More on Dynamism

Sunday, 19 January 2003 (Day 37)

Here are a couple of new ideas for you: I'd like to claim that they're totally original but humility and intellectual rigour dictate otherwise. Change is the only constant or, if you prefer a more metaphorical expression, you cannot step into the same river twice. The future is inevitable, so we might as well learn to get along with it. Don't worry, it's not the historically inevitable crisis of capitalism and the ensuing dictatorship of the proletariat that's inevitable: that future clearly hasn't happened and we can safely say that it has been indefinitely postponed. The future is definitely a capitalist, free market future and probably democratic as well, and it's already here. Or it will be once those boring stasists have been pushed aside and the way is open for the full flowering of the dynamist vision.

As I indicated that I might, I'm revisiting Virginia Postrel's The Future and Its Enemies. On reflection, I think that the least fatuous thing to be said about this tomelet is that the title would more properly read Virginia Postrel's Preferred Future and Its Enemies (that's a dangerous petard to leave lying around and no doubt I shall be hoist by it in due course). As Postrel herself admits:

There is in fact no single future; "the" future encompasses the many microfutures of individuals and their associations. It includes all the things we learn about ourselves and the world, all the incremental improvements we discover, all our new ideas, and all the new ways we express and recombine them. As a system, the future is natural, out of anyone's control, though it is driven by the artificial: by individual attempts ... to fashion realms of personal control.

Anyone read A J Ayer on Marx? Ayer notes that just because a particular future is historically inevitable, it does not follow that it is morally right and suggests that faced with an inevitable but morally appalling future, the best thing to do might be to oppose it. By the way, this comes from a philosopher who believed that voting for the (British) Labour Party was something that was worthwhile although he wasn't able to give a logically positivist justification of why this was so. Postrel manages to go one better than Marx:

The dynamist camp has the opposite problem [to the stasist camp], and the opposite strength. 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. Their "central organizing principle" is not a specific outcome but an open-ended process. A dynamic future tolerates diversity, evolves through trial and error, and contains a rich ecology of human choices. Dynamists are the party of life.

Well, that's alright then, but you begin to wonder why it should be necessary to write a book about it: especially a polemical work which argues that the technocratic left and the reactionary right should leave the future the hell alone. Still, Postrel's statement of the dynamist position, means that I can, in good conscience, declare myself a dynamist even if in working out my own version of an acceptable dynamist future I end up with a preferred microfuture which requires political and social measures which are diametrically opposed to those supported by other dynamists. As long as I'm in the party of life, rather than the other party, I can't see that it really matters.