order beauty is creation; first-order beauty is only imitation. As rationality is the qualitative distinction between the intelligence of man and animal, so the creation and governance of second-order beauty, something requiring nothing less than omniscience, is the qualitative distinction between the intelligence of man and God.

Rules are to be applied at the highest level at which they constitute a general principle.

Rules which are applicable to all people at all time would be the only domain of the federal government – namely, freedom to, which is maximized by the institution of certain freedoms from which are often called the “natural rights”. Because as Kant says, “welfare . . . has no principle, neither for him who receives it, nor for him who distributes it (one places it here, another there); because it depends on the material content of the will, which is dependent on particular facts and therefore is incapable of a general rule”, individual agency is by default the final word.

The process of discovery then, must start with a general “freedom to”, and determine from there what the best “freedoms from” are. There is one freedom to, but a multiplicity of freedoms from. The “natural rights” – life, liberty, and property – are (despite their common yet inexpedient formulation) freedoms from which are so conducive to the survival of mankind that any group which should choose not to follow them must surely languish so obviously next to their neighbors who do respect them that given the freedom to choose, nearly all would institute them. They are more accurately freedoms from violence, from physical coercion, and from encroachment by others on one’s sphere of property. Both freedom to and freedom from in this formulation must refer to actions, not things.

Now, taken to its extreme, this principle is nothing more than the presumption of general liberty, the only layers being the government and the individual. But as people are wont to perceive externalities in the behavior of others at every turn, what this in fact does is set up a quickly tapering gradient with the maximum agency entrusted to the individual, the minimum to the federal government. The rule allows for something akin to microfederalism where people organize themselves into microstates.

The analogy is often made to homeowners’ associations, rather than states: people voluntarily give up certain freedoms to in order to gain certain freedoms from – to be free of certain externalities (such as a neighbor’s messy lawn). And, crucially, if one wants the freedom to have tall grass and trash in the yard, there are other places to move. It all comes down to which freedom is valued more by which people, and those people will organize themselves into microstates based on the freedom to that they replace with freedoms from. This is the process by which we got a set of “natural rights” in the first place, though its name is misleadingly final: they are neither necessarily the only ones, nor necessarily the best possible.

In this way, those microstates will prosper whose rules are the most conducive to the preferences of their people. The principle sets up an equilibrium on the scope of subsidiary authorities. There’s a reason to call it microfederalism – namely, because coercive institutions can only maintain order “so far as the voice of a herald could reach”, as Aristotle put it. Group solidarity and common ends collapse once the group becomes large enough to be impersonal, at which point the principle of solidarity is replaced with the principle of liberty. Our own subsidiary governments as we have them now (states, counties and cities) are far too vast in scope to institute rules that would be any more meaningful than a federal mandate, and thus have the impossible task of conforming to the local preferences of a body far to vast to have them uniformly.

Microfederalism under this principle is the only system which simultaneously preserves freedom from and freedom to. Of course, such a system – like any other system of liberty – could only be itself preserved by the vigilance of its people, though they voluntarily submit to the regulations which their preferences have manifested in their own microstates, to resist general encroachments. Freedoms from can exist as general principles only so far as the submission is voluntary (that is, when one has the freedom to leave and choose among other options). That is the size beyond which federalism itself is an encroachment, and why the “states’ rights” rallying cry is a poor counterfeit of a belief in liberty.

Spontaneous Order is not just the domain of the market. It arises anywhere out of opposing constraints on human action, and in the most surprising of places. Language is an oft-cited example – how a massive community comes to learn and accept the same sounds and the same structures to mean the same things in order to communicate – and how that changes. Culture itself is a spontaneous order; an emergent property of the interactions of a group of individuals. It is orderly, yet uncontrolled by any central or top-down authority.

The art world is a fascinating example of spontaneous order. The market works as spontaneous order because people can in general be counted on to act from economic motives to equilibrate supply and demand, but the motives of art are entirely different. But as we will see, motive is indeed the key to art culture as spontaneous order.

Art and Motive

There are two axes on which we can describe the motive of artistry: first the artists’s with regard to himself, and second the artist’s with regard to his audience. catharsis to commodity, and extolling to entertainment, respectively. In reality, any piece of art is a combination of these separate motives, so we speak of proportions and continua rather than of categories.

