Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita.1

A novel about the devil and a housing crisis. Weird and fun. Eventually, even a little bit touching.

It was, I read, the inspiration for the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil”. You can see a clip online where Jagger sounds just like Dylan as he’s working out how to sing it2.

Virginia Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress.

“The Future” is sometimes sort of a shorthand for the inevitable next iteration of the present, an extrapolation of technological and demographic trends. But this whiggish version of history contains an implicit guarantee that cannot in reality be guaranteed: the present will be allowed to change in to a future.

Postrel writes about the people who want to prevent change. She chooses as a frame the dichotomy of “stasis” and “dynamism”, and somewhat awkwardly calls adherents of each “stasists” and “dynamists”. Using this, she investigates political issues of the late nineties and argues for the benefits of letting change happen, even if one cannot be quite sure how it will turn out.

Virgina Postrel wrote The Future and Its Enemies in 1998. It’s hard to judge a popular political book from 25 years ago. What is more interesting than the specific political examples she uses is the description of who, in Postrel’s eyes, supports efforts to stop or slow down change, movement, and progress. She tells the story of a TV segment in which antiwar protestor and environmentalist Jeremy Rifkin was supposed to go head-to-head with paleoconservative Pat Buchanan and produce good, exciting TV.

But as soon as the discussion began, the entire format broke down. [Pat] Buchanan and [Jeremy] Rifkin turned out to be soulmates. Rifkin answered Buchanan’s opening question with a fearful description of “this new global high-tech economy” as a cruel destroyer of jobs. “You sound like a Pat Buchanan column,” replied his interrogator. “I agree.”3

Left-reactionaries like Rifkin and right-reactionaries like Buchanan are joined by the technocrats, who may support change in theory but want it done according to plan (e.g. Clinton-Gore, Gingrich, Perot). These technocrats set up reasonable (“reasonable”?) systems to guide change which are then harnessed by reactionaries who mean to arrest it totally:

Technocracy does not allow such turbulence. It is centralized and inflexible. […] Such a system, whose goal is control, 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, if used by someone as clever as Rifkin, to bar genetic engineering; Food and Drug Administration reviews to deter high-tech medical products; immigration quotas (a Progressive Era idea) to manipulate the racial stock; recycling mandates to attack new materials; antitrust laws to harass retail innovators; mass transit subsidies and car-pool mandates to fight the automobile; broadcasting licenses to control popular culture, and on and on. The original technocrats simply wanted to manage change. But the apparatus they created provides a million ways to stop it altogether.4

Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, Abundance.

Postrel’s book is nominally about the future, but because she supports letting the complex society figure things out, she doesn’t have much to say about what that future will look like. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book, Abundance, is nominally about the economy. But its main argument is that we need an economy that produces new things, not just more of what it already produces. And so it begins by painting a picture of a beautiful world of clean energy, home automation, desalinated water. This is surprising in retrospect because the book spends very little time devoted to policy suggestions.5 “The year is 2050.”6

By way of summarizing their thesis and demonstrating that they spend too much time on Twitter, they write:

This book is dedicated to a simple idea: to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need. That’s it. That’s the thesis.7

“What we need” will not be, as they say some people mistakenly think, more of what we already have. Instead, “What we need” are new and different things.8 Real growth is necessarily change. “It is equally important to imagine a just—even a delightful—future and work backward to the technological advances that would hasten its arrival.”9 “What is often missing from both sides is a clearly articulated vision of the future and how it differs from the present. This book is a sketch of, and argument for, one such vision.” 10

“Working backwards” from a “clearly articulated vision” is the core technocratic competency. It has its weaknesses. But it has one strength that Postrel does not have: an enticing future vision. Postrel’s book suffers from the same weakness as all advocacy for decentralized and non-directed progress: you can only make the argument in retrospect because, as the argument goes, the genius of decentralization is that no one can figure out what it will do in advance. To advocate for a decentralized system by explaining what it will do is to treat it as a bad implementation of a centralized system.

Postrel argues that there is strength in the lack of commitment to a specific vision: “to work together, they do not have to agree on what the future should look like.” But it would help. Pluralism may be preferable but it is hard to market. Without a specific future to advertise, she’s left to say things like “a dynamic future tolerates diversity, evolves through trial and error and contains a rich ecology of human choices.”11

This is what most clearly separates the two books. Abundance is unabashedly technocratic and The Future and Its Enemies is fundamentally libertarian. Though they cover much of the same ground and make many of the same diagnoses (Postrel 25 years earlier), they split on the question of vision and whether a vision for the the future is a necessity or a liability.

