Agoraphobia in Tomorrowland
Craig Goodrich
Rant Magazine
January/February 1999
Well, 1998 has been a fascinating year for politics junkies, beginning as it did with George Stephanopoulos saying on TV that if the President had sex with an intern he'd certainly be impeached or resign, and ending with the Democratic caucus of the Senate refusing to convict Bill Clinton because that would make Bob Dole President (what else could "overturning the election" mean?), thus defending the Constitution by ignoring the Twelfth Amendment, ratified in 1804. (Understandable, I suppose: only Senator Thurmond could possibly remember it personally, and he turned Republican.)
On the crisis front, we had the Administration dropping half a billion dollars' worth of bombs in the Middle East to vent its disgust at the Special Prosecutor's office spending $50 million and managing only a dozen or so felony convictions. The toll in innocent lives was minor, by 20th century standards: only about a hundred Iraqis and a few potential prosecution witnesses.
And of course, nearing the end of the 20th century, the media pundits briefly toyed with the idea of selecting not just a Person of the Year but a Person of the Century and a Person of the Millennium, thus proclaiming themselves qualified to decide, for example, whether Galileo was more important than Newton, Einstein, and Madame Curie, or Shakespeare than Dante and Dostoyevski. Modesty does not appear prominently in their job descriptions, apparently....
[T]he vision of progress we have come to take for granted in the 20th century ... [requires] controlling the future, plotting it out in advance, and eliminating the detritus of the past. ...
The hold exerted by the idea of progress-as-stages explains why, when Disneyland opened a revamped Tomorrowland in May, the near universal media spin was that the park no longer believed in a bright future. In designing its new attractions, Disney had jettisoned the "one best way" of modernism in favor of a "culture of futures" that included reminders of the past. It no longer imagined tomorrow as uniform or wholly new. That meant, cultural critics intoned, that the park had rejected "the illusion of evolution as progress" and adopted their own view of technology as "a killing thing."
To such technophobes, the obvious alternative to obliterating the past is preserving it: rejecting new ideas and turning the world into a museum; keeping buildings, technologies, business practices, and social customs just the way they are, or used to be. We must choose, say both technocratic planners and their reactionary counterparts, between reinventing the world and changing nothing at all. We must pick one discrete stage or another. The debate about progress, in this case, is a debate over two essentially static notions. We will either construct a neatly designed future or return to the past, either control progress or eliminate it. ...
All of this is simply, and profoundly, wrong. It completely misunderstands how progress occurs and how civilizations learn. It ignores the lived experience of business, science, technology, art, and culture. It devalues adaptability and resilience, experience and experimentation. It gives rhetorical aid and comfort to the enemies of creativity, enterprise, and progress. Encountering the unplanned, incremental, dispersed, and unpredictable way important innovations really occur, it encourages panic and rejection.
If these pundits had paid more attention to one little book that came out during the year, they might have understood the pointlessness of naming such Persons:The Future and Its Enemies, by Virginia Postrel.
Postrel, editor of Reason magazine and a columnist for Forbes, provides an explanation of the curious feeling many of us have that the only real difference between, say, Ralph Nader and Pat Buchanan is the size of their waistlines. The relevant political division, she argues, is not between the traditional Right and Left, but between those whom she calls -- in phonetically somewhat unfortunate terms -- stasists and dynamists.
For the stasist, society is a static set of relationships and personal roles, and its stability must be preserved at all costs. Change is potentially dangerous and must at the very least be carefully controlled so as not to endanger the institutions, beliefs, and traditions of the current social order.
Among the stasists, Postrel further distinguishes between reactionaries -- those who believe that somehow society has gone terribly wrong and must be returned to some idyllic earlier age -- and the technocrats, who believe that social and technological change must be watched and guided to insure that it leads the masses in the direction prescribed by their Master Plan. What both have in common is horror at the prospect of an unknown future beyond their control.
The dynamist, on the other hand, sees change as the result of decentralized, spontaneous processes, as millions of individuals act independently to produce change and progress in their own lives. The future, for the dynamist, is not merely unknown, but it is unknowable; it depends on the outcome of countless daily experiments in living by the countless different people covered by the misleading umbrella term "society." Progress is produced by the knowledge gained from a continuous creative ferment of trial and error; the good ideas survive and spread, to become the foundation of new experimentation, while the equally-valuable lessons learned from failures and imperfections provide opportunities for new attempts at improvement.
This accumulation of knowledge, new ideas arising from combinations of older ideas, is what produces human progress. Since this process is cumulative, it makes no sense to ask whether Newton was "more important" than Einstein. And since this process is completely open-ended, the future itself is open-ended. There is no "end of history" in sight; that's what terrifies the stasists.
Unfortunately, this dynamic vision lacks a public vocabulary. And it frustrates the power fantasies of those who find satisfaction not in local improvements but in global reengineering. ... The static model has broad appeal. It particularly comforts those whose minds crave unitary meaning in human affairs and fear a future of endless, decentralized, unpredictable innovation and adaptation. So dynamism is frequently misunderstood, ridiculed, or condemned by people who cannot bear the thought of progress without control.
What are the political implications of the dynamist vision? The defining characteristic of government is that it may use force to compel obedience to its dictates. The threat of force is not particularly useful in inspiring the kind of creativity that gives rise to progress ("Invent the electric light, buddy, or I'll blow your head off"), but it can quite effectively prevent people from doing things. Given that progress requires constant individual exploration in unpredictable directions, we can expect the greatest progress where individuals have the greatest degree of personal freedom. One key to progress, therefore, is variety, to allow as broad a field for new ideas as possible.