Catharsis is art as an end in itself. It is the ideal of the artist who creates only for himself. Most art in public view which professes to be cathartic is probably less so than the creator would have us believe, and in fact, the vast majority of cathartic art is probably not public. Cathartic art is only so bound by convention as the author’s mind, and the most innovative art in any medium probably has a good deal of catharsis in it.

Commodity, on the other hand, is art as a means to personal ends. Not that that’s a bad thing. Any artist who intends to personally gain from his art at all (whether monetary or not – i.e., art created to gain respect) would create from this motive. We must admit some degree of economic motive in art, but we may allow it to be small.

Commodity art is the most common among art in public view, for publicity is the standard of success for commodity art. Because the artist is bound by the preferences of his audience, commodity art tends to take fewer risks. The more commodified an art piece is, the more distance between the artist and the creation, simply because it’s being created for an audience, and not for the self. Art for hire – graphic design, for example – would be the most purely commodified art. The subject is dictated by the client, and the artist is concomitantly least personally invested in it.

The second axis, from extolling to entertainment, is the response the artist intends to invoke from the audience.

Extolling cathartic art springs from a genuine appreciation of the subject and the desire to see others appreciate it in the same way. It is art that points beyond itself. Examples include (hopefully) a lot of praise music, religious iconography, the “help starving babies in Africa” compilations that come out periodically (assuming the music is supposed to get the masses to help on their own, and not just to raise revenue), most of Deviantart, and documentaries based on anything more than detached historical interest. Fanart is the ultimate in extolling cathartic art, because out of all of these, it is created with the least regard for audience. C.S. Lewis says praise is the consummation of enjoyment, and the extolling catharsis is an expression of that.

Down the scale to more commodification are the starving babies compilations, which if we’re honest, are probably done more for good PR than for genuinely wanting to help. Extolling commodity art tends to be uninteresting except as history. It includes advertisements, and the host of portraits commissioned by kings and nobles. The artist is dispassionately exhorting you to appreciate something; something he himself has no necessary interest in beyond his wage. People are naturally skeptical of this, so its success is based on how well it can masquerade as the cathartic variety. (as an analogy, when people are hired to give glowing testimonials for a commercial).

Entertainment art is art that, for the audience, regardless of its purpose to the author, is intended to exist for its own sake. It’s the difference between Power Rangers and Captain Planet: one is mindless entertainment, and the other wants to instill a message. Power Rangers exists for its own sake, where Captain Planet exists for the sake of extolling its message.

Cathartic entertainment art is probably the vast majority of art which is created, most of which never goes public. Doodles in the margins of a notebook, aspiring photographers who never gain the confidence to go pro – people who create for fun or release. It is entirely self-existent: it exists for its own sake both for the creator and the audience, which in most cases are the same in this category.

Commodity entertainment art is, again, not very interesting artistically (though the successful among it is indeed entertaining). Most television and movies fall under this category. They are created for the sake of the audience, but have no point to make, and as far as the viewer is concerned, are entertaining in themselves without reference to anything else.

Order from Tension

Most of the art world probably lies halfway in between commodity and catharsis. To be successful as self-standing art (as opposed to art for another purpose – a magazine, for example), it must be cathartic enough to be interesting, and yet commodified enough to be acceptable. The infectious passion attendant to an artistic catharsis is what makes art interesting, while the commodity motive keeps art grounded in what people actually enjoy. This tension is the driving force behind culture, catharsis always pushing the limits of acceptability, and commodity always informing the artist by the success of others’ and his own previous work what the people enjoy.

Likewise, people are more comfortable with entertainment than extolling. Extolling art puts pressure on the viewer. But extolling art is where you change peoples’ behavior. The advertising industry is shaped by this tension: advertisements have to be entertaining to disarm the reflexive distaste people have against it. The extolling is the defining feature of advertising; what makes it worth anything. Yet the entertainment is what makes it acceptable – the commodity motive itself driving another tension on this axis, where there is no cathartic motive to balance it.

Having spoken of the tension between cathartic and commodity art in general, and the tension between entertainment commodity art and extolling commodity art, there is no need to speak of a parallel tension between entertainment catharsis and extolling catharsis, for entertaining catharsis, being generally for private consumption, has a negligible effect on culture. We can thus say that the three quadrants which are relevant to what we might call art culture operate under tensions which produce the spontaneous order we see reflected there. There is a two-way information flow between artist and patron, out of which a dynamic order arises to maximize the felicity of both.

