to religion, not to reason and science

It is the last chapter of the last book by Friedrich Hayek. It is a five-page chapter titled Religion and the Guardians of Tradition. It was written by an eighty-nine year old man who had spent his life trying to lay down the rules for a better society where religion was always kept excluded.

He knew that for the majority of his followers it would be a shock. He begins the chapter writing:

"In closing this work, I would like to make a few informal remarks (...) about the connection between the argument of this book and the role of religious belief. These remarks may be unpalatable to some intellectuals because they suggest that, in their own longstanding conflict with religion, they were partly mistaken - and very much lacking in appreciation".

And then the key paragraph of the chapter:

"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 those things in mind, we can better understand and appreciate those clerics who are said to have become somewhat sceptical 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 [like himself] 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." (F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1988, pp. 135, 137; bold mine) .

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In other words, we owe our lives and our civilization to religion, not to reason and science.

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Actually, in the post here I tried to suggest where a rational system of morals like that Ayn Rand and her Objectivist followers tried to build might lead.

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Rand could justify on rational, moral grounds to her husband Frank, her soon-to-be lover Nathaniel and his wife, Barbara, the logical necessity of entering into an affair with her disciple, more than twenty years her junior. She went further to set rationally the conditions under which the affair would take place. They would meet twice a week in her appartment, one aftertoon and one evening. Her husband was supposed to leave on those occasions.

Obviously, the love affair based on her rational system of morals ended badly for the four people involved. It illustrates, however, where this revolutionary, rationalistic and atheistic intellectual attitude usually leads. It seems to me an attitude congenial to Jewish intellectuals. You find it in Rand, you find it also in Marx.