The Future and its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress.(Review)

The Future and its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress, by Virginia Postrel; Touchstone Books (Simon & Schuster), 1998, $22.

THE OF LIFE is having a party. Bring along each volleyball, a net, and a copy of Hayek's Why I am Not a Conservative. Maybe stuff Huizinga's Homo Ludens into your gym bag too. But leave Small is Beautiful at home, along with the entire devotional literature romanticising pre-industrial wooden simplicity from William Morris on. It is Virginia Postrel's argument that messy complexity and innovative confusion are what we'll be seeing a lot more of in the information age--and they're Good Things too.

The title echoes The Open Society and Its Enemies. The open-endedness of open societies is certainly a major theme, and Popper is a philosophical influence. But Hayek's ideas are Postrel's main inspiration. In her new and exciting book, "the party of life" she celebrates are the same people Hayek wrote about when, distancing himself from the conservative embrace, he spoke up in The Constitution of Liberty for "the party that favours free growth and spontaneous evolution". He wanted to rind a name for this nameless collection of people--something which would set them apart from the Tories and socialists around him. But he couldn't. So "the party of life" had to serve.

Anyway these are people who know that while it is foolish to prefer the new merely because it is new, it would be stupid not to see that "it is of the essence of human achievement that it produces something new; and is prepared to come to terms with new knowledge" when new knowledge appears. They welcome and understand technological change. They favour the dynamic rather than the static (which is why Postrel divides the world into "dynamists" and "stasists"). They are friendly to scientific research: however limited their understanding they will have looked with interest at Science for 24th March 2000, with its colour printout of the complete Drosophila genome. And while respecting tradition when respect is due, they also know that creative destruction is how civilisation proceeds.

Yes, says Virginia, there is such a thing as progress. There is also such a thing as civilisation too--and liberty under law is what makes it flourish. But for this to happen we all have to recognise how deeply ignorant and mutually dependent we are. "The more civilised we become," wrote Hayek, "the more relatively ignorant must each individual be of the facts on which civilisation depends." This specialisation however has far more benefits than costs--providing that free association driven by private interest allows and encourages all the social bits and pieces to come together, and work together, for the common good. Free association under law, but not under regulatory control.

 
   There can be little doubt [wrote Hayek] that man owes some of his greatest 
   successes in the past to the fact that he had not been able to control 
   social life. His continued advance may well depend on deliberately 
   refraining from exercising controls which are now within his power. 

That was in 1959. The century still had a long way to go. Yet even then it was clear that the nescience principle was vastly more successful than the prescience principle (the latter being the belief that the future is known, and that with enough revolutionary enthusiasm it can be imposed) in improving human affairs. But back to Virginia Postrel. In her terms the "enemies of the future" who threaten the party of life are two fearsome regiments--"reactionaries" on the one hand and "technocrats" on the other Today green reactionaries on the left far outnumber black reactionaries on the right. But they both admire Herderian communities rooted in the soil, and are anti-cosmopolitan, anti-technology, anti-science, anti-commercial, anti-specialisation, anti-mobility, and anti-WTO.