JOEL MILLER INTERVIEWS VIRGINIA POSTREL: Technology, Culture, and Power—What Connects Them All. Journalist Virginia Postrel on Spotting Trends, AI, Her Simple Advice for Young Writers, More.
In The Future and Its Enemies, which came out in 1998, I argue that many political and cultural issues are better understood not as conflicts between traditional left and right but as conflicts between advocates of dynamism and advocates of stasis.
The central value of dynamism is learning. Progress occurs not as marching toward a known goal but as a decentralized process of trial and error with feedback provided through competition and criticism. We neither start from scratch nor seek to freeze what is (or was). We build on the past by identifying flaws—“form follows failure”—and seeking to correct them. Progress is a bottom-up, incremental process. Contrary to what some people assumed because of my Reason job, dynamism isn’t synonymous with libertarianism—it’s compatible with some forms of redistribution, for instance—but it does require less regulation and more tolerance than we’re often accustomed to.
Today when I give talks on the subject, I often define dynamism as a variety of liberalism that foregrounds learning, whereas other versions foreground other values, such as justice, equality, or autonomy. Liberalism in real life, as opposed to liberalism in philosophy articles, values all these things but also constantly makes tradeoffs among them. Liberals argue among themselves about which should take precedence in a given situation.
The drive for stasis takes two basic forms. The first I call “reactionaries.” Their central value is stability. They idealize a steady-state society where things don’t change. The irony is that pursuing this ideal implies a revolutionary turn from our current liberal order, usually toward an idealized past. When I wrote the book, the best examples were often green ideologues, who have since morphed into degrowthers. Today, they’ve been joined by integralist theocrats like Patrick Deneen. Consciously or not, reactionaries oppose the open society. They are illiberal or anti-liberal.
The other stasist camp, which I call “technocrats,” emphasizes control. Technocrats often praises the idea of progress but define it as moving toward a single, known goal. When the book was new, I used to talk about Bill Clinton’s “bridge to the future” as an example of technocratic thinking. The phrase sounds inspiring, but it assumes a single route from Point A to Point B. Deviate from that predetermined path and you fall into the abyss. Technocrats may or may not have liberal allegiances. Bill Clinton does. Xi Jinping does not.
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