By Colin Walters

The Washington Times, December 13, 1998

Copyright (c) 1998 The Washington Times, reprinted with permission.

Virginia Postrel describes any number of remarkable people in her new book, and many of them will be familiar to anyone likely to be reading this column. One name not so likely to be recognized among the writers, intellectuals, politicians and executives, but in a way the most remarkable of the lot, is that of Rico Medellin.

Miss Postrel gets the story from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the Chicago psychologist and creativity guru: Mr. Medellin is an assembly-line worker whose job involves doing the same task nearly 600 times a day. His employer allows 43 seconds for the completion of each task, but after five years of doing it, Mr. Medellin has got his best time down to 28 seconds. Now he spends his days trying to equal or beat that record. By making play out of work, something normally reckoned a province of artists and other privileged souls, this factory worker has made himself one of Winston Churchill's "children of fortune."

What Mr. Medellin's mates on that assembly line make of his job performance and outlook on life isn't recorded, but he can't be getting many points for class solidarity and other traditional values stemming more from social status and community membership than individual enterprise. He could be in trouble with an employer seeking to avoid dissension in the ranks, with a union foreman having the same concern and with fellow workers not wanting to do more work than they have to. A Mr. Medellin is apt to be out there - on his own - which is just what Miss Postrel's book, "The Future and Its Enemies," is about.

The writer, who is editor of Reason magazine and a prominent advocate for libertarian views, is concerned with more than upbeat blue-collar workers able to look on the bright side. Opening up her lens, Miss Postrel considers the game of beach volleyball, which sprang up spontaneously along the coastal towns of southern California, went on to become an Olympic sport and led to Newt Gingrich's remarking, uncharacterstically, that "no bureaucrat would have invented it. And that's what freedom's all about."

Beach volleyball, like the personal computer - Don't like the Food and Drug Administration's rules? Get the medicine you need from France on the Internet - is a nightmare for technocrats and others seeking to excercise social control over people's lives, and over the future.

"Neo-Victorians do not play beach volleyball," writes Miss Postrel, indulging one of her rare thowaway lines in this slim, information-packed volume. But while they, like Mr. Gingrich, represent the political right, one also finds scholars, politicians and activists on the left defending similar protectionist, regulatory or other naysaying positions.

Chapter One begins by visiting the first 1995 edition of the CNN television program "Crossfire." Jeremy Rifkind, the antitechnology polemicist, and Michael Kinsley, both brought in to represent the left, sat across from Ed Cornish, president of the World Future Society, and Pat Buchanan. But the show hardly had time to get underway before Mr. Rifkind and Mr. Buchanan found themselves in unexpected agreement over the perils of "'this new gobal high-tech economy' as a cruel destroyer of jobs." And the program director's promoted slugfest along partisan lines collapsed.

To take a simple self-administered test for how you are likely to respond to Miss Postrel's book, ask yourself how you respond to the phrase "brave new world." Many will reply, "Exactly, the novelist was a prophet." For Miss Postrel, on the contrary, Aldous Huxley's 1930s future dystopia was a technocrat's paradise, not a bit like the free-wheeling world so full of unprecedented opportunities that we enjoy. From her standpoint, we are living in enchanted times, and there "is no abyss to cross" to get to the future.

One could take Franklin D. Roosevelt's line that dark inauguration day in 1932, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," and apply it to Miss Postrel's take on the world. Fear and its corollary risk-avoidance are what lead to such defensive postures as trade protectionism, wanting to limit immigration, economic and cultural timidity and generalized "anguish over an open-ended future."

In this regard, the neo-Victorian, the bureaucrat (domestic or international) and the Green militating for "participatory democracy" and "no innovation without participation" (if you can believe that), are birds of a feather. Bill Bennett who would be schoolmaster to America, Ross Perot wanting to bring in the experts and solve problems once and for all, Vice President Gore with his centrally controlled information superhighway are all, each in his own way, a part of the problem for Miss Postrel.

They represent what she calls the stasist side in the battle for the future. Opposing them, fewer in number and scattered all over, are the dynamists. In her own words:

"Stasists and dynamists are thus divided not just by simple, short-term policy issues but by fundamental disagreements about the way the world works. They clash over the nature of progress and over its desirability: Does it require a plan to reach a specified goal? Or is it an unbounded process of exploration and discovery? Does the quest for improvement express destructive, nihilistic discontent, or the highest human qualities? Does progress depend on puritanical repression or a playful spirit?"

Positions that Miss Postrel takes in her book are not always libertarian, just as the positions of individual libertarians are not always the same - some, for example, support the idea of a safety net for the poor. But that is the point of being a libertarian, which is to politics what being a Buddhist is to religion - hardly any institutional apparatus, and something you mainly do on your own.

None of this makes Miss Postrel an anarchist, which she demonstrably is not. She believes in having rules but thinks they should be few, clearly understood and foundations upon which people and groups can build according to their separate needs. The U.S. law requiring all frozen pizza to contain tomato sauce, and much of the current tax code, do not make her cut.

Generally, Miss Postrel is for risk over safety, and when it comes to nature versus artifice she argues that since much nature as we know it today is a product of both nature and the artifice of ages past - Indians burning meadows, thousands of years of human history - there is no need to see any conflict. And she extends this thinking to the human body, no less a combination of nature and artifice than anything else. "We cannot fob off our moral choices on nature," contends Miss Postrel.

A dominating metaphor in her book's argument is the shipping container. All of them look alike, can be transferred easily from truck to train to plane, and may contain anything one wants them to - it doesn't matter. The Internet was built this way - one reason why it is not just some technological fad but a major battlefield for stasists versus dynamists. The Internet also grew up very fast, too fast for anyone to stop, and was the work of outsiders and upstarts.

Thinking about all this, the central control-oriented pessimism of a John Kenneth Galbraith writing 30 years ago is easily written off. Of course we have moved on, with then and now hardly recognizable. Unavoidably, in the here and now the future's hand is a trickier call.

To that, Miss Postrel's answer is, don't bother calling it. Just keep trucking, as innovatively, inclusively and freely as is humanly possible. It is a recipe for life in the 21st century that requires a robust optimism, for oneself and for one's fellow man, which many will be unable to share. Sigmund Freud would have found it tragically mistaken, reckless, doomed. On the other hand there is a historian as reasonable as Daniel Boorstin - Miss Postrel ends her book with him - to bear witness that humankind's finest hours have taken place among people living "on the verge." London, say, in the first half of the 18th century.

But go ahead and read the book for yourself. Policy stuff, it is not an easy or very stylish read, but becomes exciting nevertheless as Miss Postrel's argument gathers momentum and force. It certainly is a very important book, and I have wolfed it down.

Reprinted with permission.