The Future's Enemies

Heather Ouellette
A junior at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
E-mail: traillogic82@yahoo.com

The following essay was in response to a reading of Virginia Postrel's book, The Future and Its Enemies.

"If we complete the destruction of nature, we will have succeeded in cutting ourselves off from the source of sanity itself."
           --David Orr, Love it or Lose it: The Coming Biophilia Revolution

Tangled up in Postrel's dense and haughty text is the fact that the future is a decidedly uncertain entity. How political, cultural, and economic aspects of the future are approached depends upon a person's comfort with this tenet. Dynamists and stasists are the two dueling factions presented by Postrel, seeking to polarize all possible outlooks on the future.

Stasists prefer an authority directing the potential outcomes of this hazy future. Therefore, they encourage the government to expand and assume the position of, for lack of a better term, a Big Brother, aiding those who may be fearful or not as savvy when it comes to "thinking in the future tense." This group is broken down into two main departments: reactionaries and technocrats. Both admit to the world being dynamic, though the former wishes to reverse all change and restore the past to some bygone Romantic and/or Pleistocene vision of an unchanging utopia, while the latter wants to control dynamism, and seek out the best rational answer towards that end. Boundaries are vital to their type of rule, to enforce the "one best way."

Postrel claims that technocrats have failed, citing public schools as one example. Perhaps they seem "dedicated to mediocrity" (20) because little or no faith/attention/money has been afforded to these institutions until only recently, when the buck could no longer be passed to anyone else. These important places are not indispensable enclaves of the wealthy--that is why they have been overlooked. So, technocrats can espouse egalitarian ethics until they are blue in the face (the majority of them are in a comfortable enough economic position to say so, without fear of losing their job, or house, or livelihood), but they still seem like advocates of a tiered society to me. Sure, some of them are sickened by vapid mall culture, or the world economy, or overpopulated cities, but they remain unable to unite under one main goal.

Postrel undermines her dear dynamists and their supposed openness by deeming them some sort of superior "party of life" (26). They do, however, claim to embrace the uncertainty of the future, seeing it as a great possibility, thriving in the notion that anything can happen. They are also proponents of competition, criticism, and choice. Dynamists are gracious enough to acknowledge that someone might come along with an idea that will blow them out of the water; they also revel in the uniqueness of human life. In order to create the future, one must not ignore the past; according to Postrel, "knowledge is cumulative and so [...] is experience" (48).

Through this knowledge, Postrel admits that she doesn't think Hayek's view of holding power over nature is the greatest, but she does believe that it lets humans prosper. Yet, does wielding that kind of power really allow humans to flourish? Do we "enjoy" nature by destroying it? And what exactly does "nature and artifice are not antitheses but complements" (169) mean? So, it's okay to get breast implants, even if they are toxic (though the text claims that evidence to that end is nonexistent) and "to overthrow nature" (23) out of some superficial need created by the human mind?

I do agree with some aspects of dynamism, though, such as the emphasis placed on the individual, and always keeping the past in mind to learn from it, using it as a tool to navigate through the murky waters of the future. I also agree with the contention that "playfulness," a trait that scares stasists, fades with age. For example, a recent poll showed that Baby Boomers are more in favor of military action now than they were in the 1970s (when they were the ones who had to/were supposed to fight). Obviously, now that they are older, their dynamism has waned as they creep toward their autumn years, fearful of death and trying to secure money for retirement--they want the stability of a stasist type of life.

Despite these reservations I have concerning Postrel's offering, dynamism might possibly be the best approach in an assembly of lackluster options. As long as its proponents remember not to get so caught up in their contrived, self-effacing grandstanding that they hinder the basic ideals from standing for themselves, the dynamist way could manifest itself nicely in the minds of the masses, prompt constructive debate in the mainstream, and in turn, bring about thoughtful answers dedicated to a better future for everyone, not just an elite few.

Academic Exchange Extra invites reader responses to any writings in this issue--especially articles advancing the scholarly debate of issues raised.

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