This blog doesn't even have a name yet. That doesn't seem natural, somehow, to be writing its first entry before the poor thing even knows what its called. But its OK: given that a lot of it is going to be about emergence, I'm sure I can say something like: “the name will emerge from the interactions of the writings,” or some such nonsense. Actually, maybe I won't say that.

What kind of a blog is it? Well, its Drupal – an open source content management system, that has a much more flexible approach to categorising content than most things around, and has a very organic feel to it. Its also able to be very simple, but expand to whatever one might want it to be.

"No – what kind of blog is it?"

Oh. In September, I'm going to be starting four years of study, into a set of questions that has vexed me for many a year. In one way or another its been a theme running through all the stuff I've done. If I was forced to choose one question, it would be:

What is the correct balance between human order and natural order?

I'll break that question down in a bit. First to say, I want two other things from the blog.

1.To get a set of other people interested in the same questions to contribute. Not a large number, but have a group who are the main contributors.
2.To write about whatever other stuff might be interesting that group of contributors too. That is, be normal common-or-garden blog where folk can also write about fishing, if that seems relevant at the time.

This may or may not happen. I'm easy at the minute. Already the internet (and my life!) is littered with the carcasses of my abortive attempts to get things off the ground. I tend to get them just high enough so that, when they fall, they make a good soggy splat. I'm not in any particular rush with this. Well – obviously not. There's four year's worth of study to do, for a start.

I am hoping that it might attract an interesting group of people, because our understanding of the political aspects of spontaneous order is in its infancy. Quite recently – in Levitt and Dunbar's 'Freakonomics' – we saw another claim that morality and one particular version of the study of spontaneous order - economics - are two entirely separable realms. Economics, we are told, deals in reality, as revealed through statistical analysis. Our moral concerns have no bearing on this.

Really? There's one of the first hooks. Accepting that, yes, human society has systemic properties does not necessarily mean that anything systemic is amoral (or, in Levitt's case, that researching into those systemic properties somehow conveys amorality upon them). It might just mean that we have to understand the system better before we can make moral choices that are also effective political choices.

This difference of two orders – 'that which is the result of human action but not of human design' (from Hayek's Wikipedia entry) being one of them - one might think, are like oil and water. And terrible warnings and wailings can be heard if you try to mix the two.

Good intentions, in the hands of the wrong people, become dangerous things. Calamitous, even.

Again, really? Hayek offers us a syllogism: socialism equals state planning; state planning equals centralisation; centralisation is the road to serfdom. Abandon hope of equality all ye who are born here. Capitalism or fascism: take your pick.

The ascendancy of this particular version of Hayekian liberalism is often portrayed as something that emerged meteor-like from the political wilderness, as though neo-classical thinkers had been forced to wander from city to city, shouting on soap-boxes in provincial town centres, just to keep their belief alive. But nothing is new under the sun: one question (perhaps of peripheral interest) is to what extent it is just the continuation of strands of 18th century Burkean conservatism and 19th century economic liberalism? (I hope we'll get to unpack all these generalisations as time goes on!)

Having said that nothing is new under the sun, I must point out two things. This is a blog, so I'm allowed to vent fairly untutored and prejudiced views. I'll try and steep them as much as possible, but I'm hoping to discover along the way that, in fact, a whole department has existed in a university in Toronto, and they already have the answers.

A lot of this PhD is going to be about synthesising. They've given me money to be a generalist. How unusual – but equally, how much more important to try and capture a range of opinion and views on the conclusions. I hope this blog will help.

There are plenty of people already looking at different aspects of these questions. The best I've read so far (and so I've been doing a lot of populariser reading!) is Philip Ball's Critical Mass: the Physics of Society.

His last chapter is particularly relevant to this stuff. He quotes historian Richard Olson, who's paraphrasing Adam Ferguson.

One way of expressing the relationship between physical and moral laws – i.e. between science and morality – in the formation of society... is to say that social systems are 'softly' deterministic. Left alone, they will inevitably develop along certain lines; but the possibility of changing those lines by conscious and intentional intervention does exist. The whole point of a 'social science', then, is to explore the opportunities for and likely consequences of intentional moral action. Without the science, morality is blind; but without the morality, science is useless, pointless and paralytic.

Ball goes on to quote Hayek – a natural follow-on from the above:

The attitude of the liberal towards society is like that of the gardener who tends a plant and, in order to create the conditions most favourable to its growth, must know as much as possible about its structure and the way it functions.

(I'm hoping to shoe-horn something gardening related into the final name for the blog. Sadly, kompost.org is taken!)

You have to wonder from what position of power and knowledge the gardener gets to know the composition of her garden? But I won't pre-judge Hayek at this stage, since my knowledge of him is entirely superficial. Having said that – one of his key arguments is that human order is far, far too complex for the central planner to have a hope of controlling it. Its on this argument that his Road to Serfdom case is built. But if so, how can he come to any conclusions at all? If he's right, do we then have to concur with Oakeshott - that “a plan to resist all planning may be better than its opposite, but it is still from the same style of politics.”

This has only scratched the surface of the questions I want to look at. The key one I haven't mentioned yet is 'why now?' The one sentence answer is 'computers'.

I guess I can start making a few preliminary entries, see how that goes. But, hmm, this'll do for now.