FORWARD TO THE FUTURE
CEASER, JAMES W.
FORWARD TO THE FUTURE Virginia Postrel's Dynamist Manifesto By James W. Ceaser Move over Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, there's a new cleavage in town: stasists versus...
...Conservatives—if one dares still to speak in such outmoded categories— will find much to admire in this irrepressible and ingenious work...
...The Future and Its Enemies updates conservative arguments against centralized economic control and applies them to features of our economy that snobs like to disdain...
...Yet the reader may well wonder about the wisdom of basing a whole political theory on the principle of spontaneous organic development...
...For the libertarian, the liberty of the individual is an end in itself—indeed, the highest end...
...They understand that progress cannot be charted...
...In place of repression, she elevates play and the spontaneous desire for fun...
...The Future and Its Enemies is more than an analysis of the emerging political cleavage in America...
...And she reminds a certain branch of conservatives, those who revel in the gloomy fantasy of a return to the medieval city, of the link between liberty and progress...
...We can conceive of imposing, by conscious design, an architecture on politics or economics...
...And their embryonic conflict will soon—or so argues Virginia Postrel in her new book, The Future and Its Enemies—become the main division in American politics...
...Postrel's conviction displays itself not just in the content of the book, but in the style she has developed to explain it...
...For someone who sees the future as unpredictable and open-ended, Postrel is remarkably certain about the coming cleavage in American politics...
...All follow the same law of spontaneous growth...
...Humans, it is true, fit oddly into this universe because we can picture a system as a whole...
...It is a measure of Postrel's intense partisanship that she calls dynamism the "party of life...
...The only spontaneous urge that humans are obliged to suppress— obliged, as it were, by a law that reveals the secret of progress—is the desire to rule or command a general system...
...By trying to command what cannot be commanded and rule what cannot be ruled, humans violate the reality principle and muck things up...
...She has had enough of the fuddy-duddies who preach "the repression theory of progress," enough of the East Coast intellectuals who amuse themselves by ridiculing what they snidely label the oxymoron of California culture...
...They are believers not in outcomes but in process: "The dynamist promise is not of a particular, carefully outlined future...
...The technocratic wing of stasism, represented by the likes of Al Gore with his information superhighway, is a bit of a wolf in sheep's clothing: The technocrats may speak the language of James W Ceaser is professor of government and foreign affairs at the University of Virginia...
...Where academics make careers trashing Disneyland, McDonald's, and Wal-Mart, Postrel shows both the genius that lies behind such business enterprises and the reasonable human needs they fulfill...
...Has any society of liberty been based on spontaneous growth...
...Previous proponents—one thinks of Locke, Hume, and Smith—tended to make an exception of sorts for the cultivation of human beings...
...It is not the case, moreover, that all systems of liberty have developed spontaneously or that they can be maintained without any knowledge of the whole of the political order...
...It is a fervent partisan statement, "an unabashedly dynamist work...
...While Postrel is surely not the first to argue this principle, she seems to have embraced it with a passion unknown to any of her predecessors...
...progress, but their adherence to centrally imposed plans for the future inevitably ends up thwarting genuine progress...
...Try as she might, Postrel herself cannot remain unabashedly dynamist in her responses to such questions...
...Political life cannot be subsumed under a single reality principle...
...And better it will be if only its "enemy"—the stasist party of death— does not stand in its way...
...Stasism is divided into a reactionary and a technocratic wing...
...Nevertheless, they know that this process will bring us something better: "The future will be as grand, and as particular, as we are...
...But when we do so, Postrel argues, we go astray...
...Nor is she afraid to celebrate the well-tanned culture of the beach, praising "the bronze and the brown," for which she is, admittedly, a more plausible advocate than Steve Forbes...
...Dynamists, by contrast, are those who wish to press ahead, to go where no man has gone before...
...But while she does not exactly reject the label of libertarian, neither does she embrace it...
...And the alternative she offers, one that elevates the playful spirit to the apex of the human hierarchy, does not strike me as plausible...
...Overpowered by Postrel's twin strikes from neoclassical economics and new-age philosophy, the reader is supposed to have no choice but to submit...
...She is especially effective in exposing the elitism of the communitarians who preach about people's right to choose—but only after they have been instructed on how they must think...
...But this turn to play is not a critique of progress...
...For the dynamist, liberty seems to be primarily a means, vindicated by the progress it brings...
