Dynamist.com

Political malady constricts flow of progress

By George C. Leef

Surveying the damage wrought by the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator William Reilly asked, "Where are the exotic new technologies, the products of genetic engineering, that can help us clean this up?"

The answer is that federal regulations had been and still are smothering advances in biotechnology, from oil-gobbling microbes to frost-resistant strawberries. On this and many other fronts, the cutting edge of progress has been dulled -- perhaps shattered -- by legal obstacles.

The slowing of progress is no accident. The last few decades have seen a distinct rise in the influence and numbers of people who look askance at change. The late Robert Nisbet commented on this trend in his 1980 book History of the Idea of Progress: "The skepticism regarding ... progress that was once confined to a very small number of intellectuals ... has grown and spread to not merely the large majority of intellectuals in this final quarter of the century, but to many millions of other people. ..."

The Future and Its Enemies, by Reason magazine editor Virginia Postrel, is about those people, both "conservative" and "liberal," who fear and loathe progress. There are vast differences among them: They may be dewy-eyed romantics who long for "the good old days," crusading technophobes or just people whose jobs or investments are threatened by some particular innovation.

What they have in common is an aversion to change. Postrel calls them "stasists" and describes their mind-set as one of "peasant virtues, of the imagined harmonies and, above all, the imagined predictability of traditional life."

But the book is also about people with the opposing view -- "dynamists," she calls them. Whereas stasists think they know the One Best Way for Things to Be and insist that everyone live by their notions, dynamists argue that if there is a one best way, it probably won't remain best for long, and that we should grant people the freedom to experiment. Postrel writes of dynamism: "Its central value is learning, which unlike stability or control is an open-ended process. Dynamists do not expect, demand or desire a world that holds still."

There have always been conflicts between dynamists and stasists. Which camp prevails depends mainly on the society's institutions, Postrel argues.

When institutions make it easy for stasists to arrest change by hindering or preventing new ideas, products and technologies, they do so. During the Middle Ages, powerful guilds and rulers who wanted to preserve the status quo routinely thwarted innovation.

Throughout most of American history, in contrast, we were a nation open to new ideas. Not everyone welcomed change, but our institutions -- property rights, freedom of expression and inquiry, the patent system -- provided grumblers no means of interfering with progress.

Postrel argues that the proliferation of government is making it ever-easier for stasists to get their way. She observes that modern America "provides numerous opportunities for resourceful reactionaries: urban planning and endangered species laws to keep out Wal-Mart and block new housing; environmental impact statements to limit business development and ... to bar genetic engineering; Food and Drug Administration reviews to deter high-tech medical products ... and on and on."

The bureaucratic urge to regulate everything has given us a network of legal pressure points where the stasists can delay or prevent changes and innovations. Increasingly, you can't just try something; you have to get permission first, a circumstance that gives "self-appointed activists the power to veto other people's experiments," Postrel writes.

What worries her (and should worry the rest of us) is that the country is afflicted with a political malady resembling arteriosclerosis. Just as hardening of the arteries constricts the flow of blood and slows its victim down, our political equivalent constricts the flow of new ideas and slows progress. The unending torrent of laws and regulations, so often mandating that "one best way," makes the condition worse.

Postrel shares Nisbet's view that Americans are slowly being led by the blandishments of the stasists to adopt an anti-progress mentality. "Technologists are no longer celebrated for making improvements in everyday life," she writes. "Our collective attitudes toward progress -- the attitudes suggested in the popular press, in movies and books, by politicians, scholars, and acceptably 'serious' pundits -- reflect stasist values." As stasist attitudes spread, playing upon manufactured guilt and anxieties, America will become an increasingly hostile environment for dynamism.

The outcome of this struggle is uncertain.

"Stasis supporters are numerous, but their visions of the ideal future are varied and incompatible, making their alliances fragile and temporary. ... They cannot truly triumph unless everyone's future is the same," Postrel writes. On the other hand, "Although fewer in number, dynamists permit many visions and accept competing dreams. To work together, they do not have to agree on what the future should look like."

What will the United States of the future be like? Will we transport and use oil, relying on marketplace deterrents to minimize oil spills and bio-engineered microbes to eat up the few that occur?

Or will we succumb to the stasist demands for a timid, unchanging world that eliminates the oil spill problem by having us huddle around wood fires and drive donkey carts?

If you care, read this superb book.