Customer Reviews

The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress

5 star:		(47)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

...not even about Liberal vs. Conservative. Everyone seems to want change. Postrel make the convincing argument that the battle is really between those who demand central control and a pre-planned future vs. those who are willing to let the future evolve in a many time unexpected way. Essentially it's an age old debate - almighty wisdom vs. evolution.... It's authority (whether it be religion or the state) versus freedom of choice (whether it be the markets or experimentation). Postrel delineates the battle ground with a variety of examples...both contemporary and historic.

The book offers insights into the potential of creativity breaking out from the traditional command and control mentality. As a former urban planner, I was particularly enlightened by her examples as they relate to a changing urban scape.

Overall, this is a ground breaking book that links a number of guru management ideas, politics, science and economic thought....the kind of cross-disciplinary analysis that opens up new ways to more objectively view the world. The Future and Its Enemies is a worthwhile read that will help the reader understand the real underlying dichotomy and debate ("the paradigm" which is a term that Postrel gratfully doesn't use) that defines how politicians and others react to a wide variety of contentious debates. Now the reader can understand the underlying personalities and sets of beliefs and predict how the future balttle lines will be drawn..and what side to be on.

I was familiar with Virginia Postrel's work in Reason magazine before I bought this book, so I was already looking forward to it with great expectations. However, Ms. Postrel actually managed to exceed them! So often even the best journalists cannot make the transition to writing full-length texts, but Ms. Postrel has done so with ease. Some reviewers have complained that the book lacks depth and it is true that Ms. Postrel could have added more case studies or psychological and philosophical analysis. But I have never thought that every book must achieve the scope of _Human Action_ to be useful. Indeed, something can definitely be said for making a book accessible to the public-at-large rather than catering to the converted.

I found Ms. Postrel's arguments very compelling, especially when taken with the writings of previous authors. F.A. Hayek, Ayn Rand, and Frederic Bastiat of course did not use the terms dynamist and stasist in their works, but the same thread is clearly evident. Hayek, Rand, and Bastiat (along with many others) long ago identified the alliances between the far-left and far-right for the purpose of destroying progress. Yet Postrel's book brings that analysis to its logical conclusion by finally obliterating the falsity of the left-right dichotomy which many 19th and 20th Century writers still implicitly accepted even when they identified the parallels between stasist groups.

That said, Postrel's book, although certainly capable of being read on its own, would be best read as part of a body of literature. I would recommend also reading Hayek's _The Road to Serfdom_, Rand's _Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal_, and Bastiat's _Economic Sophisms_ for readers previously unfamiliar with the subject. Those texts are readily available and are as accessible as Postrel's for the novice reader.

Finally, I must say that with this book, Ms. Postrel joins Wendy McElroy as a heroine for the 21st Century, carrying on the work of such great liberal (in the proper sense of that word) women such as Ayn Rand, Rose Wilder Lane, and Isabel Paterson.

As a citizen of Sweden Postrels book gets a special meaning. As a liberal politician in Sweden even more so.

Sweden can be classified as a semi-socialist state. On one hand Sweden is modern and liberal when it comes to all the standard human rights issues. On another there is a very deeply rooted, and dominant, culture of social engineering and socialization. Virtually everything, and I really mean everything, is in some manner under direct political influence. As everything in this country is politics, everything is also subject to thorough planning, scheduling and political debate. From my point of view, Sweden is a "stasist" state with very little room for any kind of dynamist influenses. This book has given me, beeing an anti-socialist in a semi-socialist society, new hope. Maybe there are other ways to break the stale mate in our country, when it comes to analyzing politics. I'll apply the dynamist-stasist dimension here, and see what happens.

It has become fashionable as of late to argue for cultural stasis. The green left, for instance, argues that nature is best and any 'progres' away from the natural should be silenced. Similarly, the conservative right warns that culture and social structure should remain in the '50's and that the new 'consumerism' is threatening cultural 'stability.' Both groups, and others like them, have their own vision of the 'best way' for society to be. To varying degrees, these groups want to save the people from the 'wrong' future by technocratic planning and regulation that allows for the 'right' future - their future.

Virginia Postrel opposes ideas of a planned future based on any model of the 'one best way.' She argues in this book that the best way for the future to happen is sponteneously. Instead of regulating industries, mores, and ideas, we should let people and companies be as free as possible to experiment with new ideas and innnovations, and through trial and error, let THEM decide what they like and do not. A future planned in advance through regulation and government controls leads to stagnation and fewer options. An open future leads to vibrancy, ingenuity, and increased options.

These ideas, of course, are not new. Those familiiar with economists like Hayek, Sowell, and Friedman will recongize them instantly. These and other economists argued (iconoclastically) that planned societies (or planned markets) not only ciphen off people's inborn urge to try new things and experiment, but lead to social and economic stand-stills.