I've said that the Evolutionary Imperative is this: for life itself to prosper, living things must not only be fruitful, they must be as different from one another as possible. It isn't fashionable these days to assert that there are qualitative differences between human beings and other living things, but one of the most conspicuous of those qualitative differences is something I've heard many a zoologist talk about: there are more individual differences among human beings than between whole species of many other organisms.What other organisms strive to accomplish as whole species, human beings tend to do as individuals. We live everywhere on the planet, almost from the South Pole to the North Pole, and from almost the highest mountaintop to the bottom of the sea. We eat everything that doesn't eat us first -- and quite a number of things that try. We build every imaginable kind of shelter, wear every imaginable kind of clothing, practice every imaginable kind of marriage system, several different reproductive systems, indulge ourselves in every possible variety of religious and philosophical belief. Both literally and metaphorically, we try to fill every niche and be as different from one another as possible.
No two people agree with one another about everything. The fact is that I'm often surprised that two people can ever agree on anything at all. We all seem to possess a drive -- and I'm not sure that anyone has ever noticed it before -- to differ with one another simply for the hell of it. And that drive appears far stronger to me than any contrary inclination toward conformity.
This is a good thing. This is a very good thing.
Likewise, for the trial-and-error knowledge to be accumulated and spread, it is important that the individual both profit from his successes and bear the brunt of his failures. So another key is responsibility.
In short, the best thing a government can do to hasten progress in whatever field you wish -- technology, art, material well-being, philosophy -- is to stay out of the way as much as possible. Or, as Thomas Jefferson put it, "That government which governs least, governs best." It is ironic beyond comprehension that the two political movements which have claimed the name "Progressive" -- the technocratic elitist Republicans of the early part of this century and the odd coalition of Marxist relics and reactionary greens currently camped in the left of the Democratic Party -- are the very groups whose ideology would most obstruct progress through pervasive regulation and control.
To dynamism's critics, it is immature to expect institutions to evolve over time, to allow experimentation and adaptation to address the problems new technologies bring. Faced with these issues -- porn on the Internet, consumer data collected by Web sites, technology haves and have-nots -- they demand solutions right now. They cannot stand the idea that diversity and choice, rather than "a comprehensive system," might make people better off. But in the real world, people have many different goals, and we don't know all the answers in advance. Risk is inescapable, pluralism is essential, there is no alternative to experimentation, and solutions take time.
This analysis provides a ready explanation for the stagnation of contemporary socialist states, of course, but Postrel discusses at some length a broader (and more exotic) question which historians have addressed with mixed success: why Western civilization has taken over the world.
In the Middle Ages, an objective observer (say, from Arcturus) would have bet on China. Their technology was far ahead of Europe's in nearly every field, from metallurgy and chemistry to papermaking and shipbuilding. They developed gunpowder, which Europe never discovered independently, and had been casting iron for a thousand years before the process was (re)invented in the West. Their traders and missionaries were active all over Asia, importing new ideas from Arabia, Persia, and India, and copiously documenting their discoveries in scientific and mathematical treatises.
But suddenly in the 1400s the xenophobic Ming emperors closed the country; by the middle of the sixteenth century, records of earlier voyages of discovery had been burned and going to sea to trade was considered treason. Perhaps the Ming feared some Perotesque "giant sucking sound," or perhaps they simply believed in "China for the Chinese," but for whatever reason, says Postrel,
... reactionary ideals, technocratic administration, and monopoly power converged to enforce stability at the cost of stagnation... Even in its creative period, China's dynamism was primarily technological, not social, economic, or political... The very openness of the mandarin bureaucracy ... pulled many of China's best minds away from other, more creative pursuits.
So China was closing up just as the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on empirical science, rationalism, and individualism, was coming to Europe. Excessive government took hardly a century to squander China's thousand-year head start.
Neither Postrel's analysis nor her conclusions are completely original, of course, as she herself would be the first to explain -- as indeed she does, with numerous fascinating quotations. But it's a highly readable synthesis, and a great antidote to the avalanche of alarmist rhetoric we're going to get as the year 2000 approaches.Be prepared -- the next time you hear some politician proposing a new program and promising to "build a bridge to the 21st Century," just remember: throughout history, the future has been built by people in spite of the government, never because of it.
Ordinary people, using their ingenuity and knowledge for their own purposes, created -- and are still creating -- the technology and variety that now pervades our lives. Ordinary people built AT&T, IBM, and GM; governments built the DEA, the KGB, and the IRS. Ordinary people have given us 31 Flavors, 100 cable channels, and the thousand-dollar supercomputer. Governments have given us the Five Year Plan, the Hundred Years' War, and the Thousand-Year Reich.
So we don't need a bridge to the future, because there's no chasm there, however much the media-government complex tries to frighten us. They'd like to build a bridge, because a bridge forces everyone to travel on the same narrow path and arrive at the same carefully preplanned spot on the other side. But you, and I, and billions of other "ordinary" people, are building our own futures right now; all we need the politicians for is to take down the walls and fences they keep putting in our way....
The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress, by Virginia Postrel (The Free Press, 1998; 265 pp). Available through your local bookstore or from Laissez-Faire Books, 1-800-326-0996.
Watch Virginia's interview on CSPAN's Booknotes.L. Neil Smith's latest novel Bretta Martyn is now available in paperback, locally or from Laissez-Faire Books. Watch for The Forge of the Elders, forthcoming from Baen.
Computer guru Craig Goodrich lives in a house in the woods in Elkmont, with his wife, two children, and four cats. He is a representative-at-large of the Libertarian Party of Alabama, a smoker, and a gun owner.