...Dynamists take their progress piecemeal—which is, they say, the only way it can come...
...Too much time for reflection, it seems, violates the dynamist's credo to move, strive, seek, and find...
...Although she does not like to speak much about these architects, without their edifices and without the knowledge they employed to construct them, we would be nowhere today and heading for tyranny or barbarism tomorrow...
...But Postrel extends the notion of spontaneous development to the human soul itself...
...Is a philosophy that speaks only of blind process, unconnected to any image of the good, sufficient to ground a political order, especially one promoting liberty...
...The principle is one of organic growth: The individual parts of any system follow their own limited nature or ends, and the result is a progressive evolution of the whole...
...Even for those conservatives who share with Postrel a partiality for dynamist ideas as a guide to public policy, the question remains whether the principle of spontaneous growth is an adequate philosophical support...
...The future wants to be better...
...Postrel is editor of the libertarian magazine Reason...
...As the title of her book indicates, the future is not a neutral period of time, but something with an aim or direction...
...Indeed, Postrel herself is of two minds on this point...
...Stasists are those who desire stasis and fear open-ended change...
...they feel that "the world has gone terribly wrong, and someone needs to take control and make things right...
...But the best modern conservative models have long recognized the difference between such intrusive visions and a more modest understanding of nature that underwrites liberty and keeps humans worthy of being free...
...They want to hold onto something from the past or (what amounts to the same thing) to impose a preconceived image on the future...
...And there would seem to be a difference between libertarianism and dynamism...
...Drawing on the examples of techies whose fortunes derive from solving puzzles for the sheer joy of it, Postrel contends that the more we play, the more we succeed...
...While praising spontaneous development, she cannot fail on occasion to notice the mysterious "architects" who construct the edifices that allow successful organic growth...
...In cultural affairs, the reactionaries— like the prigs who run The Weekly Standard—cling to outmoded Victorian values and detest such spontaneous cultural creations as beach volleyball...
...The marketplace is merely one manifestation of a larger principle at work throughout the universe...
...She grounds her position not on a particular view of the human good, but on a universal "principle of reality" that governs everything—physical, cultural, economic, and historic...
...I can readily accept a playful soul as head of the computer-programming Microsoft or the movie-making DreamWorks, but must I have one as my university's dean or, God forbid, my nation's commander-in-chief...
...only willful human action can hold it back...
...It is far more likely that our political conflicts will turn on traditional questions of justice, and that the source of America's problems will not be stasists but some hostile force on the international scene...
...Play is what we do for its own sake, yet it is a spur to our most creative, significant work...
...It is this cunning of systems that allows development of ecosystems, languages, and economies...
...This shift from libertarianism to dynamism reflects the strikingly theoretical character of Postrel's argument...
...Conservatives may similarly doubt whether Postrel leaves any room for politics...
...This principle appears to guard against the temptation of imposing a rigid image of the Good Society on human affairs, stifling the energies that promote innovation...
...For Postrel, the fingerprints of an invisible hand are everywhere...
...It belongs to the process...
...Progress is in the nature of things...
...In economic matters, the reactionaries—Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, and Richard Gephardt—are wedded to current modes of production and spooked by globalism...
...Of course, we should try to be rational in the conduct of our own little pieces of reality, but the whole is properly the business of no one...
...Postrel writes like a dynamo: Just as you are digesting the ideas she presents from Hume or Hayek, she bombards you with clusters of vignettes from pop music, movies, television sitcoms, and the techie software universe...
...No rest is offered for the weary, no moment for intellectual stasis...
...If previous experience is any guide, it is likely that a decade from now our political parties will not be divided between sta-sists and dynamists...
...Postrel offers no speculation on why this harmony should exist—she does not speak of a First Cause or God—nor does she indulge many expressions of awe other than to sing the praises of our "enchanted world" that includes "beach volleyball and bread machines, pianos and Post-it notes...
...Signs of this growing split can already be glimpsed: in disputes over international trade, where Buchananites and Naderites join to fight proponents of a high-tech economy, or in battles over immigration, where the Sierra Club locks arms with the editors of National Review...
...FORWARD TO THE FUTURE Virginia Postrel's Dynamist Manifesto By James W. Ceaser Move over Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, there's a new cleavage in town: stasists versus dynamists...
Vol. 4 • January 1999 • No. 17