Klein and Thompson believe the vision of the future is necessary even though progress cannot be predicted and planned in every instance.12 They quote historian Gary Gerstle: “For a political order to triumph, it must have a narrative, a story it tells about the good life.”13 You need something to depict in Post Office murals.

It is not clear how to create a vision for the future without creating a concomitant, totalizing fight about that vision which hampers its execution.14 For Postrel’s position, there is a different open question: How do you make compelling a future whose only characteristic is that it is different from the present? Emergent order is not popular, especially as the mood of political life becomes increasingly conspiratorial, that is, unfriendly to the idea that emergent phenomena are emergent at all.15

Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back.

If Klein/Thompson are focused on the liberal or progressive future, Dunkelman is interested in its past.

He writes:

this book argues that progressivism itself has changed. Once committed to galvanizing experts to tackle big problems, the movement has more recently turned in the other direction. Having come to see how men like [Robert] Moses were wielding public authority, progressives haven’t just taken more frequently to “speaking truth to power.” Rather, we’ve remade our governing agenda in its entirety. We’ve broadly abandoned efforts to draw power into the hands of power brokers and worked instead to diffuse authority—to push it down and out.16

This theme is articulated in a few different ways. In this passage, it is described as diffusing power by moving it from centralized locations to decentralized ones. Elsewhere, it is Alexander Hamilton, representing the centralizing force worried about “chaos”, pitted against Thomas Jefferson, representing the desire to “thwart overbearing authority”.17 In its most basic form, Dunkelman calls it a “cultural aversion to power”.18 In the introduction, he quotes a liberal in a characteristic internet fight: “I will ALWAYS stand beside those with less power.”19

The “aversion to power” is a cultural attitude prior to its political manifestations:

“Progressivism’s turn against regulation wasn’t explicitly derived from the New Left’s Port Huron Statement, or from the civil rights movement, or the anti-war movement, or the counterculture. Few would even have thought to make the connection. But they were all linked—each born from the same cultural aversion to power.”20

This feeling was strengthened and supported by French theory, the “broader impulse to deconstruct the institutions of modern life” that “echoed the cultural aversion to power.”21

The Port Huron Statement, written in 1962 and published by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), serves as a consolidated representation of the attitude, taking issue with “progressivism’s generalized embrace of centralized authority”:

SDS was intent on replacing “power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance [with] power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity.” In this critique, America’s problems were rooted less in chaos than in the big bureaucracies, corporate leaders, city fathers, the Establishment figures donning charcoal suits and fedoras. The New Left was less interested in attacking the right than it was in pulling the progressive tradition away from its embrace of centralized power. That was its call to action.22

Replacing one type of power with another does not point to an “aversion to power”. The Statement may not have been focused on centralized power or building things, but it is clear, as is definitionally required for any political movement, that its goal was political power. Putting radicals aside — those who literally carried on Maoist criticism/self-criticism sessions and admired the victims of Stalin’s purges for their false confessions for the sake of party coherence23 — the Statement itself testifies to this. It complains of “the very isolation of the individual—from power and community and ability to aspire…” It seeks out the universities as an “overlooked seat of influence” from which “power […] can be summoned.” And it talks of the “bridge to political power” which must be built, “through genuine cooperation”. “We must […] act with confidence that we can be powerful.”24

(The anti-war protestor who was mayor of my city, who was so averse to power he served eight terms over 45 years25, gave keys to the city to Tom Hayden, the author of the Statement, and to Fidel Castro.26)

What Dunkelman sees as an “aversion to power” I think it more accurately read as a “discomfort with power”, which pushes political power in to places where it can be exercised with plausible deniability. The negative approach to governance is felt as a check on power rather than an expression of power itself.27 But in the end, I am not convinced the framing of the tendency to criticize and limit rather than to build as an “aversion to power” provides any clarity; “power” forms a unit of analysis that permits nearly any interpretation of a system.

As he tells it, the over-arching power of the centralized authority would be reigned in by “voice” and “outside scrutiny”:

Trapped unwittingly between conservatism’s vilification of government and their own skepticism of the Establishment, progressives alighted on what felt like a safe riposte to Reagan’s excesses: open the government to more outside scrutiny. Force disclosure of what was being discussed along the corridors of power. Voice would be the magic bullet.28

The problem is that voice is a force that works in one direction and, without a robust system for finally deciding, it only works to gum up the works: “voice is not in and of itself a strategy for weighing the trade-offs born in public policy.”29 Postrel sees the “voice” of SDS and the New Left as “central control” but arrives at the same conclusion:

