The Adam Smith Institute’s response to change

The ASI is often described as centre-right because of its neoliberal approach to trade and its emphasis on markets and competition. It is far from a populist outlook that is anti-immigrant, anti-drugs, anti-lifestyle choice and traditionalist moral values. It is not conservative (small c) in wanting to keep thing the same. Quite the opposite, it embraces change because change brings the chance of improvement.

Two of the most eminent pre-Socratic philosophers were diametrically opposed. Parmenides said that change is an illusion brought about by our senses, and that in reality nothing changes. His contemporary, Heraclitus, said that everything is changing all the time. “We step and do not step into the same river for new waters flow ever about us.” We are not the same person we were an hour ago because we have changed.

The political world can be roughly divided between the followers of Parmenides and Heraclitus. There are those who seek the stability and predictability of permanence, and those who are ready to embrace change – even to welcome it. Perhaps this is the difference between small ‘c’ conservatives and progressives, even revolutionaries.

The division produces some strange alliances. Trade Unionists side with retired Tory colonels in wanting to keep things as they were. Many environmentalistslook back to when we all lived more simply and made less impact on the planet.  They urge us to go backwards, to travel less, to produce less, to consume less, to do less.  Many of them are against growth. At heart such people are deeply conservative, the children of Parmenides.  They yearn for a predictable, static world.

Those who want to keep things the same support such things as protection and subsidy for domestic industry.  They want the comfort of traditional goods produced by traditional methods in traditional places. The admission of cheaper foreign goods threatens that stability and portends upheaval.  So tariffs are urged to protect domestic producers from competition, while subsidies from taxpayers are urged to keep them in business

The children of Heraclitus seek improvement, which necessarily means change.  They set targets and seek to attain them.  They experiment and innovate.  People live lives that are dramatically different from the lives lived by their parents, and incomprehensibly different from those lived by their grandparents.   Their lives are characterized by progress.

The story of humankind can be told as the story of progress – by no means constant, by no means linear, but the story of progress nonetheless.  It took only 12,000 years for us to come out of our caves and plant our footprints on the moon – that is not even one tick of the astronomical clock.

Societies that seek stasis limit freedom.  They restrain the right to innovate, to experiment, because this threatens stability.  Societies that embrace flux tend also to embrace freedom – the freedom to differ, the freedom to change.

Which, then, are we in the Adam Smith Institute? No surprises here. We’re the good guys, the disrupters, the innovators, the early adopters. We change things, we make things better. We don’t take kindly to being told what to do because we’d rather decide that for ourselves. We’re the free marketeers, the libertarians, the neoliberals. What we seek is the space for people to do all this, and to jump with confidence across the stepping stones that give passage across Heraclitus’ moving river.

Credit: Bust of an unknown philosopher. One suggestion is that it is Heraclitus, but the museum makes no such assumption. Photo: Roy Focker / Capitoline Museum in Rome/ Wikimedia/ CC BY-SA 4.0