“The Future and Its Enemies” by Virginia Postrel [Book Review]

The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress: The complexity of the emerging global economy is staggering and the evolution of science and technology is ever accelerating. In “The Future and Its Enemies”, Virginia Postrel argues that individuals can be classified as stasists or dynamists depending on their reactions to the previous sentence. If you are a proponent of using government power to stifle change and globalization, or you react to every new scientific development (e.g. genetic engineering and stem cell research) by blindly calling for regulations and restrictions then you are most likely a stasist (a proponent of the status quo or perhaps even drastic measures to revert to some idealized past way of life). On the other hand, if you are comfortable with the idea that change is unpredictable (and exciting) but science and technology openly developed in the competitive atmosphere of free markets is the best way to ensure a bright and prosperous future, then you are a dynamist.

Postrel presents compelling arguments for why it often makes more sense to use the stasist/dynamist classification when trying to understand politics today instead of more traditional divisions such as republican/democrat or conservative/liberal. Increasingly, the traditional divisions are breaking down and past enemies are finding themselves aligned. For example, Pat Buchanan desires a homogeneous English-speaking society and the Sierra Club wants preservation of wilderness. Although Buchanan does not consider himself in the same camp as most environmentalists, he and the Sierra Club can both be classified as stasists in that they both see technocratic planning and government-imposed limitations on immigration as the best means to achieve their goals.

Postrel argues that it is dynamists who are responsible for generating the prosperity we enjoy today. They are scientists and engineers living and working at the leading edge of knowledge, creatively spawning ideas often at the intersection of disparate fields. There would be no Google, YouTube, or iPhone without dynamists, no life-saving medicine or disease-resistant crops without people willing to pursue their curiosities and take risks. An economy such as ours requires dynamism to flourish and is forever in danger of stagnating under the weight of stasist government policies. lt isn’t often that a book so thoroughly defends the world of scientific and technological change that individuals such as myself champion. Every technophile should read this book and arm themselves for the fight for the future.

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