Man is undoubtedly a social being. Nearly everything he does is in regard to another human being. Some have taken this observation so far as to say that it is a fundamental characteristic of human beings to fragment into competing groups, with tenderness, courage, and generosity towards their own group, and hate, malice, and animosity towards rival groups. Entire political philosophies have been built upon the foundation of “man as member”.

Certainly this tendency is found in all peoples across all times. From the factions of the ancient Greeks, fighting for the honor of their tribe, to the irrational animosity between fans of different sports teams, it’s not difficult to point out numerous examples of the instinct.

Yet to say this is a fundamental characteristic of humanity fails to apprehend the core of the tendency. Man, as we know, acts with reason. Is it irreducible that man derives pleasure from being part of a group?

No; there is a deeper desire at work there. Sociality is not the sole reason for joining groups. Think of the NRA or the ACLU, among whose members only the most active ever have social interactions in the context of their group. Their memberships are vast, but generally entail nothing more for the average member than paying dues and holding a card. Yet these groups command a visceral fidelity from their members not less than a more social club: attack the NRA and its member will feel personally affronted, just as if you had slandered his church or nationality.

There is much more to the in-group/out-group mindset than direct social bonds. The fundamental desire behind it is not human contact as such, but the desire to be known. It is the selfish (though entirely natural) desire to be appreciated and understood. Lacking deep relationships to satisfy this desire, people gravitate towards groups as a proxy for themselves: in lieu of understanding me as an individual, you may understand the group I belong to, and thus understand me to some degree.

As the unsatisfied desire becomes more and more vexing, the specific character of the group becomes less and less relevant. Rather than selecting a group by which he may approximately be known, he defines himself by the group he has selected (or that has been selected for him). This is why the competition between Republicans and Democrats is so fierce, despite mainline candidates rarely differing on anything substantiative. This is why culture divides itself along racial lines – why there is such a thing as “black culture”, despite the obvious fact that skin color has no necessary influence on stylistic choices. This is why nationalism ironically triumphs all the more in countries with the least to be proud of (Germany, for example, did not fall into nationalist fervor until their country was in ruin).

Group instinct has been responsible for a vast number of evils in human history. From the senseless violence of ancient wars, crusades, and plunders, to the horrors of genocide during Fascism’s brief reign earlier in the century, all the way to the disingenuous partisan treatment of intellectual discourse today, group identity is obviously an unsatisfactory and dangerous substitute for personal friendships and relationships. Totalitarian and statist governments entrench themselves by destroying the bonds of commerce and voluntarism, and replacing them with rigid group-identity roles. The individual loses his identity to the group – he is no longer an individual but a member.

This is the danger of collectivism. Not only do we become materially worse off from economic reasons, but the bonds of friendship and knowing cannot coexist with a collectivist social structure. They are the foundation of individualism, and wherever they exist, let tyrants and bureaucrats beware. Wherever they do not, let the people beware.

He makes salient the difference between Monarchy and Despotism: in a monarchy, the power of the sovereign is constrained, where in a despotism, the sovereign has total power to execute his every whim.

Rather than making one threefold distinction, as Montesquieu does, it seems more appropriate to make two twofold distinctions: the seat of sovereignty, and the limits to that sovereignty. The first distinction is who holds power, whether the masses (democracy), a few (aristocracy or oligarchy), or one (monarchy). The second distinction is how much caprice that sovereign is allowed. The former distinction is discrete and the latter continuous.

The ancient Greeks called a corrupted monarchy tyranny. Both these words are in common use. Less common is their word for corrupted Democracy: ochlocracy – mob rule.

I submit that modern Democracy tends (and has been tending since the New Deal) more towards ochlocracy. The fears of the early founders about the tyranny of the majority have been and continue to be realized in costly centralized and non-optional programs such as social security, and now the individual mandate for healthcare.

Let us divest ourselves of romantic notions that “Democracy isn’t perfect but it’s the best system we’ve got”. Democracy turns to ochlocracy, monarchy to despotism, when limits to sovereign power (in our case Constitutional) are ignored – when we interpret our founding documents as negative, rather than positive, meta-policy.

The solution isn’t better politicians. Every election in retrospect shows us this, yet our hopes of reform are inflamed anew with each one coming. We can only redeem our (or any) democracy with structural limits on what it can do.