Postrel's book alternates well between theory and practice. She offers scores of examples illustrating why regulations on markets tends to stifle valuable innovation, and why deregulation tends to lead to better and better technologies (while allowing consumers to sort the good from the bad instead of being dictated to from on high). From the ingenuity made possible by deregulation of airlines, to the remarkable progress (and sponteneous order) that the internet (unhampered by regulation) has offered, Postrel brings theory home by illustrating its practical effects.

My favorite chapter is "Creating Nature," focused particularly on the biotech industry and "its enemies." It is also the chapter most relevant to me. While writing a grad paper on biotech, I read many of the works noted (and deftly criticized) by Postrel - by the likes of Leon Kass, Bill McKibben, and Jeremy Rifkin. These rather anti-technology luddites sincerely argue that the days before technology were better and that if we were as smart as they, we would realize it too. As Postrel notes, they are unashamedly snobbish, often deriding the general public for valuing the better life afforded by technology and the bugbear of 'consumerism.' Postrel eloquently explores all of this, highlighting the problems endemic to such thought.

The only two criticisms I can offer of the book are these: First, Postrel seems so intent on grilling the luddites that she might err in the opposite direction and exhibit TOO MUCH faith in change for change's sake (she uses the phrase "faith in progres" quite a bit). Unfortunately, this makes her come off as having the same level of unquestioning zeal that she spots in her opposition. Second, the book is unabashedly libertarian. While this is not a problem for me (I am one too) she never quite comes clean about it. This may strike some readers as a tad covert.

All in all though, this is an excellent read. The chapters are organized so as to minimize repitition, the research is varied and well done, and her arguments are extremely tight. For those not afraid of progress, or those curious about those that are, this is a must read.

I consider myself an optimist and insightful person, but somehow managed to miss many of Postrel's insights. She gives me even more hope that the future is going to be more wonderful than I previously thought. She does keep that hope in check, though, by talking about the enemies of the future- primarily protectionists and those that see free trade as a threat, instead of the blessing that it is.

She thoroughly destroys the notion that 'there is nothing new under that sun'. While the universe, therefore our earth, is necessarily finite, we misunderstand this finiteness because we misunderstand the different combinations things can be arranged in. For example, a deck of cards has only 52 cards, but the number of combinations you can put the cards into is 52x51x50x49x...x3x2x1, which is a number larger than the number of particles in the universe! So whenever you shuffle a deck of cards, you can rest assured, that that is probably the one and only time that arrangement of cards will ever be in existence... ever.

People are so inventive and creative and always looking for new things. Obviously, there will always be new things. Every time someone declares that we are nearing the end of history, science, technology, etc. it's safe to say they have no idea what they are talking about. We need to let people be as creative and as inventive as they can. It will only make our lives better, on the whole. There will always be setbacks, but as long as people can think, we will always find a way to make out of those setbacks.

The book is a stunning, intelligent look at modern life. I liked it so much, I bought The Substance of Style, which is, yet, another insightful look at modern life.

Postrel forces you to think explicitly about the future. I have 10 children. Thus I have more invested in the future than most people. The future my children and grandchildren inherit and create be mostly shaped by people with dynamist views. After all, it is the dynamists who created civilization. To be sure, history is full of examples where the forces of stasis won over the dynamists, sometimes for centuries. However, I think the future is with the dynamists. I'm betting this book will be considered a seminal classic 100 years from now.

This book promises a new way to think about otherwize puzzling phenomena. It doesn't disappoint.

I enjoyed the book immensely, and thought its pronouncements on the bizarre alliances between "right" and "left" quite enlightening.

The book's central theme involves a conflict between what Postrel calls "stasism" and "dynamism," where the former view involves a blend of both reactionaries (whose primary value is social stability) and technocrats (whose primary value is control - "one best way for everyone"). This analysis enables us to understand the weird overlaps between reactionary environmentalists, who think that the only threat ecosystems face is human-caused instability, and conservatives, who fear cultural instability ("I refuse to let you affect my life.")

Then there are the technocrats, who, as Postrel ably describes, think that if one day care center has an in-house play area, then all of them should. Postrel quotes with merry abandon, laying bare the code in which technocrats talk (they love phrases like "national standards," "comprehensive plans," etc.).

These then are the future's enemies, and they tend to share either a distrust or ignorance of what Postrel, following F.A. Hayek, calls "localized" or "tacit" knowledge. Hayek described such knowledge as "the knowledge of specific circumstances, time, and place" -- that is, the sort of knowledge no technocrat in Washington could ever master, no matter how big his computer. The existence of this sort of knowledge is the reason why large-scale plans foisted on everyone, regardless of circumstances, tend to fail, and why markets, with their endless ability to customize and tailor products to even the most obscure of needs, tend to succeed.

Hayek wrote of these things many years ago, but even he disparaged his own writing skills. (Nonetheless, I am hard-pressed to think of a greater social thinker in the 20th century than Hayek.) It is a good thing that there are people like Postrel to take up the banner.

