Enjoy the roadless ride into the future

By Joanne Jacobs
San Jose Mercury News, Thursday, January 7, 1999

SCIENTISTS are nurturing human embryonic stem cells that could be grown into new heart muscle, new nerve and brain cells, whatever's gone bad or worn out. Within a decade.

How would society change if we could replace our body parts as easily as we buy a new set of tires?

E-commerce is taking off. What will happen to stores, downtowns, our sense of community, when it's easier to buy online than in person? Who will prosper, and who will be out of work?

New technologies are changing the way Americans work and play, get and spend, create life and postpone death. If you're nervous, dubious or flummoxed, Virginia Postrel has advice for you: Get over it. And get out of the way.

In ''The Future and its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise and Progress,'' Postrel divides the world into fearful fuddie-duddies, or ''stasists,'' and bold explorers, called ''dynamists.''

Postrel, editor of Reason, a libertarian magazine, is a dynamist, confident of humans' ability to adapt and thrive. We can't predict what's coming, she writes. We can't control it. But we can learn to embrace ''a world of constant creation, discovery and competition.''

The book's thought-provoking thesis is that our political, intellectual and cultural divisions aren't between left and right, liberal and conservative. The argument is between those who welcome the future, in all its complexity and messiness, and those who want to stop it or regulate it.

Stasists may come from the left (environmentalists, unionists, simple-lifers, Luddites) or the right (nativists, religious traditionalists, neo-Puritans). Reactionaries, who value stability, ally themselves with technocrats, who want to manage change so it's predictable and safe. They unite in hostility to capitalism (too much ''creative destruction''), globalism and consumer culture, and in defense of the status quo.

Postrel recalls a 1995 ''Crossfire'' show in which Patrick Buchanan, on ''the right,'' and Jeremy Rifkin, on ''the left,'' agreed totally about the evils of the global, high-tech economy.

Nostalgia for the good old days isn't confined to conservatives. Leftish writers dream of a post-tech peasantry living in self-sufficient simplicity, with no Happy Meals at the mall, no hedonistic luxuries like strawberries in January. Or, as Postrel points out, no genetically engineered cure for cystic fibrosis.

Dynamists seek progress, not perfection, through trial and error, diversity and choice. ''Dynamists are often drawn to biological metaphors, symbols ofunpredictable growth and change, of variety and of experiment, feedback and adaptation,'' Postel writes.

Stasists are into civil engineering. I enjoyed Postrel's deconstruction of Clinton's ''bridge to the 21st century.'' A bridge ''goes from known point A to known point B. Its construction requires big budgets and teams of experts, careful planning and blueprints. Once completed, it cannot be moved. 'A bridge to the 21st century' declares that the future must be brought under control, managed and planned by experts.''

Al Gore, the virtual veep, calls the Internet the ''information superhighway,'' recalling the federally engineered interstate highway system, Postrel observes. As a technocrat, Gore can't accept the dynamic flowering of the Internet, which grew powerful before the powerful noticed its existence, ''a model of spontaneous order and dynamic, trial-and-error learning.''

Postrel's arguments have special relevance in dynamic Silicon Valley, a garden of capitalist creativity and creative destruction, where innovation grows like kudzu.

Japan, with a centrally decided industrial policy, was supposed to eat our lunch. It didn't happen.

''Most experts'' in 1988 predicted ''permanent, decisive inferiority'' for the U.S. chip industry within 10 years, unless government policy fixed the ''fragmented, chronically entrepreneurial'' Silicon Valley, said MIT's Charles Ferguson in the Harvard Business Revew.

But fragmentation turned out to be diversity, which makes the valley resilient to downturns and brilliantly adaptable to change, Postrel argues.

Technology didn't lead to bigness, order and drab homogeneity, as envisioned in Apple's famous ''Big Brother'' ad. Companies rise and fall and remake themselves, like IBM and Apple. Grad students fool around and create Yahoo! Nobody's in charge.

It may seem that politics is a battle between technocrats and reactionaries, with the dynamists too busy making money to get into the game. But American culture is fundamentally dynamic, which is why we're so rich. Americans believe in progress, not in happy peasantry. (Most peasants, given the choice, choose America.) We may be nostalgic for Pleasantville, but we wouldn't want to live there.

The promise of a dynamic society -- ''more variety, more opportunity, more options, more knowledge, more control over time and place, more life'' -- draws us into the roadless, bridgeless future, despite our fears.

Reprinted by permission.