Among my very favorite libertarian books—in fact, my second favorite, only behind Atlas Shrugged—is Virginia Postrel’s The Future And Its Enemies. You can check out Mrs. Postrel’s website about the book here.
The theme of the book is that the left and the right are coalescing into a single anti-innovation party, leaving a few others who believe in freedom. The former she calls “stasists,” and the latter, “dynamists”:“Once upon a time,” she explains, “before the Berlin Wall came down, [Pat] Buchanan and [Jeremy] Rifkin did indeed belong on opposite sides of the Crossfire table. Whatever agreements they might have had about the evils of corporate restructuring…paled in comparison to their fundamental disagreements about how to deal with the Soviet Union.” But now with that gone, the “fusionism” of which Frank Meyer talked about, is gone as well. The left and the right now increasingly agree on an anti-technology, anti-capitalism, anti-innovation program. “What all these left-right alliances have in common is a sense of anguish over the open-ended future: a future that no [conservative or liberal]…can control or predict, a future too diverse and fluid for critics to comprehend.” Both sides want to organize and control the innovative energy of people, or even to destroy it entirely to preserve a stable society that will not change.
This is why the book’s title is based on Karl Popper’s famous The Open Society And Its Enemies (which was featured in Libertarian Bookworm some time ago.) Popper writes that Plato seeks “a state which is free from the evils of all other states because it does not degenerate, because it does not change. The state which is free from the evil of change and corruption is the best, the perfect state. It is the state of the Golden Age which knew no change. It is the arrested state.” Id. at 21. So, too, left and right increasingly seek to arrest society or at the least to guide it in the “right” direction. Those who want to arrest it entirely, Postrel calls “reactionaries.” “The characteristic values of reactionaries are continuity, rootedness, and geographically defined community.” The characteristic reactionaries are Richard Weaver, Robert Nisbet, and Russell Kirk, but extreme environmentalists are also reactionaries, who praise primitive tribal culture and long for a return to it. Those who want to guide change in the “right” direction, Postrel calls “technocrats.” “Technocrats…do not celebrate the primitive or traditional. Rather, they worry about the government’s inability to control dynamism…. What terrifies technocrats is not that the future will depart from a traditional ideal, but that it will be unpredictable and beyond the control of professional wise men.”
But in both cases, these groups are opposed to allowing individuals to exercise their free energy in the pursuit of happiness, to discover for themselves the sort of social order they want to live in. These groups want to impose a social order from above, rather than see the order that arises from below on the basis of people’s freely chosen activity.
Postrel’s book uses some great examples of the unpredictability of a free society and the futility of trying to organize society to meet the preferences of “experts.” One passage I greatly enjoy is her explanation of why we should not have to give a “good reason” to do things. I’ve pointed out before that throughout America, licensing laws stifle innovation by requiring people to get a “certificate of necessity” before starting a business—that is, they must prove to a bureaucrat that a new business is “necessary.” Randy Barnett has argued that this runs counter to the “presumption of liberty” established in the Constitution; Anthony de Jasay points out that it is essentially asking people to prove a negative. But Postrel explains thatWe all know many things we can’t explain. Some are basic and widely held: how to breathe, sleep, and walk; the meanings of words and tones of voice…. [T]he knowledge we share [often] remains unarticulated. So, too, does much of the knowledge we do not share. A swimmer cannot say how he stays afloat, nor an editor truly account for what makes an interesting, appropriate article. Artists know their art in ways they could never define…. No litany of attributes can capture the nuances that inspire love. We simply know it when we see it. [This is] “tacit knowledge.”
Tacit knowledge is knowledge—but it is inarticulable knowledge; knowledge that usually can only be achieved through practice. “In everyday life, we take our intimate knowledge for granted. We just assume that there are naturally things we know deeply that other people don’t, things that are hard to explain….” But when a stasist demands that you give a “good reason” before you act, he is essentially excluding this tacit knowledge. The person he says this to might not even realize that the reason for wanting to do something—open a business, try a scientific experiment, paint a portrait—is inarticulable. But even if he does, the stasist is saying that a person may only act if he can prove that he ought to be free to do so—which requires the articulation of reasons which the actor might not be able to accomplish. “Reactionaries idealize a world in which everyone knows pretty much everything, in which we fully understand every artifact we use and know every person with whom we interact. Their vision appears to celebrate competence and personal knowledge, but in fact it exalts ignorance. It sucks most of the knowledge out of life.”
Postrel’s book is pretty short—265 pages—and she doesn’t get into the psychological or more than a little of the philosophical reasons for people adopting a stasist perspective. I believe that there is a fundamental difference in the outlook of stasists and dynamists, which was well described by Friedrich Nietszche. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche contrasts what he calls “the free spirit” and “the bound spirit.” The free spirit, or the dynamist, is the person who “has released himself from tradition, be it successfully or unsuccessfully. Usually, however, he has truth, or at least the spirit of the search for truth, on his side: he demands reasons, while others demand faith.” (§ 225). For the bound spirit, on the other hand, four things are in the right: first, all things having permanence are in the right; second, all things that are no burden to us are in the right; third, all things that benefit us are in the right; fourth, all things for which we have made sacrifices are in the right. Free spirits, pleading their cause before the tribunal of bound spirits, have to prove that there have always been free spirits and that freethinking therefore has permanence [as when I cite the founders’ original intent]; then, that they do not want to be a burden; and finally, that on the whole they are beneficial to bound spirits [as when libertarians cite all the technological advances capitalism brings]. But because they cannot convince the bound spirits of this last point, it does not help them to have proved the first and second”
(§ 229, emphasis added). What distinguishes the dynamist from the stasist isn’t just a vision of the ideal society, but a vision of man’s nature: the dynamist celebrates innovation, creativity, diversity, uniqueness. For the stasist, these are a burden and a danger: “all things having permanence are in the right,” and individual creativity is deeply threatening to that.
The Future And Its Enemies is an extremely enlightening book; a manifesto for many of us. I give it my highest recommendation.
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