I was at Printer's Inc bookstore in Mountain View, CA with a friend last month and he foisted this on me, assuring me that it would be an eye-opening sort of experience. I read the book from cover to cover in a couple days and I don't think my outlook on technology and the West Coast was changed as significantly as he claims his was, but I've got to admit that it was an excellent read and gave me much to ponder.

Virginia Postrel is the editor of the uber-libertarian Reason Magazine and also writes frequently for the Wall Street Journal. This book is basically a fleshing out of her favorite theme- that technology is what is going to carry us through the 21st century intact and save us from death by exponential and catastrophic population growth, and that the future of our culture and the arts are essentially tied to technological development. But she also warns us that only unfettered technology can flourish. Regulation means expense and expense is the great bogeyman of research and development. If governments start regulating genetic engineering, the Internet and nanotechnology while they are in their infancy, there will be no bright tomorrow.

One of the most interesting aspects of the book was the connection that Ms. Postrel draws between the neo-Luddite Jeremy Rifkin types of the left and the nationalist Pat Buchanans of the right. The idea that there is a coming realignment in politics is not original to her, but she presents the shift of political alliances away from left-right and into a freedom-tyranny oriented spectrum more capably than anyone else I have read.

She doesn't paint a utopian future. She makes it clear that the road to tomorrow won't be easy for anybody, let alone everybody. But we won't get there at all unless the social problems of our day and the problems raised by increasingly rapid change are delt with by individuals, not bureaucracies. If the great enemy of the future is regulation, its best friends are the thinker, the private humanatarian and, most of all, the entrepreneur.

This is a book that could have been great. The concept is compelling: a storm is brewing at a distance between those who embrace change, embrace technology and innovation, whom she calls dynamists, and those who fear change, believe it's corrosive on our way of life, and, like the Unabomber, want to stifle technological innovation and revert us all back to an agrarian, self-sufficient society, in effect. An eclectic mix of political factions -- the Pat Buchanan anti-free-traders, the Al Gore environmentalists, the Ralph Nader anti-industrialists, Bill Bennett cultural conservatives, the Hillary Clinton technocrats (who want to fiddle with everything to make it "better", Theodore Kaczynski luddites, and others are awkwardly but inevitably coalescing into a new party or faction that will oppose/is opposing the free development of technology and the like, ostensibly to protect consumers and in their minds, to protect a "status quo" standard of living or way of live, that in their mind is superior to whatever may lie
ahead. In contrast, a separate cast of political factions -- Milton Friedman freemarketeers, "genomic" liberals (who want free rein in biotech research), Harry Browne libertarians, Cher social-liberal types, militant Timothy McVeigh federalists, the Howard Schultz entrepreneurs, investment bankers, and others. Weird bedfellows, to be sure. But recent protests at
WTO conferences, acts of sabotage by Earth Liberation Front cells, the popularity of isolationist rhetoric by Ross Perot or Pat Buchanan here and counterparts abroad are symptomatic of an escalating tension driven by the accelerating adoption of technology worldwide. Things are moving fast, and not everyone
is comfortable.

The author argues that dynamism, the label she gives the pro-technology/pro-progress faction, is innate in each of us: we crave learning, and trial and error is part of learning, and technology is a logical result of trial and error, starting
with early man's need to make stone tools all the way to a young engineer's need today to build a better ultralight aircraft. Much of what we do is utilitarian, but the author makes a forceful argument that play, or challenging ourselves
just for the sake of challenging ourselves, is innate in each of us and thus argues that the dynamic path, not the stasist (status quo/anti-progress) path,
is our natural destiny. The implications for all of this are profound, and it will be fascinating to watch existing centers of power grapple with this issue as the transition to the "new order" oriented around this issue will be awkward and contentious, but I would agree the day is inevitable
when this issue will be front and center.

My main, and significant, problem with this book is the quality of the writing: it meanders, could be more forceful, seems unclear in its purpose at times, and misses many opportunities to make earth-shattering points. For this reason, it's not a super-page-turner, but rather is something that can be power-read without missing important pieces of learning.

This book is at times very good and others quite monotonous. I must laud Mrs. Postrel for her insightful and truly revolutionary look at the dynamism of how we relate to the future and try to deal with its uncertainties. Although she does try to be somewhat even handed with the views of her "technocratic" villains, much of the text reads like a political manifesto with distinct examples of why "Dynamism" works and "Technocracy" doesn't within a pseudo-analytical framework. I don't feel that what was included herein provides enough information for a complete book, however. Any English professor would have written atop it in red pen "good ideas but be more brief and concise". The point she makes, however is very poignant and I agree with quite a bit and it does flush itself out in many of the examples. I wish she had either made it a pointedly direct pamphlet manifesto, or a truly journalistic look at the broad spectrum of how people, society and government approach the future. All in all she is a brilliant social critic and I look forward to seeing more from her.