The ostensibly antitechnocratic ideal of “participatory democracy” became in fact a new form of technocracy. This result, while counterintuitive, isn’t really surprising. The New Left’s founding document, The Port Huron Statement, demanded “that decision-making of basic social consequence be carried on by public groupings” and, more specifically, declared “that the economy itself is of such social importance that its major resources and means of production should be open to democratic participation and subject to democratic social regulation.” Both positions flatly reject the idea that social or economic evolution should proceed through decentralized trial and error. Both demand central control. Unlike traditional technocracy, however, they locate that control in vaguely defined “public groupings” and “democratic participation” rather than in agencies and experts. In practice, however, such forms of “democracy” require the time to sit in meetings and the attention to master specialized issues. They recreate bureaucratic governance by giving self-appointed activists the power to veto other people’s experiments.30

The history in Dunkelman’s book is interesting and, I think, does do useful work to illustrate the origins of current political attitudes. But the conclusion, instead of transcending the bipolar history of the movement, gives in to it, as if there is a giant knob labelled “centralized authority” which can be turned in one direction — too far and you’ll get Robert Moses — or in the other — too far and you’ll get 15 yards of High-Speed Rail for the annual GDP of Europe. Dunkelman:

That, in the end, is the best argument for full-circle progressivism. The movement has been justified to erect protections against Robert Moses–era abuse—to manacle the octopus. But that Jeffersonian retrenchment, now more than fifty years old, has run its course. Now, the core obstacle to the movement’s substantive success—to greater economic equality and prosperity, to more social justice and responsibility, to a more robust response to climate change, to more housing, to greater mobility—isn’t centralized power. It’s the absence of centralized power. Populism takes hold not when democracy works well, but rather when it doesn’t deliver. No amount of righteous sanctimony can substitute for the political benefits of making public authority serve the public interest. Moving forward, that should be the progressive movement’s north star.31

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.

A history of the crimes of World War II that happened in the land between Germany and Russia. The people between Hitler and Stalin were very often brutalized by both. It covers the period from the early thirties to the end of the war:

In the first period, the Soviet Union carried out almost all of the mass killing; in the second, during the German-Soviet alliance (1939–1941), the killing was balanced. Between 1941 and 1945 the Germans were responsible for almost all of the political murder.32

The purpose of the book, Snyder writes, is to correct a historiography that focused too much on the German and West European experience and which was limited by physical access to the places where they happened and to the state archives:

Like the vast majority of the mass killing of civilians by both the Nazi and the Soviet regimes, the Holocaust took place in the bloodlands. After the war, the traditional homelands of European Jewry lay in the communist world, as did the death factories and the killing fields. By introducing a new kind of antisemitism into the world, Stalin made of the Holocaust something less than it was. When an international collective memory of the Holocaust emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, it rested on the experiences of German and west European Jews, minor groups of victims, and on Auschwitz, where only about one in six of the total number of murdered Jews died. Historians and commemorators in western Europe and the United States tended to correct that Stalinist distortion by erring in the other direction, by passing quickly over the nearly five million Jews killed east of Auschwitz, and the nearly five million non-Jews killed by the Nazis. Deprived of its Jewish distinctiveness in the East, and stripped of its geography in the West, the Holocaust never quite became part of European history, even as Europeans and many others came to agree that all should remember the Holocaust.33

Bloodlands tells the story of atrocities that were partially incorporated into west European history during the Cold War, but which took place in eastern Europe between 1933 and 1945. During the Cold War, west Europeans and North Americans could write of German and Soviet atrocities, but could not easily travel to the lands where they took place and had little access to archival sources from the region. East European historians lived among the sites of the major atrocities, but were prevented by communist censorship from writing about Soviet crimes. Communist leaders also presented German crimes in a certain stereotyped way, as directed against civilian populations in general, rather than against (to take the most important example) the Jews in particular. After the revolutions of 1989, many archives were open, and local scholars began to write monographs about the Holocaust and other atrocities. Yet somehow the larger event, the fourteen million killings in that compact place over a short time, eluded the historiography. I began to see it as my obligation as an east European historian to bring the new knowledge together in an accessible way.34

P. D. James, Children of Men.

An extremely religious book. It is, unlike the movie, obsessed with Christian imagery and with the spaces and ceremonies of Christian worship. Christening and funerals. The book of Common Prayer.

I last read this about twenty years ago, whenever the movie came out. My memory of the book was faulty in many ways. For one, I had forgotten how much time we get with Theo (that is his name!) before the action really begins. And two, I had forgotten how violent is to its characters. My memory of it, in retrospect, was filtered by the movie (images being much easier to remember!) and I remembered the story as grey, dark, detached. The second act, which in the movie is set in grey, bombed out buildings, is set in the green, overgrown west of England. I loved the movie but the book is humane in a way that the movie is not, even if it is crueler. It’s very good.