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

"This diverse, decentralized process makes technocrats uncomfortable—no one is in charge, and the results are unpredictable—but it strikes reactionaries as downright evil. They find its ambition unseemly, its results disruptive, its values perverse. Open-ended trial and error represents a willful rebellion against fate, a refusal, in their minds, to honor what is and what has gone before. It views civilization as an ongoing process rather than an eternal state. It overvalues the future and encourages discontent."

The above quote from the book is at the heart of what The Future and Its Enemies is trying to persuade. If the passage speaks to you, then I recommend you read the whole thing. Virginia Postrel's work is a marvel, and if show more nothing else, she highlights a clash of philosophical worldviews that do not fall along the standard left/right, liberal/conservative continuum. To those seeking to control and contain, know that this is a fool's errand. The future is guaranteed to surprise us with upheavals of the most cataclysmic and wondrous kind. show less

Somewhat unusually for a libertarian-type book (Postrel is former editor-in-chief of Reason magazine,) this volume is geared towards general readers who don't already identify as agreeing with the author. Essentially, the book argues that the groupings "right" and "left" aren't really how politics are organized - that it's about a person's opinion of change, choice, and openness, and that people on the "left" and the "right" may end up on either side of the question of dynamism (change is good) versus stasism (change is bad.)

I liked it, but I also like John Stossel and Ayn Rand and Radley Balko. Recommended for political science junkies, libertarians, and people who wonder why it is they hate Lou Dobbs and Bill O'Reilly AND Pat show more Robertson all at once.

Oh, and be sure to actually read the end notes. They're actually interesting. show less

This book presents well reasoned, well supported arguments for encouraging technology-driven innovation from a libertarian perspective. It also presents a selective, highly negative view of the forces that argue against the author's position. For the most part, the author avoids hyperbolic claims. While not taking the utopian-optimist way of argument, the author does not expend a lot of effort on critical self-examination. This book is much worth revisiting in 2023, 25 years after publication, given the impassioned public discourse taking place about the impact of artificial intelligence on pretty much all aspects of human experience.

Simply a brilliant and iconoclastic work of nonfiction. The author has a mind for ideas and their consequences and makes a case for the defense of the independent creator.

A very good work of non-fiction on politics, economics, and sociology. Postrel's dynamist ideas are like those of Friedrich Hayek, but in late 20th century English instead of early 20th century German. The book is written in a wonderfully "pop life" style which should make it accessible to, um, everyone. But an accessible style doesn't indicate superficiality. The point Postrel makes - that "planning" doesn't work and that decentralization and spontaneity are the mode of life and the wave of the future - is of vast importance in politics (and every other sphere of life).
One way of describing this book is that it is a late 20th/early 21st century elaboration of Hayek's phrase "spontaneous order." Getting this one phrase into the minds of show more our "intellectuals" would improve the world immeasurably. show less

Insightful position on a rarely explored dimension, applicable to Libertarianism. Postrel is a "dynamist" (vs. "stasist") and she achieves a fascinating, compact explanation of the difference and meaning. The few years since this was published continue to prove her points. I'm still undecided regarding some of the bioethical issues, but am generally convinced of the merits of "dynamism."

Virginia Postrels book is aimed at launching a new word - "Dynamist". This is a view of the world that she says has rarely been fully articulated.
As the editor of Reason magazine, contributor to Forbes ASAP, Wired and a careful technology observer she has concluded, I think very correctly, that the old political terms of "Right" and "Left" have been superseded. We live in a new world in which the fundamental division is between people who welcome change (Dynamists) and those that don`t (Stasists). She follows Hayek and quotes him, identifying Dynamists as "the party of life, the party that favours free growth and spontaneous evolution". The idea is a wholehearted acceptance of evolution through variation, feedback and adaption with a show more basic framework of laws that "protect the soundness of the system without guaranteeing an outcome".
Stasist government planning troubled Hayek and he was one of the few voices speaking out against it in the 1940`s and 50´s. It was the fashionable pseudo-scientific TRUTH that was embraced in everything from economics (Beatrice Webb: "I had laboriously transformed my intellect into an instrument for research. Child bearing would destroy it..."??) to urban renewal projects (concrete dead zones) and psychology (Skinner- if you can`t measure it it doesn't exist). Postrel sees this technocratic attitude firmly in power ever since Roosevelts Progressive Era when he instructed public officials to "look ahead and plan out the right kind of civilization", with the emphasis on "plan". The idea that things could evolve and develop alone was strongly opposed by technocrats who tried to anticipate events and still do so, producing enormous regulatory foul ups such as the S&L problem, the California power crisis or the Crédit Lyonnais bankrupcy in France - to quote only more recent examples.
She identifies another kind of stasist that has been around for a longer time, namely Reactionaries who have their roots in farming/ landowning societies with fixed status, obligations, tradition, church and life governed by the seasons. Interestingly she shows how this view has metamorphosed into the green movement and ironically into parts of the very industrial societies that destroyed landowning power. She quotes Lasch on the parochialism of urban ethnic neighborhoods: "Lower middle-class culture, now as in the past, is organized around the family, church, and neighborhood ......The people of Charlestown ........had renounced opportunity, advancement, adventure, for the reassurance of community, solidarity, and camaraderie". All this ties in with anti NAFTA anti WalMart anti computers and a general desire for stasis.
Some criticism of a very good book:
- Slight criticism: The Friedmans in "Free to Choose" have similar ideas and aren't mentioned. Also Schumpeter is quoted approvingly as usual for his "creative destruction" view of capitalist change. When will someone mention that in the same book he rejected the idea and went on to strongly support socialist technocratic planning?
- Moderate criticism: Aren't reactionary tendencies integral to us. ie.they are tied to our emotions. How do we handle this? Also dynamism can overshoot badly in the economy - see Soros (Alchemy), being an open invitation to the technocrats to come in and fix it.
- Serious criticism: She says, "Dynamists would argue for the human value of saving what they love, for prairies as a connection to history and species preservation to serve our aesthetic and moral sense." She is anti monopoly but doesn't humanity really have a monopoly hold over other species ? Also the Dynamist view drives us at full speed into Kurzweils quote,"few serious observers who have studied the issue claim that computers will never acheive and surpass human intelligence." This may be desirable or undesirable but it is a consequence of free evolutionary growth that she doesn't consider. show less